You’ve seen the banqueting hall, you’ve read the menu, you’ve been force-fed details about Melania’s dress, now join us for a debrief.
Rick Wilson had an entire career as a Republican political strategist before he co-founded the Lincoln Project in late 2019, a superpac founded with a group of other Republican strategists who all had the single-minded intention of trying to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump. It ran a series of satirical ads on channels like Fox News where they knew he would see them and helped turn the tide in several key demographics…although obviously not enough.
Rick is an incisive commentator on the current state of US politics who has found himself personally targeted as a result of speaking out and he’s suggested a transatlantic conversation to understand the transatlantic ties between the US and Uk governments. He’s also a great racconteur (with some tall tales from his time working for the likes of Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani) and living in Florida, he’s had a ringside seat on the whole Epstein affair.
Joining us is Peter Jukes’s, Byline Times’s co-founder and executive editor (and my partner in crime in making the Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring podcast). There’s a very good piece published today on Byline by Nafeez Ahmed on Peter Thiel’s ever-encroaching influence in the UK and his connections to a race science network, something I think we may find ourselves discussing.
The conversation will, hopefully, be something of a corrective to the fawning and often uncritical coverage that’s overwhelmed the news system for the last couple of days, particularly around the Orwellian-named “Technology Prosperity Deal”. This is a package of announcements from Silicon Valley tech companies that the UK government has wrapped up in a big bow while failing to tell us the terms behind these deals, the promises made.
It includes a “Stargate UK”, a watered-down version of the deal Trump announced on his first full day in office with OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle and OpenAI’s Sam Altman was even granted a seat at Windsor Castle’s state banquet. The headlines are all about billions of pounds of inward investments and the creation of thousands of jobs, but AI is an extractive industry that feasts on hugely valuable datasets – our NHS date, for one, our intellectual property for another – that employs vanishingly few people with any value created being taken out of the country.
It’s also, given the relationship between these firms and Trump, a profound national security risk.
Join us at 5pm and bring your questions for Rick.
Seven years on
This tweet from 2018 gets periodically picked up and goes viral all over again. Felt like a good moment to re-lift it.
How not to kill children
I realised that I didn’t send around the recording of the Substack Live I did with the two stars from the new documentary, Can’t Look Away. It’s an extraordinary conversation with a mother whose teenage son died after being targeted by a drugdealer on Snapchat and a lawyer whose legal practice is pioneering lawsuits that are holding tech companies accountable for the many ways in which their platforms’ design are killing children.
Laura Marquez-Garrett, the lawyer, has some eye-popping details about the scale of the problem and how documents they’ve obtained in discovery have revealed how much those inside the companies know exactly what their products are doing. And Amy Neville is an inspiring example of a parent who has turned tragedy into a quest for justice.
One of the people we talk about who had direct knowledge of how Instagram was systematically harming children was Nick Clegg, the ex-UK deputy PM whose coalition government brought us Brexit, lost his seat, and hotfooted it to Silicon Valley where he was reportedly paid $100m in compensation. He’s now back on our shores with a book to sell. But Laura points out that he well knew what was happening inside the company.
I highly recommend steering well clear of the cringeworthy interviews Clegg that have been flooding the press, none of which asked him anything about this or anything else remotely uncomfortable, with the exception of this one by Emily Maitlis who genuinely rattles him.
Rally or hate crime?
On the subject of US-UK relations, Elon Musk spoke at London’s far-right rally on Saturday and boosted the livestream all day as a pinned tweet in his feed. I turned it on briefly and was transfixed by an American speaker, the hitherto unknown to me, Valentina Gomez.
This felt less like a stump speech than a hate crime. Muslims are going to rape your wives and behead your children, she told the crowd.
We are in deep trouble. The US-UK axis is critical to understanding what is coming next. Do join us at 5 (in 15 mins!) to discuss…
Thank you, as ever, Carole
This post has been syndicated from How to Survive the Broligarchy, where it was published under this address.