1984 Today!

In her book The Privacy Pirates: How Your Privacy Is Being Stolen and What You Can Do About It, Dr Leslie Gruis describes the current situation in stark terms: “If privacy were a patient, it would be in the intensive care unit. It’s not dead, but it is life-threateningly ill.” Dr Gruis worked at the National Security Agency for thirty years, and her last two assignments were at US Cyber Command and the National Intelligence Council. She was the first president of the NSA’s Women in Mathematics Society, and is a prominent advocate of STEM education for girls. She joins me in this episode for a conversation about how she started working in intelligence, why she is so concerned about the state of privacy in the United States, the fascinating history of privacy and transparency in American law, and the ongoing tug of war between private technology companies and government. You can visit her website to find out more about her work, and for links to her books. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

On September 13, central London was taken over by competing gatherings. One, organised by Tommy Robinson, was billed as a free speech festival and national pride event called Unite The Kingdom. The other, March Against Fascism, was put together as a protest against the Robinson rally, with participation from Stand Up To Racism, backed by a coalition of Britain’s unions. The Metropolitan Police estimate that 150,000 people attended Unite The Kingdom, with 5,000 taking part in the March Against Fascism. The police had planned for the two marches to be kept separate, but due to circumstances unknown at the time of writing, protesters ended up face to face, with unfortunate and predictable consequences. 1984 Today was there to speak with the participants of both events and ask about their reasons for attending. What emerged was a troubling picture of a country in which people of all political affiliations have lost faith, where the incumbent government is disliked equally on both sides of the police cordon, where communication across ideological boundaries is felt by many to be almost impossible. What seemed to be agreed upon by nearly everyone we spoke with is that “the State is broken”, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a focal point of discontent, and belief in the possibility of meaningful change is in short supply. I left with the distinct impression that if only the people who were kind and open enough to speak with me could have the opportunity to speak to one another in the same way, some of the suspicion, division, and animus might be dispelled. Here’s hoping… 1984today.substack.com 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Michael Box and Patrick Hague are creative partners in EchoEterna Productions and have worked together for almost 20 years as musicians, writers, and filmmakers. They join me to talk about their feature film project SpeakEasy, set “in the near future, where creative freedom is monitored by an oppressive authority class.” As a lover of cinema, dystopian fiction, and punk rock, it was a special pleasure to take a ride through their imaginations and explore the world-building they engaged in to realise a believable dystopian world for their protagonists, a band called The Riot Police. We also got into their impressions and experiences of present-day America, where living conditions could be encouraging the rise and acceptance of “an oppressive authority class”. You can listen to a sample track by The Riot Police on Bandcamp, and buy it to support the fundraising for the film. To help get a sense of the tone they had in mind, I asked Patrick and Michael to each name a punk rock song that gives a flavour of their dystopian world. Michael chose Rise Above by Black Flag, and Patrick chose Full Disclosure by Fugazi. If you want to find out more about the film, you can follow them on Instagram or visit their website. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today Follow 1984 Today! on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Free speech dies, comedy dies. It’s that simple. From 1952 to 2018, MAD Magazine published over five hundred regular editions as well as specials and books. In that time, it defined and shaped political satire and social commentary for generations of readers, becoming a cornerstone of American culture without ever taking itself seriously, a true achievement. Gazing gap-toothed from MAD’s cover was almost always the grinning face of Alfred E. Neuman, whose catchphrase became embedded in American culture: “What, Me Worry?” The “steady stream of pointed political satire and pure silliness” that MAD delivered to its fans was created by “The Usual Gang of Idiots”, the affectionate term for the writers and cartoonists who populated its office in New York City. As early as 1959, “The Usual Gang of Idiots” were the subject of a minor diplomatic incident in which a British newspaper attempted to prevent the “highly undesirable” importation of MAD into the UK in a sniffy letter to the US Embassy because of a humorous depiction of the Royal Family. “[E]very possible attempt should be made to stop this appearing in America no less than in Britain,” wrote Lee Howard, the editor of the Sunday Pictorial. The Department of State wisely advised the embassy in London that “making an issue out of the incident would likely add more grist to the mill”. From its inception, MAD was at the front of the endlessly evolving and shifting arguments and legal wrangling over censorship, humour, and taste, questions that remain pressing, urgent, and at the centre of what it means to preserve a free society. Now-former senior editor Joe Raiola worked at MAD “[f]or an embarrassing 33 years”, describing it as “the only place in America where if you mature, you get fired.” In that time, he was credited on over 100 articles and found Joan of Arc in a seafood bisque. As well as “making funny noises in the hallway” at MAD, in 1993 Joe created and began touring a one-man show called The Joy of Censorship, which he has since performed in 44 states. Describing himself as “a floundering comedian, comedy writer, speaker and producer”, Joe joins me in this episode to talk about his time at America’s greatest satirical magazine, the absolute necessity of free speech, and the ever-present danger of censorship to comedy and liberty. It was great fun speaking with him. I hope you enjoy it. You can experience more of the joy of Joe at joeraiola.com or by joining him on October 5 for “an evening of smart stupidity” at City Winery in New York City. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: 1984TodayPod Instagram: 1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Frank Sanazi is a unique comedy character, a tongue-in-cheek mashup of Adolf Hitler and Frank Sinatra described by his creator, the British singer and comedian Pete Cunningham, as “a satirical blitzkrieg blending dark humour, swing music and politically incorrect cabaret”. The newspaper The Scotsman has called him “brilliantly stupid, fantastically wrong and ridiculously funny”. The comedy blog Chortle considers him “a pleasure uber alles”. As well as doing solo shows, Frank also leads The Iraq Pack, a gang of crossover crooners including Dean Stalin, Saddami Davis Jr., Osama Bin Crosby, his daughter Nancy Sanazi, and, of course, Diva Braun. Frank has performed internationally, from Austria to Israel, and regularly features at Glastonbury and Bestival in the UK. His act is a wild freewheeling thumb in the eye to the seriousness with which history’s lunatics and despots have been traditionally accorded, and it cannily highlights something often overlooked about Hitler: He was a performer. “There’s no doubt about it,” the legendary comedian Mel Brooks told Der Spiegel in 2006. “Hitler worked in the same branch as we do: he created illusions.” In the same interview, Brooks summed up why mocking the 20th century’s most infamous boogeyman was not only permissible, but necessary: “[B]y using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.” In this episode, Frank Sanazi joins me to talk about how he conceived and honed his character, how standup comedy has changed over the years he’s been working, and why satire and ridicule are essential tools against tyranny. You can buy Frank’s albums Mein Way on a Steinway and Songs for Swinging Leaders here. Tickets for his one-hour show at the Edinburgh Fringe (August 1 through 23) are available here. You can also visit his website. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod Insta: @1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

It’s trite to point out that the internet is an increasingly weird and difficult space to explore. AI-generated ‘slop’ muddies search results and even ends up in published scientific papers. Bots roam social media freely, making it nearly impossible to know whether interactions are organic or automated. Your voice and face can be cloned and reproduced by AI, making security breaches and fraud much more likely. The response from tech and government is to push for heightened identity verification and so-called “proof of humanity”, with one example being Sam Altman’s WorldCoin project and its iris-scanning Orb. It didn’t used to be like this. Signing a legal agreement running into the thousands of pages in order to buy a pair of jeans is not normal. A business demanding that you install their app on your phone so it can track your location, spending habits, and browser data is not normal. Being forced into a surveillance dragnet to prove you aren’t a bot is definitely not normal. Is there a way that technology can protect our civil liberties instead of eroding them? Can we re-establish privacy as a default setting in the hands of the public or are we past the point of no return? To examine these questions and more, I spoke with Shady El Damaty, co-founder of the Holonym Foundation, whose mission is the establishment and protection of “natural digital rights for privacy, security, and data ownership”. One of their projects, Human.Tech, is developing “human-centric technology that fosters freedom, resilience, and opportunity in a connected, borderless digital world.” Through applied cryptography, they believe they can provide the tools for “digital personhood” in a way that gives the individual control over what data is shared, how, and when. In 2009, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google at the time, told CNBC that “if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.” In 2006, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “[p]rivacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.” The tech sector has broadly been on Team Schmidt for a generation. It’s time to hear from Team Schneier before it’s too late. You can visit human.tech to find out more about Holonym’s work. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today Instagram: @1984Today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

BeLikeWater (a.k.a. Lisa) is a Superforecaster® with Good Judgment Inc., the forecasting project co-created by Professor Philip Tetlock (the co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction), and a forecaster with Sentinel Global Risks Watch and the Swift Centre in the UK. In a recent interview with Polymarket about her successful forecast of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear capability, she made a bold call: The probability of Ayatollah Khamenei being out as Supreme Leader of Iran by the end of 2025 is “somewhere around 85%”, and “70-75%” for him to be out by the end of July. At the time of writing, Polymarket has the probability of the former at 35%, making her outlook an outlier, if not downright contrarian. To come to this and many other forecasts using the accountable framework encouraged by Good Judgment Inc., she applies a rigorous, repeatedly-updated process and works with a diverse team of colleagues to interpret, digest, and parse a wealth of information from which a prediction with clear parameters and adjustable probability can be distilled. In our conversation, she shares the details of her methods, her often-surprising thoughts on what might happen in 2025 (and beyond), and insights into the dystopian trends she sees developing or culminating in the near future. Speaking with her was as enlightening and reassuring as it was concerning. I hope you enjoy it. You can find Lisa on X and Substack, and you can read Sentinel’s reports and research here. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod Instagram: @1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

There is sadly a lot to worry about when it comes to the rights to privacy and free speech. Digital ID, central bank digital currency, facial recognition, online censorship, spying on bank accounts - you name it, the British government has a plan, none of them very promising for individual freedom. Big Brother Watch are one of the UK’s leading civil liberties campaign organisations, and their Advocacy Manager Matthew Feeney joins me for a conversation about the challenges facing the citizens of Britain in 2025. Are we past the point of no return when it comes to the philosophical idea that a citizen in a liberal democracy is innocent until proven guilty, free to interact and transact without government oversight or interference, and entitled to the right to be let alone? Or is there still a chance to reclaim and redraw the boundary of individual liberty, to reassert that our freedoms are not granted by government at their discretion, but natural and not to be limited without due process and valid probable cause? Besides the largely unregulated roll-out of facial recognition across the UK, high on the list of looming horrors is the apparently unflushable idea of a mandatory national ID card, now rebranded for the digital age as ‘Britcard’. First tried during World War II and repealed by Churchill in 1952, it was subsequently floated by Tony Blair’s Labour government but shot down due to popular resistance. Since then it has risen over and over, unbidden and unwanted, refusing to go round the U-bend into the sewer of terrible ideas. Now it’s back, again with the support of Tony Blair in his capacity as the reviled-but-somehow-taken-seriously elder statesman of British politics, and after the current government “ruled out” the introduction of digital ID in July 2024. Big Brother Watch have a petition to reject Digital ID in the UK that you can view and sign here. “We’re a democracy that’s been around for a long time…we were dealt a good hand,” Matthew told me at one point. “I hope we don’t squander it in the near future.” As my dear departed grandfather used to say, “let’s not and say we did.” You can visit the Big Brother Watch website here or follow them on X. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Hamit Coskun (pronounced Josh-kun) is a fifty year-old asylum seeker from Turkey living in the city of Derby in northern England on a support allowance of £48 per week. His grasp of the English language is assessed at the A1 (Beginner) level, so he uses Google Translate to protest on social media about the erosion of secularism and rise of Islamist sympathies in his home country. In February 2025, he burnt a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London and was attacked by two men, one of whom had a knife. He was then arrested and charged with a religiously aggravated public order offence of which, on 3 June, he was convicted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. His case marks a potential inflection point in British policing and justice. According to the prosecutor, the barrister defending him, and the judge, no single element of his behaviour was a criminal offence. However, the violent reaction to what he did, and the fact that he did it in a public place and used “the f-word” led the Crown Prosecution Service to charge him with public disorder, and ultimately secure a conviction. I attended the entire trial and wrote it up as a long-form piece called Hamit in Wonderland. As requested/suggested by subscribers to the 1984 Today Substack, this episode is a reading of that report on the trial. You might also be interested in listening to my conversation with Hatun Tash, about getting stabbed in Hyde Park for Jesus, or reading Witness for the Persecution, the story of the Berlin ‘thought crime’ trials of the American satirist CJ Hopkins. We’ll resume our usual format of long-form conversations about dystopian trends in society in our next episode. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In 2023, Professor Garret Merriam ran an experiment that caught 40 out of 96 of his students cheating on the final exam in his ethics class at CSU Sacramento. He had decided to “poison the well” to see who among them might use a well-known study resource website to review the answers before the test, so he inserted obviously false answers that anyone paying attention in class would know to be incorrect. The process of analysing the results was “exceptionally stressful”, taking up time that he “would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.” Since then, Garret has been sounding the alarm about the prevalence of AI use and cheating at American universities, alongside writers and teachers like Ted Gioia and Troy Jollimore. Tales of woe continue to emerge from academia. Teachers are fed up of running faster and faster to stay still, spending increasing time and energy fighting the intrusion of AI-enabled cheating, playing the role of an enforcer to the detriment of delivering an education to their students. New York Magazine recently published a piece by James Walsh called Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College which, despite the clickbait title doing a disservice to the many students who are trying to learn, gives a thorough picture of the parlous state of pedagogy in the age of AI. As one source tells Walsh in the article: “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.” Is this the typical bellyaching of an older generation as youth discover new technologies and ways of behaving? Or is there a real problem in higher education? Garret joins me in this episode for a wide-ranging discussion on the impact that AI has had on his experience as a teacher, how he tries to balance enforcement and prevention with his responsibilities as an educator, as well as the practical and philosophical implications for society if machine learning supplants human learning. In the humanities especially, we face a pressing and vital question: Who do we become as a culture when our understanding of ourselves is shaped not by individual study and reflection but the acceptance and use of what machines say we are? You can follow Garret on X or explore his YouTube channel, Sisyphus Redeemed. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Ever since I read Travellers in the Third Reich, a Sunday Times best-seller by Julia Boyd, I’ve been recommending it to anyone who will listen. Her carefully researched narrative is constructed from the diaries, letters, and correspondence of people who visited Germany between the ends of the First and Second World Wars. From Quakers to Boy Scouts, classical music lovers to dedicated fans of Hitler, she finds and brings together a wonderfully broad range of personal contemporaneous accounts of what it was like to visit, work in, study in, and travel through a Germany struggling to redefine and reclaim itself in the interwar period. It’s an illuminating, moving, troubling picture of how we humans are prone to seeing what we want to see, discounting present dangers on the basis of our assumptions and prejudices, and failing to face the reality of what is going on around us. Julia followed that book with another, A Village in the Third Reich, the focus of which is the citizens and residents of the Bavarian mountain village of Obertsdorf. The experiences of foresters, priests, farmers, nuns, innkeepers, Nazi officials, village councillors, mountaineers, socialists, slave labourers, schoolchildren, tourists and aristocrats are woven together along with the accounts of the Jews who survived to give a picture of life under Nazism like no other. Her detailed research and compassionate writing won her the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for Travellers in the Third Reich, and A Village in the Third Reich was named a Waterstones Paperback of the Year and a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2022. The Oldie dubbed her “a leading historian of human responses in political extremis.” Julia joins me in this episode to talk about her experiences researching and writing the books, what the intimate correspondence of people from another time taught her about our shared humanity, and how a human being can transcend the pressures and prejudices of their era to live decently while surrounded by horrors. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Berlin’s CyBrothel is “the world’s first AI brothel”, according to its founder and Episode 130 guest Philipp Fussenegger, offering visitors an alternative to human prostitution in the form of silicone sex dolls. Some of the dolls are humanoid, some are aliens or vampires, but almost all of them can, with the visitor’s consent, interact by listening, talking back, and ‘seeing’ (with the help of CCTV). It isn’t AI making whoopee with the discerning doll diddler, though — connected remotely in real-time is a human “Voice Queen” named Leni von Mayn. In our conversation, Leni shares her personal voyage of sexual discovery with good humour, candour, and a refreshing willingness to open up. An unexpected job offer during the pandemic set her on a path from a bot brothel in Berlin to a beach in Bali, living her best life as a “sexplorer” and mindful sexuality coach. She gives her thoughts and feelings about the impact of technology on our sex lives, the importance of presence and attention in intimacy, and even throws in some tantric pointers. The idea of romping with a silicone doll that talks back while a human woman watches on CCTV and talks dirty might strike some of us as off-putting, complex, awkward, even synthetic, but is “artificial sexuality” really an alienating factor for modern humans, or just another new way for people to engage with themselves and their desires? As Woody Allen said: “Love is the answer. But while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.” You can follow Leni von Mayn on Instagram and X, or find her on OnlyFans. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In 2014, an NHS junior doctor named Chris Day made “protected disclosures” to the hospital trust he worked for in south east London. He raised issues of understaffing (doctor/patient ratios were 1:18, more than double the national standard of 1:8) and reported two specific cases in which poor care led to avoidable patient deaths. The hospital trust took swift action, thanked him for bringing it to their attention, and wrote him a glowing recommendation. Just kidding. What could have been a ‘teachable moment’, or at least a routine incident of whistleblowing, instead set Chris on a collision course with Britain’s National Health Service, the then-national training provider Health Education England (HEE), and the justice system itself. In his words: One night in January 2014 I became a whistleblower. I did this without realising it and since then I have been very nearly swallowed up by an NHS made legal gap or ‘lacuna’ in whistleblowing law. Writing in 2016, Benedict Cooper explained the “lacuna” for the New Statesman: The fulcrum of the case is a gap – or “lacuna”, to get into the legalese – in the laws protecting junior doctors when they blow the whistle. A gap which exists because of an ambiguity as to who is ultimately responsible for their career, and which Day’s case has revealed. The status quo is that HEE isn’t fully bound by S43K whistleblowing laws because it is a training provider not an employer, while NHS trusts, which take junior doctors on as temporary employees contract-by-contract, don’t have to afford the same rights to them as they would more permanent staff . The background – and how this fits into the junior doctors contract dispute – is all here. Day and his legal team are arguing that this ambiguity is leaving junior doctors in a no-man’s land; that while doctors are duty bound to report concerns, they’re not protected against harsh treatment when they do; that HEE, as de facto employers of junior doctors, should step up and take responsibility for them. Chris found himself unable to work for the NHS as a junior doctor, characterised as “angry” and “emotional”, and embroiled in a fight to prove that he was an employee of the organisation he worked for in order to benefit from whistleblower protection. As Chris went from hearing to hearing, he found the lengths his former employers were willing to go to to discredit him and save face increasingly extreme: * In one episode, “one of the trust’s directors “deliberately” deleted up to 90,000 emails midway through a tribunal hearing in July 2022.” * The outcome of one hearing was a ruling that effectively stripped 54,000 junior doctors in the UK of whistleblower protection, later overturned on appeal. * The law firm defending HEE turned out not to have “disclosed key contracts it had been paid public money to draft for its client”, contracts that could have resolved the “fulcrum of the case” and prevented what ex-shadow health minister Justin Madders described as “a lengthy and wholly unnecessary legal battle where HEE was effectively seeking to remove around 54,000 doctors out of whistleblowing protections by claiming that they were not their employer.” As Tommy Greene wrote for Byline Times in 2023: This lack of disclosure allowed the agency to argue it could not be considered the legal employer of junior doctors – a position that Court of Appeal judges overturned in 2017. The contracts were eventually obtained through FOI requests in 2019. Believe it or not, Chris’s case is still ongoing, and, after more than ten years, the British Medical Association has now announced it is backing him up “as part of plans to improve its support for whistleblowers.” How much has the perennially cash-strapped NHS spent fighting Chris in court? According to Tommy Greene (writing in 2023): As of 2018, more than £700,000 had been spent by NHS bodies defending the case brought by Day. Overall costs are currently thought to stand at around £1 million. Chris...

Are the nations of ‘the West’, especially the United States, in a new Cold War with Russia and China? What does the world look like now that nations favouring authoritarian governance and repression of civil liberties have become major influential global powers? How can states and individual citizens navigate the new reality in which we find ourselves? According to the March 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, “Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—individually and collectively—are challenging U.S. interests in the world by attacking or threatening others in their regions, with both asymmetric and conventional hard power tactics, and promoting alternative systems to compete with the United States, primarily in trade, finance, and security.” Is this a global hegemony bemoaning the rise of a new multipolar order, or are we hearing an early warning signal of a potentially far-reaching 21st century power struggle? To get into all this and more, I’m joined by Velina Tchakarova, a geopolitical strategist and strategic foresight expert. Velina runs a consultancy called For A Conscious Experience (FACE), serves on the board of the European Alpbach Forum and the Advisory Board of a French think tank called Eastern Circles, is a visiting fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, and was previously the Director of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy in Vienna. In our wide-ranging conversation, she describes what she calls ‘Cold War 2.0’, a new oppositional relationship between the United States and Europe on one side and the alliance she calls the DragonBear, made up of Russia and China, on the other. As summed up in the U.S. intelligence community’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, Cold War 2.0 is an undeclared conflict in which the DragonBear and its allies “seek to challenge the United States and other countries through deliberate campaigns to gain an advantage, while also trying to avoid direct war.” One doesn’t need to be an apologist for the excesses and vagaries of American power projection to see how an alliance of authoritarian regimes keen on securing their own interests and projecting their own values internationally can have a chilling effect on the rights and quality of life of individuals everywhere. You can find Velina on X for up-to-the-minute clear-eyed commentary, or read her blog posts on FACE’s website. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In January 2025, Elon Musk started posting on X about a long-festering blot on the copybook of British justice, the decades-long organised mass rape of children across the cities of northern England by ‘grooming gangs’. In places like Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and Oldham, years of horrific abuse had gone barely acknowledged by authorities, with intermittent, insufficient, and inconsistent prosecution. The majority of the victims were girls between the ages of 11 and 16. After Musk’s social media posts, the scandal became international news, with the media often seeming more upset that Musk was criticising the British government than about the years of mass rape, human trafficking, torture, and murder that the alliterative sanitised phrase “grooming gangs” glosses over. An inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, commissioned in 2013 by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council and published the following year, gave a “conservative estimate…that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013,” and that “[t]his abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day.” The report was, in a word, damning: Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham. Jay subsequently oversaw a full report, published in 2022, that called rampant child abuse an “epidemic that left thousands of victims in its poisonous wake,” in which institutions “prioritised their reputations above the welfare of those they were duty bound to protect.” In the report’s foreword, Jay wrote: “I urge the UK government, the Welsh Government and all other relevant institutions to implement promptly the Inquiry’s recommendations which are designed to protect children from sexual abuse in the future.” The report made detailed recommendations to the Home Office and called for swift action to prevent the failures of the past from continuing into the future. In January 2025, when Musk’s social media activity drew fresh attention to the issue, it was twenty-seven months after the 2022 report and Professor Jay had been “frustrated” by the lack of action from government. Whistleblowers, community activists, and citizen journalists like Raja Miah had been working to get the story proper scrutiny for years, but Musk’s involvement, while bringing attention, drove the characterisation of ‘grooming gangs’ as a far-right talking point, summed up as follows by Sky News in their coverage at the time: Condemnation of rape and grooming gangs isn't far-right in itself: the entire British public shares exactly the same position. But there's evidence that Musk's introduction to the topic is a result of right-wing and far-right accounts on X. At issue was a sore spot at the centre of the sordid sinuous saga: The majority of the victims in places like Rochdale and Rotherham had been white, and the majority of the perpetrators had been from the Asian, usually Pakistani, community. One inquiry into the failures that prevented or delayed justice mentioned a “nervousness about race”. Britain’s success story as a multicultural society was seen as being endangered by the ethnicity of the criminals and their victims. On one side, a reasonable fear of opportunistic elements seizing on the role of minorities in horrific crimes to drum up violence and social unrest. On the other side, the very real experience of being frozen out of the justice system and abandoned by institutions and the government because admitting and facing the problem head on would concede something that could be misused by those elements. Raja Miah joins me in this episode to give a detailed insight into the genesis of the scandal, the communities that were affected, and the successive governments that looked the other way. Raja is a second generation Bangladeshi Muslim who...

In recent months, Britain, like Europe, has seen farmers take to the streets in their thousands to protest against changes in the law that they say will make their jobs harder, undermine food security, and possibly even close them down. Britain has proposed a change to inheritance tax that would affect 25% of the country’s farms and could result in many farms being parcelled off or even sold entirely. The EU has a clear plan to “restore” 20% of its land and sea, albeit subject to an “emergency brake” that would place reductions on hold at the national level “under exceptional circumstances if they severely reduce the land needed for sufficient food production for EU consumption”. Are these necessary steps to protect the environment, or the final nail in the coffin for national food security? Could it be both? Helen Freeman joins me to get into these questions, and more. Helen works for Farms Not Factories, an NGO campaigning to end factory farming in the UK. She is also a farmer with a high welfare free range herd of Saddleback pigs. You can find her writing on Substack and follow her on Instagram. In our conversation we make reference to her article The Price of Protest, about the 10 February 2025 farmer protest in London. I hope you enjoy it. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

“This is something that you don’t fully comprehend until you face it.” The small, historically important and culturally rich country of Georgia, nestled in the Caucasus between Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, has seen nonstop street protests for months, taking over the centre of the capital city, surrounding the nation’s parliament, and challenging the ruling party. Police violence and “shocking human rights violations” against the protestors, including the use of torture and shock troops, have only served to enflame public sentiment and increase support for the resistance. The two most recent actions by the government that inspired such ongoing resistance were a cancellation delay of Georgia’s EU membership bid and the enactment of a ‘foreign agent’ law that classified as spies any organisation (even animal shelters) receiving more than 20% of their funds from overseas. More changes in law and policy have followed, including draconian limits on the rights to assemble and speak freely. The issues run deeper still. As a former Soviet republic, Georgia has also struggled to define itself as separate from and outside the sphere of influence of Russia. Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia might well have been the first European war of the 21st century, and the muted response from the international community was a modern revival of “appeasement”. Russia’s willingness in that conflict to use violence to carve up another country’s territory also proved to be a grim harbinger of the current war in Ukraine. Marika Mikiashvili is a lecturer at Alte University in Tbilisi and a member of the Droa Party, which belongs to the Coalition for Change, standing in opposition to the incumbent party, Georgian Dream. She provides a wealth of background and historical perspective to contextualise the independent and pro-European aspirations of the Georgian people, as well as sharing her own personal experience of living through a constitutional democracy’s sudden shift towards authoritarianism. You can find Marika on X where her handle is @Mikiashvili_M. Background image by George Khelashvili. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

The existence of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States was highly classified for over twenty years until the Senate’s Church Committee investigation in 1975. Prior to that, the long-running joke was that the initials NSA stood for ‘No Such Agency’. Since 1975, the NSA has been at the centre of major scandals alleging violations of the Fourth Amendment and breaches of its ‘outward-facing’ role which is meant to limit its surveillance to non-US citizens and foreign countries. The Bush administration’s ‘warrantless wiretapping’ programme was believed to be the most egregious example of intrusion until “the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history” in 2013, when Edward Snowden released documents and information to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald in a Hong Kong hotel room, bringing the sheer scope and depth of the NSA’s spying into the public domain. Jeremy Duffy worked at the NSA for sixteen years, where he taught Operations Security and was an adjunct faculty member at the National Cryptologic School. He witnessed first-hand the behaviour of the agency when the scandals broke, and often protested against what he saw as the mistreatment of employees and rampant institutional dishonesty. Since leaving the NSA, Jeremy works as a consultant on workplace communication and organisational improvement. He is the author of Are You Listening? Lessons in Waste, Abuse, and Mismanagement from the Agency That Doesn’t Listen, and blogs at thegeekprofessor.com, where you can join his mailing list to receive a free 44-page mini-book about his time at the NSA. In our conversation, Jeremy describes the hostile environment at the NSA, discusses his experiences of the atmosphere during the scandals during his tenure, and shares very handy information on what he calls LifeSec, which is the use of Operations Security measures in daily life, to keep your data safe. Speaking with him was eye-opening, worrying, and fascinating. I hope you feel the same. 1984.today 1984today.substack.com X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

AI has come for the world’s oldest profession! Cybrothel in Berlin offers customers a range of human-free sexual experiences involving sex dolls, AI, and virtual reality. “The world’s first AI brothel” is the brainchild of Austrian filmmaker Philipp Fussenegger, whose most recent film Teaches of Peaches premiered at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a Teddy Award for Best LGBTQ Documentary. Philipp agreed to take a break from his skiing holiday to speak to me about how he got the idea, what it’s like catering to his clientele, and how far he thinks technology can go in augmenting or even replacing human-to-human sex and intimacy. Our conversation takes in the queasy implications of realistic sex dolls, the narrow parameters of “beauty”, the complexity of human sexuality, and the challenges of broadening horizons while maintaining safe and healthy boundaries. Also, Philipp is offering you the opportunity to name Cybrothel’s new male sex doll! Make sure you leave your suggestions in the comments on Substack, or send them to us via our website. Make sure you enter quick, because competition will be stiff! Enjoy! You can find Philipp’s film work on his website, and stream Teaches of Peaches on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. https://1984today.substack.com https://www.1984.today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Richard Sanderson was a director of the London Musicians Collective for ten years, helped set up the UK radio station Resonance FM, and founded the experimental music label Linear Obsessional through which he released over 150 albums as downloads, CDs, cassettes and vinyl, until its demise in 2022. The label’s demise was precipitated by strong, negative, and abusive reactions Richard received to four of his social media posts sharing commentary on trans issues. The backlash drove him out of the experimental music scene to the point that he felt compelled to shut down his label. In November 2024 he wrote an article about his experience, which is how I found out about his story. Richard and I sat down together to discuss some of the experimental music he put out, how it felt to be subjected to abuse online, what being ‘on the left’ means these days, and more. It was a great chat, and Richard even brought along his melodeon to play us out with an exclusive in-studio rendition of There Was An Old Woman Tossed Up In A Blanket, a lovely English folk tune. I hope you enjoy it. You can find Richard on Substack and X, and visit the remains of Linear Obsessional on Bandcamp. 1984today.substack.com 1984.today X: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com