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Nadine Dorries, who is one of the architects of the Online Safety Act, has called for the law’s repeal, following complaints by her new buddies in Reform UK. Apparently, the hard-right party’s perfectly normal proposals to build concentration camps — sorry, ‘detention centres’ — in Green-voting wards keep getting flagged as ‘hate speech’ … for some strange reason. On 17 May, Zia Yusuf, Reform’s unelected, non-MP, non-shadow-cabinet ‘home affairs spokesperson,’ posted that: Labour is using the “Online Safety Act” to silence political opponents, and TikTok is doing their dirty work. Undeterred by the complete lack of evidence of Labour’s involvement, Yusuf complained: First, TikTok removed my video announcing Reform UK’s new policy to place secure illegal migrant detention centres in non-Reform constituencies, prioritising Green ones. TikTok explicitly cited the Online Safety Act as the reason for its removal. This is hard evidence of this draconian legislation being weaponised to silence political opponents. As the Canary reported recently, the previous Tory government introduced that ‘draconian legislation’. Then-digital-secretary Nadine Dorries actually championed the law throughout its passage. And what party is Dorries part of now? Oh yeah… it’s Reform UK. Dorries: It wasn’t me… Then, on 18 May, Dorries wrote for low-quality toilet paper supplier, Daily Mail: Why we must scrap the Online Safety Act I helped bring to life Of course, the Tory-Reform turncoat tried to claim that she only had a hand in the ‘good’ bits of the Online Safety Act. She wrote that: The Act was designed for the simplest of reasons: to protect children from harmful online content such as material relating to suicide, violence and pornography. As culture secretary from 2021 to 2022, I signed off its most striking provision: that if an online publisher such as a social media giant breached the Act, it would face a fine equivalent to 10 per cent of global turnover, which could be in tens or even hundreds of millions. However, Dorries claimed that those darn meddling lawmakers then muddied the waters of her beautiful child-protecting bill. She claimed that: What I hadn’t accounted for was that once the redrafting of the Bill got under way, so many MPs would want to bring their own issues to hang on it. Before long, ever more provisions were being added that had nothing to do with protecting children and were instead about restricting the free speech of adults (especially ‘hate speech’), widening tools of censorship, surveillance and the harnessing of personal data, and including every other pet project one MP or another wanted to bring. Don’t you just hate it when laws stop you from voicing hate speech? Oh, sorry, ‘hate speech’, with the scare quotes. Wouldn’t want anyone thinking you were against all that antisemitic bile your new overlord Farage definitely didn’t say, but which would also be fine if he actually did say it after all. Free speech! A vast archive of violence and pornography But wait, why did Dorries accept all these terrible additions to her masterwork? Well, you see, she was figuratively fighting for her legislative life. In her own words: I was referring to it as the ‘Christmas Tree Bill’ to my staff, as every new issue from MPs seemed to be hung on it like baubles as time went on. There was precious little I could do, because every bauble that was demanded came alongside a threat from the MP that they wouldn’t vote for my Bill if I didn’t include their provision. Frankly, I was held to ransom. These MPs made the Bill unwieldy, intrusive and, I sensed over time, unusable. Oh that poor soul. Fortunately, she’s now safe in the party of MPs who don’t even turn up to vote half the time. Thankfully, there’s no danger of being held to ransom by a no-show colleague! Unfortunately, the former digital secretary seems to have forgotten that, as well as being a vast archive of violence and pornography, the internet is also a repository for the lying hypocrisy of politicians. You see, when the Online Safety Act first passed, Dorries seemed thrilled with the extra provisions: We don’t give it a second’s thought when we buckle our seat belts to protect ourselves when driving. Given all the risks online, it’s only sensible we ensure similar basic protections for the digital age. If we fail to act, we risk sacrificing the wellbeing and innocence of countless generations of children to the power of unchecked algorithms. Since taking on the job I have listened to people in politics, wider society and industry and strengthened the Bill, so that we can achieve our central aim: to make the UK the safest place to go online. Wait, Dorries “strengthened the Bill” herself now? Here’s us thinking she was being forced to curb free speech by those nasty MPs and their votes. Just who is the public meant to believe? The Dorries of 2022, who seemed so proud of her achievements, or 2026 Dorries, who deeply regrets the restrictions she placed on the definitely-not-hate-speech posted by her new friends on the far right? In the words of one of the great social commentators of our age: You Really Think Someone Would Do That? Just Go On the Internet and Tell Lies? Featured image via Leon Neal/Getty Images By Alex/Rose Cocker From Canary via This RSS Feed.
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“External funding for these civic campaigns is critical. Without external support, they wouldn’t happen.” Walk through a square. Any square. From Belgrade in 2000 to Bucharest in 2025. You will see the same things in the photographs. Young people. Clean visual branding in a single color. A simple symbol you can paint with a stencil. A name in two or three words that means “resistance” or “enough” or “it’s time.” Posters everywhere. Stickers everywhere. T-shirts with the same logo, often handed out for free. The crowd is large but disciplined. Music. Theatre. Humor that mocks the regime rather than confronting it head-on. Foreign journalists are abundant. Foreign observers are abundant. Western politicians arrive with cookies or speeches and the cameras find them. Then the crisis trigger. A disputed election. A contested verdict. A tragedy that becomes a symbol. A claim of fraud that must be answered immediately, on the street, by occupation, not in the courts and not at the ballot box. You have seen this picture before. The faces change. The slogans change. The branding stays surprisingly consistent. This is not coincidence. It is a method. The method has a name in Western academic literature. It is called “nonviolent civic resistance” or “people power” or sometimes just “civil society.” In the literature of the targeted governments it is called “color revolution” or “hybrid warfare.” Both descriptions point at the same observable phenomenon. This article is not about whether the method is good or bad. That question depends on whose side you are on, which is exactly the question the method tries to make you stop asking. This article is about the method itself. The mechanics. The seven recurring elements. Where they came from. How they have been applied. And why they are starting to fail. The Source Code The method has an origin. It is not hidden. Gene Sharp was an American political scientist who studied Mohandas Gandhi for decades. In 1973 he published a three-volume work called The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The second volume contains a numbered list of 198 methods of nonviolent action, classified into three categories: protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and intervention. The list is the closest thing to a manual that exists. It is in print. It is on the website of the Albert Einstein Institution, the organization Sharp founded. It has been translated into more than thirty languages. The full PDF is one click away. In 1993 Sharp wrote a shorter, more applied work called From Dictatorship to Democracy, originally for Burmese dissidents. This second book is the operational handbook. It explains how to identify the “pillars of support” that keep an authoritarian government in power and how to systematically remove them one by one without armed force. Both books are publicly available. They are not what is hidden. What is hidden is the recognition that they have been used, in a deliberate sequence, in country after country, with similar branding, similar funding, and similar timing. In 2004 a former leader of the Serbian student movement that brought down Milosevic, Srdja Popovic, founded an organization called CANVAS in Belgrade. The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies. CANVAS exists openly. Its website is online. Its mission, by its own description, is to train activists in nonviolent struggle around the world. Popovic has been profiled in The New York Times and other Western media as a hero. The most thorough Western documentation of the Otpor playbook is the Peabody Award-winning PBS documentary “Bringing Down a Dictator,” narrated by Martin Sheen. It walks through the entire 1998 to 2000 operation in detail, the branding, the training, the Hungarian seminars, the financing, the synchronization with foreign embassies. Western media presented it as a triumph of “people power.” Watched from a different angle today, it is the clearest available training manual. According to multiple sources, CANVAS has trained activists from more than fifty countries. Ukraine. Georgia. Egypt. Tunisia. Venezuela. Iran. Belarus. Hong Kong. Russia. Zimbabwe. The training is the same training that worked against Milosevic. The handbook is From Dictatorship to Democracy. The Iranian government in 2009 charged protesters with following “over 100 stages of the 198 steps of Gene Sharp.” Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, the recognition of the method by the targeted state is itself evidence that the method is identifiable. This is the source code. Open. Documented. Reproducible. If the source code is open, why are the regimes that get targeted by it always surprised? Who Pays For It The method is free. The mobilization is not. Posters need printing. Stickers need printing. T-shirts need printing and distribution. Trainers need salaries and airfare. Translators need salaries. Independent media outlets that broadcast the message need staff, equipment, satellite uplinks. Election monitors need salaries, accreditation, hotels. Lawyers need fees. Tents and field hospitals on the square need supplies. International press conferences need locations and translators. Lobbyists in Washington and Brussels need retainers. Srdja Popovic of CANVAS, in a candid 2011 statement, was direct about this: “External funding for these civic campaigns is critical. Without external support, they wouldn’t happen.” Where does that external support come from? It is documented. The same names appear case after case, decade after decade. Six are doing most of the work. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Founded in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. A 501©(3) private nonprofit on paper. Nearly 100% funded by annual appropriations from the US Congress. Reagan himself said in 1983 the program “will not be hidden in the shadows.” The decisive admission came from NED’s own first acting president Allen Weinstein in a 1991 interview with The Washington Post: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” This is not a critic’s framing. This is the man who helped found the organization, describing in plain language what the organization is. NED disbursed roughly $1.2 billion in grants between 2011 and 2020. It issues over 2,000 grants per year through four “core institutes.” The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute fund political party building. The American Center for International Labor Solidarity funds trade unions. The Center for International Private Enterprise funds business associations. In Ukraine alone, NED funded sixty-five NGOs around the 2013-2014 events. According to RIA Novosti citing NED’s own pre-deletion records, $14 million was invested specifically in Ukraine projects. NED later deleted the public records of its Ukraine grants from its searchable database in 2022. Researchers had archived the older records before the deletion. The grants were real. NED has been sanctioned or banned by Russia, China, and named as foreign interference by the governments of Belarus, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Egypt, and Thailand. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Founded 1961. A US government agency, not a nonprofit. Annual budget roughly $50 billion before the partial dismantling in early 2025. Its “democracy and governance” program funds the same NGO ecosystem as NED, often through subgrants via groups like Pact Inc., Counterpart International, Internews, Freedom House. The USAID money is the iceberg. NED is the visible tip. In Ukraine in 2013 alone, USAID funded Center UA, a “civil society” group run by Oleh Rybachuk, the former chief of staff to Orange Revolution President Yushchenko. The Kyiv Post reported that USAID gave Center UA over $500,000 in 2012 through Pact Inc. In December 2013, three weeks before the Maidan turned violent, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland publicly told the US-Ukraine Foundation in Washington that the US had “invested more than $5 billion” in Ukraine’s “European aspirations” since 1991. The figure was not denied. The speech is on the record at the State Department website. The recording is on the record on YouTube. The Open Society Foundations (OSF). Founded by George Soros in 1979 in its earliest form. As of 2025, OSF has reported expenditures of over $24.2 billion since establishment. The largest private philanthropic foundation operating in this space. In Ukraine, the OSF presence is the International Renaissance Foundation, founded by Soros in April 1990 before Ukraine became independent. In Georgia, the Open Society Georgia Foundation. In Hungary, where the foundation originated, OSF was expelled in 2018 after years of conflict with the Orban government. In May 2014, three months after the Maidan, Soros himself confirmed his foundation’s role to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: “I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia. And the foundation has been functioning ever since.” The International Renaissance Foundation explicitly took credit for “supporting civil society during the Euromaidan protests,” including legal aid for “activists, protesters and journalists” as well as medical care and assistance to Hromadske TV and other pro-Maidan media outlets. OSF has been banned in Russia (2015), placed on watch lists in India (2016), and is the subject of investigations in Hungary, Bulgaria, and other countries. The German political foundations. Each major German party operates a state-funded foundation that runs international democracy promotion programs. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation (CDU). The Friedrich Ebert Foundation (SPD). The Heinrich Boll Foundation (Greens). The Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FDP). The Hanns Seidel Foundation (CSU). The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Die Linke). Each operates offices in dozens of countries. Each funds local partners. Each is funded primarily by the German federal budget through the development ministry (BMZ) and the foreign office (AA). Combined, they receive roughly 500 million euros per year from German taxpayers and disburse it globally. In Eastern Europe, in the Balkans, in the post-Soviet states, the German foundations are a parallel and sometimes larger funding stream than the American sources. They are less visible because they wear the language of party-to-party cooperation rather than democracy promotion. The European Endowment for Democracy (EED). Established 2013 by the European Union, modeled explicitly on the American NED. Based in Brussels. Funded by EU member states. Its mandate is the “Eastern Neighborhood” and “Southern Neighborhood” of the EU, which includes Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Caucasus, the Western Balkans, and North Africa. EED grants are smaller than NED’s but equally targeted. They go to “emerging democracy supporters” in countries where the EU wishes to see political change. The private oligarch networks. A newer addition. The most documented case is Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. His Omidyar Network donated $335,000 to Center UA in 2011 alone. The Kyiv Post reported that 36% of Center UA’s funding around the time of Maidan came from Omidyar Network. Other named private donors who have appeared repeatedly: Bill Gates’ Gates Foundation in education and health-related programs that overlap with the political networks. Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media network. The Skoll Foundation. Various tech philanthropy structures associated with Silicon Valley. The combined annual flow from these six sources, into the democracy promotion ecosystem, is conservatively estimated at $4-6 billion per year. That is the working budget for the playbook. When Donald Trump in early 2025 paused NED and USAID funding for a month, mainstream Western media reacted with what was, in plain reading, panic. The Associated Press wrote that “the beacon of freedom dims.” Within weeks, most funding was restored. The Trump pause did, however, reveal the dependency. The infrastructure of “civil society” in dozens of countries had been quietly running on US Congressional appropriations. If the protests are organic expressions of popular will, why do they collapse when the appropriations stop? The Seven Recurring Elements The playbook is not a single sequence executed identically every time. It is more like a set of seven repeating elements that get recombined depending on the local terrain. Some elements appear in every case. Others appear when the local conditions permit them. Walk through them in turn. Element 1. The youth movement with branded identity. Otpor in Serbia, 1998 to 2000. Black clenched fist on white background. Designed by a 23-year-old. Otpor means “resistance” in Serbian. Kmara in Georgia, 2003. The name means “enough.” Pora in Ukraine, 2004. The name means “it’s time.” Wore yellow. Pora founder Oleh Kyriyenko said publicly that the Pora handbook was From Dictatorship to Democracy. KelKel in Kyrgyzstan, 2005. The name means “renaissance” or “rebirth.” Pink and yellow. Zubr in Belarus, 2006. The name means “bison.” April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, 2008 onward. Trained by CANVAS. Every case has a youth movement. Every movement has a single name in two or three syllables, a single logo simple enough to stencil, and a single color or color pair that becomes the visual identity of the campaign. This is not folk culture. This is graphic design from a brief. Element 2. The crisis trigger. The playbook needs a moment around which to mobilize. The moment is usually one of three types. A disputed election in which the targeted government is accused of fraud. A constitutional crisis around the removal or extension of a leader. A tragedy or scandal that becomes the symbolic justification. Serbia 2000: contested presidential election with both sides claiming victory. Georgia 2003: contested parliamentary election with monitoring claims of fraud. Ukraine 2004: contested presidential runoff with monitoring claims of fraud. Ukraine 2014: the government’s last-minute refusal to sign an EU Association Agreement. Georgia 2024: contested parliamentary election. Romania 2024: a presidential first round won by an outsider candidate that the Constitutional Court then annulled. Serbia 2024 to 2025: the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad that killed fifteen people. In each case the trigger is real. The question the playbook does not allow is whether the trigger justifies the response. The response is the goal. The trigger is the occasion. Element 3. The square. A central public space in the capital is selected and occupied indefinitely. Tents are erected. Food, medical care, security, performance, and information are organized inside the occupied space. The square becomes a “city within the city.” Belgrade 2000: in front of the Federal Parliament. Tbilisi 2003: Freedom Square and Rustaveli Avenue. Kiev 2004: Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Kiev 2014: Maidan again, occupied for three months. Cairo 2011: Tahrir Square. Bucharest 2024 to 2025: Victory Square and University Square. The square is not a venue. It is a strategic instrument. Once the occupation reaches a critical mass, the government has only two choices: clear the square by force, generating images of state violence that energize the movement and split the security forces, or tolerate the occupation, conceding effective dual sovereignty in the capital. Both options favor the movement. That is the design. Element 4. The election or court verdict as the inflection point. The playbook does not seek to win by occupation alone. It seeks to use the occupation to invalidate or override a specific institutional outcome. An election result. A court verdict. A presidential signature. A parliamentary vote. The pattern. The institutional outcome goes against the movement. The movement claims the outcome was fraudulent or unconstitutional. The square mobilizes around that claim. Western governments and Western-aligned NGOs declare the outcome illegitimate. Domestic institutions are then placed under pressure to validate the movement’s claim, by re-running the vote, by removing the official, or by ruling the outcome invalid. The Romanian case in 2024 is the cleanest example of the judicial variant of this element. The first-round winner of the presidential election was an outsider candidate the establishment did not want. The Constitutional Court annulled the election. New elections were ordered. The original winner was barred from running. The replacement candidate of the same political tendency was beaten in the runoff. The institutional system survived. The voters who had backed the original winner are still on the streets two years later, asking what their vote was for. Element 5. The Western chorus. Throughout the events, a synchronized Western response amplifies the movement and delegitimizes the targeted government. Embassies issue statements. Ambassadors visit the square. State Department officials hand out cookies, as Victoria Nuland did at Maidan in December 2013. Senators arrive and speak. Editorials in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Die Welt describe the events in identical language. The targeted government is “increasingly authoritarian.” The protesters are “the people.” The Western chorus is not necessarily coordinated by a central authority. It does not need to be. The networks that produce it have been built over decades. The National Endowment for Democracy. USAID. Freedom House. The Open Society Foundations. The German political foundations. The European Endowment for Democracy. The Konrad Adenauer, Friedrich Ebert, Heinrich Boll, Friedrich Naumann, and Hanns Seidel foundations. These organizations have local partners in every country where the playbook operates. The partners have been receiving the training and the grants for years before the trigger happens. When the trigger happens, the chorus sings without rehearsal. Everyone knows their part. Element 6. The neutralization of the security forces. The playbook requires that the security forces either refuse to use violence or use violence in a way that backfires. Sharp’s theory of power is the foundation. Power is not monolithic. Power depends on the obedience of its agents. Withdraw the obedience and the regime falls. The methods to neutralize security forces are multiple. Flowers in gun barrels. Direct appeals from protesters to soldiers by name. Songs that include the police as fellow citizens. Public statements that the movement does not blame the rank and file. Defection rewards for officers who switch sides. Foreign pressure on the security ministry to refrain. When the security forces hold, the playbook stalls. When the security forces use violence, the playbook reaches its decisive phase. The images are broadcast. The Western chorus intensifies. International pressure on the government becomes overwhelming. Maidan 2014 produced the most extreme example of this dynamic. Snipers fired on both protesters and police on February 20, 2014. Over fifty people were killed within hours. To this day, eleven years later, the question of who fired those shots and on whose orders has never been resolved by an internationally accepted investigation. What is not in dispute is what happened next. Within forty-eight hours President Yanukovych had fled to Russia and the playbook reached its conclusion. Element 7. The choreographed handover. The final element is the moment the targeted leader leaves. It is rarely a chaotic moment in the way revolutions are romantically imagined. It is a negotiated handover, often involving European or American mediators, with replacement leadership already on the bench and ready to be installed. The 2014 leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt is the textbook documentation of this element. Two American officials discuss, three weeks before the actual fall of the Yanukovych government, who specifically should be in the next Ukrainian government. “Yats is the guy.” Arseniy Yatsenyuk was Prime Minister of Ukraine within four weeks. The phone call was leaked, presumably by Russian intelligence. The substance of the call has never been disputed by either Nuland or the State Department. In Serbia in 2000, the replacement leader Vojislav Kostunica was chosen by US Ambassador Richard Miles, working with what Western diplomats themselves called the “midwifed” Democratic Opposition of Serbia coalition. In Ukraine in 2004, the Orange Revolution placed Viktor Yushchenko in the presidency. His wife was Katherine Chumachenko, a US citizen, former employee of the Reagan State Department, with a long career in Ukrainian diaspora politics in the United States. The choreographed handover is not a defect of the playbook. It is the point of the playbook. The square is not a venue for democracy. The square is a venue for transition. If the transition is to “the people,” why does the next government keep arriving from the diaspora or from the Embassy? Three Cases, One Pattern Walk through three cases briefly. Watch the seven elements appear. Serbia 2000. The youth movement: Otpor, founded 1998. Color: black and white. Symbol: clenched fist. Funded through National Endowment for Democracy channels and US Embassy programs. Training sessions in Hungary run by NED contractors. “Suitcases of cash” smuggled across the border per multiple later memoirs. The trigger: presidential election of September 24, 2000. Both Milosevic and the opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica claimed victory in the first round. The Federal Election Commission called for a runoff. The opposition refused to participate, framing it as fraud. The square: central Belgrade, occupied beginning October 5. The election as inflection point: the runoff that was never held. The square’s purpose was to make the runoff impossible. The Western chorus: synchronized. The Guardian of London wrote that the operation of “engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience” was now “so slick” that the methods had matured into a template. The security forces: police largely stood aside. A bulldozer driver drove through the perimeter of the state television building. The day is still called the Bulldozer Revolution. The handover: Milosevic stepped down peacefully. The Democratic Opposition of Serbia coalition took power. Vojislav Kostunica was president. The seven elements were all present. The playbook was new. It worked. Ukraine 2014. The youth movement: not a single named organization this time, but a coalition including AutoMaidan, Right Sector, and the established opposition parties. The branding was more diffuse than Otpor but the visual identity, the orange and the blue, the Ukrainian flag and EU flag side by side, was uniform across the square. The trigger: President Yanukovych refused to sign the EU Association Agreement on November 21, 2013, choosing instead a Russian loan package. The trigger was not a contested election. It was a contested foreign policy decision. The playbook adapted. The square: Maidan Nezalezhnosti, occupied for ninety-three days. A “city within a city” with field hospitals, security, food distribution, sound stage, library. The election as inflection point: in this case the inflection point was not a vote but the moment of violence. February 18 to 20, 2014. Snipers fired on protesters and police alike. Over a hundred people died in seventy-two hours. The Western chorus: senators visited. Nuland visited and handed out cookies. The Embassy was actively involved in selecting the next government, as the leaked call documents. The security forces: the Berkut riot police were used and the use generated the images that drove the climax. Within forty-eight hours of the sniper killings the government had fallen. The handover: Yanukovych fled to Russia on February 22. Parliament voted his removal on the same day. Yatsenyuk was Prime Minister within days. Petro Poroshenko was elected President in May. The seven elements were all present. The playbook was older. It worked, but at a higher human cost than Serbia. Romania 2024 to 2025. This is the most recent case and the most interesting variant. The playbook applied not by an external power to overthrow a government, but by the existing establishment to override a vote. The youth movement: not the lead actor this time. The movement against the annulment of the election was not a CANVAS-trained color revolution. It was a grassroots reaction by voters who felt their ballots had been stolen. The trigger: Calin Georgescu, a nationalist outsider candidate, won the first round of the presidential election on November 24, 2024. He had not been polling near the top. His campaign had run heavily on TikTok. The institutional move: on December 6, 2024, two days before the scheduled runoff, the Constitutional Court annulled the entire election. The justification was alleged Russian interference in the TikTok campaign. The evidence presented in public for that interference was thin. The decision was unprecedented in Romanian post-communist history. The square: protests appeared spontaneously in Bucharest and other cities. They were not organized through CANVAS-style networks. They lacked the visual branding of the classic color revolution. The protesters were heterogeneous, from far-right Georgescu supporters to civic libertarians outraged by the precedent. The election as inflection point: the rerun in May 2025. Georgescu was barred from running. The far-right vote consolidated around George Simion of AUR, who won the first round with forty percent. He lost the runoff to the centrist Nicusor Dan, who became president. The Western chorus: synchronized but in the opposite direction. Western governments and media largely supported the annulment, on the grounds that Romania had defended itself against Russian interference. The same Western network that had been the chorus of color revolutions for two decades was now the chorus of an anti-color-revolution. The Romanian Constitutional Court was praised for its decisiveness in defending democracy. The handover: there was no handover. The establishment held. The vote was annulled, the original winner was barred, a substitute was beaten, and the centrist coalition continued. The Romanian case introduces a new variant. The institutional power that has been the target of color revolutions for twenty-five years has now learned the playbook. It can pre-emptively use the language of “defending democracy from foreign interference” to annul electoral outcomes it does not like. The legal infrastructure for this. The Constitutional Court precedent, the foreign-interference framing, the social-media-as-vector argument. These will be available in every future case. What does it mean when the same legal and rhetorical infrastructure that was built to overthrow inconvenient elections is now being used to overturn them by the institutions instead of the streets? What Has Changed The playbook is no longer working as reliably as it did between 2000 and 2014. Several things have changed. The targeted governments have studied it. Russia spent the years after the Orange Revolution building a counter-color-revolution doctrine. China studied the Soviet collapse for thirty years and applied lessons systematically after 2003. Belarus, after the 2010 protests, restructured its security services and information environment around the recognition that the playbook was an external strategy. Venezuela survived multiple attempts. Iran survived 2009. Even Serbia, ironically, learned. Aleksandar Vucic, the president since 2017, has held his ground through multiple waves of street pressure including the 2024 to 2025 wave. The funding has been disrupted. The USAID restructuring in early 2025 removed a major funding stream for the NGO network. National Endowment for Democracy budgets have been challenged. The Open Society Foundations remain active but more visible than before, which is a problem for an operation that depends on appearing local. The legitimacy has been damaged. After Ukraine 2014, after Libya, after Syria, after the Arab Spring’s wreckage, the global South has become widely skeptical of the “democracy promotion” frame. The same techniques that were celebrated in Belgrade and Tbilisi are now suspected on first sight. The information environment has changed. The narrative monopoly the Western media enjoyed in 2003 no longer exists. RT, CGTN, Al Jazeera, TeleSUR, and a vast ecosystem of independent and adversarial outlets now provide parallel accounts of what is happening on the ground. Targeted governments can document what they see as foreign interference and reach a global audience without needing Western platforms. And, ironically, the playbook itself has become so familiar that simply pointing at it disarms it. Vucic in Serbia openly calls the protests a “color revolution.” That framing alone has been enough to keep half the Serbian population uncertain about the motives of the protesters, regardless of whether the protests are genuinely organic or not. The playbook has not disappeared. It is still being deployed. Belarus 2020 was a classic attempt. Hong Kong 2019 to 2020 was a classic attempt. The 2024 to 2025 wave in Serbia and Georgia were attempts. But the success rate has dropped sharply. If the playbook is failing, why is it still being used? What This Means For You This article does not argue that every street protest is a foreign operation. Most street protests are organic. Most people who go to a square are there because they are genuinely angry about something real. The playbook does not invent grievances. It harvests them. The question of who the removed leaders were is not the question this article asks. The question is what was done, by whom, with what method, and with what funding. Regime change is regime change. The label “color revolution” is the label given to it when the West likes the outcome. The label “coup” or “foreign interference” is the label given to the same operation when the West does not. The mechanics are the same. The funders are the same. The trainers are the same. The only thing that changes is which side wins the narrative battle for what the operation is called. What the article argues is something narrower. The method exists. It is documented. It is reproducible. It has been applied across a quarter-century with a consistency that is statistically improbable for organic phenomena. And it has been treated by Western media, throughout that period, as if each case were unrelated to the others. For the reader, the question is not whether to support or oppose a given protest movement. The question is whether the language being used to describe the movement, in the moment it happens, will turn out to map cleanly onto the seven elements of the playbook. If the youth movement appeared on cue, with full branding, three months before the trigger. If the square was occupied within hours of the trigger, with infrastructure that took weeks to plan. If foreign embassies were visibly engaged within days. If the Western media narrative was synchronized across outlets within hours. If the security forces became the subject of psychological operations designed to demobilize them. If a replacement government was being discussed in foreign capitals before the existing one had finished resigning. If all six of those things appear together, the playbook is being run. Whether you support the outcome it is trying to produce is a separate question. Closing The method is open. It has been documented for half a century. The handbook is online. The training centers operate publicly. The funding flows can be traced. What is hidden is not the method. What is hidden is the recognition that the method is being used. The hardest part of breaking a magic trick is not learning what the magician did. It is accepting that the trick was a trick at all. People resist that step because acceptance feels like a kind of self-criticism. If the trick fooled me, what does that say about me? Nothing. It says the trick was good. Pull the camera back. The frame around the frame is the actual story. What does the frame around your next protest look like, from there? Sources Bringing Down a Dictator (PBS documentary, 2002, narrated Martin Sheen, Peabody Award winner): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7dNLt5mC1A Nuland-Pyatt leaked phone conversation, complete with subtitles, February 4, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k Victoria Nuland confirms US has invested $5 billion in Ukraine, US-Ukraine Foundation, December 13, 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPVs5VuI8XI The method itself: Gene Sharp, “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” Albert Einstein Institution: https://commonslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/GeneSharp_198Tactics.pdf The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Nonviolent_Action Gene Sharp profile, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp Nonviolence, Power, and Possibility: The Life of Gene Sharp, Progressive Magazine, 2018: https://progressive.org/magazine/nonviolence-power-and-possibility-the-life-of-gene-sharp/ CANVAS, the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies: https://canvasopedia.org/ Colour revolution, Wikipedia overview with documented cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution The financiers: National Endowment for Democracy, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy Allen Weinstein 1991 Washington Post quote, documented: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-responds-to-our-burma-nuclear-story NED goes dark: new “duty of care” policy concealing recipients, The Grayzone, May 2025: https://thegrayzone.com/2025/05/01/ned-goes-dark/ Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy, William Blum: https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-the-national-endowment-for-democracy Should We Celebrate the Demise of USAID and NED?, Antiwar.com, Scott Horton excerpt from Provoked, February 2025: https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2025/02/23/should-we-celebrate-the-demise-of-usaid-and-ned/ US Reinstates Funding to Propaganda Outlet NED, Antiwar.com, May 2025: https://original.antiwar.com/Roger_Harris/2025/05/22/us-reinstates-funding-to-propaganda-outlet-ned/ Fact Sheet on the National Endowment for Democracy, Chinese Consulate Penang: https://penang.china-consulate.gov.cn/eng/zt_19/zgwj/202205/t20220511_10684485.htm Open Society Foundations, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Society_Foundations Open Society Foundations in Ukraine, official statement: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/the-open-society-foundations-in-ukraine International Renaissance Foundation (Soros, Ukraine), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Renaissance_Foundation What George Soros said about Ukraine in 2014 CNN interview, PolitiFact: https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/sep/20/what-george-soros-said-about-ukraine-2014-cnn-inte/ Assessing the International Influence of Private Philanthropy: The Case of Open Society Foundations, Global Studies Quarterly, Oxford Academic: https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/1/4/ksab039/6460388 Serbia 2000: Otpor, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otpor Otpor and the Struggle for Democracy in Serbia (1998-2000), International Center on Nonviolent Conflict: https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/otpor-struggle-democracy-serbia-1998-2000/ How Color Revolution Was Born and Died in Serbia, Compact Magazine, September 2025: https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-color-revolution-was-born-and-died-in-serbia/ October 5, 2000: Flashback to Yugoslavia, the West’s first color revolution victim, RT op-ed: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/405771-october-2000-remembering-yugoslavia-nato/ Red Hand Revolt in Serbia, Antiwar.com, February 2025: https://original.antiwar.com/malic/2025/02/04/red-hand-revolt-in-serbia-people-power-or-color-revolution/ Ukraine 2004 and 2014: Revolution of Dignity, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity Euromaidan, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan When Ukraine set course for Europe, Brookings, February 2024: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-ukraine-set-course-for-europe/ What Really Happened in Ukraine in 2014, The Bulwark, April 2022: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-really-happened-in-ukraine-in-2014-and-since-then The Ukraine Mess That Nuland Made, Truthout, July 2015: https://truthout.org/articles/the-ukraine-mess-that-nuland-made/ Ukraine 2014 Revolution of Dignity, RBC-Ukraine: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/analytics/key-episodes-of-ukraine-s-2014-revolution-1764502055.html EuroMaidan was not a coup, Kyiv Independent, February 2025: https://kyivindependent.com/explainer-ukraines-euromaidan-was-not-a-coup-despite-russian-disinfo-pushed-by-musk/ Romania 2024 to 2025: 2024 to 2025 Romanian election annulment protests, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%932025_Romanian_election_annulment_protests Romania’s democracy in turmoil, CIVICUS Lens, May 2025: https://lens.civicus.org/romanias-democracy-in-turmoil/ Romania ultra-nationalists gain momentum amid election controversy, Balkan Insight: https://balkaninsight.com/2025/02/24/romanias-ultra-nationalists-gain-momentum-amid-election-controversy/ Fault lines in the East: Romania’s political transformation, Real Instituto Elcano: https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/analyses/fault-lines-in-the-east-romania-political-transformation-and-europe-future/ Elections, Austerity and Public Discontent Marked Romania in 2025, Balkan Insight: https://balkaninsight.com/2025/12/23/elections-austerity-and-public-discontent-marked-romania-in-2025/ Romania in crisis ahead of presidential election rerun, Civicus Monitor: https://monitor.civicus.org/explore/romania-in-crisis-ahead-of-presidential-election-rerun-protests-become-violent/ Targeted Disruption: Russian Interference in 2024 Elections of Moldova, Romania and Georgia, GEOpolitics, September 2025: https://politicsgeo.com/targeted-disruption-russian-interference-in-the-2024-elections-of-moldova-romania-and-georgia/
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I am sorry that it has been so long since my last post. I have been busy with our civil rights work at Civil Rights Corps and co-founding something new called the Hub for Innovative Law Offices. (CRC receives all donations people choose to make for this free newsletter.) First, at Civil Rights Corps, we recently won the most important civil rights case in our organization’s history. By my calculations, it is probably the single most liberatory court decision in U.S. history in terms of the number of people in jail. The California Supreme Court finally ruled for us on an issue we pioneered and have been litigating for a decade, holding essentially that no one can be detained prior to trial and separated from their family in California in misdemeanor cases or in any non-violent or non-sexual felony. This is the vast majority of arrests in California—hundreds of thousands of people per year. Importantly, the Court held that the government cannot get around these constitutional prohibitions by using money bail, and that any money bail amount must be attainable. These holdings would also apply in a number of other states, and we have begun working around the country to do that. It also comes as a vital moment because of the centrality of pretrial detention to authoritarian projects around the world and Trump’s statements about making pretrial detention and money bail priorities for his administration. Vindicating the fundamental rights to pretrial liberty and the presumption of innocence is one of the most important things that can be done to promote democracy. Because of the magnitude of this victory, we are about to see an unprecedented right-wing fear-mongering campaign against our work, which has already begun in the New York Post by right-wing California prosecutors. Here’s me talking about it all with my great friend Chenjerai Kumanyika on his exciting new podcast Unruly Subjects. Also, the Hub I mentioned above is the most ambitious project I have ever worked on—an attempt to transform the capacity of public interest lawyering in the United States to meet both this moment of acute authoritarian crisis and the chronic catastrophe of inadequate legal services for a wide range of important causes like economic justice, civil rights, criminal defense, immigration, family defense, the environment, disability, healthcare, and more. We helped incubate 30 public interest law practices at the end of 2025 in our first cohort, and our applications are now open for our 2026 cohort. Within a few years, our goal is to incubate and organize together a social movement of sustainable small public interest law practices that can change the balance of power in our legal system and our society by, for the first time, building the capacity to meaningfully enforce violations of the law that harm marginalized people and communities. We are looking for lawyers who want to be part of a transformational community and make a sustainable living while building at scale a formation critical to enforcing laws that protect the most vulnerable people, communities, and ecosystems. Within a few years, we could help thousands of lawyers across the country transform the organization and capacity of the legal profession. I’ve also been doing some fun things. Above is my first experiment making art out of melted wax. This one is on a large mirror I salvaged. And, I’m also working on some standup comedy—hopefully I’ll have the courage to start doing it in public in the next few months…. *** Repression and the Liberal Establishment When I published my last post, I intended to write a three-part series. I had almost completed the second part about Democrats and liberal news media spending years building the physical, economic, and propaganda infrastructure to support what ICE is doing across the U.S. Then, before I could take the time to finish it, masked armed federal agents executed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota on camera. And a lot of other stuff has happened since…. The underlying points I want to make are largely the same, but the context requires me to make some adjustments. So, here is the belated Part 2 in my series on three important myths that lead to a lot of establishment institutions and even well-meaning but uninformed professional class elites supporting indefensible repression. In the first post in this series, I dispelled the myth that reducing investment in repressive bureaucracies is unpopular. Public support for reducing budgets of police/prosecutor/prison/surveillance bureaucracies—and shifting more investment to various institutions of care and connection like healthcare; education; housing; pollution abatement; and community participation through art, music, theater, athletics, food, mutual aid, and urban/architectural planning for beautiful spaces in which to engage in each of these things—is among the most popular consistently polled questions in U.S. politics for decades. Separately, and probably more importantly, I also explained why “popularity,” at least as expressed by superficial polling, is a poor basis for progressive movements to make strategic decisions about how to achieve the power to build a world with more liberty, equality, and mutual flourishing. In posts 2 and 3, I will address the other key myths: that there are few social costs to increasing the repressive capacity of the government and that more repression is therefore on balance good for safety. I’ll focus primarily on the pervasive assumption that there are not serious negative consequences to growing the capacity for state repression. This assumption is virtually everywhere in mainstream Democratic Party punditry. It’s the air we breathe. It is typified by perennially unquestioned decisions to increase police, prosecutor, and prison budgets, expand surveillance, expand immigration enforcement, militarize the border, respond to public safety fears with punishment, and so on. I view the lack of focus in elite liberal spaces on the enormous harms of repression as perhaps the most pervasive flaw in what passes for liberal intellectual circles and one of the most important things every person of good will must think about. The almost always unstated assumption that more repression carries few negative consequences has been a recurring feature of my personal interactions in Washington, D.C. for 15 years. Virtually no person I have met in fancy media, well-funded non-profits, and Democratic Party circles has acknowledged to me any negative costs to society of their mantra that Democrats need to be “tougher on crime” by expanding the punishment bureaucracy. So, why do so many liberal pundits still participate in punishment bureaucracy mythology? There are many cultural and financial reasons I explore in Copaganda, but I want to focus on one intellectual reason here: even well-meaning people in polite liberal society catastrophically underestimate the social costs of the punishment bureaucracy. Most ordinary staffers simply don’t know much about the issue. And the pundits/consultants who preach to liberals promote the punishment bureaucracy because they are fundamentally either (1) misleading people about the social costs or, (2) like much of their audience, ignorant of them. Most liberal discourse erases three primary harms of the punishment bureaucracy: The corrosive effects of the punishment bureaucracy on hope for any semblance of a democratic, flourishing, participatory, healthy, and egalitarian society through its selective targeting of the most vulnerable groups in ways that preserve inequality across every important domain; How the punishment bureaucracy is used by explicitly authoritarian forces; and How the punishment bureaucracy has been wielded to oppose, infiltrate, and crush every progressive social movement in modern U.S. history. The failure to grapple with these social costs allows other myths to flourish because, if you believe that the punishment bureaucracy has no negative consequences for all of us, then you are unlikely to ask whether the punishment bureaucracy produces safety or question why it might not be popular. The attitude becomes the Democratic Party mantra for 50 years of mass incarceration: “Why not try more punishment? Who could oppose that? What could go wrong?” Some cringe-worthy examples The remarkable thing is that I could choose almost any mainstream news segment or any public appearance by almost any Democrat from the last several decades to illustrate the moral and strategic failure of their public positions on the punishment bureaucracy. Such is the pervasiveness of the repression-has-no-consequences delusion. It’s almost misleading to select just a few examples! Nonetheless, I collected a few recent ones that have particular salience or comedic value now: When Trump unleashed the National Guard on us in D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser said that she “greatly appreciates the surge of officers” and assured all of us who live in D.C. that she wanted to “do the same thing” as Trump during his deployment of the military in D.C., just using local police instead. I scoured the record in the weeks following and, in the wake of Trump’s deployment, I could not find Bowser or any mainstream commentator talking about any negative social costs to D.C. of expanding the scope of the armed surveillance state under the control of the D.C. police. It’s as if there is not even a discussion to be had about what kind of society that might foster. The New York Times Editorial Board is a leading purveyor of the myth that more punishment has no negative consequences. In the below examples from its attempts to stop the election of Zohran Mamdani, the paper asserts, with no evidence, that being “skeptical” of “law enforcement” has “has failed.” Without a single clause of a single sentence explaining its pronouncement, the paper announces that “cuts to policing” are among a vague list of “dubious ideas.” The paper mentions no negative consequence associated with policing in New York: And from its casual dismissal of another progressive candidate, Brad Lander: Former prosecutor Amy Klobuchar has long stood out among Democrats for her flat-earther public safety views, but last year I bookmarked this tweet because it’s rare that leading Democrats drop the pretense of safety and say in public the things their staffs and consultants say to us in private: This statement is impossible to parody. A Democratic Senator talks about a prison as if there are no negative social consequences to the greatest expansion of human caging in recorded world history. As I explained in Copaganda, the U.S. does so much caging that it reduces total U.S. life expectancy by 1.8 years from what it would be if the U.S. had incarceration rates like its own history or like other comparable countries. Her policies are, literally, reducing overall life in the U.S. by hundreds of millions of person-years. And I have been unable to find a single example of her even mentioning the costs, let alone justifying these hundreds of millions of years of lost life with corresponding benefits. And she makes the statement celebrating the success of her advocacy to keep the prison open six months into Trump’s second term—at a time when the increasingly fascist government already cages people 6 times its own historical average, 5-10 times comparable countries, and Black people 6 times South Africa at the height of Apartheid. In any reasonable world, this person would not be taken seriously, let alone as a leader of a supposedly progressive political party. Leading Democratic Party officials—while issuing a steady slop of cliches and platitudes about the “rule of law” and fighting repression for low-information liberals—worked hard to give Trump officials sweeping and draconian new powers to criminalize coordinated boycott campaigns targeting Israel, including even advocacy targeting illegal Israeli settlements, and even as the U.S. sanctions judges of the International Criminal Court for minimal attempts to enforce international law: Angie Craig, Congressperson from Minnesota, was seen in the news performing the role of loud critic of ICE in Minnesota. But Craig had voted shortly before to “express gratitude” to ICE and to call for greater collaboration with ICE among state and local officials. Incredibly, she was one of Democrats who supported and voted for the Laken Riley Act sponsored by Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego, a prominent fiend for more repression: It is worth reading my thread on the Laken Riley Act in full to understand some of the consequences of the Democratic Party’s embrace of repression, but here’s another key point about laws that expand the repressive tools of the government: Then there is Chris Murphy, one of the most buffoonish of a new generation of Democrats who are adopting faux-casual TikTok personas as they promote the same mass repression agenda but with “cooler vibes” to seem more relatable. In 2024, he supported doubling ICE’s budget and curtailing of the basic human right to asylum (in his own words, following the “instructions” of Republicans “to the letter”). Murphy’s alarming embrace of what Democrats had just a few years ago likened to Nazi policies and rhetoric at the border elicited the following statement from MSNBC cartoon character Al Sharpton: “we’re looking every day at the invasion of migrants.” Here is Murphy in 2024 denouncing “CHAOS AT THE BORDER” and claiming that the “real story” is that the Democrats are tougher on immigrants than the fascists: Then, even after Trump came to power, here he is again promoting immigrant “chaos” propaganda and celebrating that Democrats had, with the endorsement of the far right border guard union, attempted to give the Executive “new emergency powers” and tried to “toughen asylum laws”: In a crescendo of cruelty, Murphy went on to make fun of Kristi Noem by bragging that Biden had deported twice as many people per week as she did in her first week: None of this is new. It fairly describes the establishment strategic and moral consensus in the Democratic Party for decades: And then, after public outcry relating to ICE reached a crescendo, the Democratic Party establishment all came together to promote one of the great counterinsurgency frauds of modern times: co-opting people’s anger and outrage into calls for even more money for ICE for surveillance and training. The Trump administration immediately celebrated this consensus to expand funding and surveillance for DHS. Here’s me on Democracy Now on this shameful episode: Many of the people I love most in this world spend their lives confronting the unspeakable human costs of these senseless policies and strategic catastrophes. The cumulative effect is that well-meaning people across our society have massively uninformed and misinformed intuitions, attitudes, and conscious views on the costs of repression. So, it’s difficult to write about what people like Chris Murphy are doing in a tone that is appropriate given that my grandma reads these posts. But, in the next and final post in this series, I’ll try to explain the costs of repression and why this should be one of the primary areas of focus for every person of good will in our society. Subscribe now From Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
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Since the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump and his acolytes, right-wing media, and coal industry barons and lobbyists have obsessively painted the picture of Trump as a friend to coal miners and the so-called “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal.” But as labor journalist Kim Kelly reports at In These Times, “the simpering ’Trump digs coal’ image the administration seeks to project is vastly at odds with the actions it’s taken to limit miner protections, endanger their health, and exacerbate the black lung crisis consuming Central Appalachia.” In this episode of Working People, we speak with Kelly about the Trump administration’s latest betrayal of coal miners and their families and its underreported attack on the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission and abrupt, unprecedented firing of FMSHRC Commissioner Moshe Z. Marvit. Additional links/info: Kim Kelly website, X/Twitter page, TikTok, Bluesky page, and Instagram Kim Kelly, In These Times, “Trump’s latest target: Coal miners’ safety” Jordan Barab, Confined Space, “Friday night massacre at Mine Safety Review Commission” Kim Kelly, In These Times, “The Trump administration ramps up its war on coal miners” Kim Kelly, In These Times, “Trump to coal miners: Drop dead” Featured Music: Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song Credits: Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’re talking about coal miners and workers in the coal mining industry and what the government is doing to help them or hurt them under President Trump. Mr. I love coal miners. It’s been a meme ever since the 2016 presidential election. Trump loves throwing on a coal miner’s helmet and lining up coal miners around him for the cameras. He loves talking about bringing coalback quote unquote. He loves talking about quote beautiful clean coal. Trump and right-wing media are so obsessed with cultivating this image of him as the coal miners champion and this so- called blue collar billionaire who really gets the working class. And obviously the industry itself is all for it. Earlier this year, Trump was even crowned the quote undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal. And he was presented with this big stupid trophy by the Washington Coal Club, which is an advocacy group with financial ties to the coal industry. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s one video that the White House posted on Instagram in early February of this year. President Donald Trump: The most important people here today are those who get their hands a little bit dirty to keep America running at full speed. Our frontline coal workers. Coal Miner 1 (Kayla Blackford): My name is Kayla Blackford. I work at the Bear Run Mine. I drive a haul truck and I think what the president has done for the coal industry is really important and we’re able to keep electricity prices down. Coal Miner 2 (Vernon Roche III): My name is Vernon Roche III. I’m a coal miner in Alabama, Shoal Creek Min. We know that President Trump loves clean coal. Coal Miner 3 (Drew): Been in the coal industry for 16 years and the time with Trump being in office. It’s been a great deal for my family, from a small coal mining town in Southern West Virginia originally. Coal Miner 4 (Scott): Conveyor belts are the machines that we use to transport coal from 600,000 feet below ground to the surface where it goes to power plants that fuel America’s energy. Coal Miner 5 (Matt): We are thankful for President Trump’s commitment to coal to bring affordable energy to American people. It gives us the ability to sell coal to the power plants to get us to the extreme cold temperatures, the extreme heats in the summers when our energy grid would be struggling. It always has been and always will be affordable, reliable source for electricity. President Donald Trump: The really dependable form of energy that we have and that’s clean, beautiful coal. Coal Miner 1 (Kayla Blackford): Thank you, President Trump. Child 1: Thank you, President Trump. Coal Miner 2 (Vernon Roche III): For knowing the clean coal. Child 1: Clean, beautiful coal. Coal Miner 3 (Drew): Keeps the lights on. Coal Miner 5 (Matt): Keeps the lights on. Coal Miner 4 (Scott): Thank you, President Trump for knowing that clean coal keeps the lights on. Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. So now that we’ve got that Trump marketing machine BS version of reality, let’s contrast that with the shocking news about what the Trump administration is doing to protect those coal miners that they call brave and claim to love so much. And in her latest report for in these times, Kim Kelly writes, “On May 1st, International Workers Day, Trump administration officials targeted the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the FMSHRC, abruptly firing Commissioner Moshe Marvit, and closing down one of the agency’s three offices. In total, the FMSHRC lost 16 workers as well as the entire Pittsburgh office that day. Marvit has spent the bulk of his career, including 12 years as a supervisory attorney advisor at the FMSHRC unabashedly representing workers’ interests, both in court and as a freelance journalist for outlets like in these times, the Washington Post and dissent. The pro worker reputation preceded him when President Joe Biden first nominated him for a commissioner position back in 2022. It took three tries to get him confirmed to his current role and he’s not giving it up without a fight. On May 7th, Marvit filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over what he calls his quote unlawful and unjustified purported termination, which has left a backed up FMS HRC even more shorthanded. The Trump administration’s war on coal miner’s health has become especially pronounced during the president’s second term, Kelly continues. The simplering Trump digs coal image the administration seeks to project is vastly at odds with the actions it’s taken to limit minor protections, endanger their health and exacerbate the black lung crisis consuming Central Appalachia, where one in five veteran minors has black lung and one in 20 has the most severe and totally disabling form of the disease. So to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined once again by friend of the show. You love her, you know her. She’s the one and only. Kim Kelly herself. Kim, for those who don’t know and have been living under a rock, is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia. She is a labor writer for in these times and regularly contributes to many other publications including The Real News Network, he first book, Fight Light Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and the Young Reader’s Edition, Fight to Win. Heroes of American Labor are both available from One Signal Simon & Schuster publishers. Kim, thank you so much for joining us against this. I really, really appreciate it. I want to just kind of jump in and toss it to you. Please pick up where I left off reading from your really important article, which we’ll link to in the show notes, but just break down for folks like what the hell is actually happening here with this little known agency that actually has really important consequences for the lives and health of coal miners and their families. Kim Kelly: So here’s the thing, the FMS HRC, I kind of think of it as like talking about a ship named after Hillary, the FMS HRC. A lot of acronyms. I mean, honestly, the acronyms of it all, that kind of plays into the issue here.This is a smaller, respectfully not that sexy little government agency that impacts a very specific group of workers and communities. And it’s being absolutely torn apart as part of this ongoing kind of Trump administration push to deregulate and de- skill and dethrone every possible government employee imaginable that isn’t expressly falling in line with their authoritarian project. I did get to interview someone with very deep knowledge of the agency. Obviously I had to keep their identity to ourselves because there’s only like 30 people left and he was just kind of saying it felt like the thought of someone in Trump world just kind of going down a list of agencies and like it’s their turn. And this has happened to a lot of other like smaller commissions, boards, OSHA, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, their equivalent of this commission they got, got like the NLRB has gotten all types of jacked up. It feels as if we’re in kind of a new stage of this dismantling. We had the Doge era where it was like really big, bombastic slash and burn Intel’s going through your computer, like lots of press coverage. And then Doge, it was KIA, took about back, shot, done with that. But this ongoing project has not ceased. It’s just become quieter and arguably more insidious because public attention has understandably shifted towards all of the other cataclysms that our country and our government is responsible for right now. But this came across my radar. Of course, we need to shout out Jordan Barab, the worker safety guy. He incredibly experienced runs confined spaces, fantastic publication. He reported on this first and that’s how it came to my attention. And honestly, the thing that stuck out to me besides the fact that it was about coal miners, coal miner safety is kind of my thing, but I recognize that name, Moshe Marvit, because I remember earlier fights to get him confirmed to this arguably pretty atypical, pretty non-controversial agency. He’s a lawyer, he’s pro- worker, seems like a fairly inoffensive type of guy to end up on this type of agency that essentially deals with civil cases and worker discrimination cases, but he had a hell of a time getting confirmed and I think it is because he’s an outspoken worker advocate who’s written for lefty publications and was very clearly like pro- worker and he was nominated by Biden. It took forever for him to actually get confirmed and now he gets fired out of nowhere and it seems very clear that there is some kind of ideological purging kind of effort behind this and he is fighting back. The reason I wasn’t able to interview him personally, we chatted a bit, but I couldn’t speak to him on the records because he’s suing the government over this. I think Jordan mentioned that this was the first time in I think the 50 years of this agency’s existence that someone had been removed from the commission in this way. And this commission was created as part of the 1977 Mine Act, which is really mostly one of our, I think, lesser known but more impressive pieces of labor legislation in this country is obviously coal miner specific, but it really did a good job of laying out very specific protections and building up agencies like MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration. It’s a good law. It’s a good law. And this is something that obviously the people that run coal mines and make money off of coal mines and get their little clean, greedy fingers all over coal miners paychecks, of course there’s stuff in there that they would prefer not to have to deal with like safety regulations like worker safety laws, like union organizing rights. And something that stuck with me when I was talking to this anonymous worker at the agency, they were saying the fact that there’s three people left, one’s Republican, then there’s two Democrats whose terms end in August. And with Moshi currently out of the picture, if they lose people, they lose the ability to have a quorum, which essentially means they can’t do anything. And I asked them, “Do you think more people will be confirmed? What do you think will happen?” And they said something that I thought was so interesting and terrible like, “Well, what if the reason that there isn’t a big rush to confirm even Trump loyalists is that they just don’t want to deal with enforcing this law at all What if they’re trying to kind of kill it by a thousand cuts by just chipping away at things?” And I thought that was a really astute and stressful observation to make because this is the thing, right? It’s not all like this onslaught against worker safety and human rights and every other possible decent thing that people are able to derive from this government. So much of it has been big, bombastic, like big fights, but a lot of it has been happening behind the scenes in these little agencies, these smaller commissions, boards, federal, like places with beige offices that they’re not as exciting, they’re not as photogenic, they’re not going to get headlines necessarily, but they really have a very important role to play. There’s a reason they exist and they have an impact on people’s lives. For example, the FMS HRC, there are coal miners who are waiting for cases to be heard. There’s workers who have filed discrimination complaints over them being discriminated against for calling out safety issues at work. Those are people. There’s civil penalty cases in which MSHA has basically found that a mine is unsafe, that it’s engaging in unsafe practices or violating safety practices. Someone has to do something about that. I know it can be a little like red tapey and bureaucracy and all of this. It’s a little convoluted reading up on this stuff enough to write a useful article took a little bit of time, but that’s almost kind of part of it, right? Like what they do in the shadows. Maximillian Alvarez: And that work done in the labor done in the shadows in these government agencies that you’re talking about, it is such a shame that we have so little understanding of that and the media is as culpable for that as anybody, but your average citizen doesn’t understand that and thus can’t see past the word and the hatred for the concept of government bureaucracy. And so when these cuts from Doge or Trump or wherever they are, the firings from Trump, the cuts from Doge, people just see a sort of attack on that bureaucracy, but they’re not seeing the people who are responsible for resolving these disputes and claims that matter a hell of a lot to coal miners who are spending their lives underground and trying not to be taken advantage of for it. They matter to … I interviewed some whistleblowers who were both fired from HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development earlier this year or last year and they were whistleblowers talking about how that agency has effectively become defunct and like the people like them who were lawyers who were responsible for ensuring that like battered women and people in life threatening situations get the housing that they need, that they’re not being exploited by like landlords or anything. These are real people in life critical circumstances that all of that, like you said, Kim, is now just being sort of hushed and silenced at the same time that the media industry and the whole media ecosystem is going haywire. And so it’s a real crisis, but you are one of, again, those sterling examples of like a committed journalist who has maintained through the chaos a commitment to the coal miners that you report on, the industry, the working conditions in this industry, the environmental conditions. You’ve been doing excellent reporting on the black lung crisis in this country. We connected and worked together here at the Real News for years as you were reporting on the Warrior Met coal strike in Alabama. So with all of that knowledge and firsthand contact with people in the industry, I wanted to ask before I let you go, what state was the coal industry and coal workers in going into the second Trump presidency and how has whatever the hell this administration is doing, like for all it says it loves coal miners, like is it actually helping coal miners? Is it helping the coal industry? What’s actually happening here? Kim Kelly: It’s interesting. I think back to the beginning, I guess of this, not even this one, I think back to like 2020, 21 in the earlier days of these things, and I remember talking to a minor in Alabama who had said, “Just so you know, I’m a Trump guy and he brought coal prices have been super high since he got in. ” And I was like, “Oh, well, have you seen any of that? ” And he’s like, “Well, no ma’am.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And that always plays in the back of my mind when it comes to this reporting because it is I think a true thing that coal industry interests have found the Trump administration to be positive at the very least just in terms of skewing the playing field in their favor and trying to destroy previously approved and funded renewable energy projects. They’ve been pushing this coal line incredibly strongly against anyone’s conventional wisdom or scientific wisdom, really just like a fool’s errand and that’s endeared them to the industry movers and shakers. But for the workers, it’s been bad. It has not been bad. Wages haven’t gone up. The jobs aren’t coming back. I think we’re down to about probably less at this point. I think last year, the year before, it was about 33,000 coal miners left in the country. If I double check the stats now, I’m sure it’s gone down. And some of the big worker safety wins that coal miners across any political persuasion, because it is not a monolith, it’s not just a whole bunch of white guys voting for Trump. I’ve met plenty of people that do not fit that description and have talked to union representatives for the UAW that are very aware that they have a pretty diverse coalition of, well, not even coalition, just a diverse group of people in their union. Retirees are one thing, but the younger folks and other generations, you’d be surprised. But a lot of the work that has been doing around these sort of community issues like the black lung crisis, like worker safety, like pensions, like black lung payments out of this fund, the existing black lung benefits fund for workers and former workers who have been diagnosed and disabled by black lung. A lot of that work actually started bearing some fruit during the Biden administration because there weren’t as many roadblocks. The one thing I learned through reporting on agency doings that I hadn’t known that much about before I kind of dove in was how pivotal it is that there is a nominally at least pro- worker or not cartoonishly anti-worker at least a person in the executive chair and then the administration because a lot of the people, especially pre-Trump purges that work in these agencies are just trying to get shit done, but their ability to do so can be either helped or hindered by who’s in charge. So for example, in 2024, at the very end of the Biden administration, minors and their advocates, because they did the real work, they finally got this new silica exposure rule basically approved. The process is a whole situation, but we’ll just say they got it, right? They got this new rule that was going to limit the amount of silica dust that coal miners could be exposed to during their work days. This is not a new thing since 1974. We’ve known that silica dust is toxic, 20 times more toxic than coal dust. It is the absolute biggest factor driving the uptick in black lung cases and severe black lung cases among coal miners, especially those that are much younger have much less time underground. We’re talking late 20s, 30s, 40s folks dealing with the most severe and debilitating form of this disease. Silica is the biggest reason. And up until this rule finally got through, coal miners were legally able to be exposed to twice as much silica dust as any other worker in the entire country because silicate is something that exists in a lot of other professions. There’s construction workers, courts countertop workers in California that are dealing with their own silicosis crisis right now, but we know all this workers have been trying to do something about this for a really long time. Finally got to the finish line, 2024. It was supposed to be implemented April 2025. What happened between those two things happening, Trump got elected all of a sudden that rule very specific, very much not something the coal industry wanted to deal with because it required them to follow some more rules and maybe spend a couple more dollars on safety equipment and engineering controls and ate into their profits the tiniest bit. They didn’t want anything to do with it. And so this rule that took decades of activism and law being organized and by coal miners and public health advocates and everybody who wasn’t a total thickhead were trying to get this through and it kept being delayed, just kicked down. At first, I think it was a three month delay. Then it was like a six month delay. It just kept getting delayed, the implementation and enforcement to the point where the most recent development is that it’s been basically pulled back for more judicial review, further study, more changes for essentially they’re going to make it easier for the coal industry interest to come in and weaken it and just chop it all up.This is something that should not be controversial no matter what values you have. Making it so that fewer people get black lung seems pretty infensive, seems like a decent win even at the point where some of Cold State senators like full on Trump zombies came out earlier during the Doge era when NIOSH and black lung monitoring services were getting slashed up. They’re like, “Oh, wait, wait, maybe can we keep some of that? ” And the administration pulled back. So all that to say, things have gotten worse. They’ve gotten worse. It’s just as dangerous, if not worse, because there’s this emphasis on coal and this emphasis on trying to open new mines and new coal fired facilities. It’s not going to be good for anyone but the people who have been making money off of these workers, blood, sweat, tears, and lung tissue for centuries now. And it’s really disappointing. We don’t expect anything good to come out of the kind of people that Trump puts in charge of these agencies or Trump himself, but it’s like, what is the constituency for killmore coal miners? Who is asking him and them to make it harder for workers to have safety discrimination cases heard? Who’s voting for that? It’s not like these are big popular … No one’s like, “You know who really deserves a comeup into those fat cats at the FMSHRC.” It’s like, who is this for? There’s like one cold guy somewhere who’s like, “Yeah, We got them.” And it’s just unfortunate. And I’ve been reporting this for a long time. This is one of my things I report on. I ended up being that guy. And the one thing that … Well, there’s a lot of things that make me sad, but one thing that makes me sad and frustrated when I share stories on social media like, “Here’s this article I wrote, please clap.” There is always, always some people, some commenters who are like, “Well, they voted for this. ” Well, that’s what they get. Who did they vote for? Who do they vote for? And that has been a recurring theme ever since I first started writing about coal miners, gosh, almost like six, seven years ago. There’s a real lack of empathy and a real sort of spitefulness from some folks who just assume that coal miners are all the same, they’re all the same kind of person, they all voted the same way. And it’s just disappointing to see because I guarantee you, no one voted to get black lung and lose the ability to breathe or play with their grandkids or their kids. People being sold a bill of goods, I don’t think anybody deserves to die because they voted for someone who lied to them. Maximillian Alvarez: No, I wholeheartedly agree. And it’s like the exact same thing I say to people who say those exact same comments when I’m reporting from East Palestine, Ohio or that train derail. They’re like, “Well, they voted for that. They deserve it. ” I was like, “Are you kidding me? Do you see what they’re going through?” How could you say that on a video that is showing you that they’re dying? Have we lost so much of our humanity that we can’t even empathize with each other on that basic level? And again, I could talk to you about this for days, but I know I got to let you go. And I want to underscore for people that that is why Kim’s work is so important and why we work so well together with Kim here at the Real News is because if you’re not tending to that human stuff, then you’re not actually interested in the truth, right? You’re interested in an argument about the truth and how you can twist the truth into something else for your own purpose. We are reporters who care about human beings. So we go out and get the truth wherever it lives in the complex lives of complex people, like the ones that Kim is talking about. And Kim, with just a two-minute maybe wrap up, I wanted to end on that note, not asking you to speak for anyone or any group of people, but just any points you want to impress upon people who are thinking that way, especially in an election year. Well, they voted for that. Why should I care about that? What do you want them to know about what black lung actually does to your body? What do you want them to know about what it’s actually like to work in a coal mine or live in a coal mining community? Just anything you want to leave folks with before we let you go and wrap up. Kim Kelly: So years ago, I made friends with a retired coal miner named Danny Witt and he got diagnosed with black lung in 1988, that’s the year I was born. So for my entire life, his lungs have been struggling to function. He’s had a hard time walking. He had to stop doing a job that he works to care for his family and put food on the table and he kind of got off easy in a way, which is a wild way to frame it. But Danny’s lungs are full of coal dust. I’ve met people my age, I’m 38. I’ve met people my age and a little bit younger who have lungs full of silica and they can’t breathe on their own. They can’t really walk anymore. If you’ve seen photos of what a lung with black lung coal miners pneumoconiosis, it’s government name, it literally turns black. There’s a man named John Moore, a black father of three in West Virginia who he wasn’t even a career coal miner. He picked up some shifts while he was doing other stuff. He had a wig shop, he does events now. He was all over the place. He was hustling and he’s dying and he’s 42 and I don’t think he deserves that. I don’t think he voted for Trump, but he might have. I didn’t ask. I asked what he was doing to take care of himself and how his daughters were coping. And I think there is so much humanity that is missed when we give into these kind of divisions and this manufactured tribalism. I know there’s people that I report on that probably think I am just the worst godless calmy piece of trash. And you know what? Join the club. I’ve been online for a long time. Not everybody has to … You don’t have to like me. I still don’t think you need to choke to death. I might wonder why does some tattooed broad from Jersey going down to Alabama all the time talking to coal miners? Well, because they remind me of my dad. He works in construction. He has terrible political opinions, but there’s a lot of things we do agree on and I’ve been able to move him a little bit towards the way to seeing the world I see it. Not that it’s the right way, but it makes sense to me. I think we need to give each other a little bit more grace. And it is easy for me to say that I’m a whitebroad from Jersey. There’s a lot of structural things. There’s a lot of racist things. There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t have to think about that other folks have to think about because of who they are Or how they’re born, where they’re from, how they identify. And I understand why some people would be like, “Well, I don’t have any sympathy for these people. Why would I care? They don’t think that I deserve to exist.” And that’s fair. You’re allowed to think that. I get why you would. I would just ask if you have the time to think about it a little bit, maybe nobody should suffer. Maybe there’s some things we can sort out after the revolution. If we just have to ensure that enough of us make it there to have time to sit down and have those conversations. Maximillian Alvarez: All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, the indomitable Kim Kelly, freelance journalist and labor writer. Go find Kim’s book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and follow more of her writing using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network across all our different platforms. And we’re doing grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real news newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever. From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.
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On 18 May, we reported that online influencer “EDobbins” had sexually harassed a child at Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally. Since then, the Rochdale-based micro-celebrity has attempted to defend himself, but no one’s buying it: Scott Margerison aka E.Dobbin is feeling the pressure from his video. He claims the person he harassed is not a child (because she has tattoos and her mum was ‘having a joke’), and that anyone who is concerned with his creepy behaviour should tell the police. Sounds like a… https://t.co/xD8IBGsby0 pic.twitter.com/Gg09Z75gUU — HUMAN WA$TE (@Dplanet) May 19, 2026 Excuses In the video above, EDobbin said: Hello everyone. So I’m getting loads of messages telling me that I’m a nonce. So ‘nonce’ means ‘Not of Normal Criminal Exercise’. Technically, it stands for ‘Not on Normal Courtyard Exercise’, referencing the sex offenders who weren’t permitted to mix with other inmates. It’s now common British slang for “paedophile”, and the reason people are calling him a ‘nonce’ is because he published a video in which he sexually harassed a girl who was said to be 15 years old. EDobbin continued: If you truly believe that I am a criminal and that I have criminally done something and engaged in something what I shouldn’t be doing, then please report me to the police. I will happily engage with conversation with the police. The girl that I spoke to, now, if we can get a message to this girl so she can just tell us all how old she is, she’s got tattoos. People have disputed the idea that she had tattoos, and we couldn’t see any ourselves: He’s saying she was over 20, but that’s irrelevant. He was told she was 15, yet still followed her and joked, “I’m going to jail in a minute.” He knew he was being a wrong’un. — Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) May 19, 2026 EDobbin also said: Her mum was having a joke. You’ve got to have a look into it a little bit deeper than the surface level shit that you’re all used to. You’re so toxic, you just jump on. If you watch The Simpsons, you lot are all the people who just chase The Simpsons with pitchforks and attack, and attack, and attack. And you’re all stupid c*nts. That girl was not 15 years old who I was talking to. She was over 20-something. Hopefully, she will potentially put a message out just to prove it, that she is. EDobbin would later claim the girl contacted him: Lying removed update. Report his Instagram. Report his TikTok. Report his Facebook. Get. Him. Gone. https://t.co/oXyO2yE7pu pic.twitter.com/13mCn10dLU — Zomby Pop (@TheZombyPop) May 19, 2026 The Instagram in question belongs to a young woman who looks similar to the girl in that they’re both brunettes. They don’t seem to be the same person upon closer inspection, but it’s difficult to say conclusively, because the woman on Instagram could be using any number of filters or camera tricks. In his video, EDobbin also said: There’s no such thing as negative press. And: F*ck yourself. This was all filmed in a van with a mattress in the back of it: The fuckin bed in the back https://t.co/zfAmYUxaQN — Xannon The Buses (@xannon199) May 19, 2026 Caught on camera EDobbin is an incredibly strange individual who believes the Earth is flat and that mountains are the fossilised remains of dragons. As we said on 18 May, however, being an oddball is no excuse for behaving like an out-and-out paedophile. This is what happened in the video which originally brought him to national attention: At the start of the video, ‘influencer’ EDobbin greets a trio of men in Union Jack suits before putting his arm around a passing child and describing her as “my little girlfriend”. After asking what her name is, the teenage girl’s mother said: She ain’t no child bride. When asked how old the girl is, the mother clearly answered “15”. Whoever captioned the video wrote “16”, which is the legal age of consent in the UK. Suggesting that EDobbin definitely heard “15”, he responded: Fucking hell. How old are you really? Please, I’m going to go to jail in a minute. Following the above, EDobbin proceeded to follow the mother and child down the street, asking the young girl for her “details”, and saying “look at that” as he secretly filmed her. As people have highlighted, EDobbin wears glasses that allow him to covertly film the people he speaks with: Mate, if you’re not a pervert, why are you wearing Zuckerberg’s Pervert Goggles? https://t.co/5p7eKE75Lr — The Marquiz de Slade (@Mudkipstoat23) May 19, 2026 Reporting on the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, Open wrote: What Makes Meta’s Smart Glasses Difficult to Spot? The camera in Meta’s Ray-Bans sits flush within the frame, and the recording indicator light is reportedly so dim in daylight that most bystanders never notice it. To the untrained eye, they are ordinary eyewear, which makes covert recording effortless. Who Is Already Being Filmed Without Their Knowledge? Reports have emerged of women being secretly recorded in public by men wearing AI glasses, often for prank or unsolicited content. One woman told the BBC that when she requested a video of herself be removed, she was told it was “a paid service.” Since public photography is broadly legal, victims have little recourse When people talk about the risks of this technology, EDobbin is precisely the sort of person they’re warning about. Grim The grim irony in all this is that many of those who spoke at the Unite the Kingdom rally claim to be protectors of women. In reality, these people ignore their friends to focus on a minority of a minority for political capital.Unite the Kingdom organiser Tommy Robinson is among the worst offenders for this: British grooming gangs pic.twitter.com/p00ZHFYCBH — The Saviour (@TheSaviour) May 18, 2026 As Maddison Wheeldon wrote for the Canary on 20 October: Women and girls have a legitimate reason to feel increasingly unsafe in our society, but it’s not because of immigrants and foreigners, it is far simpler than that; it’s because of men. I can hear the protestations already, ‘Not All Men’, and of course, that would be ridiculous to assert. So then, why do we feel so comfortable to slap a label on all male immigrants, simply because the establishment tells us to? When we dig just a little deeper, it very quickly becomes obvious that the ‘threat of the immigrant’, touted by the mainstream press and far-right pundits is as baseless as their moral consciences. Trust me, it would be wonderfully helpful if there were identifying characteristics that could help women and girls stay safe, but that is a complete fiction. Another grim reality is that Black and minoritized migrant women face additional challenges on this front as a result of government failings, as the women’s organisation Hibiscus stated: At a time when meaningful action is urgently needed, the government has once again failed to address the structural inequalities that make women vulnerable to violence in the first place. There are no concrete commitments to invest in specialist support services, no long-term funding guarantees for by and for organisations, and no serious recognition of the socio-economic and political realities facing Black and minoritised migrant women. Instead, several of the proposed bills appear either dangerously indifferent to these realities or intentionally punitive in nature. A serious issue While it’s easy to ridicule figures like EDobbin, it’s crucial to remember that there’s nothing funny about men like him to the women and children they harass. We’ve very little time for the adults who attended the Unite the Kingdom rally, but even they don’t deserve to be followed and harassed by creeps like this, and that’s especially true for any children they took with them. Featured image via Twitter By Willem Moore From Canary via This RSS Feed.
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If I ever had doubts about how protestors at Saturday’s Unite the Kingdom rally feel about Muslims (which I don’t), they were quickly laid to rest as my Instagram timeline flooded with photographs and videos of incendiary – and sometimes bizarre – anti-Muslim displays of behaviour, which included a Korean musician playing the cello while wearing strips of bacon on his shoulders, before shaking hands with Tommy Robinson on stage and announcing: I may be hung like a chipmunk, but I’ve got enough balls to fight Islam. I’m sorry, Mr. Cellist, but crispy cured pork will not result in me fainting or repel me back into the shadows like a vampire exposed to garlic. I also found his self-denegrating joke about the size of his package to be, in all honesty, quite sad. It plays into racist Western stereotypes about Asian men that have sought to emasculate them. It was an example of the ways in which people of colour belittle themselves to fit into white-dominated spaces. But I digress. Saturday’s march was less ‘Unite the Kingdom’ and more ‘Unite the fight against Islam’ – the crusader references at the march were too many count. Far-right racists often accuse British Muslims like me of playing the victim card, but never has there been more blatant hatred for Islam on display than there was at Saturday’s march, which one attendee called ‘an incredible family day out in London‘ in a post on Facebook group Britain’s Voice, showing just how polarised British society has become. I am not sure you can call a rally where a 15-year-old girl was sexually harassed on camera ‘family friendly.’ However, the cherry on the top was Collectif Némésis’ niqab stunt. Unite the Kingdom: an anti-Islam trope as old as time Three members of the French right-wing ‘feminist’ group – I am intentionally putting the word feminist in quotation marks – took to the stage during last Saturday’s rally clad in black niqabs (the Islamic face veil) and abayas (an over garment worn by some Muslim women) before whipping them off in unison to a crowd of jeering men yelling “take it off.” How very feminist of them. Not only was Collectif Némésis’s stunt reductive, resorting to the use of Muslim women’s clothing yet again as a symbol of what they perceive to be oppression, which is an anti-Islam trope as old as time, but by politicising our clothing and placing us on the frontline of their racist, bigoted political agenda, they are endangering us. And endangering fellow women isn’t very feminist, is it? Muslim women bear the brunt of anti-Muslim hatred The intent is clear: to stoke racist tensions by reinforcing the pernicious view of Islam as an oppressive force against women. And it is Muslim women who bear the brunt of these tensions. It is well-documented that anti-Muslim hatred is gendered, with more Muslim women in Britain experiencing anti-Muslim harassment and hate crimes than Muslim men. Arguably, that’s because the hijab makes us more visibly Muslim. According to Tell MAMA, a non-governmental organisation monitoring anti-Muslim hatred in the UK, 65% of Islamophobic incidents in cities happen to girls and women, and stunts like the one Collectif Némésis pulled off last Saturday just embolden those who seek to harm Muslim women. The consequences are serious; last month John Ashby was given a life sentence for raping and strangling a Sikh Woman last October in Walsall who he thought was a Muslim woman. Mainstream British media outlets also bear some responsibility for the entitlement and impunity the far right feel when it comes to expressing their hatred towards Muslim women. When it comes to media coverage of the hatred that was openly expressed towards Muslims and Islam last Saturday, all you can hear are crickets. Collectif Némésis’s actions contradict feminism Then, there is the anti-feminist aspect of Collectif Némésis’s pathetic burlesque. The three French activists can be seen in the video encouraging the men in the audience to shout, ‘Take it off.’ The sexual objectification of women via the removal of clothing is misogyny at its finest. It also plays into the Orientalist and colonialist-era obsession that some white men in the West have with unveiling Muslim women. As a visibly Muslim woman, I feel equally hated and fetishised by far-right white men. Collectif Némésis claims to be a feminist group, but really what they exhibited at the Unite the Kingdom rally was their blatant support for Britain’s misogynistic, patriarchal far-right movement whom, if they were to gain power, would rescind women’s rights. According to Politico, one in three Reform supporters are fans of Tommy Robinson, a party that has spoken about repealing the Equality Act 2010, imposing a tax on childless women, and lowering the legal abortion limit, among calls for a return to traditional family values reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale. Women who degrade, ridicule, and harm other women to win the approval of the same men who would hurt them, are, what queer feminist activist and writer Mona Eltahawy calls: foot soldiers of the patriarchy. Right-wing women like those who are members of Collectif Némésis hide behind the guise of feminism and ‘liberating’ Muslim women. They have absolutely no interest in making life better for Muslim women; their hatred is one and the same. Featured image via Instagram/CNN News 18 By Yousra Samir Imran From Canary via This RSS Feed.
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Een 23-jarige man is ter dood veroordeeld voor moord op een zeventienjarige TikTokker in Pakistan. Hij schoot haar dood nadat ze meerdere versierpogingen had afgewezen.
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De man die vorig jaar juni in Pakistan de bekende influencer Sana Yousaf (17) doodschoot in haar ouderlijk huis ****is veroordeeld tot de doodstraf. De rechtbank in Islamabad kwam gisteren tot deze uitspraak. De moord leidde tot veel opschudding. De vader van het slachtoffer noemt de veroordeling […]