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People And Nature ☭ “I am using this trial as a tribune from which to denounce the war publicly”, Dmitry Ivanov told a Moscow court, just before it sentenced him to eight-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for circulating “fakes” about the Russian army.




Ivanov was a maths student at Moscow State University. His “crime” was to write 12 anti-war posts on a student Telegram channel that he helped to set up.

Darya Kozyreva (centre, with bright red jacket) and supporters
on the day she was sentenced. Photo by Mediazona

Any Russian person with a conscience feels guilty about the war, he told the court in March 2023. “We love our country, and so it is especially sickening and shameful that this inhuman war is being waged in its name.”

Ivanov was not the only anti-war protester to use a Russian court as a platform to address his fellow citizens. Dozens of others did the same.

With support from the European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine, some of these speeches will later this year be published in English in a new book, Voices Against Putin’s War: Protesters’ Defiant Speeches in Russian Courts. I am the book’s editor, and this article is based on a talk I gave about it, by video, to a session at the Socialism 2025 event in the USA this month - Simon Pirani.

When the full-scale war broke out in February 2022, I got involved in efforts to support comrades and friends in Ukraine and Russia. In the summer of 2022, we learned of a new group, Solidarity Zone, which had been formed to support those arrested for taking direct action against the war, mainly by fire-bombing military recruitment centres. A group of us in the UK started translating their fundraising appeals and other material.

The firebombings are done when the offices are closed: they are aimed at damaging property, not persons. This became a comparatively common form of protest. There were more than 100 such actions in the first year after the invasion of Ukraine. Solidarity Zone saw that those who were detained, and their families, needed support, and particularly lawyers.

Following this at a distance, I was especially struck by some of the courageous statements made by these young people when they were brought to trial. Similar speeches were also made in court by people who had not engaged in such dramatic protests, but had simply denounced the war out loud — at a political event, online, etc — and then been arrested.

These people are victims of a general clampdown on democratic rights in Russia.

More than 30 Russians have made anti-war speeches in court all together. These, together with hundreds of others, made in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states since the 1960s – from pro-democracy dissidents to Crimean Tatar activists and other resisters against colonialism – are gathered on the “Poslednee Slovo” (“Last Word”) site, a wonderful new resource.

Earlier this year, with our friends in the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine, we decided to publish a collection of the anti-war speeches in English.

There are ten speeches in our book, as well as two statements from people who appeared in court but made their statements elsewhere: from Kirill Butylin, who (as far as we know) was the first person to carry out a fire-bombing protest and put out a social media message; and from Savelii Morozov, a young man from southern Russia who was eligible for conscription but who denounced the war at the conscription commission.

The first thing that struck me about these speeches was the deeply moral tone of many of these protesters, who have obviously been prepared to sacrifice an enormous amount just to make these speeches. Igor Paskar, for example, firebombed the office of the Federal Security Services (FSB) where he lived, and then stood there waiting to be arrested. He was detained and badly tortured. When he got to court, he said:

Do I regret what has happened? Yes, perhaps I’d wanted my life to turn out differently – but I acted according to my conscience, and my conscience remains clear.

He is now serving an eight-and-a-half years jail sentence.

The second thing that struck me is that they were addressed to the population, not to the government. Alexei Rozhkov firebombed a military recruitment centre where he lives. He was released from detention after an initial hearing — the unusual result of good work by his lawyers. Rozhkov then fled to Kyrgyzstan but was kidnapped, presumably by security forces, and returned to Russia for trial. He said:

I also have no doubt that millions of my fellow Russians, women and men, young and old, are opposed to the war too, and, like me, are convinced that the war is not a solution, but a dead end. But they have no way – without risking ending up behind bars – to do anything to be heard, to ensure their opinion was listened to.

Ukrainian artist Bohdan Ziza splashed blue and yellow paint — the colours of the Ukrainian flag — on government offices in Crimea, which has been occupied since 2014. He filmed himself doing it and saying: “I address myself above all to Crimeans and to Russians.” In court, he said his action “was a cry from the heart, from my conscience, to those who were and are afraid — just as I was afraid — but who also did not want, and do not want, this war.”

The third thing that struck me about these statements was their very different starting points. On the central issue of the war, their views range from pacifist to defeatist. Sasha Skochilenko, an artist jailed in Saint Petersburg for writing anti-war messages on labels in a supermarket, was fortunately freed as a result of a prisoner exchange. When she was in court, she did not know she was going to be freed. She said:

I am a pacifist. Pacifists have always existed. It’s a certain creed of people who place the highest value on life. We believe every conflict can be resolved peacefully. I can’t bear to kill even a spider, frightened by the very thought of taking a life.

Alexei Gorinov, a very prominent political prisoner, also expressed himself in court very much in terms of pacifism, and quoted Lev Tolstoy.

In contrast, we have the attitude of Darya Kozyreva, a St Petersburg student jailed for laying flowers at the statue of Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian national poet. In court, she made clear that, for her, the central issue is Ukraine’s right to self-determination and clearly justified Ukrainians asserting that right by force of arms. She said the war is a criminal intrusion on Ukraine’s sovereignty, that Ukraine does not need a big brother, and that it will fight anyone who tries to invade.

Another example is Ruslan Siddiqi, an anarchist who tried to inflict tangible damage on the Russian armed forces by detonating bombs that derailed a train taking munitions to the front. He justified this as a military action on Ukraine’s side, saying he thinks of himself as a partisan who should be classified as a prisoner of war.

The final example, who also made a very clear statement of hope for Russia’s defeat, was 68-year-old Alexander Skobov. He was first detained in 1978, in Soviet times, tried for activity in the dissident movement and subjected to forcible psychiatric treatment. This year, 47 years later, he was again in court on charges related to what he said about the war.

In court, he spelled out three principles of his political organisation, the Free Russia Forum: the unconditional return to Ukraine of all its internationally recognised territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea; support for all those fighting for this goal, including Russian citizens who joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces; and support for “armed resistance to this aggression on the battlefield and in the aggressor’s rear”, but excluding terrorist attacks on civilians.

Overall, if we are talking about the scale of repression in Russia, I propose we use the phrase “the 21st century gulag”, which I think is fully justified. Memorial: Political Prisoners Support, one of the main non-governmental organisations supporting political prisoners, has a list with more than 3000 names on it. The last time there were comparable numbers of political prisoners was in the mid 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev.

In addition to the people detained in Russia, there are many prisoners from the occupied territories of Ukraine. In their cases, there is a great deal of uncertainty about the numbers. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, in a submission to the International Criminal Court, identified more than 5000 civilian victims of “enforced disappearances” from the occupied territories. These people may be in detention or dead. In most cases their families do not know.

In 2023, two Ukrainian human rights groups, Zmina and the Center for Civil Liberties, compiled a list of 585 arrested civilians who were in detention or missing due to their political and civic activity in the occupied territories. This list included local government representatives, former military personnel, volunteers, activists and journalists.

The cases of political prisoners from Crimea are more known because of the strength of civil society organisations there. The Crimean Human Rights Group currently has a register of 265 of such prisoners, many from the Crimean Tatar community. Then, there are also thousands of civilian prisoners who have been moved from the so-called people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. They were tried under very local arbitrary legal systems and transferred to the Russian prison system.

In the world we live in, with militarism and authoritarianism on the rise, the anti-war protests in Russia have international significance.

It is worth making a comparison: in Britain, which is very far from facing the sort of dictatorship that rules Russia, or even the threats to democracy that we see now in the United States, the criminalisation of anti-war protesters follows a very similar Kafkaesque ideological logic to what we see in Russia.

Palestine Action, which organises direct action protests against arms deliveries to Israel, is threatened with a ban under anti-terror legislation. Singers who have denounced the genocide in Gaza are investigated by the police. The parallels with some Russian cases are striking.

What can be done in western countries about these political prisoners? First, we can raise awareness, particularly in left-wing circles, where the influence of campism remains strong. By campism, I mean the idea that Russia is not really an imperialist power and does not deserve the same condemnation as the US or Israel.

Another thing is writing letters, a standard form of support for political prisoners. It is very difficult to write letters from western countries: possible for Russian speakers, but in practice not for others. But we can send money to people who organise parcels and letters. Memorial is the biggest and most well-known. There is also OVD-info, which has been doing fantastic work over the past three years. And I have also already mentioned Solidarity Zone, the Crimea Human Rights Group and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, which also has its roots in Memorial. These are all organisations that fully deserve our support.

🔴 Thanks to Links journal, where a version of this article was first published.

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How Protesters Use Russia’s Courts To Denounce The War On Ukraine

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Seven Hundred And Forty Four

Mark Gray ✍ I almost gave up on this article.

What was the point, given the enormous spreading bloodstain, erupting from Israel’s unrelenting onslaught on Gaza, seeping across West Asia? (‘The Middle East’ in deeply engrained Western colonial terminology.) What was the point in the face of conspicuous genocide complicity across Europe? What was the point, confronted by the United States’ iron-clad, bipartisan support for Israel, enabling and abetting its genocidal fury?

I didn’t give up, though. I finished the article as a small act of solidarity with all those who have awakened to protest the appalling slaughter and accompanying de-contextualized narrative, especially young people whose activism has put their future at risk, and Jewish people who see that what is being done in their name is grotesquely at odds with the good Judaism has to offer the world in its search for justice.

Primarily, I finished it as an act of witness to what is happening in Gaza at this moment of Kairos and conscience, in conformity with what Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel identifies as ‘the eternal struggle of an ethical gaze.’ This gaze must involve the heart also: how we respond to an inhumanity, which is being normalized against a beleaguered, battered, brutalized people.

A multitude of ways has been found to frame the dreadful and disproportionate violence unleashed against Gaza, exemplified in the destruction of schools, hospitals, sewage works, universities, bakeries, museums, water plants, mosques, churches, even cemeteries: every sinew of civilized life.

Gaza has been subjected to more destructive force than across Ukraine in its war with Russia. This small, densely populated strip of land has suffered the equivalent of at least two atomic bombs. The Lancet medical journal estimates that the true Palestinian death toll is reaching towards a minimum of 200,000. Yaakov Garb, a professor at Ben Gurion University, has concluded on the basis of Israeli military data that more than 350,000 Palestinians are missing, many certainly dead. Far more children have been killed than in every conflict around the world since 2019 combined.

The stream of shocking videos and stories keeps rising, a flood of depravity: mass graves; dogs feeding on dead bodies; drones targeting toddlers, shooting them through the head or heart; emaciated children, hunger gnawing at their guts; Palestinian medics forced at gunpoint by Israeli troops to abandon premature babies in al-Nasr Hospital . . . when the medics return, the babies are dead, their bodies decomposing.

My friend, Columbia Theological Seminary graduate, Rev Dr Becca Young, has been teaching Palestinian children via Zoom in Gaza and the West Bank. She found an openly posted video of the Beit Hanoun school where she volunteered being obliterated. Israeli soldiers roared their approval. She wept. In cosmopolitan Israel, sweaty night-clubbers cavort to a song about burning Palestinian villages. In moon-scape Gaza, Israeli warriors put on the underwear of Palestinian women, whose wrecked homes they ransack. A society unhinged, its moral compass smashed. A child hasn’t spoken or eaten in days. When a psychologist finally gets him to talk, he asks a question that stops her cold: ‘Everyone says my friend went to heaven, but I didn’t see his head. How can he go to heaven without his head?’ This is Gaza today.

None of it exists in a vacuum, disconnected from history, policies and attitudes.

My grandmother was Jewish. This was only a family curiosity until 2005. I was in Palestine-Israel learning about grass-roots Palestinian development and Israeli solidarity in the struggle for justice. I mentioned my grandmother to an Israeli human rights activist. Interested, he observed that I could be designated Jewish, with the right of ‘return’ to a land I had never previously been, had no ties to, and have not set foot in since. I would gain privileges and access which Palestinians, who had roots going back generations, had been stripped of and systematically blocked from ever getting back.

That this intersection of the personal and political was remotely possible was vertiginous and disturbing, especially in light of a poignantly charged story I heard from Nazer Halteh, a wonderfully animated and determined woman working with the YWCA to give Palestinian children and young people the best skills possible to make their way in a cruelly discriminatory system.

Her father-in-law had recently died, his mind ravaged by dementia. As a young man, his entire family had been driven off their farm at the foundation of the Israeli state, forced to live as refugees in their own country. To his last breath, when he remembered nothing else, he kept talking about how he wanted to go home, back to where he had been born and grown up, close to historic Jaffa, now swallowed by Tel Aviv.

This is emblematic of the legacy and live significance of the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, leaving families with keys to homes from which they had been swept like the detritus of history: a weeping wound, inflamed, untended since.

From a Western perspective, the creation of the state of Israel was a response to the chimneys of the holocaust. This arrangement, however, was never morally watertight, and more and more people increasingly understand its inadequacy and injustice. Essentially, Eurocentric North Atlantic countries absolved themselves from centuries of deep-seated antisemitism at the expense of Palestinian rights, while inserting a settler-colonial ally in a volatile region. As Edward Said put it, Palestinians have been victimized by the victims.

Remember though, Zionism was a form of 19th century nationalism, which from its origins aimed at colonizing and Judaizing all of historic Palestine. Key Zionists envisioned the expulsion of the Palestinians long before WW2, as attested by Ilan Pappé, one of the ‘New Historians’ in Israel, who have debunked a distorted Zionist narrative.

Little wonder Rashid Khalidi entitled one of his books The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Little wonder either that, since the Nakba, Israel has obdurately defied the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as international law guarantees. As a parallel strategic policy, it has also relentlessly pursued the partition of Palestine, until it now resembles a fragmented scattering of Bantustans. Here’s the reality: Israel is an ethno-nationalist apartheid state. Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela knew this in their bones.

I wish I had time to introduce you to more of the people I met: Ahmed Sourani, giving each of his children seeds at the age of five to teach them that growing anything – including peace – takes time and patience; Suliman Abu Allah, living in the shadow of a massive illegal Israeli settlement, under constant military surveillance, fenced in and cut off from his land by a Jewish only road; Abu Said Natat, making his farm in Gaza flourish again following the Israeli occupation that had made it a wasteland; Raji Sourani, striving for human rights for decades, still alive after Israeli warplanes destroyed his offices, then his home in the current carnage. All had experienced the ritual humiliation engrained in how Israeli society treats Palestinians.

In Palestine, I encountered some of the most hospitable, generous, hopeful people I have met anywhere, all rooted in the related concepts of Sumud and Palestinianity: steadfastness, perseverance and resilience as the cultural, ideological and political foundation of resistance to occupation and oppression.

Encountering Palestinians exposed the depth of my unconscious anti-Palestinian prejudice, based on historical ignorance, old Leon Uris novels and standard Israeli myths. I left with a different view. By that stage of my life, I had been many places in the world, several marked by tension, division and violence, not least my home place, Northern Ireland. In Israel I felt that one community was trying to eliminate the other: through its policies, the Israeli state appeared determined to erase Palestinians. I never shared this impression with anyone: how can you say that sort of thing?

We are now at an apocalyptic point, which is both revelatory and terrifying.

It reveals that the Palestinian people, rather than any ideology or organization, is the problem for Israelis, 82% of whom support the annihilation of Gaza. More starkly than ever before, it reveals the latent genocide lurking in Zionism when Palestinians refuse to accept that their dehumanized role is to ‘scuttle around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle,’ as General Rafael Eitan described it back in 1983. It reveals the staggering moral vacuity of the global system constructed by the West, now crumbling under the weight of its own hypocrisy. It reveals that the horror in Gaza emerges from the same racist imperial mindset that drove the slave trade, massacred indigenous people, oversaw colonial famines.

For the terrifying – from which there is a fathomless pool to draw – listen to Ghassan Abu-Sittah, plastic surgeon and founder of the Conflict Medicine Program at the American University of Beirut:

I think we’re beyond words … we’re into the final solution where you intentionally create a famine while you’re killing people … I think the Israelis have decided that expulsion is not going to happen … people need to be killed where they are.

It is a bleak assessment.

The people of Gaza are at the heart of darkness, in all its dystopian horror. But the way of tears through the blood of the slaughtered – perhaps – may not end where we dread. A junction has been reached. One direction allows Israel and its backers to continue driving Palestinians to extermination. The other leads to the establishment of a binational, authentically democratic, egalitarian state: equality in dignity and respect; equality in the right of return for refugees; equality in all things as the prerequisite for Palestinians and Israelis to live together. Jeff Halper, an American-Israeli sociologist, has addressed how it could work in his book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State.

Some will dismiss and deride this as utopian. But it recognizes that in the Nakba, Israel rendered its own catastrophe inevitable. It articulates a more profoundly hope oriented reality than the alternative, which will only deepen Israel’s crisis of legitimacy, accentuate its status as a pariah state and accelerate its descent into psychopathic violence. Some might clutch at the straw of resuscitating the corpse of the two state solution. But this would only replicate multiple Gaza scenarios across the splinters of remaining historic Palestine, dominated and unfree, permanently threatened by rolling genocide. There is no Zionism with a human face. Neither is there any way to be pro-Israel and anti-Zionist.

Ordinary people around the world have seen the multi-faceted barbarity of the live-streamed genocide, and have written, marched, protested. Now, faced with the depravity of Israeli troops being ordered to kill starving, unarmed civilians attempting to get food for their families – one returning soldier acknowledged he felt like a Nazi treating the Jews – it’s time to take things to a different level. With Western governments prioritizing closing down Palestinian solidarity rather than ending the genocide, it’s time to show that ordinary people are not peripheral actors in history but its authors.

The challenge is massive. But international levers are available to end the Gaza atrocity. Taking a cue from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the Global March to Gaza, it’s time to mobilize, using all the skills available from every aspect of civil society around the world, to pressurize the powers that be to: (1) end the slaughter and starvation by getting a peace-keeping and emergency relief mission into Gaza under the UN General Assembly ‘Uniting for Peace’ Resolution 377 (V); (2) make West Asia a nuclear free zone to ensure Israel never has the chance to deploy its Samson option; (3) pursue through the courts all those involved in genocide and war crimes to hold them to account.

It’s time to bear witness to children devoured by fire and famine: the traumatized, targeted, shot, bombed, amputated – often without anaesthetic – children and people of Gaza. It’s time to play our tiny part in Tikkun Olam – mending the world: pursuing without ceasing the demands of conscience and heart for the good of Gaza and wider Palestine until, with everyone sitting under their own vine and fig tree, the tear is wiped from every eye. And no one will terrorize them or make them afraid anymore.

⏩Mark Gray is a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. He holds an M.Div. From Columbia Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from Queen's University, Belfast. A former mission worker to Malawi, he has also served congregations in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Gaza 🪶 A Question Of Witness And Of The Heart

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Seven Hundred And Forty Three

 

A Morning Thought @ 2772

 

A Morning Thought @ 2771

Mike Burke ðŸ‘… Sinn Féin Press Release, 28 July 2025 🪶 Pa Daly Welcomes The Rising Of The Sun, Philip McGuigan Its Setting.

If you’re not a daily visitor to Sinn Féin’s website, or if the site failed to verify that you’re human, you may have missed the latest news:

Sinn Féin spokesperson for the Environment, Climate and Energy, Pa Daly TD, noted that the sun rose today at 6:03am. He said:

I will continue to work with my party colleagues and the wider community, north and south, to ensure that the sun comes up each morning.

Sinn Féin MLA Philip McGuigan remarked that the sun is scheduled to set at 8:46 this evening. The party’s health spokesperson said:

In a new Ireland, it will be important that darkness falls each night so that people may enjoy a long and restful sleep.

Both party representatives clarified that Sinn Féin does not welcome the rising of the moon.

⏩ Mike Burke has lectured in Politics and Public Administration in Canada for over 30 years.

Rising Of The Moon Unwelcome

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Seven Hundred And Forty Two

Barry Gilheany ✍ Donald Trump’s back tracking from his promise to his MAGA base to release files relating to the death of the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has caused, in equal measure, consternation to his devoted followers and schadenfreude to his opponents who delight in seeing Trump hoist on this particular conspiracy petard – one of many conspiracies which he has made his political career. 

 But on an even more serious level, his refusal to release the Epstein files may not merely be due to the likely appearance of his name in them but that they could evidence an allegation that has long circulated; that Donald Trump raped 13 year old Katie Johnson, later 16 year old Jane Doe, procured for him by Epstein and his partner in multiple sex crimes, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. How else can his good wishes towards her before her trial and hints that she could receive a Presidential pardon as she currently meets with Federal prosecutors be rationalised? His status as an adjudicated rapist and his predatory attitudes and behaviour towards adult women are matters of public record; testimony that he gets a thrill from barging into groups of under 16 females in states of undress meets the definition of paedophilia in the sexual attraction sense; should it be proved judicially that he raped Ms Johnston, then he should be properly regarded as a pederast or nonce in street parlance.

There are two main claims concerning the Epstein files: that Epstein kept a client list that he used to blackmail co-conspirators and that he did not commit suicide, but that he was murdered in his cell so that he would not reveal compromising material on his associates.[1]

For right-wing influencers and Trump acolytes, this was the opportunity to reveal the full moral turpitude of the Biden administration and the liberal, globalist elite. In the run up to last year’s US Presidential election, the wildly popular podcaster Dan Bongino fulminated:

Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal because it speaks to an enormous problem in this country. It is that there is a connected class of insiders that feel that they can get away with anything because they can.

On another right-wing podcast, Kash Patel, a Trump aide turned influencer, in 2023 urged Republicans in Congress to force the White House to reveal all. “What the hell are the House Republicans doing? They have the majority,” he said. “You can’t get the list? Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the paedophiles are.”

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said last October “We need to release the list.”[2]

Despite the presence of all three of these personages in office; Vance as Vice President; Patel as Director of the FBI and Bongino as his deputy, the Trump administration earlier this month issued a memo insisting that there is “no incriminating list” of clients, “no credible evidence” that Epstein blackmailed anybody, and that Epstein definitely took his own life.[3] Trump had overruled Attorney-General Pam Bondi’s promise to release the files. He told his followers not to “waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”[4]

However, it is almost certain Trump’s erstwhile allies will not get this particular memo. For throughout the period following the revelation in January 2015 that Prince Andrew and other unnamed “powerful men” were referenced in a civil case against Epstein and the publication by Gawker of his little black book, febrile speculation solidifying into conspiracy theories has accompanied the various contours of the sordid saga around Epstein. Epstein’s defence attorney expressed “significant doubts” that his client had taken his own life; doubts that were shared by other public figures, including Trump’s personal lawyer Rudi Guiliani and the Democratic representative Al Green. 

After Trump was voted out of office, conservatives trained their sights on the Democrats, baselessly accusing the Biden administration of supressing incriminating details related to Epstein, including the famed client list. Meanwhile, despite his friendship with Epstein in the 1990s, Trump was being showcased by the MAGA world as a fighter against the type of people who associated with the prolific sex offender. When the FBI searched Trump’s Florida residence in August 2022, the far-right commentator Jack Posobiec told his followers: “We now know the judge who signed off on the Mar-a-Lago raid was Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer. Don’t question it!” Fox News aired a doctored picture that falsely showed the judge next to Maxwell. But Trump himself was a reluctant crusader, suggesting on the campaign trail last year that he would declassify files about Epstein but cautioning that “You don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phony stuff in there.”[5]

Before looking in more detail as to how Trump has typically tried to ride out the storm over his connections to Epstein; whether this relationship will prove to be his downfall and the prospects of something developing even more to the right of Trump and the MAGA movement, it is very instructive to look at the component of the MAGA coalition which has provided the most red meat to its most devoted fantasists – the Q-Anon movement. For therein lies the greatest danger to Trump.

Q Anon: The Conspiracist Case Study

QAnon started in October 2017 when an anonymous user posted several times on the message board 4chan. That user called themselves ‘Q,’ suggesting that they had a level of US security approval referred to as ‘Q clearance. The 4chan posts were cryptic and coded; to be able to understand them would almost require the ability to learn a new language. They talked about Donald Trump a lot – as well as secret plans and pledges. But it’s USP and strapline was to be ‘Save the Children’ – the idea that powerful cabals of people were stealing, abducting, and even eating kids. [6] One figure stood out more than anyone else in this lurid and fantastic demonology – Hillary Clinton. She functioned as the archetypal Wicked Witch figure who led this cabal of liberal elites who drank the blood of “pure blood” children. During the 2016 Presidential Election, as the Democrat candidate, Ms Clinton became the lightning rod for so much right-wing populist hatred of the Washington and East Coast “elites” with the misogynist flavour that only successful liberal women like her can generate, that Trump rallies would always resound to the cries of “Lock Her Up”. It also generated the grotesque and unfounded Pizzagate conspiracy scandal in which she ran a paedophile ring of liberal politicians in the basement of a Washington pizzeria (which, never forget, led to a gun attack on the premises by a deranged individual sucked into that conspiracy narrative).

Accordingly, what really kicked the QAnon prophecy industry into gear was the expectation that when on 28 October 2017, news broke that the first indictments from the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump camp and Vladinimir Putin’s Russian mafia state to influence the outcome of the previous year’s election, the Trump fans on 4chan’s ‘/pol/ board (short for ‘politically incorrect’) were primed to believe that it would be a figure from the enemy side, namely Hillary Clinton, who would be arrested, not a more obvious figure from Trumpworld. This was the juncture of revelation; when the true nefarious plan would be uncovered, and the lamentations of the vanquished enemies would be great.[7]

The first ‘Qdrop’ fed this belief. ‘HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. ’ It read. ‘Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organised in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur.' Although it didn’t make a major impact on its first landing, the poster in question was persistent – they kept the identity out there, continuing to drop tantalising hints of secret knowledge over the coming weeks.[8]

Of course, when it became apparent that Hillary Clinton’s forecast arrest on 30th October would not materialise (the arrestee being Trump’s former campaign chief Paul Manafort instead) – one of many failed Q predictions. But for every failed prophecy there was an explanation – the plot, behind the scenes, was growing more complex and multi-dimensional. There would be new adversaries, and further revelations would prove the conspiracy ran even deeper than previously expected. In order to sustain the narrative, another element had to be bolted on.[9]

It is in this way that Q-Anon metastasised into a wider vortex of diverse but self-reinforcing conspiracies. For QAnon was a theory in search of a conspiracy. That Trump was fighting an evil plot was clear; what that plot actually was had considerably more flexibility. The New World Order merged with the Deep State to provide an overarching framework to understand the plots which swirled around in the minds of QAnon followers. New Age theories about alternative medicine accompanied white supremacist theories about the Great Replacement. As new events developed, they could be woven into the QAnon quilt with ease – Covid saw anti-vaccination and 5G theories worked into the fold; the 2020 Presidential election witnessed long-promulgated Republican theories about illegal voters combined with Bush-era Democrat beliefs about rigged voting machines.[10]

To those who have searched online for QAnon ‘map,’ and its world view requires navigation around baffling, hyperdense network diagrams of interlinked people, institutions, events, and belief systems – massive fractal images in which zeroing in on any node in the network reveals another conspiracy theory. Princess Diana sits along the North American Free Trade Agreement; the Trilateral Commission is just over ley lines; Black Lives Matter, fluoridation, cattle mutilation and the 1973 oil crisis as all part of the same masterplan.[11]

Perhaps expertise in numerology helps to decode QAnon messaging. According to the New York Times, when the Alabama State football top with the number 17 on and he held it up for the cameras, QAnon took it as a sign that he was on their side – because Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. Never mind that it was in 2017 and in 2015 they’d given Barack Obama a shirt with 15 on it.[12]

Stripping away all the attendant conspiracy theories, QAnon’s core belief is that Hollywood celebrities run the world harvesting life-extending chemicals from the blood of trafficked children, all of which is being secretly battled by Donald Trump and his sidekick, John F. Kennedy Junior who faked his own death in a plane crash in 1999 so that he could bide his time before joining “The Donald” in a global fight against international paedos.[13]

Stripped off the modern fantasticalism of faked deaths and crisis actors, QAnon is ultimately a reheated version of the age-old antisemitic trope that a group of evil Jews is plotting to take over the world; only now they’re called globalists, or bankers, or ‘Manhattan lawyers’ or ‘Hollywood elites’. But disturbingly, possibly the most irrational concatenation of beliefs that has emerged in the Western hemisphere since the era of the Third Reich, has acquired a solid base of constituents. A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) The Persistence of QAnon in the post-Trump Era, based on a random sample of nearly 20,000 American people suggests that its peak, 17 per cent of them believed in QAnon. This report also shows that one in five Americans agreed with this base level QAnon statement: ‘There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.’ Regarding those who mainly view and trust far-right cable news channels like Newsmax and Fox News, a frightening 40 per cent of this cohort agreed with this declaration: “The government, media and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping paedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.’ [14]

The collision of and enmeshment of QAnon within wider far right conspiracist narratives around the ‘Deep State’ had real life consequences with the events of 6 January 2021 when weeks of ‘Stop the Steal' lying and agitation by Trump and his supporters about the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election led to the storming of Capitol Hill by protestors determined to thwart the certification of Joe Biden as victor and incoming President. In the maelstrom of violence that day which led to the deaths of five people and the shocking visual imagery of makeshift gallows at which the mob intended to lynch Vice-President Mike Pence for his ‘treachery’ in doing his constitutional duty in verifying the election result and so ensuring the ordained, orderly transition of power, the figure of the QAnon Shaman – real name Jake Angeli – is arguably the most iconic symbol. One of several individuals present with known ties to QAnon, Angeli was memorably photographed in horns and a fur hat with the Stars and Stripes painted across his face. Evidence in the weeks and months ahead would substantiate the links between QAnon and assorted far right groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.[15]

The Perils for Trump

It is the predominance of women among those who have swallowed the “Red Pill” in relation to QAnon that may spell most danger for Trump in light of his drawing back on the release of the Epstein files and the widely circulated images of his conviviality with the deceased sex offender in the 1990s. In her research into those ‘lost’ to QAnon and other conspiracist rabbit holes, Dr Sophia Moskalenko, a specialist at the University of Pennsylvania on the psychology of radicalisation, in mass psychology and in conspiracy theories, has found in her research that it’s the women who are more likely to be the ones in relationships to fall for QAnon. According to her, it often starts with ‘wellness’ websites devoted to seemingly fluffy and harmless New Age philosophies. The providers of yoga, kale, meditation, crystal and other seeming esoteric and ‘alternative’ health services are naturally suspicious of medical authorities and their promotion of man-made vaccines. As people discovered such realms of ‘hidden knowledge’ in the QAnon world; there is a natural urge to share with your groups this episteme which sets you apart. It was the notion that QAnon was out to rescue children from satanic paedophiles that appealed to so many. It became a rescue mission:

that reverberated through a lot of online spaces frequented by women … by stay-at-home moms or the parenting-as-lifestyle people.[16]

The satanic, child trafficking cabal narrative fell on a fertile territory embellished by sex scandals in Hollywood, the #MeToo movement, sex scandals in the White House and the revelations of child abuse within churches on top of the preexisting cynicism towards government, elites, experts and the mainstream media.[17]

This type of female demographic which are traditionally open to the entreaties of conservative social movements such as pro-life or pro-family would now be (though not exclusively) be receptive to movements like “Liberty Moms” and far right politicians like Republican Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor- Greene a QAnon devotee and promoter of many other conspiracy theories.

Trump’s reaction to the furore around the non-release of the Epstein has been his tried and tested technique of distract, distract, distract. Just as on the same day during the 2016 campaign when the Access Hollywood tape emerged of Trump boasting about “grabbing women by the pussy”, his campaign team seized on the Wikileaks release of thousands of emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, helping him to snatch victory from what the jaws of what should have been a terminal moment, so Trump has put the distraction machine into overdrive, starting with a threat on 12th July to revoke the citizenship of the New York-born actor and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell for questioning his “moral compass”.[18]

Next came a Trump post on 16th July that Coca-Cola had agreed to use real cane sugar in its main product in the US. The next day came a rare missive from the White House Press Secretary on the President’s health, assuring reporters that his bruised hand resulting from “frequent handshaking” and his swollen legs caused by chronic venous insufficiency did not reflect any cause for concern.[19]

More darkly, he made the baseless claim that officials in the Obama administration had fabricated intelligence reports to assert that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, following that up with a fake-AI generated video, being forced to kneel by FBI agents, who handcuff him next to a beaming Trump in the Oval Office, then wearing an orange jumpsuit and pacing a prison cell to the soundtrack of the Village People’s YMCA. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, then attempted to give this despicable narrative further heft by making baseless claims that Obama and his “treasonous” advisers plotted nothing short of a coup.[20]

Trump has also resorted to another faux strongman weapon – lawfare. Last week, he sued the Wall Street Journal’s billionaire owner Rupert Murdoch, publisher Dow Jones and two of its reporters for libel and slander over claims he sent Jeffrey Epstein a signed lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman as part of a book celebrating Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003, according to reporting from the New York Times. The birthday gift collection includes about five dozen contributions from public figures and unknown acquaintances, according to documents reviewed by the Times and the Wall Street Journal and was assembled before Epstein’s first arrest.[21]

However, for all the lurid conspiracies which propelled to power – ‘birtherism’, the ‘American carnage’; the Podesta falsehoods; Pizzagate and the invasion of the US hordes of ‘bad hombres’ from ‘shithole countries’ like Haiti who eat the pets of the residents of Springfield, Ohio – he may well have to come to grief over the arguably the most preposterous of all of them – QAnon and its tale of the satanic cabal of blood drinking transnational elite paedophiles. While, admittedly, he was reluctant to openly peddle it, he was an undoubted beneficiary of it in his anointed role as saviour of American children. While the reaction of right-wing influencers to Trump’s apparent backsliding; for Alex Jones “over the top sickening”; Liz Wheeler “seems like unforgiveable behaviour” and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ description of Trump as “fat”, “a joke” and “stupid”[22], may, in the spectacle of rogues falling out, gave liberals and progressives temporary delight and relief, it is worth considering if this really is the hill that we would like Trump to die on. For the visceral feelings of betrayal felt by the QAnon and related parts of the Trump coalition at their hero’s involvement with the actually existing embodiment of internationalised child sex exploitation could lead to something even worse on the right – the emergence of a figure who, unlike Trump who merely but maliciously instrumentalises conspiracy theories, will sincerely believe and seek to execute the most deranged of them. A Republic of Gilead meets a 21st century Reich?

References

[1] Xavier Greenwood and Fred Harter, The Epstein files: Trump is trapped by the conspiracy theory he once gloried. The Observer 20th July 2025 pp.18-19

[2] Ibid, p.18

[3] Ibid

[4] Freddie Hayward American Affairs. Trump told his MAGA base to look the other way over Epstein. Now it’s looking at him. The New Statesman 25-31 July 2025

[5] The Observer, p.18

[6] Marianna Spring (2024) Among the Trolls. My Journey Through Conspiracyland. London: Atlantic Book pp.101-02

[7] Tom Phillips & Jonn Elledge (2022) Conspiracy. A History of Bxllocks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them. London: Wildfire p.322

[8] Ibid, pp. 322-23

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid, p.325

[11] Ibid

[12] Danny Wallace (2024) Somebody Told Me. One Man’s Unexpected Journey down the Rabbit Hole of Lies Trolls and Conspiracies. London: Ebury Press p.86

[13] Ibid, p.85

[14] Ibid, p.85

[15] Springer, p.103

[16] Wallace, pp.94-95

[17] Ibid

[18] David Smith Nothing to see here! President’s Epstein files tactics miss the mark. Guardian 25th July 2025 pp28-29.

[19] Ibid

[20] Ibid

[21] Nina Lakhani and Lucy Campbell. New evidence of Trump-Epstein link fans flames as controversy grows. The Guardian. 24th July 2025 p.32

[22] The Observer, 20th July 2025 p.19

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Minding His P’s And Qanons 🪶 Donald Trump’s Epstein Travails. Have The Chickens Come Home To Roost?

 

A Morning Thought @ 2770

 

A Morning Thought @ 2769

Anthony McIntyre  ☠  At the weekend, someone attempted to murder Clifford Peeples, the loyalist activist and pastor. 

While he slept at his North Belfast home a petrol bomb was tossed into his living room. The PSNI is reported to be treating the attack as arson with an intent to endanger life.

Mr Peeples has led a highly charged life, often to the fore of contentious issues. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in 2001 after his arrest two years earlier for possession of pipe bombs.  Having twice served alongside the Ukrainian military in its battle against Russia's expansionist ubernationalism, he is no stranger to the world of headlines, to this day remaining a controversial figure. Earlier this year he was involved in failed legal action against the kakistocracy in Stormont that suffers from delusions of governance. Last year the PSNI arrested him on foot of allegations that he was posting 'hate material' online, something he described as politically motivated harassment, the work of 'PSNI boot boys' who vandalised his library. Few will accuse the force of being book boys. His account of the reasons behind his detention was detailed to the Sunday World.

I had posted a piece about the Southport attacks expressing concern for the safety of police officers and my solicitor demanded to know how it could be construed as hateful. They then asked I was influenced by a well-known right-wing political philosopher. I refused to talk about that because my post hadn’t broken any Facebook rule or regulations. And they then asked me about anti-Semitism. The police appeared to imply I actually hated everyone. It was truly bizarre . . . It was clear to me the PSNI wanted to know if I was working for the Israelis by compiling photo-files of Muslim extremists. It was nonsense and I told them that.

While his political and religious opinions would be a universe removed from my own, there is absolutely no justification for trying to inflict on him the fate that befell Michael Servetus at the hands of hate theologians. In 2009 when the Derry home of Mitchel McLaughlin was petrol bombed I described it as a hate crime, commenting:

The torching of political opponents is a practice we associate with the middle ages when people could be described as witches and burned at the stake. It is not the type of thing we expect from something that describes itself at republicanism in the 21st century.

While there seems to be a snowball's chance in hell of any republican strand being behind this attack, the standard applies across the board. It is as wrong to seek to burn Mr Peeples to death as it was to attempt the same with Mr McLaughlin. 

As is usual there is much scuttlebutt flowing from the rumour mill as to who might be responsible, with a rare unanimity of opinion on display suggesting a strange variant of cross community collusion. But speculation and hard facts run on different tracks, and to slightly rework an apt Kipling observation, the twain do not always meet. 

Like Jamie Bryson, Clifford Peeples, given his talent for writing coupled with a Masters degree in law, would better serve loyalism and the community on whose back it sits like a distended hump if he was to reflect on it rather than reflect it. Even if he has used incendiary language, trying to incinerate him serves only murderous hatred. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

A Burning Hatred

Belfast Telegraph ★ Written by Sam McBride. Recommended by Christy Walsh.


Much of what was said by Sinn Féin president at critical juncture in stuttering peace process was crafted in Downing Street by Jonathan Powell.

A man who is now a key figure in Britain’s intelligence apparatus wrote key sections of a seminal speech Gerry Adams gave about the IRA’s disbandment, declassified files prove.

The Sinn Féin president’s words in October 2002 came at a critical point in the peace process where the IRA was on the back foot after a series of incidents.

It had got discovered smuggling guns in from Florida, got caught training FARC rebels in Colombia, faced a backlash over the post-September 11 war on terror, and was known to still be widely involved in criminality and so-called ‘punishment shootings’.

That had contributed to unionism deserting David Trimble for the DUP, with the First Minister clinging to office but lacking real authority even within his own party.

Against that backdrop, an IRA spy ring at Stormont was exposed at the start of October 2002, prompting the government to suspend the institutions before Trimble walked out.

Just three weeks later Adams turned to a highly unlikely source to help write a speech about the IRA: the Prime Minister’s chief-of-staff, Jonathan Powell.

Continue @ Bel Tel.

Files Prove Key Parts Of Seminal Adams’ Speech Written By Man Now Key Figure In British Intelligence

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