Byline Times Audio Articles

Trump's Violent Assault on Minnesota Is an Operation in 'Reflexive Control'

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY The Trump administration chose Minnesota as ground zero for an operation that can best be described in the parlance of Washington DC as 'counter-programming'. That's shorthand for the use of Government power in an intentionally newsworthy way to change the media narrative away from another inconvenient story. In this case, they are executing a complex political approach which echoes a sophisticated Russian military strategy called 'reflexive control'. Developed in the Soviet Union, the primary goal of this strategy is to dominate the information space in order to force your opponent to voluntarily make bad decisions. When the US Government floods a major city with law enforcement agents, people with cameras on their cellphones are going to be there to oppose the movement, news outlets are going to cover the chaos. Soon after will follow the organizers, the activists, and the provocateurs who amplify these narratives. Reflexively, the media narrative will move towards this stimulus – and rightfully so – given the Government's illegal actions. EXCLUSIVE 'Trump Has Already Rigged the 2028 Presidential Election': US Defence Insider Regardless of how people vote, the chances of a Democrat Government coming to power in 2029 is now virtually nil, argues Brynn Tannehill Brynn Tannehill However, the voluntary bad decision Donald Trump wants to trigger is simple. He wants for the information space to stop focusing on his sex trafficking cover-up, his trillion dollar healthcare cut to fund equally massive tax cut to his elite political donors, and the White House's enormous consumption tax levies while dictating by Executive Order the transformation of America's heretofore strong economy into right-wing socialist paradise for loyal oligarchs. And that is how the Trump administration is using its counter-programming efforts to achieve reflexive control over the media narrative, the discussions of activists and the broader national conversation about politics. Trump and his regime are desperate to move away from their cover up of the Jeffrey Epstein files exposing a trans-Atlantic pedophile ring, desperate to deflect from their multiple major policy failures that are economically oppressing hundreds of millions of Americans. And this is the White House's only plan. Distraction Tactics What we are witnessing in Minnesota is the deadly use of counter-programming on a level not even seen during the first Trump administration. Minneapolis is the capital of Minnesota, surrounding the banks of the mighty Mississippi River, part of its thriving Twin Cities metropolitan area including the city of St. Paul lying just to its east along a bend of the river. Home to about 3.8 million residents, the Minneapolis region holds a global political relevance far greater than the size of its population owing to its concentration of the headquarters of 14 prominent companies in the Fortune 500 from 3M to Ecolab Inc to Target. Minneapolis is globally known for its notoriously awful relations between police and citizens of color, in the wake of international protests set off by one of its officers' murdering George Floyd, while his co-workers complicity watched for nine long minutes. What we are seeing in Minneapolis and throughout Minnesota is nothing short of using the full might of the American federal government's law enforcement powers to just redirect the national political narrative. How big has the operation grown? Recently, I learned from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey – who went viral for saying "ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis" – that the city only has roughly 600 sworn law enforcement officers on its city police force, and the ICE task force occupying the city numbers over 3,000 federal agents. Trump's Downfall Will Come Much Quicker Than Anyone Thinks The growing backlash against ICE's killing of Alex Pretti will be ...

How YouTube's Algorithm Pushed People Into Neo-Nazism

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY Members of a leading far-right and fascist organisation were radicalised via YouTube's 'autoplay' function, taking them from right-wing and libertarian content into a rabbit hole of neo-nazism, a new study has found. A researcher in the criminology department at City St George's University analysed podcasts, interviews and articles by 40 members of the group Patriotic Alternative describing their "red pill moment" when they became members of the far right. 33 out of the 40 PA activists analysed by the study cited social media as important to their radicalisation, with three quarters citing YouTube as a key instrument in their political journey. Patriotic Alternative was launched in 2019 by Mark Collett, a former BNP organiser who recommends Mein Kampf to his followers. At the core of the group's ideology is a belief in the concept of a "white genocide" and a "great replacement" of white people committed by Jewish and liberal elites, who they believe undermine the white race by allowing immigrants into European nations. The study which sifted through 1,000 hours of material from PA activists, found that the users eventually drawn to PA began their political journey as consumers of online content from the likes of British right wing YouTuber Sargon of Akkad and were moved on to content from Patriotic Alternative by YouTube's autoplay function. A PA activist who went under the pseudonym "Hope on the Horizon" described his 'redpill' journey, stating that: "[Y]ou go through all the different Sargon era and Ben Shapiro and all that sort of nonsense, you know, the sort of civ nat rebellion sort of rubbish. And then eventually you come across the people like [PA leaders] Mark Collett, Laura [Melia]. And then you find things like [12-hour-long, neo-Nazi propaganda film] Europa: The Last Battle, that sort of stuff. And then, you know, you've hit the bottom of the rabbit hole, there's nowhere else to go". Patriotic Alternative: The Threat from the Far Right A revitalised Europe wide white supremacist movement is growing in the UK, gaining recruits through social media and online gaming Michal Grant James Owens, a PA activist who was branded "Britain's most racist YouTuber" by The Times, who used the pseudonym "The Ayatollah", noted that the "algorithm is definitely real", crediting it with his radicalisation and recalling that while he had been doing his washing one evening, YouTube fed him the six-hour pro-Hitler propaganda film The Greatest Story Never Told. Dr Tony Karas, the researcher behind the study, told Byline Times that the members of PA he studied "narrate their [political journey] almost entirely in terms of content they consumed". "PA sustains their involvement [in the far right]. The fact that they can chat to people in their little Telegram groups and meet up online. But I think the content and the power of the parasocial relationship is really important". Sargon of Akkad, the pseudonym used by YouTuber and former UKIP candidate for the European parliament Carl Benjamin, was the most frequently cited gateway channel into Patriotic Alternative content, according to Karas. Patriotic Alternative's recruitment tactics have targeted young internet users in the past. One report from Anglia Ruskin University found that the group had been attempting to recruit young members through video game live streams. In 2019, Collett made £7,265.93 from his videos on YouTube, with the platform taking a 30% cut of his total earnings. EXCLUSIVE 'Wipe Jews Off the Face of the Earth': Racism and Antisemitic Slurs of Viral YouTuber Exposed A recording exclusively obtained by Byline Times exposes YouTuber and Infowars alumnus Paul Joseph Watson using racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs Byline Times Team Patriotic Alternative has lost momentum since 2023, with several of its members defecting to the Homeland Party...

Trump's Downfall Will Come Much Quicker Than Anyone Thinks

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY I predict that Donald Trump's fall from grace, when it comes, will be swift and definitive, just like former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's fall after partygate. I remember living through Johnson's premiership in a state of permanent shock and outrage. Shock, that someone so puerile, self-serving, and manifestly unsuited for high office could be elected as Britain's Prime Minister. Outrage, that so many people around him who should have known better – Ministers, advisers, fellow MPs, senior civil servants, journalists – were willing to go along with his serial lying, cavalier disregard for the norms of British democracy, dangerous affiliation with Russian contacts, and wilful misrepresentation of the implications of Brexit, despite the massive danger all these things posed for every aspect of the British state, purely for the sake of their own careers and self-interest. I have felt the same shock and outrage throughout the first year of Trump's second term as President. It is not so much that I expected him to become a more competent and honourable leader second time round. His vanity, arrogance, bigotry, ignorance, dishonesty, and greed are too deep-seated for him to ever change. EXCLUSIVE 'Trump Has Already Rigged the 2028 Presidential Election': US Defence Insider Regardless of how people vote, the chances of a Democrat Government coming to power in 2029 is now virtually nil, argues Brynn Tannehill Brynn Tannehill Nor did I expect those in his immediate orbit to attempt to curtail his worst instincts, as happened in his first Presidency. It was obvious that he was going to surround himself with sycophants and toadies this time round, to avoid being subject to any kind of restraint on his behaviour or actions. I did, nevertheless, cling on to the hope that the other two branches of America's government – Congress, and the Courts, would continue to do their jobs properly, and insist on their rights and prerogatives being respected. I did cling on to the hope that at least some in the Republican Party would find just enough spine to raise at least some objections, when he nominated utterly compromised or unfit individuals to critical positions in his cabinet, including Pete Hegseth as Defence Secretary, Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, Kash Patel as head of the FBI, Pam Bondi as Attorney General, and Robert Kennedy Jr as Health Secretary. I did cling on to the hope that more than one or two of them might be willing to speak out when Trump's actions clearly crossed a constitutional line, or were actively harmful to America's interests, such as his crazy notion to seize Greenland at the cost of destroying NATO. I did cling on to the hope that the battered, unpopular Democrat Party, might be able to shake themselves out of the doldrums, and conduct more effective opposition in Congress. I did cling on to the hope that even in the compromised Supreme Court, the more serious judges would recognize the dangers of allowing the President to continue to accrue so much executive power without pushback. I also, naively as it turns out, assumed that the major organisations most badly affected by Trump's erratic policy making – such as businesses damaged by his tariff policy, universities by his clampdowns on free speech, companies dependent on migrant labour, lawfirms and media companies bullied by his lawsuits – would not cave so rapidly to his demands, or remain so cravenly silent. Though there have been some honourable cases, particularly within the Department of Justice, of people stepping down from their positions in protest at his administration's unlawful actions, I had also assumed that there would be far more mass resignations from his government, as his outrageous actions mounted. Unfortunately, it turns out that, amongst America's elites, fear and self-interest are powerful ba...

Four Day Weeks, Andy Burnham and the Death of Labour Dreams

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY While the Labour leadership deploy their time and effort to block the best-placed candidate, in Andy Burnham, to win a crucial by-election and keep Reform at bay, normal people with normal lives struggle to get on and get by. Labour's leadership claim that this is what they are focussed on – making our lives better. But the reality is quite different. This is the short story of who, what and why some in the party seem hell bent, under no pressure from anywhere, on actually making our lives even harder. What is the good society and the good life? Too often we struggle to just keep up, to keep our heads above water, to survive the day, to have the luxury of time to even contemplate how life could be transformatively better. But without a lodestar, a utopian vision of what could and should be, progressives offer little hope or sense of direction. To be a dreamer, in a world ruled by scarcity, fear, insecurity, the clock, endless and mindless consumption, coercion and control, is deemed to be wasted idleness. But nothing good happens, has ever happened or ever will, without a dream. Enter the Governments Non-Dreamer in Residence, Steve Reed the Secretary of State for Local Government, who took it upon himself to crush the dreamers in councils with his pre-Xmas Scrooge like rebuke to even consider a four-day working week. He said full time work for part time pay could be an indicator of "failure". As such Reed joins his soul mates at that bastion of progressive campaigning the Taxpayers Alliance in their predictable and dreary campaign to stop people having more time and instead keep their noses to the grindstone. Control over the working week is of course part of a centuries long battle between capital and labour. From the enclosures, through to the fabrication of the Protestant work ethic, the poor laws and the creation of the never ending turbo-consumption race that can never be won and should never have been started, people have battled for the right to spend more of their time how they want to. What Keir Starmer Should Have Done With Andy Burnham The PM's decision to block Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election risks handing the seat to Nigel Farage, and ultimately triggering his own downfall. It didn't have to be this way, argues Adam Bienkov Adam Bienkov "There are many definitions of the good society" wrote the American economist JK Galbraith "the treadmill is not one of them". But today we learn, to work, to buy. Many do more than one job to make ends meet. Parents pass like ships in the night with barely a moment to do the precious things in life, like the time to read a child a bedtime story. The remorseless and relentless grind of growth without purpose, the so-called 'hard-working families', the denigration of the so called 'scroungers' as opposed to 'strivers', the politicians who kick down and kiss up are all symptoms of a governing system that has lost its connection to us as human beings. Whatever Steve Reed says and does the demand for more time and greater freedom are only likely to grow as supply of work is likely to decline, while AI takes his grip on the vociferous and politically crucial middle class jobs of people who live in swing seats, and work in professions like law and accountancy. Every technological revolution leads to fears over systemic and permanent net job losses, only to see new areas of work arise. The AI revolution looks like it could be different, with a structural decline in the demand for mental labour, as opposed to the physical labour job displacement of the past. The option to work less should be available to everyone, even as it becomes a fait accompli for many. The savings and benefits of a four-day week to individuals and society are almost incalculable, from mental physical health and well-being, care, volunteering retraining, the lis...

Revealed: Reform UK Crypto Partner's Ties to Pro-Trump Big Tech and Kemi Badenoch

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY When Reform UK announced it would accept cryptocurrency donations through a payment processor called Radom, the decision was presented by the party as a breakthrough in the modernisation of political fundraising. But a Byline Times investigation reveals that Radom's origins lie deep within the same Silicon Valley networks that have bankrolled and built the technological infrastructure for President Donald Trump's political movement in the United States. The company's leadership emerged from corporations and venture capital firms deeply connected to some of Trump's most prominent tech-world supporters. They include Peter Thiel, the billionaire who became MAGA's chief evangelist in Silicon Valley with over a dozen allies in Trump's second administration, and Larry Ellison, Oracle's controlling shareholder described by a Trump advisor as a "shadow president" behind Trump himself. Byline Times can also confirm that Amazon, a major pro-Trump donor controlled by Jeff Bezos, provided seed-funding to Radom. Radom had already exerted its influence in the UK Parliament years before Farage's announcement, through an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) whose secretariat was run by an organisation advertising close relationships with pro-Trump tech giants including Oracle, Google and Microsoft. Byline Times can reveal that the APPG's secretariat had not only received funding from Oracle, but at the time was dominated by Conservative Party politicians – including current Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch. From Oracle to Radom: Silicon Valley's Republican Vanguard Radom's founder and chief executive, Christopher Wilson, cut his teeth as a software engineer at Oracle, the technology giant controlled by Larry Ellison. Wilson worked at Oracle's Greater Dublin office from 2015 to 2017. Oracle is not merely another Silicon Valley firm. Under Ellison's stewardship, it has become synonymous with a particular strain of pro-Trump, anti-regulatory conservatism rare among major tech companies. Ellison has hosted fundraisers for Trump, donated substantial sums to Republican Party causes, and positioned himself as one of the President's most prominent backers. A decade ago, senior Oracle executives were hobnobbing with people in Trump's orbit shortly before the 2016 election. Oracle CEO Safra Catz and chief lobbyist Ken Glueck went on to join the Trump administration's transition teams. Wilson's tenure at Oracle does not necessarily mean he shares Ellison's politics. But it situates Radom's technical leadership within a corporate environment closely entangled with Trump-aligned networks and narratives throughout the MAGA era. EXCLUSIVE Nigel Farage Paid by Trump Crypto Adviser Who Worked With Russia Operative Paul Manafort The Reform UK leader received payment from David Bailey, who collaborated with the convicted fraudster behind the Trump-Russia influence scandal Nafeez Ahmed The Thiel Connection The Trump network connections deepen when examining Radom's other co-founder. Mariel Yonnadam, the company's former chief technology officer from 2022 until 2025, previously worked as a front-end engineer from 2018 to 2019 at Faire, a San Francisco-based marketplace that has become one of Silicon Valley's most highly valued 'unicorn' start-ups. Faire's meteoric rise was powered by a roster of venture capital investors that reads like a who's who of Trump-aligned tech finance. Among the most significant are Founders Fund, co-founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, joined Trump's presidential transition team, and has since incubated numerous hard-right political projects whilst providing intellectual scaffolding for tech nationalism. Another is Sequoia Capital, which in recent years has become increasingly associated with powerful Trump-supporting partne...