1984 Today!

Daniele Bolelli is an Italian historian, professor, and author who also hosts the podcasts History On Fire and The Drunken Taoist. He grew up during the Years of Lead, a fraught pair of decades from the 1960s into the 1980s when extreme political violence was common in the Land of Caesar. The story of the Years of Lead is rich in conspiracy fuel, involving Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic lodge, NATO’s...

Graham Linehan is a five-time BAFTA-winning comedian and writer who created Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd. He also wrote for The Fast Show, Harry Enfield & Chums, Brass Eye, The Day Today, and Blue Jam, all near-legendary British comedies.Over the past decade, Graham’s life underwent a total transformation. After making his views on gender identity public, his work in the UK dried...

Feminists have a saying—we can’t fight sexism if we can’t say what sex is. And that is precisely where we are as a society today—we can’t say what sex is.Kara Dansky is the author of The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, and she writes The TERF Report on Substack.She is the former...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...