Book Review
Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Journalism doesn’t need saving by those who made it toxic. Wright names the rot—Murdoch, the lobby, the Oxbridge cartel—and shows how the presses keeps running.
The rest of the blog
Journalism doesn’t need saving by those who made it toxic. Wright names the rot—Murdoch, the lobby, the Oxbridge cartel—and shows how the presses keeps running.
Trump didn’t just return to NATO; he returned as “Daddy”—a role not earned through diplomacy, but conjured through spectacle. Baudrillard warned that when image overtakes reality, politics becomes performance. The bombs may have hit Iran, but the real strike was rhetorical. What mattered wasn’t destruction, it was the appearance of obliteration, the meme of authority, the myth of restored order. In the empire of simulation, the sovereign returns not with treaties, but with merch.
Labour won power by promising stability, but what it offers now is paralysis. It has no strategy to counter Farage, no defence against a Tory right fightback, and no imagination to confront the ecological and economic shocks coming fast over the horizon. While Reform sets the agenda and the left reorganises, Starmer retreats into technocratic caution. The government is not leading Britain—it’s managing decline, and doing it badly. Unless Labour finds the courage to confront the forces tearing the country apart, it risks becoming the caretaker of its own collapse.
Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza is a searing indictment of Western complicity in Israeli aggression, exposing the ideological, economic, and political forces that have enabled the destruction of Palestine.
The work isn’t fake because it’s imaginary—it’s fake because it pretends to matter. We clock in, log on, file the forms, and call it a life.
Matt Goodwin’s claim that “London is over” isn’t analysis, it’s a panic attack in column form. Behind the talk of pints and train delays lies the same tired script the Mail rehashes every few weeks, just in time for its readers to rage over their cornflakes. Crime becomes a cipher for immigration, anecdote stands in for data, and the city’s diversity is framed as an existential threat. But what really offends Goodwin isn’t decline—it’s that London no longer looks or sounds like him.
Alexander Dugin’s latest polemic is not political analysis but fascist sermon—an apocalyptic blueprint in which nuclear war is both inevitable and desirable. Cloaked in the language of sovereignty and tradition, it is a call to arms for a new ideology of holy Russian power. What begins with Fordow ends with the end of humanity. And for that reason alone, it demands scrutiny—not celebration. You listening, tech bros?
The next state to cross the nuclear threshold won’t be doing anything new. It’ll be following the path Israel already took—building the bomb in secret, shielded by silence and strategic utility. The real precedent was set decades ago in the Negev. That’s the hypocrisy at the heart of the so-called international order: one bomb is a threat to civilisation, the other a pillar of it. This isn’t about non-proliferation. It’s about who gets to own the apocalypse.
On Faiz Siddiqui’s Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk
The presidency was already a sideshow in Trump’s first term, but his second has stripped it of any remaining dignity, turning the White House into just another stage for his brand of gaudy, transactional spectacle.
A masterful dissection of power, corruption, and the making of modern America, The Apprentice deserved to sweep the Oscars, but the Academy, as always, chose safety over truth.
The age of algorithmic authoritarianism is here: governance has been outsourced to billionaire-controlled social media and AI systems that manipulate reality, suppress dissent, and enforce ideological obedience through predictive algorithms and digital surveillance.
There’s no mystery here. The American empire, bloated and decayed, has finally started eating itself, and Musk is just the latest tech-cult billionaire to turn state side destruction into spectacle.
The transition is complete. The bureaucracy is being purged, executive orders rain down like decrees from a throne, and opposition is branded treasonous. The state is no longer a neutral machine for capitalist management—it is becoming an instrument of direct class war. Trump’s second term is not simply a rerun of his first; it is something darker, more disciplined, more openly repressive. The threats against political enemies are no longer bluster—they are policy. The FBI and CIA are being reshaped in his image, turned from institutions of surveillance into enforcers of ideological loyalty. Official diktats appear not just in government memos but on X, where Musk, the regime’s favoured oligarch, polls his Twitler Youth on whom to exile next. The question is no longer whether American democracy is eroding but whether we are watching its final transformation into something else entirely. Neoliberalism is collapsing, and in its ruins, a new order is emerging. The only question is: what kind?
Picture a once-mighty empire, stripped to its underwear. Once hailed for its democratic values and global reach, the United States now staggers beneath the weight of its own contradictions—its institutions hollowed out, its alliances squandered, its climate left to burn. In the aftermath of a second Trump presidency, what was once dismissed as political theatre has morphed into a crisis so profound that even the most reluctant observers must confront the truth: the old order cannot endure.
The growing concentration of power in the digital realm, exemplified by Elon Musk’s control over X, poses unprecedented risks to both online discourse and real-world stability.
From the cult-like following of visionaries like Elon Musk to the polarising influence of figures such as Donald Trump, we explore how the digital age’s most prominent personalities contribute to and thrive within the ever-evolving spectacle that captivates and divides our global society.