Apart from anything else, fascinated by the internal cost/benefit analysis of continuously writing op-eds for the Telegraph where the organic audience is overwhelmingly hostile and the paywall means you limit its reach among the wider public

Aaron Banks now squats like a giant toad across British politics. He has expanded the Overton window in both directions. Praising bolsheviks and Liz Truss...

Also, note the very different approach to speech that could be characterised as inflammatory when practiced by the movement (Kirk etc) and when they are on the receiving end of it. Guess words can be violence after all.

Badenoch has finally found a hard line between the Conservatives and Farage.

I don't think this is predominantly ideological (though expect there is also an element of over-correcting for being seen as 'out of touch' with Reform-inclined audiences) but rather the general deterioration of quality news standards which inherently benefits Reform narratives

KERNEN: Speaking of Nvidia, I don't know if it's a shakedown, but it doesn't seem normal to say 'you can sell your chips to China, we just want 15%' HASSETT: There's a serious national security risk if the Nvidia chips lead to Chinese getting a head start in AI K: How does getting 15% solve that?

It's not just the authoritarianism — it's how shameless, how *gleeful* this administration is about it

A very easy way of gauging commitment to genuinely open debate is to see whether its purported participants have ever refined their intellectual perspective on an issue as a result

Is joking about murder acceptable again?

I’m not saying Britain has gone entirely batshit crazy but a Reform councillor in Wales has just stormed out of a local Torfaen Council meeting in Gwent because it failed to acknowledge the killing of a man in America. In other news, Britain has gone entirely batshit crazy.

Why is my gym in the business of wishing happy birthday to foreign autocrats?

Because as with 'free speech', for most it was only a means to an end

Cato, well-known Marxists.

Beatings will continue until morale improves

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. 🔗 www.404media.co/doj-deletes-...

Streeting has a remarkable knack of boldly taking a principled stand as soon as the permission and incentive landscape has shifted www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Juncker had this good quote about how politicians know exactly what needs to be done they just don't know how to get re-elected after doing it

White House Officials Vow Vast Crackdown on Liberal Groups www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09... Open authoritarianism. Happening right in front of us.

This is a 10/10 quote

I think 2nd part of this is right, but I think first is too reductive, take Brexit for example, people voted for it for all sorts of reasons not just nostalgia, problem is that they were oft contradictory at a systemic level

I think the damage might already be done bro

I read MiL's copy of the Times yesterday out of interest - the news section - and it was striking that they presented him as a 'conservative activist', included 3 or 4 laudatory quotes from CK friends and allies (including one comparing him to JFK & MLK), but no examples of his own rhetoric

But also, who is this content for exactly?

Shot, chaser Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

Elon, speaking at the Tommy Robinson march today: “This is a government against the people and not for the people, this is why everyone is gathered here today…we don’t have another four years…there’s got to be a dissolution of parliament” And the government just…continues to use X.

The thing is, not just is this not true (of current Reform intenders or especially their 2024 vote), but it's actually somewhat unusual in British politics to be the most popular party and have a support base as deviant from the median voter.

X is wild because you can post a link to a NYT feature story on this and no one will see it, but cuntycakes123 can make a post summarizing the main bullet points with no attribution and it will go viral and everyone will be like "OMG why isn't the media covering this?!?"

"principled, legal and non-partisan"

I was expecting the Reichstag Fire parallel to be made, but I did not expect it to come from the right.

Charlie Kirk was a man so deeply committed to freedom of speech and enlightened, reasonable debate that you are not allowed to quote anything he said ever again.

i've said before that the US Civil War being primarily formal armies fighting each other in setpiece battles really clouds a lot of americans understanding of what an actual civil war looks like

I genuinely hate that Republican politicians only feel brave enough to say stuff like this when they're retiring.

Grimly crisp illustration of the mechanism whereby toxic and unrepresentative social media shapes mainstream coverage. Prominent journalist logs onto X, sees claim, assumes truth, repeats in national broadcast from trusted mainstream news org. Happens all day every day, just especially stark here.

Also, as an aside, what tangible achievements does Lucy Powell have from over a decade in UK politics? (other than winning her seat the lowest ever turnout in any by-election to date)

Keeping Mandelson would mean Number 10 thinks not following a recommendation to take specialist tax advice is a resigning matter, but believing the world’s most notorious paedophile over his victims and lying about your post-conviction contact with him isn’t. That’s…not a sustainable position.

What is scary is not just the rise in political violence in the US per se, but the completely asymmetric partisan response to it

No one could have predicted.

A lot of words to say... what exactly? Its good that we "come down like a tonne of bricks on racism and discrimination" but also its bad?

🚨New Research 🚨 Ahead of the release of Wave 30 of the BES Internet Panel, the team has examined Labour's decline since the 2024 GE. Labour's support has splintered into mostly indecision or left-liberal parties, but they've also lost their few right-wing voters. 🧵⬇️ tinyurl.com/3m62exph

Thought they were going to refocus the military on 'warfighting'

Donald Trump is in the middle of launching numerous plans that won't "work" but: 1. They're happening 2. Efforts to stop them are having *at best* mixed success 3. They're causing a phenomenal amount of harm already So yeah, this is a terrible line of attack, Stephen says.

I'm choosing to imagine him saying this in a Theresa Villiers voice

Rep. Jamie Raskin on Trump's exec order on flag desecration: "One of his first acts in office ... was to grant full and unconditional pardons to violent insurrectionists who themselves used the American flag as a weapon to attack and beat American police officers" on Jan. 6. They included:

I think this is evidence more of the utter strategic drift and timidness as opposed to genuine ideological alignment with Farage, remember Starmer made his 'island of strangers' speech and then subsequently said he regretted it

If, four years from now, Democratic voters view the military negatively or skeptically, this will be treated as a problem that is incumbent *for the Democratic party to solve*, not as a failure by the DoD leadership or something that requires policy shifts to ameliorate.