Professor Roger Watson reviews The Trials of Maurice Brophy, the new novel by Marcus Bland about a Cambridge academic whose life spirals after he finds himself summarily cancelled over his research on Wagner.
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L’arrestation d’Ian Proud par la police secrète à l’aéroport de Londres marque un nouveau plus bas dans la mesure où l’État profond peut aller pour contrôler un faux récit.
L’arrestation d’Ian Proud par la police secrète à l’aéroport de Londres marque un nouveau plus bas dans la mesure où l’État profond peut aller pour contrôler un faux récit. Mais cela montre aussi un nouveau niveau de peur.
Aussi fou que cela puisse paraître, il semble bien que les nations d’Europe occidentale, du moins, se préparent à entrer en guerre contre la Russie à un moment donné dans un avenir pas trop lointain. Ce qui est particulièrement inquiétant, c’est qu’il semble y avoir un vide distinct dans tous les domaines de ce que nous pourrions appeler largement les « médias » pour remettre en question ce récit. Il y a trente ans, il était considéré comme normal que les journalistes soient la source de questions embarrassantes envers les acteurs étatiques et soient généralement une épine dans le pied, puisqu’ils remettaient en question chaque décision prise et chaque idée présentée. Notre travail était d’être anti-establishment et d’adopter un point de vue très cynique sur la « politique ». Cela n’avait rien de remarquable. C’était ce que nous faisions. Être méprisé par les grandes puissances faisait partie du travail ; travailler à des heures antisociales et avoir peu d’amis en faisait aussi partie.
Aujourd’hui, il n’y a plus de journalistes dans ce que nous appelons les médias « grand public » pour faire cela. Ils ont été remplacés par des « créateurs de contenu » plus jeunes, plus habiles avec les réseaux sociaux, qui croient que le journalisme est plus ou moins un rôle grammatical, où la matière première vous est remise avec toutes les informations qu’elle contient, et où le rôle du journaliste est simplement de la raffiner au style du jour pour la consommation de masse.
Le danger de cette transition est que presque tout ce qui nous est présenté comme des nouvelles est en réalité faux, ou au mieux lourdement expurgé pour maintenir les masses là où l’élite veut qu’elles soient : contenues, préparées et mal informées.
La guerre en Ukraine en est un excellent exemple. La principale raison pour laquelle les populations aux États-Unis et au Royaume-Uni sont si fabuleusement biaisées contre la Russie et si sympathiques à l’égard de l’élite corrompue de Kiev est que, pendant des années, elles ont été lavées le cerveau avec des « nouvelles » sur la Russie qui étaient négatives et qui alimentaient astucieusement un préjugé raciste – un préjugé cultivé depuis au moins une décennie, sinon plus. Le résultat est qu’aujourd’hui un certain nombre de mensonges sont devenus établis dans les salles de rédaction, où les journalistes, même ceux qui savent, contournent simplement les nuances et présentent une histoire de conte de fées, conçue pour être comprise par les masses qui n’ont pas d’autres sources d’information pour même la remettre en question.
Tout récemment, des médias occidentaux ont rapporté une « peste » en Russie, avec des histoires de « confinement », à la suite du cas d’un travailleur dans un laboratoire mort d’une pneumonie dans des circonstances encore incertaines. Les médias occidentaux, dans le cadre de leur rôle consistant à maintenir la russophobie à son apogée, sont si verrouillés et chargés que leurs réactions « à la gâchette facile » aux mauvaises nouvelles venant de Russie sont compréhensibles. Ils sont aussi avides de contenu accrocheur, et de telles histoires nourrissent un public affamé qui a déjà eu sa première dose de ce genre d’histoires d’hystérie COVID et qui en veut davantage. La vérité est totalement immatérielle. L’hystérie et les mensonges sont ce qui est injecté à un rythme fébrile par des « créateurs de contenu » aux dents et aux griffes rouges, l’écume à la bouche dans leur désir de servir l’État profond et les élites qui ont tant investi dans un agenda.
Le contraste entre la Russie et l’Occident est intéressant, cependant, lorsque nous examinons les médias. Tout récemment en Russie, le correspondant de la BBC basé à Moscou a fait vibrer Internet sur les réseaux sociaux avec sa courte interview du ministre russe des Affaires étrangères, qui a eu la gentillesse de répondre à sa question orientée sur l’idéologie de guerre de la Russie avec l’Ukraine. Ce que absolument personne n’a relevé, c’est à quel point la Russie est heureuse d’accueillir des journalistes étrangers qui ont un agenda si distinct pour alimenter la russophobie chez eux, tandis que les journalistes russes sont interdits dans ces capitales de l’UE depuis des années. La vieille Europe, qui tenait autrefois si cher des valeurs comme la liberté de la presse, a adopté le modèle soviétique, tandis que la Russie est en réalité plus avancée en ce qui concerne ces principes de ce que nous attendons dans une démocratie. La Russie n’a pas peur des questions embarrassantes, contrairement à l’Occident.
Nous devrions nous demander qui bénéficie réellement d’une guerre avec la Russie.
Est-ce trop sceptique et « théoriste du complot » de supposer que le complexe militaro-industriel a fait du lobbying avec succès pour une telle guerre pendant AU MOINS une décennie et, surtout, qu’il a réussi à convaincre l’establishment du renseignement et de l’armée au Royaume-Uni d’utiliser son levier sur les médias pour fournir aux journalistes la matière première qui renforce un préjugé contre la Russie ?
Normalement, une telle idée pourrait être rejetée comme pure absurdité. Mais considérez simplement jusqu’où le Royaume-Uni, par exemple, est allé pour éradiquer toute couverture médiatique pouvant être considérée comme au moins favorable à la Russie – ou même simplement pour tenir le gouvernement britannique responsable en posant les questions que les journalistes britanniques ont cessé de poser. Si l’élite au Royaume-Uni qui contrôle les journaux déficitaires (réfléchissez-y) est si sûre de sa logique selon laquelle la Russie est l’ennemi avec lequel nous devons aller en guerre, pourquoi est-elle si terrifiée par des journalistes – ou quiconque, d’ailleurs – qui expriment simplement un point de vue avec des questions sur le récit ?
Je ne peux pas être le seul commentateur occidental à croire que les agents doubles Sergueï Skripal et sa fille Ioulia n’ont pas été empoisonnés avec l’agent neurotoxique Novitchok à Salisbury en 2018, ce qui a été rapporté à l’époque comme ayant « déclenché une immense crise diplomatique entre la Grande-Bretagne et la Russie ». N’est-ce pas la véritable histoire que les chefs de la sécurité britannique ont décidé, après avoir découvert que Sergueï Skripal était en réalité un triple agent qui transmettait des informations à Moscou, qu’il était dispensable ? Et quel meilleur moyen de soi-disant donner une leçon aux Russes, tout en blâmant Moscou pour sa mort, que de l’assassiner lui et sa fille en utilisant un agent neurotoxique qui était soit du Novitchok – qu’un laboratoire britannique situé juste en bas de la rue où vivaient les Skripal avait commodément dans un réfrigérateur – soit un poison similaire ? Ce qu’il est important de noter à propos du Novitchok, c’est que les victimes meurent généralement instantanément au contact. Ce qui est probable, c’est que les Skripal n’ont pas été empoisonnés par la substance russe mais par une version britannique d’un autre agent neurotoxique. C’est un exemple choquant de la médiocrité du journalisme britannique que les scribouillards au Royaume-Uni rapportent simplement l’incident Skripal d’empoisonnement au Novitchok sans le moindre fragment de preuve pour l’étayer. Ils n’ajoutent même pas une note de scepticisme dans leurs reportages sur la substance et sur qui « affirme » qu’il s’agit de Novitchok.
Nous voyons le même niveau choquant de reportages atroces et biaisés sur la guerre en Ukraine, que le public britannique a simplement été informé par le récit médiatique comme une « invasion » par l’armée de Poutine. Aucun contexte, aucune nuance, aucun aperçu de la perspective russe, car personne ne peut supporter, semble-t-il, que l’histoire soit obscurcie par les faits.
Et c’est la même chose avec l’histoire de la « peste » russe, comme ce fut le cas avec l’histoire de l’« attaque » de la base de la RAF récemment, qui était probablement juste des voleurs locaux achetant de l’essence de contrebande à des soldats américains/britanniques corrompus cherchant à se faire un peu d’argent rapide à la base britannique. Remarquez avec quelle rapidité Trump a utilisé l’histoire comme base pour déplacer tous les bombardiers américains hors de la base et les renvoyer sur le sol américain, où ils sont complètement inutiles dans sa soi-disant guerre au Moyen-Orient. Pour Trump, c’était une occasion pour un autre coup médiatique qui le maintient à la une et tout le monde dans l’expectative. Il était probablement reconnaissant aux Britanniques de lui avoir offert la matière première. Un autre problème de cette nouvelle génération de journalistes est leur complaisance à rapporter des « nouvelles » qui ne sont pas du tout des nouvelles, mais simplement du matériel utilisé comme distraction, un jour à la fois. Trump est un maître dans la manipulation des médias avec ce jeu, disant généralement quelque chose de si stupide et de si controversé, ce qui détourne les journalistes du vrai journalisme. Si vous pouvez occuper les journalistes avec des articles sur le dernier commentaire ou la dernière déclaration idiote de Trump, alors vous les contrôlez en contrôlant leur temps.
Regardez simplement comment l’affaire Epstein n’est pas rapportée ni enquêtée. Comment Trump s’en est sorti impunément, puisque depuis le 28 février l’attention des journalistes a été détournée vers la guerre avec l’Iran – ce qui est l’une des raisons pour lesquelles Trump maintient cette histoire vivante avec des mouvements de troupes constants et des discours sur une attaque massive après les élections de mi-mandat. Les gens n’ont pas fait le lien entre la fuite du matériel Epstein et le déclenchement de la guerre avec l’Iran pratiquement le même jour.
Pour les Britanniques, l’histoire « les Russes arrivent » n’a aucun article cynique de la part de journalistes qui sont à 100 % complaisants avec son récit erroné. La peur des élites à Londres est cependant palpable, celle qu’elle sera toujours remise en question par des acteurs marginaux occupant de la bande passante sur les réseaux sociaux. Dans le passé, c’était le correspondant de RT à Londres, qui pouvait poser des questions difficiles et être généralement une épine dans le pied du village de Westminster qui contrôlait les journalistes comme des rats tenus dans un panier. La principale raison pour laquelle RT a été expulsé du Royaume-Uni était qu’il offrait un style de reportage sur la politique britannique qui nous avait quittés depuis trente ans – tel est le monde trouble de l’État profond et la façon dont il a vu comment, à Bruxelles, les journalistes pouvaient être manipulés jusqu’à devenir des sténographes pour lui.
Pourtant, même avec ce nouveau style stalinien de contrôle des médias au Royaume-Uni, l’État est branlant. Même avec la mise en place impressionnante qu’il a maintenant de domination médiatique totale, où les journalistes débitent des ordures totales sur la guerre en Ukraine ou sur ce qu’on leur dit d’écrire sur le Moyen-Orient, la peur est toujours là.
L’exemple du vidéoblogueur Ian Proud, un ancien diplomate britannique autrefois basé à Moscou, est inquiétant mais poignant. Le simple fait de se rendre à Moscou pour assister à une conférence où Poutine parlait a suffi pour qu’il subisse le traitement complet de la Stasi à l’aéroport de Heathrow – détenu et tout le contenu numérique saisi.
Les interviews YouTube de Proud, avec son style de présentation ringard, s’avèrent populaires car il offre simplement une vision plus sobre de la Russie et du Foreign Office britannique, son ancien employeur. Ces interviews attirent l’attention des espions britanniques, qui sont si nerveux à l’idée que la vérité sur la Russie éclate et que les mensonges honteux qui sont maintenant emballés pour le public britannique soient révélés, qu’ils ont dû infliger à Proud la routine américaine de « fouille en prison ». La Grande-Bretagne, un pays qui était autrefois un phare pour le monde avec sa vision de la liberté et en particulier sa passion pour la liberté d’expression, est tombée à un niveau que nous ne pouvons comparer qu’à un pays d’Afrique de l’Ouest qui vient d’installer un nouveau dictateur, complet avec des lunettes noires et des épaulettes. Ce que l’affaire Proud à l’aéroport de Heathrow montre, c’est que ce nouveau régime au pouvoir ne reculera devant rien pour contrôler un récit, et que le dernier bastion de la liberté d’expression – les podcasts YouTube – est la prochaine cible. Plus la chaîne de Proud devient prospère, plus il est inévitable qu’il soit contraint de quitter le Royaume-Uni et de s’installer en Russie pour continuer à exercer la liberté d’expression. Les glands d’épaule de l’État profond britannique ne dormiront pas bien tant que le pays n’aura pas un récit médiatique qui ferait rougir Joe Staline – et les journalistes britanniques les aident à atteindre cet objectif.
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
Ian Proud’s arrest by secret police at a London airport marks a new low in how far the deep state can go to control a false narrative. But it also shows a new level of fear.
As mad as it sounds, it does appear that Western European nations at least are preparing themselves to go to war with Russia at some point in the not-too-distant future. What is particularly worrying is there seems to be a distinct vacuum in all areas of what we could broadly call ‘media’ in questioning this narrative. Thirty years ago it was considered normal for journalists to be the source of vexing questions towards state actors and to generally be a pain in the arse as they questioned every decision made and every idea presented. It was our job to be anti-establishment and to take a very cynical view of “policy”. There was nothing remarkable about this. It was what we did. Being despised by the greater powers was part of the job; working anti-social hours and having few friends also came with it.
Today there are no journalists in what we call ‘mainstream’ media doing this. They have been replaced by younger, more social-media-savvy ‘content creators’ who believe that journalism is more or less a grammatical role, where the raw material is handed to you with all the information therein, and the role of the journalist is simply to refine it to the style of the day for mass consumption.
The danger of this transition is that nearly all of what we are being presented with as news is actually fake, or at best heavily redacted to keep the masses where the elite want them to be: restrained, prepped and misinformed.
The Ukraine war is an excellent example. The main reason why people in the U.S. and UK are so fabulously biased against Russia and are so sympathetic towards the corrupt elite in Kiev is that for years they have been brainwashed with ‘news’ about Russia which has been negative and which cunningly feeds a racist bias – a prejudice which has been cultivated over at least a decade, if not more. The result is that now a number of lies have become established in newsrooms where journalists, even those who know, simply navigate around nuance and present a fairy-tale story, designed to be understood by the masses who have no other sources of information to even question it.
Just recently, Western news outlets reported a “plague” in Russia, with stories about a “lockdown”, following a case of a worker in a laboratory dying of pneumonia in circumstances which are still not certain. Western media, as part of their role to keep Russia-phobia at its peak, are so locked and loaded that their ‘hair-trigger’ reactions to bad news stories from Russia are understandable. They are also hungry for clickbait, and such stories feed a starved audience which has already had its first fix of such COVID hysteria stories and wants more. The truth is entirely immaterial. Hysteria and lies are what’s being fed at a feverish rate by ‘content creators’ red in tooth and claw, foaming at the mouth with their desire to serve the deep state and the elites who have invested so much in an agenda.
The contrast between Russia and the West is interesting, though, when we look at media. In Russia just recently, the BBC correspondent based in Moscow made the internet buzz on social media with his short interview with Russia’s foreign minister, who was kind enough to answer his loaded question about Russia’s war ideology with Ukraine. What absolutely no one noted was how Russia is happy to accommodate foreign journalists who have such a distinct agenda to feed the Russia-phobia back home, while Russian journalists have been banned in those EU capitals for years. Old Europe, which once held such values as a free press so dearly, has adopted the Soviet model, while Russia is actually more advanced when it comes to such tenets of what we expect in a democracy. Russia has no fear of the awkward questions, unlike the West.
We should be asking ourselves who really benefits from a war with Russia.
Is it too sceptical and ‘conspiracy theorising’ to assume that the industrial military complex has been successfully lobbying for such a war for AT LEAST a decade, and critically, it succeeded in convincing the intelligence and military establishment in the UK to use its leverage with media to provide journalists with the raw material which enhances a prejudice against Russia?
Normally such an idea could be dismissed as pure nonsense. But just consider how far the UK, for example, has gone to eradicate all media coverage which could be deemed as at least leaning towards Russia – or even simply just holding the UK government to account by asking the questions that British journalists have stopped asking. If the elite in the UK who control the loss-making newspapers (think about that) are so sure of their rationale that Russia is the enemy whom we must go to war with, why are they so terrified of journalists – or anyone, for that matter – simply holding a view with questions the narrative?
I can’t be the only Western pundit who believes that double agents Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were not poisoned with nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, which was reported at the time as “sparking a huge diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia”. Isn’t the real story that British security chiefs decided, upon discovering that Sergei Skripal was actually a triple agent who was feeding information back to Moscow, that he was dispensable? And what better way to supposedly teach the Russians a lesson, while blaming Moscow for his death, than to murder him and his daughter using a nerve agent which either was Novichok – which a British lab just down the road from where the Skripals lived had conveniently sitting in a fridge – or a similar poison? What’s important to note about Novichok is that the victims usually die instantly upon contact with it. What is likely is that the Skripals were not poisoned by the Russian drug but a British version of another nerve agent. It is a shocking example of how poor British journalism is that hacks in the UK simply report the Skripal incident of Novichok poisoning without a single shred of evidence to back it up. They don’t even add a note of scepticism in their reporting about the drug and who is “claiming” that it is Novichok.
We see the same shocking level of atrocious, biased reporting about the Ukraine war, which the British public were simply told through the media narrative was an “invasion” by Putin’s army. No background, no nuance, no glimpse of Russia’s perspective, as no one can cope, it would seem, with the story being clouded by facts.
And it’s the same with the Russia “plague” story, as it was with the RAF base “attack” story recently, which was probably just local thieves buying contraband gasoline from corrupt U.S./UK soldiers looking to make a quick buck at the UK base. Notice how quickly Trump used the story as a basis to move all U.S. bombers off the base and back to U.S. soil, where they are completely useless in his so-called Middle East war. For Trump it was an opportunity for another media stunt which keeps him on the front pages and everyone guessing. He was probably grateful to the British for being offered the raw material. Another problem of this new generation of journalists is how compliant they are to report “news” which isn’t news at all, but just material used as a distraction, one day at a time. Trump is a master at manipulating media with this game, usually saying something so stupid and so controversial, which draws journalists away from doing real journalism. If you can occupy journalists with writing up stories about the latest idiotic comment or statement by Trump, then you control them as you control their time.
Just look at how the Epstein story is not being reported and investigated. How Trump got off scot-free, as since February 28th journalists’ attention was diverted to the war with Iran – which is one of the reasons why Trump keeps this story alive with constant troop movements and talk of a massive attack after midterms. People have not made the link with the Epstein material being leaked and the war with Iran kicking off practically on the same day.
For the British, the “Russians are coming” story has no cynical write-up by journalists who are 100 percent compliant with its erroneous narrative. The fear of elites in London is palpable, though, that it will always be questioned by fringe actors taking up bandwidth on social media. In the past this was the RT correspondent in London, who was able to ask difficult questions and generally be a thorn in the side of the Westminster village which controlled journalists like rats held in a basket. The main reason why RT was kicked out of the UK was that it offered a style of reporting on UK politics which had since left us thirty years ago – such is the murky world of the deep state and how it saw how in Brussels journalists could be manipulated until they become stenographers for it.
Yet even with this new Stalinist style of media control in the UK, the state is wobbly. Even with the impressive set-up it has now of total media dominance, where journalists pump out total garbage about the Ukraine war or what they are told to write about the Middle East, still the fear is there.
The example of video blogger Ian Proud, a former UK diplomat once based in Moscow, is worrying but poignant. Simply going to Moscow to attend a conference where Putin was speaking was enough to have him get the full Stasi treatment at Heathrow airport – detained and all digital content seized.
Proud’s YouTube interviews, with his dowdy style of presenting, are proving to be popular as he simply offers a more sober view of both Russia and the UK Foreign Office, his former employer. These interviews are getting the attention of UK spooks, who are so nervous about the truth getting out about Russia and the shameful lies which are being packaged now for the British public, that they had to give Proud the American prison ‘shake down’ routine. Britain, a country which once was a beacon for the world with its view of liberty and in particular its passion for free speech, has fallen to a level which we can only compare to a West African country which has just had a new dictator installed, complete with black aviators and epaulettes. What the Proud Heathrow airport case shows is that this new regime in power will stop at nothing to control a narrative, and that the last bastion of free speech – YouTube podcasts – is the next target. The more successful Proud’s channel becomes, the more inevitable it is that he will be forced to leave the UK and settle in Russia to continue practising free speech. The shoulder tassels of Britain’s deep state will not sleep well until the country has a media narrative which would make Joe Stalin blush – and British journalists are helping them with this goal.
Comedy clubs are begging for taxpayer bailouts, the BBC is censoring classic sketches and Muslim activists are trying to ban John Cleese. British comedy is becoming less funny by the day, says Steven Tucker.
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On September 19, Dou Xiankang, who heads the National Natural Science Foundation of China, described a grant that most young scientists anywhere would envy. Researchers under 35 will get 15 years of support. The money doubles after five years and doubles again after ten, and there are no short-term performance reviews. The only test, Dou […]
The post China buys time for its young scientists as US rations it appeared first on Asia Times.
"Mother and father" is unacceptable language, the Green Party has said, with members threatened with sanction under the party's code of conduct if they fail to use gender-neutral terminology and 'inclusive language'.
The post “Mother and Father” is Unacceptable Language, Says Green Party appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The Government is keeping a blacklist of people who question its policies, with social media posts criticising the Government being monitored and investigated by officials.
The post The Government is Keeping a List of People Who Question its Policies appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Too often in workplaces and at social gatherings people nod along with the acceptable Left-wing narrative because they're too afraid to say what they really think. Joanna Gray has some tips for 'how to talk to normies'.
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Nurse Amy Gallagher was forced out of an NHS training course for refusing to relinquish her belief in colour-blind meritocracy. It's time, she says, for the courts to intervene and end this woke campaign of victimisation.
The post I Was Forced Out of an NHS Training Course for My Belief in Colour-Blind Meritocracy. It’s Time for the Courts to Intervene appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Is Britain experiencing a free speech crisis? No, says our governing elite. That's a conspiracy theory put about by JD Vance. But data suggest the UK police are arresting up to 40 people a day for speech offences.
The post Does Britain Have a Free Speech Problem? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large.
On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.”
10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.
Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.
An initial slate of cases includes objections against the New York Times, for reporting on how Thiel’s fellow traveller David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Donald Trump’s former “AI and Crypto Czar,” uses his White House position to benefit Silicon Valley connections; The Wall Street Journal for its revelations about the doodle contributed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book (a case recently dismissed by a federal judge); and British reporter Hannah Broughton for an aggregated story in the UK tabloid the Mirror about allegations that Amazon workers were told to continue working while a colleague lay dead on the warehouse floor. A smattering of social media provocateurs (Candace Owens) and politicians (Bernie Sanders) round out the roster, but the aggregate effect is indisputable: Thiel’s animus was about journalism all along. Indeed, the Objection.ai team couldn't be clearer about that.
“Gawker was not unique,” writes D’Souza on the company’s website. “It was simply the first large media company to be tested against reality in the age of clicks, outrage, and algorithmic amplification. Since then, the same structural failure has spread everywhere.”
“Peter Thiel and I … did not just fight Gawker,” he goes on. “ — We demonstrated that facts still mattered if someone was willing to enforce them.”
This is worse than revisionism. D’Souza is banking on everyone having forgotten that the Hulk Hogan case had nothing to do with “reality.” It was undisputed that the sex tape published by Gawker was real. The original suit, which failed, was for copyright infringement and the ultimate $140 million award that bankrupted the company was for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional harm.
This foundational lie is important, because it is a warning against the temptation to engage Objection.ai on the merits. It would be easy enough to conduct a good faith debate to take at face value D’Souza’s argument that tech platforms and algorithms amplify false claims to millions, that courts are expensive and slow, media ombuds toothless, and fact-checkers partisan. And it would not be hard to demonstrate that he is harnessing widely shared concerns about a disordered information environment to mobilize support for an AI powered justice system controlled by a hyperpartisan private company with a track record of attacking the very institutions that are holding the line on consensus reality.
It would also be a mistake. There is nothing good faith about this effort. Rather, it is classic Thiel: an attempt to hack the principles of accountability, and turn them against journalism. Leave it to his less sophisticated Silicon Valley peers to rail against the media, create in house news outlets or buy them. The PayPal co-founder is going for the heart of the system, and financing infrastructure that will enable anyone who can afford a used Honda Civic to launch a harassment campaign, cloaked in the language of legitimate investigation. James O’Keefe, but with the judicial rather than journalistic process as its governing metaphor.
It will be tempting, too, to question the likely financial sustainability of Objection. That will be the least of its founders' concerns. The for-profit structure supports a story about the company’s purpose. It may work, or not, but its goals are nonfinancial. We reached out to Thiel for comment on Objection.ai before publication and will update this article as soon as he responds.
Providing funding, alongside Thiel, is Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and author of “The Network State,” a book about social networks with “a sense of national consciousness” replacing the nation state. He once outlined an early version of the Objection.ai model in an email to the far right theorist Curtis Yarvin about dealing with critical coverage. "If things get hot,” he suggested “it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts."
These men understand the limits of the Gawker verdict’s impact. It bankrupted the company, a personal victory for Thiel, but perhaps the least important outcome of the case. At a more systemic level, it struck fear into the hearts of media insurers and newsroom counsel, focusing attention on third party litigation finance as potential threat.
If people with limitless resources could sponsor litigation against news organizations they disliked, constitutional protections would be no match for the sheer cost and complexity of defense.
Now, they’ve found an AI-assisted way to supercharge those effects.
The Gawker case routed around the First Amendment by relying on a privacy claim. Objection.ai does so by building a hallucination of the legal process. Any journalist foolish enough to agree to binding arbitration by the company probably deserves what they get, but that will be a vanishingly small minority. For those who don’t, a phone call, or a knock on the door from a former FBI agent, or defense intelligence operative, will be chilling, and an ex-parte verdict rendered by Thiel’s custom-tuned AI will act as a cudgel on social media and via traditional PR. Journalists will be assigned a “trust score” to act as an additional goad.
In an environment of less peril for press freedom, it might be easy to laugh off Objection.ai as the confection of a thin-skinned millenarian. Right now, with the crony capture of broadcast news far advanced, swathes of the tech community openly hostile to journalism, and the White House onside, it would be wise to take it seriously. That starts with seeing it for what it is, and refusing to engage with a process which, unlike the real courts, Peter Thiel has no legal power to compel.
Natalia Antelava
Isobel Cockerell
The post Peter Thiel is building a parallel justice system — Powered by AI appeared first on Coda Story.
On the night of January 16, 2024, Egana Djabbarova was awoken by her wife and told that she needed to leave the country immediately. Djabbarova, her wife said, had been denounced by pro-war activists and framed as an enemy of the country. She had recently published her novel, “My Dreadful Body,” with a small, indie press that had been praised by mainstream critics, unexpectedly propelling her into the public eye. One of the book's central themes is surveillance: growing up in a community with strict behavioural codes, the protagonist's every move is under scrutiny.
In a dark echo of her work, Djabbarova was now under online surveillance herself. “I was just the perfect enemy,” she tells me, “because I’m queer, I’m not Slavic, I worked on decolonial and feminist projects… So boom, it happened.”
She is speaking to me from Hamburg, where she now lives. Djabbarova is part of the so-called fifth wave of writers exiled from Russia, alongside Maria Stepanova, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Maxim Osipov to name a few. Her upbeat tone during our call gives little indication of the arduous journey she has endured since fleeing Russia. Upon receiving a humanitarian visa from Germany, she spent months in a refugee camp. She lived, she says, “in a container house, literally a shipping container. You feel like you're not a subject, not a human being.”
More permanent accommodation has provided a degree of safety and stability, but a sense of precariousness lingers. She describes her position as an exile as “strange” — on the one hand she has been welcomed into Germany’s cultural elite in winning the Hamburger Literaturpreis; on the other, she feels like a “ghost,” unable to express herself in German and often bewildered by the unfamiliarity of everyday tasks in a new country, and in a new city which, she tells me jokingly, is quaint and polite like the well-behaved boy next door.
But there’s a deeper, historical layer to Djabbarova’s story of exile. Her father was a refugee from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, while her mother was forced out of her family home. “Homelessness and exile — this is my heritage,” she says. Being othered became a common theme of Djabbarova’s childhood, as a child of Azeri parents living in Yekaterinburg. “In Russia you are constantly reminded that you're not Russian,” she says. “Then during the summer you visit your relatives in Azerbaijan and they laugh because you cannot speak Azerbaijani properly.”
This sense of double estrangement is mirrored in “My Dreadful Body” (published in Russian in 2023 and recently translated into English by Lisa Hayden). At only a touch over 100 pages, it is a slim but powerful account of the pressures on one woman growing up among the strict codes of an Azerbaijani family living in Russia. A sense of surveillance and conditional belonging defines the narrator’s upbringing: “In the world where I grew up,” she writes, “gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes. Life in the community was reminiscent of a reality show with constant video surveillance: no action, word, or undertaking went unnoticed.”
The story is based on Djabbarova’s own life. “Maybe 70-80% of this story is absolutely true”, she confirms. The narrator is named Egana, she grows up in an Azerbaijani family in Russia, too Russian for the family, not Russian enough for her friends at school. She also, like Djabbarova, suffers from a debilitating autoimmune disorder that is eventually diagnosed as dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. During one episode, she describes her body as resembling “willow branches gone mad from a strong wind” — a potent image of struggle against external forces. Djabbarova describes the book as a way to reclaim her body through language. “I was trying to tell this story in a poetic way. I wanted to change my body into poetry.”
Each chapter of “My Dreadful Body” begins with a different body part (“Eyebrows,” “Eyes,” “Hair” and so on), like the poetic blazons spun by Renaissance poets. Where those poems encouraged an idealized, sensationalized reading of each body part, Djabbarova’s chapters are more sober explorations of the physical limits — and personal and cultural stories — these body parts contain.
In one of many poignant scenes, the narrator’s head is shaved in preparation for a procedure. She cries on seeing her “shorn scalp,” but the sadness is not aesthetic, it’s ancestral; the act marks a symbolic rupture with her lineage. “My past,” she writes, “the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body — all that now lay on the cold floor.” After this scene, her grandmother’s dictum that only long hair was considered beautiful, rings even more sharply.
Illness then emerges as another form of exile, from one’s sense of self, from what’s perceived as “normal” in society, from the culture and community one belongs to. “They do not see you as a subject, as a human being, and they do not recognize your existence… I realized if I wanted to be seen as a subject, I needed to do it myself.” Djabbarova is talking about the plight to be believed about her symptoms here, but she could easily be talking about the often dehumanizing experience of exile. In both instances there is something fundamental under question, or as Djabbarova puts it, “You’re trying to prove that you have the right of being. You’re trying not to be erased.”
We often talk about exile in the context of loss, but how might exile liberate? Paradoxically, Djabbarova tells me, her diagnosis became a form of liberation. “I always felt I had so many expectations on me as a girl, as a woman, so when I was finally diagnosed it was a liberation because my parents realized I would never be this type of girl.” Exile breeds a particular creative liberation, too, evidenced by the fact Djabbrova wrote the novel from Taiwan where she was briefly teaching Russian. “Here I had enough distance from my own life and my own experience,” she says. “Maybe it’s easier to write about your story being on an island in the Pacific Ocean.”
Writing is arguably the real heroine of Djabbarova's novel. For the narrator Egana, it is a place free from surveillance and a source of protection, “like an invisible amulet.” Poetry, she told me “was the only safe space for me because nobody was asking anything of me. It's the only place where I don't feel judged. I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel questioned.”
The chapter “Hands” opens: “The most important parts of a woman’s body were her hands: they prepared food, rocked children, did laundry, ironed men’s shirts, sewed clothes, swept, washed the floor, and dusted.… Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” To use her hands, then, to write becomes both a symbolic and quite literal form of resistance against such gendered codes.
Notably, Djabbarova is not alone in invoking the body as a space to explore the upheavals of exile. In Maria Stepanova’s autofictional work “The Disappearing Act” — recently translated into English by Sasha Dugdale — the narrator attempts to purge herself by volunteering to be cut in half as part of a circus trick. Djabbarova’s approach to reclaim identity and agency through the body is less literal, and more personal, but through this specificity she has landed somewhere indisputably universal.
“I realized the only way I can write this novel is through my body,” she says. “Because the only way I can rehabilitate my being, my agency, my subjectivity is through my body. And that's why I wanted every reader to feel my body… It's really important for all of us not to forget that this right of being is basic. It's not given. It's something you have from birth."
At the end of our conversation, Djabbarova (who has been speaking in English) struggles to recall a word and jokes that learning German is slowly pushing her English out. “Certain words I only remember in German!” she laughs. Is this the beginnings of a kind of homemaking for Djabbarova, a sign that the seeds she has scattered in her new country are taking root? Like her protagonist, who finds solace and safety in words, it seems that Djabbarova’s most trusted tool for survival, for managing the condition of exile, is language.
This story is part of our Age of Exile series, which explores how displacement has evolved from historical punishment into a defining condition of our time—one that reveals profound transformations in how we construct identity, maintain community, and exercise power across borders. In an era where digital connection enables presence without physical proximity, exile has become more complex, more global, and more central to understanding our world. Explore The Age of Exile series
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Nadia Beard
Sara Kontar
Nadia Beard
The post Exiled at midnight appeared first on Coda Story.
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