Gloria Steinem was one of the most important feminists to ever live – and did so with unrelenting purpose until the age of 92. Born in Ohio, she was a journalist and activist who became a trailblazer feminist during the second wave of the 1960s and 70s. She famously went undercover at The New York Playboy Club for Show magazine to expose Hugh Hefner’s sexploitation, before she co-founded Ms Magazine in 1971 - the first mainstream publication to deal with women’s rights head-on via the female perspective. She launched major advocacy groups, fought for women’s reproductive rights and equality, and later joined arms with climate change activists and LGBTQ+ rights leaders. She widened the coalition, but critically that coalition later treated sex as negotiable.

I’d like to thank her for being one of the first prominent women to sign a statement [here] condemning Hamas’s use of sexual violence on October 7, in particular, alongside Sheryl Sandberg, Professor Catharine MacKinnon, Ashley Judd and Diane Von Furstenberg.

“We bear witness to the mountain of evidence that Hamas and other terrorist groups used rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women and girls; and we demand accountability for crimes that must never be tolerated by the world community. Most of all, we stand with the victims of gender-based atrocities, with the survivors and with those who did not survive, and we raise our voices in solidarity with them.”

October is also America’s month for Domestic Violence Awareness, and so it’s impossible for me to ignore how meaningful it was that Steinem signed an open letter to condemn the public shaming of Amber Heard in 2022, when it felt like the entire world was laughing. For everything –glorious Gloria – thank you.

Today instead of just thinking about Steinem’s legacy, I am wondering where we are left standing. Feminism’s failure breaks me. Steinem lived to see so much of her work undone. Particularly this concept of “sisterhood”, which is now abused by fake feminists in order to exploit women in desperate need. The tears I shed today are not just for all we’ve gone backwards on. They are for the women I have done everything to try and help who have been deceived by women who have no right to call themselves “feminists”.

When I spoke up against a grave miscarriage of justice four years ago, very few feminists followed. I learned just how perverted the industry of feminism had become. I had once trusted many brands of feminists who were not who they said they were. At the center of arguably one of the most public pile-ons of a female complainant in modern memory, the plausible deniability is strong with those who rely on a notion that nobody stands to gain from speaking up for a woman suffering a great public ordeal. Yet, the terrible reality is that bad actors do see personal opportunity, while they pretend to care, feign to help, and come armed with their own agendas. I am still sick over those who prey on a very desperate type of vulnerability. The DARVO and manipulation by women of female victims. The subsequent devastation of bonds that should never ever ever have been broken. The pain of it. I wish I had words to describe the ripping apart of something so delicate and precious, like a pack of wolves tearing through the very essence of sisterhood; something I have fought with every single muscle in my body to protect. I would do anything to repair it. I still don’t know how.

Some days I don’t know what to do, except keep doing what I’ve always done. For I am a feminist who stood up against a mob because it was right, and for no other reason, despite what fantastical claims my detractors come up with. I am a feminist who stood in the fields of Re’im after the Nova massacre and clutched my chest at the sight of the barren trees where women were gang-raped and shot in the head. And I was defamed a racist, a “genocidal baby killer”, a “Zio bitch” for observing, for honoring, for acknowledging. I was libeled as instigating a “smear campaign” for publicly condemning a so-called feminist for advocating for an infamous alleged rapist. Like so many others, I have been excluded for my views on trans rights, because I see through a bullying, hateful propagandist movement that shows its true colors this week in the wake of the Maureen Lipman boycott in the London theater circuit.

Lipman, who is a true feminist, defended herself in the Telegraph yesterday, before yet another trans activist pulled out of her forthcoming show:

“There are a lot of Jewish actors who won’t speak up for Israel. They keep quiet. That is up to them. But I will not countenance juvenile, immature posturing. Why didn’t Mr McCarthy just say he had a hernia if he really could not face working with me? Why did he have to release a lengthy, moralising statement attacking views I have “publicly and repeatedly” expressed? I will not be bullied, nor will I allow anybody to tell me what to think. If that affects their ability to work with me, as opposed to convert me to their point of view, then they are lily-livered… Let’s behave as actors who believe in free speech and free thought, rather than engage in a new McCarthyism.”

I wrote previously about this drama here. “Values don’t align” comes the explanation of trans activist number two. But do Trans Rights Activists have any values besides “me me me”? They don’t seem to care about anyone or anything else, especially not feminism. That part Steinem got wrong.

Steinem eventually bowed down to some of the TRA talking points after her initial years of rightful skepticism, adjusting her tune. In 1977 she asked whether, if the shoe doesn’t fit, we must change the foot. In 2013 she took it back: transition was authentic, “not questioned,” and medical decisions belonged to the individual alone. She never advocated for self-ID in law, or for men to play in women’s sports. Yet she still enabled. She walked back her 1977 warning about changing the body to fit the role, signed a letter that called trans girls “girls”, and treated single-sex recreation as a barrier to be removed. She supplied the moral permission, but not the specific policy.

Here is what we must confront about the Trans Rights Activists. Indeed all of the fraudulent feminist organizations, figureheads and causes who now spit in the face of Steinem’s decades-long advocacy. Forget the theater, the boycott is the performance. It is the career move. The boycott is the entire point. These activists begin as Average Joes who were nothing without the movement, and the posturing. They corrupt everything around them. They remove all that they perceive as a “threat” – something they can’t compete with. They eviscerate because they can’t win otherwise. They have targeted Jews, women, lesbians and traditional liberals, not The Patriarchy. They are anything but harmless and victimized; that perception is how they advance themselves. They are controlling and abusive. They establish cult rules the instant they get a fingernail in the door. If you have ever been impacted, you understand the silent harm. Your life becomes a chess piece in their own narcissism, and those around you will believe them to be your victim.

I don’t for a moment believe that women no longer need sisterhood. We need it more than ever. I made a promise that we could rebuild that sisterhood, and I have not forgotten that promise.

Women’s rights are not given. They must be fought for. And they are always - always - being negotiated away. In order to survive, we must be honest about who is doing the negotiating. For those women, are not – and can never be – our sisters.

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A story broke before the weekend about an Irish nothing actor who pulled out of a short theater run at the Soho Theater in London. He was to continue starring in Right Before I Go, which enjoyed a week or two at the Edinburgh Fringe this August. And yet, when Maureen Lipman was announced as his new co-star, he pulled out, and released this statement for he was now a victim of discomfort:

“Following the announcement that Dame Maureen Lipman would be joining the company, I privately explained that, because of views she has publicly and repeatedly expressed regarding Israel and Palestine, I did not feel comfortable personally promoting her involvement.”

The most damning thing about antizionist racist Gerard McCarthy (again - who?) is that he seemed to once be a fan of Dame Maureen Lipman; or at least shameless enough in his grift to use her to advance his career. Lipman is a decades-deep successful British thespian. National treasure status is not an exaggeration. Comparatively no one has ever heard of Belfast sometime soap opera actor McCarthy (I haven’t seen Hollyoaks since before 9/11), which is usually the case in these scenarios. The only place anyone ever hears of these self-identifying non-binary provincials is in their own heads. Why are so many of them Northern Irish?

Earlier this summer, McCarthy attended the industry-studded press night for Lipman’s new play Allegra. Lipman was the lead. She was still a Zionist then. Weird how McCarthy had no issue attending the performance (on July 9, only seven weeks ago) beneath the radar where, after years of relatively little work, he could presumably network and introduce himself – or themselves (sic)? According to PinkNews, McCarthy acquired they/them pronouns in 2022 when he “bravely” came out at the age of 41 with the statement: “I’m just me!”. Brave? By 2022, they/them was positively mainstream. Gay men, lesbian women and remarkably hoards of straight people had already decided they have multiple personality disorder, and/or suddenly had an urge to get surgery after decades of high functionality with zero medical reports of body dysphoria. It was far more “brave” to be aligned with your birth certificate in 2022.

Alas “I did not feel comfortable”, said the northern Irish pro Palestine non-binary trans rights activist about the established Jewish woman who he was happy to use for as long as it took him to get his foot back in the door before this desperately empty virtue-signalling performance. These stories are so intensely on the nose for all of us who have been experiencing this en masse for years. There is not a single lesbian who has not been pushed out of the “queer” space for a lack of fascistic ideological capture.

(Pause and dream with me for a moment about how much great art and comedy and writing and theater and film and music will exist again after the Trans Rights And Rape Is Definitely Resistance Activists are given the boot…)

McCarthy is not uncomfortable with Lipman, really. He’s uncomfortable with the truth. The truth is, he hasn’t achieved a fraction of what Lipman had at his age. By the age of 45 (ie in 1991), Lipman had already established herself as one of Britain’s most versatile and beloved cultural icons. Rather than sticking to a single lane, she achieved massive success across theatre, television, mainstream film, literature, even advertizing. Without the protest, the pronouns and the fake outrage sloganeering, these people are zilch, and if the Jason Arday scandal has indicated anything, it’s that more of them are about to be reminded of the truth (note: not their truth) the hard way.

Over the weekend, these puritanical imbeciles decided to banish local lesbian Tanya Tsikanovsky who is running for West Hollywood city council this fall from the only lesbian bar in the zip code. Tsikanovsky is a Zionist, and is quintessentially gay. She won’t mind me asking you to confirm the facts by just looking at her. She’s the dyke next to me with the aviators.

[Tsikanovsky and I at Pride in Tel Aviv, June 2026]

Being a dyke, and running for West Hollywood, there was none more obvious place for Tanya to hold an event than the only lesbian bar Sweet Water. However, within three minutes (180 seconds) of the announcement of the upcoming event, Tanya was contacted by the bar’s owner to inform her that she was pulling it from the calendar due to an overwhelming number of negative comments on social media.

Tanya rightfully went to the press, and blew the story up, citing that she didn’t blame Sweet Water for the decision, expressing empathy for them as a small business, but that she was going to call out the blatant Jew hatred of the bar’s clientele who ran her out of the venue with their hate speech. Not only did their speech focus on Tanya’s support for Trump in the 2024 election (after being a life-long Democrat, and literally working on Hilary Clinton’s campaign team); they were overwhelmingly upset that Tanya is a Zionist.

What happened next? Last night, the owner uploaded a video to Sweet Water’s Instagram denying the antisemitism, and insisting that Tanya is free to come to the bar in her own time whenever, but going forward Sweet Water asks that everyone “leaves their politics at the door.” To that I call bullshit.

Watch:

The owner makes some pathetic assertions. The crown jewel is her speech about the space needing to be filled with love and safety for all. She ignores the reality that these spaces are inherently radicalized. Not just political; politically extreme and radical. This is a result of the “queering” of the LGBT community, which I’ve written about extensively on Blacklisted.

True inclusiveness welcomes all regardless of political opinions. We know that Sweet Water will not police politics in the venue. The policing only goes in one direction. The community will be protected from any intellectual challenge. There is no sudden ban on the wearing of keffiyehs, or ACLU t-shirts, or Amnesty International badges. “Love” is not tolerating people’s delusions or cushioning life so that we never question beliefs that are shoved down our throats. This exclusion is dangerous to the whole community when extremism is protected under the guise of tolerance. The owner admits she witnessed the vitriol on her side of the aisle, and she decided that instead of confronting the hate and inviting the event to go ahead regardless, to provide the detractors the opportunity to hear from Tanya directly, that no such opportunity could exist. Where is the humanity in that? Humanity is diverse of mind, of thought, of reason. Humanity is the ability to debate ideas in a free society. Sweet Water chose the coward’s way out.

Do these queer non-binary pricks ever think about how narrow their worldview has become in the ten years they’ve spent ensuring nobody who veers even one degree from their gobshite propagandist perspective can speak a word to them? Aren’t they at all curious as to why a lifelong Democrat-voting Dyke felt no other choice but to vote for Donald Trump in 2024? Don’t they want to understand why - say - all of my gay and lesbian Persian friends voted for Trump and stand for Israel? They are first generation Americans whose parents fled persecution, and they have kicked the door down to be out and proud in their own conservative communities. Now they’re being labelled fascists and bigots by privileged straight people who identify as “queer” and they’re banned from what were once inclusive LGBT spaces.

Many of us supported Trump’s election in 2024 (I cannot vote, to clarify) because we wanted to see the release of the Israeli hostages. One of those hostages, Emily Damari, is a lesbian, who had to hide her identity while in captivity. She was liberated from Hamas’s hell tunnels the day of Trump’s inauguration. This weekend, Emily celebrated her marriage to her wife (mazel tov) Danielle Amit in a Tel Aviv ceremony.

Yet, Emily and Danielle are Zionists. They are not welcome in Western “queer” spaces.

The “queers” are the flat-earthers, and they will resist every warning because they feel “uncomfortable” being in the same room as any and all of us with the freedom to think for ourselves. I tell you, they’re going to feel mighty uncomfortable when they find out that the Jihadists who they voted in are plotting to blow them up.

Zohran, dying is when you pass away from disease or natural causes.

Does anyone know why so many people who worked at the Twin Towers weirdly passed away that morning?

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This is culture. This culture doesn’t care to be what anyone wants to bully it into being. It doesn’t care if you’re gonna like its opinions or what it’s gonna say or wear – or how. This is what we don’t nurture any more in a world where moral puritans keep destroying everything wonderful and unifying about life.

I’ve tried to stay away from appraisals of Dolly for the last few days, mainly because I don’t want to read a bunch of progressives shoehorning their own ideologies into a woman who refused to let anyone else speak for her. I know how hard it was to get her to speak to anything she didn’t want to share, because I was once tasked with trying, and I did ask her all the questions: from bathroom bills to Trump. And what an honor that was. However, some of the commentary has inevitably passed under my nose, and I’ve thought: wouldn’t it be amazing if music critics would stop imposing their own political agendas onto Dolly Parton?

Dolly was a Christian woman from the South, and incredibly outspoken about being so. She wrote about the South and its realities, and did so without judging anyone in the story; not the girl who fell pregnant, nor the lover who left her, nor the momma who kept her secrets, or the daddy who might commit a homicide. Everyone who listened to Dolly’s songs felt held and seen by her. She reflected reality back at the world with the honesty of someone who lived it herself.

After Nine To Five, Dolly stayed away from Jane Fonda’s activism – and thank god, because Fonda is now a ceasefire-screaming Jew hater. Dolly was able to do what so few artists remember to do now; she let her music do the talking. Even though she rejected the term, Dolly was more “feminist” than anyone using the title in 2026.

She outperformed her male competitors for one reason, and one reason alone. She wanted to do the thing she loved, and boy did she. When I met Dolly, she wasn’t some mothering type. She was warm, but she was firm. She was a woman on a schedule and she meant business, and she didn't want to be asked any questions that would detract from business. The only political thing about her was her capacity to maneuver herself into the neutral so as to be the exact product America rewards. She wanted to reach as many hearts and souls as possible, and that she’s mourned by one and all speaks to her wild and prolonged success at doing so.

I spent the last few days enjoying as much Dolly as possible. The sweet southern twang of “Early Morning Breeze” to the crushing tragedy of “Down From Dover” and the spirit-lifting harmonies of the Trio album with Emmlyou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. I wish it wouldn’t take her death to have such an excuse to stop and immerse in a great artist’s canon. Not just a great artist. One of the most exemplary to ever do it. I re-watched Steel Mangolias almost instantaneously and sobbed. I don’t usually cry tears for stars, but I think my tears were for a world that seems to be lost; one that rewarded based on merit, on being out of the ordinary. I re-watched Nine To Five, and gleamed. I’ve consumed about as many clips of old interviews and performances as the rest of us. (Social media is still good for some things). She left us with so much for all eternity, and that’s before we even get into the philanthropic efforts that should humble everyone.

Of course, the only people in the world who weren’t celebrating and mourning the life of one of the last great Americans, were the Palestine activists. They took to Wikipedia hours after her death to title her “Jew lover” and inserted a swastika onto her page.

I didn't really want to acknowledge it on the day, but I imagine some of you also noticed that there was a trend going around by a bunch of content creators saying “the wrong white people are dying” and “the wrong 80 year old white person died”. They couldn't even wait an hour. They did it instead of sharing anything of Dolly’s legacy (presumably they don’t have any class, taste, or brain cells). If any of them knew a thing about the spirit of Dolly Parton, they wouldn't have dared. She represented an America that is long dead. An America where everyone could put their differences aside. That is the only America that I want to fight for.

She united everyone and barked if you tried to make her say something political. In a charming way, of course. I loved her and I was also a little afraid. Which is how you should be around Southern women.

I met Dolly in St Louis. I joined her out on the road in the summer of 2016, ten years ago for The Times. The full piece is below…

In St Louis, Missouri, at a hockey arena that overlooks the Mississippi, Dolly Parton is about to sing the opening lines of I Will Always Love You. It should begin,“If I should stay, I’ll only be in your way …” but Dolly halts proceedings because something has got in her way. “Hold up, I think I sucked a bug down ma throat!” That’s the last thing 2016 needs: Dolly Parton suffocated by a mosquito onstage in the Midwest. With her self-deprecating humour and still holy vocals, indestructible Dolly laughs it off. She launches into the ballad that made America’s queen of country rich three times: once in 1974, again in 1982 and, most obviously, via Whitney Houston and The Bodyguard in 1992 (four times if you count the surge when Houston was found drowned in a Beverly Hills hotel tub in 2012). Notably it was never sung by Elvis, who was also keen to cover it. The mastermind of her own career, Parton refused to let that hound dog put his name to it when Presley’s manager demanded 50% of the publishing rights and royalties.

Elvis and Whitney have since left the building. Parton, on the other hand, is on her first proper tour in 25 years. Sixty-four dates across America will bank just over $3m (£2.25m) and touch 35,000 souls. Alongside Jolene, Islands in the Stream and 9 to 5, she’s delivering all the pan-generational karaoke hits – in what amounts to a quadruple-D year. In 2016, the singer-songwriter, actress, philanthropist, gay icon and “hillbilly Dalai Lama” turned 70; she renewed her vows on the 50th anniversary of her marriage to her mysterious husband, Carl Dean (still never seen in public); she’s celebrating six decades in the business (100m records sold) and has wished her Dollywood theme park a happy 30th birthday. During a politically precarious time for the United States, Dolly remains the answer to every American princess’s prayers.

“I get my music from my momma’s side,” she tells the crowd, recalling how she left home for Nashville at 18 to pursue her singing dreams. In the early days, she would sometimes sleep in her Uncle Bill’s car, putting on her make-up in the vehicle’s wing mirror. She was raised in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children of Robert Lee Parton, an illiterate yet resourceful farmer, and Avie Lee, who sewed the jacket that informed Dolly’s Coat of Many Colors tune. She tells the audience about making her first record when she was 10 and singing at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. The morning after graduating from high school, she left on a Greyhound bus with “a sack o’ songs and a head full o’ dreams”. Tonight, she sings many of them a cappella in perfect pitch. St Louis is one stop on a swamp tour of the USA, the kind you embark upon as a whippersnapper country artist spreading the word the old-fashioned way, sucking up bugs between beers. “We wanted to do something pure and simple,” Dolly explains — and Pure & Simple is the title of her 43rd album, released this week.

It’s so pure and so simple, she doesn’t even have a drummer on her tour bus. Dolly plays more instruments than her three onstage silver fox compadres combined: piano, several types of guitar, a fiddle, a flute, a harmonica and a miniature saxophone (I’m not actually convinced she was tooting that). Each instrument is white and augmented by rhinestones. But they don’t outsparkle Dolly, who gleams like a human mirror ball. “My drummer said, ‘Are you going to get rid of all that make-up and your rhinestones?’ I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ So that’s why we have a vacant spot. He’s back in Nashville trying to take a five-inch rhinestone heel outta his butt!” The fans roar with laughter. She points at a drum machine, purchased at her local RadioShack, America’s equivalent of Comet. “We’ve saved a lotta money: $47 as opposed to the $47,000 I’d have paid him to be here.” Dolly may be renowned for her phrase “it costs a lot to look this cheap”, but she’s not spending money where it can be saved.

She didn’t intend to tour in 2016 and you wonder what possesses her to do this. Having played a handful of shows in America in 2011 and early 2014, the Glastonbury Festival in June that year proved a career high: Dolly drew the biggest crowd of the weekend, with about 100,000 people enjoying her Sunday-afternoon hits marathon. Despite her reception in the UK, she’s said she wasn’t convinced anyone at home wanted to see her again. She was wrong: crowd reaction on the tour has exceeded expectations. Even so, there are moments when she doubts herself. “I’m a human being. I feel everything to the core,” she told me before the show. “But I refuse to harden my heart.”

“D-minus three!” says one of a trio of publicists, signalling the countdown to my encounter earlier that morning. Backstage, next to Dolly’s “massage” room, I wait in a room that has all the warmth of a morgue. It’s 11:15am and Dolly, who is always prompt, is running seven minutes behind due to a lighting problem while filming something for broadcast. A shadow from one hair on her wig is being a pest, a quintessential Dolly issue. One of her team sits in Dolly’s preassigned armchair. “She’ll probably sit like so,” he says, crossing his legs. We await news via walkie-talkie of how far Dolly has progressed with her outfit change. “She needs to put some pants on so the men can’t look up her skirt,” someone explains, helpfully.

And in pants she arrives. Denim, studded with glimmering trinkets, and matching crystal-strewn shirt. As Dolly enters, the room brightens. Suddenly I feel like a leprechaun inside a rainbow. She grabs my hand and apologises for how cold hers is; her pink acrylic talons wrap around my wrist like extended icicles. “I been holdin’ onto this bottle o’ water!” she explains, in that high-pitched Dolly shrill that doesn’t come towards you but shoots heavenwards like a helium-filled balloon. Her make-up is thick and shiny, like a toddler in a beauty pageant. You can only know her to an extent, but she immediately senses a deep connection. “You’re Sco’ish!” she says, mimicking my accent. “Well, so am ahh!” Are you, I ask, sure that she’s part Cherokee, mostly all-American. “I’m a mixture,” she smiles. “I love people. I am people. I love that song by … is it Whitney? I’m Every Woman?” Chaka Khan, I say. “Oh well, I’m like every person. I see my family in everybody. Y’all remind me of a brother or a sister of mine. Like my momma, I home in, try to cater to you however I can.”

Dolly remains an inspiration to young recording artists. Lily Allen, Adele and Grimes all sing her praises, while the superstar rappers Drake and Nicki Minaj reference her on their collaborative track Make Me Proud (“Double D up hoes, Dolly Parton,” goes the line – a compliment). I am the envy of everyone I speak to: young songwriters, music A&Rs, teenage pop wannabes and obscure indie bands back in LA where I live are desperate to accompany me to meet her. “Dolly! Hashtag jealous,” they gasp. This year, at the Country Music awards, Katy Perry asked to sing Jolene with her. Parton gave a masterclass performance to a room filled with country’s modern heroes, including Tim McGraw and Carrie Underwood.

And Dolly loves them all right back. “Katy Perry is a wonderful artist, beautiful girl,” she says. She recalls meeting Taylor Swift – arguably her most likely heiress – back in the Nashville days. “What Taylor Swift has done to keep herself together and be such a hero for the young is amazing. Smart girl.” Perry and Swift are huge rivals. In an age where a Twitter endorsement is the official form of high praise, I wonder why Dolly follows Perry’s account but not Swift’s. “Oh, I don’t know any of those girls,” she says. “I’m more in Miley [Cyrus]’s corner because I’ve known her since she was a baby. She is my goddaughter, of course. Isn’t she precious? But I don’t pick favourites. I’m too old for that!”

While Dolly never has a bad word to say about anyone, she has better words to say about a few. The one artist who’s achieved the highest Dolly stamp of approval is Adele, name-checked on a new song, Head Over High Heels: “I painted my lips red, and my eyes like Adele.” Dolly laughs that lyric off, claiming it was a happy accident, not an invitation for a collaboration. “I love Adele. Love her,” she says, eyes sparkling. “I relate to her like she’s somebody I’ve always known. Some day we may get together, write, sing something, wouldn’t that be great? I think we both want that actually.”

Without Dolly, the road to female music success would not have been so well paved. One of Parton’s initial hits, 1967’s Dumb Blonde, announced her arrival by weaponising her femininity. “This dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool,” she cooed. Dolly played the game on her own terms. She got her break on the Porter Wagoner TV show at the age of 18. “I had to prove myself to him. He was a country boy with that inbred male chauvinism,” she says. She came along not just singing songs, but writing them, and having business acumen, which rubbed Wagoner up the wrong way. “I wasn’t trying to take over his career, I was trying to take over ma own!” Dolly didn’t want to get what she calls “hick-rich”. “I wanted to invest, keep my publishing, build my own label, keep control of my masters.” Her most famous hit, 9 to 5 (also in the Jane Fonda film of the same name), is an anthem about equal pay. “I agreed to act in that movie on the condition I got to write the theme tune,” she laughs. “Women are so much smarter than men in high places.” Even today, Dolly is often the only “girl” at a boardroom table. “We work extra hard to prove it. We have to.” For Dolly her female qualities have always been a business resource, a mentality gleaned as much from her daddy who farmed land as from the local hookers she nabbed her wardrobe ideas from. I suggest she’s a feminist, and she recoils. “That’s a political word. I hate controversy.”

St Louis is one of America’s most violent cities. The tension between white and African-American communities has mounted since the killing of Mike Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, 10 miles from where Dolly is playing tonight. The venue is a stone’s throw from the site of a Donald Trump rally in March that saw 31 people arrested after clashes between protesters and supporters outside the venue. Tonight is a sea of white faces. Jesus protesters are outside, telling people they’re going to hell. For Dolly, a woman who “loves everyone”, this backwoods tour has meant skirting around some blazing issues. There’s a lot at stake: six decades’ worth of a brand that’s satisfied a cross-section of society, many of whom are at war with each other. Perhaps that’s why she’s publicly remaining on the fence about who she’s voting for. “I have not endorsed Hillary, nor Trump,” she tells me. “They’ve both got a lot to show me. I keep my eyes, ears, heart and head open and I’ll vote for whoever I think does the best job. My mom was a Democrat, my dad was a Republican. Me?” she shrugs. “I guess I’m a Hypocrat!”

Joking aside, Dolly has no choice but to employ UN level degrees of diplomacy. She repeats a gag tonight that she debuted in New York. “Can you believe all the craziness going on in the election? I been thinking about running myself! I got the hair for it and we could use some more boobs in the race.” In New York, she delivered the joke to a 25%-30% LGBTQ audience at the tail end of Pride week, with completely different connotations. I guess Dolly, a genius wordsmith, composes hers to be spun as a one-size-fits-all.

Even with her gay following, it’s getting trickier to be the happy-go-lucky spokeswoman. I ask for her thoughts on the Bathroom Bill, a piece of legislation in North Carolina that requires transgender individuals to use restrooms based on the sex they were assigned at birth, and am surprised at her defensive response. “Look here, I am not gay. I have a lot of gay and lesbian fans, but I am not their poster child. I have a whole lot of Bible thumper fans too - they want to crucify me.” She’s equally hurt by their fanatical assertions. “As Christians, we’re not supposed to hammer people down, we’re supposed to lift them up.” Unlike Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr, Dolly didn’t cancel her North Carolina date. “I got onstage and said, ‘If anybody out there needs to pee, I have four tour buses out back.’ I serve more purpose onstage than off. I’m all for letting people be who they are. Doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, black, white, green, yella or alien grey.”

Easier for Dolly are matters of a more personal nature because she simply shuts them down. When she and her husband renewed their wedding vows in May, they took pictures - finally some evidence of Carl’s existence. He also did his first interview. The plan was for Dolly to auction the words and pictures off to the highest bidder to raise money for children’s charities. Unfortunately, she says, they have yet to receive a high enough offer to make it worthwhile. “For now I’ve put the pictures in a wedding book. I’m gonna keep Carl private.” She tells me nothing additional about him other than “he’s very funny”. I suggest she must look at Kim Kardashian and Kanye West blasting their private lives all over the TV and think they’re bonkers. “That has been productive for them, they live like that. I couldn’t do that. I could do a reality TV show if it was Dolly on the road, behind the scenes. Not my personal life. Oh heavens no!”

Reports say Carl has only seen Dolly perform live once. When she introduces Jolene onstage later, she jokes about the flame-haired female bank teller who inspired it by trying to muscle in on her husband. “That red-headed gal didn’t get my man. I did a lot of banking after that, but not with her bank.” Her onstage persona must be difficult for him to enjoy. Dolly flirts with all the fellas. “Mercy! Check out my sexy cowboy assistant,” she says as a camp buckaroo brings her a freshly tuned gee-tar. “Pretty, ain’t he, girls? Ain’t he, boys? I said I was married for 50 years. I didn’t say I was blind and dead!”

One of the tracks on her album, Can’t Be That Wrong, is a documentation of adultery. Dolly, is it time to come clean about all those rumoured affairs? “Oh! That’s a cheatin’ song!” she smiles. “I’m a songwriter first and foremost. People say, ‘You must’ve lived through this to have sung that.’ I choose stories, even some things I haven’t lived. Most of it I have! I don’t deny or admit anythang.” She laughs nervously. With everything wrapped, I’m invited to have my picture taken. When I survey the photo afterwards, I realise my hand is reaching round towards her goods. I could swear it was on her back. Maybe even her shoulder. Dolly never flinched. Dolly Parton’s chest — gatekeeper of her heart — craves the attention.

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I said the following (and don’t come at me for swearing please. That is also boring).

Here goes:

“I’m so fucking bored of all of you.

There were incredible bands, and actors, and storytellers, and writers, and comedians, and painters, and fashion designers, and architects, and marketers, and fucking brilliant ideas people, and they were all pitchfork-chased out of the room for being brilliant and NOT boring, by all you boring puritanical talentless wankers, so you can sit around “taking up space” at all the places where amazing art used to happen just opining for hours on end about things that have already been decided.

Things like: “there are many types of lesbians”. NO. There aren’t “many types of lesbians”. There is ONE type of lesbian. A woman who wants to get it on with another woman. We decided this eons ago. Get over it. Move on. It’s done. It’s decided.

“Black lives matter”. Alright, nobody ever said that wasn’t the case. We know already. Let's get on with it now thanks. Get back to business.

“Rape is a spectrum”. No it’s fucking not. Rape is rape, and it’s illegal. Fuck you. Move on. Let’s stop debating it.

“From the river to the sea”. You don’t even know which river and which sea, you dolts. Stop endlessly bleating on about things you don’t understand. Never gonna happen. Move on.

All this time and fucking oxygen you’ve all stolen from people who were using it for the betterment of the world and culture at large, and we’re all bored out of our brains because all that’s left is to try and shut you lot up for giving us all brain damage.”

I could add a lot more examples. Maybe you guys want to chime in. Perhaps you got trapped in a circular conversation you couldn’t get out of at the dog park about the intersectional ethics of dog parks and how to determine your dog’s gender when it can’t bark in English to self-ID. I’m just done, man. I have spent months climbing the walls this summer. All the worst people have invaded everything and everywhere, and littered what was once our world with trash nonsense, much of it made up, as the story of Jason Arday has revealed to us, and people who know better have bought it because they’re worn out.

Arday’s memoir is out this week by the way, according to family wishes. If you review it, you’re a racist. If you review it, you’re a colonialist. If you review it, you’re committing genocide. It’s racist to review Jason Arday’s book but it’s also racist not to review it. If it doesn’t get a Booker Prize, everyone in the UK is a racist.

I have not heard a single album this year that makes me want to disappear for hours on a mountain and write free-form. Remember when you would discover a new band and it was the closest feeling to being an astronaut, like you’d discovered a planet nobody else knew about? Music aside, no TV show sticks. Film? Yeh I liked The Odyssey, but I am not excited by Zendaya and Tom Holland, who are as thrilling as a triangle of gouda. Are we sure they even like each other that much? Like everyone else in a partnership these days, they just seem to be fond. One of those words that lands as blandly as it intends. Fond. Who wants to be fond? I’m fond of my dentist - for being less unpleasant than every other dentist I have encountered.

The standards have evaporated. A while ago there was a tweet going around about how Hunter Schafer, the transwoman, is the prettiest girl ever. Absolutely not. Grace Kelly was the prettiest girl ever. Liv Tyler and Alicia Silverstone in the Aerosmith video for Crazy were the prettiest girls ever. Is there even a bar to set any more? Are we at the floor?

There was an era I faintly recall because I was only alive for less than 20 years of it where the unattainable was absolutely unattainable. You know, when Kate Moss said “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” and she was a real anorexic, and it took work, not an online-ordered shot.

Why are you glamorizing anorexia?!? come the moral puritans.

I’m not. I’m telling you that there was a life that was not intended to be attained by normal people, because abnormal people who lived outside of any recognizable margins were the only people who could scale the heights of anything that would accrue the type of attention and platform and microphone that now seems to be available to absolutely anyone and everyone. Now everyone can slide into the most unattainable people’s DMs. Ask Lana Del Rey’s husband.

Take the microphones away. Most people have nothing interesting to say, and shouldn’t be sharing every single thing that occurs to them. Other than with their friends and family who have learned to put up with them, and who once upon a time could tell them if and when their delusional ideas should probably stay private for fear that they might not ever meet anyone other than them to keep them company.

It’s like the women of the HR departments have escaped from the office buildings and are now running around policing and controlling all the areas of life that defied any HR department. We annihilated the most talented people for the mediocre non-entities who have the politically correct words coming out of their bog standard undistinguished mouths.

2+2=5

2+2=5

2+2=5

It's not so much the frustration at how dangerously regressive everything has become, it's how monotonous, routine, predictable it is. What was once a popular song, or a blockbuster film, or a dumb reality TV series, is now just whatever-happened-on-social-media-today. And here comes the applause. Stop clapping. Please stop clapping.

Mark Ruffalo. You are so boring.

Queer cult. You are so boring.

Candace Owens. You are so boring.

Mamdani. You are so boring.

#IStandWith. You are so boring.

Rose McGowan peaked as Tatum Riley in Scream when her neck was crushed as she tried to escape Ghostface via the cat-flap of the electric garage door. By all means, keep the serial sex offenders behind bars, but in their absence please make something worth paying attention to you again. You’re not cutting edge, OK? You’re a dull pair of scissors carving up everything that was special about our beautiful gorgeous exciting world. Some losers are supposed to stay losers. It’s not progressive. It’s conservative. Bring back real shame; shame for being boring, for being an idiot, for repeating thick slogans that don’t make any sense. You’re all viciously stupid.

Here’s a video of me taking some transgender activists to task a few weeks ago. These people have made the world fatally boring. Close the feed. They scream about tolerance while banishing anyone from their debating space who may challenge the madness of their views. Look how much we are missing out on while morons rule the planet. These will be remembered as the years of the Great Empty. A whole lot of nothing.

I’m gonna go listen to The Velvet Underground or something. A Gen Z asked me “what’s that?” a few months ago.

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Today, however, Mark is responsible for the most viral tweet of the summer. It has 787,000 likes, 148,000 retweets and over 25 million views (there are 15 million Jews alive). Thus proving that the biggest target of online disinformation in 2026 is the Jewish people. This isn’t a trailer for some future feature. This is war. It’s here.

Mark got into trouble last week when - for the first time - he decided to take offense at a regular business merger in Hollywood. Would it have something to do with the fact that those involved in the merger are… Jews? Mark invoked antisemitic tropes by criticizing the possible Warner Brothers merger under David Ellison as “crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.” He accused David’s father Larry of being a “classic Oligarch” suggesting he was looking to take control of Hollywood.

Mark: this is classic economic libel.

After Paramount called him out, Mark clapped back with the aforementioned now viral tweet, in which he sets the agenda for what does and does not constitute hatred against Jews, defending his own:

“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life. This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary. The $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for serious national security review, and regulators still haven’t given the public a real answer. Until they do, the merger shouldn’t move forward. Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues, not step back or concede.”

The virality of this tweet is a major danger, requiring a coordinated, all guns blazing push back from our community and beyond to expose the truth. Henry Ford produced half a million copies of The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion in the 1920s in America to normalize anti-Jewish libels. Again, Mark just got 25 million views, and counting. His tweet has nothing to do with reasonable criticism of Israel’s policies or leaders (which would not be antisemitic). He called Larry Ellison an oligarch. Describing him and his son as “really profoundly scary people”. Why does he really oppose the merger?

Mark, you have made this very personal.

You continue to attempt to moralize your fanatical addiction to demonizing the state of Israel and the Jewish people who support it (ie, the vast majority of us), invoking this addiction to punish Jews whenever you perceive our fantastical “power” slipping from your fingers. You reject any suggestion that you are antisemitic while weaponizing your long-standing views on Israel to try to stop a major Hollywood merger, involving Jews. You insist that criticizing Israel’s elected leader, military technology contracts, or the executives behind them is not the same as criticizing Jewish people - in an altogether completely unrelated venture. Mark, do the “Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect” exclude the Jews you were shitting on last month on Mehdi Hassan’s podcast? The ones you say you “can’t talk to any more”…

And yet everything you know about activism and humanity has been “profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones” in your life? Who are those people Mark?

I suggest we use this context to examine the actual record that Mark has established for himself, and all of us.

Today I found an interview that Mark gave this last April while he was filming a movie in Rome. He admitted he didn’t even know about the Israel-Palestine conflict until 2008; so that’s after both intifadas, and during the first Gaza war. (I guess he was busy bar-tending). In the Italian magazine Il Fatto Quotidiano, he was asked why he supports the Palestinian cause:

“In 2008, when I first started hearing about it, I couldn’t understand why this conflict dragged on. We never saw Palestinians on television; we only knew one version of the facts. But when I learned about the Nakba, the expropriation of the lands in 1948, I saw a completely different perspective, that of a great injustice.”

The Nakba. Say less…

The timing is curious. If Scott died on December 8, 2008, the Gaza war that year began on December 27, just weeks later. That is the moment Mark says he first “started hearing about” the conflict. Grief is a drastic, ghastly thing. May Mark have been looking for something to blame?

According to records on X, Mark developed verbal diarrhea about Israel and Palestine in 2016. What else happened in 2016? He endorsed Bernie Sanders. Mark fits the bill of political agitator made in the image of antizionist Jews (actually the antizionist Jew), equipped with the ultimate defense of “I have Jewish friends”. The issue there is that Mark’s Jewish friends are Jews with internalized Jew hatred, and he is their willing executioner. Either he’s using them or they’re using him. Whatever way you slice it, he’s obsessed with Jews, wants to police Jews, and be the gatekeeper of what constitutes hatred of Jews. He even protested the adoption of the globally recognized IHRA defition of antisemitism by the United Nations in November 2022.

Mark is a Jew hater. An antisemite. And the poster boy for antizionism. His criticism of Israel became as consistent as it has become more conspiratorial.

In 2021, during another round of Israel-Hamas fighting, he repeatedly demanded sanctions on Israel, and called for an immediate ceasefire. He condemned attacks on Jews in the Diaspora, however he used the word “genocide”, which was the provoking factor in said attacks in the first instance. (Note: he used the word “genocide” two and a half years before the October 7 massacre and the subsequent defensive war in Gaza to return the hostages.) So days later Mark apologized, admitting the term was inaccurate, inflammatory, and being used to justify antisemitism.

That same month he promoted a fundraising event for UNRWA, the organization later disgraced for participating in the October 7 massacre.

After the massacre, Mark’s tone hardened. He became more confident using his rehearsed term “genocide” even though the proof still didn’t exist and no finding has been made by the International Court of Justice, he called Netanyahu a war criminal – again innocent until proven, and he demanded an end to American weapons funding, advocating to betray America’s greatest ally. He has spoken of “lawless terrorism and apartheid”, and ethnic cleansing. Again, baseless, easily refutable claims.

Mark, if you’re going to make such bold claims about the Jewish people and Israel, you better be prepared to stand up for them as the libels become exposed. Yet we know that your scheme is running out. Maybe it’s time to do some new self-tapes…

The last week has been one of coalescence for me, Mark included, as I watch leftists continue to filet themselves. My last two pieces were about the Jason Arday debacle. Jason Arday was a pathological liar and lifelong con artist who was peddled by overzealous elite academics protecting him from exposure. And now those martyring him compare him to women in the public eye who have survived serious crimes.

Please never compare Jason Arday with women who survived atrocities.

It’s impossible to ignore the tricks of so-called “anti-patriarchy” journalists, filmmakers, academics and lawyers now. It isn’t just that they conveniently ignored October 7, the hostage crisis, Iran, and the women of Afghanistan (Friday marked five years of Taliban rule). They should be leading a conversation on Lindsay Clancy’s psychosis and they’re not. They’re fatally pigeonholing women who have done nothing wrong into the Jason Arday debacle. They are pretending the Ceuta crisis doesn’t exist (reports indicate multiple sexual assaults). They are too chicken to put their necks out about the violence of the trans movement, pretending its somehow synonymous with “women’s rights”. They will never be honest about the grooming gangs scandal or the rise in rapes due to mass migration (including the pamphlets that the UK’s flailing government have initiated this week to tell asylum seekers not to perform female genital mutilation on British children). They’re frauds latching onto the leftist agenda for their own gains.

They will step over any woman to get there, unless she’s still good for something.

Arday is the first of many tragedies. When the enablers stop entertaining or defending the delusions and the lies unravel, the whole house of cards will collapse. They will similarly have nowhere to go. In the meantime, as the biggest threat to the world is misinformation and disinformation, it is a non-negotiable that we have a free press. Those hijacking Arday’s suicide to limit the free press in the UK may as well suck the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dick. That is exactly what they want them to do. It’s what Russia wants them to do. It’s what China wants them to do.

Their minds have been totally infected by years of this delusional junk, and they are tearing down their own freedoms believing that they’re acting from a place of righteousness. Anyone who has an interest in punishing the free press around Arday is not a friend of democracy but an enemy of the state.

Last July, I published a piece called The Art Of The Con. It was inspired during a time when the strings were being pulled against me by a bunch of con artists. It turns out my piece was pretty prescient about what would come with Arday, the con merchant, now martyred.

“The art of the con is to make out like you’re suffering for taking a moral stance, while manipulating it to get the power and control you seek. And it’s working for them. Kneecap were unheard of 18 months ago. Now playing gigs that bands on their third album would dare to dream of. How about Snow White Supremacist Rachel Zegler? Breached her Disney contract in desperation to tell the world that even though she acted alongside Gal Gadot in the Disney movie, promoted Snow White thus: “and always remember, free palestine.” (all lower case). Zegler is the star of London’s West End this summer. Had you heard of her a year ago? Rachel, do you know who popularized musical theatre? (Clue: not the Palestinians). The sad fact is this: the con artists are currently winning. They are using every opportunity in sight to promote themselves, and themselves only. Everything in their wake is collateral. Did Owen Jones ever lose anything? Nothing except his sobriety.

The con artists like the socialists of times past have redefined concepts around good and evil. What’s right and wrong? They will decide. It’s fine to ban Jews. It’s protective. We are a threat. They are morally convinced they are correct. Get us out. It hurts to be around us. You might catch something. Like the truth. Unfortunately, a lot of people in our lives have fallen prey to cultists. It’s a cult. Socialism is a cult. Progressivism is a cult. They are terrified of being ousted from the cult of moral purity; the one place they’ve been convinced they belong in a world that wants to otherwise oppress them. They are hyper vigilant about the perceived harms of the world, preferring to hide in the shadows of a “safe space” - but how safe is that space? Is it free? Or is it manipulative? They believe in their mutual victimhood and they have an empty anger at the mere fact of existence. They therefore feel like a fake utopia is the only answer. They feel high in their collective hatred of others. It’s a “joy” that requires constant topping up by more and more extremism and trauma bonds.

I think social media has facilitated it but it’s a social contagion that has arisen during a time of unrest and a lack of leadership, guidance and faith. We Jews, and our gentile allies, and anyone with their brains switched on stand between the fiction and the reality. And that is why they hate us. That is why they have reinvented morality to make any resistance to us justified. And they will continue to reinvent morality to protect their lies. Here is the reality. If they can convince you to betray the ones you love, they will eventually betray you. If they can write fiction about their own lives and the people they hate, they will eventually write fiction about you. If they can steal and cheat to achieve what they need for their sense of inclusion, they will one day steal from and cheat you. We are not the martyrs, you are.”

I am bored of and disgusted by watching leftists infantilize people who can speak for themselves.

“I speak for the oppressed,” they say, on the red carpets, with their bloody red hand pins.

“I speak for the voiceless,” they say, having their pictures taken.

They prey on victims for their own glory. None of us are free, until we are all free – of their insufferable grift.

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I’ve watched people raise kids around me, coddling their every bite of food, with “nah-ah! blow! blow first! bloowwwwwww!” We sit three times a day with a chorus of “blowwww!” and multiple adults making blow faces at them every twenty seconds, while the wee ones look at us all with cold judgment. Can you all go and catch up on your iPhones instead of making faces at me while I’m trying to eat my unseasoned yellow mash, for fuck’s sake? Listen, I’m in no way advocating you let your kids burn their tiny little mouths. Don’t try that at home. I’m just saying – I got away with it once, and I learned a lesson.

I wish everyone ranting and raving about Jason Arday had been allowed to learn from their past mistakes, but they’re too coddled by their helicopter liberal elite leaders to learn anything.

As I’ve documented throughout our time on this newsletter: George Floyd wasn’t a grassroots thing. It was a match lit under a well-funded, well organized BLM movement ready to weaponize a news cycle to “defund the police”. It failed so hard the woke are having to walk it back now, even Reverend of Woke, Zohran Mamdani, who last week said at a press conference:

“Sometimes what you believe can change, it can develop, it can grow. I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, that I will not be defunding the police.”

Jason Arday is made in BLM 2020’s image. The fever has returned. For this round, the same leftists are going to abuse this story to tear down the free press. They are communist opportunists waiting for their next opening. Don’t fall for the grift twice.

I didn’t fall for it the first time. I spoke out instantly. We know what happened to me. It is the title of my newsletter. I will certainly not shut up now. Now that the flare has gone up again, we see where everyone stands, and many - depressingly - have not moved an inch. They want to burn it all down. The “it” for the re-awoke-ning is not the police. It’s the media. The uninhibited slander of the media (read: journalists’ genuine search for the truth) is preventing society from being as good and benevolent as it should be. How very supremacist of them.

“It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.”

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Who is behind these calls for media clampdowns? One of the most prominent leaders is a barrister in the UK by the name of Jolyon Maugham KC, who was looking for something - or someone – to help his agenda of orchestrating a sequel to the UK’s Leveson Inquiry (2011’s judicial inquiry into the ethics of the UK press following News Of The World’s phone-hacking scandal). He needed a similar ethics-breaching scandal to prove that “right wing media” are evil, and need to be stopped. That way the press will be prevented from investigating powerful institutions that the “good” left is seeking to protect, such as elite universities employing DEI policies.

Who is he? Maugham specializes in tax law and runs a non-profit called The Good Law Project. And unlike the evil right, he is a very kind man. Unless you’re a fox. He clobbered one to death with a bat in his garden on Boxing Day seven years ago.

He got away with the fox thing. Maugham is either a grifter barrister or a legal gangster. Either way, he clearly doesn’t know how journalism works. He has significantly boosted the Arday story, arguably elevating it to international-level after he decided to publish an open letter on July 26 with major support to suggest that Arday was being “smeared”. It has 17,000 signatures now. Quite a claim with zero evidentiary basis. On the website for his Good Law Project, he has written an article on his qualms with the way the Guardian handled the Arday story. (If you’re a leftist going after the Guardian as part of the “far right smear”, you’ve really lost the plot). In this article he includes an email he sent Guardian culture editor, Lanre Bakare.

I wrote to Lanre to ask him to reconsider running the piece:

“I’ve been made aware of your incoming piece about Prof Arday. I’m sure you will have thought about how damaging it will be to have the Guardian carry a negative piece about him.”

Sorry, is this The Godfather. You wouldn’t want your little rag to get a bollocking now would you? Effectively Maugham doubled-down on the intimidation tactics that were already being used vis-a-vis The Times’ reporting, fellow Cambridge professors and Arday’s students, which I wrote about here. Question: how does a tax lawyer have the time to moonlight as a self-anointed editor of a broadsheet newspaper? I digress. Maugham continues:

I want to emphasise that I did not agree with the Guardian’s decision to carry the story – and I was uncomfortable with the editorial decision to choose Mr Bakare to write it given his history with Professor Arday and the fact that, as arts and culture correspondent, it was not obviously on his beat.

I worked with Lanre Bakare while I was a freelance writer for the Guardian between 2015 and 2017. He was a good editor. Diverse range of subjects. In fact, the first feature I ever did for him was with a medically diagnosed schizophrenic; the lead singer of a punk band titled Titus Andronicus. That was enormously challenging and required a great deal of sensitivity to his manic state during our interview. Maugham here was suggesting that he could be the gatekeeper of a black journalist’s “beat” in the name of protecting a black professor from “racist” smears. What spectacular irony.

(By the way, I never thought I’d be here, concerned about the well-being of Guardian journalists after the truly racist blacklisting I underwent at the hands of my industry when they learned that I am a Big Scary Zionist, but even I do not wish them harm. Neither does my peer Suzanne Moore who has also documented her travails there).

Maugham flat out denied all the plagiarism claims. “There is no doubt at all that this was a racist attack on a working class black man,” he says. According to this argument, any query about the claims are racist. To seek the truth is racist! I ask: Can the truth ever be in and of itself racist? No, it cannot. Facts in isolation are not racist. Plagiarism claims cannot in isolation be racist. They are fundamentally neutral. You could however argue that Maugham’s refusal to grapple with the claims was racist. You could also argue that Arday became his pawn for the legal reform he seeks.

Their trope that the media were “punching down” at Arday is preposterously racist, too. If a black professor abuses the law and the police to intimidate and silence his accusers and the media, is that OK? Is he somehow incapable of abusing the law to silence the truth in the same way as a powerful white man does because he’s a powerful black man? The bigotry of low expectations.

The Good Law Project have set an agenda in motion that has inspired a hunting of journalists. Within 48 hours, lists of named journalists including the aforementioned Bakare, plus a string of female journalists including Juliet Hartley-Brewer, Camilla Long, Sarah Vine, Kath Viner, and more, have been circulated online by angry, often antizionist, activists calling them “murderers” and seeking to “destroy them”. Journalists from The Times, The Atlantic, The Telegraph, The Spectator etc. They claim to be “doing some journalism” by urging thousands of people to call the British police on them, and spam their email inboxes with threats of harassment. They are not critiquing their work, but instead demanding their ruination. The same vile mobs who have declared a “genocide” in Gaza. They inflame language to justify their hateful violence. They lie in excess. It sounds much more like an organized mob than the accused “media”.

They want to replace journalists with conspiracy theorists, many of whom are embittered former journalists who failed at their jobs.

(Incidentally, the above names are the some of the only female journalists in the UK who have reported on the Muslim rape gangs and who have fought against the October 7 deniers to courageously publicize the rapes and sexual assaults of Hamas. Something the left’s anti-racists have remained totally silent on…)

Thank god for brilliant journalists like Coleman Hughes who wrote in The Free Press today:

“The Arday scandal has also revealed something else: white liberals in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes on to achieve greatness.

In fact, they want to believe in this sort of story so badly that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.

The irony, however that we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turns out to be conservatives - or if not conservatives, then at least out-of-step with the left-wing religion of racial justice.”

Kemi Badenoch, who I think is the most talented political performer in the UK, would never get the vote of the white liberal elites no matter how terrible their own options, because she is the leader of the Conservative party. Hughes, who is a brilliant black intellect, writes that this should be a moment of reckoning for white elites to examine white guilt as a “virus” that ensures they prioritize their own catharsis over the public’s interest in the truth. But can they handle the truth?

Today many noticed that someone by the name Tia Lazaro-James began a petition on Change.org for a new “Arday’s Law” - already signed by thousands - that would limit the number of articles the media can write on a public figure. I can think of many, many public figures who have survived more than 249 articles being written about them. Johann Hari survived an enormous plagiarism scandal. He admitted his wrongdoings, left traditional journalism, and went on to write books. Many books!

Upon Googling the Change.org petitioner’s name, the top result is for a Wimbledon Court criminal hearing eight days ago for battery and assault.

Perhaps it is not the same Tia Lazaro-James.

The only reason the media wrote so many articles on Arday was because he made so many stupendous claims. Arday’s Law as a reaction to journalists doing journalism is one thing, and one thing alone: a revenge smear.

But beyond anything else, if you’ve ever witnessed a real witch-hunt, which I have, you would know that “Arday’s Law” would be completely unenforceable. How do you ensure that only, say, ten pieces of media a week are produced about said public figure? You cannot. It would become a tool for the new dictators of who should be silenced, and who should not be silenced. For some reason, leftist barristers are interested in this particular selective power. Yet what the barristers seem to forget is that journalists investigate. That’s our job. So if you declare war on us, strap in. No stone will be left unturned.

When I woke up this morning, the first thing I saw were people glamorizing Arday in droves at the vigil that was held for him yesterday in Trafalgar Square. Thousands of people came. At first it made me laugh. The usual suspects, with their predictable slogans, oblivious to what it looks like from the outside. A last-ditch desperate attempt for the progressives whose time is coming to an end. Had it been Nigel Farage committing suicide after a summer of bad press, I’m sure they’d have gathered to dance on his grave, Zack Polanski throwing shapes from the main stage: Brrapppp.

Perhaps they are truly clueless as to the pendulum swing they are due to experience. Their puritanical blindness has led them to believe that Hamas are a resistance movement, that DEI is aspirational, that “rape is a spectrum” (recent commentary from “trans” member of the Scottish Parliament who goes by the name Q Manivannan), and that Islamism is not a threat.

The amount of exploitation of victims the progressives have done to advance their own agendas is inhumane. The victims are waking up. Why did Arday take his own life? Was it because of the press, or was it because he was abandoned by the people who said they’d protect him? The people who exploited him?

You wonder.

But then it made me deeply angry – the theater of the vigil.

I have been to several vigils in the last three years. My friends have been to many, many funerals too. One of the hardest vigils was for the Beautiful Six. I wonder if the Arday vigil-goers have heard of them…

Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
Eden Yerushalmi.
Carmel Gat.
Ori Danino.
Alexander Lobanov.
Almog Sarusi.

They spent 328 days underground, starved and emaciated, refused basic hygiene in the tunnels of Gaza. Then executed at gunpoint in August 2024. People wailed at that vigil like the world was ending. Young gorgeous souls.

Then I spoke at a vigil in Beverly Hills in March 2025. That one was for three people. Shiri Bibas, Ariel Bibas and Kfir Bibas. Again, have they heard of them? Shiri was last seen clutching her two red-haired babies as Hamas dragged her from her home in Nir Oz into Gaza. Her husband and their father Yarden was also kidnapped. He was kept separately. Yarden was released after 484 days. Nineteen days later, he discovered that his wife and babies were murdered in November 2023. They were returned to Israel for burial. Hamas sent back a different woman in a casket marked with Shiri’s name. That vigil was also hard. Awful.

To those who went to Jason Arday’s vigil yesterday and are preaching today about “compassion” and “kindness” and “300 articles!!!!” etc. Just stop with the performance already.

Grow the hell up.

Don’t you dare scream that he was “lynched”. He died by suicide.

Don’t you dare tell us that he was killed by “racism”. You’re insulting our intelligence.

For 738 days total there was a hostage crisis in Gaza. Not one of you wore a yellow pin, or advocated for the return of innocent civilians captured by a terrorist organization. Not once did you do that. Let me know when you want to talk about how many articles have been written about Jews and Israel in the last three years, accusing us falsely of genocide? Do you want to know how many hate messages private individuals have received? How much social media abuse? How many attacks in real life that continues to lead to? How many innocent Jews around the world have been murdered by your kind and compassionate silence?

You say nothing. You know nothing. You do nothing.

Why? Because you’re racists.

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I was told to apply to Cambridge University to “read” Law, which already sounded pompous. “Read”? It was a bit of a faff applying to Cambridge. You didn’t just apply like you do at a regular university. You have to go down there and look around all the colleges and decide which one is most you, and then apply directly there. It’s a lottery within a lottery. And once you apply, if you make it to interview, you have to go back down there and experience an audition process that makes Simon Cowell look like a pussycat. So I went for my mooch around Cambridge, and I decided I wanted to apply to a college called Downing. There was absolutely no reason for this beyond aesthetic. It was so different from the fusty medieval courts of the other colleges, and had these giant neoclassical columns and bright green lawns. It looked like the Greek Gods had taken over Camelot.

But when I reported back to my school’s admissions advisor, it was suggested I’d have better luck applying to another college called Selwyn. It was more strategic, apparently. I wasn’t that into Selwyn but I did what I was told. Application and personal statement went off. Fingers were crossed. Then weeks later, I got a fat letter in the post (fat is good) and it contained instructions. I had been invited for interview. So back down I went. I had two different interviews. They were odd and cartoonish, like Monty Python meets Dr Seuss. I was almost waiting for the Knights who say Ni to pop out from behind a bookshelf and offer me riddles. Not like a natural discussion or conversation. It was more like a hazing, and I saw right through my tormentors. It was there I felt something brand new for the first time: a judgment I’d never felt before. They brought up my religion. The fuck does that have to do with Law, I thought. I left feeling like I’d been put in a naughty corner by a bunch of power-hungry academic lunatics. I didn’t have any fun.

Weeks later, I went to visit some other universities I’d already received offers from, including Manchester. I was on the bus going down Oxford Road to the main university campus, blasting Definitely, Maybe by Oasis on my Discman, and I experienced a sensation of total destiny for the first time in my life. I thought - I’m having this! There were students of all flavors teeming out of every crevice of a city that was vibe-ing with music and fashion and everything. I wanted it. But I knew everyone wanted me to go to Cambridge. Everyone except Cambridge.

I got a thin letter in the post (thin is not good), and it said something about regrets and sorry. No room at the inn for you this year. Perhaps their ethnic minority quota was filled. Who’s to say. They advised me to wait a year, reapply, and there will likely be a place for you. Go on a gap year! That pissed me off even more. I was 17. I wanted out and on to the road of real life, not to be killing cockroaches in a hostel in Vietnam with a bad tummy. My school were raging about my rejection, which was really on brand for them. Statistics have feelings too, you know.

But I didn’t give a shit about not getting into Cambridge. I was going to go to Manchester, and have the best three years of my life, and I did, and it was awesome.

Before I go on, I want to make something clear, because I am a journalist – a real one. Deifying someone who just committed suicide is incredibly dangerous. The Samaritans guidelines themselves instruct journalists and content creators to strictly avoid sensationalizing, glorifying, or romanticizing suicide. That specifically includes blaming anyone’s suicide on a simplified cause such as “the media”. Samaritans media guidelines are free. Anyone is able to look them up online. But I guess it speaks to online commentary these days that none of the thought police thought to do so.

Jason Arday - if you haven’t already read - was the youngest ever Black professor at the University of Cambridge, and the poster child for DEI. After months of scrutiny over plagiarism allegations, among other issues, he was found dead yesterday. An absolutely dreadful end to a torrid scandal. His suicide is being exploited by progressives and leftists to score political points, and it is depraved. Journalists who would know not to post incessantly after a very public suicide story have been replaced by self-promoting activists who don’t care about the ramifications of their actions or their speech, and are motivated to point fingers at the media (“hounded to death” has been the common slogan) and make baseless accusations that his treatment by the press had something to do with his race. London Mayor Sadiq Khan pulled the race card.

The idea that other people who are not Black have not been victims of “pernicious public shaming” is categorically insane. Can’t we please live in reality? No, we can’t. The Mayor shut off any replies to his tweet, doubling down on the refusal to be held accountable.

I would like to ask. If DEI prevents systemic racism, then how did racism kill Arday? Pick one. Either the ideology is failing or they’re lying to protect the ideology. It’s very uncomfortable for leftists to admit that DEI is inherently racist, that positive discrimination is a mechanism that protects the racism of low expectations, and encourages fraud. So they force everything through the lens of race, and continue racing to the bottom.

DEI is cruel. It is cruel to promote and tolerate the delusions of the under-qualified and then abandon them when the toxicity of those delusions begin to harm the surrounding system. Students had a right to complain without being targeted as racists. Fellow academics and journalists had a right to investigate Arday’s bogus claims without being intimidated by police, or threatened with legal action. Arday hired Carter-Ruck, one of the most aggressive libel law firms in the UK, to scare off Times Higher Education who were investigating the integrity of his academic research. Those who are swift to blame “the media” for his suicide must face a question: do you not believe in a free press that holds systems of power to account?

Let’s be clear. Arday was the darling of the elite liberal left, and he courted intense media coverage upon assuming his professorship. He was due to have his memoir published by the biggest publishing house in the UK, Simon & Schuster, and claimed he had received a £1.4million advance. This was a public interest story. Something of extreme concern to me in all this outrage-baiting around Arday is that barely a single person outrage-baiting has given a sentence to the dangers - or indeed the nuance - of suicide. They demonstrate zero understanding of what may lead a person to take their own life – one that doesn’t involve their own projections about their own feelings.

Arday is a victim of progressive ideology; an ideology that only knows how to double down instead of looking itself in the mirror, and asking if it’s really working. Even more of a victim of the ideology are his students, who will no doubt be harassed and harangued now by the morally virtuous left. More tragedies will occur. How many more marginalized people do the liberal elite want to build up to tear down? How many more will they exploit? To blame the media is to deflect from a corrupt system, the investigating of which is not “racist” or hateful. It’s strange that my previous piece was titled “Killing With Kindness”.

And say it was “racist”, OK. Say the media’s behaviour was “racist”. Say everyone who wanted to expose Arday was “racist”. Then I must call the bluff of the racism patrol. To label Arday’s suicide a “racist witch hunt” and a “disproportionate media onslaught” is pretty rich from the same people who have spent years either participating in or standing by a disproportionate and completely baseless witch hunt that has been happening to Jews worldwide. We, as individuals and a collective, have been dealing with daily media libels and social media harassment that incites violence against us in the streets at an alarming rate. We are at war, and I don’t say that lightly.

Last night, a terrorist invaded a synagogue in New York City. In Manhattan. He wanted to harm people. It is due to a “media onslaught” against the Jewish people and Israel that has lasted decades. It is being supported by media including the Guardian and BBC, by elite academic institutions including Oxbridge and Ivy Leagues, by politicians including Sadiq Khan and Zohran Mamdani, and by non-profits who are receiving their money from foreign sources in Iran, Qatar and China. The Jews are accused of genocide. Which is the worst crime in the world. Far worse than plagiarism. It’s also the crime we have endured. Genocide is a term coined by a Jew who lost almost 50 members of his family in the Holocaust. We are not guilty of genocide. But the “media onslaught” continues. And it is supported by frauds who were elevated to positions of prestige by DEI. Care to speak up? Why don’t they?

They don’t speak up because it doesn’t serve their fake virtue. They only stand up for their own, even if they’re liars. They fall silent otherwise. And Jews; they’ll take from us, but they won’t invest. So upset about racism, they have said nothing about Arabic copies of Mein Kampf going on-sale in book stores across London. No big deal, eh.

Being a true journalist takes integrity and a willingness to be hunted for speaking the truth. I had - I have - a successful career rooted in integrity and talent and a preparedness to be fearless. Despite being smeared, called a racist, a transphobe, accused of spreading misinformation online about issues and about individuals I have been linked to, with absolutely no evidence to back-up any of these weaponized claims, I continue to do my work. I have done nothing I have been accused of by those who are trying to stop me from writing the truth. Frauds who have stolen from me, including stealing work. It’s funny isn’t it that the liberal elite call for media crackdowns when they’re trying to avoid exposure, arguing that it’s the “right wing” who hold the power. Reader: I have not had a byline in a mainstream outlet since 2020. That’s not because of the “right wing”. I’m politically homeless, despite the smears.

Free press is not a a luxury. A free press keeps power honest. Hard-hitting investigative journalism must ask the uncomfortable questions that nobody else is prepared to ask, whether they are politically correct or not. That is the only way to hold systems, to hold individuals, to account, particularly in instances when the public interest is at stake. For years, however, that kind of journalism has been under attack, as reporters have been intimidated and silenced from doing their jobs. It’s not governments bullying them, it’s activists with immovable agendas. Those bullies decide which stories are allowed to exist, and which voices must be discredited and totally destroyed.

I am no stranger to this. I have been intimidated and silenced; by pop stars, by public academics and by gangs of online activists, particularly progressives. People who claim to stand for truth, but who work overtime to suppress it whenever the truth challenges their narrative.

I had an experience in which I subtly called out an academic fraud without even naming them. This person is not a private individual. They made themselves a public figure by also courting a lot of media attention. For the crime of minimal journalism pointing out their hypocrisy, they lied and claimed that I smeared them – a smear it was not. They however had already been smearing me in private, spreading harmful gossip about me and making up lies. They approached several of my own contacts with these lies via third parties to intimidate me into silence. Ten years prior a similar thing happened with a female celebrity who took offense at a mild review I did of her concert. She similarly smeared me behind closed doors and engaged in intimidation tactics including threatening serious legal ramifications.

These cowards know what they did. You fucked with the wrong Jew.

I have been hounded by activists and agenda-driven “journalists” for asking basic questions about social justice movements including BLM who vandalized synagogues and terrorized Jews in the name of anti racism. I was memed. I was abused. I was harassed. I was cancelled. I have asked basic questions about the hypocrisy of so-called feminist academics. And I have been punished and threatened in private over it. None of those outraged by Arday said anything. Silence.

I never gave up. I continued building this. I had nothing to escape accountability from, and those who smeared me know that. Liars tend to lie. You’ll find out when you criticize them.

Activists will blame the media and cry bully to avoid all accountability for their own DARVO, their own circle jerking, their own narcissism, their own savior complexes. They will avoid the uncomfortable truth of Arday’s own attempts at silencing and intimidation. Do the press sometimes go too hard with individuals? Yes they do. I speak as someone who has been absolutely terrorized by former colleagues. But those posting outrage right now are completely demonizing a press that was caught in a public scandal. Many individuals get caught in public scandals, some guilty, some innocent. Should vulnerable people be better protected? Yes absolutely.

Journalists must ever be forced into silence. That is moral blackmail. When that happens we all lose. Accountability disappears. Power - whether celebrity, academic or institutional - operates without scrutiny. A free press that can’t speak freely is not free. It must be defended, or it will be replaced by more cheats, more frauds, and more activists pretending to be professionals. And then what happens to the truth?

This week, a female supporter of Islamic Jihad was appointed an assistant professor at Cambridge University. But hey, let’s not report on it. Islamophobia and all. It might hurt her feelings. I’m sure the students will be fine…

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.

Singham, an American-born tech millionaire based in Shanghai, invests his billions in foreign policy narratives that promote the CCP and the Islamic regime. “Women’s rights” are not a major facet of either society. He is currently facing ongoing US federal and congressional investigations for allegedly funneling millions into far Left American-based non-profit organizations to fulfill this other, far more foreign agenda.

CODEPINK is a $51 million foundation whose other co-founder is Medea Benjamin (pictured), an antizionist Jew. This week, it was reported that CODEPINK has been ordered to cease charitable operations in California after years of tax and regulatory delinquency. Also reported is that sources of funding have affiliations with terrorist organizations such as PFLP. Benjamin even met in person with senior Hamas leaders. Where is the humanitarianism in that, one wonders?

How is it that the feminist and human rights advocates who preach superior morality all day long are actually having their pockets filled by international terrorist networks?

So many great questions. We should ask more questions of other organizations who have spread similar if not identical aggressive messaging over the last decade or two. Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. CODEPINK were founded one year after 9/11 specifically to prevent the war in Iraq. They branded themselves as Women For Peace, ie promoting their idea of what it means to be “anti-war” as “intersectional” and “feminist”. They were funded to re-frame the Trump Administration as pro war and anti peace, as regards Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine and the Middle East. They were funded to tie issues of climate change to an “anti-war” stance. They were funded to promote “Justice For Palestine” and spread libels about “genocide”, “occupation” and “apartheid”. The weakest links are always the first to fall, ie CODEPINK.

Who else is hiding?

I have to try and get this out. It doesn’t feel good. I know that people who I really gave my all to have worked so hard to make me look nuts, because they don’t want anyone to truly understand what they - the populism-swallowing leftists - have got their kicks out of doing to people that they envy. It’s unhinged. I am not unhinged despite their protestations that I am. What they did is diabolically unhinged.

There’s been a ton of conversation the last two weeks about boycotts of Jews in media and writing. I will not write a full-length feature here on the dire state of this week’s New York Magazine cover, because it has been amply addressed by Isaac De Castro for Tablet, and by Eli Kowaz in his superfluous surgical demolition here: “No Zionists in Habibi City”.

The Middle Ground

No Zionists in Habibi City

It’s something that you can only do in New York City. At least, that’s my opinion. Explore any culinary scene in the world, and you can do it within the five boroughs. When I lived in the city, I ate my way around the Middle East without once t…

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23 days ago · 71 likes · 11 comments · Eli Kowaz

TL:DR this week’s issue of NY Mag rewrites the identity of New York City as one that celebrates its “SWANA” heritage (stands for South West Asia and North Africa). Except while doing so it totally erases the Jewish contributions from SWANA to New York City, which if you think about it from the most objective stance possible, are legitimately enormous. Not only that, they said that SWANA communities exist despite - despite - “xenophobia, Islamophobia and Zionism”. The articles are riddled with Jew-hating tropes, and specifically employ voices that are either proud antizionist Jews, or adjacent to Jewish “non-Zionists”. De Castro said that the issue is “batshit”. He is correct. It writes out Mizrahi Jews from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Morocco, and Egypt who were driven out of Arab countries in the last century.

New York Post did an exclusive story yesterday hitting back at the magazine, and interviewed me as part of their piece. I told them it’s nothing new. That I was a writer for them; actually one of their rising stars. Here is my page on their website, still somehow to my surprise active: https://www.vulture.com/author/eve-barlow/

You’ll find there in-depth interviews I did for them with Paramore’s Hayley Williams, with British pop star Lily Allen, with American wunderkind Maggie Rogers, with The 1975’s Matthew Healy, with members of N*Sync. I also covered Coachella for them, I covered LA’s gig circuit, I went to Las Vegas to review Lady Gaga’s residency for them, I did retrospectives on Britney Spears for them. I wrote about the commercial exploitation of LGBT artists. And I was working on an investigation to expose sexism inside the Grammy’s Recording Academy. My last piece by them was published in May 2020. I never received a word of negative feedback from them. In fact, they assured me I was going to grow even more there.

That was until June 2020 when I took offense at synagogues being vandalized during BLM protests. After I tweeted about that, outing myself as a “Jewish supremacist/Zionist”, I never heard from New York Magazine again. They ghosted me when I emailed my editor there. And one day I noticed every staff writer and section head had majestically unfollowed me on socials. Hmm.

New York Magazine weren’t alone in this.

Let me clear my throat.

Yesterday I shared to Instagram just a selection of cover stories I wrote in the first four years of my freelance career in LA from 2015 to 2019: link. A snapshot of some of my work, of where I was going. I was also a regular contributor at GQ, The Guardian, Billboard, Pitchfork, BBC, LA Times, and many more. But it all came to a screeching halt because when I was brandished by non-Jews and stupid Jews a “Zionist”. When I became a “Zionist”, I was no longer a “journalist”. Suddenly I went from being one of the safest pairs of hands in my industry to the most evil person they had ever met. Tricked they were. The mask was off: Zionist! Which meant… what exactly?

I’m glad you asked.

It meant that I was a “genocidal baby killer”, and it meant that three years and four months before October 7, 2023. And three years and six months before the IDF went into Gaza. The math ain’t mathing, is it?

I am frustrated. To put it mildly. I shrieked into the void for years and nobody believed that this week’s NY Mag Jew-erasing cover story was where it was headed. Most people did not want to comprehend my experience. Did not want to acknowledge. Many still don’t. “Wild”. “I don’t get it”. “How is this possible?” And now they’re looking at New York Magazine, and they’re freaking out, and I am checking my limbs to see if they still exist. Can anyone else see my limbs? Am I in the room?

Read this: this is the level of unhinged.

Anyway what’s the point in responding further to New York Magazine really. They don’t care. So why should I? I can’t express how much I adored that world we all used to live in. It was so genuinely thrilling. I never took a day of it for granted. The people who remain in the media and in entertainment, who have cancelled half of the arts and the media world in favor of agenda-driven activism are suffocating what it means to be alive. They are draining the magic. They are muffling the exquisite sound of truth in all of its various forms, replacing with flags and slogans and nothing. It is NOTHING.

Simon Sebag Montefiore nailed it.

“It is very strange how a celebration of the wondrous delicious eclectic scene of Arab, Iranian, Palestinian, Middle Eastern food and culture - something delightful and positive about New York life and indeed about the Middle East itself - can be turned into a screed of hate bigotry ignorance and - tellingly - power superiority over other cultures.

It is interesting too how what presents as the activism of cultural kindness is actually rather poisonous.”

This isn’t about me at all. It’s about culture. They have absolutely handed culture over to people who hate culture. They’ve destroyed it from within. So kind of them. They are the kindest people on earth, they insist. Killing us all with their kindness.

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A few weeks ago, a box arrived from Random House with books. At the risk of embarrassing myself by incessantly posting everywhere about the first one of the books that I picked out: you must buy and inhale a copy of The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella. If I could, and believe me I want to, I would anonymously Amazon it to people who no longer speak to me. I have notoriously defended female celebrities against torrential tirades of the same disinformation war tactics that are no longer targeting individuals, but civilization. As I predicted they would. Kinsella is a non-Jewish Canadian journalist, and with the state of play the fact he is not a Jew is - fortunately or unfortunately - a greater source of credibility. The Hidden Hand is the book I have been waiting for, since long before October 7, 2023.

In May 2021, I wrote a piece for Tablet titled “The Social Media Pogrom”; which has been quoted in Congress, and features in Representative Elise Stefanik’s 2026 book Poisoned Ivies about the rise of Jew hate on American college campuses. “The Social Media Pogrom” identified what I anticipated at the time was the first big dress rehearsal for an anti-Israel, anti-West, anti-America propaganda campaign that is unlike anything the world has ever seen before, assisted by automated “bot” accounts on social media, across TikTok, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter) and Meta (Instagram and Facebook). I had noted how social media was attempting to completely erase and disappear one side of the narrative: the side of truth, as spoken by Jewish advocates for Israel, and how that was then correlating to a shocking rise in violent attack against Jews all over the world in the streets:

Two weeks ago, as Westerners began educating themselves about Sheikh Jarrah and the Iron Dome through stick figures with biased speech bubbles on the Diet Prada and Refinery29 Instagram feeds, something else started happening on social media. I coined it the world’s first social media pogrom. The activity that Jews—Zionist Jews in particular—experienced all over the web was bizarre at best and invalidating, abusive, and dehumanizing at worst. Zionist Jews weren’t just being unfollowed for advocating for themselves and their brothers and sisters in Israel and Palestine, we were also losing access to direct message and comment abilities, having posts removed for violating community guidelines (while blatant antisemitism online almost never receives the same treatment), and having our accounts threatened with temporary suspension or closure.

The cherry on top, of course, was that we were simultaneously fighting off a barrage of thousands upon thousands of troll comments and hateful direct messages, which frequently included homophobic, misogynistic, and extremely violent language. Some people even generously took the time to record voice messages. I received a few of those, including one from a woman with a British accent calling for my family to burn in hell. She sang it. Or she tried to.

The seeds of this pogrom have been sown for a while. Online, there are different degrees of erasure and exclusion. First comes the unfollow, which hurts, especially from those we consider friends, those we love and cherish, whose memories are still fresh. Sometimes an unfollow is the result of pressure from other online users who dox people they disagree with. Sometimes an unfollow is a decision taken with complete autonomy, someone deciding to simply delete a person from their timeline rather than ask for clarification or, God forbid, pursue a fair-minded discussion.

If you’re a Zionist, you are not deemed worthy of dialogue. Most people who think this couldn’t give you a working definition of Zionism. They just know which labels are accepted by the intersectional world, and which labels are not. Anti-Zionism good. Zionism bad. Except Zionism is a globally recognized concept, whereas anti-Zionism doesn’t seem to have an agreed-upon definition. It exists only as a knee-jerk rejection of a belief in the State of Israel and anyone’s justification of its existence, regardless of how reasoned, empathetic, or fair-minded that justification might be.

The response to the piece’s publication proved its point. Overwhelmingly leftist progressives and hardcore Islamists (who form today’s Red-Green Islamo-Marxist alliance) attacked the work so much that my “hate name” (Eve Fartlow) became the Number 2 trending topic on X that day within an hour perhaps of publication, largely helped by Seth Rogen, who tweeted a fart emoji at me. I had met Rogen in passing years prior at a charity event he held annually with his once best friend James Franco.

Behind the trend of my hate name at Number 3 was a school shooting in San Diego.

After that day, in mid May of 2021, I understood that progressives are not friends of truth, of decency, of human rights, or of peace. I understood that they were idiots.

Suddenly my phone was ringing off the hook.

“Dude…” came a text from Ari Ingel, Executive Director of Creative Community for Peace, a non-profit entertainment industry organization. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL called me to ask me to explain what was happening. I was frozen at my kitchen table, looking at the ticker on the trending topic increase. Thousands of tweets. I saw people I thought were friends, who I had spoken to only weeks prior, join in retweeting puerile jokes about me, ensuring that everyone knew they shunned me, and we were no more. They may as well have sent a press release out to say: EVE BARLOW IS ABSOLUTELY NOT MY FRIEND. The noise was growing louder and louder on the screen but I was sitting on the other side of it next to the quiet hum of the refrigerator, and my own demise. My mind understood. My mind recognized. My mind was surprisingly calm. My body, however, was paralyzed.

The ‘90s alternative band Eve6 changed their Twitter handle to my hate name. American cartoonist Eli Valley published an antisemitic cartoon of me. Rolling Stone’s current feature star Hasan Piker was compiling YouTube videos where he relished in mocking my Scottish accent for no intelligent reason beyond clickbait. There was a maelstrom of GIFs suddenly circulating of my face distorted, my nose enlarged like you see in the Holocaust museums of Nazi Germany depictions of Jews, of me as the Gollum character in Lord Of The Rings. Google it. You’ll see. I have not Googled myself since 2019. There were now fabricated tweets of me saying abjectly racist things circulating — tweets that were doctored, that I’d never written. All of it everywhere. To this day, it is everywhere.

I knew instantaneously that this was it. I knew my life as I knew it was completely over. I was exposing them, and I was right so they had to make an example out of me. They had to suppress me. I exposed them. I exposed the Social Media Pogrom. I knew what was happening. I felt it in my body. I spoke it with my words. I recognized the pattern. I saw it happening to women during #MeToo. I knew what it was. It was happening to all of us now. They were trying to suppress me. They were silencing me. They are still silencing me.

But.

I was right. I was right. I was right.

The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella is the proof, landing in my lap five years later. He terrifyingly lays out how Islamist terror groups from the Middle East have weaponized the internet early, even before social media was invented. Al Qaeda was running its own online servers on the world wide web from the Internet’s nascence, and they recruited the West, they recruited the new generations. We learn finally that the inversion of truth, the rise of propaganda slogans like “from the river to the sea”, the libels spread about Israel, Jews and Zionism in the Gaza war, etc are all a result of a catastrophic online smear campaign by far left, far right, and Islamic extremists.

It was grown decades before the October 7 massacre, normalized in a mainstream media that had long already dumped journalism for activism due to dwindling profit, adopted by elite universities via terror-affiliated student groups such as Students For Justice In Palestine (SJP), and rubber-stamped by NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who have received eye-watering donations from nefarious sources overseas. How is that even legal, one wonders. Kinsella explores the origins of the antizionists’ hate language. I doubt that any of the Palestinian flag emojis, or the watermelon earrings, or the upside down red triangle fans know the origins of the slur “Zio”. It was started by a man named David Duke. The guy who rebranded the KKK into a major political movement. When the horseshoe comes to life… Among Gen Z, Jew hate and antizionism went viral, as soon as the Covid pandemic hit in February of 2020.

And then came October 7; the tinderbox moment, setting all the kegs of gasoline that had been set about the forest of Western civilization ablaze.

In Gaza itself where cellphone usage is almost 100% (one of the highest percentages globally), the “reports” from on the ground during the war were constantly uploaded to social media without any scrutiny from the Western media that would then share it as fact. The videos would be uploaded to TikTok, and TikTok’s algorithm was totally skewered towards Hamas. “#IStandWithIsrael got two million views. Meanwhile #IStandWithPalestine got an extraordinary 37.7 million views – almost twenty times as many,” Kinsella reports. TikTok was being viewed more than all of American traditional media combined, and that was a trend that had begun during Covid. And lest I remind you: TikTok is Chinese. The Chinese don’t consider Hamas terrorists.

YouTube has also been one of the worst offenders, surprise surprise. Its model has always relied on users being on the site for longer, which perfectly aligns with Hamas’s requirements. For YouTube that equates to profit. For Hamas it equates to radicalization.

“Cyabra, CyberWell, and ISD all reported that online antisemitism proliferated after October 7, in what looked like a highly coordinated way. And, when measured by views and engagement, the propaganda - anti-Israel, anti-West, antisemitic and pro-Hamas - was at a level no one had ever seen before.”

Immediately after October 7 prepared disinformation bots were activated first in the Arab word, and then in the English-speaking world to push that the massacre was justified. Agitators in the West were paid thousands a week to protest, to aggravate, to proliferate pro Hamas, pro regime rhetoric. Even Wikipedia was the target of pro-Hamas hackers and editors who were rewriting history as it was unfolding. From the Qatar-owned AlJazeera to the Hamas-infiltrated Associated Press, Hamas dominated the global narrative and Israel’s voice was non-existent.

Most chillingly for me, Kinsella identifies that Hamas admits to targeting anti-Hamas activists by “neutralizing them” and “damaging their reputation”. They would seek to damage the public image of people fighting the truth, people like me, like us. This is the segment of Chapter 3 that I want to plaster all over the world:

Hamas used a bot army to build the Free Palestine movement and DARVO the Jews.

As I’ve written before, there’s a one-word definition for antisemitism: libel. The libels of this propaganda machine have all fallen apart in recent months. The genocide libel. The apartheid libel. The starvation libel. The killing of journalists libel. No matter the International Court Of Justice is years away from any decisive judgment on South Africa’s Qatari-backed lawfare claim that Israel is committing a genocide. No matter that the The UN’s own data now shows all of these lies to be what they are: libel. See the latest UNICEF figures on child malnutrition worldwide. Gaza’s child malnutrition rates are as low as *checks notes* Germany’s. And yet, the disinformation war has been so successful, the inevitable truth has become a footnote.

I noticed a piece at the end of last week about Zohran Mamdani’s use of bots. It is suspected he has used hundreds of bot accounts on X have to pump his messaging into millions of feeds, some posting more than 900 times a day. The accounts are often no more than three days old, with zero followers, doing nothing but re-posting Mamdani’s propaganda. Analysts have been reported in The Jerusalem Post to having determined that the IP trail leads back to City Hall itself. Thank you to journalist Mathilda Heller for staying on this story.

As I mentioned in the opening of this piece, the same bot campaign strategies used to attack individual celebrities in Hollywood (Blake Lively, arguably, Amber Heard, definitely), are also being used to promote Marxist-Islamist politicians like Zohran Mamdani, and the call is once again coming from inside the house. We warned you that what starts with female victims of online abuse doesn't end with us. When I saw Mamdani’s glossily produced antizionist Instagram video vilifying Israel two weeks ago receive eight million likes overnight, my body knew what was going on, and I wrote this urgent piece. “I’ve seen this before”, I thought. This is a social media-assisted DARVO playbook used by violent infiltrators. And it wound up putting a Jewish man in hospital after he was stabbed with a screwdriver the next day on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Allahu Akbar” screamed his attacker.

This is what’s extra depressing. Before the entire West was captured by TikTok et al on October 7, the path to peace in the Middle East had never been more hopeful. Weeks before 10/7, the word was that Saudi Arabia would be joining the Abraham Accords, furthering a trend of years of normalization between Arab nations and Israel. The Islamic Regime of Iran was due to be isolated, alongside Qatar and Turkey. On October 7, the path to peace was destroyed. Not by Israel. By Hamas, the Islamic regime and its global propaganda war. All those who preach that Zionists and Israel were the barrier to peace are bad faith actors. Israel left Gaza 20 years prior. Israel knew Gaza would receive billions of dollars in financial aid and Gaza’s leaders were left with the agency to use that aid as they pleased. They used it to go to war with Israel first and the West second, and to kill the dream of a two state solution.

So now I just have one question for everyone who left, who walked out, who created distance, who believed libels about their Jewish friends or the Jewish nation we defend, who fell victim to a world-sweeping historic propaganda machine that is truly unprecedented, one that attacks not just Israel but every single individual voice who defends her: What if you were the one being lied to? What if you were wrong? Would you say sorry? Would you correct yourself?

(Oh and I was right about Hasan Piker, too, by the way. Not that Rolling Stone care. They do have form writing puff pieces about vigilante males, though.)

Warren, thank you for your work. I hope everyone reads your book. Everywhere.

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