In this, PART FIVE of my series on the ‘Palestinian Question ’, we’re going to walk together into a minefield that I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, will likely be the most contentious piece of the series. I want to be very clear from the get-go that this is an OPINION piece based on events that are very difficult to research, because the events of October 7 are shrouded in a blanket of propaganda in which the Israeli government has invested enormous amounts of time and capital to shape the narrative.

I’ve spent hours sourcing and carefully reading and listening to verified reporting of the material used for this very sensitive episode. I have provided full attribution for sources; I have gifted important news articles that I feel are important, so nobody is denied access to the reporting because of a paywall. Every effort has been made to use language that is respectful of the hundreds of Israeli citizens who lost their lives on that fateful day.

For the sake of clarity, and to remove any suggestion of doubt. The barbaric attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli citizens was a WAR CRIME. This is not only my conclusion, but that of both the UN and the International Criminal Court. I mourn the passing of all those murdered on a day which history will record as an unconscionable act of cowardice and a senseless act of unprovoked violence. My heart goes out to all those families left behind whose lives will never be the same again.

The biggest problem for anyone attempting to report on events of that infamous day is the carefully crafted narrative that has emerged as part of the justification for the Israelis’ wholly disproportionate response to what was undeniably a horrific assault on the innocent. My aim in this piece is not to seek justification for the attack, or to in any way diminish or misrepresent the anger and pain of those impacted by the events, but rather to look beyond understandable emotion to examine the facts. I aim to ensure that you, as a reader, are able to view events outside of the propaganda bubble created to shape the justification for the industrial-scale murder of Palestinians that followed.

Where to begin is the question. What I’m going to try to do is piece together from the most reliable sources what went wrong and how the Israeli government failed those who relied upon it to keep them safe. I’d like to begin with an assessment from The Centre for Strategic and International Affairs, titled "How Could Israeli Intelligence Miss the Hamas Invasion Plans?" This is a piece by Emily Hardin, Vice President, Defence and Security Department, from the Intelligence and National Security and Technology Program. It was published on October 11th 2023, and opens with:

Given the Israeli security services’ reputation, it is inconceivable to me that they missed the preparations being made for this attack. The reason I suggest you read this article is that it provides a roadmap for the questions to ask. It was published just four days after the event; it is not tainted by opinion, a point emphasised by the following:

So how could Israeli intelligence services—among the best in the world—be caught by surprise? It happens to the best of us, and the aftermath is both professionally and personally painful. Examining the root causes of the failure with clear eyes and an open mind is essential to avoiding the same mistakes in the future.

Outlining the reasoning behind the attack in a short piece such as this is impossible, but I would point you to a very important study titled The Strategic Origins of Hamas’s October 7 Attack by Daniel Sobelman, published on January 12th 2026 and available on Taylor & Francis Online. This is a comprehensive research document that analyses all angles and is important reading for those who want to understand both the motivation and the consequences of the attack. In the concluding paragraph, the study notes:

When it comes to understanding the motivations of terrorist organizations, an important lesson from Israel’s disastrous failure to imagine, let alone prepare for, an invasion of a nature and magnitude as Hamas’s October 7 attack, pertains to states’ perception of terrorist groups and the way in which their perception impacts their preparedness. Israel seems to have failed to grasp the implications of Hamas’s evolution from a mere “terrorist group” into a highly organized military entity that in many ways resembled an “army.” From a conceptual standpoint, Israel’s labeling and conceptualization of Hamas as a terrorist organization rendered the visualization of a strategically motivated military invasion from Gaza far more difficult.

To understand the failures, we need to first understand Netanyahu's thinking about how he saw and presented Hamas in his attempts to ensure there would never be any meaningful discussion of a two-state solution. As noted in an Op Ed in The Times of Israel by Tal Schneider on October 8th 2023:

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

As noted in the reporting:

Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.

In effect, Hamas was the dangerous pit bull pet on a leash rewarded by Israel, as specifically facilitated by Netanyahu to guard against the ambitions of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for a Palestinian state. An ambition he knew would be widely supported by many of Israel’s allies. By dividing the West Bank and Gaza, Netanyahu believed that he could create an unholy alliance with Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority, thus ensuring no discussion on the international stage of the long-desired two-state solution. He wanted Hamas to behave badly, but he believed he could keep the pit bull on the leash.

So confident was he that he could control them that he personally sanctioned funding that amounted to over a billion dollars in funding delivered monthly in cash by a Qatari diplomat escorted from the Jordanian border to Gaza by the IDF, as ordered by Netanyahu. This began in 2018. In addition to the funding, he also increased the number of work visas issued to Palestinians in Gaza to work in Israel

The reporting notes:

Toward the end of Netanyahu’s fifth government in 2021, approximately 2,000-3,000 work permits were issued to Gazans. This number climbed to 5,000 and, during the Bennett-Lapid government, rose sharply to 10,000. Since Netanyahu returned to power in January 2023, the number of work permits has soared to nearly 20,000.

Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza.

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Effectively, Netanyahu did a deal with the devil. However, it’s clear that by sanctioning funding to Hamas and vastly expanding the number of work permits, he created a permissive environment for intelligence gathering at scale, while facilitating the arming of Hamas fighters and their allies. This was a fatal error which ultimately led to the attack on October 7. You would have to be deluded to come to any other conclusion. The consequences of his arrogance and hubris led to the slaughter of innocent Israeli citizens with weapons funded from cash delivered in suitcases and escorted by the IDF since 2018.

Netanyahu made no secret of what drove his policy position regarding Hamas. The reporting continues:

“[His position was clear], at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The intelligence failings on the day were catastrophic; there is no doubt. According to reporting in The Guardian by Peter Beaumont on November 28th, 2023:

Israel’s military and intelligence officials were given a highly detailed warning that Hamas was actively training to take over kibbutzim on the Gaza border and overrun military posts with the aim of inflicting substantial fatalities, according to reports in the Israeli media.

The claim made by Israel’s Channel 12 on Monday evening was based on leaked emails from the Israeli military’s 8200 cyber-intelligence unit discussing the warnings.

It should be noted that this is supported by several Israeli media outlets. The Guardian report continues:

According to the leaked emails, Hamas went as far as giving the mocked-up kibbutz used in training a name and even practised raising a flag over its synagogue.

Plans were also intercepted that discussed overrunning a border military base and killing all of its occupants.

All of this intelligence turned out to be remarkably accurate. The arrogant assumption seems to have been that Hamas, the pit bull on the leash, was merely showing its teeth. It appears nobody at a senior level took the compelling intelligence gathered seriously, which takes us to reporting by Maya Lecker in Haaretz on November 20th 2023, in which the subheadline reads:

The piece opens with :

Fifteen unarmed women soldiers were killed at the IDF’s Nahal Oz lookout base on October 7, in what is usually referred to as the “surprise” Hamas attack on the Gaza border communities. Seven others were taken hostage – with one of them subsequently killed by her kidnappers in Gaza.

The key takeaway from this heartbreaking article is that the female spotters had, for months, been watching Hamas training at the border

….for months, they had seen Hamas militants training for this very scenario

They did their job, the job the IDF trained them to do. They observed and reported their observations to their commanders. The reporting notes:

They were told by officers of every rank that their reports were meaningless. Some told the spotters that they didn’t understand what they were seeing – even when what they saw was very high-ranking Hamas officials briefing armed men meters from the fence. One high-ranking Israeli officer who visited Nahal Oz base this year was explicit: “I don't want to hear another word about this nonsense,” he said. “If you nudge me again about this, you will stand trial.”

These women who spoke to Maya Lecker had seen their friends killed in front of them and had been forced to play dead for hours among the corpses of those they served with before finally being rescued. I can’t even begin to grasp the level of trauma they suffered as a result of being ignored by men who showed little respect for them, an arrogant, misogynistic decision which resulted in an atrocity that could have been avoided. I could go on and on with reporting on what senior members of the military had been warned of, but I’ll conclude with this piece from The New York Times by Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman. The reporting opens with:

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

It’s well worth your time to read the full article, which I have gift-linked above, as I have done with the Haaretz articles, so they are NOT behind a paywall. There was obviously much confusion following the attack; it was not until weeks later that the actual numbers were reported by Jerusalem AFP, which reported:

This was picked up and reported by France 24, and I have linked the article here.

The final death toll from the attack is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.

While lower than the originally published numbers, it remains a catastrophic and senseless loss of life, which could have been totally avoided if the abundant intelligence that was in the possession of those who could have prevented it had not been regarded as fanciful.

What’s important to understand is that it is likely that not all Israelis were killed by Hamas on October 7th. It is now widely reported, including by Israeli news outlets, and verified by them, that the Hannibal Directive was invoked. As reported in Haaretz by Yaniv Kubovich on July 7th 2024 :

So what exactly is the Hannibal Directive? This report by Rachel Fink, again in Haaretz on January 17th 2024, might help explain exactly how it operates. The article is titled: ‘Unlawful, Unethical, Horrifying’: IDF Ethics Code Author on Alleged Use of ‘Hannibal Directive’ During Hamas Attack

The article notes:

It’s a controversial and often misunderstood and misapplied operational order developed by the Israel Defense Forces in 1986 in response to an attempt by Hezbollah to abduct two soldiers into southern Lebanon.

In its original version, it outlined the procedures to be followed when a soldier may be at risk of abduction into enemy territory. The directive, drafted by Yossi Peled, the head of the IDF’s Northern Command at the time, along with Colonel Gabi Ashkenazi and Colonel Yaacov Amidror, emphasized the priority of rescuing captured soldiers from their captors, even if it meant risking harm to the captive soldiers themselves. Notably, the order was formulated without consulting legal experts.

Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram gave the most controversial order during the October 7 battles: to fire a tank shell at a Kibbutz Be'eri house where Hamas terrorists held hostages. As a result:

13 of the 14 civilians who were being held hostage in the house were killed (at least one had been killed earlier). Subsequently, in January, during the IDF's ground invasion, Hiram was also slapped with a disciplinary reprimand by the chief of staff for blowing up the main building of Israa University in Gaza, without receiving the requisite authorisation from his superiors.

Hilo Glazer - Haaretz, 31st May 2024

The bottom line is that we simply don’t know how many of its own civilians the IDF killed on October 7th; what we do know for sure is that the Hannibal Directive was in play across the battlespace. To be VERY CLEAR, this does not in any way diminish the role that Hamas played on that day and the months that followed with respect to the hostages seized. What it does do, however, is point to a directive most of us will find deeply disconcerting. I have included the Haaretz articles in full so you can fully understand the account of that day.

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In the next episode, we’ll deal with Netanyahu’s role and the opportunity he grasped to instigate the attempted ethnic cleansing of Gaza. We’ll also look at the West Bank and settler violence because it is vital to understand how Israel operates as an apartheid state. I apologise for the length of this episode, but again, I didn’t want to split it into two pieces.

Have a great Labour Day weekend, and I’ll return on Tuesday with the next episode.

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PREFACE | PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR

Given that I’ve summarised the history of the birth of the state of Israel and the Arab backlash that resulted from the Zionist self-declaration of statehood in 1948, It’s time to start to look at when and why the US became so aligned with Israel. To examine this, we need to look at the rise of the Israel lobby and the formation of AIPAC in 1959. There is no correlation between the influence of AIPAC and John F Kennedy’s decision to supply Israel with HAWK anti-aircraft missiles in 1962. That decision was a result of high-level diplomacy between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who lobbied Kennedy directly.

The most notable discussion between Ben Gurion and Kennedy took place at a meeting in New York in May 1961. This was a deliberate move by Ben-Gurion to bypass AIPAC, which at the time lacked both the funds and the infrastructure to deliver the required outcome. AIPAC was new and had recently changed its name from the American Zionist Council Political Affairs Committee in 1959. It would be over a decade later before AIPAC had the required financial and political clout to deliver the influence Israel needed.

What you have to remember is that this was the Cold War era, a period of significant tension between the US and the Soviet Union. In the Middle East, the Soviets engaged in the same geopolitical disruption they pursue today. They had supplied MiG jets to Egypt, which had tipped the balance of power in the region. At the same time, the UK and the US had a regional arms embargo in place. The reason for this was that both countries were heavily reliant on Arab-controlled oil, so the US had to tread a delicate line. As a result, the supply of HAWK missiles to Israel by the US was advertised as a move to balance the regional power scales. It was NOT an arms agreement, but rather a move to mitigate Russia's supply of MiG jets.

There was also a secondary reason for Kennedy to supply the missiles. US intelligence had discovered the Dimona secret nuclear facility in Israel. So Kennedy added a condition that Israel allow US inspectors to inspect the facility. The actual name of the site was the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Centre. Although the inspections were allowed to proceed, they were deliberately heavily restricted. As noted in the National Security Archive, Israel tightly controlled the timing, restricted movement, and routed inspection teams past specially constructed false walls and covered-up corridors to conceal underground plutonium-reprocessing facilities. Once Israel had got what it wanted from the US in terms of an arms pipeline, the inspections were halted in 1969 under an agreement between Richard Nixon and then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

This led to Israel’s policy that prevails to this day of nuclear ambiguity. It has allowed no inspections of any kind since the agreement with Nixon was reached, and Israel is NOT a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Yet another example of a ‘teacher’s pet’ mentality that allows them to do what they like with impunity. Unlike with Iran, Trump is not going to war with Israel to prevent them from owning nuclear weapons. As a result, Israel currently retains an independent nuclear deterrent. If you would like to get a better insight into how Israel became a nuclear power, I highly recommend this article by Emma Claire Foley from June 23rd 2024, which appeared in Jacobin.

Returning to AIPAC. For a decade, from 1960, the organisation had its work cut out for it because Kennedy was not only cautious about their cause but, some might say, mildly hostile. He had an adversarial relationship with the AIPAC umbrella organisation, the American Zionist Council (AZC). Indeed, between 1962 and 1963, the Kennedy DOJ actively demanded that the organisation register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The pressure on the AZC faded after Kennedy’s assassination and the transition to the Lyndon Johnson administration. It was never again placed under the same pressure. Also, before anyone jumps in to promote the conspiracy theory that Mossad was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination, there’s not a shred of evidence to prove it.

AIPAC operated separately from the AZC; it was incorporated by Isaiah Kenen, a US citizen born in Canada, thereby allowing it to function as a domestic American nonprofit lobby rather than as a registered foreign agent. This was despite Kenen being a registered public relations and information officer involved in Israeli government affairs in the United States. He’s credited with creating the modern framework of the Israeli lobby we know it today.

Understanding AIPAC's influence not just in American politics but in American society is absolutely critical. AIPAC goes way beyond politics; it has quite literally infiltrated the very heart of US policymaking and foreign policy and is deep-rooted in American society at large. In my view, it represents the most significant and dangerous breach of US national security in American history. Its tentacles extend into every facet of policy and legislation in relation to promoting Zionist objectives. It has also metastasised worldwide due to its grip on US politics. It’s ubiquitous; it has no party loyalty, just as in the 1940s, when Zionist leadership courted the Soviet Union on its march to secure the state of Israel, and later, its deal with Czechoslovakia to obtain arms for its fight in the Arab-Israeli war.

Today, AIPAC’s only loyalty is to Zionist ambitions for a Greater Israel. I’ve linked a video below to hopefully help you understand my assessment.

There’s no question that while politicians from BOTH parties remain on the payroll of what has become a rogue state, now widely regarded as a pariah around the world, public opinion, once solid in the US, has undergone a massive shift. Netanyahu is very aware of the threat this represents. This is why we have seen a transformation in its approach, using AIPAC and the now myriad of Israeli-sponsored entities and opaque organisations providing a front for a mobster state to maintain control of US politicians. The shift from removing the billions of dollars in military aid to integrating its military technology into the US industrial-military complex is a masterstroke by Netanyahu, and his loyal political foot soldiers on BOTH sides of the aisle have lined up to support the move. It's the biggest psyops coup in geopolitical history, and the US has swallowed it whole. It is a true testament to the power of a nation of 10 million people over a captive population of 340 million.

What intrigues me is the evolution of public opinion since October 7 2023. For some, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wasn’t on their radar; they had more important things to worry about. However, the events of October 7, as they have become known, changed that as the spotlight was turned on the most audacious and barbaric act of terrorism since 9/11, an attack which saw Hamas kidnap and murder hundreds of innocent civilians.

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If we are to examine the events that triggered the unprecedented rampage of vengeful retribution that followed, it is, in my view, imperative to establish the truth about a day which will remain in infamy for its senseless depravity and callous disregard for human life. Once again, I want there to be no doubt that the actions of the Hamas terrorists and their allies on that day were war crimes, and I unreservedly condemn them today as I have on numerous occasions since the attack.

Every life lost on that day was a human being. A father, a mother, a son, a daughter, a child whose presence posed no threat to anyone. They were loved ones who no longer sit at the dinner table, come home from work or school to share their day. They are now just voices and images in the minds of those left heartbroken by their absence.

In our polarised political dystopia, tragically, their memory has been weaponised to justify reciprocal war crimes. As a result, those like me who simply seek to tell the truth have become the enemy, declared antisemites and terrorist sympathisers. Since when did the truth lose its value and legitimate questions become acts of disloyalty? Even the loss of one life on October 7 would be unacceptable, so the loss of hundreds of lives targeted simply because they were Jews is abhorrent and unquestionably a crime against humanity, as it was later judged by the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

Israel claims to be the only democracy in the region and to adhere to the rule of law. We’ll deal with that assertion shortly, but before that, we should address the facts of the number of fatalities declared by the Israeli government on the day and days following the events of October 7. The initial claim in the fog of war was that 1400 innocent Israelis had been murdered. This was later revised down to 1200, not uncommon when dealing with such attacks, given the confusion and the fact that some were still listed as missing at the time.

There were no 40 beheaded babies or babies cooked in ovens, as was claimed over and over by not just Israeli spokespeople, and often repeated to this day, but also by Benjamin Netanyahu. A man on a propaganda mission to gain unwavering support from the US and European allies for his planned atrocities. As if the horrors of sexual violence and abuse were not enough, the Israeli government decided that further embellishment was required to secure the weapons it required for what it intended to do.

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If we are to have an open and frank conversation about the horror of the events of October 7 2023, and the unbridled retribution that followed, then I think we owe it to ourselves to begin with the truth for all of those who have perished. Since the 1200 fatality number was released, there have been no further updates, just an endless stream of propaganda to justify a wholly murderous, disproportionate response. In the next episode, we’ll look in detail at the events leading up to and including October 7th. We’ll discuss what is known as the Hannibal Directive, the unfathomable and uncharacteristic security failures that simply don’t make sense.

I’m very aware that there remains a gap in this historical journey we are taking together in respect of the intifadas, but fear not, I will incorporate these into where we are going, because we also need to discuss the 2006 elections in Gaza and the overstated support for Hamas. I know this has become an epic journey, but it’s my hope that, when complete, you will have access to a resource that breaks down the Palestinian question into digestible segments that make historic sense.

For those who want to support my work but can’t commit to a paid subscription, you can now make a one-off donation by clicking on the image below. By donating, you help to cover the cost of research resources and keep this independent reporting free for all.

After I saw the above video clip, and given that I am in the middle of a series of pieces on the ‘Palestinian question’, I thought it might be a good opportunity to take a small diversion from my planned piece today, which I’ve pushed to tomorrow. Mehdi Hasan’s commentary might seem incendiary to some, but if you’re bold and brave enough to take a step back and study history and the facts, the only conclusion you can draw from his assessment is that he’s making a valid and very important point that deserves to be heard.

Given the torrent of criticism and abuse I’ve received in my email inbox since I started writing this series. Abuse, might I add, from those who apparently don’t have the balls to air their assaults in the public comments of my pieces, I conclude I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. So let me add some gasoline to the fire, because unless people are prepared to burn down the insidious false narrative that is so pervasive on this issue, we will all be forever held hostage by the propaganda from Netanyahu and his thugs.

Full disclosure, I have long been a big fan of Mehdi Hasan’s work and his commitment to telling the truth regardless of the cost. He doesn’t just talk the talk; he walks the walk, delivering his often brutal but accurate factual observations. I support Zeteo News both in the U.S. and the UK and am proud to do so. They are one of the few news networks prepared to speak truth on the third rail that is the ‘Palestinian question’.

The ‘right to exist’ at its heart is a fundamental HUMAN right, not an ethno-nationalist state right. As such, it applies to ALL PEOPLE. In contrast, history teaches us that the right to exist as a country simply does not exist, as Mehdi correctly points out. Borders change, even countries’ names change as a result of conflict. If Israel seized Gaza, Southern Lebanon and the current occupied territories, as is the ambition of many in the Israeli government, all would disappear and become part of Israel as the conquering power. So the question is already asked and answered.

There’s no doubting that Israel and its behaviour are in many ways unique and provoke high emotion, especially given that Israel is a country created to provide a homeland for the Jews following the horrors of the Holocaust. They are in the unique position of never having been given set borders, but rather being given free rein to set them themselves. In this respect, it’s easy for them to expand and grab land, then claim it as their own. I certainly can’t think of any other nation that has the same advantage. Can you?

The world stands rightly outraged by Russian attempts to seize Ukraine in an attempt to absorb it as part of Russia. Yet Israel has ambitions to create a ‘Greater Israel’, and nobody dares say a word. As you would expect, Netanyahu would claim this ambition does not exist, but there’s too much evidence to the contrary, even down to the patches worn by some in the military denoting their expansionist aims.

This is the same reason Israel has nuclear weapons, which have NEVER been inspected or even admitted to exist, a point which we’ll also explore this week. They have become the geopolitical ‘teacher’s pet’, constantly being given ‘special treatment’ by dominant Western powers, without whose aid they would not be able to engage in a fraction of their abhorrent behaviour.

Prior to 1948, they’ve flagrantly weaponised the extermination of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust to shame the US and Britain into agreeing to the unconditional creation of the state of Israel. A state which has since become a country in a perpetual state of war for what it claims is good reason; they are constantly under threat from a brutal enemy that brings a pea shooter to a gunfight. The uncomfortable truth is, Israel is a nation built on stolen land previously occupied by Arabs who coexisted with a minority contingent of Jews under the Ottoman Empire for four centuries. The demographics of the population of Mandated Palestine in no way reflected a population-based entitlement to a sovereign state for the Jews. They were simply the longstanding minority. It’s like the US government being told to give up its rights and transfer power to the minority Hispanic community. It would never happen; the US military would crush any attempt at such an absurd attempt at a hostile takeover.

Israel has been able to repel pissed-off Arabs since 1948 not because of their strength, but rather because of the global dominance of their friends, the US military and, to a lesser extent, the receding power of the British army from the days of empire. This is an amendment to the original post regarding Israel’s friends. It’s easy in the context of what is happening today to think of Israel’s natural allies as Western nations, when at the time the zionist movement was working towards statehood it looked way beyond the US and the UK. Between 1941 and 1948, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion courted Soviet diplomats such as Ivan Maisky and Andrei Gromyko in an effort to support the Jewish state and force the British to withdraw from Mandated Palestine.

In short, just as now, Israel would sell its soul in pursuit of its objectives. Nothing has changed. If we look at the timeline between 1941 and 1948, Chaim Weizmann invested a great deal of time and effort in getting the Soviet Union onside, not least for its vote at the United Nations, which he knew it would need. In 1943, Ivan Maisky visited Palestine and met David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir; it was this meeting that prepared the ground for Soviet support of Israeli statehood that would follow.

The level of geopolitical jiggery pokery was off the chart, but Zionist leadership back then was as efficient and effective as Netanyahu is today. If you want to dig into the details, I would highly recommend reading this piece from Le Monde by Gabriel Gorodetsky, published in February 2016, which documents the then-Soviet ambassador to Britain, Ivan Maisky. It provides a fascinating insight into negotiations which led in 1947 to Soviet support for the Partition of Palestine and support for the creation of the Israeli state we know today.

In my original assessment, I focused on US and British support, which, while not wrong in a wider context, failed to highlight the Soviet connection, which was pivotal to the Zionist leadership achieving its goal; because the truth does matter, this adjustment to the piece was important for the record.

There’s no question that Israel could NOT have survived Arab aggression without external military and diplomatic support, much as they could not have committed genocide without the complicity of Israeli allies. What was not mentioned in the original piece was the importance of Soviet military support, including the supply of military aid totalling $14.5 million. Adjusted for inflation, this would be $200 million. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, the arms package included:

‘some 400 tons of mortars and other heavy machinery, aerial bombs, rifles, ammunition, machine guns, flamethrowers, explosives, tanks, and combat vehicles from the Czechs. A separate deal promised twenty-four Czech-built Avia S-199 fighters, a lesser version of the German Messerschmitt.

It should be noted that at the time there was a Middle East arms embargo in operation by both the US and the UK, so as David Ben-Gurion later admitted,

“Czechoslovak arms saved the State of Israel, really and absolutely. Without these weapons, we wouldn’t have survived.”

The fact is, it was communist support that saved the day for Israel, but this had the unintended consequence of providing the new Israeli government with leverage to secure what was ultimately billions of dollars of continuous military aid from the US, which persists to this day. Russia has long been the wily old fox in the geopolitical hen house, and at the time it played both sides in the Arab Israeli tensions, supplying MIG jets to Egypt. JFK found himself under pressure domestically to counter the Soviet threat by supplying Hawk anti-aircraft missiles to Israel in 1962. At the same time, he refused to establish a formal military alliance to avoid alienating Arab states on which the US relied for oil.

This is where we get into the complex choreography of nuclear proliferation and the issue of Israel’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrent, which we’ll discuss in the next episode.

As a result of constantly waging war on them under the guise of ‘self-defence ’, Israel has created a perpetual pipeline of terrorist adversaries who, absent comparable military capability, wage asymmetric war using the age-old tools of insurgent terrorism. Suicide bombs and deliberate attacks on soft targets, i.e., civilians, have become their resistance of choice. This results in a never-ending cycle of conflict. As a consequence, Israel ‘mows the lawn’ periodically to stamp its authority on the region to remind the cockroaches who’s in charge.

To be very clear, I do not condone violence from ANY source; it’s wrong, and it’s abhorrent; as such, I unreservedly condemn it. Sadly, in such unregulated conflict all too often civilians are caught in the middle and suffer the highest losses. In any situation where there is a mighty military force imposing pain on a perceived much weaker enemy, the victims of their assault have little choice, as illustrated by Iran, but to engage in an asymmetric response which is often crude but highly effective.

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The broad kill ratio in terms of conflicts was, until 2023, upwards of 22:1. (For every Israeli killed, the IDF killed 22 Palestinians). However, in 2023, after the US gave Netanyahu a free pass to murder as many Palestinians as he liked following October 7, all while turning Gaza into an uninhabitable pile of dust, that ratio now stands at a minimum of close to 60:1 (that’s assuming we accept Israel’s admission of the numbers). I actually believe the numbers are significantly undercounted, given the deliberate policy of denying the international press access to the crime scenes. Indeed, as outlined in a report by Sophia Sheera for Novara Media on August 14th 2026:

Israel is removing rubble caused by demolitions and bomb blasts in Gaza to wipe away evidence of the ongoing genocide, rights groups say.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimates that 10 million tonnes of rubble have been carted away from the 66% of Gaza under Israeli military control.

That means evidence of war crimes is being destroyed before forensics teams can investigate, the group says – and the remains of victims under the rubble are being taken away.

The report quotes Amnesty International as stating:

“The bulldozing is an integral part of all attempts to destroy the lands in Gaza City and in the Gaza Strip in general,” Amnesty International researcher Budour Hassan told Al Jazeera.

“The real fears are that these operations are taking place with the aim of obliterating and hiding evidence.”

As an aside, Novara Media does outstanding work and is well worth your support; you can find their mission statement here, if you're interested.

Moving on, it’s a little-reported fact that Netanyahu personally authorised $1.3 billion in funding to be delivered IN CASH to Hamas by Qatar for the sole purpose of preventing even a conversation about a two-state solution. Unfortunately, the experiment escaped the lab, costing 1200 Israelis their lives on October 7 2023. We WILL examine this in more detail in the next episode.

There was no downside in this act of terrorism for Netanyahu; he simply used the events as a welcome opportunity to wage vengeful and unbridled retribution in order to feed red meat to the Israeli far right. All while attempting to deliver a long-held ambition to rid Israel of the remaining Palestinians in Gaza from homes they had lived in for generations. The ocean of Palestinian blood that he gleefully bathed in has kept him in power, and he believes more Palestinian blood spilt will also see him re-elected in the upcoming elections at the end of October.

So, in answer to the question, ‘Does Israel have the right to exist?’ There’s no question that the PEOPLE of Israel have a collective right to exist. As to the country of Israel, it’s not a special case and is subject to the same spoils of war theory that Ukraine is being forced to endure largely without American military assistance. The only winner in that war is the US, which is profiting from arms sales to Europe, which are then passed on to Ukraine. We may have some romantic idea that Ukraine has the right to exist, but if Russia wins, that right will disappear in the blink of an eye, as will the Ukrainian language and culture, just as it did when Russia absorbed it in the late 1700s.

No country has the right to exist; it has only a right to defend its borders, which is, for Israel, a gift, given they appear to be subjected to no requirement to define borders, providing flexibility to achieve its ambitions. I support Jews having a land they can call home. Just as I support the Palestinians who have lived on the same land for the last four centuries to have the same. The problem we have with Israel is that few people are prepared to call bullshit on their propaganda-driven victimhood.

Someone made a valid point when commenting on yesterday’s episode:

Please be aware of the difference.I know you know, but it didn’t not come across well in this article. The “Jewish community” does not have a government. Jews are in every country! However, Israel does have a govt. Fuck BB and his genocide.

It’s important to acknowledge that the Jewish diaspora is scattered around the world, which accounts for a little over half of the Jews in the world (8.6 million). They are all too often tarred with the same brush as the Zionist hardliners, and that’s truly unfortunate. I do not and have not condemned the wider ‘Jewish community’ for the actions of the Israeli government. While many Jews living outside of Israel have a deep emotional and/or ancestral connection to the state of Israel, they overwhelmingly condemn the actions of Netanyahu and his far-right government.

Polling suggests that between 75% and 80% of American and British Jews do not support the actions or policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and the likes of far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Many support a two-state solution and the right of Palestinians to self-determination. I unreservedly apologise to any member of the Jewish community who might have misinterpreted the clumsy wording I used in the last piece. It reminded me of the clip below from Kayla Shrader, which I thought worth including for context. I have recently started following her work, which is highly informative and easy to relate to.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8FcxdTq/

Empires rise and fall, as we are witnessing in the US. There are no guarantees, so I believe that while Mehdi’s words may be perceived as incendiary, they are ultimately correct, however uncomfortable that might feel for some. When I started this series of posts, I really had no idea where it would lead, other than to share my findings as I unravelled the cloak of invisibility Israel has surrounded itself with when it comes to accountability for its actions. We are only halfway through, and if you feel half as well informed as I do, it’s a resounding success so far.

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The ability to think outside the box and challenge what doesn’t feel right is truly liberating, and despite the hate flooding my inbox, it’s proving well worth the effort. I’d like to conclude by pointing you to the video below. I know that those who appreciate my work will certainly feel what I felt when I watched it. In my view, it’s essential viewing. It’s from someone I have been a longtime admirer of for a whole host of reasons. Reasons that go beyond how aligned we are on politics and our shared desperate desire, through our work, to deliver a better tomorrow for our children and our grandchildren. has created what I believe to be a groundbreaking project, which is well worth a moment of your time to check out. It is a project I will be joining later this week as a founding circle member; that’s how much I believe in what Matthew is doing.

Finally, I’d like to give a big shout-out to those who have started to use the Buy me a drink link below in recent weeks. In particular, I want to thank those who showed their generosity following yesterday’s episode in this series. Some readers suggested I include the link a little while ago, and it’s proved to be a big success, so thank you. While paid subscriptions provide continuity and monthly or annual revenue, I fully appreciate that some simply can’t afford to make that level of commitment. This is why the Buy me a drink link was created. I’m not one for sending out begging emails with ever-deeper discount subscription offers; if you can’t afford to subscribe or buy me a drink that’s fine, it really is, there’s no pressure from me. Those who, through their kind generosity, have long supported my work remain my guardian angels; you help keep the show on the road and help provide my work for free to everyone. For that I’m truly grateful, and it’s not just by me, I’m sure.

I love writing, but delivering the type of content I create requires a wealth of expensive research resources to ensure it meets the exacting standards I demand and that people here have come to expect. I never want to compromise that. As a pensioner, I don’t have access to unlimited resources to cover the costs; if I did, rest assured I would. In the absence of that luxury, every little helps, and it’s simply reinvested into delivering high-quality content you can rely on.

Martin

This was originally two posts, but I’ve edited it into one because it made no sense to split it; I hope you’ll agree.

I thought it might be a good way to begin PART THREE with an opportunity to address the issue of claims that there is no such place as Palestine, a longstanding Zionist primary propaganda talking point. I could spend time regurgitating information from a number of sources to debunk this nonsense that reminds me of the selective use by Republicans of ‘originalism’ when it comes to the US Constitution and the Bible. A tactic they often use when they want to ‘interpret’ meaning to fit their political narrative, much the same as Netanyahu likes to interpret the Torah. The common thread with right-wing ideology is religious instrumentalisation, using religion as the magic sauce to distort the truth to provide credibility for the lies. It’s prevalent in MAGA just as it is in hard right Israeli politics.

The Israeli justification for slaughter and persecution of the Palestinians is a calculated and deliberate biblical distortion of historical fact. I was born into a Roman Catholic family to parents who were devout in their faith. I went to church every Sunday, and even at a young age, I felt no connection to the repetitive indoctrination that has for centuries acted as a mechanism to control populations around the world; it’s not for nothing that religion is often referred to as the opium of the masses. More ‘righteous’ wars have been fought in service of religion than have not. As children, we have a natural instinct to please our parents; I even became an altar boy. I went to Sunday School and joined the church choir. I was introduced to the premise of propaganda: repeating the same unverifiable stories over and over until they are accepted by too many as fact.

Being the rebellious creature I am, once I had the independence to choose for myself if I wanted to continue the charade, I ran for the hills and never looked back. This was a decision reaffirmed by the revelations of an epidemic of child sexual abuse by priests and those in charge of church-run orphanages across the world. I decided instead that I would build a values framework on the good things I learned from my time studying the bible, centred around Matthew 25: 31-40:

I would add, however, that while organised religion is not for me, I do understand how important it is for so many people. It certainly remained important to my parents, and I respected that, as I do those for whom their faith is an integral part of who they are. I also feel a great sense of empathy as right-wing politics has so successfully taken faith hostage for political gain. The historical power of religion to influence the thoughts of its congregation was never lost on the likes of Adolf Hitler and, more recently, of course, Trump and his cynical adoption of Christian Nationalism for his own personal gain.

The thing about religious zealots is they aren’t satisfied with their faith being for them; they are obsessed with imposing it on others, and this is particularly pervasive when it comes to Christian nationalism, because it’s a political construct that adopts faith teaching as a propaganda tool. I could spend this whole piece on the insidious nature of this bastardised faith captive indoctrination, but that’s for another day. Needless to say, it’s this corrupted faith narrative that has driven the crusade-level persecution of the Palestinians.

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Faith-driven narratives weaponise centuries of entrenched religious indoctrination that dictate we NEVER challenge the word of God for fear of eternal damnation. You may think this is nonsense, but I guarantee that, in many people’s subconscious, they are resistant to challenging cynical faith narratives, even if these bastardised teachings have been reinterpreted and crafted for political purposes; especially if you belong to a culture that has been persecuted for millennia. There is no question that victimhood has been weaponised time and again to justify crimes against humanity. It’s a moral abomination that MUST be called out.

Already today I have had a comment that stated:

Actually the Jews have a 3,500 history in the holy land starting with King David.

My response:

It is sadly indicative of the deeply embedded narrative that it is the God-given right of the Jews to own the land they did in biblical times. On that basis, I’m looking forward to the next Native American government in the hope that they will not do unto Americans what was done unto them. You don’t get handed a nation state because the Torah says so; that’s not how it works.

This leads me nicely to where I was going with this episode and the need to understand there was no Israel until Zionists from Europe self-declared it on May 14th 1948. To be very clear, it was IMPOSED on the region, not created through dialogue with the population that lived on the land and were subsequently ethnically cleansed by the criminal act of expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians. NONE of it would have been possible without the support of the US and Great Britain. An event which led to the murder of around 15,000 Palestinians, many of them murdered by Zionist militia that was to become the IDF. Numerous massacres took place in villages like Deir Yassin, Tantura, and Dawaymeh. For context, these were often led by men who would later become senior leaders in the newly declared Israeli government. Just as in Gaza and Lebanon today, they laid waste to villages that had been in the ownership of Palestinians for generations. NONE of it would have been possible without the aid and support of the US and Great Britain, who were as complicit then in war crimes as they are today.

It really is time to stop sugarcoating these atrocities and understand that the behaviour we are witnessing today in Gaza and the occupied territories is absolutely nothing new; they are in the DNA of a nation where humanity and moral decency have long left the building. This is a nation that saw six million of their fellow Jews exterminated at the hands of the Nazis in Germany in the 1940’s. They rightly claim that this was an act of genocide. Indeed, it was what led to the formation of the United Nations and the Treaty of Rome, which established the International Criminal Court in 1998. An organisation designed to hold those guilty of such barbaric acts to account on the world stage.

How interesting it is that the Israeli government does not recognise either the rulings of said criminal court, nor the Resolutions of the United Nations, claiming their occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal. How odd it is that we constantly hear invocation of the Holocaust to justify the commission of war crimes against the Palestinians. A Holocaust, might I add, which actually saw the murder of over 11 million people, including Russian prisoners of war, Slavs, Poles, Romani people, along with political prisoners and the disabled. The additional 5 million victims, it appears, have been erased from the Israeli narrative because it seems they want exclusive rights to victimhood when it comes to justification of their own crimes against humanity.

The critical point is that it was not a genocide exclusively perpetrated on the Jews as Israeli propaganda would have you believe. Indeed, the person who commented above would inform you as he did me:

To be factual there is no genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Genocide is the deliberate murder of an entire people or race.

The United States treatment of the indigenous tribes in the 19th century comes close to that.

The settlers in the West Bank can be very violent even against Jews who don’t share their ambitions but is not a genocide but the appropriation of land on a so-called religious and biblical basis.

Most Israelis don’t support them.

By his own argument, the author whom I have not named, because I don’t want people targeting him as I am often targeted by SOME members of the Jewish community. However, rest assured, these are direct quotes. He’s effectively saying Hitler did not perpetrate a genocide on the Jews, given he didn’t kill them all; it’s a nonsense assertion. It seems he contends that murdering tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians is acceptable because it’s only a fraction of the population. Was it their benevolence that allowed the rest to live in an uninhabitable wasteland? Netanyahu’s himself has publicly stated:

"you must remember what Amalek has done to you,"

Referring to Amalek—an enemy commanded in scripture to be totally destroyed. Yoav Gallant, former Defence Minister (a man who, along with Netanyahu, is the subject of arrest warrants issued by the ICC for war crimes), stated:

"we are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,"

This is all part of a systemic attempt by a number of government ministers and members of the Knesset to dehumanise Palestinians in order to justify murder.

As reported by NBC:

Amichai Eliyahu (Heritage Minister): Suggested in a radio interview that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was "one of the possibilities"

I could go on and on and on, but this goes to the very heart of the definition of genocide, ‘intent’. The uncomfortable truth is that if they could, it’s clear that certain segments of the government absolutely WOULD kill them all. I’m afraid one can draw no other conclusion. Palestinians are portrayed as subhuman by senior government officials, to be stamped on, persecuted and abused at every opportunity. What’s more, the IDF have been found to be systematically targeting Palestinian children along with hospitals, schools, and reproductive services clinics; neonatal units WERE discovered with dead babies who had been left to perish after hospitals had been forced to evacuate; there is no end to the level of deprivation carried out by the alleged ‘most moral army on earth’.

Often the Israeli assertion is that you can’t be guilty of murder if you drop some leaflets telling people to leave the area. So it’s fine providing you inform them you are going to murder them unless they leave, prior to your attack? In what world does that provide absolution for war crimes? This behaviour is nothing new; it is absolutely endemic in segments of Israeli society. It is simply not true to state “most Israelis do not support it”; there is a big difference between the diaspora and those living in Israel, although the attitudes persist throughout to some degree; you only have to listen to AIPAC politicians bought and paid for by the Israeli government to understand that. In Israel itself, over 70% support the IDF's actions.

In a report in Haaretz by Shay Hazkani and Tamir Sorek, in 2025 (which I’m happy to supply the link to, but is behind a paywall if you are not, like me, a subscriber), they note that in a poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, the results showed:

82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. These figures mark a sharp rise from a 2003 survey, in which support for such expulsions stood at 45 percent and 31 percent, respectively

Does this suggest to you that “most Israelis do not support it”? I would respectfully disagree. The report goes on to note:

Religious interpretations play a key role in shaping these views. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants." Sixty-five percent said they believed in the existence of a modern-day incarnation of Amalek, the Israelite biblical enemy whom God commanded to wipe out in Deuteronomy 25:19. Among those believers, 93 percent said the commandment to erase Amalek's memory remains relevant today.

Here are two interesting graphs that appear in the report too:

While it would be wrong to suggest that all Jews support the actions of their government, and indeed there are many organisations within Israel that support a two-state solution and the right to Palestinian self-determination, it is incorrect to suggest they are in the majority; the evidence simply does not support it. It should also be noted that this survey was sent to Israelis living in Israel.

There has long been a principle in place that states ‘Kill one of us, and we will kill many of you’. Between 2008 and October 7 2023, historical data shows that roughly 5,600 Palestinians have been killed compared to about 250 Israeli deaths, yielding a consistent kill ratio of roughly 22-to-1. This excludes times of significant military incursions in which the might of the military, supported by the most powerful nation on earth, takes off the gloves and teaches the Palestinians a lesson.

If we go back further in history:

• First Intifada (1987–1993) - Between 180 and 200 Israelis were killed. In response, 1962 Palestinians were killed.

• Second Intifada (2000–2005) - 1,010 Israelis were killed, and 3,354 Palestinians lost their lives.

• Gaza War (2008) - 13 Israelis were killed, and in response, the IDF killed around 1200 Palestinians.

• Gaza War (2014) - 73 Israelis were killed, while the IDF killed around 2,200 Palestinians

• Gaza War (2023) - An estimated 1200 Israelis, and latest numbers indicate that Palestinian deaths now exceed 70,000

If you are looking for a potted history of the conflict, I highly recommend reading this very informative piece from The Wachenheim Centre for Peace and Security, which was last updated on August 3rd 2026.

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In the next episode, we’ll look at the obsession with the Biblical right to Israel as it was in the United Monarchy (c. 1020–930 BCE), when the lands were ruled by Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, establishing Jerusalem as the political and spiritual centre. Yes, that’s how far back the Israeli government wants to go to make Israel great again. It should be noted that the last period of sovereign Jewish rule prior to the self-declaration of an Israeli state, thousands of years later, was the Hasmonean Dynasty (140–37 BCE), which followed the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire. It’s tantamount to Italy demanding they be handed back the Roman Empire.

It really is time to put Netanyahu and his thugs’ biblical wet dream where it belongs: into the bad joke book of history and to call out the clowns who have been complicit in their war crimes.

For those who want to support my work but can’t commit to a paid subscription, you can now make a one-off donation by clicking on the image below. By donating, you help to cover the cost of research resources and keep this independent reporting free for all.

They came home and shared their stories with the world, but few listened, so this film is testament not only to their bravery and sense of humanity, but is an indictment on an act of vengeful retribution aided and abetted by the U.S. and western powers, who remain complicit in an act of genocide which will remain a stain on us all for eternity.

My series on the origins of the Arab Israeli conflict continues later today. If you want to be better informed you might want to check it out.

https://politicsusa46.substack.com/p/israeli-elections-are-inbound-at?r=54ihjc&utm_medium=ios

TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZN8FQJ5fm/

PREFACE | PART ONE

I thought when I started researching the evolution of the Israeli genocide that I would be able to contain my thoughts in a series of episodes that would maybe take a week. The more I dig, the more I realise it would take months, which would be impractical in a world of soundbites and shrinking attention spans. What I think I can say is I may not be able to wrap it all up this week, but I should be done early next week. I hope you’ll forgive me for that, because I believe readers of my work will understand that the geopolitical complexity of the subject demands in-depth coverage that goes beyond a short, pithy summary.

I apologise in advance for this particular post being long, but it’s absolutely essential to gaining a better understanding of this conflict and why history plays such a role in this series of posts, and I promise this will be the exception rather than the rule.

The classic propaganda-fueled premise for Israel’s persistent and historic persecution of the Palestinian people is that time and time again they were offered a Palestinian state, but Palestinian leaders refused to accept. I had a comment attempting to insult my intelligence on a note today that was a classic cut-and-paste Israeli talking-point response. I’d like to thank the author for the opportunity and take a moment to address each claim, because the truth matters, right?

To quote the author: “There is a missing part 🤡”

Key Historical Rejections and Proposals

1937 – The Peel Commission: The British proposed dividing the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian Arab leaders rejected the plan, demanding all of the territory and opposing a Jewish state. (Citing this reddit link).

My response:

Let’s assume your family had been living in California for generations and you had built a life there; yes, it had its challenges, but it was a place you called home. Then one day, a foreign government rocked up to town, held a meeting inviting state leaders and business stakeholders to announce that they had been tasked with the creation of an Israeli state that would become a homeland for the Jews.

The proposal is, those currently inhabiting the most fertile land in the state will be required to up sticks and move to the Mohave desert, handing their homes, land and businesses to the incoming Jews. What would your response be? I’ll wait. Oh, that was quick. Did you say ‘fuck off ’? I thought so.

That’s exactly what the 1937 Peel Commission proposed. To partition Palestine while at the same time denying Arab independence and transferring fertile lands occupied by Arabs and Arab-majority Galilee, to a new Jewish state. It also recommended the forced transfer of 250,000 Arabs who made up the majority of the population. Last but not least, it proposed the transfer of vital agricultural land owned by Arabs and worked on by generations of their families.

Of course they rejected the proposal; what would you have done? This was not an offer of a Palestinian state; it was a land grab and denial of Arab independence. If ANY Western nation had faced the same imposition, it would have been rejected out of hand and war would have ensued.

1947 – UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181): The United Nations proposed dividing British Mandatory Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab states. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, but Arab and Palestinian representatives rejected it, leading to the 1948 war. (Citing this UN link).

Of course Jewish leaders accepted the plan; they had no state at the time, so the suggestion that this was an act of benevolence is frankly ludicrous. Again I ask, if this was being attempted in the US, would the US go to war to protect its land? ABSOLUTELY it would.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan was yet another one-sided offering. At the time, the Jewish population made up around 33% of the population while owning just 10% of the private land. The plan sought to allocate between 50% and 55% of then Mandatory Palestine to a Jewish state. It granted the Jewish community the majority of the territory despite Arabs owning 94% of the private land and making up two-thirds of the population.

Arabs legitimately claimed that the plan violated the UN Charter and denied the Palestinian majority the right to govern their entire homeland. Again, I ask what you would do if you were the Arabs? It’s preposterous to suggest that the plan was a genuine attempt to offer Palestinians their own state and the right to self-determination. It was in truth a non-negotiable imposition of a Jewish state on the land they had inhabited and developed for four centuries. It’s not difficult to understand that this led to the 1948 Arab Israeli war.

I would once again remind you that prior to these repeated attempts at partition, Arabs and Jews had lived side by side in relative peace for centuries. Jews held dhimmi status, meaning they could worship freely. However, they had to pay a tax called ‘jizya’, and they did NOT have equal political status with Muslims. Was this fair, no it was not, but it was Ottoman rule at the time.

It was not until the late 1800’s that European (Zionist) immigrants began arriving in the region, raising nationalist tensions leading each group to began to establish a tribal culture in the political discourse of the day. And so the seeds were sown for the fatal and brutal division that was to follow.

It should be noted that in 1947, there was no IDF. Israel did not exist; all that existed was Palestine, ‘from the river to the sea ’. It was not a political slogan, but rather a statement of fact. The influx of European Zionists led to decades of preparation for statehood. While there was no IDF, there was the Haganah, a clandestine defence force, and the Palmach, its muscle. There were also smaller militia organisations, such as Irgun and Lehi, that operated independently.

In short, by the time of the 1947 Partition Plan, Zionists had already created the foundations for the birth of the Israeli state. The writing was on the wall; it was no longer if an Israeli state would exist but rather when.

Charles Glass, reviewing 2 books in 2001, ‘One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate’ and Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-48, noted:

The British army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the promised land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, “to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain neglected to observe the Declaration’s final clause: “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

He went on to add:

Britain erected and for thirty years maintained the scaffolding that the Zionists happily tore down when their house of Israel was ready. Despite the objections of some British military commanders and civil servants in Palestine, His Majesty’s Government protected Jewish immigration, encouraged Jewish settlement, subsidised Jewish defence and protected the Yishuv, as Palestine’s minority Jewish community called itself, from the native population. Without Great Britain, there would not have been an Israel for the Yishuv, or a catastrophe – nakba in Arabic – for Palestine’s Arab majority. It is not surprising that each year Balfour Day is celebrated by the friends of Israel and mourned by Palestine’s Arabs.

Political Zionism, founded by Theodor Herzl, worked on the understanding that an Israeli state could only exist by the legitimacy conferred upon it by the major powers. On May 14 1948, Zionist leadership was confident enough to declare statehood independently. It had already established the infrastructure for government and simply had to bring together already established militias to give rise to the Israeli Defence Force, the IDF.

Before statehood had even been declared, between December of 1947 and April 1948, the forced displacement of between 250,000 and 350,000 Palestinians had already begun, led by Israeli militias; this was the civil war phase preceding the declaration of statehood. In March 1948, Zionist leadership adopted what was known as ‘Plan Dalet ’, also known as ‘Plan D’. If you’d like a more detailed insight into the plan, I highly recommend this piece by The Institute for Middle East Understanding. This was the blueprint for the systematic depopulation and destruction of Palestinian villages. Sound familiar in 2026?

Officially adopted on March 10th 1948 it called for:

“Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously… “Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Now you understand where the destruction of Gaza and Southern Lenbanon came from, they already had the blueprints, they just had to dig them out of the cupboard and brush off the dust. The IME report continues:

Three quarters of all Palestinians, about 750,000 people, were forced from their homes and made refugees during Israel’s establishment. Their homes, land, and other belongings were systematically destroyed or taken over by Israelis, while they were denied the right to return or any sort of compensation. More than 400 Palestinian towns and villages, including vibrant urban centers, were destroyed or repopulated with Jewish Israelis.

While the mass expulsion, better known as the Nakba is commemorated on May 15th, it actually spanned from late 1947 to 1949. During that time, between 13,000 and 15,000 Palestinians were killed and over 500 villages burned to the ground in an orgy of hate and destruction. There were dozens of documented massacres by Israeli forces. Thousands of these deaths occurred across dozens of documented sites, including at Deir Yassin, Tantura, and Al-Dawayima. At the conclusion of this ethnic cleansing exercise, to add insult to injury, around 80% of those that remained in what was now the state of Israel (150,000) were granted Israeli citizenship but stripped of most of their land and governed by violent, undemocratic military rule until 1966. If you would like a deeper insight into the consequences of the Nakba, take a moment to read this piece, again by the Institute for Middle East Understanding.

Be in no doubt that the massacres that took place during the mass expulsion of the Palestinians weren’t carried out by rogue elements of the militia:

dozens of children, women, and elderly people, massacred in the Palestinian town of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem on April 9, 1948, by Zionist militias led by future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. The massacre at Deir Yassin was one of the worst atrocities committed during the Nakba and a pivotal moment in Israel’s establishment as a Jewish-majority state, triggering the flight of Palestinians from their homes in and around Jerusalem and beyond. The Deir Yassin massacre is commemorated annually by Palestinians around the world

It’s not until you study the history that you understand the context of the current episode of attempted ethnic cleansing and genocide; I’m afraid it’s in the DNA of Zionism as documented in the history of the atrocities perpetrated almost 80 years ago. This was a group of people from Europe whose people had suffered unspeakable crimes at the hands of fellow Europeans, NOT Palestinians or Muslims, but so-called Christians, and here they were with no problem massacring women and children less than three years after the fall of Nazi Germany. That takes a special kind of hate, one that has clearly raised its head 80 years later behind a fig leaf of ‘self-defence ’. Make it make sense, because I’m really struggling. How much suffering does one people have to endure before enough is enough for governments to not be complicit in this perpetual cycle of genocidal persecution?

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2000 – Camp David Summit: U.S. President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state comprising Gaza and most of the West Bank, with parts of East Jerusalem. Arafat turned down the proposal without making a counteroffer. (Citing this reddit link)

Yet another myth; it’s becoming frightfully tiresome to read the endless propaganda openly supported by mainstream media that should and do know better. I would point you to this article by Seth Ackerman for fair.org from July 1st 2002. He noted that this is how the media at the time reported it, much as the author of the above statement paints it.

The Camp David meeting ended without agreement on July 25, 2000. At this point, according to conventional wisdom, the Palestinian leader’s “response to the Camp David proposals was not a counteroffer but an assault” (Oregonian editorial, 8/15/01). “Arafat figured he could push one more time to get one more batch of concessions. The talks collapsed. Violence erupted again” (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). He “used the uprising to obtain through violence…what he couldn’t get at the Camp David bargaining table” (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/21/00).

In reality it was another one sided proposal as Ackerman noted:

Because of the geographic placement of Israel’s proposed West Bank annexations, Palestinians living in their new “independent state” would be forced to cross Israeli territory every time they traveled or shipped goods from one section of the West Bank to another, and Israel could close those routes at will. Israel would also retain a network of so-called “bypass roads” that would crisscross the Palestinian state while remaining sovereign Israeli territory, further dividing the West Bank.

Israel was also to have kept “security control” for an indefinite period of time over the Jordan Valley, the strip of territory that forms the border between the West Bank and neighboring Jordan. Palestine would not have free access to its own international borders with Jordan and Egypt—putting Palestinian trade, and therefore its economy, at the mercy of the Israeli military.

2008 – The Olmert Offer: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a state on roughly 93–94% of the West Bank, land swaps, and a shared administration of Jerusalem. Abbas did not accept the offer and walked away without a counterproposal. (Citing this reddit link)

This is the only statement that holds any weight in my mind and I believe is the closest offer that should have been up for further discussion. I believe Ehud Olmert to be a man with honourable intent and he impresses me to this day by his preparedness to speak up against Netanyahu’s attacks on innocent civilians in Gaza.

I believe this was the closest the world came to an offer that had legs. However, I believe that even if the deal had been sealed, Olmert was a lame duck, and there is no question that Netanyahu would have walked away from any such deal.

I think this piece by Lazar Berman in the Jerusalem Times encapsulates part of my thinking regarding the possibility of a two-state solution and the near miss.

2020 – The Trump Peace Plan: The United States proposed a conditional, demilitarized Palestinian state with economic aid and a capital in outer East Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority rejected the plan immediately and refused to negotiate. (Citing this reddit link)

I’m not going to dignify this with a response, because it’s an unserious proposition from a very unserious man at a time when Netanyahu has absolutely no intention of agreeing ANY peace deal.

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If you managed to stick with me to this point, I applaud your commitment to a better understanding. History plays an important role in understanding how we arrived here and why finding a solution seems so elusive. In the next episode, we’ll fast forward to 2023 and the day of the attack by Hamas. The day the propaganda war began to justify an act of genocide.

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Before we begin today, I just want to take a moment to mourn the passing of the unique and irrepressible tour de force that was Dolly Parton. She’ll be greatly missed, not only for her extraordinary musical and songwriting talent, but also for the example she set for us all through her care for others. I could write a whole piece about her generosity, not only in fiscal terms, which was beyond many people’s comprehension, but also her humanity and generosity of spirit. She was a shining example of achieving the American dream, and having done so, embracing the concept of ‘giving back’.

Her legacy is not about a ballroom or a triumphant arch; it’s about the FREE books she gave to schoolchildren and her quiet giving to those suffering times of struggle. It certainly won’t be for making dumb the new smart. We are blessed to have experienced the emotion of the songs, the performances, the humour, the self-deprecation, and her endless belief that we all deserve our place in this world. THANK YOU, Dolly.

You will be deeply missed; we will always love you, and as we embark on our daily nine-to-five, we’ll remember the joy you brought to an upside-down world with a smile that breaks a million hearts today.

Nothing could be further from the example that Dolly Parton set than that set by the Israeli government when it comes to humanity, or rather, total lack of it, wrapped up in their abhorrent behaviour. As someone who has written extensively about the Israeli government’s unconscionable actions, I am often hindered by concerns about how people might view the honesty of my condemnation. When I set out to bring myself up to speed on their latest atrocities, I decided to put aside any fear of retribution and take a fresh approach, dispensing with the sanitisation filter I normally apply when discussing matters concerning Netanyahu and his hard-right political thugs.

There’s a certain sense of liberation that comes with writing with the gloves off, where the sole objective is to approach the subject with the same unvarnished truth I usually apply to my work. My thoughts on the subject of the Israeli apartheid state go back decades and have been punctuated by the numerous military incursions onto Palestinian land and the construction of illegal settlements in the occupied territories.

Before we can even begin to understand the dangers posed by ideological zealots, we have to grasp the very heart of the nationalist fervour that has long gripped a deeply divided society. It’s impossible to do a deep dive on this without understanding the wider picture that defines the US/Israel relationship. We talk about MAGA, but it’s just a derivative of Zionism; it's a common bond that has provided Netanyahu with the first real opportunity to truly manipulate a US political establishment which has long been sympathetic to the Jewish cause, but sceptical of its ideological aims. Trump has become the bridge to a dangerous ideological union that has proved not just unpopular with the American people, but also dangerous when it comes to national security.

The recent passage of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA, HR 8800) and, in particular, Section 219, which was derived from the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, was sponsored in February 2026 by Republican Ted Budd and Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand in the Senate and by Republican Ronny Jackson in the House. It should be noted that it had broad bipartisan support in the House. While it’s beyond the scope of this piece, it’s highly relevant because it highlights what can best be described as an infiltration of the US military in plain sight, aided by US lawmakers, for the benefit of a foreign state actor who is the subject of this series of posts.

My aim, as always with critical geopolitical matters, is to provide links not just to the texts of the acts but also to assessments I believe add context to the actions of lawmakers elected by US citizens. Lawmakers who seem all too willing to abandon their constituents’ interests in favour of serving dark-money demands. When it comes to this type of dangerous development relating to military integration clearly spearheaded by the Israeli lobby and AIPAC in particular, it points to a disturbing reality. One in which an unregistered lobby group representing a foreign state actor prepared the ground for its client, the Israeli government and its Prime Minister, to drag the US into a war from which there is no escape. A war in which the chief protagonist is ambivalent to anything but the objectives of an out-of-control Israeli government held hostage by hard-right religious nationalist zealots. How bizarre it is that I could be talking about both nations.

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Once you have lawmakers on the payroll of foreign entities, the question of sovereignty becomes a real question, and this is NOT just a Republican problem; AIPAC has bought just as many Democrats. I’m more than aware that dark money has long been a cancer at the heart of US politics, and it’s this that the Israeli government and its various PACS have exploited very effectively. You have to ask how a lobby group representing a foreign state can operate as a domestic lobby group while remaining unregistered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). It’s foreign infiltration; there can be no other words to describe it.

The key to understanding Israel’s position on the geopolitical landscape is recognising the historical power conferred by its relationship with the US. Israel. Netanyahu has long understood the importance of the US-Israeli alliance and the unconditional military support the US has provided for decades. Since the formation of the state of Israel, the US has provided over $300 billion in military and economic aid, the majority of which has been military. This makes Israel the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding.

To better understand the timeline of arms supply, I’ve included the chart below.

Both of these charts are included in an outstanding analysis of US aid to Israel by Jonathan Masters, Deputy Managing Editor, and Will Merrow, Senior Editor, Data Visualisation at The Council on Foreign Relations. The article was updated on October 7, 2025. If you are interested in drilling down into the details of military aid and arms sales to Israel, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I can already hear whispers of ‘Come on Martin, get on with it’, to which I say, to truly understand how Israel has been able to commit genocide with total impunity, you absolutely MUST understand the grip that Israel has on US politics and especially foreign policy and Middle East affairs. I would like you to be able to use this piece as a reference point when forming an opinion of the threat I believe Israel poses not just to US national security, but to the impact we are seeing with the Iran war on the US economy.

I’ll do my best in the coming days to break it down into daily segments that don’t just deal with the crimes committed, but the symptoms and causes of them. To do this, we have to examine not just the history, but the support of Western allies to Israel. How its tentacles have infiltrated these allied states at the highest levels of government, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the loyalty of legislators across the globe. Be in no doubt: nobody manipulates its allies as Israel does- NOBODY.

If we put aside the international bribery and corruption to ensure control of the narrative, the next big question to tackle is the Israeli population and the diaspora. The total global population of the Jewish community is estimated at around 17.8 million according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. That’s just 0.2% of the world’s population. Of that population, they overwhelmingly (between 85% and 90%) live in either Israel or the US. Beyond that, significant populations remain in France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Germany. Prior to the Holocaust, the population stood at 16.7 million, so it’s taken close to 80 years for the population to recover from the genocide committed in the Nazi concentration camps.

Why is this relevant? Because it clearly outlines where Israel’s primary political and military support comes from. This, in turn, leads us to the difference between the Israeli domestic population and the diaspora. It’s where we come face to face with Zionism and its relationship to the global Jewish community. I think it is safe to say that political values are shaped by lived experience. In Israel, the domestic population’s lives are defined by threats and the perpetual fear that they are constantly in harm’s way. It is in this environment that political Zionism finds fertile ground.

I would highly recommend that you take a moment to read the research undertaken by Pew Research on ‘Views of the Jewish state and the diaspora ’. The primary researchers were: Neha Sahgal, Senior Researcher, and Alan Cooperman, Director of Religion Research, but they were supported by a large research team as credited in the report. It should also be noted that the research is from March 2016, long before October 7 2023 and the tragic events that followed.

The reason I think the report is important is that it’s untainted by the events of 2023 and, as such, examines the uneasy relationship between Zionism and Judaism that permeates Jewish communities worldwide. Judaism is a religion; it represents the faith, culture, and way of life of the Jewish people. Zionism is a political movement that adheres to a manifesto asserting that Jewish people have the right to self-determination and to an independent state in the land of their ancestors.

On the face of it, there are no competing values, you might think, until you introduce the toxicity of religion and nationalism; then we’re talking Middle East MAGA territory. The founders of Zionism were largely secular and liberal in their values, but as with all things sensible, there’s always a malign element that seeks to weaponise the founding principles in order to seek power. Just as Christian Nationalism has infected US politics, the same cancer grew within the Zionist movement to a point where we now see the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and others, rise to shape Israeli politics.

It’s often said that Middle East politics is complicated. In the case of Israel, the history of how the state of Israel came to be, it’s probably a fair word to use. I don’t want to revisit the history of land ownership prior to 1948, other than to say it was considered British Crown territory and was controlled by the British Army after it defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War I. In short, Britain was the governing authority. At the time, Arab and Palestinian residents privately owned between 15% and 20% of the land, while Jewish buyers and organisations purchased around 7% separately.

Under the Ottoman Empire, Jews and Arabs lived side by side for CENTURIES; they traded and shared towns, and each was at liberty to practice their faith unhindered by the ruling authority under what was called the millet system, which permitted religious groups local autonomy. To be clear, Palestine existed for four centuries under the Ottoman Empire between 1516 and 1917. It is true to say it’s a historical fact that there has never been a sovereign country or state called Palestine, and the territory was never governed by a native Palestinian Arab government.

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However, if you’d like to get more context, I highly recommend you read this piece by Douglas J. Feith for The Hudson Institute, who, as part of the article, notes that:

… the region has a long, recognised history as a geographic and administrative territory

The key takeaway from today’s first episode of this series is that prior to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and subsequent British rule, Arabs and Jews lived in peace side by side. The conflict began when, in 1948, 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the Israeli state.

In the next episode, I want to zoom in on the politics of Zionism and the part it played in lighting the blue touch paper on the ethnic shaped charge that has delivered an apartheid state and the persecution of the Palestinians through sheer brute force, aided and abetted then by the British and American governments.

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PART ONE | PART TWO

My apologies for not posting yesterday. I’m deep in the weeds of the apartheid Israeli state and their war crimes. Research in this area is both challenging and dangerous because of the ever-present threat of retaliation. Not necessarily physical, but attempts at reputational damage and other insidious actions. I find myself checking, checking, checking and checking sources and facts again so as to leave no door open to claims of antisemitism and the usual ‘blood libel ’. I’ve made it a point of visiting the subject every six months so that the unheard voices and fears of those who fall victim to the Israeli crusade are heard.

Unfortunately, working on this subject adds a layer of delay, as I have to run my work past lawyers to double-check that I’m not exposing myself to frivolous legal action designed to cost me money to defend. There’s a reason people steer clear of writing about this conflict, despite the desperate need to speak out. This is the first of what looks, at the moment, to be a four-part series, though this could change as my thoughts and research evolve throughout the piece. So, thank you in advance for your patience.

I am more than mindful that Israel’s prosecution of its war on Hamas and Hezbollah and anyone else who upsets them in the region is and always has been contentious. Those who discuss or write about it are often the targets not just of Israeli ire, but also of the US, which seems to provide unquestioning loyalty to Israel regardless of their at times abhorrent behaviour. I’ve experienced the consequences of speaking out, which I have discussed before, so I see little point in reliving them. However, speaking truth to power is why I’m here, and those who read my work expect no less.

Experience shows that a series of posts like this can lead some readers to unsubscribe because the uncomfortable truth can be difficult to read. I fully accept and respect anyone who makes the decision to take such action. The only thing I would say is that when I deliver these posts, it is not done for clicks or outrage. It is just me honouring my promise to deliver the truth people need to hear, not the truth they want to hear.

In an upside-down world where a malignant narcissist and convicted criminal has taken America hostage. Where the truth now appears to be the enemy of the state, we are faced with the reality that we can’t believe a word of what the US government says. That’s becoming ever more dangerous as Trump becomes ever more desperate not to be held to account for his corruption in office. To be very clear, Trump has absolutely no interest in ANYONE but himself and stuffing his pockets with money by any means necersarry, and that includes through conflict, extortion and geopolitical abuse.

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I want to treat this opening piece in the series as a preface to set the scene for how and why Israel has been empowered to embark on an act of vengeful retribution that has resulted in an act of genocide and the perpetration of war crimes with impunity. It’s not just the US that has enabled their actions; it’s the UK and many European governments who have, by their silence, also become complicit in Netanyahu’s religious crusade to realise his long-held ambition to see the birth of the ‘Greater Israel Project’.

This series of posts is an opinion based on my thoughts after extensive research on the current conflict and the long history of the Israel-Palestinian war of attrition. I have long subscribed to several Israel-based publications that offer diverse perspectives on the subject, helping me understand both sides of the narrative. However, don’t mistake my willingness to listen to both sides of the story as a search for ‘balance’. I do not come to this highly contentious matter with anything but a social justice hat on. Just as I don’t approach the subject of the Holocaust with a view to providing an equal perspective of Hitler’s position on the Jews.

It’s not my job to defend the indefensible; it’s my job to look at the picture in the round and overlay my social justice values set in an attempt to provide a fair but truthful assessment of where I stand. I do this to provide thought-provoking commentary that hopefully prompts readers to dig deep and find a critical path to their own conclusion. I am not here to tell you what to think; I’m here to lay out the facts and challenge a narrative that wants you to believe that if you criticise Israel you are antisemitic, which is nonsense.

What I don’t want to do is travel over ground I have covered before, which is still highly relevant to what I want to build on this week. With that in mind, can I point you to my previous writing on the subject so you understand how I have long approached it? If you want to familiarise yourself with my thinking long before the advent of this deadly conflict, I have linked my last four-part series below, which looks at the history and evolution of Israel, and, in particular, Netanyahu’s longstanding ambitions in furtherance of the Greater Israel Project.

It’s important to look back at the evolution of my feelings, because I think it will become evident that, bad as the situation was perceived then, it has become exponentially worse today.

Looking back to May of 2025, I made a short video featuring a song, ‘Whispers beneath Gaza’s Sky’ from Muslim artist Amal Iqbal, which absolutely reflected my thoughts at the time, and features just a fraction of the case presented to the International Criminal Court by a series of learned international lawyers

The reason I include this deeply disturbing short reflection of how I felt is that it’s easy to fall for the Israeli claim that ‘It’s complicated’ or a misrepresentation of the facts. There is nothing complicated about murdering innocent women and children and turning their homes to dust, with the absolute intent of rendering Gaza uninhabitable. In March 2025, I wrote an earlier piece that really digs into the horror of Netanyahu’s abhorrent act of vengeful retribution.

Just as a measure of how the public mood has evolved since this piece, I lost over 2000 subscribers overnight as a result of my words; I received death threats as a result of it being shared on other platforms, as well as being called a Hamas sympathiser and an antisemite. Neither of which, by the way, is true.

In a post I wrote on X on October 10th 2023, just three days after the Hamas attack, I wrote:

Nothing I wrote on that day, following the barbaric war crimes committed against innocent Israelis, was either antisemitic or sympathetic to the cause of Hamas. It should also be noted that many of those attacked on the kibbutz communities were actually supporters of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian people. For the record, I unreservedly condemned what was a clear act of terrorism and a war crime, and supported a proportional response by the Israeli government. I stated, however, that I feared the response would be disproportionate. Never in my wildest dreams did I foresee what would follow.

The question for those of us who condemn Israel for its actions is always: ‘Do you support the right of Israel to exist?’ My answer is very simple: YES, of course I do, and I also support their right to defend themselves against attacks from those that might do them harm, just as I support the right of Ukraine to defend itself from the illegal invasion perpetrated by Russia. It’s not a difficult question to answer.

What I don’t support is the creation of an apartheid state in which Palestinians are subject to separate judicial laws. Laws that deem them second-class citizens living under illegal occupation of land that has belonged to them long before the creation of Israel. I don’t support administrative detention under which Palestinians can be detained for unlimited periods on mere suspicion of wrongdoing, or as summary punishment. I don’t support the detention of children for throwing stones or shouting insults at members of the IDF. Equally, I don’t support the Israeli Army’s ability to walk into the home of a Palestinian family in the occupied territories and declare it a military outpost, nor do I support the illegal eviction of Palestinian families by Israeli settlers supported by the IDF.

This conflict did not begin on October 7th 2023; it has been a systematic persecution of the Palestinian people since 1947. October 7 simply provided an excuse for the Israeli government to remove the Palestinians from Gaza and further persecute those living in the West Bank, in an effort to create a permissive environment for ethnic cleansing.

Though few dare ask them, serious questions remain about October 7 for fear of retribution. These questions are NOT about denying the attacks happened and that Hamas committed war crimes on that day, as already supported by the issuance of indictments for Hamas leaders. Leaders that Israel took care of by assassinating them without a trial. The questions relate to events leading up to the attack and the Israeli response that immediately followed. We know that despite the false claims still made today by those pushing Israeli propaganda, there were no 40 beheaded babies.

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In the coming days, we’ll drill into the facts that few dare speak of, not to defend Hamas or diminish their barbaric crimes against innocent Israelis, but rather to step back, set aside the emotion and outrage, and examine the facts to ensure the historical record is accurate. I’m sure the families of those murdered would want that record to be defined by the truth rather than the politically charged lies of an Israeli Prime Minister prepared to kill an unlimited number of Palestinians even during an alleged ceasefire to get re-elected and avoid prison.

For those who want to support my work but can’t commit to a paid subscription, you can now make a one-off donation by clicking on the image below. By donating, you help to cover the cost of research resources and keep this independent reporting free for all.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen Scott Bessent try to create a fantasy narrative of US benevolence in an intervention to prop up the Japanese yen. Laughably, he presented it as the US helping a buddy out. The official line was that Washington acted to curb regional financial instability in Asia, protect U.S. export competitiveness, prevent Japan from selling massive amounts of U.S. Treasury bonds, and support a key geopolitical ally. This was the first coordinated action to support the yen in over a decade.

What he failed to mention is that if Japan were forced to liquidate a large volume of US Treasury bonds, the sky would fall in on the US economy, as it would raise the interest the U.S. Treasury pays on its debt. The ‘Japanese carry trade’ has, for decades, allowed investors in US stocks to take advantage of Japan’s ultra-low interest-rate policy. This has enabled them to borrow Japanese yen at minimal cost and then invest in higher-yielding U.S. equities, corporate bonds, and other assets.

While Japanese interest rates remain low, all is rosy in the garden, but if the Bank of Japan starts to raise interest rates to protect the yen, then, depending on how high they go, it will force the sale of assets, which could cause serious problems if the assets bought with cheap Japanese yen are U.S. Treasuries. It would have the same impact as if Japan or any other large foreign holder of US debt sold US bonds. Add to that, Japan is the largest holder of US debt. The US intervention had nothing to do with helping Japan, and everything to do with avoiding a huge spike in bond yields, which are already precariously high. It gives you insight into the tightrope the US is walking. A situation made all the more perilous by the now-$40 trillion national debt.

This brings us nicely to Scott Bessent’s announcement that the US is now doubling the ceiling on its liquidity-support buyback operations for longer-dated debt. The US is now issuing short-term debt to buy back longer-term debt. It’s important to note that this move does not alter overall net debt issuance; it just adjusts the deckchairs on the Titanic to shift the refinancing cycles closer together. Bessent can put lipstick on the pig all day long; at some point, the deck of cards will collapse. The only question now is not if, but when, and who is holding the baby when it happens. History tells us that this is a common play by Republicans. Create carnage and leave the Democrats to clean up the ensuing shit storm.

The danger, though, with the next storm, is it will be bigger than anything that has gone before, because the US is not only navigating $40 trillion in debt, it’s now accompanied by an AI bubble that, if it bursts, will, if history is our guide, result in the largest market correction in history. A correction that will make both the Great Depression and the 2007/2008 housing crash look like a walk in the park. The level of fiscal recklessness at the moment is off the charts. I’m writing about this because you deserve to know that no election result in November can save the US economy, or the global economy for that matter, if the AI bubble bursts.

The reason we have no idea if or when this might happen is that the truth is being hidden; there is a mountain of off-book debt, and the Fed have now decided that forward guidance is for pussies. They believe the markets can take care of themselves. Yeah- sure. If you think that the big tech companies are just sitting back and crossing their fingers while the storm clouds gather, you need to seek medical help. They are already making plans to shift the liability from them to YOUR pension funds and annuities. Do you know how it feels to sit here writing this, feeling you are in a literary ‘locked in’ moment, where you are screaming, and the words are going nowhere?

If you think there’s an affordability crisis now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. All the catastrophic pieces of the puzzle are slowly coming together to create the perfect storm, and the War in Iran may well prove to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is like having an out-of-body experience of a slow-motion car crash with few survivors. To be clear, I absolutely do not want to be the messenger delivering the bad news to the victim’s family, but unless I am missing a vital part of this situation, the US economy is a dead man walking; it’s just not prepared to admit it yet.

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I want you to take the time, if you can, to watch the piece below from Andrei Jikh in the hope it will provide you with a better understanding of what’s going on in the dark. If you want to read the research which broadly reflects my thinking, the assessment on which this video is based, you can read it here

The key here is that YOU will be on the hook via your pension pot or your annuity. If the whole thing goes tits up, whoever is in government has a choice: face the wrath of angry 401(k) holders who are about to lose their pension savings, or provide a taxpayer bailout, which in effect is still your money because it would be funded by taxpayers as opposed to 401(k) pots. You see how this works; the one common denominator in all of it is that the tech companies might feel a little pain, but they have no responsibility for the debt, because that’s on YOU.

The whole problem with the 2008 crash was that, in many cases, nobody understood the financial instruments that created the crisis; extraordinary wealth was extracted through fees and commissions, and the banks largely walked away from any responsibility, living to fight another day. Hardly anyone went to jail; they just set out to create their next ‘too big to fail’ project, and here we are. WE HAVE LEARNED NOTHING. The really scary part about it, though, is the fact that they walked away from it in 2008 proved to them that they could gamble to their heart’s content with your money, provided they did it at such a scale that the only way out is a taxpayer bailout.

It makes me feel physically sick to think of the level of premeditated exploitation of the system that has now become the norm. Now those at the top of the food chain have unlocked the door to your pensions and annuities; you are providing the free chips to fuel their fiscal casino gambling addiction. You have become their guarantor, and they didn’t require your permission for it. What’s even worse, is they have stolen so much of the workers' share of the wealth over the past half century that they have insulated themselves against the incoming storm at YOUR expense. They have simply created new vehicles to steal your future, leaving you to hold the shit stick.

It’s difficult to overestimate the level of systemic abuse of your tax dollars when it comes to the complicity of governments from both Parties. However, the prize goes to this particular regime, which has taken it to the next level as they enable the rich to horde as much money as they can before the shit hits the fan.

I have to be honest and say I have no idea when this correction will take place because there is so much deception, misinformation, and misdirection at the very top of government; it’s difficult to get a read on how close the storm is. What is undeniable is that America is drowning in debt, and it continues to grow. It’s growing at a rate in excess of $2 trillion each year, with no plan to address it other than to cut more and more services and plunder Medicaid and Social Security. At some point, there will be nothing left, so can we please stop pretending that it will all work itself out?

Trump has bet the entire house on winning an AI war that the US, in my view, has already lost. How do I know? Because he thinks the answer is to attempt to ban Chinese technology and ban allies that no longer trust the US from adopting it. How did that go with EV’s? You can only postpone the inevitable for so long, and if you strip AI and associated infrastructure projects out of the US economy, there is no growth, and without growth, the debt just gets bigger until we hit default territory, and I suspect this is far closer than the government would have you believe.

I am increasingly of the opinion that Republicans are totally unconcerned that they might lose the General Election in 2028; in fact, I think they will happily leave the carnage they have created for Democrats to clean up. That said, I’m sorry to say there will be nothing left to clean up because unless I’m missing something, the life support machine will already have been switched off.

So for those in my comments who have been saying the Midterm elections will not change anything, I would say this. The only hope for America in the next 80 days is that voters take a deep breath, splash some ice-cold water on their face and wake the fuck up. Democrats are the only game in town. Do I like it? Absolutely not, because I think they have become part of the problem, but they are, without question, the lesser of two evils in this moment of peril. A vote for Democrats, even if you have to hold your nose to do it, is the ONLY WAY to have any hope of putting the brakes on this madness.

If Democrats win big in November, there remains hope, not just to declare Trump a lame duck and begin the process of accountability, but to provide the opportunity for a revolution within the Democratic Party to reshape the narrative for 2028 because, on the current economic trend line, more of the same old same old just won’t cut it.

I am truly sorry to end the week on such a pessimistic note. Please don’t think I take any pleasure from delivering this type of assessment. I’ve talked in the past about solutions and my fears that nobody is listening, and now we are tragically reaching the moment of truth, and I’m terrified, not just for the US, but for the world. I desperately want to be wrong, but every piece of extensive research I do leads back to the same point. Nobody wants to be wrong more than me, and there is still, of course, a chance I’m missing something. I’m very open to someone pointing out what it is, and I’ll gladly buy you a drink and share it with the world.

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I’ll be back on Monday with a new multipart series on developments in the Middle East. I like to take time every six months or so to revisit the Israel/Gaza conflict and do a deep dive into the situation, and I think it’s long overdue for me to provide an updated assessment.

For those who want to support my work but can’t commit to a paid subscription, you can now make a one-off donation by clicking on the image below. By donating, you help to cover the cost of research resources and keep this independent reporting free for all.

I think I have come to the conclusion that the only thing that’s trickling down to half of America is stupidity. I was once of the opinion that I should have compassion and empathy for those who were hoodwinked by Trump in 2016. I understood their frustration, and while I saw it as a racist response to a black man having been in the White House for eight years, I could see how a reality TV guy who portrayed himself to be wealthy despite 6 bankruptcies, could convince people it was a leadership asset to NOT be a politician. In reality, he was just an old obese guy with bad hair and an orange face. He was just a fantasist, pathological liar, an expert at spending other people’s money. Tragically, it was no obstacle to being elected president of the alleged most powerful nation on earth.

His first term was not the birth of populism in politics; that has been with us since time began, but it was the first time a global leader would leverage technology that was to change politics forever. Trump is no academic; indeed, he has long struggled to string together a coherent sentence. What he has become, however, is the poster boy for unregulated free market capitalism, an economic street fighter. The combination of this malignant narcissistic greed and the absence of a moral compass has brought us to where we are. It has proved to be devastating to society as a whole, except for him and a chosen few.

He’s the first leader in my lifetime to be judged by voters, not on what he’s actually done, but rather on the fairytale he presents himself as having done. It’s nothing short of remarkable that around 70 million people initially bought the lies he sold in 2016, then in 2024 were again convinced by the same liar whose incompetent handling of the COVID pandemic led to the unnecessary death of an estimated 250,000 Americans.

Political scientists for generations to come will study how he convinced American voters that he inherited an economy on its knees, despite economists worldwide praising Biden for the fastest post-pandemic recovery among all developed nations. It remains an indisputable FACT that the Biden administration left behind half-century low in unemployment, inflation reduced from close to 10% to 2.9%, and record job and wage growth. That’s before we discuss new manufacturing growth.

The fatal mistake Joe Biden made when resurrecting an economy left on life support by Trump, was that he unwittingly rebuilt it for the shareholder class, reasserting corporate control over wealth. He didn’t break the corrosive cycle; he perpetuated it, as many Democratic presidents before him had. To his credit, I genuinely don’t believe he did this intentionally, and I do accept he genuinely thought he could create a fairer America. He did NOT give tax cuts to the rich; instead, he invested in infrastructure and intended to reduce the burden of student debt. He was committed to creating tech and green energy jobs and was on track to deliver on both objectives.

The mistake he made, aside from the fatal error of reneging on his promise to be a one-term president and to build a bridge to the next generation of Democratic leaders, was to underestimate the power of social media and the right-wing messaging monster. It was as if Democratic strategists had forgotten how Trump had won the 2016 election, with the Benghazi inquisition and the weaponisation of Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ unforced error, along with executing a culture war narrative.

Fast forward to 2024, and some of us were on the front lines of the threat, making every effort to document it.

There’s more than enough blame to go around, much of which I have written about at length, but much as I hate to admit it, Trump’s normalisation of the lie coupled with Project 2025 exposes the Democratic Party as the amateurs they were and remain to this day. There’s no argument that the economy Biden handed to Trump was, for all its flaws, a sound foundation on which to move America forward and deliver prosperity for all. Every piece of data supports this assertion. It was not the economy that dealt the fatal blow to Democrats; it was their inability to make the case that, given four more years, they could deliver the transformative change that would bring relief to those still suffering.

Instead, they arrogantly told those fighting to put food on the table that they were imagining it, because the American economy was the fastest-growing in the world. Technically, that statement was correct, but that means NOTHING if you can’t afford to feed your kids and pay the bills. What had happened was that Biden created the environment for the economy to come roaring back, largely by putting money in the hands of those at the bottom and the middle while lifting 50% of children out of poverty. It WAS the right move; there’s no question of that.

What he did was to give those at the bottom and the middle a taste of how life should be; he effectively auditioned what American society should look like. The fiscal stress burden was lifted as he created a temporary illusion of reducing the wealth gap by putting money in the hands of those who had struggled just as much before COVID. The problem was that it was TEMPORARY, and once that fiscal crack was removed, the economic withdrawal symptoms took hold because Republicans had other plans for the money that had given them a glimpse of what was possible.

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The second unintended consequence of getting money to those who needed it was that they spent it in the economy, and the have-yachts cashed in with price gouging, which in turn pushed up inflation. It’s now been established that up to 53% of the rise in inflation during the Biden administration was manufactured by corporate America, which engaged in a price-gouging bonanza that led to record profits. This then provided Trump with ammunition to weaponise the same inflation his donors had manufactured. It was the perfect political crime, and Trump was the sole beneficiary.

Once the COVID support disappeared, millions of voters who had felt good about what Biden had done to help them felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under them, and it had. Meanwhile, the shareholder class that had benefited from the money handed to hard-pressed Americans was buying up stocks and benefiting from the economic recovery as never before. It was genius; corporate America had colluded with Republicans to use Biden’s commitment to building from the bottom and the middle out against him. Democrats had inadvertently handed Trump a loaded gun to shoot them in the face, and it handed Trump the election on a plate. He just had to do what he does best: tell lies to the millions who had now had their fiscal comfort blanket removed. All he had to say, was that he would fix the affordability crisis they were now experiencing because Biden had failed them. The rest is history.

Now let’s look at what happened after the election. At the outset of his administration, Biden effectively redistributed wealth temporarily. Using the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, he, for example:

• Provided $1,400 direct recovery payments to most individual middle- and lower-income Americans.

• Child Tax Credit: Temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit, significantly reducing child poverty rates in 2021.

• Unemployment Support: Provided temporary federal boosts to weekly unemployment benefits.

If you want a more detailed summary of the intentions Biden had for his administration, it’s worth reading Biden’s own account on the American Presidency Project website. As I’ve said on many occasions, he was a good and honourable man with good intentions. While I will never forgive him for his hubristic and calamitous attempt to run for a second term, especially given his known serious health condition, that doesn’t change how I feel about what he DID achieve, and I believe in credit where credit is due.

When looking at what Trump has subsequently done, it’s important to consider the numbers behind Biden’s investment in people, NOT corporations. The American Rescue Plan was unquestionably a ‘people first’ project. The consequences, however, were ultimately self-defeating. The working class had no alternative but to spend money to survive. Capitalism kicked in, leading to price exploitation by corporations to hoover up COVID relief and generate profits. Meanwhile, those in the upper-middle class who benefited from the same relief either saved the money or invested it in stocks, widening the wealth gap once again.

The bottom line is, there was an injection of $2 trillion into the economy, much of which Republicans vehemently opposed, ultimately blaming it for out-of-control inflation, despite 53% of it being driven by their own donors. The claim was that the government was handing out money to Americans like candy. If, for one moment, we accept this accusation as valid, someone needs to explain to me why, as soon as they took office, they decided to hand DOUBLE the amount of relief given to American families in the American Rescue Plan to the rich in the form of tax cuts. Make that make sense, because if you can, I’m all ears.

I just need to wrap some context around this to emphasise my point. NO tax cuts for the rich have EVER, and I really do mean EVER, delivered a return on investment. There is NO example NOT ONE- where a Republican tax cut has paid for itself. Especially when you have to borrow money to deliver them. We are living in a world of economic insanity when, in truth, America is bankrupt, but the stock market continues to believe in some sort of bizarre fantasy that eventually it will all come out in the wash. IT WON’T. At some point, the horrific reality will hit home, and then God help us all.

Biden handed out $2 trillion for a short period, which proved that it is possible for people to live in a fairer society. It was short-lived because the rich had decided that they wanted that money in tax breaks. The Billionaire Social Welfare Bill handed over $4 trillion to the top 10% over the next decade; if you add to that the estimated $1 trillion each year that same group will save by evading taxes, that’s a $14 trillion gift to those at the top, all while millions of kids are being denied food assistance and millions can no longer afford healthcare.

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Jesus, why do I feel like I’m constantly bashing my head against a brick wall trying to help turkeys who are marching to vote for Thanksgiving? It’s the very definition of trickle-down stupidity. If you tax wealth above $400,000 at 2% in the US, you don’t need the American Rescue Plan, and people could live without fear of perpetual economic anxiety, wondering where the next meal is coming from or whether they might not be able to afford a medical emergency. What’s more, the rich would see their wealth reduced by just 1%. Read this:

If you detect I’m angry AGAIN, you’d be right. The next obvious question is, why does it matter to me? I’m not an American. Firstly, you don’t have to be an American to care; secondly, here in the UK we’re importing the exact same right-wing cancer that is now eating us from the inside out too. What better place to fight the cancer than at its source?

For those who might doubt my commitment to this fight, I invite you to watch the two short films I created below. I know some of my readers will have seen these before, but we have many new readers here now. This first film was created in 2020. Yes, I was still in this fight back then.

This was created a year ago:

And just in case you thought I might not be up to speed on the Oligarchy:

None of these was created yesterday. If you tell me that I don’t understand US politics after watching these films, then I give in; I’m not your guy, and the work I do is useless. To the rest, I would say that Truth Matters and your support is mission-critical to this fight.

We have to find better, more emotionally connective ways to make the case for a better world, and I’m constantly on the hunt for more effective ways to do so, but I can’t do it on my own.

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Let me take you back to September 2024, just weeks before the General Election and the origins of what would become World Liberty Financial. They trace back to a relationship between Trump’s now-Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and crypto entrepreneurs Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. The objective was to promote mass adoption of US dollar-denominated stablecoins and democratise access to decentralised finance services by eliminating traditional financial intermediaries (as noted by MarketsWicki). It’s the classic move to shift from a regulated space into a world where the law of the jungle prevails. Witkoff saw an opportunity to be on the leading edge of the next grift.

He introduced Herro and Folkman to the Trump family, who were known never to pass up the chance at a new opportunity for a grift. To cut a long story short, World Liberty Financial emerged from this introduction. On October 15th, 2024, it launched its public token sale, seeking $300 million in investment by selling 20 billion WLFI tokens at $0.015 each. In its first two weeks of issue, there was little interest, and the tokens raised just $2.7 million.

Everything changed in November 2024 when Trump was reelected president for the second time. As noted by MarketsWiki:

The trajectory changed dramatically following the November 2024 US presidential election results, when demand surged significantly.

By November 2024, the platform had secured its first major investor when Justin Sun, founder of the TRON blockchain, announced a $30 million investment in WLFI tokens. Sun's investment marked a turning point for the platform, as it provided the necessary liquidity to kickstart operations and established him as an advisor to the project.

This was a clear indicator to Trump that the grift was on and that an untraceable crypto funding pipeline had been established which could facilitate anonymous pay-for-play once Trump was in the White House. It’s estimated that Sun actually invested close to $45 million. He later purchased a further $75 million in WLFI tokens in 2025 and was a staunch advocate for the venture. There is little doubt that Sun’s advocacy for the project led to a flood of investment. Bear in mind that when the tokens were first offered, the aim was to raise $300 million. This was then cut by 90%, with a new target of $30 million, following the initial lacklustre performance. Sun’s $30 million investment met the new goal in a single transaction.

This raises questions about Liberty World Financial's due diligence process and policies, given that they were happy to accept $30 million from a man who was the subject of SEC charges filed in March 2023 for secondary-market manipulation through wash trading. They weren’t interested in anything else but his money. Fast forward to March 2026, and the SEC dropped the charges in return for Sun paying a $10 million civil penalty.

It’s also worth noting that a little over a year after Trump was reelected, in April 2025, he disbanded the unit dedicated to investigating cryptocurrency-related fraud. In a memo issued by then White House Counsel Todd Blanche, he stated that the national cryptocurrency enforcement team (NCET):

“shall be disbanded effective immediately” He went on to state, “The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator”, claiming, “The prior administration used the Justice Department to pursue a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution.”

Blanche’s memo followed a statement by Trump when he said to reporters:

“The digital assets industry is critical to the nation’s economic development and innovation”.

Anyone in any doubt that Blanche is now merely Trump’s ventriloquist dummy Attorney General should think again. This story shows that Trump saw an opportunity to exploit crypto for his own gain. There remains a question of whether he actually knew Musk could fix the election, as both he and Musk have hinted at doing so after the election. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, but it is, I think, worthy of a mention, because if he did think his election win was a certainty, that would no doubt have given him more confidence to bring Liberty World Financial to life prior to the election, so the crypto vehicle was in place before the election took place.

To recap, without Justin Sun, there was no momentum for Liberty World Financial. Then, in 2025, he bought $75 million in tokens after Trump was elected, and by March 2026, the SEC charges had been dropped in exchange for his paying a $10 million civil penalty. I would suggest a reward for services rendered.

In an article by Crystal Kim for Investopedia dated February 7th 2026, she notes:

World Liberty Financial was founded by President Donald Trump, his sons, the president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Witkoff’s sons. Its USD1 stablecoin, which aims to stay pegged to the U.S. dollar, is at the centre of the Trump family’s crypto venture—as is its token WLFI, which was recently trading around 11 cents, a fraction of its peak around 33 cents since its September launch.

Here is the makeup of the leadership team:

• Donald J. Trump: Co-Founder (Chief Crypto Advocate)

• Zach Witkoff: Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

• Zak Folkman: Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer

• Chase Herro: Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer

• Steven Witkoff: Co-Founder

• Donald Trump Jr.: Co-Founder (Web3 Ambassador)

• Eric Trump: Co-Founder (Web3 Ambassador)

• Barron Trump: Co-Founder (DeFi Visionary)

As ever with projects involving Trump, Sun found out the dangers of handing money to a Trump-backed project: on April 21st of this year, Sun filed a lawsuit in federal court in Northern California, accusing WLFI of embedding a secret "backdoor blacklisting function" in the platform's smart contract. The bottom line was that Sun is accusing the firm of fraud, breach of contract, and wrongfully freezing hundreds of millions of his tokens. By this time, don’t forget Sun was free of the SEC charges filed against him. It was just one crook fighting another.

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Trump no longer needed Sun because he had what he needed. According to reporting by Peter Stone for The Guardian on August 13th 2026 :

“… brought in $799m in 2025 for Trump, according to public filings.

Last year too, Trump earned another $636m from his novelty memecoin $Trump, which Trump began marketing just days before his inauguration in 2025.”

The report continues that this is just part of an estimated accumulated:

$1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June. Simultaneously, about one million investors in a Trump crypto scheme suffered almost $3.8bn in losses as their volatile crypto holdings tanked in value.

It certainly begs the question: is World Liberty Financial a deliberate attempt to provide an anonymous crypto pipeline that allows ANYONE, including foreign powers, to engage in pay-to-play activities that directly benefit Trump and his family? There is a very good reason Trump wants absolute immunity and wants to deny the IRS the ability to investigate his past activities. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and that if the true extent of corruption is revealed, he would face serious legal jeopardy.

I firmly believe that his actions represent a threat to national security and place Americans at risk. The fact that, as reported in the Wall Street Journal by Sam Kessler, Rebecca Ballhaus, Eliot Brown and Angus Berwick:

Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities.

The deal with World Liberty Financial, which hasn’t previously been reported, was signed by Eric Trump, the president’s son. At least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a World Liberty co-founder who weeks earlier had been named U.S. envoy to the Middle East.

The report continues:

The investment was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Abu Dhabi royal who has been pushing the U.S. for access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips, according to people familiar with the matter. Tahnoon—sometimes referred to as the “spy sheikh”—is brother to the United Arab Emirates’ president

It’s no surprise then that, as reported by Ari Hawkins and Ben Johansen in Politico on July 27th 2026, that:

The Trump administration ignored warnings from career staff at the Commerce Department when it granted the United Arab Emirates sweeping access to advanced American semiconductors and other technology, according to three former officials with knowledge of the reports and two other people familiar with the matter.

This whole affair is purely transactional from start to finish. If you go to the World Liberty Financial website, to say the ‘about us’ page is opaque would be the understatement of the year. It’s as if those behind it are invisible. Hardly surprising when data analytics show that about 85% of secondary-market buyers of World Liberty Financial's ($WLFI) tokens are currently holding unrealised losses and are underwater on their investments. Given the anonymous nature of crypto wallets, it’s difficult to put a number on it, but investigative groups estimate that losses on tokens have reached roughly $674 million, while Trump is up by around $800 million.

Just to add insult to injury. As reported by Erin Mansfield yesterday in a piece for USA Today:

The cryptocurrency company that made President Donald Trump nearly $800 million since he returned to the White House has received the green light to become a bank and potentially make him even more money.

World Liberty Trust Company received conditional approval from the Treasury Department on Aug. 14 to become a bank. The approval specifically gives World Liberty the right to issue a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoin, which is tied to the U.S. dollar.

This, my friends, is what is possible when you have taken control of all the levers of government and regulation and placed them in the hands of a convicted criminal who has spent his entire life believing that he is above the law. The really terrifying thing is, NOBODY is prepared or willing to stop him or stand in his way. As a result, he is operating a fiefdom with impunity.

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Once Trump and his fellow crooks are allowed to operate as a bank, there is no question that more people will suffer as he and his chosen few embark on a legal robbery spree. Just think about it: the President of the United States is giving himself a license to operate unregulated in the banking space with the most volatile financial vehicle on earth. He and those close to him know this will open the door to untold wealth for the few at the expense of the many. What’s more, it will be almost impossible to unravel the level of corruption given the opaque nature of cryptocurrency. Sigh……

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Trump is their Red Caesar, the man to deliver global corporate governance headquartered in the US. The problem is, the wheels are coming off the bus, and Trump was the corporate elite’s hope to deliver. However, it transpires he looks set to lead to the collapse of their wet dream. Now what?

It’s time, I think, for a ‘big picture’ Monday view of where we find ourselves in this moment of continued existential threat. It remains for me an absolute indictment of the DNC and Democratic leadership that a big win for Democrats in November comes down to a game of Russian Roulette according to the US mainstream media. In more recent times, the Polymarket seems to have been more accurate than polls, which is, in itself, a statement about the times we live in. Here’s what the markets show today, and rest assured, Trump and his acolytes are watching these numbers.

If we take a look at a sample of current polls, you can see what a more traditional picture looks like, like with the latest polls as featured in the New York Times

These are a sample from a much larger sample, as noted by polling researcher Caroline Soler in the NYT piece. As she notes:

Generic congressional ballot questions ask voters which party’s candidate they would support if the 2026 election were held that day as well as those that ask which party voters would prefer to control Congress after the election.

On its face, it would seem to be an easy win for Democrats, but the burning question is whether it will be a big enough win and send a message loud enough to make the regime sit up and take notice. There is no question that those pulling the strings saw a midterm overturning of the House as a real possibility; that’s exactly why they passed the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ and have accelerated the dismantling of democracy and the rule of law from the get-go.

I believe Republicans have been silent on Trump’s hostile takeover of the government because they believe the damage caused will be so severe by 2028 that the Democrats will inherit a socioeconomic wasteland if they win. A country so damaged, they will struggle to rescue it from the ashes, leaving the door open for another Republican victory when Democrats come up short.

There is no doubt in my mind that corporate America has got its foot firmly on the neck of the Democratic Party, and that is only going to make matters worse as they attempt to repair damage that will likely take a generation to remedy. There’s no way that a change of government will change the position of American allies in Europe and around the world. They will not make the mistake that they did with Biden, when he claimed to them, “America is back”. The truth is, they now understand that a repeat of the tyranny might be just one election cycle away, so there’s no way trust will be restored without a LOT of work, if ever.

It’s a harsh reality to come to terms with, but I’m afraid the US has become anaesthetised to Trump’s abject failure, as millions have been taken hostage inside his world of make-believe in which they are rendered incapable of believing he is transferring what little wealth they might have to the rich, while at the same time herding them into economic slavery. In what world would you pay $4 a gallon for gas for a global village idiot to engage in a war from which the only escape is to hand Iran back billions in frozen assets, while leaving them in charge of the Strait of Hormuz, having handed over none of their enriched Uranium? It makes absolutely no sense.

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For any country to thrive, it has to preside over a strong economy. Trump’s entire 2024 campaign was about, as he put it, returning to the greatest economy that he created in his first term, when we know for a fact that he left behind an economic wasteland when he left office in 2020. His ability to control the political narrative has been his best friend up until relatively recently, but now he’s being forced to tell flat-out lies about EVERYTHING, because nothing of what he has said has come to pass. Yet still millions of Americans are shooting up on his FREE ‘political narcotics for all’ agenda.

Meanwhile, as is always the case, the truth comes knocking, telling a very different story. The whole premise behind his introducing an average 13% sales tax on every American, dressed up as tariffs, was to make America rich again. It wasn’t revenue from foreign countries; it was tax, for which, incidentally, he’s been forced to pay back $100 billion to the corporations that paid it, while passing the cost on to the public. Americans will not receive a dime, as those corporations benefit from a ’ double-dip’ windfall without being subjected to a windfall tax themselves.

To emphasise just how out of control the situation is, the US budget deficit soared to $432.3 billion in July, the highest since March 2021. The bottom line is that $100 billion in tariff refunds is weighing heavily on the government revenue stream. This will continue as a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs. It’s forced Trump to make stuff up to replace the loss with new tariffs of between 10% and 12.5%. However, the critical point you MUST understand is that this is not revenue from goods, services or traditional revenue generation; it’s from a tax increase on Americans. In other words, this is your money creating the illusion of a trade-driven revenue stream, when it’s just another LIE.

Scott Bessent is now attempting to manage a budget deficit that looks set to exceed $2 trillion in the current fiscal year. This is forcing him to borrow in excess of $150 billion EVERY MONTH to keep the lights on in Trump’s fantasy world. The Treasury’s official quarterly borrowing estimates emphasise the massive scale of this ongoing fiscal insanity. July to September, it is estimated, the Treasury will borrow $739 billion and will end the year borrowing a further $628 billion. For context, this means the national debt is increasing by $12.6 billion per day and is now exceeding $40 trillion. Nobody can convince me that this is sustainable.

Even in a stable economy, this level of debt simply can’t be sustained, but in a fantasy economy where the whole economy relies on tech giants handing out circular finance like a game of musical chairs, it’s a problem. The music will eventually stop, and reality will hit home like an economics-shaped charge, as those in the middle and at the bottom are left to pick up the pieces of the carnage that will follow. Once your economy relies on extorting and bullying your allies, you know the writing is on the wall.

If it’s one thing the Iran war has proved, it’s just how the US Industrial Military Complex has become a slush fund for the apex predators at the top of the economic food chain. They’ve stolen so much money from the US taxpayer on the pretence that they were keeping Americans safe, when what they were actually doing was soaking the American taxpayer to the point where a single war with a third-rate nation has left the nation exposed to threats. How can you call yourself the most powerful military on earth when a single Asemetric response from an adversary YOU attacked teaches you a lesson that dropping bombs does not a victory make?

After just six months, the US finds itself diverting military assets from allies to the Middle East as sailors are jumping from aircraft carriers. All at a time when their Commander in Chief says that their 250-day continuous deployment is, and I quote, “Not nearly long enough”. I suppose if you are, in his words, “suckers and losers”, what can you expect from a five-time draft dodger?

This is not about a failed military; it’s about failed leadership from the top. Not only is it expensive, but it also signals to US adversaries that, when faced with an enemy willing to sacrifice and fight back, the US lacks the political will to go all in. That sends a massive message to both Russia and China, who now share a diminished view of the US threat.

The shareholder class, who have been soaking the American people in an abundant stock-fuelled fiscal pipeline, have, by their actions, rendered US military readiness questionable. They are like the building firms that skimped on materials to build homes that collapse at the first sign of an earthquake. Americans should not be surprised if Iran is waiting until closer to the election to carry out an atrocity on US soil. We know the US has already proved susceptible to threats on its water infrastructure from Iranian hackers. In addition, despite the denials, we know that the Iranians have caused massive damage to US bases and assets in the Middle East. This has led regional allies to look for alternative security solutions, just as the world is rewiring trade and arms procurement.

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NOBODY trusts America anymore, and that damage is likely to take a generation to address, if it ever can. Trump bases his whole agenda on the fact that everyone fears America and its military. There’s no question that the US military has formidable capabilities, but in the wrong hands, it has proven ineffective against an enemy that does not engage in conventional conflict. It’s beyond essential that someone sends in a team of forensic accountants to audit the DOD, because until the scale of the corruption is uncovered, the lies will continue and the risk to national security will persist.

The trade deficit is the best indicator yet that the US is slowly becoming incapable of sustaining its dominance. While there is clearly no imminent threat today, the wheels are in motion to unravel the dollar and US geopolitical dominance. As with all such moves, I’m afraid hubris blinds the victim until it’s too late.

I’ll conclude today’s post by saying that the world is changing. Two years of Trump have taught it to plan to reduce its reliance on the US. China is carefully positioning itself as the adult in the room, capable of providing the world with a much more stable and reliable partner. As a result of Trump’s stupidity, they don’t even have to make the case; he’s making it for them.

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🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZN88ve8tE/

I know yesterday’s post was, in some ways, introspective, but it’s important to me that readers know I understand the challenges of life and that, while at times all may seem lost, there’s a way back if you seek a helping hand to put things back together. I know that the political situation in the US is extremely challenging, much as it is here in the UK, but it has been this way before, and right has a habit of defeating wrong if we embrace a collective approach to resistance. I know many activists feel a sense of frustration and powerlessness, given the sometimes lamentable efforts of the Democratic establishment. The sense that nobody’s listening can be soul-destroying.

What I would say is, “Hang on in there”, because millions are feeling the same frustration as you, and organising is not what it was in the time of the Civil Rights Movement. We now live in a ‘quick-fix’ society in which diminishing attention span is king and the social media ecosystem defines truth as what the regime deems it to be. That’s a hard obstacle to overcome when the source of the tyranny has taken the media hostage. Of course it doesn’t help when the opposition party is cosplaying Republican lite.

With less than three months before E-Day, we are about to enter a whole new world of attacks on the election process, and a blitzkrieg of divisive propaganda the likes of which we have never seen is incoming. The challenge for Democratic activists across the country is to speak to and engage with people where you meet them. In the supermarket, the bar, the mall, the gym and on the street.

The failure of the Democratic establishment to put forward a coherent proposition other than vote for us because the other guy is a fascist speaks to where we are, leaving the responsibility of the mission to save American democracy firmly on the shoulders of those who can sell hope, not fear. People who can help banish the politics of division and hate. Activists are the tip of the spear, and the ability to articulate an argument for a better tomorrow has never been more vital than in this moment.

It would be fair to say that experience tells us the battle lines are already drawn, and the political trenches are full of opposing views that are preparing to go over the top and do battle. There’s no question that this is all about motivating those who chose not to vote in 2024, because there are 90 million votes up for grabs. The good news is that Democrats aren’t being forced to defend the indefensible, so selling a vision of hope versus fear, on paper at least, should be easier.

It’s taken me far too long to understand the true power of hate and lies. On the surface, you would think this can be addressed by simply pointing people to the facts and the truth. If only it were that simple, we’d all live in a better world. Unfortunately, there are much darker forces at work creating propaganda to exploit our susceptibility to cult behaviour. Fred Lewsey wrote a piece about a study by Cambridge University in which:

Researchers mapped an underlying “psychological signature” for people who are predisposed to holding extreme social, political and religious attitudes and supporting violence in the name of ideology.

He opens his piece by noting:

A new study suggests that a particular mix of personality traits and types of unconscious cognition – the ways our brain takes in basic information – is a strong predictor for extremist views across a range of beliefs, including nationalism and religious fervour.

These mental characteristics include poorer working memory and slower “perceptual strategies” – the unconscious processing of changing stimuli, such as shape and colour – as well as tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation seeking.

It should be noted that this is NOT a uniquely American trait, though the US currently provides an abundant source of research to better understand it. Ironically, I believe it’s all about the need to ‘belong’ to something; it’s a little like we in Europe experienced with senseless football (soccer) violence in the UK and across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s when organised hooligans (so-called ‘firms’) engaged in acts of senseless tribal violence. It was known at the time as the ‘English Disease,’ and gained a global reputation for riots and racist abuse becoming commonplace on match days. It’s all about activating tribal instincts to cause fear.

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Political violence is just a new iteration of an age-old problem. Lewsy goes on to point out that the research:

… also maps the psychological signatures that underpin fierce political conservatism, as well as “dogmatism”: people who have a fixed worldview and are resistant to evidence.

and that:

Brains of dogmatic people are slower to process perceptual evidence, but they are more impulsive personality-wise. The mental signature for extremism across the board is a blend of conservative and dogmatic psychologies.

There is no question that the right-wing messaging monster plays into the specific trait of a resistance to evidence. This is what allows Trump to get away with what, for those of us with the ability to smell bullshit, carries no weight with MAGA devotees. The messaging is designed to trigger the lack of trust in 'government or elections, as seed which has been planted long ago and reinforced over time. It also plays into the fact that nobody likes to think they have been played. Admitting that means believing that Trump deceived them, which is an alien concept to the cult.

For Republicans, it’s all about taking grains of truth to introduce plausibility, then wrapping that grain of truth in a ball of lies so big that the truth is buried. It’s a highly effective strategy that has served Trump and the Republicans well. Nobody likes to admit they have been played, especially men, and that’s why normal people are left banging their heads against the wall trying to understand what can’t be understood. It’s why wasting time trying to reach MAGA supporters is a waste.

The focus needs to be on those who have abandoned politics because trust is nonexistent. This is where ‘people first’ politics becomes a lighthouse in an ocean of ‘corporate political capture’. It’s about speaking to voters where they are about issues that affect them. This is exactly what good progressive politicians are great at; you need look no further than to see the difference that doing what you say works. How odd is it that we listen to politicians and rarely believe a word they say? Voters would be better off putting their case to the CEOs of corporate America, because so many politicians are merely their ventriloquist dummies.

A record number of progressive candidates will be fighting for seats in both the House and the Senate in November. The key point I would make is that transformative change does not happen overnight; we are seeing wins and losses among progressive candidates, but many of these are close races. There is certainly no reason for progressives to lose faith. The critical goal here is for everyone to push in the same direction and to, at the very least, take back the House. Then, change can be delivered from within, and the quiet revolution can gain momentum.

This is a moment in history when infighting must take a back seat to the political imperative. Things are going to get ugly enough when Trump sends his troops over the top to sow doubt in the election results, without Democrats fighting amongst themselves. The internal revolution can wait. When the enemy is at the door, the one thing you need is unity of purpose and messaging.

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I think it’s beyond imperative to bring together the messaging teams that drive AOC and Mamdani to inject a unified core messaging strategy to underpin the local ads that candidates produce. It’s deeply annoying to me that there is no coherent national vision other than hoping Trump sets himself on fire, but maybe if they hand the reins of core messaging to these tried-and-tested progressive messaging shops, common policy objectives could be highlighted to provide a backdrop for more regional advertising?

I’ve got some great ads in the pipeline for the last month of the campaign and am really looking forward to seeing how they play in what will be the most consequential election in modern American history.

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In moments of reflection in a world gone mad, I feel a sense of contentment and gratitude that I have the luxury of reading from the wide range of subscriptions I have invested in across a wide variety of subjects, from geopolitics to economics to climate science. As someone who has spent his working life as a ‘solution provider’, I had thought those days were in the rearview mirror as I settled into lazy days in retirement. Then, due to circumstances beyond my control and sharp practices by my mortgage provider, I lost my home during COVID and was forced to become my own solution provider.

That woke me up to the reality that no matter how comfortable you might feel in life, circumstances can hit you like a freight train. This is when you are truly tested, and I’m not going to lie, mentally I was broken, so much so, that I stood on a city train platform contemplating an exit. To this day, I have no idea how I had arrived at that selfish conclusion. A conclusion which would have destroyed the lives of those who loved me, but that’s the power of despair.

In that moment of loss of faith in the world, I was teetering on the edge of ending how I felt when a young woman did something I will never forget. She detected my distress; a perfect stranger put aside the world of me, me, me, and came up to ask if I was OK because I looked unwell. That simple act of humanity turned a pitch-black moment of hopelessness into one of restored faith. I never knew her name, but her face, her eyes, and the compassion she showed have never left me.

There’s often much talk about the police and their insensitivity and lack of empathy, but on that day I saw something very different. Can I be sure that a black man or a homeless person would have received the same level of compassion I was afforded? I can’t attest to that, but in that moment of need, they were professional and sympathetic, and they took me to the hospital for the help they believed I needed.

I share this for no other reason than to say I’m not a comfortable liberal writer who has been insulated from life’s challenges. I’m not even a well-educated writer. I left school when I was 16 and could never get on with working for others, probably because I was on the spectrum, so I became a freelancer long before it was fashionable. My qualifications come not from university, but rather from the university of life. I’ve survived on both beans on toast and, in the good times, eating in fancy restaurants and flying on Concorde. In partnership with the love of my life, we’ve raised three children, though, to be fair, she did more of the heavy lifting than I did in the early years. We put them all through college and University and, in one case, law school and the bar, so I’ve lived both the dream and the nightmare, and that’s what shapes who I am and how I write.

In a sick twist to this story, the mortgage company were sued in a class action, and after I had been forced to sell my house, they were forced to pay me compensation which, had it been made at the time, would have let me hang on to the house long enough to sell it on my terms.

My whole world is about knowledge, and writing here allows me to impart hours and hours of research culminating in the delivery of my thoughts based on a life of ups and downs. A decade ago, I lived in a big house, living the dream. Today I live in a rented property, forced to come out of retirement to do IT consulting work to help support my passion for writing here, because I believe I have something to contribute. How valuable that contribution is is up for debate, but with over 500 pieces under my belt, I’m proud of where I have landed.

The critical point is that, much like many of those who read my ramblings, nobody ever gave me a thing; I grew up in a working-class family on a social housing estate with a father who set an example of hard work and achievement in the face of adversity. He served his community for decades as a town councillor, so I understand the concept of public service and political struggle. What you read here comes from a lifetime of lived experience and a passion for politics and social justice.

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As citizens, we have an obligation to provide a better tomorrow for our children and our grandchildren. If we’re honest, we’ve done a pretty shit job and should have done MUCH better. We now live in a world where if you’re in the bottom 50%, your children are unlikely to be able to jump on the housing ladder and do better than their parents did. That’s on us, but we can only provide better if we have leaders we can trust to have the best interests of future generations at the heart of their policymaking. In that respect, BOTH parties have failed us, both here in the UK, where I live, and certainly in the US, where politics is no longer about social responsibility but rather about corporate compliance.

There’s no way that Democrats should be in a position where November is a close election. It’s utter madness to think that a convicted criminal and his acolytes can dismantle democracy and the rule of law, dispense with social responsibility and moral decency in service of profit and still even be in the race. The system is so broken it’s not fit for purpose. It’s so damaged that those who advocate for common-sense, social, and economic reform are considered enemies of the state by BOTH parties. At what point will people wake up and say, ‘We have a problem’?

Sometimes I feel physically sick at how the vulnerable and those caught in possession of a black or brown face have become the Patsies for the failed policies of those at the top of the economic food chain and their political enablers. Otherism has been weaponised to mobilise division among those fighting for the crumbs from the rich man’s table. If you’re in the bottom 90%, you should be angry, and I mean really angry. If you’re in the now all-but-extinct middle class, you should be even angrier, because all you have to show for your effort to live the American dream is a frayed label with faded words ‘Middle Class’ written on it. A reminder of what might have been, as the have-nots have exiled you to the land of the have-nots.

Just as there are two parties in the US, there are now only two classes. Blaming those in the same overcrowded lifeboat for your declining prosperity, is the greatest achievement of the thieves and charlatans who have been stealing your share of the nation's wealth since the 1970s. They’ve convinced you that your economic slide is because of immigrants and gay people, and the drag on the economy from the poor, the disabled, and the lazy. Were it not so tragic, it would be amusing.

Now I may no longer be as well off as I was in years gone by, but the wealth of knowledge I have gathered makes me a rich man in a world where AI and the corrupt politicians controlling it are telling us what to think. You can’t place a value on critical thinking partnered with knowledge from extensive research and lived experience. While knowledge alone can’t pay the bills, it can help you mitigate the crimes these monsters are attempting to perpetrate on society and better inform your vote.

Knowledge is the antidote to the Trump narcotics that are being mainlined into those incapable of thinking for themselves. It’s the very reason Truth Matters exists. A place where you can come to read ‘no bullshit’ commentary and opinions based on just the facts. A place where you can come with the confidence that nobody is trying to pull the wool over your eyes or serve a political master. Just plain unvarnished truth delivered without fear or favour, designed to educate and inform, while at the same time encouraging critical thinking and a challenging of the political narrative. A place where someone tells you what you need to hear, NOT what you want to hear.

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Every day I scour the social media landscape to curate content and present it for the consideration of the truth seekers that visit daily. It’s about providing thought-provoking content that I believe keeps people informed about the good, the bad, and the ugly of what’s going on in our upside-down world. The community we have built here together has changed my life for the better; it’s given a man in the autumn of his years a sense of meaning, a sense of being part of something special and much bigger than me. It’s what we have built to help defeat the tyranny we are being forced to endure.

It may seem unconnected, but this journey has motivated me to remodel a wilderness at the bottom of my garden, which, incidentally, helped me discover muscles I never thought I had. It’s opened my eyes once again to the extraordinary beauty of nature and the gift of plenty we often take for granted when it comes to growing food. It’s been a one-man crusade to tame nature and enter a partnership to grow my own vegetables. It’s the first year, so yes, mistakes have been made and lessons learned, but it leaves me optimistic for 2027. Gardening has become a political palate cleanser, enabling me to better express myself.

In addition, after losing two and a half stone doing the garden, it’s given me the opportunity to start running again, something I very much enjoyed in the past. So it’s back to a 6 am run to start the day. Just short runs to get back into the swing, then hopefully my ageing frame will allow me to push the boundaries a little further.

I’ll be off the radar tomorrow, as I was last week, but I’ll try to get a shorter post done later today and post it before I leave home in the morning. Keep an eye out for an early post tomorrow. Then I’ll be back as usual on Monday.

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I know today’s post has been a bit of a departure and somewhat personal, but sometimes I think it’s important to understand what drives my thinking and my broader outlook on life. I don’t care where you find yourself on your life journey; I hope you feel that we are in this fight together. If you regularly read my work, I’m sure we already share a vision, but I wanted you to have a clearer understanding of the place my work comes from.

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Trump has begun the task of shielding himself from accountability should the Democrats win back the House and, with it, subpoena power in November. He has been forced to resign himself to the reality that the odds of passing the Save America Act are remote, and Republican leadership will not risk abolishing the filibuster, especially given the real possibility that they will be out of power in 2028. Reality is beginning to come home, but the one gift Trump has been given is the confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General.

If there’s one thing we know about Blanche, it’s that he will do as he’s told and carry out Trump’s orders to the letter. In effect, Trump has now officially taken the justice system hostage. It’s now been fully weaponised to serve his malign intentions and put in place protections against him ever being held accountable. He understands the importance of putting things in place that any subsequent Democratic administration will find hard to overturn.

Blanche’s first act as confirmed Attorney General was to issue, as reported by Rebecca Beitsch in a piece for The Hill yesterday, an opinion which:

“..argues the president can assert executive privilege not just over communications with his White House staff, but also with “private advisors” outside of government, an interpretation that would broaden the number of people President Trump could try to shield from congressional investigations.”

It’s important to note that this is a non-binding opinion. Nevertheless, it clearly indicates the intended direction of travel in what is a clear attempt to allow Trump to avoid accountability in any inquiry that might be instigated by a hostile Congress following the midterms. T. Elliot Gaiser, assistant attorney general for the OLC, who authored the opinion, states:

“The interests motivating the privilege are at their apex when it comes to decisions of the President. The need for ‘candid, objective, and even blunt or harsh opinions’ … is all the more important for the President, who is tasked with making ‘the most sensitive and far-reaching decisions entrusted to any official under our constitutional system,’” he added.

“Without a promise of confidentiality, the President’s ability to ‘decide and act quickly’ on matters of unrivaled importance would be seriously hindered.”

Beitch goes on to note:

The OLC said the claim is not absolute and that the president could only assert executive privilege for discussions with outside advisers who are “limited to communications ‘in performance of [a President’s] responsibilities,’ ‘of his office,’ and made ‘in the process of shaping policies and making decisions.’”

Nonetheless, it could be used in an effort to stymie congressional investigations, particularly for a president routinely in touch with business leaders and who has hatched several business deals while in office.

It should be noted that Punchbowl News was the first to report the newly issued memo, and if you’d like to read the official definition of Executive Privilege, I have linked it here. In addition, I’ve included a very informative video below from the former US Pardon Attorney, .

The reason this is important, is that it speaks to the clear intent to shield a convicted criminal from any attempt to hold him accountable for crimes he may have committed outside the official definition as ruled by the Supreme Court. The aim is to expand the scope of privilege to any and ALL communications, which could, for example, include discussed arrangements with ANY outside party for payments to his crypto accounts. It should not escape your attention that he admitted on camera to controlling the Make America Great Again SuperPAC, which is by definition illegal given that, under the law, it can raise unlimited money for campaigns and spend it freely to support him, but it is barred from coordinating directly with presidential campaigns.

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Trump is a man approaching the ‘find out’ phase of his second term, and he’s not even halfway through. Beneath the bravado, he’s worried, regardless of what he might say. Imagine being the alleged most powerful man on earth, and being forced to hide in a catering truck because you fear the reach of a middle-tier nation you have proclaimed to the world has been defeated. I have no words to describe the absurdity of the situation he finds himself in. The thing about Trump is he’s obsessive about his safety; he’s a known germaphobe, yet he has an unhealthy obsession with McDonald’s junk food. He’s truly a man of contradictions.

He now plays golf surrounded by mobile air defence missile units. His paranoia is very evident, and Iran, I’m sure, is enjoying having a front-row seat to watch an American president with no escape from the war he declared, leaving Iran in a much better geopolitical position than they had prior to him spending billions of dollars and diminishing missile stocks to achieve absolutely NOTHING. Trump is the textbook definition of a failed president. It’s like he’s suffering from presidential locked-in syndrome. He can see the dangers on every front, but he’s powerless to act.

The courts have now denied his attempts to prevent mail-in ballots. The ruling by US district ‌judge Indira ‌Talwani in Boston expanded on an ‌earlier order she had issued in June that had prevented Trump’s administration from implementing it in 23 mostly Democratic-led states. Slowly but surely, the door is being closed on his attempts to restrict the voter pool, enabling Republicans to choose their voters rather than the other way around.

Be in no doubt, no matter how many of the doors are closed on his attempts, he will not stop; he cares about nobody but himself, as clearly demonstrated by using reporters, cabinet members and staff on Air Force One as human shields on a decoy aircraft. He effectively declared them expendable, given that a credible threat had been assessed as credible enough to hide him in a catering truck and transport him to safety on a separate aircraft. He’s a coward who will stop at nothing to protect himself from both threats and accountability, regardless of the cost.

On the point of threats to Trump’s life, it’s important to note that a ‘fatwa’ against Trump was issued following the 12-day war in 2025; this effectively put a $20 million price on his head. Per HH 6230 :

Congress finds the following:
            (1) Abdolmajid Kharghani, a hardline cleric and Quranic 
        studies expert, reportedly revealed an online fundraising 
        campaign to the assassination of U.S. President Donald Trump 
        and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Khargani claimed 
        that this could be achieved in Europe with $10-$20 million.

For the sake of clarity for those unfamiliar, a fatwa is a formal legal ruling or advisory opinion on a point of Islamic law (sharia), issued by a qualified legal scholar known as a mufti. It’s usually a non-binding response to a specific question about daily life, ethics, finance, or religious practice. It’s not normally, as media commentary would have you believe, a death sentence. Although there are exceptions, as in the case of Salman Rushdie in 1989, who actually had his throat cut by Hadi Matar on stage at an event in New York as he was stabbed 15 times on August 12, 2022. This was in response to Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa in 1989.

In short, Trump is right to be worried and will never be rid of that fear, because Iran has a long memory and they are masters at waging psychological warfare. He will always be looking over his shoulder until the day he dies, and I have to admit that does give me a warm feeling inside; however inappropriate that might be, given the death and destruction he is complicit in imposing on the world.

The fact is, Trump is facing threats from every direction, from threats on his life from Iran, to the domestic threat of losing his grip on political power. That makes him increasingly dangerous the closer we get to the midterms. The confirmation of Todd Blanche only serves to emphasise the danger, as there is clearly nothing that the most senior law officer in the country will not do for Trump.

There’s little doubt in my mind that ICE will be deployed as ‘protection’ for polling places, with an unspoken remit to intimidate non-white voters. Don’t rule out the possibility that they will have a dual role. One to intimidate, and two, to encourage violence from voters who are unhappy with their presence. I’m pretty sure the military will be on standby too, with an objective to seek every opportunity to suspend the elections, claiming them to be unsafe. The possibilities are endless with a compliant Attorney General and Secretary of War. Trump simply can’t afford to lose. I hope I’m wrong, but I believe we are about to see the kind of elections that are common in African banana republics.

Trump will not allow it, but there should be UN election monitors on the ground; that’s how serious this is. He will accept no other result than victory; you don’t have to be a political scientist or scholar in fascism to see exactly what’s on the cards for November, so everyone needs to buckle up and, more importantly, Americans need to check their voter roll status on a regular basis.

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Bear in mind I have not even discussed the number of election workers the regime now has on the inside, and the threats that experienced election workers are about to face just trying to do their jobs. 90 million Americans sat on their hands in 2024; it is vital that they step up and do the right thing. The only way this goes down without incident is if the margin of defeat for Trump is too big to fix. It really is as simple as that.

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I read a great piece in The Guardian by Nesrine Malik regarding the wake-up call for the Democratic establishment resulting from the victory of Dr Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, in which she noted:

The symbolism of the win is heavy, that of a politics snapping the chains of corporate power and special interest groups whose agendas run counter to voters’. It suggests two things. One, an electorate waking up to the fact that its democracy is captured. Two, features in the past that would have been disqualifying – lack of experience, lack of establishment endorsement – now render a candidate a “clean skin”. Someone untainted by the sordid game that keeps in play expensive healthcare, cruelty to immigrants and the hoovering of tax dollars out of the country.

Even in this moment, his own Party, after his victory, is attempting to assure its corporate donors that he’s just a freak radical blip on the broader political landscape. It’s exactly the same message as when Zorhan Mamdani was elected New York Mayor. There is no question that Democratic leadership is rattled, as it finds itself at odds with an American public sick of the same old same old politics that has infected America over decades.

The reality is that the Dem establishment and its corporate backers spent $30 million to defeat Sayed. More disturbing, AIPAC, which remains an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), representing Israeli interests, added a further $30 million to defeat him. Can you imagine if a Muslim government had implanted a lobby group in Washington?

In total, those who did not want a Muslim in the Senate spent $60 million against him. It represented a 9:1 spend against Dr Abdul El-Sayed, making it the most expensive Democratic Primary campaign in history, and still he emerged victorious. Democrats can try to dismiss it as a one-off aberration, while Republicans play the Islamophobia card. What we should not lose sight of is that, in a democracy, the people, not the money, still have the final say. What needs to be foremost in people’s minds as they exercise their constitutional right to vote in November is that Trump will be working overtime to deny anyone who does not support him that right.

The ‘red scare’ politics seems to me to be tragically coming from both sides of the aisle, and that is deeply disappointing. What we are seeing is both the Democratic establishment and the now far-right Republicans coalescing under the corporate America banner to demonise ‘Democratic Socialists’. Unfortunately, this is what happens when corporations and special interests own politics and politicians. Democratic leadership can opine all day long that they are the party of the silenced, the vulnerable, and hard-working Americans, but the last half century has seen the antithesis of this, as the interests of corporate America have slowly suffocated the interests of the many to serve the interests of the few.

People can say, what does a Brit know about US politics and the American way of life? It’s a question often asked. Aside from the fact that I have spent a lot of my time in the US, both for business and pleasure over the decades, I have a comprehensive knowledge of both US law and the politics that drive America. I would hazard a guess that I have a better understanding than many Americans do. What I do bring to the party is the added advantage of looking from the outside in without any political baggage hindering my thinking. Be in no doubt, if the Republicans were advocating for my sociopolitical beliefs, I would be advocating for them.

This isn’t about political parties for me; it’s about a belief, a framework that has been in my DNA all my life. People can call me a liberal bleeding heart; I really don’t care. What I do care about, however, is the imperative of fairness, compassion and moral decency. If I were an American, I would be a raging progressive wanting to burn down the system and start again, but 66 years on this earth has taught me that in politics, pragmatism has to be at the heart of political discourse. I know I can be brutally blunt, but the truth is sometimes brutal, uncomfortable, and difficult to accept. I get that, so please don’t misinterpret my at times brutal honesty as anything but love. I firmly believe America can be great again if it can break free from the tyranny that has been imposed upon it.

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I’m not here for clicks or fame and fortune; I’m here because I care, and if together we can make America care again, we can rebuild what Trump and his acolytes have burned to the ground. It takes a good friend to say the tough things out loud. I have found a home here for my thoughts, and I go to bed each day knowing I took my responsibilities to speak truth to power on both sides of the aisle seriously, without fear or favour. My loyalty lies with those who refuse to be subjugated, extorted and abused. Look, this is not rocket science, and to believe everything is ‘complicated’ is frankly absurd. Values matter, just as the truth does. Moral decency and fairness are NOT the enemy; they are the superpower of a just society.

My assertion is very simple: ‘Let Democrats be Democrats’, not ‘Republican lite’. This whole ‘Democratic Socialism’ thing has become challenging, not because the foundational premise is flawed, but because it makes the label an easy target in a social media-centric world. A world where facts are no longer relevant. Where the truth has become so distorted as to poison the minds of millions of Americans who seem to be cheering themselves on into economic and propaganda slavery.

People have abandoned politics because it’s delivered nothing for the middle and the bottom, while those at the top of the food chain gorge themselves on the wealth stolen from the many. Who in their right mind would accept this as the status quo? It seems the answer is Democratic leadership, because once they secured their seat on the gravy train, the most they’re prepared to do is engage in performative politics that tinkers at the edges of a system that is no longer fit for purpose. They have merely become paid guardians of the interests of those who bought their loyalty as the bottom 90% nurse their declining prosperity.

The progressive tiger that has been locked in the Democratic basement for too long has escaped, and the Democrats can’t put it back in its cage. The sooner they understand that there is no putting it back, the better they will come to learn it now has a taste for what could be achieved. All you’re going to hear from the right is a drumbeat that the communists are coming. The Democratic establishment would be well advised not to reiterate that sentiment by declaring those non-compliant with false corporate democracy ‘rogue’. To call ‘people first’ Democrats ‘rogue’ is an indictment of their inability to read the sentiment of the American people. Much as they were deaf to the ‘working class’ in the 2024 campaign, who were screaming that they were struggling to put food on the table.

Nobody trusts politicians because they persistently fail to do what they promise. Mandani has opened a window onto what can be done if you do what you say, not say what you can’t do. The genie is out of the bottle, and Americans are waking up to the possibility that things can change and politicians can deliver if they are bold and ambitious enough to not cave when the going gets tough. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, labels matter; vulnerabilities are born of them. This is why I have long advocated for ‘people first’ Democrats; it is a label that does not lend itself to opposition weaponisation in a world where perception is everything.

Take the term ‘radical’ when partnered with ‘left’. In America, for political purposes, the Berlin Wall never fell, and the Cold War with the communists is just a heartbeat away. That, my friends, is indoctrination at its best- anything left of Mussolini is a communist in the Republican social Darwinist model. Only in America is it radical to provide healthcare as a human right, or to expect a living wage and affordable childcare. Excuse the French, but wake the fuck up. In a civilised modern democracy, what are regarded in America as ‘luxuries’ should be the societal benchmarks.

Take a deep breath and say it with me: ‘AMERICA IS BROKEN’. Only when you accept this to be the truth can you even begin to fix it. The Republican Party is intent on snuffing out ‘people first’ politics before it takes its first breath, and the real tragedy is that corporate Democrats are complicit in this political joint enterprise endeavour.

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The critical mass of progressive candidates is not yet mature enough to mount and win a revolution, even inside the Democratic Party, but that’s fine. Just as the Civil Rights Movement did not obtain voting rights (which, incidentally, have now been gutted by this regime) overnight. Hard-fought change takes time, but above all requires the intelligence to pick your fights and campaign smart. I remain confident that a true progressive agenda WILL eventually emerge and be delivered to America, and that the American people WILL embrace it for the transformative change it can deliver. This victory can only be delivered from within, and that’s why Americans need to place their faith in these ‘people first’ pioneers so that much-needed change can be delivered.

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And so begins another week closer to the midterms. A further week of intellectual arguments represented by a no-vision, no-agenda approach from Democrats in a country in which 21% of the population is illiterate, and 54% manage a 6th-grade literacy score. I have long been an advocate for not dumbing down the sociopolitical argument, but there is a fine line to tread when the party in government is convincing the public that dumb is the new smart.

It’s very unfortunate that the ‘Democratic Socialist’ argument debate has taken so long to come to the fore, and it’s even more unfortunate that democratic socialists chose the ‘socialist’ tag to hang their hat on. A far better strap line is ‘people first Democrats’; it’s simple, descriptive, and carries no baggage that opens the door to being labelled communism, Marxism, or socialism. As soon as the 2024 election was over, there should have been a full-throated apology to the American people for failing them in 2024 and a commitment to do better. Instead, we’ve seen an epidemic of self-preservation and a silence that was deafening for the best part of a year.

I was struck by a comment left after unsubscribing to one of last week’s posts:

As much as I may agree with Martin, the constant ranting about the stupid American electorate begins to wear thin, from someone across the pond who doesn't have the same skin in the game.

I have no problem with folks unsubscribing; it comes with the job, but to this statement I simply would say, I have tried everything to highlight the at times seeming indifference to the urgency of the problem when it comes to sacrifice and inconvenience. As an outside observer, it’s unfortunately difficult to come to any other conclusion as to why the American people would vote for a pathological liar who stole from his own charity and perpetually evaded paying his taxes while employing hundreds of the very immigrants on low wages he now wants to mass deport. All while stiffing contractors and students at his fake university, yet the American people voted for him TWICE.

On the point of me being “someone across the pond who doesn’t have the same skin in the game”. Rest assured, it not only affects me, but it also affects millions of people across the world, because it’s the same stupidity that has now put the whole world economy and security at risk. All from some sort of inexplicable electoral brain fart. The whole reason we have Nigel Farage in the UK, Germany has the AfD, and France has Marine Le Pen is because of Trump, not in spite of him, so I absolutely have skin in the game and what better place to fight tyranny than at its source?

Returning for a moment to the Democratic Socialist argument, it does represent the type of revolution that is required within the Democratic Party, and to be clear, I absolutely welcome it. This should have happened a long time ago, and it’s certainly regrettable that it has taken until this primary season to see it elevated into a war that sees progressives not only attacked by Republicans, but also by their own party establishment.

Since the era of Clinton, we have slowly seen the lines blurred between what were traditional Republicans and Democrats, as each attempted to park their tanks on the centre ground of US politics. It’s become the very source of the same old, same old politics that led 90 million voters to sit on their hands in 2024. Trust in politicians in the US is now in the basement at 17%, compared t over 50% in many Nordic capitalist countries with far more ‘people first’ political policy agendas and higher tax societies. That’s until you add up the cost for what’s not included in US social costs; then the costs look more on par.

The argument is that you don’t get growth and prosperity in ‘socialist societies’, to which I would agree, and the Nordic nations, despite the propaganda narrative, are NOT socialist societies; they are free market capitalist countries. As a comparison, and remembering that these countries are allegedly NOT on the front edge of the AI revolution the US claims to lead. The Nordic countries averaged between 1.5% and 2% growth in 2025. By comparison, the US grew around 2.1% WITH the AI frontier technologies in their camp.

Let’s drill down a little more, though. If you strip out AI and short-term investment in AI infrastructure from the US economy, it grew by just 0.1% in 2025. Now, before you jump in and say that’s a nonsense comparison, I would ask you one simple question: how much of the growth generated by AI in the US is real and how much is based on the hope of jam tomorrow? The magnificent 7 companies that are driving Trump’s wet dreams are passing trillions of dollars around to each other and passing it off as revenue and growth. It’s NOT; it’s a bubble. So the next obvious question is what happens when the bubble bursts, which I assure you it will, as has every major revolutionary advance in history, from the railways to the Internet.

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I suppose the reason I get confused is that I assume that common sense and critical thinking are part of the natural makeup in a democratic society. BIG MISTAKE: common sense and critical thinking have become an optional luxury in a world where greed is king. All you need to make the greed work is someone below each demographic to blame when their lives seem to be going nowhere. It’s for good reason that the decline of unions and collective social movements has eradicated all but the upper middle class, while at the same time decimating the working class. This has now just left the have-yachts and the have-nots. Corporate America knows organised labour is a threat to profits, and they want none of that. US trade union membership currently stands at 10.0%, representing 14.7 million members; there are almost as many top 10% households as there are union members. In Norway, for example, union membership sits at around 50-55% in the private sector and 80% in the public sector.

There is a sweet spot for a progressive agenda, and there’s no better example of understanding that than AOC. Since her early years as part of the Squad, she has evolved so much, and the reason she has done that is that she understands the evolution of politics and the need to pick your battles carefully. She knows that transformative change can’t be delivered overnight and that the first step is to gain power. Only then can you transform society.

If you watch what Zohran Mamdani is doing in New York, this is a great example of how you can marry really resonant messaging with a very visible policy agenda. It’s all about an emotional connection with voters and breaking the political mould by doing what you said you would do on the campaign trail. It’s the same reason AOC resonates and is able to raise the kind of money required to run a presidential campaign.

You can see the difference between Abdul El-Sayed and AOC, and the reason AOC has backed him is that she can see herself in him back in 2018. If you look at his campaign, he clearly got hooked up with a similar messaging team that propelled Mamdani and AOC to power. If you understand emotionally connective messaging, half the battle is won. Despite what he might say publicly, the close result in Michigan shook him, despite the massive spend against him. He expected a bigger win, and I think that’s a good thing, because now he knows the fight he has on his hands, and I’m confident he will rise to that challenge.

The messaging line for November has to be affordability, affordability and affordability with a healthy dose of affordability. Everything else stems from that central premise. Ideology has to take a back seat to pragmatism, because I've seen up close and personal the consequences of misreading the room. In 2018, when Jeremy Corbyn in the UK was backed by a movement called ‘Momentum ’, it had a phenomenal young messaging team that delivered a similar progressive agenda. They believed wrongly that they were riding a wave of confidence that they assumed would wipe out a very unpopular conservative government. Corbyn went down to a historic defeat that saw Boris Johnson win the election with the largest conservative majority in 30 years.

Corbyn’s experience is a cautionary tale: the Democratic Socialism label is probably not the answer, and I believe he lost that election because the Conservatives weaponised ‘socialism’ so effectively, and they had nowhere near the kind of capture of media messaging that Trump has right now. We have seen already that Republicans are running the ‘red-scare’ playbook, and candidates ignore this at their peril. This is why, for a long time, I have advocated for using the term ‘people first’ Democrats. Yes, Republicans will attempt to tie it to socialism, but it’s never easy to demonise the term ‘people first’. Why provide them with a loaded gun to shoot you with is my position.

In this midterm cycle, there is now no time for a revolution within the Democratic Party; that boat has sailed for now. This has to be about regaining the power of the subpoena to facilitate the forensic examination of the corruption that has been the hallmark of this regime. This is where attention has to be split: one part of the majority focuses on accountability, while remaining Democrats develop a compelling proposition to the American people for 2028. It’s important to use the investigations to force Republicans to incriminate themselves. Yes, they will claim lawfare and victimhood, but that is the last thing Democrats need to worry about.

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If Democrats are to succeed in November, it MUST be laser-focused on the affordability agenda. Remember, you can roll so much into affordability, like healthcare, the minimum wage, affordable child care and paid parental leave, which can be used to raise awareness of the key issues without making them central. It’s about careful framing of the agenda until after the election. After November, we move to phase two, when there will be an imperative to present a coherent policy agenda to serve the many, not the few. It’s about knowing which battles to fight and when.

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As noted by Praveena Somasundaram in her Washington Post piece today

The Democratic Party is less popular than before the 2018 midterm elections, when a blue wave delivered 41 new seats, according to a CNN poll released in late July. Just before that 2018 election, 46 per cent of adults rated Democrats favourably while 45 per cent rated them unfavourably. Now, 30 per cent rate Democrats favourably while 51 per cent rate them unfavourably, almost identical to ratings for the Republican Party.

I have said for some time that it’s extremely high risk to depend on the Trump protest vote rather than laying out a coherent vision for the American people. Voters are NOT stupid, as is clear from current polls in which both parties are underwater. They have lost faith in politicians full stop, and who can blame them?

The tragedy of the situation is that we are now coming off the final bend, the dice have been rolled and I fear there are now diminishing opportunities to grab the initiative. The American people chose, for whatever reason, to exercise their power as consumers because the pain of the inconvenience of a spending strike was just too much. As a result, they are now in the hands of the most corrupt president in American history or Chuck and Hakeem, the Laurel and Hardy of opposition politics. Sigh…..

It reminds me of a British comedy featuring Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which seems totally apt for this moment. You’ll even find a reference to John Fetterman; it really was quite prophetic.

The American people have decided in their infinite wisdom to put their faith in an election where Trump will only accept the outcome if he wins. What could possibly go wrong? Other than mass voter suppression, thugs out on the streets to prevent anyone not white from voting. Purged electoral rolls and total domination of the social media narrative. I can’t think of a better environment in which to regain the House and Senate.

As an outside observer, I am left speechless that a convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist who has exploded inflation, gas prices and blown over half of the nation’s defensive missiles in a war of choice with no exit, is still in with a shot. Make it make sense.

Despite the now Willy Wonka stock market, which his friends have golden tickets to manipulate. His fantasy wealth narrative against the backdrop of almost $40 trillion of national debt, 28% of which has been added all by himself, continues to defy all economic logic. Millions of kids are facing food insecurity, while at the same time, tens of millions of Americans are losing access to healthcare. The argument seems to be that Americans aren’t angry enough yet. I have to tell my American friends that I am in awe of your pain tolerance. What exactly will it take to stop being the Turkey voting for Thanksgiving? Let me guess, the abolition of credit cards?

I think I can say without fear of contradiction that if the Democrats fail to win the House back, I’m not sure that there is a way back without enduring unimaginable social and economic pain, especially if you’re not lucky enough make the cut for the top 10%. In short, EVERYTHING hinges on November. Anything short of a win too big to dispute may well prove too difficult to defend. Then what?

Once the US has reached this point, I’m afraid I’m out of answers because I fear the ‘every man for himself’ mentality will truly kick in and heaven knows where that might lead us. The only option on the table then becomes an economic collapse, forcing the collapse of the government and likely major civil unrest.

What people need to understand is that the top 1% have been planning for such a collapse, and they are now well insulated against any fallout unless it becomes very violent. If you track the economic corrections, they learned the lessons of the 2001 dot-com crash. Their wealth took a hit in that correction, and that woke them up to the need for insulation. By the time the 2008 crash came along, far from being hurt, they grew their wealth on the back of the misery of those who suffered the most. By the time the COVID crisis hit, they already had a wealth expansion model in place to ride that storm too, all while holding out their begging bowls for free government money.

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Now they have built this new tech Ponzi scheme with AI; the ground has already been prepared to shift the risk to taxpayers, so when it bursts, ‘We the people’ will be left holding the baby as their wealth continues to expand unabated. What’s that saying? ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’, but this will be the fourth time in 24 years; now that truly does make us fools. If my piece on the tax solution proves anything, it proves that the wealth of the top 1% is now so vast, I fear it would take the likes of global conflict to have any impact. Even then, I dare say they would find a way to profit.

We appear to have reached a situation where we are on a bus careering towards a cliff, and have decided to place our faith in the flip of a coin to decide whether to pump the brakes. It’s pure insanity. We’re living in the political Twilight Zone, unable to escape from the madness, because we can’t even trust the politicians claiming to be on our side to save us.

I’m having sleepless nights about these AI literary rapists buying up original literary works, then scanning and destroying the originals. Can someone tell me what happens when they consume the works of scholars, playwrights, and writers over the centuries, making them the sole source of knowledge? How will we ever be able to tell truth from fiction when an AI can be programmed to reimagine history based on a political directive?

What happens when AI renders human labour obsolete? Will we use AI to decide who will be included in the cull? These might once have been questions for a science fiction writer; now they are legitimate questions for those in power who control the technology. We saw our first glimpse of sovereign AI when the US government issued an edict stating that access to a US frontier model should be blocked to any user outside of the US on national security grounds. How long before this is integrated into the National Security Defence Plan? How long before access to US AI is dependent on paying protection money to the US? Take it from me, ‘economic dominance’ is a very real thing and this regime will be happy to roll it out.

What the US has thus far failed to recognise is that the world is now wide awake to the possibility of the US weaponising AI, not just in a military context, but in trade and economics. This is exactly why China has decided to appear to play the responsible adult on the international stage, offering a hedge against US malign action through extortion. They now have an impact-tested cross-border payments system up and running to allow circumvention of the US dollar. This is already integrated into their Belt and Road Initiative, opening the door to fast, frictionless dollar-free trade over a wide variety of borders.

In March of this year, China published its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030). This serves as the core operational roadmap, bridging the strategic path toward China's 2035 modernisation goals. These include:

• Advanced Technology: Supercharging artificial intelligence integration across the economy, prioritising semiconductors, high-end manufacturing, and tech self-reliance.

• Investing in people: Addressing domestic consumption, elderly care services, and family support policies to counter economic slowdowns and demographic changes.

• Security and Supply Chains: Building resilient domestic manufacturing and resource frameworks to insulate against external trade shocks.

• Low-Carbon Development: Push for industrial carbon-peaking, aiming for green factories to account for 45% of manufacturing output by 2030.

• Clean Energy Integration: Expanding wind, solar, and smart microgrid infrastructure, to include zero-carbon computing facilities powered directly by renewable energy.

These are just the top-level bullet points forming part of a strategic plan that is not hostage to political fortune. These objectives are the declared aims of the Chinese government and, as such, Chinese businesses will have access to the resources to meet them. There will be no shareholder class taking a cut. This is why this race is already won at a fraction of the cost to China. Rest assured, they are just sitting waiting for the US AI bubble to burst, and they’re in no hurry.

I realise that too many Americans are struggling right now as a result of a policy agenda which is facilitating the constant flow of wealth from the bottom and the middle to the top. This is made all the worse by a president who daily stares directly into the camera with a straight face, telling Americans not to believe their own lying eyes when they fill up their car, go to the supermarket or check their bank balances, because there is no affordability crisis. Meanwhile, they live with the hands of the rich constantly in their back pocket. Trump claimed yesterday that there are more people in work in America than ever before, knowing he was telling a bare-faced lie.

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It shouldn’t be the case that people like me find themselves the enemy for simply pointing out the facts. He’s a man who won’t accept the word ‘NO’ from Senate leadership when they tell him they don’t have the votes for The Save Act, or the Supreme Court when they rule his tariffs illegal or deny his attempts to abolish birthright citizenship. Instead of conceding, he simply goes looking for a way around their ruling. What’s the point of the rule of law if it is just ignored? Yet here we are, less than 100 days out from the midterms, and it looks like it will be another close election; I just can’t wrap my head around what appears to be an epidemic of stupidity.

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After concluding my three-part series on solutions, culminating with my taxation solution yesterday, I want to thank those who have reached out privately to me, not just to thank me for bringing some clarity to some relatively obscure consequences they hadn’t spotted before.

I’m more than aware that I’m the guy who always seems to be delivering bad news, but until we wake up to reality, how can we be expected to make any progress in addressing a threat that so many choose to ignore, either because ignorance is bliss, or because they are too busy trying to survive TODAY to worry about tomorrow? Don’t get me wrong, I get it; lies and fairytales sell much better than truth and honesty. Believe me when I say that reporting the truth is expensive. There was a time when my writing here covered the cost of the research and analysis tools needed to do the job properly. Now, I can only afford to write five days each week. I’ve had to come out of retirement to make up the ever-increasing shortfall by consulting a couple of days a week.

It is a sad reflection of the times in which we live, but let me assure you that for as long as I can fund this work, it will remain free to everyone. Once I can’t afford to do it properly, I’ll simply stop and leave my work here as an archive, then just keep a private diary of my thoughts.

Fact-checking and detailed analytics tools are imperative for accurate, factual reporting. I don’t have the might of a media organisation to fund what I do; all I have is a paid subscriber base that is being squeezed more every day by a government out of control. The truth does matter to me, and I owe it to everyone to be transparent about the challenges faced in spending 8 hours a day, sometimes many more, making sure that readers have the comfort of knowing they can trust what they read here. I’m not prepared to cut corners when it comes to the facts.

Putting that aside, I was reading through the mountain of notes I created for my solutions series of pieces, and I have to tell you, I woke up today with what I think is a much better understanding of why people are either blind to the reality of where we are, or simply unwilling to face reality. That scares me to death. Sometimes I can’t hide my frustration when I get the feeling I am screaming into the abyss, and I know that is noted by those who regularly read my observations. I never came to Substack thinking I would build a community of over 100,000 subscribers, and that’s the truth. I came here to journalise my thoughts in these challenging times, so I could later reflect to see how right or wrong I was.

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This community has been a joyous revelation to me. To think that my musings have resonated with so many others in a little over a year is the fuel that drives me on. I take the responsibility of having a voice here very seriously, as I know many respect and recognise it. If what I do helps people understand the threats and the consequences of what’s happening under the tyrant in the White House and his complicit enablers, then it’s worth all the stress it brings.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the traps Trump sets every day to keep us from focusing on the things that matter. The distraction, the lies, the misdirection are all part of a carefully crafted plan to hide his malign intent to serve the few at the expense of the many. The aim is to make those who don’t share his vision of his reimagined America feel powerless and in a constant state of fear and anxiety about what he might do to punish dissenters. Let me assure you, fear and anxiety are the oxygen that fuels his ambitions to establish an apartheid theocratic autocracy, and we must deny him that objective.

Independent truth seekers and critical thinkers have become enemies of his state, but they are in reality the resistance that will see his fragile empire crumble, and I aim to be an active player in that and to be here to see that happen. What about you? Truth is his kryptonite, and combined with the geopolitical evolution that is now rewiring global trade, economics and security, his imperial ambitions are on borrowed time. As I have said many times, this is not about if the regime will fall but rather when and the scale of the dissent that will ultimately lead to it.

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I’d like you to bookmark this post so we can hopefully reconvene a year from now and review the thoughts again I’m about to share because unless you’re prepared to zoom right out, you will not be able to see the wood from the trees in the forest of deceit Trump and his sycophants have created. We have already established that independent media is largely the only link left in a world drowning in lies and disinformation; the trust deficit in media is now on par with the trust deficit in politicians and the Supreme Court. This is why we MUST NOT allow independent media to whither on the vine of democracy preservation.

There is a reason the Heritage Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its vision for a white Christian Nationalist nation for decades. They believe above all, with religious fervour, in ‘economic dominance’ both domestically and globally. They understood that all they needed was a compliant president in the White House prepared to burn the system to the ground to achieve their objective. Then along came Trump. You often hear the right complain about the ‘deep state’; it is pure projection. In less than two years, they have built a police state Stalin would be proud of. They’ve constructed a foreign policy agenda that Hitler would be proud of and are on the road to delivering an apartheid state Netanyahu would be proud to put his name to.

This isn’t small change stuff; it’s the ambition of empire, and it has been constructed with military precision. Its existence is an indictment of the Democratic Party's failure. Their joint enterprise with corporate America and special interests has allowed the Heritage Foundation to have inside knowledge, enabling it to anticipate and nullify any attempt to stop their march to destroy democracy in America. They have literally war-gamed the entire Democratic response. This is why they have managed to implement the core objectives and then some of Project 2025.

We now live in a world of adversarial soundbites that drive the political narrative, which is able to spread more effectively from the right because the regime has effectively taken social media hostage, while at the same time they have rendered left-leaning media impotent and living in fear of economic retribution. In a coup, what’s the first thing you take control of? The media ecosystem, and Trump has unquestionably done that. What remains encouraging, though, is that even with the level of control he’s captured, the heart of America’s democracy is still pumping political antibiotics through the system to fuel resistance.

This is not about engaging in a political brawl; it's about engaging in a tactical fight. I can’t tell you how unhelpful ‘Eat the rich’, ‘Tax the rich’, ‘Defund the police’ and even ‘Abolish ICE’ are. Yes, they are provocative, and certainly, in the case of abolishing ICE, there’s a good case, but it’s impractical to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It has a key role to play in the immigration process in every country. Nobody in their right mind wants to abolish a key agency designed to protect the American people. The statement should be ‘Reform ICE’ and ‘Reform the police’. As for ‘Tax the Rich’ and ‘Eat the Rich’, these are just unhelpful slogans that can easily be attacked by asserting we are just jealous of their wealth.

They lead to the creation of the T-shirts and the bumper stickers that are a gift to the Republican messaging monster, which is far more effective and efficient than any counter-messaging system the Democrats have been able to come up with. It’s an affliction that the Dems have of handing a loaded gun to the Republicans to shoot them in the face, and it’s beyond infuriating. They need to learn from the Republicans' mastery of narrative capture. Take this Fauci nonsense and their ability to suck the oxygen out of the room in order to distract attention away from their incompetence. It’s been as effective as the Benghazi hearings that helped defeat Hilary Clinton in 2016. How many times do Democrats need to be humiliated before someone says, ‘We might need to take a different approach?’

Although nobody dares talk about it today, I will. Abdul El-Sayeed’s victory in Michigan yesterday was evidence that the American people are open to a new ‘people first’ politics. However, it was NOT the overwhelming victory that either he or the wider progressive movement were expecting. While there is no question that being outspent 9:1 by AIPAC and corporate PACs was unquestionably a factor, it was a cautionary tale that the result should be taken into account when measuring the race for change. I think Abdul is a phenomenal political talent who could help usher in transformative change with his presence in the US Senate. However, he’s now up against the entire right-wing propaganda machine in November, and that’s a whole new ball game. On the good news front, however, the Democratic machine will now be forced to hold their nose and line up behind him. I’m not sure how that works, though, with an empty bank account.

The point I’m trying to make is that it is NOT a done deal that Republicans will suffer a major defeat in November. Democrats are broke, and the Supreme Court gave the green light for Republicans to pour unlimited amounts of cash into Republican coffers to hold onto power. This fight will need to be approached with eyes wide open and a smart campaign strategy which focuses on the 90 million Americans who chose to sit on their hands in 2024. Unless Democrats regain the power of subpoena in November, I fear the consequences are unimaginable. The harsh reality is, even if they do win, Trump will attempt to discredit any victory and use the courts to delay handing over any power until he’s forced to do so. This, I’m afraid, is inevitable, so it’s going to be a long few months ahead.

I’ll be off radar most of the day tomorrow as I’m doing a consultancy job over the next three days, but I have done a post for tomorrow which I’ll post before I head out, so be aware it will drop early tomorrow; then after that, I’ll be back on Monday. Have a great weekend.

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