bc, it was fairly clear from your jokey response to nooneithinkisinmytree that you, very understandably, thought MAGA was neither a virus nor a bacterium, and probably nothing comparable. But as you have noted, your comments here frequently lead people to think you are a Trump apologist*. Since the MAGA people seem to be behind Trump no matter what he does, unlike more trad Republicans (whose ranks are anyway shrinking, and most of whom are MIA) not to mention conservatives like wj, I wondered what you make of MAGA? What do you think explains how this has come about, in people who voted for Trump when he said he would not get the US into foreign wars, claimed that the Biden administration (and family) were tremendously corrupt, and made a fetish of patriotism (USA! USA!) while insisting that the 2020 election was stolen in the face of all evidence to the contrary?
*For example, making a case about why it is desirable to ensure that Iran does not acquire or refine the means to make a nuclear weapon seems to ignore the fact that what the Trump administration did in its first term, and is now continuing, seems to make that outcome more rather than less likely.
I know it's very long, and not everybody's cup of tea, but I think that Carole Cadwalladr is a brave and important voice, and these issues are a vital explanation of the degradation of our politics and culture. It is very copiously linked, almost all of which I had to deactivate. For anybody looking for it with active links, check her substack.
The North Hatley Trust had been a seed investor in the company and in the latest round had bought a further 434,234 shares. That made it one of the Observer’s biggest investors. When I’d seen the name in the seed round I assumed that North Hatley Trust was…a trust, ie some sort of non-profit or family foundation. But when I looked more closely, I found it was just the name of an opaque financial vehicle. An opaque financial vehicle that is now one of the biggest shareholders in the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper.
The only information is a “Legal Entity Identifier” or LEI listing that reveals the barest of details and that’s it. The “Parent” information - ultimate beneficial owner - is not provided.
These sorts of financial vehicles can be set up for all sorts of perfectly legitimate reasons. But they’re also useful if you want to mask the true owners of a company or source of funds. They provide total anonymity. They’re also commonly used by investment firms for cross-border transactions or to administer sub-funds. (North Hatley is a small town in Canada, to save you the Google.) And there’s just a few other tiny bits of information including that it was registered on Jan 20 last year
And that its registered legal address and listed HQ is: Suite 5700, 415 Mission Street, San Francisco.
415 Mission Street is a pretty famous address in San Francisco. It’s home to the city’s landmark Salesforce Tower, a huge office building. But North Hatley Trust’s address is much more specific than that. It’s based in Suite 5700.
And that’s where it gets interesting. Because it turns out that 415 Mission Street, Suite 5700 is the headquarters of Hellman & Friedman, a US private equity firm.
And I was already familiar with Hellman & Friedman because of this guy, another investor in Tortoise Media, Patrick Healy.
Healy is the CEO of Hellman & Friedman.
He sits on its investment committee, leads its European division and is core to its media acquisition team. He also led Hellman & Friedman’s investment into, wait for it, Axel Springer, the Germany company now buying the Telegraph. (H&F has since exited from the firm.)
When James Harding came to present his vision for the Observer in the Guardian’s office, he took questions and I put up my hand. Was Patrick Healy a fit and proper person to be an owner of our newspaper, I asked? And I explained my reasons why.
Two years ago, Hellman & Friedman was revealed to have taken an undisclosed amount of investment from the Saudi public investment fund, Sanabil.
And just so there’s no doubt about who and what the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is, it’s a $776bn fund personally led by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. That’s Mr “Bonesaw” to you, the man who the CIA concluded ordered the killing of Washington Postjournalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
The Guardian along with other media outlets rightly condemned the murder of Kashoggi in the strongest possible terms. It has published multiple blistering leaders on it, (leaders express the official voice of the newspaper). In 2018: “The Guardian view on the death of a critic: Riyadh must pay a price”. It published another in 2019 and again in 2023, and perhaps most appositely, of all, yet again in 2023: The Guardian view on Saudi Arabia’s rehabilitation: following the money.
“While most of the world is tightening its belt, Riyadh has billions to lavish on everything from PR executives to aid its rebranding to big-name architects to build the crown prince’s “city of the future” in the desert, Neom…[meanwhile] Executions have almost doubled under the crown prince…
“Unlike Saudi nationals, foreigners are free to challenge the kingdom – yet instead many use their voices to laud it. Why then should the country pause, when the price of its actions is so low?”
Harding assured us that Healy had invested in Tortoise Media in a personal capacity. Subsequently, a group of press freedom organisations raised the same points about his Saudi connections with the chair of the Scott Trust, Ole Jacob Sunde, who gave the same assurances. Last December, I included Healy in a piece I wrote about Tortoise Media’s funding and included his response in the article:
This week, a spokesman for Healy said that his investment in Tortoise is as an individual and not on behalf of his firm. He disclosed that, contrary to Harding’s statement, he would not be participating in the latest round.
In fact, Healy did go on to participate in the latest round. As did the North Hatley Trust which is legally registered as being co-located in the office of his firm, Hellman & Friedman. I do not know if Healy has any relationship to or stake in the North Hatley Trust. Similiarly, I don’t know whether Sanabil, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has any interest or money in the vehicle.
It does not publicly disclose its investments. The only public information, as Bloomberg reports, is that the Saudi Public Investment Fund commits around $2 billion a year into “venture, growth and small buyout assets worldwide” via portfolio companies of which Hellman & Friedman is one.
Neither Patrick Healy nor Hellman & Friedman responded to my queries on the matter. Nor did Tortoise Media/The Observer. This included a yes/no question of whether it has taken Saudi money. Ole Jacob Sunde, the chair of the Scott Trust (which owns the Guardian and is a co-investor in Tortoise Media) did not respond either. Only the Guardian press office answered my emails. A spokesperson said it did not wish to comment on this matter.
What it means when someone won’t answer your press inquiriesThirty years ago, when I trained as a news journalist, the importance of the “right to reply” was drilled into me. It’s an important defence in the event that a company goes legal but more than that it’s a matter of fairness. Even just a few years ago, it was unusual for a press office to simply ignore journalists’ inquiries. But now the rules on everything are broken and it’s increasingly standard practice. Why bother responding to a news outlet when most people think it’s “fake news” anyway?
But for a news organisation, it’s another rupture of another norm.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation as to why the Observer is refusing to disclose the real identity of an opaque investor who happens to share an address with a private equity firm that’s taken a ton of cash from Mr Bonesaw, that’s why we send right to reply letters: to get the facts.
It’s not just a box-ticking exercise, it’s a crucial step to make sure you haven’t jumped to conclusions. It’s bad faith for anyone to not respond but something is profoundly broken when it’s a liberal news organisation that champions transparency and accountability. It’s the same reason why I believe the Guardian’s secrecy over its deal with OpenAI is so profoundly wrong. You can’t enter a financial arrangement with a subject you report on without disclosing the terms. Yet that’s exactly what it’s done.
Perhaps, you think, the Guardian’s leadership is ignoring my questions because they perceive me as a troublemaker. Well, doh! Of course they do and of course I am. That’s what investigative journalism is. They know that because they publish brilliant, important investigative journalism by my former colleagues.
I lost my job because I investigated this deal and my own news organisation, despite the same leadership’s public statements that no jobs would be lost. It wasn’t just me. The editor, Lucy Rock, lost her job too and last week, the Observer announced it was seeking further voluntary redundancies across the company with staff told they may be facing compulsory redundancies next
In it, he actually points to the example of the Guardian and how it explained that it was taking a stake in Tortoise Media to “enshrine our values in the new ownership structure”.
So where are these values? Who is the Guardian’s co-investor in the Observer? Why the lack of transparency? How does this serve the public interest?
The ‘how’ of thisI established these facts before Christmas, sent the right-to-replies and wrote it up as a straight-down-the-line news story. At that point, I sent it to trusted senior financial journalists and editors to sense-check it and get their input. And then I left it.
When I came to read it again, I doubted that anyone outside the small world of UK media would understand it or be interested. Stories about financial disclosures are pretty dull. More importantly, the “third person” omniscient voice is a con. A news story can look “balanced” and obscure all sorts of biases or agendas. And people know that. It’s why increasing numbers of people don’t trust newspapers any more.
I’ve taken a decision to write this in my own voice, as me, to clearly state my priors, and to lay out the evidence for you to judge for yourself. I’ve long been inspired by OSINT - open source intelligence. It’s a form of investigation that’s collaborative, open, doesn’t rely on unnamed sources and provides the evidence that you can double-check yourself. I’m not asking you to trust me on any of this.
I’m laying out what I’ve found. I don’t know what or who the North Hatley Trust is or why the Guardian and Observer won’t say. I doubt it’s in any way connected to the Palantir puff piece but I’ve decided to publish this today because it speaks to the central issue: it’s impossible to know when the newspaper won’t disclose its owners.
I have a personal stake in this story. I don’t want to pretend that doesn’t exist. It’s what also gives me a really deep understanding of the issues and what’s at stake. It’s why I care and why I’ve bothered to go digging and to ask the questions.
Press ownership matters. We are in a time of danger. And news organisations are falling like skittles. Guardian’s corporate structure - two boards, no effective governance - has enabled an executive leadership to make a series of decisions that, I believe, has unforgivably compromised its journalism. Whether those decisions - the deals with OpenAI and Tortoise Media - were the responsibility of the CEO, Anna Bateson, the chair of the Scott Trust, Ole Jacob Sunde, or others, I don’t know. But it’s the editor-in-chief, Kath Viner, who needs to answer these questions. She’s failed in her most important vital role: to protect her journalists and defend the Guardian’s journalism.
Not for the first time. Maybe I’m channelling my own trauma from my High Court trial here. It’s perhaps why I’m so reactive to what’s happening: secret deals with Silicon Valley companies, oligarchic power, shadowy moneymen. I don’t just know this stuff in my brain, I feel it in my cells.
The press is under a coordinated, global assault and I write this as a critical friend of what remains of Britain’s independent media: do not, in the historian Tim Snyder’s words, obey in advance. Stop doing dumb shortsighted self-sabotaging deals, stop thinking tech companies will save you, they never have and never will and answer the sodding questions when journalists put them to you.
PS. There’s one more piece of information that the filings threw up. This one is for my colleagues who remain at the Guardian. Skip to the end if you want to get the fun video. But what Guardian journalists won’t know, because the management never told them, is that the Guardian took a large undisclosed financial stake in Tortoise Media before the transfer of the Observer took place.
Tortoise’s annual accounts show the company took £2.7million in convertible loans before the transfer. In the same period, Guardian News & Media acquired 382,096 shares in the company. These were dissolved on April 22 last year, the day the Observer transferred ownership. On that same day, the Scott Trust - Guardian News & Media’s owner - acquired 803,640 shares.
It suggests that Tortoise Media needed a substantial cash injection to survive up to the date of the transfer. It raises a question over how much the Scott Trust actually invested, whether it was the £5m announced previously or more. And for my union colleagues who negotiated terms for their departing colleagues with the Guardian and Tortoise Media, they did so not knowing that the Guardian was already a major shareholder in Tortoise Media.
The Guardian and Observer declined to answer any of my questions in relation to this deal.
Part 1 of Carole Cadwalladr's latest substack. There is permission to share. I have had to remove most of the links so it doesn't go into moderation - let's hope the two parts aren't too long to go through.
The broligarchy's war on journalismThe capture of US media by Trump allies is accelerating and the UK is the next in line. Plus: the mystery money behind my old newspaper. Carole Cadwalladr
Mar 27, 2026
A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.
This week, the BBC announced the appointment of a new director general. An ex-Google middle manager called Matt Brittin who will lead the publicly-owned corporation at a time when its entire existence is under threat. The next years are crucial: Nigel Farage, whose far-right Reform party is surging in the polls, hasn’t disguised his Trumpian desire to smash it to pieces.
I’ve written about Brittin in the Nerve this week because I believe it’s a disastrous appointment for the BBC and therefore us all. It’s a choice rooted in our ongoing naivity about Silicon Valley technology firms including Google that’s is still seen as a dynamic start-up not a rapacious AI company that’s actively trying to destroy journalism.
Google’s AI summaries now appear at the top of every search, they scrape journalists’ work while simultaneously tanking traffic to their websites. Since they were introduced, some websites have seen up to 80% fall. And Brittin is your standard issue AI hype man.
Last year, he was appointed to the Guardian’s board to help the organisation navigate decisions about AI and the organisation promptly entered into “strategic partnership” with one of the worst companies on the planet, OpenAI.
This is tech capture. It’s a playbook we’ve seen play out time and time again. And, as an ardent believer in the importance of independent media and the survival of both the Guardian and BBC, I think it’s a terrible, terrible error of judgment. Silicon Valley creates dependencies in media companies that gives them leverage to avoid negative coverage and crucially regulation including through a range of techniques that include blackmail and extortion.
In the US, the Washington Post has been hollowed out by one tech broligarch (Jeff Bezos) and CBS and TikTok have been captured by another (the Ellisons). CNN is the next in line. Larry Ellison’s son David is set to take control of Paramount which owns CNN and HBO among a welter of other media brands. CBS, which it already controls. already become a hollowed-out husk of a once vital US network. Oliver Darcy of Status also reported this week that viewers are turning off in droves. This is a media crisis wrapped inside a political crisis.
The UK’s media was pre-captured. Our print media is overwhelmingly oligarch owned. But the process is accelerating here also. The German company Axel Springer is buying the Telegraph in a £575m deal. It’s owned by another Trump ally, Mathias Döpfner who’s also close to Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir. Thiel is actually in business with Döpfner’s son, Moritz, investing $50m into a fund he founded.
And this Sunday, my old newspaper, the Observer - which was an integral part of the Guardian until a year ago - published a story on Palantir that made my heart sink.
At the Nerve, we’ve investigated Palantir’s chokehold on the UK government, we’ve found Ministry of Defence whistleblowers who claim it’s a threat to national security, and revealed the UK pension funds who are fuelling its growth. I’ve written here about its role in what I believe is the US’s descent into technofascism. And of course, in this newsletter, Peter Thiel, one of the most dangerous men on the planet, is a regular character.
This is what alerted me to the Observer piece. Two glowing endorsements from…Palantir’s UK CEO, Louis Mosley.
Mosley is the grandson of Oswald Mosley who founded the British Union of Fascists, aka “Blackshirts”. The examples he cites were case studies that the Observer’s political editor had exclusively obtained. Mosley also granted her an exclusive interview. For comparison, Palantir did not respond to any of the press inquiries we sent it before our first investigation. The Observer piece is behind a paywall - as all its journalism now is - but there’s a text version here.
What’s noteworthy here is that Palantir is being covered by my old newspaper by the political editor as a political story. UK political reporting is largely a time-honoured game of favour trading that sees journalists use politicians to give up their gossip and politicians use journalists to channel their spin.
Certainly this is the game (and journalists) that Palantir’s press man in the UK knows: he previously worked at Number 10 Downing Street. I may be wrong and we can never know but I don’t believe the Observer of a year ago would have run this piece. Not because of me or my strongly held views on the threat Peter Thiel poses to democracy (his words, not mine: Thiel says democracy is “incompatible” with freedom) but because of normal editorial processes.
News organisations make mistakes. The Observer famously did when it backed the Iraq War. But channelling Palantir spin into a double-page spread without robustly interrogating the provenance of the story or the motivations behind it? A simple fact check would have revealed Mosley’s claims weren’t even true. The case study Palantir provided made the bold claim that Palantir had prevented all domestic murders in Bedfordshire last year.
“Usually 5 or 6 domestic murders a year,” Mosley tweeted quoting the article. “Last 12 months? Zero. By using Palantir, Bedfordshire Police identified 1,000+ women whose partners had a history of domestic abuse - and warned them they could be in danger.” Er, no, as the journalist Iain Overton points out. He found at least two Bedfordshire women murdered in their homes last year. I also asked a solicitor who specialises in domestic abuse what she made of the piece [I have had to remove this link. Anyone interested should check out Cadwalladr's Substack.]
The UK police have a persistent track record in failing to act on domestic abuse and threats of violence against women. And what Bedfordshire Police have done, with the assistance of the Observer, is to techwash these failures via Palantir’s press office.
All of which begs the question: why?
A mystery investorIt’s nearly a year since the Guardian “transferred” the Observer to a group of private investors along with £5m. It did so after a bitter dispute with its journalists, 93% of whom voted to go on strike. I’ve written here about Tortoise Media, the company that acquired it, and here about the issues with the deal including the friendship between James Harding, Tortoise’s founder and the Guardian’s CEO, Anna Bateson, who cooked this deal up. And here, about the day we left the Guardian.
In a meeting, on the day the deal was done, we asked Anna Bateson for the names of Tortoise’s new incoming investors. She told us she would send a list after the meeting. That offer was rescinded. The Guardian said Tortoise Media had to supply the names. Tortoise Media declined to do so.
The new known investors include a major political donor to the Labour Party and the controversial thinktank, Labour Together, Gary Lubner, and the owner of Prospect magazine, Clive Cowdery.
But just before Christmas, Tortoise Media, now the owners of the Observer, published a new financial filing with the UK registry, Companies House, which finally listed the names of all shareholders. Most of them were already in the public domain, which made the secrecy all the more baffling. But one caught my eye: “The North Hatley Trust.”
You can tell it's coming to the end of the month and I still have gift articles to share! An interesting piece on how justifying a war against Muslim nations often involves rationales that it will improve the lives and rights of women. I have confessed here before that this was one of the reasons that I supported the war in Afghanistan after 9/11, in addition to the fact that the laws of war permitted it because Mullah Omar was sheltering Osama Bin Laden. By the time Bush et al moved on to Iraq, I had learnt better:
Well, for me, tout comprendre c'est tout comprendre. Unattainable of course, but worth aspiring to.
We're no longer, after the McKinney era, subject to pathetic panegyrics on how western civilisation is the most advanced and superior civilisation on earth, nor (not that we here have ever been) to the narrative of the subtle and advanced civilisations of the east. As far as I can see, nobody here needs to be convinced of the missteps, stupidities, inhumanities and treacheries of this or various past administrations. (Although, I did notice in the Biden era the tendency of some progressives to illustrate too well Voltaire's le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. It's always worth talking about the better, and what it would look like, but one must at the same time be realistic about the world as it is, and the challenges it throws up.) In any case, none of this erases the wholesale oppression and abuse by the Islamic Republic. Nor of course does anything erase the unbelievable corruption, stupidity, ineptitude and short sightedness of the Trump administration.
Of course I am old enough like many here to remember SAVAK's repression, and the fact that it was CIA trained and backed. But one must also remember that the mullahs backed the coup that ended Iran's democracy, and Mossadegh's premiership. History is complicated, and as I said before, a lot depends on the date at which you draw the line "where it all started".
Scoring points seems unnecessary (I acknowledge I was the first to bring up transactionalism). The camps who are comfortable with emphasising that America is the root of all evil, or that America is the source of all that is good ("Truth, Justice and the American way), are equally ridiculous. The world is complicated, as are people. Cesar Chavez did good, as well as evil. Ezra Klein brings something valuable to the US discourse whether one agrees with him about everything or not. As well as understanding the past, one has to acknowledge the realities of the present. Things are not black or white.
Given that Frum proudly takes credit for including Iran in the Axis of Evil, which made its debut after Iran offered to help the US in the wake of 9-11
So does that mean that you think having offered to help the US after 9/11 automatically means that Iran should have been entitled to be excluded from whatever (questionable to say the least) qualifications Frum et al considered necessary to be included in the Axis of Evil? That seems rather transactional..
Funnily enough, regarding your previous point about Frum and his attitude to the Iran situation, I’ve just been reading the transcript of his conversation with Alastair Campbell in which (among other things) he makes it clear that contrary to the opinion of most of us, and most commentators, even in the US, he thinks there WAS an imminent threat from Iran.
I've been thinking a lot about this: given that if I knew about most of, if not all, of the events in Iranian history outlined by you (and Vaez) above, you can bet that Frum did too (and more), I had to wonder why his understanding of the history did not influence his opinion of the situation in the modern context (i.e. Iraq war, and now). I wonder if it is something to do with a different concept of imminent threat, and its likely consequences. So even if one fully understands the appalling history of the US (and UK) involvement in Iran, somehow for some purposes some people can draw a line between past causes, and present conditions. (And in Frum's case, of course, there is probably also the understandable impulse - experienced by many of us - to excuse actions committed by our ideological allies.)
Another thing that makes me think this is the case of my cousin in Israel. She is a Holocaust survivor (she was a little girl who was smuggled out of a concentration camp, and who spent years being hidden in a dog kennel), probably now in her 80s. She and her husband are and have always been impeccably liberal/lefty peaceniks and supporters of Palestinian rights in Israeli politics, and eloquent opponents of e.g. Likud and Netanyahu. But in our exchanges (where I wish her and her family safety etc), she recently sent me an article in which, among other things, the author says that while some people see their country as a setting, others see it as a lifeline. Given my cousin's history, and given that the destruction of Israel has been a frequently broadcast article of faith since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, I wondered (without asking her) whether even people with her kind of political ideas think the war against Iran is justified, and must be pursued. I haven’t checked with her, because I don’t want to introduce any controversy in the current circumstances, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
So this is the sort thing I think about when I say that people are complicated, and products of their individual experiences, and that even if one disagrees with some of their views it need not necessarily influence one’s opinion of their other attitudes.
Sir Richard Dearlove (retired head of MI6 - not called M but C) interviewed by Times Radio:
“Trump blows hot and cold. He shoots his mouth off. It’s a problem in the short term.”
But he added that “one needs to be mature about these things and not worry too much about the medium to long-term impact”.
“Trump has said some pretty odd things. He’s clearly not a historian and he should perhaps be reminded that the US arrived rather late in World War One and World War Two”
Tweeted by Andrew Neil, eminent and respected (but indubitably pretty right wing) political interviewer (BoJo was too scared of him to be interviewed before his last election as PM) whose interview with Ben Shapiro I still treasure. BS had never heard of Neil, had done no research on him but was so outraged by his questions he called him left wing. Andrew Neil just laughed and carried on with the interview:
You want the NATO allies to join you in a war you started without ever consulting these allies about the war or explaining your war aims. We’re meant just to meekly fall in line. You recently supported a US invasion of a NATO ally (Denmark/Greenland) but now you want these same allies to join your war. Your president disparaged and misrepresented the role of NATO allies in Afghanistan. But now you want them to join with you again in a war of your making. You went to war with Iran without a thought of how to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and without involving your allies in the matter. But now you want the NATO allies to bail you out, even though there’s still no plan for Hormuz. You want the NATO allies to join you in a war in which you still cannot articulate the endgame. Or what victory would look like. You went to war thinking the Iranian regime would quickly topple, that Tehran would not attack the Gulf States or close Hormuz. Why would we align with such Epic Stupidity? You and other know-nothing blowhards started this war all on your own. You can finish it on your own. If you’re able to …
Oops, I imagine this is going to go down like a lead balloon with the Trump administration (especially the judgement on Kushner and Witkoff), and only add to their anger at the UK:
I certainly don't think you're "being too hard on him", nor that you're not being hard enough. (Which reminds me of that wonderful interview with Shane MacGowan, where the interviewer says in passing that, as is well known, SMG drinks too much. He says "I don't drink too much", so she says "Oh, I suppose you think you don't drink enough", to which he unforgettably replies "No, I drink enough".)
I just don't necessarily think this is a helpful or nuanced way to think about people - I think most interesting people are multi-faceted, with complicated worldviews and opinions, and unless these skew very much to the "evil" side of the scale, as long as the people are bright, knowledgeable and interesting it can be worthwhile considering what they say. Even sometimes (maybe even often) when one doesn't agree with them on whatever the topic is.
I was talking/thinking about purity politics, lj, a subject we have often discussed here on ObWi. You often refer to, or link to, Ezra Klein pieces, IMO very understandably, even though his Charlie Kirk comments were outrageous and no doubt he's behaved or expressed himself not absolutely as many of us would have liked/done on many occasions. But he provides interesting interviews, with interesting people, and he's an important voice to have on the NYT which is (if I understand correctly) still a hugely influential newspaper in the US media context.
That someone can be me! If this is what lj meant, the transcript is included in this gift link (it doesn't start in exactly the same place, but goes on with the stuff in lj's video):
Regarding any past missteps by Ezra Klein (I'm thinking of, as I assume lj is, his comments after Charlie Kirk got killed), my view is very definitely that one doesn't have to agree with every single thing someone has ever said or done to find their contributions useful, valuable or interesting. And Ezra Klein is certainly a frequent provider of all three kinds of contributions.
Particularly funny, apart from the obvious, because China, for example, is being allowed by Iran to send ships safely through the Strait of Hormuz according to the C4 News I watched half an hour ago. It looks like Trump is still being advised by the same experts who didn't factor in closure of the Strait when planning the war...
Trump seven days ago, still very pissed off that Starmer had refused permission for the US to launch offensives from UK air bases:
“The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East. That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer – But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Trump today:
“We have already destroyed 100 per cent of Iran’s military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close-range missile somewhere along, or in, this waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.” In what appeared to be an appeal to the UK and other nations, he added: “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint will send ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a nation that has been totally decapitated.”
I liked this, in today's Times (a Murdoch paper, don't forget).
Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric gives me that sinking feelingWhen the US gloats over Iranian deaths and pumps out propaganda war videos, it’s not just their enemies who recoil
Already sinking under heavy fire at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in 1898, the Spanish cruiser Vizcaya burst into flames. The ammunition store ignited, a torpedo went off, hell was unleashed and desperate, burning men hurled themselves into the sea. Watching all this was John Woodward Philip, commanding the USS Texas on the other side. “Don’t cheer, boys,” he admonished his men. “The poor devils are dying.”
Last week, the Iranian warship Iris Dena was sunk by the Americans off the coast of Sri Lanka, claiming almost 100 lives. Perhaps you saw President Trump at a Republican conference recounting what a navy official told him when he asked why ships like this hadn’t instead been captured. “He said, ‘It’s more fun to to sink ’em’,” reported Trump, with a smirk. And his audience guffawed. From one to the other. From “Don’t cheer, boys” to “It’s more fun to sink ’em.” Really, I could stop there.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-declared secretary of war, has also had a chatty week. Here he is talking about Iran’s long-running antipathy towards the US: “They didn’t always declare it openly,” he said, “except for their constant chants of ‘Death to America’.” Ah, that old giveaway. His own rhetoric, though, isn’t terribly different. In the same speech, he gloated: “The regime who chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel.” Over the past fortnight, he has also said: “They are toast and they know it,” and, “We will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” Plus, “This was never meant to be a fair fight, we are punching them while they are down, as it should be.” And more, and more, and more.
One might say Hegseth sounds like he thinks he is in a film, but only if it were a really bad film, perhaps written by a 15-year-old using ChatGPT. A comic, perhaps. A computer game. Probably, one should not use the phrase “small dick energy” on the comment pages, and particularly not when accusing other people of cheapening the discourse. But damn it, I think I must.
Hegseth is a veteran. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. What he’s trying to channel here, I suppose, is a sort of gung-ho military pep talk; how soldiers talk to other soldiers before leading them into war. Not all of them, though. Perhaps you recall Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins addressing his men in 2003 before leading them into battle in the Iraq War. “Iraq is steeped in history,” he told them. “It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there."
“Is it something they teach at Sandhurst,” wrote Jane Shilling in these pages, “that beautiful, bleak, apocalyptic turn of phrase?” Don’t assume my intent is to crassly contrast Britain and America. George W Bush admired Collins’s speech so much he had it displayed on the wall of the Oval Office.
Listening to Hegseth this week, and to Trump, I also found myself remembering Tony Soprano’s despairing wail to his psychiatrist. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” he demanded. “The strong silent type? That was an American!” That’s Tony bloody Soprano. It’s quite something when the White House’s view of American values is less appealing than his.
Speaking of TV shows, you may have also seen the videos pumped out by the White House as another part of their propaganda blitz. Computer games mixed with real war footage alongside clips from films and TV shows. “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY!” said the attached tweet, no matter that it includes Bryan Cranston saying “I AM the danger!” in Breaking Bad, from a sequence in which his character brags about being a murderer.
Bad enough if you thought this was just an administration trying to communicate with its public in language it assumes they’ll understand. The suspicion, though, has to be that it’s worse than that. This is real. This is them. This is how they see what they are doing, their world view and their oomph.
Doubtless Hegseth, in his likeable way, would regard all this as “pearl clutching”. That’s what he said about those among America’s traditional allies, including the UK, who were sceptical about this war at the start. But language matters. When Trump smirks about dead sailors you can only conclude he is without doubts, without those 3am ceiling-staring moments of normal human horror at those poor devils lost at the bottom of the sea. Which in turn makes you wonder what he thinks about the collateral damage in Tehran as flames engulf the city. But you don’t need to wonder. “The president doesn’t like the attack,” a White House insider told Axios after Israel bombed Iranian fuel supplies. Why? “It reminds people of higher gas prices”.
So no, it’s not just pearl clutching. Nor is it just about aesthetics. This is a real war with real, huge costs, and not just for America’s enemies. Few in Britain would instinctively side with the Iranian regime even in a war of at best dubious legality, begun seemingly on a whim, with little coherent plan for how it might end. But do they grasp, these chest-thumping war bros, how hard they are making it for their traditional, instinctive allies, whose own populations can see and hear every word? “It’s more fun to sink ’em.” When our enemies talk like this we conclude they are dangerous and immoral lunatics. It’s going to take some circumspection, biting of tongues and blinkers if we’re to avoid the same conclusion about our friends.
On “Maybe time for an Open Thread”
bc, it was fairly clear from your jokey response to nooneithinkisinmytree that you, very understandably, thought MAGA was neither a virus nor a bacterium, and probably nothing comparable. But as you have noted, your comments here frequently lead people to think you are a Trump apologist*. Since the MAGA people seem to be behind Trump no matter what he does, unlike more trad Republicans (whose ranks are anyway shrinking, and most of whom are MIA) not to mention conservatives like wj, I wondered what you make of MAGA? What do you think explains how this has come about, in people who voted for Trump when he said he would not get the US into foreign wars, claimed that the Biden administration (and family) were tremendously corrupt, and made a fetish of patriotism (USA! USA!) while insisting that the 2020 election was stolen in the face of all evidence to the contrary?
*For example, making a case about why it is desirable to ensure that Iran does not acquire or refine the means to make a nuclear weapon seems to ignore the fact that what the Trump administration did in its first term, and is now continuing, seems to make that outcome more rather than less likely.
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I know it's very long, and not everybody's cup of tea, but I think that Carole Cadwalladr is a brave and important voice, and these issues are a vital explanation of the degradation of our politics and culture. It is very copiously linked, almost all of which I had to deactivate. For anybody looking for it with active links, check her substack.
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Part 2:
The North Hatley Trust had been a seed investor in the company and in the latest round had bought a further 434,234 shares. That made it one of the Observer’s biggest investors. When I’d seen the name in the seed round I assumed that North Hatley Trust was…a trust, ie some sort of non-profit or family foundation. But when I looked more closely, I found it was just the name of an opaque financial vehicle. An opaque financial vehicle that is now one of the biggest shareholders in the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper.
The only information is a “Legal Entity Identifier” or LEI listing that reveals the barest of details and that’s it. The “Parent” information - ultimate beneficial owner - is not provided.
These sorts of financial vehicles can be set up for all sorts of perfectly legitimate reasons. But they’re also useful if you want to mask the true owners of a company or source of funds. They provide total anonymity.
They’re also commonly used by investment firms for cross-border transactions or to administer sub-funds. (North Hatley is a small town in Canada, to save you the Google.) And there’s just a few other tiny bits of information including that it was registered on Jan 20 last year
And that its registered legal address and listed HQ is: Suite 5700, 415 Mission Street, San Francisco.
415 Mission Street is a pretty famous address in San Francisco. It’s home to the city’s landmark Salesforce Tower, a huge office building. But North Hatley Trust’s address is much more specific than that. It’s based in Suite 5700.
And that’s where it gets interesting. Because it turns out that 415 Mission Street, Suite 5700 is the headquarters of Hellman & Friedman, a US private equity firm.
And I was already familiar with Hellman & Friedman because of this guy, another investor in Tortoise Media, Patrick Healy.
Healy is the CEO of Hellman & Friedman.
He sits on its investment committee, leads its European division and is core to its media acquisition team. He also led Hellman & Friedman’s investment into, wait for it, Axel Springer, the Germany company now buying the Telegraph. (H&F has since exited from the firm.)
When James Harding came to present his vision for the Observer in the Guardian’s office, he took questions and I put up my hand. Was Patrick Healy a fit and proper person to be an owner of our newspaper, I asked? And I explained my reasons why.
Two years ago, Hellman & Friedman was revealed to have taken an undisclosed amount of investment from the Saudi public investment fund, Sanabil.
And just so there’s no doubt about who and what the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is, it’s a $776bn fund personally led by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. That’s Mr “Bonesaw” to you, the man who the CIA concluded ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
The Guardian along with other media outlets rightly condemned the murder of Kashoggi in the strongest possible terms. It has published multiple blistering leaders on it, (leaders express the official voice of the newspaper). In 2018: “The Guardian view on the death of a critic: Riyadh must pay a price”. It published another in 2019 and again in 2023, and perhaps most appositely, of all, yet again in 2023: The Guardian view on Saudi Arabia’s rehabilitation: following the money.
Harding assured us that Healy had invested in Tortoise Media in a personal capacity. Subsequently, a group of press freedom organisations raised the same points about his Saudi connections with the chair of the Scott Trust, Ole Jacob Sunde, who gave the same assurances.
Last December, I included Healy in a piece I wrote about Tortoise Media’s funding and included his response in the article:
In fact, Healy did go on to participate in the latest round. As did the North Hatley Trust which is legally registered as being co-located in the office of his firm, Hellman & Friedman. I do not know if Healy has any relationship to or stake in the North Hatley Trust. Similiarly, I don’t know whether Sanabil, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has any interest or money in the vehicle.
It does not publicly disclose its investments. The only public information, as Bloomberg reports, is that the Saudi Public Investment Fund commits around $2 billion a year into “venture, growth and small buyout assets worldwide” via portfolio companies of which Hellman & Friedman is one.
Neither Patrick Healy nor Hellman & Friedman responded to my queries on the matter. Nor did Tortoise Media/The Observer. This included a yes/no question of whether it has taken Saudi money. Ole Jacob Sunde, the chair of the Scott Trust (which owns the Guardian and is a co-investor in Tortoise Media) did not respond either. Only the Guardian press office answered my emails. A spokesperson said it did not wish to comment on this matter.
What it means when someone won’t answer your press inquiriesThirty years ago, when I trained as a news journalist, the importance of the “right to reply” was drilled into me. It’s an important defence in the event that a company goes legal but more than that it’s a matter of fairness. Even just a few years ago, it was unusual for a press office to simply ignore journalists’ inquiries. But now the rules on everything are broken and it’s increasingly standard practice. Why bother responding to a news outlet when most people think it’s “fake news” anyway?
But for a news organisation, it’s another rupture of another norm.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation as to why the Observer is refusing to disclose the real identity of an opaque investor who happens to share an address with a private equity firm that’s taken a ton of cash from Mr Bonesaw, that’s why we send right to reply letters: to get the facts.
It’s not just a box-ticking exercise, it’s a crucial step to make sure you haven’t jumped to conclusions. It’s bad faith for anyone to not respond but something is profoundly broken when it’s a liberal news organisation that champions transparency and accountability. It’s the same reason why I believe the Guardian’s secrecy over its deal with OpenAI is so profoundly wrong. You can’t enter a financial arrangement with a subject you report on without disclosing the terms. Yet that’s exactly what it’s done.
Perhaps, you think, the Guardian’s leadership is ignoring my questions because they perceive me as a troublemaker. Well, doh! Of course they do and of course I am. That’s what investigative journalism is. They know that because they publish brilliant, important investigative journalism by my former colleagues.
I lost my job because I investigated this deal and my own news organisation, despite the same leadership’s public statements that no jobs would be lost. It wasn’t just me. The editor, Lucy Rock, lost her job too and last week, the Observer announced it was seeking further voluntary redundancies across the company with staff told they may be facing compulsory redundancies next
The UK government changes the lawThree weeks after the transfer of the Observer to Tortoise Media took place, the UK government changed the law to allow foreign state ownership of UK news titles. They also backdated the legislation to a year previously.
At least four news organisations lobbied the minister in question to get this law changed according to a report in the Guardian. The details remain secret.
I genuinely don’t know what to make of the government’s decision on this or why now but there’s no defensible argument for foreign state ownership of UK media, as argued in this excellent piece the by the Guardian financial editor, Nils Pratley:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dvI_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3bde5393-cc0c-49f2-9ab0-ae920c4cfac1_1422x644.png
In it, he actually points to the example of the Guardian and how it explained that it was taking a stake in Tortoise Media to “enshrine our values in the new ownership structure”.
So where are these values? Who is the Guardian’s co-investor in the Observer? Why the lack of transparency? How does this serve the public interest?
The ‘how’ of thisI established these facts before Christmas, sent the right-to-replies and wrote it up as a straight-down-the-line news story. At that point, I sent it to trusted senior financial journalists and editors to sense-check it and get their input. And then I left it.
When I came to read it again, I doubted that anyone outside the small world of UK media would understand it or be interested. Stories about financial disclosures are pretty dull. More importantly, the “third person” omniscient voice is a con. A news story can look “balanced” and obscure all sorts of biases or agendas. And people know that. It’s why increasing numbers of people don’t trust newspapers any more.
I’ve taken a decision to write this in my own voice, as me, to clearly state my priors, and to lay out the evidence for you to judge for yourself. I’ve long been inspired by OSINT - open source intelligence. It’s a form of investigation that’s collaborative, open, doesn’t rely on unnamed sources and provides the evidence that you can double-check yourself. I’m not asking you to trust me on any of this.
I’m laying out what I’ve found. I don’t know what or who the North Hatley Trust is or why the Guardian and Observer won’t say. I doubt it’s in any way connected to the Palantir puff piece but I’ve decided to publish this today because it speaks to the central issue: it’s impossible to know when the newspaper won’t disclose its owners.
I have a personal stake in this story. I don’t want to pretend that doesn’t exist. It’s what also gives me a really deep understanding of the issues and what’s at stake. It’s why I care and why I’ve bothered to go digging and to ask the questions.
Press ownership matters. We are in a time of danger. And news organisations are falling like skittles. Guardian’s corporate structure - two boards, no effective governance - has enabled an executive leadership to make a series of decisions that, I believe, has unforgivably compromised its journalism. Whether those decisions - the deals with OpenAI and Tortoise Media - were the responsibility of the CEO, Anna Bateson, the chair of the Scott Trust, Ole Jacob Sunde, or others, I don’t know. But it’s the editor-in-chief, Kath Viner, who needs to answer these questions. She’s failed in her most important vital role: to protect her journalists and defend the Guardian’s journalism.
Not for the first time. Maybe I’m channelling my own trauma from my High Court trial here. It’s perhaps why I’m so reactive to what’s happening: secret deals with Silicon Valley companies, oligarchic power, shadowy moneymen. I don’t just know this stuff in my brain, I feel it in my cells.
The press is under a coordinated, global assault and I write this as a critical friend of what remains of Britain’s independent media: do not, in the historian Tim Snyder’s words, obey in advance. Stop doing dumb shortsighted self-sabotaging deals, stop thinking tech companies will save you, they never have and never will and answer the sodding questions when journalists put them to you.
PS. There’s one more piece of information that the filings threw up. This one is for my colleagues who remain at the Guardian. Skip to the end if you want to get the fun video. But what Guardian journalists won’t know, because the management never told them, is that the Guardian took a large undisclosed financial stake in Tortoise Media before the transfer of the Observer took place.
Tortoise’s annual accounts show the company took £2.7million in convertible loans before the transfer. In the same period, Guardian News & Media acquired 382,096 shares in the company. These were dissolved on April 22 last year, the day the Observer transferred ownership. On that same day, the Scott Trust - Guardian News & Media’s owner - acquired 803,640 shares.
It suggests that Tortoise Media needed a substantial cash injection to survive up to the date of the transfer. It raises a question over how much the Scott Trust actually invested, whether it was the £5m announced previously or more. And for my union colleagues who negotiated terms for their departing colleagues with the Guardian and Tortoise Media, they did so not knowing that the Guardian was already a major shareholder in Tortoise Media.
The Guardian and Observer declined to answer any of my questions in relation to this deal.
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Part 1 of Carole Cadwalladr's latest substack. There is permission to share. I have had to remove most of the links so it doesn't go into moderation - let's hope the two parts aren't too long to go through.
The broligarchy's war on journalismThe capture of US media by Trump allies is accelerating and the UK is the next in line. Plus: the mystery money behind my old newspaper.
Carole Cadwalladr
Mar 27, 2026
A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.
This week, the BBC announced the appointment of a new director general. An ex-Google middle manager called Matt Brittin who will lead the publicly-owned corporation at a time when its entire existence is under threat. The next years are crucial: Nigel Farage, whose far-right Reform party is surging in the polls, hasn’t disguised his Trumpian desire to smash it to pieces.
I’ve written about Brittin in the Nerve this week because I believe it’s a disastrous appointment for the BBC and therefore us all. It’s a choice rooted in our ongoing naivity about Silicon Valley technology firms including Google that’s is still seen as a dynamic start-up not a rapacious AI company that’s actively trying to destroy journalism.
Google’s AI summaries now appear at the top of every search, they scrape journalists’ work while simultaneously tanking traffic to their websites. Since they were introduced, some websites have seen up to 80% fall. And Brittin is your standard issue AI hype man.
Last year, he was appointed to the Guardian’s board to help the organisation navigate decisions about AI and the organisation promptly entered into “strategic partnership” with one of the worst companies on the planet, OpenAI.
This is tech capture. It’s a playbook we’ve seen play out time and time again. And, as an ardent believer in the importance of independent media and the survival of both the Guardian and BBC, I think it’s a terrible, terrible error of judgment. Silicon Valley creates dependencies in media companies that gives them leverage to avoid negative coverage and crucially regulation including through a range of techniques that include blackmail and extortion.
In the US, the Washington Post has been hollowed out by one tech broligarch (Jeff Bezos) and CBS and TikTok have been captured by another (the Ellisons). CNN is the next in line. Larry Ellison’s son David is set to take control of Paramount which owns CNN and HBO among a welter of other media brands. CBS, which it already controls. already become a hollowed-out husk of a once vital US network. Oliver Darcy of Status also reported this week that viewers are turning off in droves. This is a media crisis wrapped inside a political crisis.
The UK’s media was pre-captured. Our print media is overwhelmingly oligarch owned. But the process is accelerating here also. The German company Axel Springer is buying the Telegraph in a £575m deal. It’s owned by another Trump ally, Mathias Döpfner who’s also close to Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir. Thiel is actually in business with Döpfner’s son, Moritz, investing $50m into a fund he founded.
And this Sunday, my old newspaper, the Observer - which was an integral part of the Guardian until a year ago - published a story on Palantir that made my heart sink.
At the Nerve, we’ve investigated Palantir’s chokehold on the UK government, we’ve found Ministry of Defence whistleblowers who claim it’s a threat to national security, and revealed the UK pension funds who are fuelling its growth. I’ve written here about its role in what I believe is the US’s descent into technofascism. And of course, in this newsletter, Peter Thiel, one of the most dangerous men on the planet, is a regular character.
This is what alerted me to the Observer piece. Two glowing endorsements from…Palantir’s UK CEO, Louis Mosley.
Mosley is the grandson of Oswald Mosley who founded the British Union of Fascists, aka “Blackshirts”. The examples he cites were case studies that the Observer’s political editor had exclusively obtained. Mosley also granted her an exclusive interview. For comparison, Palantir did not respond to any of the press inquiries we sent it before our first investigation. The Observer piece is behind a paywall - as all its journalism now is - but there’s a text version here.
What’s noteworthy here is that Palantir is being covered by my old newspaper by the political editor as a political story. UK political reporting is largely a time-honoured game of favour trading that sees journalists use politicians to give up their gossip and politicians use journalists to channel their spin.
Certainly this is the game (and journalists) that Palantir’s press man in the UK knows: he previously worked at Number 10 Downing Street. I may be wrong and we can never know but I don’t believe the Observer of a year ago would have run this piece. Not because of me or my strongly held views on the threat Peter Thiel poses to democracy (his words, not mine: Thiel says democracy is “incompatible” with freedom) but because of normal editorial processes.
News organisations make mistakes. The Observer famously did when it backed the Iraq War. But channelling Palantir spin into a double-page spread without robustly interrogating the provenance of the story or the motivations behind it? A simple fact check would have revealed Mosley’s claims weren’t even true. The case study Palantir provided made the bold claim that Palantir had prevented all domestic murders in Bedfordshire last year.
“Usually 5 or 6 domestic murders a year,” Mosley tweeted quoting the article. “Last 12 months? Zero. By using Palantir, Bedfordshire Police identified 1,000+ women whose partners had a history of domestic abuse - and warned them they could be in danger.”
Er, no, as the journalist Iain Overton points out. He found at least two Bedfordshire women murdered in their homes last year. I also asked a solicitor who specialises in domestic abuse what she made of the piece [I have had to remove this link. Anyone interested should check out Cadwalladr's Substack.]
The UK police have a persistent track record in failing to act on domestic abuse and threats of violence against women. And what Bedfordshire Police have done, with the assistance of the Observer, is to techwash these failures via Palantir’s press office.
All of which begs the question: why?
A mystery investorIt’s nearly a year since the Guardian “transferred” the Observer to a group of private investors along with £5m. It did so after a bitter dispute with its journalists, 93% of whom voted to go on strike. I’ve written here about Tortoise Media, the company that acquired it, and here about the issues with the deal including the friendship between James Harding, Tortoise’s founder and the Guardian’s CEO, Anna Bateson, who cooked this deal up. And here, about the day we left the Guardian.
In a meeting, on the day the deal was done, we asked Anna Bateson for the names of Tortoise’s new incoming investors. She told us she would send a list after the meeting. That offer was rescinded. The Guardian said Tortoise Media had to supply the names. Tortoise Media declined to do so.
The new known investors include a major political donor to the Labour Party and the controversial thinktank, Labour Together, Gary Lubner, and the owner of Prospect magazine, Clive Cowdery.
But just before Christmas, Tortoise Media, now the owners of the Observer, published a new financial filing with the UK registry, Companies House, which finally listed the names of all shareholders. Most of them were already in the public domain, which made the secrecy all the more baffling. But one caught my eye: “The North Hatley Trust.”
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bc, serious question: what do you think MAGA is?
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Sorry, I posted this on the wrong thread:
Bette Midler adapts Woody Guthrie to meet the present moment
https://x.com/meidastouch/status/2036946219101307129?s=43&t=MgL1AWYxk0jrswEhQ3Zjxg
On “A grammar lesson”
Meanwhile, Bette Midler adapts Woody Guthrie to meet the moment:
https://x.com/meidastouch/status/2036946219101307129?s=43&t=MgL1AWYxk0jrswEhQ3Zjxg
On “Maybe time for an Open Thread”
You can tell it's coming to the end of the month and I still have gift articles to share! An interesting piece on how justifying a war against Muslim nations often involves rationales that it will improve the lives and rights of women. I have confessed here before that this was one of the reasons that I supported the war in Afghanistan after 9/11, in addition to the fact that the laws of war permitted it because Mullah Omar was sheltering Osama Bin Laden. By the time Bush et al moved on to Iraq, I had learnt better:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/opinion/iranian-women-america-israel-bombing.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WFA.7zW-.hZBPL8bbEZu4&smid=url-share
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Jamelle Bouie in today's NYT, headlined Trump Cannot See the Opposition is Real:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/opinion/trump-iran-opposition-solipsism.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WFA.6jZA.46RuWWcq2VFn&smid=url-share
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Not excluding, of course, anything non-political or (unlikely but desirable) joy inducing...
On “Iran and the US”
Well, for me, tout comprendre c'est tout comprendre. Unattainable of course, but worth aspiring to.
We're no longer, after the McKinney era, subject to pathetic panegyrics on how western civilisation is the most advanced and superior civilisation on earth, nor (not that we here have ever been) to the narrative of the subtle and advanced civilisations of the east. As far as I can see, nobody here needs to be convinced of the missteps, stupidities, inhumanities and treacheries of this or various past administrations. (Although, I did notice in the Biden era the tendency of some progressives to illustrate too well Voltaire's le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. It's always worth talking about the better, and what it would look like, but one must at the same time be realistic about the world as it is, and the challenges it throws up.) In any case, none of this erases the wholesale oppression and abuse by the Islamic Republic. Nor of course does anything erase the unbelievable corruption, stupidity, ineptitude and short sightedness of the Trump administration.
Of course I am old enough like many here to remember SAVAK's repression, and the fact that it was CIA trained and backed. But one must also remember that the mullahs backed the coup that ended Iran's democracy, and Mossadegh's premiership. History is complicated, and as I said before, a lot depends on the date at which you draw the line "where it all started".
Scoring points seems unnecessary (I acknowledge I was the first to bring up transactionalism). The camps who are comfortable with emphasising that America is the root of all evil, or that America is the source of all that is good ("Truth, Justice and the American way), are equally ridiculous. The world is complicated, as are people. Cesar Chavez did good, as well as evil. Ezra Klein brings something valuable to the US discourse whether one agrees with him about everything or not. As well as understanding the past, one has to acknowledge the realities of the present. Things are not black or white.
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Given that Frum proudly takes credit for including Iran in the Axis of Evil, which made its debut after Iran offered to help the US in the wake of 9-11
So does that mean that you think having offered to help the US after 9/11 automatically means that Iran should have been entitled to be excluded from whatever (questionable to say the least) qualifications Frum et al considered necessary to be included in the Axis of Evil? That seems rather transactional..
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Funnily enough, regarding your previous point about Frum and his attitude to the Iran situation, I’ve just been reading the transcript of his conversation with Alastair Campbell in which (among other things) he makes it clear that contrary to the opinion of most of us, and most commentators, even in the US, he thinks there WAS an imminent threat from Iran.
I've been thinking a lot about this: given that if I knew about most of, if not all, of the events in Iranian history outlined by you (and Vaez) above, you can bet that Frum did too (and more), I had to wonder why his understanding of the history did not influence his opinion of the situation in the modern context (i.e. Iraq war, and now). I wonder if it is something to do with a different concept of imminent threat, and its likely consequences. So even if one fully understands the appalling history of the US (and UK) involvement in Iran, somehow for some purposes some people can draw a line between past causes, and present conditions. (And in Frum's case, of course, there is probably also the understandable impulse - experienced by many of us - to excuse actions committed by our ideological allies.)
Another thing that makes me think this is the case of my cousin in Israel. She is a Holocaust survivor (she was a little girl who was smuggled out of a concentration camp, and who spent years being hidden in a dog kennel), probably now in her 80s. She and her husband are and have always been impeccably liberal/lefty peaceniks and supporters of Palestinian rights in Israeli politics, and eloquent opponents of e.g. Likud and Netanyahu. But in our exchanges (where I wish her and her family safety etc), she recently sent me an article in which, among other things, the author says that while some people see their country as a setting, others see it as a lifeline. Given my cousin's history, and given that the destruction of Israel has been a frequently broadcast article of faith since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, I wondered (without asking her) whether even people with her kind of political ideas think the war against Iran is justified, and must be pursued. I haven’t checked with her, because I don’t want to introduce any controversy in the current circumstances, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
So this is the sort thing I think about when I say that people are complicated, and products of their individual experiences, and that even if one disagrees with some of their views it need not necessarily influence one’s opinion of their other attitudes.
On “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran”
Yes. I was particularly keen on "he's clearly not a historian".
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Sir Richard Dearlove (retired head of MI6 - not called M but C) interviewed by Times Radio:
“Trump blows hot and cold. He shoots his mouth off. It’s a problem in the short term.”
But he added that “one needs to be mature about these things and not worry too much about the medium to long-term impact”.
“Trump has said some pretty odd things. He’s clearly not a historian and he should perhaps be reminded that the US arrived rather late in World War One and World War Two”
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Tweeted by Andrew Neil, eminent and respected (but indubitably pretty right wing) political interviewer (BoJo was too scared of him to be interviewed before his last election as PM) whose interview with Ben Shapiro I still treasure. BS had never heard of Neil, had done no research on him but was so outraged by his questions he called him left wing. Andrew Neil just laughed and carried on with the interview:
You want the NATO allies to join you in a war you started without ever consulting these allies about the war or explaining your war aims. We’re meant just to meekly fall in line.
You recently supported a US invasion of a NATO ally (Denmark/Greenland) but now you want these same allies to join your war.
Your president disparaged and misrepresented the role of NATO allies in Afghanistan. But now you want them to join with you again in a war of your making.
You went to war with Iran without a thought of how to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and without involving your allies in the matter. But now you want the NATO allies to bail you out, even though there’s still no plan for Hormuz.
You want the NATO allies to join you in a war in which you still cannot articulate the endgame. Or what victory would look like.
You went to war thinking the Iranian regime would quickly topple, that Tehran would not attack the Gulf States or close Hormuz. Why would we align with such Epic Stupidity?
You and other know-nothing blowhards started this war all on your own. You can finish it on your own. If you’re able to …
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Oops, I imagine this is going to go down like a lead balloon with the Trump administration (especially the judgement on Kushner and Witkoff), and only add to their anger at the UK:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/17/uk-security-adviser-attended-us-iran-talks-and-judged-deal-was-within-reach
On “Iran and the US”
I certainly don't think you're "being too hard on him", nor that you're not being hard enough. (Which reminds me of that wonderful interview with Shane MacGowan, where the interviewer says in passing that, as is well known, SMG drinks too much. He says "I don't drink too much", so she says "Oh, I suppose you think you don't drink enough", to which he unforgettably replies "No, I drink enough".)
I just don't necessarily think this is a helpful or nuanced way to think about people - I think most interesting people are multi-faceted, with complicated worldviews and opinions, and unless these skew very much to the "evil" side of the scale, as long as the people are bright, knowledgeable and interesting it can be worthwhile considering what they say. Even sometimes (maybe even often) when one doesn't agree with them on whatever the topic is.
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I was talking/thinking about purity politics, lj, a subject we have often discussed here on ObWi. You often refer to, or link to, Ezra Klein pieces, IMO very understandably, even though his Charlie Kirk comments were outrageous and no doubt he's behaved or expressed himself not absolutely as many of us would have liked/done on many occasions. But he provides interesting interviews, with interesting people, and he's an important voice to have on the NYT which is (if I understand correctly) still a hugely influential newspaper in the US media context.
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That someone can be me! If this is what lj meant, the transcript is included in this gift link (it doesn't start in exactly the same place, but goes on with the stuff in lj's video):
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ali-vaez.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TVA.Pk5_.8_X0pkHJtduY&smid=url-share
Regarding any past missteps by Ezra Klein (I'm thinking of, as I assume lj is, his comments after Charlie Kirk got killed), my view is very definitely that one doesn't have to agree with every single thing someone has ever said or done to find their contributions useful, valuable or interesting. And Ezra Klein is certainly a frequent provider of all three kinds of contributions.
On “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran”
wj: I did consider putting the word experts in quotes, but rather thought it wasn't necessary!
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Particularly funny, apart from the obvious, because China, for example, is being allowed by Iran to send ships safely through the Strait of Hormuz according to the C4 News I watched half an hour ago. It looks like Trump is still being advised by the same experts who didn't factor in closure of the Strait when planning the war...
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Trump seven days ago, still very pissed off that Starmer had refused permission for the US to launch offensives from UK air bases:
“The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East. That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer – But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Trump today:
“We have already destroyed 100 per cent of Iran’s military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close-range missile somewhere along, or in, this waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.”
In what appeared to be an appeal to the UK and other nations, he added: “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint will send ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a nation that has been totally decapitated.”
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I liked this, in today's Times (a Murdoch paper, don't forget).
Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric gives me that sinking feelingWhen the US gloats over Iranian deaths and pumps out propaganda war videos, it’s not just their enemies who recoil
Hugo Rifkind
Wednesday March 11 2026, 7.11pm, The Times
Already sinking under heavy fire at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in 1898, the Spanish cruiser Vizcaya burst into flames. The ammunition store ignited, a torpedo went off, hell was unleashed and desperate, burning men hurled themselves into the sea. Watching all this was John Woodward Philip, commanding the USS Texas on the other side. “Don’t cheer, boys,” he admonished his men. “The poor devils are dying.”
Last week, the Iranian warship Iris Dena was sunk by the Americans off the coast of Sri Lanka, claiming almost 100 lives. Perhaps you saw President Trump at a Republican conference recounting what a navy official told him when he asked why ships like this hadn’t instead been captured. “He said, ‘It’s more fun to to sink ’em’,” reported Trump, with a smirk. And his audience guffawed.
From one to the other. From “Don’t cheer, boys” to “It’s more fun to sink ’em.” Really, I could stop there.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-declared secretary of war, has also had a chatty week. Here he is talking about Iran’s long-running antipathy towards the US: “They didn’t always declare it openly,” he said, “except for their constant chants of ‘Death to America’.” Ah, that old giveaway.
His own rhetoric, though, isn’t terribly different. In the same speech, he gloated: “The regime who chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel.” Over the past fortnight, he has also said: “They are toast and they know it,” and, “We will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” Plus, “This was never meant to be a fair fight, we are punching them while they are down, as it should be.” And more, and more, and more.
One might say Hegseth sounds like he thinks he is in a film, but only if it were a really bad film, perhaps written by a 15-year-old using ChatGPT. A comic, perhaps. A computer game. Probably, one should not use the phrase “small dick energy” on the comment pages, and particularly not when accusing other people of cheapening the discourse. But damn it, I think I must.
Hegseth is a veteran. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. What he’s trying to channel here, I suppose, is a sort of gung-ho military pep talk; how soldiers talk to other soldiers before leading them into war. Not all of them, though. Perhaps you recall Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins addressing his men in 2003 before leading them into battle in the Iraq War. “Iraq is steeped in history,” he told them. “It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there."
“Is it something they teach at Sandhurst,” wrote Jane Shilling in these pages, “that beautiful, bleak, apocalyptic turn of phrase?” Don’t assume my intent is to crassly contrast Britain and America. George W Bush admired Collins’s speech so much he had it displayed on the wall of the Oval Office.
Listening to Hegseth this week, and to Trump, I also found myself remembering Tony Soprano’s despairing wail to his psychiatrist. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” he demanded. “The strong silent type? That was an American!” That’s Tony bloody Soprano. It’s quite something when the White House’s view of American values is less appealing than his.
Speaking of TV shows, you may have also seen the videos pumped out by the White House as another part of their propaganda blitz. Computer games mixed with real war footage alongside clips from films and TV shows. “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY!” said the attached tweet, no matter that it includes Bryan Cranston saying “I AM the danger!” in Breaking Bad, from a sequence in which his character brags about being a murderer.
Bad enough if you thought this was just an administration trying to communicate with its public in language it assumes they’ll understand. The suspicion, though, has to be that it’s worse than that. This is real. This is them. This is how they see what they are doing, their world view and their oomph.
Doubtless Hegseth, in his likeable way, would regard all this as “pearl clutching”. That’s what he said about those among America’s traditional allies, including the UK, who were sceptical about this war at the start. But language matters. When Trump smirks about dead sailors you can only conclude he is without doubts, without those 3am ceiling-staring moments of normal human horror at those poor devils lost at the bottom of the sea. Which in turn makes you wonder what he thinks about the collateral damage in Tehran as flames engulf the city.
But you don’t need to wonder. “The president doesn’t like the attack,” a White House insider told Axios after Israel bombed Iranian fuel supplies. Why? “It reminds people of higher gas prices”.
So no, it’s not just pearl clutching. Nor is it just about aesthetics. This is a real war with real, huge costs, and not just for America’s enemies. Few in Britain would instinctively side with the Iranian regime even in a war of at best dubious legality, begun seemingly on a whim, with little coherent plan for how it might end. But do they grasp, these chest-thumping war bros, how hard they are making it for their traditional, instinctive allies, whose own populations can see and hear every word?
“It’s more fun to sink ’em.” When our enemies talk like this we conclude they are dangerous and immoral lunatics. It’s going to take some circumspection, biting of tongues and blinkers if we’re to avoid the same conclusion about our friends.
On “The ides of Texas”
Interesting points, hsh.
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