I re-publish my piece from a year ago. It's not yet over. But it's nearly there...
Today, I’m republishing my entire post from one year ago. Please read it. It was my attempt to state clearly what the US press was not: that the US was in the grips of a coup. And that if coordinated action was not taken fast, it would be too late.
It’s not that there wasn’t excellent reporting in the US press. There was. But there was a total absence of simple, bold labelling of what was actually happening. The major US news organisations could or would not call it what it was.
The event that triggered my nervous system was Elon Musk’s DOGE illegally entering the US treasury and gaining access to the entire nation’s personal and financial data: a system-level hack on the entire US population.
This was a power grab that could not be undone. Data is like a genie. It cannot be put back in the bottle. That one act - that was then replicated across the federal government - was the beginning of what I believed, still believe, is a technoauthoritarian state.
I also channelled the voices of key experts: historians of authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Tim Snyder. They also said it loudly and clearly: it’s a coup.
It’s important to mark these moments, I believe. It’s one year on. And this week, it’s become distressingly clear that everything these historians have been warning about then, have warned about for nigh-on a decade, has now happened.
Thank you to everyone who commented on that and shared it.I never imagined it would meet with such a heartfelt response from so many people.
This week I was invited on Democracy Now, an indie American news station that punches well above its weight to talk about the Epstein piece I wrote and published here last week. I was blown away by the response to that piece and I just went to find the YouTube link to the show and I’m blown away again by the response to the interview: it’s reached 1m views in just a few days.
In the interview, I say that the extraordinarily muted response of the US media to the Epstein files is evidence that America is more broken than it realises.
It’s the same problem I wrote about (below) a year ago. It’s not that there aren’t still incredible journalists doing excellent reporting, there are. It’s that US news organisations lack guts and leadership. They’re failing to frame and make sense of what is in the files and what it means, failing to spell it out in headlines, failing to give it front page real estate. And of course, above all, it’s failing the victims who’ve been failed so many times before.
A year ago, it failed to communicate the jeopardy of those first days and weeks of Trump’s administration, a fast and furious illegal blitzkrieg that laid the groundwork for a surveillance state rooted in violence that we now see ICE consolidating.
And I think it’s the same problem in this moment. The US media is pre-surrendering, self-censoring. That’s what the historian Timothy Snyder warned against. It was the first and most important point on his list of how to avoid the authoritarian backslide: do not obey in advance. Yet, here we are.
Half the press has been captured by Trump allies and what remains is cowed, unable to meet the moment, impotent in the face of the abundant evidence that’s revealed a paedophiliac cabal comprising individuals from every major US institution from universities to banks alongside tech bro billionaires, foreign agents and the US president. A cabal that disgusts almost everyone. And yet, it’s barely even troubled the front pages of America’s major newspapers.
In the clip, I talk about morality. It’s not a fashionable or much-used word in the media. But in a world in which lies replace truth and black becomes white, we need something to hang on to. A line that we do not cross. And that line, if it’s anything, is surely the rape and abuse of children? In Europe, at least, that line is holding. The revelations in these documents have caused political noise and heat and actual consequences. A long list of scalps across Europe and in Norway, in the last few days, the former PM Thorbjørn Jagland, a prominent figure in the files, has been arrested and charged.
But America, it honestly feels like you are lost. Broken. Not any of you. Not the little people. It’s your storied paedophile-adjacent institutions that are failing you. The people named in these documents are still running your banks, they’re teaching at your universities, they make up half the government. Where is the outrage? Where are the thundering op-eds? I’ve seen better headlines in Reddit than I’ve seen in the New York Times. Even in class-ridden Britain, we’ve booted out a Lord and there is serious heat for a police investigation of the King’s brother.
The frog is boiling. You’re in the water so maybe you can’t feel it. But Epstein needs to be your wake-up call. I spent last week genuinely baffled by the US media’s muted non-response to the files. But now I realise: it’s the dog that didn’t bark.
The silence is compliance. And the conditions for the Donald Trump’s coup to be fully executed are now in place. The mid-terms are the final test. But nothing is inevitable. There is everything to fight for. But stop and really listen. The dog that’s not barking now? If it’s not barking now, it won’t bark then either.
If you’re unable to call out a coup in progress, or the cover-up of an entire cohort of paedophiles and their accomplices in positions of power across every sector of the US government and economy, it’s not going to be able to summon the scare headlines needed to prevent an illegal assault upon an election.
You need to build your own alarm system. Your own media. You need to find new leaders. The billionaires are not coming to the rescue, nor their news organisations or networks or their political candidates. It’s time to build your own. The call is coming from inside the house.
