Iran suffered a major defeat last night as Israel initiated a wave of attacks that is staggering in both scope and strategic depth. In contrast to Israel’s limited strikes last April—when the IAF hit a small number of Iranian air defense sites—the current attacks are likely to impact Iran in ways that are still hard to fathom.

The list of strikes alone suggests how extraordinary this moment is. Israel is reporting that the Natanz facility, Iran’s primary nuclear enrichment complex, has been destroyed. Iran’s three top military officials—IRGC chief Hossein Salami, military chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri, and IRGC Emergency Command head Gholam-Ali Rashid—are reportedly dead. The country’s leading nuclear scientists have been killed. Most of the senior leadership of the Iranian Air Force was killed in an underground command center.

There are reports of ballistic missile production facilities being hit. A site in Tabriz—home to an Iranian Air Force base and a ballistic missile storage facility—was targeted. There are also reports that Shiraz Air Base, which hosts IRGC missile and drone facilities, is coming under attack.

At the time of writing, Israeli strikes on Iran were still underway. IDF spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin stated earlier: “The operation is only beginning.”

In Israel, people are bracing for war. “The streets are empty but the supermarkets are full,” a source told me, as citizens prepare for days in shelters. Numerous sources reported a “buzz” in the air in Israeli cities—a tense but resilient atmosphere. Sirens wailed across Israel at 3 a.m., with emergency alerts advising people to stay near shelters. In an unusual move, both active-duty soldiers and reservists were mobilized in person—IDF officers reportedly appeared at their homes at 3 a.m. and instructed them to leave their phones behind.

What’s stunning is not just the scale of the attacks, but how they were implemented. The first wave of strikes against Iranian air defense systems was carried out by Mossad commandos who had infiltrated deep inside Iran. Three separate Mossad missions were launched: one to destroy Iran’s precision-guided surface-to-air missile systems; another to cripple air defense infrastructure; and a third to deploy explosive drones against Iranian ground-to-ground missile systems prepared for retaliation.

These drones had been prepositioned inside Iran, lying dormant until activated during the operation.

This comes less than a year after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, planting a bomb in a supposedly secure Iranian government guesthouse. Haniyeh had traveled to Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, following the death of former president Raisi in a helicopter crash—the only aircraft in his convoy to go down.

That Israel was able to operate so freely within Iran speaks to its current dominance over a longtime adversary. Overnight, 200 IAF fighter jets reportedly flew missions over Iran with impunity. As far as is known, not a single Israeli jet was downed. This is partly due to Israel’s earlier precision strikes in April 2024, which disabled key elements of Iran’s air defense network in response to a mass drone and missile barrage launched by Tehran.

That barrage had itself been a retaliation for the killing of several senior Iranian generals in Syria by Israeli F-35s, including the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force.

A year ago, even a single one of these events would have seemed unthinkable. For years, the consensus within Israel held that any attack on Iran’s strategic infrastructure would provoke Hezbollah into launching thousands of rockets on Israeli cities. But today, Hezbollah has publicly declared it will not intervene. The reason is simple: Hezbollah—once the Middle East’s most feared paramilitary force—has been decimated. Its top leadership, including its iconic former head Hassan Nasrallah and his successor, have been killed. Thousands of its operatives have been incapacitated by Israeli “beeper” attacks. Its arsenal has been systematically degraded by repeated Israeli airstrikes.

What we’re seeing is a once-fearsome regional actor backed into a corner, with few options. For decades, Iran had built a vast proxy network—Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and the Assad regime in Syria—often referred to as the “ring of fire.” This network spanned multiple countries and controlled hundreds of thousands of rockets, missiles, and mortars.

At its center was Israel—seen by the Iranian regime (not incorrectly) as America’s strategic outpost in the region. With the Abraham Accords, Trump and Netanyahu had not crafted a diplomatic solution, but a strategic realignment: drawing Gulf states into open cooperation with Israel and sidelining Iran. The Saudis appeared ready to formalize ties, having already become Israel’s de facto security partner in the regional struggle against Tehran.

One of Hamas’ key motives on October 7 was to derail the Abraham Accords. In that, they nearly succeeded. Israel’s campaign in Gaza forced the Saudis to publicly express outrage—even if privately, they may have approved of Israel’s actions.

But with Israel’s strikes on Iran, the entire post–October 7 equation has shifted again. The Assad regime has collapsed, leaving Russia out in the cold. Hamas is no longer a coherent paramilitary force, but an insurgency with delusions of governance. Hezbollah, which just months ago held Lebanese politics in a chokehold, now finds itself pleading with the Lebanese government to shield it from further Israeli attacks.

The question of timing remains. Some note that the strikes came on the 61st day after President Trump issued a 60-day ultimatum to Iran to reach a nuclear deal. On this, Israeli military theorist Eado Hecht told me:

“The negotiations reached an impasse—both sides had mutually exclusive red lines. The Americans demanded zero enrichment capacity in Iran; the Iranians insisted on keeping it. The Iranians were haggling like expert bazaar merchants. But time was running out—they were nearing the point of no return.”

In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote:

“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get [a nuclear deal] done.”

One Israeli source, not authorized to speak on the record, told me the campaign is expected to last about a week. Iran is now orienting itself to the new reality: replacing killed officials, assessing damage, and planning a response. After that, Israel may strike again. The source expects Iran to activate terror cells—likely lone wolves—to attack Jewish or Israeli targets abroad.

The story is fast-developing. But one thing is clear: this is a major turning point in the Middle East.

Ten years ago, I wrote an essay about the coming tidal wave of anti-Semitism in America called “The Death of American Jewish Exceptionalism.” At the time, the US was engaging in a larger conversation about American exceptionalism, centered around Obama’s rejection of the concept. In my piece, I made the case that rising Islamist-fueled anti-Semitism around the world would be exported from Europe and the Mideast—that this was inherently a global trend that would easily cross borders, including America’s. The exceptionalism American Jews had known in their safety from violence, I argued, was about to end.

I pitched this piece to a number of national publications, including to Jewish editors at these publications. The responses I got assured me no such trend was afoot. That Jews were as safe as they’d ever been. That this “trend” (they implied) was all in my head. None accepted the piece. None even engaged with its on its merits.

The cold-blooded murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, the fire-bombing of Jews in Boulder, Colorado, and the skyrocketing rise of violent antisemitism have made it clear that it wasn’t just in my head. Rather, the denialism was in the heads of the Jewish establishment, including the bien pensant in senior positions at American publications, who didn't simply reject this idea but were offended by it.

My identifying the rise of Islamism not as a response to American foreign policy—another lie they peddling for decades, an echo of Islamist propaganda itself—but as antisemitic at its core disrupted their worldview: America was a liberal haven; immigrants from the Muslim world were integral to this conception of America; Jews were perfectly safe; and the far-right presented the only real threat of terrorism.

The piece challenged all these assumptions; so they didn’t publish the piece. Worse than that, of course, is that they refused to discuss a trend that, by that point, was already becoming evident, if not obvious. They waited until it was too late—and still now, they want to believe the problem is not as bad as it manifestly is.

The piece is in full below, unchanged from its original version.

Despite the debate raging around the question of American exceptionalism it’s difficult to deny that in one regard America truly does constitute an exception. For centuries, Jews around the world, no matter whether they were treated badly, atrociously or even tolerably, were subject to distinct national policies and social attitudes designed to deal with this category-confounding foreign element.

But almost since their arrived on American soil, Jews have been accepted as a part of the national landscape. And though they’ve been acknowledged as different (and at times subject to serious, and significant, bouts of anti-Semitism), on a whole they haven’t been considered any less American than other ethnic or religious groups. Unlike Jews of previous centuries, they haven’t suffered mass persecution at the hands of the state or the public. And unlike Jews in communities around the world today, they haven’t been forced for social reasons into Jewish enclaves that in many ways resemble contemporary ghettos.

American Jews have been free to live as Jews, as Americans and as individuals. Whether more emphasis was placed on one or the other of those categories—or on one of the categories entirely—has mostly been a matter of choice. The result is that American Jews have enjoyed the freedom to define themselves both culturally and as a group to an extent never before seen in Jewish history.

With the persistence of this freedom for almost four centuries, and with personal and group freedoms arguably stronger than ever in America, it seems there’s no reason to think anything should change. This is an attitude borne out by the current focus of many American Jewish institutions which count passive assimilation as one of the major challenges facing their communities. For individual Jews, the challenges of living life in America are not related to questions of how to be Jews in spite of being Americans, or even how to retain their Jewish identity, but, rather, to the economic, social and parental issues faced by most Americans in a similar socioeconomic domain.

But despite the well-justified confidence American Jews hold in relation to their place in American society, for the first time the exceptional character of American Jewish life is faced with a threat, the likes of which it has never before experienced. As one of the greatest geopolitical shifts of the past two or three decades, the rise of political Islamism has had profound consequences for the West, and, as we’ve witnessed in Europe, particularly for Jews.

In recent years, the world has seen how this phenomenon of Islamist targeting of Jews, which is increasingly carried out without the traditional pretext of vengeance for Israeli policy or actions, has played out in European capitals. In countries filled with churches, monasteries and parochial schools, it’s been synagogues, Jewish museums and Jewish centers that have come under attack in cities like Marseille, Brussels, Toulouse, Copenhagen and Paris.

Watching from afar, American Jews have been shocked, outraged and saddened by the outbreak of an age-old virus they (and many others) once believed was on the wane. But as they commiserate with their fellow Jews in Europe, American Jews have failed to see that, like a virus, the threat is indifferent to national borders. If the Islamist vendetta against Jews does spread to American soil it could level the exceptional character of American Jewish life and, in doing so, irrevocably alter American Jewish identity.

Looking back over its long history, it’s hard to believe that anything could challenge the centuries-old exceptionalism embodied by American Jewry. Already by the colonial period—a time, as Amos Elon notes in The Pity of it All, when Jews of Europe were still forced to enter Berlin through a gate reserved for them and for cattle—the Jews of America were recognized more or less as equals to non-Jews. In 1740, British parliament codified this acceptance with the Plantation Act, which allowed Jews of the colonies to be naturalized and went so far as to make a specific allowance for Jews to omit the words “upon the true Faith of a Christian” from the oath that was part of the naturalization process.

Even during the Dutch colonial period, the Dutch Sephardic Jews who are the founding fathers of American Judaism were not merely protected as a minority but unequivocally granted full status as members of Dutch colonial society. An order by the States General of the United Netherlands, which governed the colonies at the time, issued a concise but very clear directive to colonial authorities, regarding the Jews:

As they commiserate with their fellow Jews in Europe, American Jews have failed to see that, like a virus, the threat is indifferent to national borders. If the Islamist vendetta against Jews does spread to American soil it could level the exceptional character of American Jewish life.

These thirty-three words, and the Plantation Act following 90 years later, represented a huge reversal in traditional dynamics of European countries where Jews depended on the progressive laws of enlightened despots to (usually temporarily) enforce public tolerance of them. But despite the radical change, the real distinguishing feature for the lives of the Jews of colonial America was not just the degree to which they were accepted but the fact that their acceptance didn’t hinge on the condition that they abandon Jewish practices or identities.

As Nathan Glazer wrote about British colonial Jews in his landmark 1956 book, American Judaism: “Though they were Americanized, in the sense that they used English exclusively, and though they lived like other colonial worthies…these early immigrants found no difficulty in remaining Jews.”

In the following centuries, the most widespread and poignant struggle faced by American Jewry wasn’t the threat of being drowned by waves of intolerance but the possibility that their Jewishness (and their Judaism, a subtle but important distinction) would gradually be eroded by tides of acceptance. The attempts of different groups of Jewish immigrants to resolve the paradox of integrating while remaining distinct is, in large part, what shaped the political, cultural and even spiritual character of the different strains of Judaism that developed in America. But no matter what their answer to this challenge, all of the various incarnations of American Judaism were faced with the central question of how to keep Jews from dissolving into the American substrate.

Today, this is largely still the case—with the difference that much of the handwringing over Jewish identity has disappeared. For better or worse, only a small number of American Jews are deeply concerned with once hotly-debated questions like whether American Jews should be considered a “nation within a nation,” an American ethnic group, or simply a certain type of American who happens to worship in a Jewish manner.

As historian and scholar of American Jewish life Jacob Neusner put it: “After four generations to be Jewish is a mode of being an American, taken for granted by Jews among other Americans, and no longer problematical.”

Though this is a unique situation in and of itself, there is one major defining feature that makes the American Jewish condition truly exceptional, and that is its permanence. While Jews had been accepted at various times and under various circumstances in places like Napoleonic France, Weimar Germany, early 19th century Vienna, and pre- (and later, post-) Marinid Morocco, in none of these cases did this acceptance persist for anything close to four centuries.

In contrast, over the stretch of three centuries, America’s Jews developed into much more than an accepted minority living comfortably in the midst of the larger population and, instead, in evolved into a national model for how American minorities could melt into the proverbial pot without entirely losing their distinct identities. (The term “melting pot” is itself a product of American Jewish life, as it was coined by playwright and novelist Israel Zangwill to describe American Jewish assimilation he idealized.)

The roots of this special relationship between America and its Jews are many, but among the big ones are America’s founding principle of religious freedom and the importance of the mercantile role Jews played in the early colonies. But among these causes was a much more simple one: It proved too difficult to maintain Old World social hierarchies, and the restrictions they necessitated, three thousand miles from European shores and amid the uncertainty and instability of colonial life.

Looking back, we can see that many of these causes—physical and social distance from Europe, the primacy of economic considerations, and a commitment to religious tolerance—were also the ones that helped pave the way to American might and, along with it, a sense of exceptionalism that came to pervade American culture and society.

The country’s enormous natural boundaries, particularly the larges swaths of ocean separating it from its enemies, prevented it from bleeding power and resources into Continental strife. Likewise a product of America’s physical and social distance, slavery and territorial expansionism afforded the country economic advantages that helped lay the foundations for American military power.

But it’s exactly these factors, including physical distance, economic domination, and isolation from conflict, which fostered a sense of American exceptionalism among the public and political class, which have been are now facing gales of change, the likes of which the country has rarely seen.

With the rise of developing-world economies, the advent of cyber-warfare and the availability of digital mass communications, the economic, military and social distinctions that afforded America its defining strategic advantage are blurring. The most visible and maybe spoken-about of these changes has to do with the shifting nature of conflict. The emergence of asymmetric warfare fueled by radical Islamist ideologies, has meant that no longer are the shadows of bombers or fleets of warships the sole, or even primary, national security threat facing America.

With the rise of developing-world economies, the advent of cyber-warfare and the availability of digital mass communications, the economic, military and social distinctions that afforded America its defining strategic advantage are blurring.

The world has seen the effects of similar changes play out over recent years in Europe. With its relative proximity to the Mideast and Asia, an almost unprecedented freedom of movement and a cultural tolerance to foreign immigration greater than that of America, Europe has seen the inevitable effects of this attitude.

But what’s illustrative about the situation there is that in addition to high-profile national attacks there has been a parallel track of attacks against Jews and Jewish communities. Though these attacks have been carried out by a range of terror groups, as well as by lone wolves, they are in truth united by an underlying ideology. In fact, aside from the general animus towards the West, it might be the hatred for and targeting of Jews that cuts to the core of Islamism’s supremacist ideology and serves as a connecting thread between Islamist groups as different as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas and Hezbollah. Seen in this context, attacks on Jews are not only a sine quo non of radical Islamism but also a valuable recruitment tool that helps expand the movement.

Given all this, there’s a reasonable possibility that Jews in American could find themselves, like Jews in other parts of the world, targets of Islamist terror. In October, ISIS released its first message directed towards Jews in which a masked ISIS fighter speaking Hebrew (in what sounds like a Israeli-Arab accent) threatens not only to target Jews in Jerusalem but “until we eradicate this disease from the world.”

Where the individual is concerned, the distinction between violence committed for ideological reasons versus that committed for any other reason may seem abstract. After all, so long as the same or similar methods are used, the victim who suffers violence suffers it the same way no matter what the intentions of its perpetrator. But this is precisely the point: the very act of targeting someone in the name of ideological terror forces the individual victim into a member of a group.

The targeting of a Jew—or an African American, Latino, Christian or Muslim—serves, in effect, to put on notice not all other members of that group, but all individuals whom the perpetrators of violence deem to be a member of that group. In this sense, the violence committed in the name of racially or ethnically motivated ideological purposes is of a second order. Much more than just physical, it’s a violence committed against the individual and the individual’s right to determine his or her own identity.

This is much more than a theoretical point. The moment a group of people is targeted for what they are, instead of who they are, the nature of their relationship with the place where they live changes instantly, and sometimes irrevocably. This is something the history of Jewish experience in the world illustrates quite starkly as Jews, in various times and places, who have been subject to systematic violence have had to change the way they dress, worship, eat, marry, work, and educate their children.

The violence committed in the name of racially or ethnically motivated ideological purposes is of a second order. Much more than just physical, it’s a violence committed against the individual and the individual’s right to determine his or her own identity.

We can see these types of changes being manifested today in European countries like France, where attacks have taken place outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, against a man carrying a Torah in Marseille, and at a kosher supermarket in Paris. In response, both French government authorities and Jewish community leaders have instructed French Jews not to walk in public wearing yarmulkes or other visible Jewish symbols. But the question of outward appearance soon becomes existential, something starkly and directly experienced by French Jews who ended up on a publicly distributed kill list.

If the Islamist vendetta against Jews does spread to American soil it could level the exceptional character of American Jewish life and, in doing so, irrevocably alter American Jewish identity. American Jews who choose to self-identify as conservative, reform or Orthodox; as liberal or right-leaning; as gay or straight; or who don’t self-identify as Jewish at all but are simply singled out, for whatever reason, as Jews, will have to find ways to respond. In many cases it will be by modifying the choices they make regarding their identities and they ways they express them.

There is a counter-argument that’s often made regarding these kinds of adaptive changes, which is that they amount to “giving in” to terror or to “letting the terrorists win.” But terror often does win, which is why it works. It’s also a phenomenon that Jewish history has repeatedly demonstrated, whether in the form of adaptation made in response to the mob-terror of the pogrom, the state-terror of Nazi fascism, the religious-terror of the Inquisition or the ideological-terror of Stalinism.

Throughout history, Jews have changed as the world around them changed. But more, importantly, they’ve changed as the attitudes toward them, and events involving them, have changed. It’s a paradox of Jewish life that change forms a continuum for the Jews, yet the existence of that continuum somehow defies the forces of change.

There is a counter-argument that’s often made regarding these kinds of adaptive changes, which is that they amount to “giving in” to terror or to “letting the terrorists win.” But terror often does win, which is why it works.

It seems unimaginable that this kind of systemic attack on American Jews could ever take place, and wondering where and how it might produces only a kind of mystification. Could it possibly occur in New York, a city so Jewish it suspends street parking regulations for major Jewish holidays? What about the quiet, profoundly unassuming Jewish suburbs that dot the country? Somehow, this prospect seems even less likely than an attack on the metropolitan Mecca of American Jewish life.

Thankfully un-targeted by terror, American Jews have been shocked and outraged as the Jews of Europe continue to be attacked, their cemeteries and memorials desecrated, and their children sent to school under armed guard. Commiserating and maybe despairing, Jews of America have asked, “How can we prevent our fellow Jews in Europe from enduring these terrible crimes?”

This question is compelled by much more than just good intentions but a heartfelt sense of brotherhood that transcends language and geography. But in assuming that the rising phenomenon is unique to that particular, and distant, place, it’s a question premised on the same illusion that has also been shattered in Europe—namely, that it can’t happen here.

America has been able to resist some of the darker trends that have bloomed in Europe, especially where Jews are concerned. But if it does transpire, and American Jews find themselves targets as French, Danish, Argentinian, Turkish, Israeli, Belgian, Swedish Jews have, the American exceptionalism which offered Jews a history-defying opportunity to live their lives and understand themselves first as American individuals will be overridden by a more enduring exceptionalism: that of being Jewish.

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You’ve heard by now of Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans duo who are pushing the limits of sexual endurance. Phillips originally shot to fame after she had sex with 100 men in a day. Blue bested this by sleeping with over 1,000 men in 12 hours. In the wake of these acts, which (of course) went massively viral, the discourse forked in the most obvious and expected way: condemnation by the right and a (tenuous) defense of sexual self-empowerment by the left.

Tim Urban attempted to split the different by arguing that this these are nothing more than neutral acts of physical endurance, like an Ironman competition. None of these takes, however, identify the real phenomenon we’re witnessing, which is the shift of sexuality out of the realm of either morality or self-actualization and into that of sociopathy.

For millennia, humanity has confronted the same questions about the ownership of sexual decision making. The question of whether sex is a neutral physical act, a tribal ritual, a spiritual coming-together, or a transactional currency is present in every society. And each has negotiated its own terms for what sex is, at essence, how it should be navigated culturally, and what its social consequences may be under varying circumstances.

In the the Jewish tradition, which holds sexual morality in its most uncompromising light, we find in the biblical encounter of Tamar, the ancestress of the Messiah, prostituting herself to her father-in-law, Judah, not just a valid but morally necessary act. The Christian tradition has at its very core the sublimation of sex in the Immaculate Conception. Hindu sects speak voluminously about sexual ethics, and Buddhism addresses it within the framework of craving and clinging. The sexual revolution of the 1960s celebrated free sexual expression as a human right. Other traditions abjure sex as inherently lust-bound.

What’s different today is that the emerging sexual narrative embodied by OnlyFans super-influencers like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips is divorced from any context — cultural, political, moral, social, economic or otherwise. Even within the narrowest reading of the term “social” (i.e. as it’s appended to “media”) we don’t have a true value-laden context for the phenomenon we’re witnessing, but a format. And while these women are being accused by some of prostitution, that’s also not entirely accurate since prostitution is almost by definition born out of economic necessity.

Even putting aside their lavish earnings, OnlyFans women who live in wealthy countries where education and opportunity are accessible relative to global and historical norms have not been pressed into sexual servitude, the way that millions of women around the world, and throughout time, have been.

Nor is this truly about choice. In literature and art there’s a long tradition that celebrates sexual freedom, even decadence, and that is loaded with social and cultural meaning. In the journals of Anaïs Nin, her erstwhile sexual and romantic partner, Henry Miller, and in the semi-autobiographical novels of Jean Genet; in the lascivious gaze of Klimt figures and the raucous celebration of sex of Toulouse-Lautrec; in Shakespearean bawdy, the derangement of the Marquis de Sade, the films of Almodovar, the pornographic interludes of Caligula, the sinister suburban sexuality of Blue Velvet; in the lyrics of everyone from the Rolling Stones to Britney Spears to The Weekend, we find sex, raw, sometimes unadorned, but never without some form of meaning, even in cases where the meaning is to explicitly and pointedly strip away previous layers of meaning.

The OnlyFans sexual dynamics that have been taken to their logical extremes by Bonnie Blue and Lilly Phillips are something entirely different. The most glancingly plausible value which these women, in a thin attempt at self-justification, have invoked — that of self-ownership of sexual decision-making — rings hollow for the simple reason that sexual politics now lie squarely in the realm of the individual, as they have for at least two decades. There is no need or basis to make a point about sexual self-empowerment when that very point is made endlessly, across every aspect of contemporary human activity, in virtually every Western cultural setting.

What’s stranded this conversation is the search for meaning or any context at all. Instead, what we’re seeing today is a form of sociopathy cast onto the realm of sex. Sociopathy is generally characterized by a complete lack of concern for the wellbeing of others. People who display antisocial personality disorder (as it’s now called) display a reckless disregard for social and cultural norms. They act impulsively, unchecked by the restraining force of conscience, or even by amour de propre, an Enlightenment conception of the (generally unhealthy) instinct to see ourselves through the eyes of other that has been explored by philosophers like Rousseau and Kant. Sociopaths do harm wantonly, their violence is un-contained and unreflected upon.

In the context of OnlyFans, the question, then, is what exactly is the harm that’s being done —and to whom. Moral traditions implicitly argue that deviation from a society’s sexual norms results in some form of abstracted harm, whether that’s to the metaphysical wellbeing of the society, its social cohesion, or its standing among rival groups. The truly exceptional aspect of the OnlyFans extreme sex phenomenon is that it obviates all of these claims. From the outset, the enterprise of having sex with 1,000 men in a day is neither a rejection nor a reputation of traditional sexual morality. For women engaging in this trend, that morality is non-existent.

The harm that exists in this act is, rather, done by these women to themselves. This is difficult to express in concrete terms because these acts are based in individual choice, they occur in controlled environments, and, as mentioned above, they take place outside of any moral framework. This is what makes this issue so slippery. Unlike anorexia, bulimia or self-cutting, which either lead to, or are themselves, acts of physical harm, there is little risk of permanent injury in these acts. If the harm isn’t physical, and it isn’t moral, what is it?

One of the issues that lies at the heart of the feminist movement is the concept objectification. Feminist thought has for decades taught that across all aspects of human endeavor — from art to work to relationships to daily life — women are made into objects for the use of men. This is not a phenomenon unique to women, but women have been subject to it, as a constant, in ways that men have not. For feminists, objectification is key to the domination of women by men. It’s the cornerstone of their subordination.

Whether we agree with that point or not, there is an argument in the feminist literature on the topic that’s hard to deny: the claim that objectification lies at the very heart of pornography. As feminist Catherine MacKinnon wrote, “Admiration of natural physical beauty becomes objectification. Harmlessness becomes harm.” The reason for this is that objectification turns a person into a commodity. It strips them of the individual qualities that makes us human beings. It makes a person fungible, interchangeable, a set of body parts removed from a person’s aspirations, thoughts and experiences. It’s an absence of qualities, rather than a presence, a silhouette cast against a wall of desire. Because of this, those who have been commodified are made into something less than human, and, sometimes, as in the case of the mechanized genocide of the Holocaust, something non-human.

The strange thing about Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips (along with the entire genre of OnlyFans sex influencers) is that the one claimed justification for these activities, self-empowerment, lies in opposition to the actual effects of the extreme self-objectification at the heart of this endeavor. Here’s a description from one of the men who participated in the Bonnie Blue stunt: "There were around 30 or 40 guys around her at any one time all taking turns.” Another participant later said, "People were just going in and a group would surround her. Whoever got the opportunity would start joining in. She was in the middle and there were loads of guys around her doing whatever to her.”

This is not a description of self-empowerment but of gang rape sanctioned by state, culture and, finally, by the very woman subject to it.

One of the arguments that has cropped up online about Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips is that the entire onus has been placed on these women, and not the hundreds of men party to these acts. And this is indeed the case. Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips are subject to our scrutiny (even if we can’t put a finger on why) while the men who were essential their stunts go unremarked on. But that’s also not entirely true.

The objectification associated with transforming pornography into an activity engaged in by influencers takes place regardless of gender. Andrew Tate’s entire platform can be reduced to an obsessive hyper-objectification of women. Tate’s gargantuan misogyny, which has led him to go so far as to potentially implicate himself in alleged crimes, is driven by a need to objectify women that has taken on the proportions of an out-of-control fetish, something that has consumed his own humanity. This has made him into a kind of objectifying thing: an objectifier. He is not the all-too-human (if misguided) man on the other side of the OnlyFans camera seeking connection in a series of dwindling dopamine hits. He’s not the John. Instead, he’s the force behind the camera, the mechanism of objectification.

One of the most unnerving details from the reporting on Bonnie Blue’s sex stunt is that most of the men who participated wore balaclavas. These men, too, erased themselves in this act. Their humanity was objectified almost as much as that of the woman. I say “almost” because, unlike Bonnie Blue, they were able to preserve their anonymity. In doing so, they were able to cleave off a version of themselves that engaged in this act, putatively leaving their “real” selves untouched by it.

This cuts to the heart of why Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips have, in a post-shock era, managed to shock us. In the realm of online pornography, there is a frame. The acts displayed are presented within a literal digital frame within the browser window. This telegraphs that the people involved are participating in a kind of physicalized fiction, a kind of performance.

For decades, we’ve been acculturated to this idea: porn stars (we’ve learned) have home lives and families; they win awards for their performances; and, as we’ve seen with the most famous example of the “traditional" porn star, Jenna Jameson, they sometimes have well-founded political beliefs. This frame served as a barrier against that final step of dehumanization. Whatever might take place in the frame, they are real people.

What Bonnie Blue, Lilly Phillips and the entire OnlyFans enterprise have done is dissolve that frame. The extreme acts, the realism of the women’s presentation of their personalities, the fact that Lily’s “financial manager” is her own mother, destroys any final barrier between the objectification they engage in and their self. It’s not only that they have made the startlingly unnatural leap of self-objectification in a given scenario or professional role. It is, rather, that they have turned their lives their youth, their promise — their selves — into sexual objects, mere things.

Students of history, as well as regular people with sufficient experience in life, know that, eventually, the world tramples things. Warhols are consumed by conflagrations in LA and, in one moment, artifacts worth millions become dust. Heirlooms get smashed by rambunctious children. Once new furniture molders. Jewelry cheapens. This is the fate of a thing, and only by a sentimental or moral attachment provided by a dedicated human — a parent to their grown child’s baby shoes, a devotee to a religious icon, a collector to a rare find — does the thing have any hope of surviving the entropy of life.

This is the risk we see latent in the actions of these young women. For now, they are flush with money and (maybe more to the point) attention. They are shiny objects who have managed to stay in our collective feed while everything else disappears within moments. But the feed will move on, and where will that leave them?

Twenty years ago, a talented on-the-rise actor named Chloë Sevigny performed a graphic sex act in a film. That act has stayed with her since then, a thing-like appendage that has been, unfairly, perhaps even unjustly, stitched onto her public persona and that she’s been forced to carry with her ever since.

That was just a few frames of film in an otherwise uninteresting movie. For women who have turned their lives into a sexual spectacle, the consequences are much more extreme. And what horrifies us most about the presentiment of the existential danger they face is that not only do they not seem to know it’s there, but that they truly don’t care.

In my latest investigation at Pirate Wires, “Why is the Tesla Takedown Movement Doing Pro-War Ukraine Activism?”, I dive into what is one of the most effective propaganda operation in recent years. Below is an account of how that investigation took place.

Over the past few months, a movement calling itself Tesla Takedown has gone global. You’ve seen the images on the news and social media — protesters holding signs, chanting about fascism, calling for others to join the effort to drive the Tesla stock down.

The logic the protest organizers employ is simple: Musk is steering the US towards fascism. Most of his wealth is in Tesla. Therefore, if you want to stop Musk, stop Tesla.

That’s all well and fine — except the details tell a very different story.

I’ve spent dozens of hours investigating the Tesla Takedown movement. I can tell you one thing about it definitively: none of it is what it seems.

The anti-Musk effort was launched after the inauguration, when Musk made his famous (or infamous) “arm gesture.” The very next day — the very next morning — dozens of Reddit communities began banning links from X. Most of the earliest ones were groups dedicated to top-tier UK football (“soccer” for US readers) teams.

Many of the posts proposing X link bans became the top posts of all time in those groups. In one case, the proposal to ban X links got more upvotes than a post celebrating the team’s first championship win in 30 years. Sound likely to you? Me neither.

As I continued to dive into Tesla Takedown, I kept feeling as if there were a pattern lurking. I’d see it without fully noticing it. I wasn’t totally sure what it was, but I knew something was there: it was that cliché about feeling as if you’re being followed. And then, suddenly, it clicked.

Reporting the Reddit X ban link piece, I painstakingly assembled a timeline of the earliest posts proposing a given subreddit ban links from the Musk-owned site. Mashable had reported that r/hockey was the first to do so. (That wasn’t even close to accurate.)

One of the first communities to propose banning X was a subreddit dedicated to the Tottenham football club. That, again, was strange. I personally know many Tottenham fans, since it’s considered the “Jewish” club in the UK. Precisely 0 of them care about X links.

In the process, I came across a post on X by an account for the Armed Forces Spurs Official Supporters Club — that’s a group dedicated to Tottenham fans who serve, or have served, in the UK military. The post read:

As long as Mr. Musk continues to influence policies that undermine military aid, real-time defence [sic], and support for Ukraine’s people and Armed Forces, we cannot, in good conscience, continue using this platform he owns, uses to do harm and significantly profits from. Out. 🇬🇧 🇺🇦

Excuse me, what?

Why on earth would this group post — stridently, at that — about Musk’s alleged decision to “undermine military aid”? And that’s when the lurking pattern stepped out of the shadow.

Over those weeks of diving deep into social media accounts run by the Tesla Takedown movement (okay, I confess: it was mostly Bluesky), I had seen the same color again and again. Blue and yellow. Yellow and blue. It wasn’t just the colors. It was the flag. It was the slogans. It was the battle cry, Slava Ukraini! It was Zelensky being heroized in banners and signs. It was all of it.

Let me take a beat here to clarify: I support Ukraine in this war. I believe the country is fighting a just war. It was attacked, brutally. Its leaders, and its people, have displayed immense bravery and resilience. For me, this investigation was’t about tearing down Ukraine. It’s about reporting what is really going on in our information ecosystem.

But what I found in the Tesla Takedown movement could not be ignored. In dozens of social media posts, at protests, in YouTube videos: it was Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.

• In Dedham, Massachusetts, protesters held “Stand With Ukraine” signs.

• In rural Colorado, a protester held a “We support Ukraine” poster.

• In Vallejo, California a Ukraine sign was among the most prominent.

• In White Plains, New York, one protester was draped in a Ukraine flag and another held a sign with the country’s military emblem on it.

• In Columbus, Ohio, where protesters held Ukraine flags and “Support Ukraine” signs

• At a separate protest in Columbus, protesters held pro-Ukraine signs.

• In Lawrence, New Jersey, Ukraine signs were displayed.

There was pro-Ukraine imagery prominently displayed at Tesla Takedown protests in: Spokane, Washington; Sarasota, Florida; Rochester, New York; Smithtown, Long Island; Kansas City, Missouri; Madison, Wisconsin; Northbrook, Illinois; Salt Lake City, Utah; Troy, Michigan; Arlington, Virginia; Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In the UK, Tesla Takedown organizers timed protests so they would be coordinated with pro-Ukraine demonstrations. Alex Winter, one of the US organizers, posted ceaselessly about Ukraine — before abruptly deleting all his Bluesky posts in April.

The deeper I went, the more I saw the outlines of something else: a coordinated campaign leveraging cultural activism and grassroots optics to attack a geopolitical opponent of the war. A war many Americans have tuned out—but one European governments still see as existential.

Which might help explain the intensity.

For me, things fell into place when I realized that the Reddit X ban link and the Ukraine effort were not distinct but continuous. The operation was not limited and objectives-bound, but broad and strategic. It was implemented at a scale in direct proportion to the threat that Trump presented to those who designed it.

This made it multi-faceted, but it also made it urgent. And that made it vulnerable to exposure. In a separate Pirate Wires piece, “Tesla Takedown Tied to Short Sellers”, I traced how a network of activist Wikipedia editors (with ties to short-sellers betting against Tesla stock) helped seed the movement’s online narrative. I could do that because the campaign was run on an open platform, Wikipedia. But also because the people behind it boasted about what they were doing.

What we’re seeing isn’t just protest. It’s not even just information warfare. It’s the convergence of elite anxiety, European soft power, financial interests, activist media, and digital platforms into one big narrative weapon: Musk as threat vector, Tesla as pressure point, Reddit and Wikipedia — and the media more generally — as the battlefield.

Is this a conspiracy? Yes, and no. Some aspects of its were probably more ad hoc than others. Some were absolutely planned. But this is how modern media warfare is waged: it’s hybrid, not only in terms of its kinetic vs psychological elements, but even within the propaganda battlefield.

The best propagandists are hijack artists. They don’t create from scratch, they co-opt energy, assets, movements, accounts, and culture. If you want to know where the war’s going next, follow these flags.

— AR

More reporting on this at Pirate Wires. If you’re reading this on Substack, make sure you’re also following the main story there. And please do subscribe to The Burning Telegraph.

📎 Why is the Tesla Takedown Movement Doing Pro-War Ukraine Activism?

📎 Tesla Takedown Tied to Short Sellers

📎 Reddit X Link Ban Coordinated Astroturfing

What can you say about a book that says so much? If there were a universe in three of Primo Levi’s books — If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved — then combined in them is a black hole formed by their collision, a void of human understanding, an abyss of comprehension lying between what is possible and the real. Primo Levi managed to re-create the un-re-creatable and to speak the unspeakable.

Without pathos, without plot, without even theme, he reveals the depths of human suffering where there exists an event horizon of what can only be called evil. Beyond that boundary, there is the nothingness of the other — not the other to whom we can relate as humans, as victims, as fellow sufferers, or even bearers of indifference — rather, the boundary that separates the individuated self from the human automaton, the Nazi, the tool of evil, a bolt-gun in the hands of a being who is not properly of this world.

One of the strangest things to be found in Levi’s work is, ironically, the taxonomy of horrors which was not just inflicted by the Germans but, first, imagined by them. Each one is different, each fascinating in its symmetries, in its unexpectedness, in its total bigness (the Thousand Year Reich and its Final Solution), as well as in its microscopic pettiness (as Levi describes the little, pointless tortures, like providing camp inmates too little time, and too few latrines, to adequately relieve themselves in the morning). They form a radiolaria of torture that, for Levi, is the flower of evil. It is the unthinkable and the unmistakable, the true signs of a singular species. It’s what sends the question of Why? spinning into infinite regress — an echo in the history of hatred.

What is truly odd, but also sadly and sometimes pathetically uplifting, is the levity that appears in Levi’s description of the events. We experience this most sharply through character: the three of four figures-of-fun for whom an extreme and immediate adaptation is only a natural reaction to life in the lager, or camp, and who, on account of this, make up a sideshow of the human spirit. Their display is not grand and revealing, much like an actual sideshow, but fleeting: the less you see of them, the more wondrous their appearance (and their existence) becomes.

This is the dwarf Elias described in If This Is a Man (I use the translation of the title closer to the original Italian, rather than its American conversion). Elias, a lunatic, a dolt, a sick man “out there” in the pre- and postwar world, is, in the lager, a naturally comfortable creature, running around, working with the strength of 10 men, making himself into a battering ram as he flies head first into the midsections of enemies and adversaries, all of whom are fellow inmates and most of whom are fellow Jews. This is the young man who takes up empathy as an art of survival, turning it on like a charm, transforming the most fundamental of human values — deeper than a value, a substrate of values — into a chisel, even a weapon.

This is the tin-man tyrant, Chaim Rumkowski, who, colluding with the Nazis, managed to rule the Łódź Ghetto as a “king of the Jews.” In the face of certain death, this figure lorded over his fellow ghetto prisoners while believing himself to be their savior, a smalltime Herod who, in the end, supervised his own demise.

And yet the delight of these characters surviving as individuals dissolves in a noxious solution, a by-product of mechanized genocide. But the teller of the tale, Levi, survives, making it seem — to him, to us, to the condemned? — as if that were his purpose, as if that were the reason for his survival.

How can that be? We know that morally, logically, it can’t. We know that a man writing down the story of what happened has no more right to live than a mother trying to protect her hounded, harassed, tortured, and starved children. Or does he? We vacillate with Levi who was forever trapped in that uncomfortable equilibrium, knowing that the basis for his own survival is invalid but somehow unable to argue with its inescapability.

And we vacillate too, asking, What is this we’re reading? Is it a fiction so deep it has drawn us into a newly created world, a world demonic and horrible in every detail? Of course not. This is recorded reality, an unimaginable truth that violates all the knowledge, feeling, and collective assumptions that make us who we are. It’s a reality that tears through everything we think we know about the world.

Which is why we almost physically reject the book. To get through it, we read through a lens. We invent all sorts of reasons to permit ourselves to believe in it, including those, chronicled by Levi, that come in the form of questions about why “they” didn’t escape, why they didn’t revolt, why they didn’t … didn’t what?

Others choose, maybe not unwisely, to avoid these books. Balking at even their suggestion, they reference an aversion to reading about the Holocaust. They don’t know about that “stuff.” And, of course, they are right. They don’t. But in confronting these books, in allowing ourselves to be drawn into the horror, we face not the evil that Levi faced, but rather ourselves. We face our cowardice, and the possibility of what might beset us, too. We see in this reckoning how ill-prepared we are. We see, tragically, that the lesson of the Holocaust has given us nothing; or, rather, that we’ve taken nothing from it.

In our ongoing search for meaning, we yearn to be absorbed by something beyond us, by something bigger and greater that can reveal truth — and in their 200 and some short pages, each of these books reveals dire, necessary truths. But, living beyond skepticism, we may consider ourselves too cynical, too familiar with the hard realities of life, to need further instruction in those difficult truths.

The irony is that we are not as wide-eyed and innocent, not as susceptible and believing as the Jews, and all the others, who stepped off the cattle cars to be stripped, layer by layer, fiber by fiber, word by word, memory by memory, and made with frightening speed into something less than, lower than, beasts. We are, instead, more wide-eyed, more innocent to its reality since we, unlike them, have what you might call the benefit of history. Turning our faces away from that lived experience of history, which can be gained only through books like Levi’s, we strengthen our weakness. Knowing that it once occurred, we firmly expect it to never happen again. Like a Maginot Line of memory, our slogan of vigilance, Never again, becomes not a call to action but a statement of belief.

Those “privileged” (in the eerie words of Isaac Bashevis Singer) to have fallen victim to the Holocaust at least had no expectation of even its possibility; once confronted, they could see for themselves where they were, even if that amounted, as it mostly did, to nothing. Not wanting to know, we continue consuming the all-but-guaranteed Holocaust best sellers carrying clear-cut messages. We snap selfies at the memorials. We make our treacly pronouncements, next to which silence is infinitely preferable. We hide in the notion that, if not history, then at least our own lives constitute some sort of line, always pointed upward. And if outliers like disease or accident happen to disrupt the line, no matter: we can simply disregard them.

What we absolutely refuse to acknowledge is the notion we can be them, the privileged who were subject not just to the lunatic automatons and their bolt-guns but also to the sideshow freaks of lager life. We cannot, and will not, accept the idea that they were once us. Standing on that certainty, knowing we will not permit a flicker of self-identification with those who perished (or even those who lived), we have already forgotten.

My recent investigation for Pirate Wires (published February 20) exposed an extensive propaganda network based out of the r/Palestine subreddit that, among other activities, spreads content sourced from US-designated terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah by a group called Resistance News Network (RNN), whose main activity revolves around aggregating, translating and spreading posts from at least 12 separate terror organizations spanning dozens of channels (many of the terror groups operate multiple channels).

My report shows how RNN content is then spread by members of the r/Palestine network on various social platforms, including Reddit. It also shows how the r/Palestine network employs a command-and-control apparatus run out of a Discord server by the same name to coordinate activities across X, where it attempts to manipulate Community Notes, Wikipedia, where the network coordinates mass editing, Discord, Quora, and Reddit. Their machinations have tremendous downstream effects on platforms utilizing these data, including Google Search results, large language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and YouTube’s topical context panels presented alongside videos about sensitive topics such as the Holocaust.

In response to my report, Reddit launched an internal investigation into the claims. There were four main findings from the investigation. According to Reddit, the investigation:

• “[D]idn’t find any evidence of moderators posting or promoting terrorist propaganda on Reddit.”

• Found “four pieces of terrorist propaganda (none posted by the mods).”

• Found that “Moderator contributions in the communities we[they] investigated represented <1% of overall contributions, and this is less than the typical level of mods site-wide.”

• Found that “While the moderators' removal actions do include some political content, the takedowns were in line with respective subreddit rules, did not focus on Israel/Palestine issues, did not demonstrate a discernible bias, and did not display anomalies when compared with other mod teams.”

Regarding the investigation’s finding that there is no evidence of r/Palestine moderators promoting terrorist propaganda on Reddit, this is clearly inaccurate. At least six moderators from the r/Palestine propaganda network (some of whom moderate major subreddits like r/Documentaries and r/therewasanattempt) have posted terror-linked content.

On March 24, 2024, r/fight_disinformation moderator u/monaqur posted an image of the spokesman for the Houthis — a US-designated terror organization — that links to a post in RNN’s Telegram channel. (In case there was any doubt about the provenance of the post, u/monaqur titled it “Resistance News Network”.) This post remains live on Reddit as of time of writing. Other RNN-sourced posts by u/monaqur remain live on Reddit at the time of writing.

One of the most influential moderators in the r/Palestine network, u/Sabbah, has posted content from Samidoun (a US-designated terror entity highlighted by my investigation) on numerous occasions. At least two of those posts — the first of which includes a comment by u/Sabbah linking directly to Samidoun’s website — are still live on Reddit as of time of writing. (The first of those posts was included in my original investigation.)

Another moderator in the r/Palestine network, u/sum1tup, who moderates the r/Palestine subreddit itself, recruited Reddit users to an event organization by a group which promotes Samidoun. Moderator u/_makoccino_ posted content recruiting users to attend a Samidoun-linked event using with a digital flier that features the Samidoun logo. Those posts are live as of time of writing.

u/hunegypt, a moderator of r/Palestine and one of the most influential members of the network, has posted multiple pieces of content publicizing or glorifying US-designated foreign terror organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This includes a congratulatory post in the r/Panarab subreddit, one of the major nodes of the r/Palestine network, about the birth of PFLP and its founder George Habash featuring a PFLP propaganda poster. That post is still live. hunegypt also posted content celebrating PFLP terrorist Leila Khaled, who hijacked two airplanes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including an American plane. The post reads, “Known for her role as the first female plane-hijacker, Leila became the female face of the Palestinian liberation resistance.” That post is still live.

Another r/Palestine moderator, u/isawasin, posted a celebration of PFLP founder George Habash’s birthday, captioned, “Happy birthday to the Palestinian revolutionary George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Rest In Power!” That post is still live. u/aanonymos, another moderator of r/Panarab, posted PFLP propaganda content in a post titled, ‘“Al-Hakim Taught Us America is the Head of the Snake,” a modern rendition of a classic PFLP song.’ That post is still live.

The second conclusion in Reddit’s investigation is that the internal investigation was able to find only four pieces of content. Pirate Wires has identified more than four-dozen pieces of content — text posts, comments, links, screenshots and other formats — boosting foreign terror organizations or directing Reddit users to access this material via RNN, including the posts mentioned above posted by r/Palestine network moderators. A small sample of content glorifying US-designated terror organizations, or taken from RNN, which aggregates content from these groups, includes:

• A post glorifying Al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas that led the October 7 attacks. This post, which also appeared on RNN, is still live.

• A post showing a video of a Hezbollah operation targeting Israeli soldiers (including a violent explosion) under the title “Scenes from the operation PalestineResist of the Islamic Resistance targeting a gathering of ‘israeli’ enemy soldiers.” (“Islamic Resistance” is the recently revised slogan of Hezbollah.)

• A post sourced from RNN reporting Israeli military movement in Syria.

• A post in r/Panarab showing a photo of former Hamas leader and architect of October 7 attacks Yahaya Sinwar with the caption, “I will never forgot this guy and the way he fought to his last breath( what a warrior)”

• A post, cited in my original reporting, showing a screenshot of an RNN post quoting Houthi leader Mohammad Ali Al-Houthi celebrating attacks on the US military.

• A post in the r/Panarab, sourced from RNN, showing former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar with the first comment detailing its provenance, “per resistance news network on telegram: ‘And for red freedom there is a door… Knocked upon by every blood-stained hand.’”

(Note: All the above posts were live at time of writing, which is weeks after the investigation concluded.)

Each of the posts listed above was easily found using Reddit’s search bar, and has been reported to Reddit by users, in some cases multiple times. Despite this, the majority of the posts listed above, as well as posts not listed (for sake of space) in this report, have not been actioned by Reddit despite their ban on RNN links described in their investigation findings post.

In addition to serious legal issues they present, these posts clearly violate Reddit's own policies. According to Reddit:

“The Reddit Rules explicitly prohibits content that glorifies, incites or calls for violence or physical harm, including content that promotes or supports the activities of terrorist or designated terrorist organizations. Violative content includes: propaganda material posted by terrorists or designated terrorist organizations and their supporters, expressions of affiliation or support for terrorists or designated terrorist organizations, and glorification of terrorist acts. It also includes content that solicits or incites a person or group to participate, commit, or contribute to terrorist activities.”

The Reddit investigation also found that “Moderator contributions in the communities we investigated represented <1% of overall contributions, and this is less than the typical level of mods site-wide.” What this finding does not speak to is the extent to which r/Palestine network moderators were approving highly political or even radical content in major subreddits that have nothing to do with the Mideast.

My original investigation focused on how the r/Palestine network infiltrated major subreddits like r/Documentaries (20 million members), with eight out of 14 non-bot moderators belonging to the network. In the subreddit, I reported, there is“a steady through-line of anti-Israel or pro-Palestine propaganda on a cycle that separates them by mere days — in some cases, no more than a single day. No other topic or theme on r/Documentaries receives this persistent and intensive focus.” This was not addressed by the investigation. Nor were numerous other examples of major subreddits that had been infiltrated by the network, like r/therewasanattempt, whose page banner is a bull’s eye in the colors of the Palestinian flag, the words “Free Palestine” around it, and a map of Israel at its center.

Finally, on the investigation’s findings concerning “moderators’ removal actions” (or, in simpler language, censorship of users not aligned with r/Palestine ideologies), the investigation found that “Moderators across the ideological spectrum are sometimes relying on bots to preemptively ban users.” However, the investigation provided no quantification of the extent to which this is happening in either the r/Palestine network or across other subreddits. It also made no mention of any other subreddits where Reddit found this to be happening.

A Reddit admin also appears to have spoken to one of the r/Palestine network moderators featured in my story, u/BlueberryBubblyBuzz (aka u/Kumquat_conniption), about the investigation while it was underway. According to the mod, the admin informed them of the timing of the investigation.

In response to questions I submitted concerning the investigation team, a Reddit spokesperson responded, saying, “We have a number of internal teams that work together to investigate and review reports. We also consulted with a third party organization as part of our investigation.”

Asked whether Reddits consider Resistance News Network to be a legitimate source of information or if RNN-sourced posts or comments violative, Reddit said, “Yes, they are violative – that’s why we banned links to the Resistance News Network as a result of our investigation following your story.”

Reddit also responded, saying, “We are always listening to feedback from our community and investigating reports we receive. Much of this content was already discovered and actioned.”

On the question of how the company defines terror-related content, Reddit said:

Reddit’s definition includes (but is not limited to): “Content that promotes or supports the activities of terrorists or designated terrorist organizations. Violative content includes: propaganda material posted by terrorists or designated terrorist organizations and their supporters, expressions of affiliation or support for terrorists or designated terrorist organizations, and glorification of terrorist acts. It also includes content that solicits or incites a person or group to participate, commit, or contribute to terrorist activities.”

As noted above, we would also include content sourced from FTOs, even if not violating on its face – which is why we have banned content from the RNN.

Reddit Makes a Policy Change

In addition to the investigation, Reddit also seems to have made a significant change to its trust and safety policy. On March 5, the company posted an update to r/RedditSafety titled, “Warning users that upvote violent content.”

The policy update states:

Today we are rolling out a new (sort of) enforcement action across the site. Historically, the only person actioned for posting violating content was the user who posted the content. The Reddit ecosystem relies on engaged users to downvote bad content and report potentially violative content. This not only minimizes the distribution of the bad content, but it also ensures that the bad content is more likely to be removed. On the other hand, upvoting bad or violating content interferes with this system.

So, starting today, users who, within a certain timeframe, upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies will begin to receive a warning. We have done this in the past for quarantined communities and found that it did help to reduce exposure to bad content, so we are experimenting with this sitewide. This will begin with users who are upvoting violent content, but we may consider expanding this in the future. In addition, while this is currently “warn only,” we will consider adding additional actions down the road.

Update: A number of users and moderators in the r/Palestine network identified in my story and above have been suspended. These include:

• u/monaqur (mod of r/fight_disinformation and r/FreedomOfPalestine)

• u/isawasin (mod of r/israelexposed and r/palestineisrael1)

• u/k1m0c (mod of r/BoycottIsrael)

• u/aanonymos (mod of r/Panarab)

• u/GDtayab (participant in r/Palestine)

• u/AcademicCollar8404 (participant in r/Palestine)

• u/petergriffin_yaoi (mentioned in the original article; participant in r/TrueAnon)

While numerous conglomerate-owned or billionaire-controlled media companies have advanced the pharmaceutical agenda, only one is owned outright by a vaccine-manufacturing, Big Pharma billionaire: the Los Angeles Times.

In 2018, South African-born billionaire physician Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times, along with its sister publication the San Diego Union Tribune, for $500 million. Soon-Shiong cited “the role that journalism needs to play in a free society” as his reason for buying the papers.

Under Soon-Shiong’s ownership, the LA Times has been one of the most hardline newspapers in the country on the issue of COVID vaccines. “It’s time to get tough on COVID vaccine evaders,” the paper declared in the headline of a July 2021 editorial. Weeks later, the editorial board ran another piece, this one titled, “Bring on the COVID vaccination mandates,” which argued that people who don’t want the COVID vaccines were driven by “mystical reasons.”

Days later, the paper hammered the same idea again with an editorial titled, “There is no absolute right to refuse vaccination,” arguing anyone attending work, college, school or any other indoor setting must be vaccinated. Finally, the kicker came in November 2021 when the LA Times opined, "Young kids should get the COVID-19 vaccine, but not be forced to — yet.”

The paper has been just as uncompromising in its take on the figure on the other side of this issue, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In November, one of the LA Times’ most prominent columnists called RFK Jr.’s appointment a “catastrophe for public health.” Another columnist argued that RFK would be a “disaster.”

This month, however, Soon-Shiong made a series of startling comments about RFJ Jr. on a viral interview on the 2WAY show hosted by Mark Halperin. “I think people misunderstand Bobby Kennedy,” Soon-Shiong said in the interview, where he praised RFK for his early stance against carcinogenic artificial food coloring. "He’s really all about the science. After hours of sitting down with him, [I can attest that] he knows more about the science than most doctors.”

Given RFK’s long established stance on the COVID vaccines, Soon-Shiong’s recent comments represent such a dramatic reversal they’re almost difficult to make sense of — until we dig a bit deeper.

In 2022, Soon-Shiong again made headlines when he inaugurated a $200 million vaccine manufacturing facility in his native South Africa. The motivation for the move, he said in front of a congressional committee on Africa chaired at the time by the now-embattled mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was about ensuring "that Africa is making vaccines for Africa.”

That’s a noble sentiment, but it’s not one that justifies such a risky strategic investment. In the closing section of his testimony, however, Soon-Shiong made a deeper point that reveals what his African vaccine initiative is really about:

“We simply cannot continue to rely solely on vaccines that were developed in the early phase of the pandemic at a time when both the virus and our understanding of how to prevent infection and disease have matured. There is a path forward.”

That path lies in what Soon-Shiong calls “second generation vaccines.” These are COVID vaccines based on technology that build on the previous wave of vaccine development and deployment in human populations. In this context, Soon-Shiong is setting out to create what he calls a “universal booster” vaccine, one that can be given as a third shot after either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

Developed by Soon-Shiong’s company Immunity Bio, the universal booster would be a kind of hybrid vaccine — part RNA and part DNA. The idea is that the RNA vaccines would establish antibodies in the patient to fight the virus while the DNA vaccine would activate T-cells to clear the virus from the patient’s body.

For Soon-Shiong, the second-generation vaccine is core to his long-term business strategy. And for good reason. In 2022 (the year Soon-Shiong launched his South African vaccine manufacturing program), Pfizer brought in $38 billion in COVID vaccine-derived revenue alone. That might not be too surprising given that Pfizer is a longstanding pharma giant. But that same year, Moderna — a company that had virtually no significant revenue until the pandemic — saw $18 billion in revenue from its mRNA vaccine.

Launching his South African facility, Soon-Shiong said his aim was to produce 1 billion COVID vaccine doses by 2025. Taking an average price per dose of around $18 (Pfizer charges around $24 per dose for high income countries, and about half that for low-income countries), it’s not hard to see how a potential deal turns ImmunityBio into a global force that can compete with giants like Pfizer and Moderna.

For Soon-Shiong, however, the real prize is cancer. For years, he’s been pounding on a single — and singular — message about the disease, arguing that traditional cancer therapies like chemo and radiation wipe out Natural Killer Cells, the human body’s own inherent anti-cancer therapy. With therapies that harness the power of Natural Killer Cells, Soon-Shiong believes we can change what he calls the “cancer paradigm.”

If he succeeds in this, Soon-Shiong will be able to patent and sell a game-changing therapy for a disease that impacts tens of millions of people each year. This would enrich Soon-Shiong beyond imagination. But it would also establish his name among the pantheon of great scientist innovators like Jonas Salk and Louis Pasteur.

To achieve this, however, Soon-Shiong needs capital. While his personal fortune remains in the billions, his business fortunes have taken a less-than-rosy turn. NantHealth, a healthcare subsidiary under Soon-Shiong’s holding company NantWorks, saw its market cap plunge from a high of around $2 billion in 2016 to $3,250 today — a 99.9% drop in value.

On top of this, as Soon-Shiong himself has admitted, the Los Angeles Times is a massive financial burden, with losses from last year alone totaling somewhere between $30 and $40 million. Soon-Shiong has previously stated that he’s invested “hundreds of millions of dollars, approaching a billion dollars” to keep the LA Times going.

Capitalizing on the COVID vaccine opportunity depends on Soon-Shiong’s ability to win federal contracts and secure export licenses — including for equipment like the bioreactors located in his American facilities that are required in his South African plant. Those decisions will now be made by a figure that Soon-Shiong’s paper had once attacked as uninformed, misguided and barely short of medically evil: Bobby Kennedy.

This explains Soon-Shiong’s recent podcast appearance. But what’s happening at the Los Angeles Times is bigger than that.

In October, Soon-Shiong stirred a major controversy in the media when he refused to allow the LA Times to endorse Kamala Harris for president, leading to the head of the paper’s opinion section to resign. In November, Soon-Shiong blocked an editorial by the LA Times arguing that Trump should not be able to fast-track cabinet confirmations, like that of RFK Jr. Soon-Shiong also pledged to add a “bias meter” to the newspaper’s website and launch a health podcast called Health Decoded.

All this has the ring of media trust-building — as it’s likely intended to. But in reality, it’s brand building. The LA Times is not only one of the country’s most left-wing newspapers, it’s also (as we’ve seen) been among the most strident on vaccine mandates. By flipping the editorial stance and cozying up to Kennedy, Soon-Shiong is creating an opportunity to transform the LA Times from a reputational liability into a point of leverage.

As owner of the sixth biggest US newspaper at his disposal, Soon-Shiong can play Big Pharma’s media game far more effectively than Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, who are competing to advertise their products against valuable news content. Soon-Shiong is now both publisher and advertiser. The real lesson is that if you want to own the issue, first you need to own the media.

For more more investigative pieces on media malfeasance, follow me on Instagram or X.

CBS News is boiling in controversy this week after author Ta-Nehisi Coates—who made his name, fame and fortune calling for reparations for black Americans— sawt down for an interview with CBS News. Problem was, the interviewer, Tony Dokoupil, dared to push back on some of the more extravagant claims Coates makes in his new book on the Israel-Arab conflict.

This line of questioning, which we once called “journalism,” was deemed inappropriate by CBS brass, who subjected Dokoupil to a struggle session with the network’s “Race and Culture Unit” (yes, that’s a real thing), intervention by a DEI specialist (of course), and a verbal pounding by executives that left Dokoupil distraught.

It’s weird that we’re all now talking about Coates, who, in many ways, ignited the media’s passion for race politics in the early 2010s. Coates disappeared for a good few years to cash in on his literary stardom by writing “Back Panther” graphic novels for Marvel. Cha-f’ing-ching. But he re-emerged, right on time for the conflict of a generation, by penning a book on the Mideast, an immensely complex topic he knows nothing about, aside from what was gained on a 10-day trip to the region.

But this is all part and parcel—not just to Coates but to the vapid, self-obsessed well of hypocrisy of the media. Don’t believe me? Well, read on!

The Rise of Ta-Nehisi: Loving…Bill Cosby?

Most people know Coates for his Atlantic cover story advocating for reparations. However, his breakout moment came with a 2008 piece in the Atlantic, “This is How We Lost to the White Man,” that amounts to a 7,000-word hagiography of, yes, post-rape-allegation Bill Cosby. In the piece, Coates positioned Cosby as a symbol of Black independence, moral clarity, and social vision, placing the accused rapist in the pantheon of black historical giants like Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington.

But Coates didn’t stop there. In an act of supreme chutzpah, he even compared Cosby to Martin Luther King, Jr., attempting to contrast Cosby’s so-called "authentic" stance with MLK’s supposedly "gauzy" dream. Coates wrote:

"Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot."

At that point, Coates was not just elevating Cosby; he was rewriting the narrative. He transformed Cosby into a crusader for Black self-empowerment, ignoring the troubling context surrounding Cosby’s past.

The Omission That Speaks Volumes

This piece, which put Coates on the map in literary circles, was published just two years after Philadelphia magazine reported graphic allegations by Andrea Constand that Cosby had drugged and raped her. Other similar allegations had already surfaced: in 2005, Beth Ferrier told the Philadelphia Daily News that Cosby had drugged her, and later in 2006, Philadelphia published Barbara Bowman's account of a similar incident.

Coates and The Atlantic editors either ignored these reports or, worse, chose to overlook them entirely. Instead, in his long essay, Coates described Cosby as a moral evangelist, writing about his speeches to Black audiences and comparing him to Malcolm X. The piece opens with Coates’ description of Cosby’s address in Detroit:

"Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X."

For a journalist to miss—or deliberately ignore—such damning accusations is more than an oversight; it’s a pattern. Coates has consistently pushed his vision of "justice" while deleting any layers of context that might challenge his perspective. This same approach is evident in his latest work on Israel-Palestine, where he omits mention of Hamas or Hezbollah, reducing a complex issue into a one-sided polemic.

Coates’ failure to engage with context reveals a troubling trend: his journalistic method revolves around crafting narratives that serve his polemics, regardless of facts. Even as he quoted Cosby preaching self-empowerment to Black men, saying, "Men, if you want to win, we can win," Coates made no mention of the irony and hypocrisy of Cosby’s message given the numerous allegations of sexual assault against him. He quoted Cosby advocating for men to "protect our women and children" while omitting that Cosby’s youngest accuser was only 16 years old when she alleged he had raped her.

This selective storytelling isn’t a bug in Coates’ writing; it’s a feature. His pattern is to erase inconvenient truths in order to push a zero-sum version of justice—one that fits his ideological goals but disregards broader realities.

CBS’s decision to criticize Dokoupil for his questioning of Coates is a prime example of culture capture. As I wrote in my *UnHerd* article, legacy media outlets like CBS have long abandoned their role as objective arbiters. Instead, they have become gatekeepers, shielding cultural icons like Coates from genuine scrutiny. They adopt the interests of those they favor, refusing to challenge the figures they have invested in promoting.

This pattern reflects a larger crisis within legacy media, where ideological alignment takes precedence over journalistic integrity. Coates’ historical illiteracy, noted by historians Simon Sebag Montefiore and Simon Schama, further underscores this issue. Montefiore tweeted that Coates is "historically illiterate," highlighting how Coates’ lack of historical understanding leads to simplistic and misleading narratives. Schama echoed this sentiment, warning of the dangers of historical cherry-picking—a method Coates frequently employs to support his narratives without engaging with complexity.

The symbiotic relationship between Coates and outlets like CBS ultimately weakens both parties. Coates’ work, which sacrifices complexity for ideological purity, fits perfectly within a media landscape that prioritizes narrative over truth. But this relationship is unsustainable. As audiences grow more skeptical of legacy media’s intentions, controversies like this accelerate the decline of trust in these institutions.

CBS’s reluctance to support its own interviewer shows that its commitment is not to journalism but to maintaining its ideological narrative. When even the simplest questions are off-limits, audiences recognize that what’s being presented is not a pursuit of truth but an act of protection.

The Ta-Nehisi Coates controversy is a microcosm of the deeper issues plaguing legacy media today. It’s not just about Coates; it’s about the structures that allow figures like him to rise without scrutiny. For legacy media to regain its credibility, it must abandon its habit of protecting cultural icons and return to fostering genuine debate. Until that happens, both Coates and the media that amplify his voice will continue their decline.

The public’s disillusionment is growing, and the echo chamber built by Coates and the outlets that support him serves only to push audiences further away. If the media continues down this path, it will find itself left with an ever-shrinking base, while the rest of the public looks elsewhere for genuine insight and truth.

Wikipedia and Paid Bias

In addition to exploring the recent controversy surrounding Ta-Nehisi Coates, I recently published a new piece on Pirate Wires titled How Wikipedia is Becoming a Massive Pay-to-Play Scheme. The article investigates how the world’s largest open-source knowledge platform is increasingly being manipulated by PR firms and corporate interests.

As I detail in the piece:

Over the past two decades, as Wikipedia rose to the fourth most visited site online, a boomtown industry feeding an insatiable demand for services like article creation, editing, management and deletion has emerged. While the Wikipedia community, along with the Wikimedia Foundation, work to fight illicit “black hat” editing with undisclosed conflicts of interest, it’s a losing battle, with a seemingly unlimited supply of new front companies springing up to replace editor accounts and companies that get banned from the site.

But the white hat vs. black hat distinction — white-hat editing abides by the site’s regulations, like disclosing paid interests and not making direct edits to articles — sidesteps the real point: given the sheer scale of paid editing on Wikipedia, there’s a reasonable likelihood that any article with even the most remote economic interest will eventually be shaped by the entity that stands to benefit. The question this leaves us asking is whether we can really apply the historic term “encyclopedia” to a sprawling network of thousands of articles carefully pruned by the PR departments of billion dollar companies, or if Wikipedia is something else entirely.

In the piece, I show how everyone from the New York Times to NBC News to Facebook, Axios, Waymo, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the deputy defense secretary, Salesforce and even Breyer’s ice cream engages in the pay-to-play approach to editing their corporate reality.

Here’s the link again: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-is-becoming-a-massive-pay-to-play-scheme

Till next time – ta!

For over four decades, Iran has crafted a network of proxy militias across the Middle East to project power and encircle its adversaries, particularly Israel. This “ring of fire” was designed in part to allow Iran the strategic time and space it needed to develop its most important asset, a nuclear weapon that would lend it ultimate deterrence until the Islamic Republic ascended to its place as a legitimized global power on the world stage.

With the October 7 attack last year, it appeared that Iran, through the actions of its Palestinian proxy, Hamas, had delivered its coup de grâce. Israel’s response to Hamas’ invasion appeared to derail the country’s normalization talks with Saudi Arabia, which would have fully aligned the Jewish state with many of its most powerful former Arab enemies—Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, with more likely to come—who also happen to be Iran’s chief adversaries in the Muslim world. The ring of fire was burning hot, and Israel was trapped.

But over the past year—and culminating in the extraordinary gains Israel has made against Hezbollah in just the past few weeks—Israel has not simply disrupted Iran’s grand strategy but turned it on its head, transforming what was its greatest strength into a glaring weakness. The Axis of Resistance is all but broken and Iran is desperately exposed. Most importantly, Israel is readying to exploit this historic vulnerability.  

It’s astonishing to realize how close Iran came to achieving its dark vision. Militarily, it established and supported groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and various Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, giving it a powerful deterrent effect from any direct attacks on its soil. This Axis of Resistance was designed to keep Israel preoccupied and hesitant to strike Iran directly, giving the ability to advance its nuclear ambitions. Obama’s years-long push to forge—and, in many ways, force—a nuclear deal with Iran conferred on the revolutionary republic a level of legitimacy its founders could have only dreamt of. The resulting deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action of 2015, specifically allowed for Iran to obtain non-weapons nuclear capabilities after an extended waiting period, all under a wink-wink acknowledgment that one of the world’s biggest oil producers was doing this to pursue civilian energy projects. 

The real calculus behind Iran’s push for nukes is that, with the technology it needs to pursue weapons, Iran would be able to leverage its strength to quickly close the gap between nuclear breakout and the development of a nuclear warhead. In this scenario, Iran would achieve supreme deterrence. Given the messianic zeal of their regime, the ayatollahs in possession of nukes would be seen as having a willingness to use them. With the US in Iran’s diplomatic thrall, and its enemies atomically deterred, the country could pivot from a preparatory strategy of building its alliances and consolidating gains to its real aim—exporting the Islamic Revolution. Its first milestone along this path would be defeating its greatest regional rival and the most direct check on its aspirations: Israel.

All this changed when Hamas launched an unprecedented assault on October 7, resulting in the deaths of over a thousand civilians and the abduction of approximately 200 hostages into Gaza. The attack was a severe miscalculation—a classic, and likely historic, error of warfare.

On October 6, Hamas knew something about Israel that Israel didn’t know about itself—the Jewish state had grown complacent and strategically self-assured. Enamored with its own wonderfully variegated story—the Startup Nation, the cultural hub of Tel Aviv, the military might of the IDF—and distracted by domestic upheaval, Israel was lulled by a combination of comfortable ease and political exhaustion into sleeping in the guard booth. Even more fatally, Israel had bought into a myth that Hamas had moderated and was more interested in pursuing its own corruption and maintaining its grip on power than in pursuing war.

Hamas knew its enemy. But it did not know itself. It failed to account for the likelihood that its invasion would turn into an orgiastic celebration of barbarism. Hamas’ attack went so far beyond the pale of any kind of military invasion guided by rational strategic objectives that it effectively changed Israel, the enemy Hamas knew, into a completely new and consequently different enemy. Israel no longer functionally consisted of the IDF and political echelon whose actions were predicated on the principle of containment. It was now a nation in the throes of disaster. This was the latent nation inside Israel animated, the nation that has been reared on stomach-churning memories of the helplessness of Holocaust Jews, a nation that had promising itself it would give life and limb to prevent anything like that from ever occurring again. 

Hamas had believed a strong blow would disorient Israel, change up the balance of power, and, with a limited number of hostages dragged back to Gaza, force Israel into a negotiated outcome. But the sheer brutality and scale of the attack lent Israel an implicit understanding that whatever form its response might take, it would have to do to Israel’s enemies exactly what they had done to it: challenge their imagination. 

The problem, however, was the dogma concerning Israel’s military options held that Hamas was so well dug in that a ground invasion would result in catastrophic troop losses for Israel; that Hezbollah’s arsenal of 150,000 rockets, as well as its medium and long-range missiles, would overwhelm Israel’s air defense and destroy critical infrastructure; and that Iran’s hydra-headed network of proxies, along with mostly undefined but still widely touted native Iranian capabilities, presented an insurmountable threat. 

Despite this, Israel has accomplished the impossible. It did in part by subverting (so far) two of the three strategic assumptions. For over 20 years since its rise to power, Hamas has learned time and again that Israel was, until that point, constitutionally opposed to even the notion of a significant ground invasion, let alone a full blown military occupation. Hamas understood from its frequent flare-ups with Israel that while Jerusalem might stomach limited incursions with the aim of blackening the terror group’s eye—“mowing the lawn,” as the Israeli defense establishment called it—the Jewish state had absolutely no appetite for a full-blown ground war in Gaza. What Israel delivered was a full-blown ground invasion supported by the massive use of air power, all undergirded by a persistent campaign of targeted assassinations that decimated Hamas’ leadership.

As a result, Hamas was forced to cede its most valuable strategic edge: asymmetric warfare. It could no longer force Israel into a game of terrorist whack-a-mole, firing rockets and disappearing into his tunnel network or hiding behind civilian institutions like schools and hospitals. Instead, post-October 7, Israel engaged in exactly the type of war Hamas false believed Israel never would, or could, prosecute. It began to systematically dismantle Hamas’ primary strategic asset—its tunnel network—in some cases turning tunnels into subterranean tombs that now house the bodies of hundreds of Hamas fighters. In doing so, it shook off Hamas’ long-conjures illusion that civilian structures that had been commandeered by the terror group were not legitimate, or, indeed, essential military targets. 

The much feared losses that Israel’s citizen army was supposed to have suffered never materialized. The IDF proceeded by meticulously clearing hundreds of miles of tunnels and tens of thousands of booby trapped homes, schools, UN offices, mosques, universities and hospitals. As a result, Hamas has been defeated militarily, its most critical leaders—its political head Ismail Haniyeh, military commander Mohammad Deif, along with dozens of bridge and battalion-level commanders—have been killed by the IDF. Its arsenal is depleted and its supply lines have been cut. Most importantly, the image of a triumphant Hamas of October 7 was betrayed as nothing more than a harbinger of death and destruction for the very people it was supposed to protect.

This was Israel’s first success in its bid to challenge the imagination of its enemies.  With Hamas all but defeated as a military force, Iran lost what had effectively been a strategic pincer against Israel, with Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south. This left Hezbollah vulnerable to attack. Without the threat of a two-front war, Israel could focus on the northern front.

What Israel had coming next would not just challenge Hezbollah’s imagination, but put an end to that imagination itself. With the beeper attack on September 17, dozens of Hezbollah fighters were killed and around 1,500 were injured, with the casualties tying up precious organizational resources. Even more crucially, in those devastating moments Israel entered Hezbollah’s decision making cycle to such an extreme extent that (as we’d see over the following two weeks) it actually began driving its enemies decisions. Hezbollah commanders were forced to meet in person—an outcome Israel evidently anticipated as it began eliminating senior Hezbollah commanders, in some cases by the dozen, including the entire command of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. But the knockout blow came on September 28 when Israel dropped 80 tons of bombs on Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood, killing Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, a famously charismatic leader, had made himself into a symbol of Iran’s Axis of Resistance, his image so ubiquitous that he became nearly synonymous with Hezbollah itself. With senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard figures who served as the ligatures between Iran and Hezbollah already eliminated by Israel over the course of the previous year, it is no longer clear to whom Iran can task with resuscitating its most important proxy.

Iran is now in the position of having to choose between coming to the aid of two of its biggest proxies in their hour of greatest need or saving itself. On October 1, the country launched its second direct attack on Israel, with around 180 ballistic missiles fired at the Jewish state from Iranian territory. There was no significant material damage or even Israeli civilian injuries. In fact, the only harm done was to a Palestinian in the West Bank, who died of shrapnel wounds caused by one of the missiles.

With no discernible impact on Israel’s ability to wage war, the attack was a grave miscalculation, offering Israel the justification it needs to launch whatever may be coming next. But unlike in April, when Iran launched 300 drones and missiles at Israel, Iran is not just vulnerable but desperate. The regime is attempting to fall back on old ways by running into what it hoped would be the open diplomatic arms of the Biden administration. In the lead-up to the General Assembly, Iran telegraphed its desire to restart negotiations, a carrot it dangled in front of both the Obama and Biden administrations for years as a means of gaining concessions. But with only weeks until an election he’s not running in, and as he attempts to fend off claims he’s not fully in possession of his mental faculties, Biden has become the lamest of lame ducks. The chances of him staging a diplomatic push to protect Iran with a new diplomatic deal are now approaching zero.  

Iran is on its own. It has no Hamas and no Hezbollah to buffer it from Israel’s military wrath. There is no ersatz Kissinger-esque regional alignment at hand. At least until the election on November 5, there is only a motivated Israel that has not mere vengeance in mind but proof that the existential threat Benjamin Netanyahu had been warning the world about for decades—and which Iran itself has trumpeted for equally as long—is not only real but far more imminent than almost anyone in Israel realized.

Israel has bankrupted Iran strategically. But for Jerusalem that is not enough. Just as Israel has challenged—indeed, collapsed—the imagination of Hamas and Hezbollah, there is a strong likelihood it’s preparing to do the same to Iran. It’s impossible to know exactly what Israel will do. But whatever Israel has coming, we can surmise it will be cunning, it will be brutally effective and, most importantly of all, it will be part of a sequence of tactical events designed to render a specific strategic outcome. 

On October 7, Iran believed that it was witnessing the dawn of a new order in the Mideast. It was right but for all the wrong reasons. In that moment, with Israel reeling, Iran caught a glimpse of its messianic vision—a region aflame, its enemy in chaos, and the barbarity of its regime ascendant abroad as it has been at home. Like so many apocalyptic fever-dreams, this vision was rooted in folly. It was the hallucination of a strategically inbred ruling class that seduced itself into believing that a massive, potentially existential error was, in fact, its greatest triumph. 

What the Iranian regime failed to recognize is that October 7 galvanized its most fearsome enemy. Israel’s prosperity and security had lulled it into comforting storytelling about its cultural vibrancy and economic success. It’s political woes had distracted it from its central mission of serving as a homeland and safe haven for the Jewish people. But that day woke Israel to its ancient reality.

Iran may believe that it is now retreating strategically, retrenching, and preparing to return the kind of blow it’s received. What’s more likely is that Iran’s many other enemies—including its own population which has suffered for decades under a brutal religious tyranny —smell blood in the water. And after nearly half a century of being mercilessly attacked, they will be ready to strike back. The Islamic Republic is on the edge of a knife. If it doesn’t fall off, it can only be sliced open.

Editor’s note: While I usually write about media here at The Burning Telegraph, I spent 18 years living in Israel, where I covered Israeli politics, culture, as well as the region.

Iran fired salvos of hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel this evening. At the time of writing, Israeli reports are saying the attack is over. So far there has been no significant damage reported by Israel. Israel civilians told me by video call from their safe rooms and apartment block bunkers that they felt secure and confident in the country’s ability to protect them. Some reported children playing games while adults were shuffling between safe rooms and the kitchen, preparing meals for the Rosh Hashanah festival that begins Wednesday evening.

Though this might seem to indicate this round of exchanges is over the reality is that’s far from the case. Iran has likely invited a much more powerful response than the one it received in April, when the Islamic Republic fired over 300 missiles and drones—99% of which were intercepted—at Israel in response to the IDF’s killing of a senior IRGC general. In that case, Israel responded with an almost symbolic warning, destroying an air defense system near Isfahan. That was a pinpoint strike designed not to inflict damage but to send a message.

This time, however, Israel finds itself in a drastically improved strategic posture. Hamas, to Israel’s south in the Gaza Strip, has been all but defeated militarily. Hezbollah, reeling from the beeper attacks on its rank-and-file, the decimation of its entire command structure—including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in his Beirut bunker by a massive Israeli airstrike—was in disarray even before Israel began a ground invasion early this week.

Israel no longer faces these two major deterrents. After 11 months of Hezbollah rocket fire that has resulted in the displacement of nearly 100,000 residents of Israel’s north, the country’s political echelon has drawn and enforced its red line. In Israel, there is a widespread belief that the only way to restore calms to its border, and security throughout the country, is to “cut off the head of the octopus,” as former prime minister Naftali Bennett put it last month.

This portends a much more powerful Israeli response than Iran has experienced before. Already with the April attack Israel demonstrated that it can bypass Iran’s air defenses. Without Hezbollah and Hamas, the Islamic Republic is more vulnerable than it has been since its founding in 1979.

It remains to be seen what form Israel’s response will take, but there is no doubt that it is being formulated now in the halls of political power in Jerusalem and in Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv’s Kirya. What’s likely is that it will challenge Iran’s ability to respond, much as Israel has done over the past months with regard to Iran’s two major proxies.

Well, what do you know. Timed for (almost) the October surprise, we have another anti-Trump dossier. Hard-left journalist Ken Klippenstein has released a “dossier” on JD Vance that was supposedly created by the Trump campaign. There is no confirmation that’s true. Klippenstein was suspended by X for leaking the document, which contains personal information about Vance. There are allegations that the document was stolen by Iran and handed over to anti-Trump elements.

Nearly eight years ago, the infamous Steele Dossier was birthed into the world. Much like the Vance dossier, the Steele dossier was published without any corroboration of its authenticity. In 2017, Buzzfeed decided to take a break from cat videos and listicles to engage in election interference by publishing the document we now know to be a lie.

Despite this, that lie spread — and spread and spread. It was a variegated, multi-faceted lie. Like a propaganda monster, it spawned dozens of false storylines that got “reported” by the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Vox, and hundreds of others. None of them disclosed in their breathless reporting that, all along, they were being fed these lies by FusionGPS, the black-ops version of a PR firm hired by Clinton to manufacture then push this era-defining piece of fake news.

What we got on the back side of the publication of the dossier was seven years of nearly wall-to-wall coverage about about Trump colluding with the Kremlin to spread “Russian disinformation.” Yet now, with the publication of the Vance document, possibly stolen by Iran, the storyline is not “IRANIAN DISINFORMATION!” but “X suspends journalist who leaked Vance document.” This is the dominant headline we’re seeing about this situation.

There is no mention of “foreign election interference,” “DNC Iranian collusion," or leading questions like, “What Did Kamala Harris Know about the Leaked Vance Document.” Instead, the media is pointing at what they want readers to believe is Musk’s hypocrisy on free speech for banning a journalist from the platform.

When, five years after the Steele Dossier was released, a former New York Times investigative reporter named Jeff Gerth did a four-part series in the Columbia Journalism Review detailing the mass-level failure of the media (or, depending on your viewpoint, its mass-level success), the press was eerily, creepily silent. As Gerth noted in his series, not a single newsroom made one of its leaders available to talk to him. After years of screaming about disinformation, the media was suddenly silent on this very topic.

Three years after the Steele Dossier was published — which was stolen by a Buzzfeed “reporter” who illicitly snatched it off a lawyer’s desk when the lawyer left the room — another major story on leaked documents broke with massive political import. This time it was Hunter Biden’s laptop, stuffed with (literally) incriminating material. Once again “RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION!” was trotted out as a way of making the laptop issue simply go away weeks before the election. The New York Post’s laptop story was censored by our freshly minted libertarian Mark Zuckerberg and born-again free speech activist Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter.

But another excuse was offered by the media for its non-coverage: the emails on the laptop were, they argued, uncorroborated. Brian Stelter launched into a jeremiad on how the contents of the laptop could not be trusted: “For all we know, these emails could be made up,” he said.

Today, however, neither of these objections have been raised. The initial reporting about X suspending the journalist is an initial feint — a way to sidestep both the Iranian involvement and the fact that the material was stolen. Next will come a long, drip-drip-drip process of unpacking the Vance documents for the public, while the authenticity of the materials is taken as a foregone conclusion.

The below was adapted from a post on X I wrote.

Just a few years ago, the primary source of skepticism about major societal issues—processed foods, vaccines, government surveillance, corporate overreach—came from one corner: the elite coastal left. These were the voices questioning the intentions of large corporations, doubting the safety of certain public policies, and advocating for a more conscientious society.

Today, however, that same elite coastal left no longer leads these charges. In fact, it now pillories anyone who dares raise concerns about such topics. How did this shift happen?

We often talk about "regulatory capture," where regulatory bodies meant to oversee industries end up serving the interests of those industries, usually due to the influence of money. But what we’re witnessing today is something much deeper and more pervasive—a phenomenon I call culture capture.

What Is Culture Capture?

Culture capture happens when the very institutions, individuals, and thought leaders responsible for guarding society against government and corporate overreach adopt the interests of these powerful entities as their own.

Unlike regulatory capture, which is often driven by financial incentives, culture capture thrives on emotional manipulation and the heat of cultural discourse. It’s not just a cold, calculated exchange of favors; it’s an emotionally charged defense of what should be questioned.

The irony here is sharp: the elite culture-makers who were once the critics have become the defenders of the very powers they used to challenge. We often label the current state of affairs as “hyper-partisanship,” but that’s too convenient. What’s really happening is that one side of the political spectrum has become deeply enmeshed in advancing the agenda of the state and big business, interests that are increasingly aligned.

The Full Capture of American Culture

With this cultural capture, we’ve now reached a point where there is top-down control of all the major estates of public life: government, business, and now culture. This phenomenon explains why:

- Satirists like Stephen Colbert mock the masses rather than lampoon the powerful elite, dancing with cartoon vaccines instead of questioning pharmaceutical giants.

- Pop stars like Taylor Swift use their platforms to rally electoral support for establishment candidates instead of challenging the status quo.

- The ACLU, once a staunch defender of civil liberties, remains silent in the face of illegal lockdowns and government overreach.

- The news media dismisses groundbreaking stories like the Twitter Files without even investigating, protecting the interests of the powerful instead of exposing them.

- Anti-incarceration activists cheer long prison sentences connected to January 6, a bizarre shift in the typical advocacy for leniency and reform.

- Kamala Harris’ refusal to speak to the press is celebrated by journalists, who see her silence as a virtue rather than a problem in a democracy.

- The abortion debate has shifted from a rights movement to a cultural celebration, losing sight of the gravity of the issue.

- Congressional corruption, such as members trading stocks with suspiciously high returns, is met with little more than a collective shrug.

What was once an open field of cultural criticism and debate has been transformed into an industrialized machine, churning out narratives that serve the interests of the powerful. The effect is all-encompassing, leaving almost no part of public culture willing or able to stand up against corporate encroachment, government overreach, and hypocrisy.

A Nervous Laughter

It’s why we hear phrases like, “They have Taylor Swift, we have Cat Turd,” said with a mix of irony and despair. The right, once a bastion of cultural defiance, is now left to laugh nervously at itself because it knows it no longer has the tools to shape the culture. It’s been relegated to the margins, where it finds solace in *anti-culture*—a space so stripped of meaning that it veers into the absurd and the nihilistic.

The result? At the far edges of the right, we find the “Woke Right,” a neo-Nazism that is less a coherent ideology and more a product of intellectual inbreeding—a grotesque reaction to being shut out of mainstream cultural production.

Taking Back Culture

What’s most troubling is that culture capture, unlike regulatory capture, is complete. There’s no single entity or policy to lobby against or vote out of office. The cultural institutions we once relied on—publishing, news, activism, tech, entertainment—have all been co-opted. They no longer serve the people; they serve power.

So what can be done? In an age where the best lack conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity, the only real answer is to reclaim a small piece of culture by creating something of meaning, substance, and courage. But to do this, we have to forget the narratives being pushed by the captured culture. We must also reject the anti-culture that seeks to destroy without building anything in its place.

We need to forget the moralizing of the elite, the scorn of the anti-elite, the stupidity of social media culture, and the fear that paralyzes us. In short, like the Dadaists of the early 20th century, we must begin by forgetting everything we’ve been told and start creating anew.

Culture capture is real, and it’s all but complete. The only way forward is to recognize it, reject it, and start creating the culture we want to live in—one that serves the people, not power.

Final Thought: A Call for New Creation

If there is a silver lining, it’s that the moment of total capture is also a moment ripe for new creation. We’re on the cusp of a new era where those brave enough to challenge the status quo and create something of real substance can start to push back against this industrialized culture.

To do this you've got to forget the finger-wagging moralisms of the captured culture, the hateful scorn of the anti-culture, the blunt stupidity of social media culture, the admonitions of gatekeeping culture, and the fear you have inside you. Like the Dadaism of the early 20th century, you have to start by forgetting everything.

New York Magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi has been placed on leave for engaging in what has been described as a “personal relationship” with RFK Jr. In recent days, however, we’ve learned that far from a personal relationship – which implies mutual respect and consent – Nuzzi has allegedly been obsessively pursuing the former presidential candidate, including by repeatedly sending him pornographic content (presumably of herself).

If there’s any questions as to where the “personal relationship” verbiage came from, there shouldn’t be. In a note to readers, New York Magazine wrote:

Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.

This is quite a claim given that the magazine is only now investigating, via an unnamed “third-party,” what really happened. What’s clear is that Nuzzi and RFK Jr. have only met once. A source told the New York Post, “[Nuzzi] went after him aggressively,” the source said Saturday. “She targeted him pretty hard. Bobby was blocking her continually. It was a little scary. She was obsessed with him. I think she still is.”

Imagine the gender roles were reversed here and a highly influential national reporter was obsessively pursuing a female politician, including by sending her porn. Is there a world in which New York Magazine describes this as a “personal relationship,” and not stalking or sexual harassment or sexual misconduct?

In reality, New York Magazine is spinning the events — and the media is playing along. Which is all par for the course. But the bigger issue is a rising trend of 20-somethings — Nuzzi was hired by The Daily Beast while she was still in college — who get rocketed to the very heights of journalism.

We’ve seen this with CNN national security reporter Natasha Bertrand, who was similarly hired right out of school as a leading national reporter writing for Business Insider, Atlantic and Politico. Bertrand, who at 32 is just one year older than Nuzzi, has been responsible for disseminating some of the more pernicious stories in the Russiagate affair, many of which are flat-out false.

It got so bad that even Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple took Bertrand to task for her reporting on Russiagate:

With winks and nods from MSNBC hosts, Bertrand heaped credibility on the [Steele] dossier — which was published in full by BuzzFeed News in January 2017 — in repeated television appearances. Her written work has appeared on Business Insider, the Atlantic and Politico, where she is now a national security reporter. Along the way, she bootstrapped her punditry into a contributor’s role on MSNBC.

None of this mattered — just as it didn’t matter that Nuzzi’s reporting on Trumpworld mostly amounts to high school gossip strung together by snark. What mattered, and what still matters, to these outlets is the right contour of a journalist, the right look, the right social circles, and enough stories that seem to be scoops to keep the news brand trending.

In this regard, there are few better models for this approach than Taylor Lorenz, who similarly rose to prominence in her early 30s, with scoops that could generate buzz even if they often fell apart on closer inspection. Like Nuzzi, Lorenz has demonstrated a pronounced difficulty in sticking to basic journalist professional profile ethics. She has been caught lying about sources, about comments she made about Joe Biden, and, of course, about the subject matter of her coverage. I did an in-depth profile of her in the Spectator in which I wrote:

Lorenz again made headlines when she tweeted that she had been “relentlessly” harassed by an editor from news super-aggregator the Drudge Report who, she alleged, threatened to ruin her career. Matt Drudge, a famously reclusive figure, personally contacted Lorenz directly to clarify that he “never contacted her, nor has anyone associated with Drudge Report,” CNN reported.

There’s a trend here, a pattern. A young, often female journalist with the right look (let’s be honest: the right looks) and a good-enough resume, starts reporting audaciously on stories at the very center of American public life. Even when their stories go sideways, the reporters fail upward — and up and up.

The reason it because we live today in the era of the Bright Young Things who come pre-packaged for social media, equipped with a vocabulary of snark, and unafraid of taking what would have once been seen as wild professional risks, like sexting national politicians (Nuzzi), peddling Clinton campaign disinformation (Betrand), or lying about some of the most powerful people in tech (Lorenz).

All this calls to mind the purveyors of journalistic transgression of a previous generation, journalists like Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter on a rocketing rise in the early 2000s who was brought down by his own fabulism and plagiarism, including, as I showed in The Gray Lady Winked, by making up stories about American servicemen coming back from Iraq emotionally broken; Stephen Glass, the New Republic writer who was caught making up stories whole cloth; and Jonah Lehrer, the impossibly urbane twenty-something writer for Wired and New Yorker who, among other things, was caught making up quotes by Bob Dylan in his book on creativity.

Unlike Glass, Blair and Lehrer — all of whom saw their careers in journalism go up in flames — Bertrand, Lorenz and (in all likelihood) Nuzzi have only gone up and up. Because it’s not the ethics these news outlets care about. It’s getting caught. And right up until that moment, what matters most is the clicks, the eyeballs, and the buzz.

But while the Bright Young Things live it up online, the news industry is being driven to new lows, with trust in media nosediving. It all resembles nothing more than the parties of excess, the brilliant days of decadence, preceding the crash. But no one cares. This is selfie journalism, and the star social media journalist is far more important than the subject — never mind that formerly all-important person, the reader.

Last time, we dove into how Wikipedia launders media bias into “fact” and touched on the creeping influence of the censorship-for-profit industry. Since then, things have only escalated, and I’ve been busy tracking these developments. From the shocking second assassination attempt on Donald Trump to how big money is fueling a new censorship ecosystem, there’s a lot to cover.

1. My piece on “How Wikipedia Became a Propaganda Machine'“ is now at The Free Press

In case you missed it, The Free Press just reprinted my article on how Wikipedia—once the ultimate go-to for neutral information—has become a mouthpiece for entrenched media biases. The piece breaks down how a handful of editors and media sources dictate what you see, turning propaganda into fact.

This is not just an abstract problem. Wikipedia’s influence reaches everywhere—from the headlines you read to the studies scholars cite. When the facts get distorted here, they ripple out into our culture and politics in ways most people don’t even realize.

You can read the full piece here.

2. Second Assassination Attempt on Trump: Why the Media Keeps Getting It Wrong

Another huge issue that’s getting distorted is the media coverage of Trump—and it reached a new level with the second assassination attempt. Yes, you read that right—second attempt. In my latest piece for UnHerd, I explore how and why the media keeps missing the mark on this critical story. Instead of asking serious questions about how political violence is being downplayed, the media seems more interested in framing the narrative to fit their own biases.

Read the full piece on UnHerd here.

3. Censorship for Profit: The New Industry Controlling Speech

Over at Pirate Wires, I’ve just published another piece exposing the rise of the censorship-for-profit industry. In this article, I break down how private companies are profiting off silencing dissenting voices while governments outsource their dirty work. It’s not just about controlling speech anymore—it’s about turning censorship into a billion-dollar business.

This growing industry is reshaping the internet, making it harder for independent voices to break through. And what’s worse, it’s all happening behind closed doors under the guise of “fighting misinformation.”

Read the full piece on Pirate Wires here.

What’s Next?

I’m not done with Wikipedia yet. More reporting is on the way, plus a major new investigation I’m launching soon. I want to know what you’re most interested in reading about. Let me know in the comments or reply directly—your input helps shape the direction of these deep dives.

As always, thank you for your support and engagement of The Burning Telegraph. Together, we’ll keep cutting through the noise.

Imagine a world where the truth is not what it seems, where the information we consume daily is quietly manipulated, distorted, and re-packaged as objective fact.

This isn't the plot of some dystopian novel—it's happening right now on one of the internet's most trusted platforms: Wikipedia.

I recently explored this unsettling phenomenon in an article for Pirate Wires titled "How Wikipedia Launders Regime Propaganda." This piece uncovers the disturbing ways Wikipedia, under the guise of neutrality, has become a key player in transforming biased media narratives into hard, undeniable "facts."

Read the full article on Pirate Wires here.

The Illusion of Objectivity

Wikipedia is often hailed as the digital age’s ultimate knowledge repository—a place where information is supposedly curated and vetted by a community of neutral, well-intentioned editors. But what happens when the sources these editors rely on are anything but neutral?

In my Pirate Wires article, I dissect how Wikipedia’s strict adherence to mainstream media sources, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, creates a dangerously skewed version of reality. These outlets are not impartial; they have their own biases, agendas, and blind spots. Yet, on Wikipedia, their narratives are treated as the final word, the unchallengeable truth.

One example I discuss is the experience of Atsme, a dedicated Wikipedia editor who worked to instill neutrality into political articles. For her troubles, Atsme was banned from editing in the American politics topic after challenging the biases entrenched in the platform’s content. Her story is a stark reminder of how even those within the system face significant obstacles when they try to uphold true objectivity.

The problem doesn’t stop with Wikipedia. Once these biased narratives are enshrined on the platform, they begin to echo across the internet. Wikipedia’s entries are referenced by journalists, educators, and even policymakers. The bias thus ripples outward, shaping public opinion, influencing academic research, and even affecting the outcomes of political decisions.

Ashley on The Winston Marshall Show

To explore these issues further, I recently joined The Winston Marshall Show for an in-depth discussion. Winston Marshall, as many of you know, is the former lead guitarist and banjoist of the Grammy-winning band Mumford & Sons who took a principled stand on issues of free speech when he stepped away from the band to pursue these crucial conversations more openly.

Our conversation was as urgent as it was eye-opening, revealing the hidden forces that shape our understanding of truth. If you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend watching the full interview, which is below:

It’s More Than Just Wikipedia

The discussion surrounding this issue has been gaining traction, and I’ve been engaging with many of you on X (formerly Twitter) about it. Miranda Devine, New York Post columnist and bestselling author of Laptop from Hell, posted on X:

I also posted on X about how all these conversations about misinformation-disinformation and free speech distract from the real issue at hand—for example, where COVID-19 really came from or if Joe Biden did indeed have illicit business dealings in Ukraine.

A Look Ahead: Censorship for Profit

In my next piece, I’ll be diving into another critical issue: the burgeoning censorship industry. What I call "censorship for profit" is an alarming trend where private sector companies are stepping in to do the government's dirty work, skirting around free speech laws under the guise of combating misinformation.

This industry represents a new front in the battle for free expression, and it’s one we must confront head-on. Stay tuned for more on this in the coming weeks.

The Fight for Truth

This is not just an intellectual exercise—it's a battle for the very soul of our public discourse. It’s up to us, the informed and engaged, to push back. We must demand transparency, accountability, and above all, truth from the platforms and sources we rely on.

If you found this issue insightful, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Encourage them to subscribe to 🔥 The Burning Telegraph so they too can stay informed about these crucial issues.

Here’s the link to my Pirate Wires on Wikipedia in case you missed it.

Thank you for your unwavering support and for standing with me in this critical fight for truth.

Ashley Rindsberg

🔥 The Burning Telegraph

Hey Burning Telegraph subscribers! This is a special note to paid subscribers with an early sneak peak at my next article, which will drop today over at the excellent Silicon Valley-based tech-culture-politics publication Pirate Wires.

My first piece for Pirate Wires, published last month, is a deep dive on how Wikipedia’s original mission of providing …

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There’s been a lot of strange phenomena floating around the mediaverse lately. With once-a-generation news happening almost weekly, the animal spirits in the media ecosystem are acting in unpredictable ways. But few have been more perplexing than MSNBC, where self-contradiction, conspiracy theories, and internal fighting have thrown the network into disarray.

It’ll come as no surprise that most of the chaos at the leftwing network derives from the two parallel storylines driving almost every news cycle: the resurgence of Donald Trump and the slow, agonizing downfall of Joe Biden.

On its own, each one of these narratives would have been manageable to the network, whose operating premise is a full-blown rejection of any idea that strays from Democratic party orthodoxies. Together, however, they present a picture of a fast-emerging reality that tramples MSNBC’s worldview.

One of the most high-profile—and, frankly, weird—examples of this was the network’s decision to take “Morning Joe” off the air the night after the assassination attempt. This occurred on what is arguably the most important news day we’ve seen in years, and possibly, in generations.

The stated rationale behind the decision was that the network was going to run straight news the entire day. That, as “Morning Joe” co-hosts (and spouses) Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski pointed out when they were put back on air, didn’t happen. Other non-news shows aired;" “Morning Joe” didn’t.

Reporting on this decision indicated that network executives were worried that one of the show’s many contributors could make an inflammatory remark about Trump or the assassination attempt. If true, this shows a remarkable lack of trust in MSNBC’s flagship political show, which is also Biden’s go-to for political commentary.

No matter what the cause, when Joe and Mika made their re-appearance they were forced to issue a threat to the network, saying next time it happens they’ll be gone. Despite the threat, this was a humiliating moment for the most elite Beltway show on air today.

If this weren’t enough to roil in corporate news organization, outside of the main tent was a sideshow performed by hard-left presenter Joy Reid, who began pumping out conspiracy theories in the days following the attempt on Trump’s life. Reid posted on social media and peppered viewers with innuendo-laden questions, demanding evidence that Trump had been shot.

At the same time, Biden’s former spokesperson, Jen Psaki, has been taking to the air to try thread a very difficult needle.

Despite her nominal role as an MSNBC journalist, Psaki has remained in Biden-spokesperson mode. As recently as this spring, Psaki told viewers that “Joe Biden is going to fight for you.” Psaki repeated this messaging the before Biden’s disastrous debate as she delivered advice on how Biden could win the debate.

After months of championing the president (at least when she wasn’t excoriating Trump, which amounted to about 75% of her airtime), Psaki is now in the unenviable position of joining the chorus of media and Democratic party officials calling for Biden to step aside as presidential nominee because of his cognitive decline.

This is a network that has lost its center of gravity and is starting to totter. Everything the network collectively believes—that Biden was the “obvious” choice for the Democrats’ candidate; that post-conviction Trump had no path to victory—has been upended. And so, it seems, has the network with it.

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump has shocked the nation, and the world. At a moment when America's political culture couldn't seem to more troubled, the former president and Republican candidate was seen dodging a literal bullet, his life—and, perhaps, the stability of the country—millimeters from disaster.

We don’t know much about the shooter or his deranged motives. What we do know, however, is that the media bears responsibility for creating a climate of extreme fear-mongering and racial animus that has set the country ablaze. That the assassination attempt took place in this environment of outlandish accusations about Trump, destroyer of democracy and second coming of Hitler, cannot be ignored.

For the better part of a decade, the American news media has engaged in what can only be class as political and cultural crusade. For more than five years, the press built a narrative about Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia to swing the election. That virtually no aspect of this alleged Trump-Russia conspiracy was ever substantiated by evidence mattered not one iota to the media.

The massive, four-part deep dive by a Pulitzer-winning former New York Times investigative reporter, Jeff Gerth, published in the nation’s most prestigious journalism publication, the Columbia Journalism Review, showing how the narrative was constructed was simply ignored. Not a single major newsroom had the professional decency to make its leadership available to Gerth for an interview.

The narrative deepened. “Is the President a Russian Asset,” the Atlantic innocently pondered. Vanity Fair, throwing nuance aside, asked in a faux-question, “Is Donald Trump a Manchurian Candidate?” But the Manchurian candidate narrative—a metaphor brazenly used as the file name by one reporter, former New Republic editor-in-chief Franklin Foer in one of his fake Trump-Russia hit pieces that he submitted to FusionGPS for review, an outrageous violation of journalistic ethics that the media didn’t even report on—was only the beginning.

As they watched the lawfare effort fail as Trump’s poll number continued to rise, and his fundraising effort out-raise their that of their own candidate, the media shifted into high gear.

This was no longer about racism, sexism, or Russia collusion. This was now about fascism—as it’s been endlessly pounded into the American public consciousness. Over recent months, the press has gone all in on building a narrative about Trump as a fascist who will overthrow American democracy and install himself as dictator. But not just any dictator. Trump, we are now straightfacedly informed, is the next incarnation of Hitler.

The New Republic ran a cover for its ailing print magazine with the likeness of Trump made to look like Hitler. This was only the most egregious, on-the-nose example. In truth, the media campaign to besmirch Trump—whose daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Jews—as Hitlerian is as deep as it is widespread. Take a look at just a small sampling of this coverage:

• ABC News ran a December “analysis” titled “Donald Trump's history with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi writings.”

• Bloomberg opinion intoned in April that “Trump’s Hitler Fascination is an Ominous Echo of the 1930s.”

• The AP told us that “Trump says he didn’t know his immigration rhetoric echoes Hitler. That’s part of a broader pattern.”

• USA Today reported—without evidence—that Trump supposedly said Hitler “did some good things.” (Even Snopes had to debunk this one.)

• The New York Times, not one to be left out of a good media pile on, ran with “Trump, Attacked for Echoing Hitler, Says He Never Read ‘Mein Kampf”

• The Washington Post wants you to know that, “Yes, It’s Okay to Compare to Trump to Hitler. Don’t Let Me Stop You.”

Take this, for a moment, with the seriousness it deserves. This is the august, fabled American press, after all. The American media too pristine to accept as head of one of its top newsrooms the former editor of a British newspaper. These leading lights are telling you—they are shouting from the rooftops—that Trump is a rising Hitlerian maniac. Given this as the premise, what do you imagine would be the logical response? What would be the courageous, necessary response to a rising Hitler?

It’s not a difficult question to answer. Imagine yourself in Germany in 1935 and you had a chance to kill Hitler, thereby preventing the deaths of millions and the unimaginable suffering of tens of millions. Would you honestly not take that opportunity? You would be insane not to do it.

This is the danger of the game the media has been playing. They have pursued the most extreme narrative, relentlessly and shamelessly, going so far as to abandon even pretense of their most precious asset—their objectivity, their neutrality, their very credibility—to ensure that the other party’s candidate does not win an election.

The New York Times infamously argued in the very pages of its newspaper that the age of Trump called for a radical shift away from neutrality and objectivity (two concepts, by the way, that we were told were inherently “white” and a product of structural racism and white supremacy). This is what the Times’ media reporter wrote in 2016:

“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”

What they didn’t tell you is what’s been obvious to the rest of us. It’s not that they would “move closer” to “being oppositional.” It’s that they would go to any length to stop Trump from being elected. And the weapons in the media’s arsenal are words, ideas and, more than anything, narratives. This is precisely what we got.

Despite the pompous editorials from news outlets and the somber tones on cable news shows about political violence, there is almost no doubt that most of these people would have celebrated had Trump been killed. The political-soul-searching editorials would have appeared the next day. The deep dives. The podcasts. The photojournalism worthy of one more precious Pulitzer. But in the safe spaces of the American elite, they would have celebrated.

Thankfully, Trump survived this attempt. Like the media, the assassin’s aim was off by just a hair’s breadth. All the stentorian admonitions about political violence notwithstanding, you can be sure that recent events will not stop the great narrative mill of the American news media from grinding out its latest lie, no matter what the cost.

Ashley Rindsberg is author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.

What we’ve learned since then is not only were all these things possible, not only were they real, but they were far worse than even those horrific initial reports. There are now 150 hostages being held by Hamas, including women, elderly, and small children. Over 1,300 Israelis – along with tourists and workers from around the world – were slaughtered, most of them while fleeing from Hamas terrorists. Women were raped next to the corpses of their friends. Babies were wheeled out of their rooms on a gurney and murdered, some beheaded. And all the while, barrages of deadly rockets rained down on Israeli population centers. 

Never in Israeli history has there been an event of this scale, of this magnitude, of this horror. The enormities are so great that they’ve spilled over into the West, causing grief and outrage—but also unbridled joy at the carnage from supporters of Hamas. While we, living in the West, can go back to our routines—the morning coffee, the commute, the weekend relief—in Israel that is no longer an option. In the space of one day, everything there changed. It’s as if a layer of soot fell from the sky, covering everything we knew to be true and altering it forever.

The first manifestation of his massive shift will be Israel’s response in Gaza. For most the past two decades since Israel unilaterally left the Strip, the country has attempted to achieve a delicate balance, using enough force in response to Hamas attacks to deter the terror group, but not use so much that it would cause excessive harm to Gaza’s civilian populations. The IDF developed techniques like roof “knocking,” dropping a loud but mostly harmless bang on the top of a building before bombing it so civilians could escape. The Israeli army knew full well that this also gave the terrorists hiding in these buildings an opportunity to escape with the civilians, whom they used as shields. Nevertheless, it was a price they were willing to pay.

This week, a journalist noted that the IDF seemed to have not used the technique in a given instance and asked whether the army had stopping the practice. The response from the army’s spokesperson was that, while he would not comment on specific tactics, he would say that “the paradigm" has shifted. This was an expression of profound understatement. The paradigm has not just shifted. It has been obliterated. In previous conflicts, the IDF has considered a ground invasion of Gaza something beyond a last resort and more of a lose-lose scenario. Now, a ground invasion is imminent—and soldiers are being given a much wider berth in how they fight.

Even more than this, however, Israeli military actions that were once unimaginable will now be squarely on the table. This includes Israeli strikes on Hamas’ puppet masters in Tehran, its fellow proxies in Lebanon and Syria, and the longtime host of Hamas’ senior leadership, Qatar. In any previous war, Israel would have sought – and in some cases lobbied for – clearance from the US to undertake even the most conservative military options. Today, there will be no such permission seeking. Israel will act.

Part of the reason for this is that, for the past 10 years, Israel has watched again and again as America empowered Iran, whether through strategic incompetence or willful disregard of Israeli security. We saw George W. Bush launch an adventure in Iraq that left the country under Iranian control. We saw Obama bend over backwards to appease the mullahs, going so far as to employ as his Iran policy lead Robert Malley, who was recently exposed as part of an Iranian spy ring. And just weeks ago, we saw Biden lavish the genocidal regime, which murdered hundreds of its own citizens, including girls and women, for daring to question the dictates of their corrupt theocracy, with a $6 billion prize.

Now, in the wake of a vicious modern-day pogrom by Hamas, which is backed, equipped, trained and funded by Iran, Israel will understand that relying on the Americans is no longer tenable. This will give Israel more room to maneuver than it has known, but it will also make Israel recall what it has always known in some way: that it is the sole author of its own fate.

This is an idea that, in the space of just days, has trickled down to the individual. Israelis have watched the global leftist movement not simply remain quiet in the face of the atrocities but wildly celebrate them. Regular Israelis now know that there is no overture for peace, no act of goodwill, that will ever convince the global left that Israel is anything but evil. We have watched the persistent anti-Israel corruption of international bodies, with the UN just this year tapping Iran to chair the Human Rights Council. We saw, in 2022, the UN issue more resolutions condemning Israel than all other countries combined—this, while Russia ravaged Ukraine in a bloody war of aggression.

Most of this was long known to Israelis. But there was always a belief, maybe just a hope, that one day we would convince the world of our legitimacy. In the wake of October 7, that belief has been abandoned completely. In the days after the attacks, pundits and talking heads declared the attacks to be a sly Iranian attempt to scuttle the normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia and urged Israel not to fall into the trap. Now, there are vanishingly few Israelis who, learning day after day of new atrocities, new forms of barbarism, will think of the Saudi Arabia deal as anything but empty words printed on worthless paper. The dream of normalization, once Israel’s grand vision, also died that day in Israel’s south.

The real reckoning, however, will be at home. In the aftermath of the 1973 war, when Arab armies caught Israel unaware, Israel engaged in years of searing introspection and self-investigation. But the failures of 1973 pale in comparison to what has taken place in Israel today. No politician, military leader or intelligence head will escape the blaze of this internal interrogation. In no conceivable realm will Bibi Netanyahu’s government stand once the initial military operations have concluded. The chief of staff will resign in shame. The intelligence heads will be replaced and their replacements will overhaul their agencies. The border will be re-conceived. A new security strategy – a new strategy for our very survival – will be painstakingly developed and deployed.

And the culture will shift. Over the past ten years the fissures in Israeli culture – between left and right; secular and religious; Ashkenazi and Mizrahi; Arab and Jew – have become a chasm. Anger between citizens is palpable almost everywhere you go. In Judaism, the term for this is “sinat chinam,” wanton hatred, and the Jewish tradition has warned for centuries that when it sets in among Jews what follows is national destruction. Thankfully, Israel has not arrived at that place, traversed so many times in our fraught, forever history. But we’ve seen our most ruthless, barbarous enemies leverage the cracks in Israeli society as a toehold. While, days ago, we were confident of our future, we now see that we were closer to the precipice than we could ever have imagined.

With our dreams of prosperity and peace—fulfilled in so many ways by a vibrant economy, a diverse populace, and a slate of stunningly successful new relationships with some of our Arab neighbors—Israel allowed itself to sleep with both eyes closed. In doing so, the country came to accept once-distant dreams of peace as an emerging reality. Waking up to a nightmare, we know that is now over. What remains is for us to forge a new reality from the rubble of the previous one—to find strength in our brush with destruction and to do what Israelis—what Jews—have always done, which is reinvent our future while staying rooted to our past.

Israel will never be the same again. Our only hope is that what comes next is, in some way, better. And that those two simple words distilled from the horrors of the Holocaust, “never again,” be reinvested with all the power they demand.

For the better part of a decade, fake news has been a defining media concept. The debate (or, really, battle) of what's considered fake news regularly fills out headlines, and is part of the daily churn of social media. Academic interest bears this out, with over 5,000 papers on the topic between 2017 and 2021—compared with "just 100 in all the years leading up to 2016," according to an important study by Duncan Watts, David Rothschild and Markus Mobius.

What Watts, Rothschild and Mobius show about the impact of fake news is even more important. Far from "shaking democracy to its foundation" (or other similar metaphors), its impact is not just negligible but barely measurable. Instead, what we really should be concerned about is the impact on what I call accredited news which delivers false or misleading information, or skews an issue through deliberate or unconscious bias.

But before we dive into that, let's do what's rarely done in this conversation and define what we mean by fake news. We'll take the definition of Duncan et. al. of fake news as:

"The deliberate spread of online misinformation"

This concept lies at the core of claims that fake news is being used to achieve political or geopolitical goals. It's not just wrong, but it's deliberately wrong in a way calibrated to produce a behavioral response by a large group of people.

Over the past six years, the effects of fake news have been cast in the most grave terms. For example, in an article titled "Social Media is rotting democracy from within," Vox made a sweeping claim about the impact of fake news: "When fake news is flying around, no matter who’s spreading it, people lose faith in the trustworthiness of their social institutions or perhaps even in the very idea of truth in politics."

Interestingly, to back up this quite bombastic, claim Vox provides a link that has since been removed. But the study that article seems to refer to says little about the impact of fake news, and it limited only to claims about the intentions of governments using it for political purposes.

Beyond this single article, the authors of Watts et. al. study, "Measuring the news and its impact on democracy," similarly take note of the "breathless" claims of "tsunamis" or "epidemics" of fake news.

The data, however, don't bear this out. Watts et. al. reference another study, this one by Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which found that the fake news they studied related to the 2016 presidential election would have changed the total vote by two-hundredths of a percentage point (.02%).

This is in keeping with larger patterns of consumption of fake news. According to Watts et. al., fake news accounts for "less than 1% of regular news consumption and less than 1/10 of 1% of overall media consumption..." For the heaviest consumers of fake news, this translates to "1 min of fake news per day on average, compared with 106 min of regular news...and over 500 min of total media consumption."

Watts et. al. are careful to acknowledge that this doesn't mean there isn't a significant effect of fake news on society; but they do strongly suggest it's not the tsunami/epidemic of the popular media's imagination.

What, then, can account for the effect of biased—and biasing—information? The study's authors are pretty clear on that. "The mainstream media can also promulgate falsehoods by reporting on them." The researchers cite instances like widespread reporting by the media that Sadaam Hussein definitively had weapons of mass destruction, and the claim made by Sarah Palin in 2009 that the Affordable Care Act would create "death panels"—a claim reported by over 700 news outlets.

Finally, the study's authors make what I consider to be the most important point of all: that even when the mainstream press reports on true or real events, it can skew perception by employing a broad range of tactics, including:

"[P]artial or biased data, quoting sources selectively, omitting alternative explanations, conflating correlation with causation, using loaded language, insinuating a claim without actually making it (e.g. by quoting someone else making it), strategically ordering the presentation of facts, and even simply changing the headline..."

It’s one of the many ironies of our media environment that “fake news” was a bit of a fake concept—at least in the way it was deployed by the media, i.e. as a game-changing threat. The reality is subtler, as it so often is. What this highlights is the urgent need for objective, verified and verifiable data about media. That’s the source from which real change will come.

Editor’s Note: This post was first posted at the Alitheum blog, VERIFIED. At Alithem, we’re building technology to measure media bias, error and inaccuracy. Learn more at www.Alitheum.com.