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Remember, when the grooming gangs hit the news again in January, after decades of these gangs operating, the official line from No10, repeated by the regime media, remained that ‘the real story here is the tech oligarchs spreading disinformation and the spread of the Islamophobic far right’.
They briefed fake news to the media that ‘Cummings is writing Elon’s tweets’. The PM gave a speech about it. Useless regime hacks like Lewis Goodall called it ‘his best speech’. Goodall explained that the ‘real story’ is the influence of Elon, social media radicalising the right, ‘the emergence of a common UK/US online right … making extremist, until recently fringe politics mainstream in British conservatism… Far right thinking … has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence’ — and the idea that there’s been a national conspiracy to deny victims justice ‘is dangerous nonsense’ (Goodall, Jan 2025).
This was ‘the mainstream’ pundit view in SW1-media-land only 6 months ago. Being pathological and pathologically incompetent, the regime then tried to organise another layer of coverup with a report but this went wrong because the scale of evidence is so vast the author rebelled and told enough of the truth to make the No10 line untenable. Narrative Whiplash kicked in: suddenly the gangs were no longer ‘far right disinformation’, they’re real, there’ll be an Inquiry, though of course the core Insider belief hasn’t changed — the purpose of the Inquiry (from Whitehall’s perspective) is to control the story and suppress as much as possible voters connecting the collapse of border control and the systematic rape/abuse/killing of English children.
– Dominic Cummings
When Israel struck Iranian targets on June 13th, something strange happened four days later—thousands of Twitter accounts tweeting about Scottish independence just… stopped.
That silence? It wasn’t just suspicious. It was evidence.
In this video, I walk you through how a digital blackout in Iran exposed one of the largest Iranian disinformation operations targeting the West. Working with Cyabra, we tracked over 1,300 fake accounts—AI-generated personas pushing division in the UK, attacking the BBC, and praising Iran. And when the lights went out in Tehran, those bots vanished too.
Then they came back… parroting entirely new propaganda.
This is a masterclass in how modern influence warfare works—how state-sponsored actors weaponize your feed and how even silence can be a signal.
– Ryan McBeth
The Urban Dictionary defines a “wedgie” as
…the condition when someones underwear gets stuck up their ass naturally, or by someone pulling it up there. Wedgies are done usually to nerds who wear tighty whities. However it can be done to people who wear boxers to, and of all ages. Wedgies are done as an act of dominance, to torture somone, for sibling rivalry, or just friends messing around.
I hereby add to this definition. A “wedgie” also means an artistic performance that is woke and edgy done as an act of dominance over the audience, which is presumed to consist of white, straight, cisgender, bourgeois, uptight people – tighty-whities, one might call them – who will be shocked but who will not dare to object. The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, which took place a year ago today, was a wedgie.
Now jump back another three years. Four years and ten days ago, I was excited to post about a series of thirty-five tweets from a then-unknown podcaster called Darryl Cooper, a.k.a. “MartyrMade”. The title of my post was a phrase from one of the tweets that I thought then, and still think now, exactly captured the nature of the loss of trust in institutions that divides my political life into the time before and the time after it happened. Here is the post: “Many Trump supporters don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know with apodictic certainty that the press, the FBI, and even the courts would lie to them if they were”.
So perfectly did that series of tweets resonate with the spirit of the moment that, unknown to me, while I was writing my post about them Samizdata Illuminatus was posting about the same topic.
Time moves on. I have recently added the following note to my post from 2021:
Another edit, four years later (July 2025): After posting this in 2021, I enthusiastically clicked Darryl Cooper’s “Follow” button on Twitter. As the next four years went by, he passed from being someone I followed because I admired them to being someone I followed because I despised them. Cooper is not quite out of the closet as a fan of Hitler. Read “The Case against Darryl Cooper” by John William Sherrod.
I still think this series of 35 tweets that Cooper posted in 2021 went viral for good reason. As I have said before with regard to the far right, if there is a truth respectable people shy away from mentioning, do not be surprised when the despicable people who will say it aloud are listened to.
What has this got to do with a tedious LGBT-whatever parody of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”?
Because the thing that made it finally sink into my consciousness that Darryl Cooper is a Nazi fanboi was this now-deleted tweet from him about that opening ceremony:
No, it wasn’t, you weirdo.
I took the screenshot of the tweet from this post on Instapundit in which Ed Driscoll discusses the “woke Right”.
In case the picture succumbs to link-rot, in the essay to which I link above, John William Sherrod describes it thus:
In yet another post, he posted two pictures. On the right was the blasphemous “Last Supper” depiction from the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. On the left was a photo of Hitler and his entourage with the Eiffel Tower behind them after France fell to the Nazis. Along with those two photos, Cooper posted:
“This may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”
“Why is it so hard for the authorities to win public trust? Maybe because they keep lying to us”, Gaby Hinsliff writes in the Guardian:
If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat.
A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It’s a rightwing agitator’s dream. “The real disinformation,” wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, “is the regime media.” Yes, that Dominic Cummings.
She’s not wrong about dishonesty and censorship from the authorities causing people to rightly distrust them, but she cannot see the elephant in the room because she is looking at the room from inside the elephant.
Got that? Britain is a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and the government has to show it has a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunties for everyone to flourish. And, er, there is a link between concerns people have about (checks notes) ‘where the government is acting on their behalf and on their interests with a range of factors’.
You have to laugh, even through the tears: these are the people who are in charge. Britain is a successful country? And this government has a…plan? But the important point to emphasise here is that Rayner, and the people around her, are simply constitutionally incapable of recognising the problem itself, or the solution. They actually think that ‘immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services’ is just one of a ‘range of factors’ destabilising society, alongside ‘economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions’. And they actually think that the remedy for this is just ‘investment’ in ‘deprived areas’ so as to allow people to ‘flourish’.
British readers are familiar with this mindset: typically what it means is that money gets funnelled into regeneration schemes that kit out otherwise forgotten places like Newport, Dundee or Middlesborough with nice new shopping precincts and art galleries nobody visits. The idea, more or less, is that opposition to uncontrolled immigration is really just a feature of economic insecurity and, perhaps, a lack of civic pride. And if government can therefore just press the ‘grow’ button a bit harder, people will feel better off and pride will re-emerge, and our ‘successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country’ will simply become more successful yet.
– David McGrogan
“This [anti-abundance] mentality ultimately stems from the 1970s `Limits to Growth’ report, which predicted that natural resources would run out, prices would shoot through the roof, and there would be mass starvation.
“Reality has shown this to be bunk. Yet it lives on in decision-takers’ minds, reinforced by the belief that climate change requires a reduction in our global footprint as human beings and use less of everything. And it’s strengthened by a fundamentally elitist, snobbish mindset about economic growth, the view that growth is all about the hoi polloi buying more `stuff’ they don’t need, rather than what it is: the advancement of human possibility for all of us during our limited time on the planet.
“Look hard – actually you don’t need to look hard – and you see it everywhere. Consider the disdain for `cheap food’ and the moral panic about UPFs, surely a fabricated concept, and one whose principal benefit is psychological, allowing well-off politicians and campaigners to play Lady Bountiful telling ordinary voters how to eat. Think of the sneering at big cars, or worse still, people with more than one car, the suburban lifestyle, houses with gardens instead of egg-box flats, package holidays instead of leisurely eco-travel.
“Contemplate all the tedious lifestyle preaching, the hectoring of supermarkets about packaging, the determination to build houses with tiny windows and small rooms and then to ban air conditioning as it’s too damaging to the environment.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph.
Note: “UPFs” are ultra-processed foods, which now seem to have achieved the same Voldemort status as tobacco and booze.
Regarding the “abundance mindset” approach, I recommend this book, Fossil Future (2022), of a year or so ago by Alex Epstein. Another is Merchants of Despair, by Robert Zubrin. Last but not least is this book, written more than 25 years ago – The Intellectuals and The Masses – by John Carey. He shows how, from the 19th Century and into the 20th, a lot of supposedly clever people hated the rising prosperity of the broad mass of the public, not simply out of some concern for the natural world (much of which was sentimental bullshit), but because they hated people, and ultimately, themselves.
The result of [Argentina’s] shock therapy has been a stunning recovery. Milei has brought monthly inflation down from 13 percent to 2 percent. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7 percent. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks—indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42 percent, when Milei was elected, to 31 percent. There is much work still to be done, but a new program from the IMF will provide $12 billion of new lending upfront and potentially another $2 billion, which should enable Milei to remove the remaining capital and exchange controls without reigniting inflation.
Most governments that cut their fiscal deficit by five percentage points of GDP pay a heavy political price for the resulting pain. Margaret Thatcher took nearly all her years in office to get the British public sector borrowing requirement down from 4.5 percent of GDP when she was elected in 1979 to −1.1 percent 10 years later.
– Niall Ferguson
In December 2023, I asked “Non-sarcastically, why am I so sure that this image is generated by AI?” and listed the reasons why I thought that a picture purporting to show gleeful Israeli soldiers in Gaza was a fake.
In July 2025, I must modify my question. Why am I mostly sure that this image, also purporting to show events in Gaza, is generated by AI?
I saw the picture in a Telegraph story written by Melanie Swan and called “More than 90 dead in UN aid truck massacre in Gaza”. The caption says, “Injured Palestinians are taken to hospital after over 90 were killed waiting for humanitarian aid Credit: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty”.
Here are some of the reasons why I think the picture is AI-generated:
I always start by counting their fingers and toes. The left foot of the guy holding his knee appears to have six of the latter.
The little toe of the left foot of the bare-legged boy sitting in the centre looks wrong; too wide, no toenail – just a wedge of flesh.
Staying with the boy, his legs seem malformed – the distance from knee to ankle too long, the thigh too short and too narrow.
His right arm is too short and floppy, like the vestigial arm of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The little finger of the hand of the guy with the beard seated on the right of the picture does not join up to the hand correctly – either that or he was unfortunate enough to be born with his left hand where his right hand ought to be.
The writing on that white bag on the shelf is blurred in a way characteristic of A.I.
Moving back to the left of the picture, where is the long, thin arm pointing diagonally downwards coming from? In what position would a person be lying or standing in order to have their arm come out at that angle?
Compare the thin arm to the arms of the other people in the picture. It looks too long and thin to be true; an adult’s arm would be thicker, a child’s arm would be shorter. And, though I strain to see it, the hand looks almost as if it has two thumbs.
If you look at the picture under high magnification, it looks almost like someone has drawn around the figures with a Sharpie. These black outlines are particularly noticeable with the long-legged boy and the man clutching his knee.
This one is more speculative, but do the interiors of Israeli or Palestinian ambulances actually look like that? The (oddly sparse) contents of the shelves suggest a medical purpose, but the shelves themselves look like they come from someone’s kitchen.
Taken separately, all of the above points could be explained away. Lenses distort. Human bodies vary. Hunger makes people thin. Perhaps I will end up deleting this post in shame at having questioned the suffering of real human beings. Perhaps, but, having been able to find at least eight oddities, I think that Getty Images would be justified in putting a few pointed questions to Ali Jadallah.
However, I was right to say in 2023 that “this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer”. It is even more true now.
Added 22/07/2025: Reading the comments to the Telegraph article, a lot of the commenters are saying, like me, that one of the photographs the Telegraph has used to illustrate it is fake. Only they are talking about a different picture. This one:
It shows a boy running away while a cloud of smoke rises from the buildings behind him.
With the picture of the men in the vehicle that I talked about above, my suspicions were raised the instant I saw it. The hyper-defined outlines and sharp colours gave a sort of slick, sweaty appearance to the flesh of the people depicted that I have often seen in A.I. art and noticed on that picture even before I started counting their digits. There is nothing like that in this second picture. The strange things about it suggest Photoshop rather than DALL-E or Midjourney. The border of the smoke cloud is at a suspiciously neat 45 degree angle. There is also something suspicious about the way the buildings to the left of the boy merge into the smoke. But the main problem is the running boy himself. The photographer appears to have caught him in mid-air – fine, that can happen when taking a photo of a person leaping or running, and catching that moment is usually considered the mark of a successful, dramatic picture – but he is too high off the ground to be plausible. And he has no shadow.
Or does he? There are two darker almost-horizontal lines or one slightly bent line below and to the left of him that could be his shadow. And before anyone brings up the similar horizontal lines to the right of him, those could be the shadow of a tree or pole just outside the picture. He is still suspended at an unlikely height, though. All in all, I am less convinced of the fakeness of this picture than of the other one – and the whole point of this post was that it is getting harder and harder to tell.
We are entering an age in which decisive authentication of a photograph will no longer be possible. The question will be whether one trusts the source. I do not trust anything coming out of Gaza.
It has almost become a feature of the English sporting calendar, like the Epsom Derby and the FA Cup final, to watch a local heavyweight lose to Oleksandr Usyk in a packed football stadium or on prime-time television. Five Englishmen, on eight separate occasions, have tried and failed across two different weight divisions to beat the Ukrainian champion. None has succeeded. When Daniel Dubois was knocked out in the fifth round on Saturday night, before a sold-out crowd of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium, it seemed like a sporting affirmation of Einstein’s definition of stupidity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
– Hugo Timms
Also this is amusing.
The High Court in England & Wales has handed down a judgment declaring that the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police – a force covering Northumberland, Newcastle and Sunderland, (basically the upper part of north-east England) acted irrationally in letting her officers participate in and support a ‘Pride’ event in 2024.
In short, the issue was that the Claimant (‘Plaintiff’ to our friends over the Ocean), a ‘gender-critical lesbian’, objected to members of the local Police Force Force and/or members of the Force associating themselves with the views of supporters of gender ideology and transgender activists by actively participating in the ‘Northern Pride Event in Newcastle in July 2024. The Claimant’s belief is that as a person who is ‘gender-critical’, she believes that a person’s sex is an immutable characteristic and that “gender ideology”, which recognises a person’s gender identity, is “wrong and dangerous“. To cut a long story short, the learned judge, Mr Justice Linden, upheld the complaint. Putting it simply, the judge looked at the Chief Constable’s reasons for authorising her officers to participate in the Pride Event and found them to be irrational, i.e. there was no way that the decision could have been taken by a rational Chief Constable.
The crux of the case was that police officers have a duty to be impartial and to appear to be impartial, the Chief Constable decided that the duty to be ‘impartial’ was subject to the ‘public sector equality duty’ (a general duty used wrongly here as a ‘catch-all’ to justify any deviation from the norms of acceptable conduct), but the judge said that it was the other way around, the duty to be impartial is an absolute duty, and the ‘public sector equality duty’ is a duty to have regard to the need to achieve equality, rather than the need to achieve it. The Equality cart was put before the Impartiality Horse. At the end of the judgment is a rather stinging finding about the Defendant, the Chief Constable, in paragraph 136:
I have already explained that the Defendant’s reasoning did not provide a rational basis for her decision. After careful consideration I have also concluded that the effect of the activities challenged by the Claimant was sufficiently obvious for the Defendant’s decision to be outside the range of reasonable decisions open to her.
I should point out for our readers that in England & Wales, judges are appointed by a commission, and the notion of a judge being akin to an ‘Obama judge’, a ‘Biden judge’ or a ‘Trump appointee’ is alien here, but of course the exalted echelons of higher legal circles contain in the main the sort of people who, holding a conference on law to all comers, would see nothing untoward in sneering at a Conservative government’s legal difficulties or Brexit, and the ‘Overton window’ in the legal community is more like a pinprick hole in a camera obscura, but that is not the point. What I would say is that in England & Wales, the more senior judges will tend to stick to the law and this may produce apparently surprising results, like this case.
So what happens now? Well in respect of last year’s event, nothing other than this court’s finding. However, this judgment, although from a judge who is in the first-level of the English courts, amounts to a legal ‘slap in the face with a wet fish‘ to activist police officers and will no doubt embolden those who seek to reduce or dilute the endless stream of ‘agitprop’ we see coming from our police forces, and to an extent in the wider public sector. It also helps to show that there is a difference between the activist version of the law and reality. Will the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria take any steps like asking the irrational Chief Constable to resign? Well, I’d be more surprised by that than the Second Coming.
Now the thing is:
You can gatekeep in Europe
You can gatekeep in the United States
You can gatekeep in every single economy of the West
But you absolutely cannot gatekeep in China, for there are no tools at all, that would allow you to do that
Like what would you even do to restrict the new entrees?
Intellectual property? lmao
Some other lawfare? Again, just like the enforcement of intellectual property rights, that would ultimately rely upon the cooperation of state, and the state in China – unlike in the West – just would not cooperate.
High profit margins in the West are ultimately based upon the artificial restraints upon the new entrees, and upon the state-sponsored gatekeeping. You keep your prices high, because any new entree on the market will be scared away by the force of the state machine. And in China, the state machine just wouldn’t do that. That is why Chinese competition is getting so close to perfect, and that is why prices (and profits margins) in China, can be getting so low.
– Kamil Galeev
But since October 7, 2023, it feels as if the entire informational ecosystem has collapsed under a tidal wave of noise. I’ve never seen so many people scream and tweet and chant and repost without any regard for logic, facts, or history. Emotion has not just trumped reason, it has obliterated it.
The tragedy is not that people are choosing sides; it’s that they’re doing so blindly, ferociously, and with such utter detachment from fact. The battle isn’t just on the ground anymore, it’s for the mind. And most people are losing that battle without even realizing they’ve been drafted into it.
What used to be propaganda is now performance art. What used to be journalism is now tribalism. What used to be analysis is now algorithm.
– Almen Dean
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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