THE CHILDREN GAMBIT
How Europe’s Political Class Weaponises Innocence — and Has Been Building This Machine for Years
Islander Reports | February 17, 2026
Before we start. These platforms aren’t innocent. They’ve extracted billions from our attention, manipulated our children’s dopamine cycles, censored truth tellers, handed our data to surveillance capitalism and slept soundly every night. Hold that. And then read what follows anyway — because what’s happening right now is something else entirely.
Let’s start with the money. Because the money never lies.
€1.2 billion. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission. Meta. May 2023. The largest GDPR fine in history, for routing EU citizen data to the United States without adequate protection. A record that lasted about five minutes.
€530 million. TikTok. May 2025. Same Irish authority. For sending European user data to China and then, this is the part they buried in the press release — lying about it during the inquiry. TikTok told regulators throughout the investigation it wasn’t storing EEA data on Chinese servers. In February 2025, they quietly admitted it had been. All along.
€345 million. TikTok again. 2023. Children’s data. €14.5 million from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office on top of that, same year, same issue. €91 million to Meta Ireland in September 2024 — they stored hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext. Just sitting there. No encryption. Exposed. €390 million to Meta the year before, for forcing users to accept personalised advertising as a condition of accessing their own accounts.
And then December 5th, 2025. The European Commission handed X — formerly Twitter, now Elon Musk’s megaphone and the primary target of every European leader who’s discovered that their citizens can organise against them online — a €120 million fine. First ever penalty under the Digital Services Act. For misleading users about the blue verification badge, concealing advertiser identities, and blocking government-approved researchers from accessing algorithmic data.
Over €2.5 billion. Just the verdicts. Just the ones that made it to conclusion. Fourteen active DSA proceedings still grinding through the machinery, with Meta and TikTok each facing potential fines of 6% of global revenue. That’s €9.9 billion for Meta. €9.3 billion for ByteDance. Numbers large enough to restructure companies. Numbers designed to make platforms obedient.
So when Pedro Sanchez walked out this morning and announced that Spain’s Council of Ministers would invoke Article 8 of the Organic Statute of the Public Prosecution Service — sic prosecutors onto X, Meta and TikTok for “crimes they may be committing” through AI-generated child pornography — understand what you’re looking at.
This isn’t a regulator at the end of its rope. This is a political class that has already built the machine, tested the machine, extracted billions through the machine — and is now deciding what else the machine can reach.
“May Be Committing”
That’s the phrase. Not “has committed.” Not “is committing.” May be. Sanchez posted it on X — the very platform he’s threatening to prosecute — and the media swallowed it whole, no questions about evidence or methodology or whether a public prosecutor’s office is the right instrument for making technical judgements about AI image generation pipelines.
The Spanish government claims Grok produced three million sexualised images in eleven days, including over 23,000 involving minors. Strong numbers. Specific numbers. Precise to the point of being designed to prevent challenge — because you can’t interrogate evidence you haven’t been shown, and asking to see it means you’re defending the indefensible. Not one published source. Not one independent methodology. They arrived complete, ready-made for outrage.
That’s the genius of it. The children gambit works precisely because you cannot question it without becoming the villain of the story.
Pavel Durov said it plainly — and look, nobody should hold Durov up as a civic virtue. But he’s spent years watching governments use platform regulation as a control mechanism, and when he says Sanchez’s moves aren’t safeguards but steps toward total control, he’s speaking from operational experience. He’s seen this architecture before. From the inside.
Here’s what this moment actually is, in the longer register. Every time a Western liberal government needs to consolidate control over the information environment, it finds a victim group whose protection cannot be questioned. In the 20th century they used communists, terrorists, drug dealers. The 21st century discovered something more powerful — children. Unimpeachable. Unchallengeable. A shield so morally absolute that any surveillance infrastructure built behind it arrives pre-legitimised. Sanchez didn’t invent this playbook. He’s just the current page.
Here’s the question nobody in any press conference asked today. If you actually wanted to protect children from AI-generated abuse material — if that were the genuine, singular, burning priority — what would you do?
You’d hunt the producers. Fund specialist cyber units with the resources and legal powers to identify, locate and prosecute the people who generate and distribute child sexual abuse material. Build better reporting pipelines so victims and witnesses have direct, fast routes to enforcement. Nail the distribution networks — the forums, the channels, the file-sharing infrastructure where this material moves — with targeted operations and international cooperation. Invest in takedown technology that works at scale. These are the unglamorous tools of actual child protection. Forensic. Technical. Expensive. Slow. Not suited to a press conference.
None of that is what Sanchez announced today. What he announced was prosecution of three of the most visible American technology platforms, with unverified statistics, under a legal mechanism designed for emergency government intervention in the public interest — on the same morning Keir Starmer in London announced restrictions on the last tool of genuine online privacy.
That’s not child protection. That’s the political class treating every ordinary user as a pre-suspect, building infrastructure that watches everyone in order to catch a tiny minority — and using the minority as the justification.
When someone says “think of the children,” look at what they’re actually building. Because what they’re building right now, across Europe and Britain, is an internet where you need permission to speak.
The Network They Actually Protected
Let’s be precise about who’s invoking children to demand your identity.
Jeffrey Epstein ran an international child trafficking operation for decades. Not speculation. Court and DOJ documents. Thirty-five girls identified by Palm Beach police in 2005. FBI reports going back to 1996. Federal prosecutors in Florida prepared a 60-count draft indictment in 2007 — conspiracy, sex trafficking of minors, enticement — charging Epstein and three co-conspirators described as employees who “persuaded, induced, and enticed individuals who had not attained the age of 18 years to engage in prostitution.”
The names of those three co-conspirators were in the indictment. Then US Attorney Alexander Acosta gave Epstein 13 months in county jail with work release six days a week and immunity for “any potential co-conspirators” — in direct violation of federal victims’ rights law. The investigation was shut down. Epstein walked. The network persisted.
Fast forward. January 2026. Department of Justice releases 3 million pages (a mere 2% of what they have in possession) under a law Congress passed unanimously demanding transparency. Victims’ names exposed. Driver’s licenses published. Witness statements naming perpetrators? Redacted. Draft indictment naming co-conspirators? Still redacted. Attorneys for over 200 victims called it “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history” and accused DOJ of “hiding the names of perpetrators while exposing survivors.”
Congressmen like Thomas Massie had to read names aloud on the House floor before DOJ would release them. Rep. Ro Khanna: “The survivor statements to the FBI naming rich and powerful men who went to Epstein’s island, his ranch, his home — who raped and abused underage girls — they were all hidden.”
Now look at who’s demanding you hand over your identity to speak online.
Keir Starmer — the man proposing VPN bans and bypassing Parliament to regulate your thumbs on a screen — appointed Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to the United States in December 2024. Mandelson called himself Epstein’s “best pal” in Epstein’s 50th birthday book. Their friendship continued after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. Emails released in the January 2026 DOJ files show Mandelson received £75,000 in payments from Epstein between 2003-2004, leaked classified government information to him while serving as Business Secretary in 2009-2010, and sent messages suggesting Epstein was wrongfully convicted.
Starmer knew about the Epstein connection when he made the appointment. Mandelson had already resigned from government twice before — conflicts of interest, financial misconduct — and the Epstein relationship was public record. Starmer appointed him anyway. Made him Britain’s top diplomat. Gave him the US ambassador post. When the files dropped and the depth of the relationship became undeniable, Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney — who recommended Mandelson — resigned. Then Starmer’s communications director. Then his cabinet secretary. Three senior aides gone in days.
Mandelson is now under criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police for misconduct in public office. US Congress has requested he submit to interview as part of its investigation into Epstein’s co-conspirators and enablers.
And Starmer — whose government just had VPN downloads surge 1,800% because British citizens don’t trust him with their browsing data — is the man now lecturing the public about online child safety.
This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s consistency. The same political class that gave Epstein’s network immunity and protected co-conspirators for two decades is now demanding total visibility over your identity. The same Department of Justice that hid perpetrators and exposed survivors is the one telling you encryption backdoors are necessary to protect children. The same institutions that shut down the Epstein investigation in 2008 and buried the names in 2026 are building the Digital Identity Wallet, the fact-checker networks, the 24-hour removal mandates.
When they say this is about protecting children, look at the Epstein files. Look at who they protected. Look at who they prosecuted. Look at who they gave immunity. Look at whose names are still redacted while survivors’ information gets published.
Then ask yourself why these exact same people need to know who you are before you’re allowed to speak.
What This Actually Is — Unelected, Unaccountable, and Expanding
Here’s what nobody in the mainstream coverage will say: the regulatory apparatus now targeting these platforms was not built by people you voted for.
Picture what happens when a flag arrives. It’s 2am. A compliance officer at a major platform — a 26-year-old in Dublin or Amsterdam with a policy degree and a quota — opens an alert. A Brussels-appointed body has flagged a post as potentially harmful. The DSA gives the platform 24 hours to act or face fines of up to 6% of global revenue. There’s no named accuser. No court order. No adversarial process. Just a designation, a deadline, and a number so large that hesitation is financially irrational. The post gets removed. The writer wakes up to find their words gone. The politician whose opponents wrote it points elsewhere. The regulator points at the law. The compliance officer points at the process.
Nobody elected any of them.
The European Commission is not elected. Its commissioners are appointed by governments, approved by a parliament most Europeans couldn’t name the composition of — and its enforcement apparatus, the officials running fourteen DSA proceedings and handing out nine-figure fines, operates at a distance from democratic accountability that is not incidental but structural. The “trusted flaggers” embedded in the DSA framework, deputised to mark content for priority removal, are appointed bodies. Ofcom in the UK is a regulator, not an elected chamber. The European Board for Digital Services, coordinating enforcement across 27 countries, answers to no electorate anywhere on earth.
Sanchez and Starmer announce the intention. The technocrats execute it. And when it goes wrong — when the journalist’s article vanishes into a compliance process with no appeal, when the civil servant’s flagging of “migrant hotel” videos turns out to be political interference dressed as child protection — there is no one to vote out. The politician points at the regulator. The regulator points at the law. The law was written in workshops whose attendees you’ll never know. Democratic majorities change. Regulatory architecture doesn’t.
That’s not a flaw in the system. It’s the system working exactly as it was designed.
Britain and the VPN — The Moment the Mask Slipped
The week before Sanchez made his announcement, Keir Starmer was in London saying “no platform gets a free pass.” New powers to restrict social media. AI chatbots brought under the Online Safety Act. Infinite scrolling — the physical act of moving your thumb down a screen — to be regulated. Action in “months, not years.” And crucially, explicitly, openly: bypassing the parliamentary scrutiny that would normally apply to legislation this significant. He said it out loud. The urgency is too great for debate.
But the detail that should stop every person who cares about liberty cold is the VPN proposal.
Let’s be clear about what a VPN actually is, because the political class is clearly hoping you don’t know and don’t care to find out.
A Virtual Private Network encrypts your internet connection and masks your IP address — your digital location, the identifying tag that follows you across every website you visit, that your internet service provider logs, that governments can and do compel ISPs to hand over. When you use a VPN, your traffic passes through an encrypted tunnel. Your ISP sees that you’re connected to a VPN server. That’s it. They cannot see where you go. They cannot see what you say. They cannot read your communications.
This is the tool that domestic abuse survivors use to hide their location from abusers. That investigative journalists use to protect their sources. That activists use to organise without government surveillance. VPNs aren’t a loophole. They’re a lifeline.
After the UK Online Safety Act came into force, VPN downloads in Britain surged by 1,800%. Half the top ten apps in British app stores became VPN services. Ordinary British citizens — not criminals, not paedophiles, not terrorists — reached for the exact same tool that people under authoritarian regimes use to avoid state surveillance, because they didn’t want to submit government-verified identity just to browse normally.
Starmer’s response to that 1,800% signal was to propose restricting VPNs.
Not to reconsider whether the surveillance infrastructure was too invasive. Not to ask why a free people felt the need for anonymity tools in a democracy. No — the tool of privacy is the problem. The loophole to be closed.
And here’s the thing that proves this was never about children. Ban commercial VPNs tomorrow and any determined teenager circumvents it within hours — cheap cloud servers, open proxies, custom tunnels for less than a dollar a month. The only people genuinely impacted are the ones relying on them for legitimate safety: the abuse survivor hiding their location, the journalist protecting a source, the person who simply doesn’t want their ISP building a commercial profile of their private reading habits. A VPN ban doesn’t protect children. It closes the last gap in the surveillance infrastructure — means that when the DSA triggers an investigation into your political commentary, when the Brussels-appointed fact-checker flags your article, there’s nowhere left to go. No tunnel. No private space. Just a 1984 dystopian, digitally enhanced.
The Wallet Nobody’s Talking About
Beneath all of this — quieter, slower, more permanent than any headline — is the piece of architecture that makes everything else irrelevant to debate once it’s in place.
By December 2026, every EU member state is legally required to provide its citizens with a European Digital Identity Wallet. Not a proposal. Law — Regulation EU 2024/1183, in force since May 2024. Major platforms will be required to accept it as a login mechanism. The private sector — banks, retailers, online services, social media — can request verified identity information through it.
Brussels will tell you the privacy protections are robust. And it’s worth taking that position seriously, because it isn’t entirely dishonest.
Article 5a of the regulation is real. It states explicitly that relying parties — the companies and platforms using the wallet — “shall not refuse the use of pseudonyms, where the identification of the user is not required by Union or national law.” The Commission points to this as the safeguard. They have a point. It’s in the law. It’s binding. If you want to use your wallet pseudonymously on a platform that has no legal requirement to know who you are, the regulation says you can. Proponents argue this is a meaningful, enforceable right — and that critics conflating the wallet with mandatory real-name requirements are misreading the text.
The problem is the eleven words the Commission would prefer you not to dwell on: where the identification of the user is not required by Union or national law.
That clause means the pseudonymity right exists only in the space where no law has yet required your identity. It is protection that any member state can legislate away, for any service, with a single national law and a stated reason. Child protection. Anti-terrorism. Financial crime. Age verification. The reasons are not hard to find. The EU has no override mechanism — Brussels cannot prevent a member state from passing a law that, in its domestic application, triggers the exception and requires identification. So the right survives only until a government decides it shouldn’t. One parliament. One vote. The pseudonymity is gone for that service, in that country — legally, permanently, with the full blessing of the regulation’s own text.
And there’s something else the Commission won’t volunteer. The architecture meant to enforce the pseudonymity right — the mechanism that would actually prevent platforms from demanding your identity when they have no legal right to — was quietly gutted in implementation. Privacy advocates at epicenter.works, the only civil society organisation that worked on this file throughout the entire reform process, found that the Commission made relying party registration certificates optional rather than mandatory. Without mandatory certificates, the wallet cannot verify whether a company’s request for your real identity is legitimate or overreaching. Tech giants can demand identification in contexts that don’t legally require it. There is no technical mechanism to stop them. The safeguard exists in the legislation. The infrastructure that would make the safeguard real was made optional in the implementing regulations.
The Commission was told this directly. They proceeded anyway.
Civil society organisations warned EU officials in an open letter that the wallet “may eliminate anonymity, leading to over-identification and a loss of privacy.” Unacknowledged. One hundred and thirteen free speech and privacy experts wrote separately to raise similar concerns about the broader regulatory framework. Ignored. The pattern of constructing the infrastructure first and addressing rights concerns later — or not at all — is not a run of oversight failures. It’s a consistent set of choices made by people who understood exactly what they were choosing.
The Machine Is Already Running
People keep framing this as something that might happen. Future concerns. Hypothetical overreach.
It’s not the future.
The European Democracy Shield is operational — fifty action points, a European Centre for Democratic Resilience, a state-funded network of fact-checkers on Brussels money with a Brussels mandate, described in their own documents as “rapid response capacity” for information “crises.” The Commission decides what a crisis is. There is no external appeal. Just a bureaucrat with a mandate to act within 24 hours and a definition of disinformation so broad that it extends, in the Commission’s own telling, to content “that is not illegal.”
How broad? In May 2025, the Commission hosted a closed-door workshop with platform compliance teams. Training exercises. Internal documents. The US House Judiciary Committee obtained these documents under subpoena — you can disagree with the committee’s politics but you can’t argue with what the documents actually show. One exercise asked participants how to handle a post: an image of a teenage Muslim girl in a hijab alongside the text “we need to take back our country.” The exercise classified the combination as “illegal hate speech” requiring removal. Now, a reasonable person might argue about that specific scenario. Fine. Argue it. But the fact that this is the level at which European regulators are working — training platform compliance teams to remove common political sentiment combined with religious imagery, in closed-door workshops, before any court has ruled, before any democratic debate has happened — tells you something important about where the definitions are pointing.
Think about what that means in practice. Not in theory — in practice. A compliance officer at a platform with 400 million users gets a flag from a Brussels-funded body. The post contains a political opinion combined with an image. The body has designated it harmful. The platform has 24 hours. The alternative is a fine that could be measured in billions. Nobody phones a judge. Nobody consults the person who wrote it. The post disappears. And when it does — when that specific combination of political sentiment and religious imagery gets quietly removed from 400 million people’s feeds at 2am by someone following a process designed in a workshop that was closed to the public — that isn’t a transparency obligation. That’s the state deciding what the public is allowed to see. And doing it with plausible deniability built in at every layer.
That fact-checker network plugs directly into DSA enforcement. Platforms — X, Meta, TikTok, and by mid-2026 almost certainly ChatGPT, which already has three times the user numbers needed to trigger Very Large Online Platform designation — will be legally required to act on those findings. Not consider them. Act. Within 24 hours. Or face fines of 6% of global revenue.
The €120 million fine X received in December 2025 wasn’t for hosting child abuse content. It was for opacity — for not giving government-approved researchers access to the recommendation algorithm that determines what information reaches citizens. The Commission called it a transparency obligation. What it actually was: the state asserting the right to see inside the machine that shapes what the public thinks, so it can instruct the machine to shape it differently.
And when the Digital Identity Wallet closes the last gap — when the pseudonymity is quietly legislated away by a member state with a “reason,” when the VPN tunnel gets restricted, when every platform knows exactly who is saying what with a government-verified name attached — the system is complete. Everyone who speaks online, identified. Everything said, attributable. Every flag by a Brussels-appointed body, actionable within a day.
All of it constructed, piece by deliberate piece, in the name of protecting children from harm.
Final thoughts
The Soviet Union had a name for the officials who ran its censorship apparatus. Guardians of the public good. They had fact-checkers — called editors, party reviewers, information officers. Rapid response systems. Legal frameworks for acting on speech that threatened the stability of the state. Most of them genuinely believed they were protecting something real. That’s what makes these systems so durable — the people inside them are sincere.
They didn’t think of themselves as censors either.
What you are watching, from Madrid to London to Brussels, is the construction of a digital order in which the ability to speak freely, anonymously, without state knowledge, is being dismantled — not through jackboots but through frameworks, directives, DSA workshops, government-funded fact-checker networks, and the entirely reasonable-sounding proposition that we must protect our children.
Sánchez is a man whose government has been at war with X since the platform gave his opponents a direct line to Spanish voters that bypassed media institutions his party spent years cultivating. Starmer is a man whose government monitored social media during a domestic political crisis and then moved to expand its legal authority over the very platforms that let citizens talk about what they saw. The European Commission is a body of unelected officials who trained platform compliance teams, in closed-door workshops, to remove political sentiment they’d categorised as harmful — and then ignored 113 experts who wrote to warn them what they were building.
Keir Starmer is a man who appointed an Epstein associate as his personal envoy to Washington, knowing the relationship, knowing the history, and when it collapsed appointed himself the guardian of online child safety
These. Are. The self appointed guardians of the children.
They gave Epstein’s co-conspirators immunity and are still hiding their names two decades later. But they need to know yours before you can post a political opinion. They protected a trafficking network with clients in the highest levels of Western power. But you’re the threat that requires a Digital Identity Wallet. They redacted the men who procured children for a convicted paedophile while publishing the victims’ driver’s licenses. But your VPN is the problem that demands legislative action.
Call that what it is.
They didn’t prosecute the network because they were the network’s best customers. So how dare they invoke children’s safety to strip yours.
€2.5 billion extracted. Fourteen proceedings active. A Digital ID mandate rolling out across 27 countries by year’s end. VPNs under legislative attack in the birthplace of the Magna Carta. Parliamentary scrutiny openly bypassed in London. A Democracy Shield with a rapid response protocol for information crises that no one elected anyone to define.
They’ve been building this for ten years. The fines, the frameworks, the wallets, the fact-checkers, the VPN bans, the bypassed parliaments. Layer by layer. Always with a reason. Always with a child somewhere in the justification.
They’re nearly done.
And when it’s finished — when the wallet is in your pocket, the fact-checkers are wired to the platforms, the pseudonymity has been legislated away in some member state that needed a “reason,” the last encrypted tunnel closed — they will stand in front of all of it and tell you it was always, only, ever about the children.
An internet where you need permission to speak isn’t a safer internet. It’s a controlled one.
Epstein’s co-conspirators walk free while you need state permission to call them what they are.
Believe them if you want. History will know what it was.
Putin aide urges retaliation to ‘Western piracy’
RT | February 17, 2026
Russia’s response to “Western piracy” targeting its maritime trade should be forceful and not limited to diplomatic means, an aide to President Vladimir Putin has said.
Nikolay Patrushev, a veteran national security official who heads a naval policymaking body, called for stronger action against Western moves targeting vessels described as part of an alleged Russian ‘shadow fleet’.
Attempts to paralyze Russian foreign trade will only intensify, Patrushev warned in an interview with Argumenty i Fakty published on Tuesday.
“Unless we push back forcefully, soon the English, the French, and even the Balts will get brazen enough to try and block our nation’s access to at least the Atlantic,” he said.
“The Europeans are in essence making steps to impose a naval blockade, deliberately pushing towards a military escalation, testing the limits of our patience and provoking our retaliation. If the situation is not resolved peacefully, the Navy will be breaking and lifting the blockade,” Patrushev said.
“Let’s not forget that plenty of vessels sail the seas under European flags. We may get curious about what they are shipping and where,” he added.
Patrushev expressed skepticism that tensions could ease, saying “there is little hope that the West has an ounce of respect for diplomacy and the law.” He argued that “the old practice of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ is being revived,” citing US operations targeting Venezuela and Iran.
Washington has used warships to target suspected drug smuggling boats off Venezuela and intercept outgoing oil tankers, including one sailing under a Russian flag. The Pentagon is now concentrating assets in the Middle East as President Donald Trump pressures Iran to accept restrictions on its missile deterrence against Israel.
In today’s world, the Russian Navy is “a geopolitical tool that combines might with flexibility and is suitable for both peacetime and armed conflicts,” Patrushev said. Its strength is needed to protect Russia’s “ability to export oil, grain and fertilizers, and the normal functioning of the state.”
Keir Starmer-tied think tank paid PR firm to target The Grayzone
By Kit Klarenberg | The Grayzone | February 16, 2026
Leaked files have revealed that Labour Together, the shadowy think tank run by disgraced former top Keir Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney, paid the Washington DC-based corporate intelligence firm APCO Worldwide to spy on journalists who reported on their corrupt handling of campaign finances.
The reporters named appear to have been targeted for their efforts to investigate how the UK’s Labour Party elites spent 730,000 pounds in undeclared donations to install Starmer as their leader.
The files show APCO used those funds to oversee the fabrication of a dodgy, evidence-free dossier claiming that Russia was behind damaging disclosures about Labour Together, which it submitted to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) of Britain’s GCHQ — London’s equivalent to the US National Security Agency.
The “significant persons of interest” listed in APCO’s McCarthyite casebook included The Grayzone and myself.
According to my APCO dossier, “While a self described ‘investigative journalist,’ he is an author for the Gray Zone. The site has been described as a ‘conspiracy blog’ and ‘Wagner propaganda channel.’ In 2023,” the dossier reads, I “was arrested by counter-terror police after [I] arrived in the UK.”
APCO bills itself as “a trusted and strategic advisor… that drive[s] our clients’ missions and objectives forward.” Despite its massive contract with Labour Together, the files show the PR firm struggled to identify its targets, and proved unable to establish the most basic facts about them.
When APCO branded The Grayzone as “Wagner propaganda,” it seemed to have confused us with “Grey Zone,” an entirely unrelated and now-defunct Telegram channel affiliated with the Russian military contractor. APCO also claimed I was “arrested by counter-terrorism police” in May 2023 upon returning to Britain. In fact, I had been detained, not arrested.
APCO also targeted journalists Matt Taibbi and Paul Holden, who led investigations into Labour Together’s potentially criminal activities, based on leaks and Freedom of Information requests. The PR firm had sought to secure “leverage” over Holden in order to sabotage his work.
The spying scandal began in November 2023, when Britain’s Sunday Times revealed that Keir Starmer’s campaign manager, Morgan McSweeney, had failed to declare £730,000 in campaign donations which he diverted to advance Starmer’s rise to Labour leadership. One month later, APCO prepared a memo for Labour Together outlining a strategy to blame the damaging disclosure on Russian hackers and attack the journalists who dared to publish details of the offending documents.
The story was given new life in February 2026, when British journalist Peter Geoghehan exposed a secret contract showing Labour Together paid APCO £30,000 to investigate the journalists it blamed for exposing its legally questionable activities.
It has now gone mainstream, with the Sunday Times publishing a lengthy report branding the Labour operation as a “dirty smear” based on a “lie” about Russian hacking.
However, the Times article omitted any mention of this reporter or The Grayzone, even though we were prominently targeted by Labour Together. In the following investigation, we explain why The Grayzone was targeted, tracing the origins of the slimy spying operation to a network of Labourite operatives who have sought to destroy us since well before Starmer came to power.
“Familiar with masters of the same drivers”
Labour Together was founded in 2015 by McSweeney, Starmer’s longtime svengali. After several failed campaigns for establishment candidates, McSweeney managed to transform his organization into a propaganda juggernaut, soliciting large donations from the UK Israel lobby’s most significant moneyman, Trevor Chinn.
While presenting his campaigning outfit as a plucky little think tank, he wielded it against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the movement behind him. To neutralize the ecosystem of alternative media outlets supporting Corbyn as Labour leader, Labour Together contracted a political operative named Imran Ahmed to spin out a censorship front called “Stop Funding Fake News.”
After weaponizing dubious charges of antisemitism to defund one of the most influential pro-Corbyn outlets, Canary UK, the organization folded, then resurfaced as the much bolder Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Based inside the office of Labour Together, CCDH relied on the funding from Chinn and, as The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed, secretly coordinated with the Israeli embassy in Washington.
McSweeney entered Downing Street as Starmer’s Chief of Staff just one month before Trump’s re-election. Among his most important tasks was repairing relations with the US President. At the time, Trump’s aides were bristling over reports that McSweeney met with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris during the Democratic National Convention to plot strategy. One of Trump’s top donors, the transhumanist mega-billionaire Elon Musk, also had his knives out for McSweeney after journalists Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker revealed that CCDH’s top priority for 2024 was to “kill Elon Musk’s Twitter.”
McSweeney’s solution was to dispatch one of Labour’s most seasoned – and scandal-stained – fixers to Washington. He was Lord Peter Mandelson, the architect of the neoliberal New Labour wave whose notoriously transactional tendencies seemed to make him the perfect match for Trump. Mandelson made himself a fixture at Butterworth’s, a favorite Capitol Hill haunt of MAGA operatives, and insinuated himself into Trumpist social circles.
In June 2025, the restaurant erected a plaque honoring Mandelson during a ceremony overseen by Raheem Kassam, a close associate of former Trump chief of staff Steve Bannon. There, a mirthful Mandelson raised a toast and proclaimed a special kinship with the MAGA elite: “Although we don’t have identical politics, we are familiar with masters of the same drivers that brought our respective figures to power — President Trump in your case and Keir Starmer in mine.”
But Mandelson was also dogged by the same sex trafficking figure who constantly inhabited the personal lives of both Trump and Bannon: Jeffrey Epstein. Both McSweeney and Starmer had been keenly aware of the ambassador’s friendship with Epstein, but they dismissed the concerns, even ignoring a warning from UK security services.
However, when a series of emails confirming Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein poured forth as part of a release by the US Department of Justice, the ambassador’s position became untenable. Following his firing in September 2025, a new tranche of emails published this January provided an even more damning portrait of their friendship. They showed, for instance, that Epstein channeled money to Mandelson’s husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, for a specious initiative which was never completed. Even worse, the communications exposed Mandelson providing Epstein with advance notice of the impending collapse of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government in 2010, as well as sensitive information about the UK’s “saleable assets.”
McSweeney’s scheming had finally caught up with him. Though Starmer initially praised and defended his longtime campaign guru in parliament, he caved soon after, forcing McSweeney to resign his post on February 8.
In the days since, Starmer has been unable to fill the vacancy. Meanwhile, another senior Labour official is reportedly considering leaving his role as well. Amid the chaos, British media has begun to speculate that the Prime Minister will be next to go.
Will the revelation of Labour Together’s media enemies list, and its secret contract with APCO, be the weight that finally sinks Starmer?
Labour Together’s misdirection ploy: blame Russia
McSweeney was aware that Labour Together had secretly contracted APCO to spy on journalists; however, he didn’t carry out the dirty work himself. That job appears to have been commissioned by his successor at the think tank, Josh Simons, who’s now a senior minister in Starmer’s government.
Simons has dismissed reports that the PR firm was tasked with spying on reporters as “nonsense,” insisting that APCO was merely “asked to look into a suspected illegal hack.” Simons’ disingenuous claims are undermined by newly-leaked documents related to the probe, however.
Perhaps most damning is a December 2023 memo prepared by APCO for Labour Together which shows investigators fretting about “recent articles and blog posts” which threatened to draw attention to the political group’s questionable funding schemes. Information published by these meddling journalists, particularly Paul Holden, “[raised] concern about the source of his information and what more he may choose to publish in the future,” the memo continued.
It was therefore deemed “important to identify the source of the information and to ascertain what additional information could be published.” Labour Together tasked APCO with probing several journalists, dubbed “significant persons of interest.”
The memo speculated that Holden and others may have received leaks from inside Labour Together, Labour party headquarters, parliament, or “illegally-gathered information collected” from a purported “hack” of Britain’s Electoral Commission in 2023. APCO concluded it was “essential” for Labour Together to concoct a strategy to counter the critical reporting.
Its response was to blame the organization’s woes on a Russian hack. But rather than hiring a cyber-security firm to investigate the supposed data breach, it contracted a corporate intelligence firm to attack the messengers.
In February 2024, The Guardian contacted Holden to alert him that the paper was preparing a hit piece alleging he was under investigation by the NCSC for receiving illegally obtained information from Russia. The Guardian had clearly been influenced by briefings from Labour Together, as well as by APCO’s report. Yet the outlet backed off when Holden promised to sue them for defamation.
APCO is now under formal investigation for potential standards breaches by Britain’s Public Relations and Communication Association.
How did The Grayzone wind up on Labour Together’s enemies list?
It is unclear how and why I became a “significant person of interest” in APCO and Labour Together’s secret smear campaign. However, their operation dovetailed with another surreptitious attempt by intelligence-tied actors to smear The Grayzone as Russian agents.
I have never spoken to Paul Holden or other journalists named as the firm’s targets, or conducted any journalistic investigations into Labour Together’s corrupt financial dealings. When APCO initiated its probe, I had mentioned Labour Together in a single article months prior that focused on the organization’s censorship-obsessed spinoff, the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Such sloppiness and paranoia is the hallmark of Amil Khan, a veteran British government psyops warrior turned “disinformation expert” involved with Labour Together and Starmer’s Labour.
Khan cut his teeth running covert British-funded psychological warfare operations during the Syrian dirty war, supporting violent extremist groups armed and financed by the CIA and MI6. He subsequently founded Valent Projects, which “specializes in addressing online manipulation.” Khan’s outfit produced a paper on social media ratfucking strategies for Labour Together entitled, “Power and Persuasion: Understanding the Right’s Playbook.”
In December 2021, The Grayzone exposed how Valent Projects covertly produced Covid vaccine propaganda funded by the British monarchy’s Royal Institute, using then-popular “BreadTube” personality Abigail Thorn as the front person for its campaign. The investigation apparently placed this outlet in the crosshairs of Khan and his information warfare network.
Less than a year later, The Grayzone exposed Khan again – this time, for his role in a covert conspiracy to destroy us. Enlisted by celebrity former leftist journalist Paul Mason, Khan helped coordinate a harebrained scheme to demonetize and deplatform The Grayzone. The pair discussed going “full nuclear legal to squeeze [The Grayzone] financially,” and proposed publishing intelligence agency-sourced smears to delegitimize this outlet.
As their revenge plot approached its paranoid apogee, Mason and Khan fantasized about hosting an anti-Grayzone summit with some of the most rabid, intelligence-tied opponents of our reporting. Among those they pitched for the gathering was Imran Ahmed, director of the censorship-obsessed Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which was founded by Morgan McSweeney and shared an office with his Labour Together.
While it is unknown if the anti-Grayzone summit ever took place, we have since learned that Mason enlisted a team of high-priced London lawyers to sue this outlet just days after our article exposing his secret smear campaign appeared. In May 2023, I was detained at the UK’s Luton International Airport and interrogated about The Grayzone’s activities by counter-terror police. Six months later, APCO initiated its covert investigation of me, The Grayzone, and others whose reporting had wound them up on the Labour Together enemies list.
APCO has so far remained silent about the scandal. The Grayzone has submitted a request for comment to Tom Short, the PR firm’s London chief. We received an automated response revealing he conveniently slipped away to the US. Upon Short’s return to Britain, APCO will no longer be able to hide behind bogus allegations of Russian hacking.
Ian Proud: Economic Reset with Russia to Save Europe
Glenn Diesen | Feb 15, 2026
Ian Proud discusses why an economic reset with Russia is required for a stable peace and to prevent Europe from becoming a weakened relic of a unipolar past. As a former British diplomat, Proud performed a number of roles, including the Economic Counsellor at the UK’s embassy in Moscow between 2014 and 2019.
The Peacemonger: https://www.youtube.com/@IanProud
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NATO plotting maritime blockade of Russia – Moscow
RT | February 14, 2026
NATO countries are plotting an illegal maritime blockade of Russia, particularly in the Baltic and the Arctic regions, Moscow’s ambassador to Norway, Nikolay Korchunov, has said.
In an interview with RIA Novosti published on Saturday, Korchunov accused the bloc’s members, including Norway, of “putting the Baltic-Arctic region on a barrack-like footing” by holding a series of exercises. This, he added, is aimed at “restricting freedom of navigation and violates international law norms.”
According to the envoy, NATO is also developing plans for “a partial or complete naval blockade” of Russia. In addition, such NATO members as Norway, Sweden, and Finland “are working together to increase military mobility through the development of transport and logistics corridors from west to east, as well as through cross-border use of bases and other military infrastructure.”
These preparations increase tensions and represent a direct threat to Russia’s national security and would force Moscow to take countermeasures, Korchunov warned.
His remarks come after Bloomberg reported on Friday that UK Defense Secretary John Healey had met with counterparts from Baltic and Nordic nations on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference to discuss seizing Russia-linked oil tankers.
In recent months, Western countries have detained several Russia-linked cargo vessels under various pretenses. Moscow has consistently condemned the seizures as “piracy” and a blatant violation of international maritime law.
Last year, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev warned that NATO is seeking to undermine Moscow’s economy by considering a blockade of the country, including by paralyzing Russian ports in the St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad regions. He also pointed out that the bloc is seeking to turn the Black and Baltic Seas into “internal waters of the alliance,” adding that Moscow is preparing countermeasures in response.
UK High Court rules Palestine Action ban unlawful
Al Mayadeen | February 13, 2026
The UK High Court ruled on Friday that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act was unlawful.
On Friday, three judges led by Dame Victoria Sharp, president of the King’s Bench Division, concluded that the decision to ban the group was unlawful. However, the ban will remain temporarily in place to allow the government time to appeal.
From July 5 last year, membership of or public support for Palestine Action became a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. The group had been placed on the list of proscribed organisations, categorizing it alongside internationally recognized armed groups.
The court upheld the challenge on two of four grounds. Judges found that the proscription represented “a very significant interference” with the rights to freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, and association. They also ruled that Yvette Cooper’s decision was inconsistent with her own stated policy.
Sharp described Palestine Action as an organisation “that promotes its political cause through criminality and encouragement of criminality”, but continued, “The court considered that the proscription of Palestine Action was disproportionate. A very small number of Palestine Action’s activities amounted to acts of terrorism within the definition of section 1 of the 2000 Act.”
“For these, and for Palestine Action’s other criminal activities, the general criminal law remains available. The nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities falling within the definition of terrorism had not yet reached the level, scale, and persistence to warrant proscription,” Sharp added.
Legal and political repercussions
The judgment marks the first time an organisation banned under the Terrorism Act has successfully challenged its proscription in court.
According to the campaign group Defend Our Juries, more than 2,700 people have been arrested since the ban took effect, most under section 13 of the Terrorism Act. More than 500 individuals, including clergy, pensioners, and military veterans, have been charged.
If the proscription order is ultimately quashed, the charges could be dropped. For now, those charged remain in legal uncertainty while the ban stays in force pending appeal.
Government to appeal decision
Current home secretary Shabana Mahmood said she would challenge the ruling.
Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori described the decision as a “monumental victory” and said the ban was based on property damage rather than violence against individuals.
“We were banned because Palestine Action’s disruption of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, cost the corporation millions of pounds in profits and to lose out on multibillion-pound contracts.
“We’ve used the same tactics as direct action organisations throughout history, including anti-war groups Keir Starmer defended in court, and the government acknowledged in these legal proceedings that this ban was based on property damage, not violence against people.
“Banning Palestine Action was always about appeasing pro-Israel lobby groups and weapons manufacturers, and nothing to do with terrorism … Today’s landmark ruling is a victory for freedom for all, and I urge the government to respect the court’s decision and bring this injustice to an end without further delay.”
The case is likely to intensify debate in the United Kingdom over the balance between national security powers and civil liberties.
Populations in key NATO nations balk at sacrifices for military spending – poll
RT | February 13, 2026
People in key NATO nations are reluctant to tighten their belts to fund increased defense spending, despite believing that the world is “heading toward global war,” according to a Politico poll published on Friday.
The poll, which surveyed at least 2,000 people from the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany each, found that majorities in four of the five countries think “the world is becoming more dangerous” and expect World War III to break out within five years.
Nearly half of Americans (46%) consider a new world war ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ by 2031, up from 38% last year. In the UK, 43% share this belief, up from 30% in March 2025.
French respondents matched British levels at 43%, and 40% of Canadians expect war within five years. Only Germans remain skeptical, with a majority believing that a global conflict is unlikely in the near term.
The survey suggested a stark disconnect, however, between the growing alarm and willingness to pay for a defense buildup. While respondents support increased military spending in principle, support fell dramatically when specific trade-offs were mentioned.
In France, support dropped from 40% to 28% when those being surveyed were told about the potential financial and fiscal consequences. In Germany, it fell from 37% to 24%, with defense spending ranking as one of the least popular uses of money.
The survey also suggested significant skepticism about creating an EU army under a central command, with support at 22% in Germany and 17% in France.
While the poll suggests that Russia is perceived as the ‘biggest threat’ to Europe, Canadians view the administration of US President Donald Trump as the greatest danger to their security. Respondents in France, Germany, and the UK rank the US as the second-biggest threat – cited far more often than China.
The findings come after NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte urged members states in December to embrace a “wartime mindset” amid the stand-off with Russia. This also comes amid Western media speculation that Russia could attack European NATO members within several years. Moscow has dismissed the claims as “nonsense,” while accusing EU countries of manufacturing anti-Russia hysteria to justify reckless militarization.
No Grounds for Talks About New Negotiations With US on New START – Russian Deputy Foreign Minister
Sputnik – 09.02.2026
There are no grounds for talking about launching new negotiations with the United States on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Monday.
“There is currently no basis for discussing the launch of such a negotiation process. We have repeatedly spoken about the need to see deeper, far-reaching changes for the better in the US approach to the issues we are discussing,” Ryabkov said on the sidelines of the BRICS Sherpa meeting in New Delhi, adding that when US policy towards Russia changes for the better, then the preconditions for launching a corresponding dialogue will arise.
Russia regrets that the US administration perceives the New START Treaty as something that requires replacement with something else, the deputy foreign minister added.
“In any such hypothetical process, nothing would come of it without the involvement of the United Kingdom and the French Republic, as the United States’ closest allies, both possessing nuclear weapons and, in the current, highly tense international situation, pursuing a highly aggressive course toward our country. Therefore, ignoring their nuclear arsenals would be irresponsible. They must be at the negotiating table, I repeat, if and when something like this becomes relevant,” Ryabkov also said.
UK proposes North Sea drone fleet to target tankers – Sunday Times
RT | February 9, 2026
Britain is planning to launch a seaborne drone fleet to seize oil tankers it claims are linked to what it calls a Russian “shadow fleet,” the Sunday Times has reported.
London banned the import of Russian crude and oil products in 2022, along with related maritime transportation, insurance, and financing, imposing sanctions on over 500 vessels.
Despite those measures, Moscow has shipped 550 million tonnes of oil legally through the English Channel with an estimated value of $326 billion, according to the outlet, which said the sanctions are “failing to bite.” At the same time, Politico reported an estimated 40% of diesel-grade petroleum products the UK imported from India and Türkiye over four years originated from Russian oil.
The Royal Navy has drafted proposals for a command center for a remotely piloted flotilla of unmanned boats to police the North Sea. The drones are intended to gather evidence of “illicit activities” by tankers heading to and from Russian ports, which would form the basis for outright seizure of the vessels in the English Channel.
Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which guarantees freedom of navigation, Western powers lack a clear legal basis to enforce sanctions against cargo on the high seas.
Despite this, two tankers have been seized so far this year: the Marinera by the US with UK support in the North Atlantic, and the Grinch by France in the Mediterranean. British Defense Secretary John Healey confirmed afterwards that the two allies were coordinating to detain more vessels.
The Sunday Times noted, however, that the plan faces a significant financial hurdle, as holding seized tankers incurs high costs. To help offset this, London is reportedly considering selling the oil from impounded vessels.
Russian officials have consistently slammed tanker seizures a “blatant violation” of international maritime law. President Vladimir Putin last October called France’s detention of a vessel in neutral waters “piracy.” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova previously characterized piracy as “one of the English traditions,” adding that historically pirates were forbidden to attack English ships but were allowed to plunder rival vessels.
Bad Science, Big Consequences
How the influential 2006 Stern Review conjured up escalating future disaster losses
By Roger Pielke Jr. | The Honest Broker | February 2, 2026
For those who haven’t observed climate debates over the long term, today it might be hard to imagine the incredible influence of the 2006 Stern Review on The Economics of Climate.1
The Stern Review was far more than just another nerdy report of climate economics. It was a keystone document that reshaped how climate change was framed in policy, media, and advocacy, with reverberations still echoing today.
The Review was commissioned in 2005 by the UK Treasury under Chancellor Gordon Brown and published in 2006, with the aim of assessing climate change through the lens of economic risk and cost–benefit analysis. The review was led by Sir Nicholas Stern, then Head of the UK Government Economic Service and a former Chief Economist of the World Bank, from the outset giving the effort unusual stature for a policy report.
As the climate issue gained momentum in the 2000s, the Review’s conclusions that climate change was a looming emergency and that virtually any cost was worth bearing in response were widely treated as authoritative. The Review shaped climate discourse far beyond the United Kingdom and well beyond the confines of economics.
One key aspect of the Stern Review overlaps significantly with my expertise — The economic impacts of extreme weather. In fact, that overlap has a very surprising connection which I’ll detail below, and explains why back in 2006 I was able to identify the report’s fatal flaws on the economics of extreme weather in real time, and publish my arguments in the peer-reviewed literature soon thereafter.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I have just updated through 2025 the figure below that compares the Stern Review’s prediction of post-2005 increases in disaster losses as a percentage of global GDP with what has actually transpired.
Specifically, the figure shows in light grey the Stern Review’s prediction for increasing global disaster losses, as a percentage of GDP, from 2006 through 2050.2 These values in grey represent annual average losses, meaning that over time for the prediction to verify, about half of annual losses would lie above the grey bars and about half below.
The black bars in the figure show what has actually occurred (with details provided in this post last week). You don’t need fancy statistics to see that the real world has consistently undershot the Stern Review’s predictions over the past two decades.
The Stern Review forecast rapidly escalating losses to 2050, when losses were projected to be about $1.7 trillion in 2025 dollars. The Review’s prediction for 2025 was more than $500 billion in losses (average annual). In actuality losses totaled about $200 billion in 2025.
The forecast miss is not subtle.
How did the Stern Review get things so wrong?
The answer is also not subtle and can be summarized in two words: Bad science.
Let’s take a look at the details. The screenshot below comes from Chapter 5 of the Review and explains its source for developing its prediction, cited to footnote 26.
As fate would have it, footnote 26 goes to a white paper that I commissioned for a workshop that I co-organized with Munich Re in 2006 on disasters and climate change.
That white paper — by Muir-Wood et al. — is the same paper that soon after was played the starring role in a fraudulent graph inserted into the 2007 IPCC report (yes, fraudulent). You can listen to me recounting that incredible story, with rare archival audio.
But I digress . . . back to The Stern Review, which argued:
If temperatures continued to rise over the second half of the century, costs could reach several percent of GDP each year, particularly because the damages increase disproportionately at higher temperatures . . .
The report presented its prediction methodology in the footnote 27, shown in full below, which says: “These values are likely underestimates.”
Where do these escalating numbers come from? Who knows.
They appear to be just made up out of thin air. The predictive numbers do not come from Muir-Wood et al., who do not engage in any form of projection.
The 2% starting point for increasing losses — asserted in the blue highlighted passage in the image above — also does not appear in Muir-Wood et al. which in fact says:
When analyzed over the full survey period (1950 – 2005) the year is not statistically significant for global normalized losses. . . For the more complete 1970-2005 survey period, the year is significant with a positive coefficient for (i.e. increase in) global losses at 1% . . .
The Stern Review seems to have turned 1% into 2% and failed to acknowledge that over the longer-period 1950 to 2005, there was no increasing trend in losses as a proportion of GDP. The escalating increase in annual losses from 2% to 3%, 4%, 5%, 6% every decade is not supported in any way in the Stern Review, nor is it referenced to any source.
When the Stern Review first came out, I noticed this curiosity right away, and did what I thought we scholars were expected to do when encountering bad science with big implications — I wrote a paper for peer review.
My paper was published in 2007 and clearly explained the Muir-Wood et al. and other significant and seemingly undeniable errors in the Stern Review.
Pielke Jr, R. (2007). Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change. Global Environmental Change, 17(3-4), 302-310.
I explained in that paper:
This brief critique of a small part of the Stern Review finds that the report has dramatically misrepresented literature and understandings on the relationship of projected climate changes and future losses from extreme events in developed countries, and indeed globally. In one case this appears to be the result of the misrepresentation of a single study. This cherry picking damages the credibility of the Stern Review because it not only ignores other relevant literature with different conclusions, but it misrepresents the very study that it has used to buttress its conclusions.
Over my career in research, I’ve had some hits and some misses, but I’m happy to report that I got this one right at the time and it has held up ever since. Of course, perhaps a more significant outcome of this episode, and a key part of my own education in climate science, is that my paper was resoundingly ignored.
One reason that science works is that scientists share a commitment to correct errors when they are found in research, bringing forward reliable knowledge and leaving behind that which doesn’t stand the test of time.
I learned decades ago that in areas where I published, self-correction was often slow to work, if not just broken. Over the decades that pathological characteristic of key areas of climate science has not much improved (e.g., see this egregious example).
The Stern Review helped to launch climate change into top levels of policy making around the world. Further, we can draw a straight line from the Review to the emergence of (often scientifically questionable) “climate risk” in global finance a decade later. It still rests on a foundation of bad science.
1 My ongoing THB series on insurance and “climate risk” in finance prompted me to revisit the 2006 Stern Review, hence this post.
2 Note that the Review explicitly referenced the tabulation of global economic losses from extreme weather events as tabulation by Munich Re, which is the same dataset that I often use, such as in last week’s THB post on global disaster losses. The comparison here is thus apples to apples.
The Guardian Wants Substack To Start Censoring Creators
The Dissident | February 7, 2026
The British establishment newspaper the Guardian, is pushing for censorship on Substack in a new article titled, “Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters”.
The article used the oldest censorship trick in the book: to scour for examples of obscure individuals who hold extremist or hateful views and use them to push for a broader censorship agenda.
In this case, the author of the article, Geraldine McKelvie, scoured Substack to find Neo-Nazi pages, some with as few as 241 subscribers, and used these examples to demand that Substack further crack down on speech.
The Neo-Nazi pages listed in her article have next to no following, with the biggest one listed at 3,000 subscribers, including paid and not paid.
One of the Neo-Nazi accounts listed in the article, “Erika Drexler”, has only ever written on Substack notes and has never even published a single article .
The real censorship agenda behind listing obscure Nazi accounts on Substack becomes clearer when it goes on to quote Danny Stone, the Chief Executive of the UK Charity, “Antisemitism Policy Trust”, calling for more censorship of “anti-semitism” on Substack.
The charity, which “Works with British parliamentarians, policy makers and opinion formers to address policy issues relating to antisemitism” like many organizations pretending to oppose antisemitism, includes harsh criticism of Israel and its genocidal slaughter in Gaza as “antisemitism”.
The charity’s “Glossary of Anti-Semitic Terms”, includes “Zionist/Zio/Zio-Nazi” as “anti-semetic” terms.
The charity’s report on pro-Palestine rallies in the UK goes even further, claiming that saying, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”, is “antisemitic” along with “Equating Zionism or Israel with Nazi Germany” and “claims that Israel is committing genocide by treating Palestinians in a similar way in which Jews were treated during the Holocaust”.
The charity even claimed that saying that “Jewish/Israeli soldiers target Palestinian children” is an “antisemitic blood libel”, despite the fact that credible international doctors working in Gaza have proven that IDF snipers routinely target Palestinian children.
Also listed as “anti-semetic” blood libel in the report was, “Israelis are presented as blood-thirsty (and there have even been disgraceful allegations of organ harvesting)”, despite the IDF’s history of organ harvesting being well documented.
The Guardian’s article then goes on to write, “Joani Reid, the Labour chair of the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism, said she planned to write to Substack and Ofcom to ask them to address the Guardian’s findings. She said antisemitism was ‘spreading with impunity’ and getting worse.”
Joani Reid, another Zionist Labour MP has , “explained that her decision to speak out against the issue (of “anti-semitism”) stems from a deep sense of duty, particularly in light of the ‘terrible legacy’ left by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn” the former labour leader who was slandered by the British Zionist lobby as an anti-semite for his sympathy towards Palestinians under Israeli bombardment.
The Jewish Chronicle wrote, “She was faced with a difficult choice when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party: ‘either leave the party or take action.’ She chose the latter, becoming actively involved in addressing the rise of antisemitism within the party”, in reference to the “anti-semitism in Labour” hoax, where Corbyn and his allies were painted as anti-semites for their criticism of Israel.
The point of the Guardian’s article is clear: to list off a few random extremist Substack pages in order to usher in a censorship regime on Substack policing “anti-semitism”, to be driven by people like Joani Reid and Danny Stone, who want to silence criticism of Israel.
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TV Drama Review
Japanese drama projects Japan’s wartime atrocities onto Chinese characters
Global Times | October 25, 2026
By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.
What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.
It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.
China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.
The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News. … continue
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