Ed Sheeran does provide a ‘safe space’ – for the billionaires who own him. Read my latest here: jonathancook.substack.com/p/…

Exclusive -- Britain's new arms sanctions on Israel have resulted in zero export licences being suspended. The government has advertised a policy which makes no material impact while refusing to stop fighter jet parts reaching Tel Aviv. Me & @daniaakkad: declassifieduk.org/uk-sancti…

What happened to me is bigger than one artist or one stage. When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention. So we're going on tour. All proceeds will benefit organizations supporting the Palestinian people and movement. Sign up at macklemore.com

The furore engulfing Sheeran wasn't provoked by his silence on Gaza. But now it's clear that billionaires dictate what artists can say in venues, Sheeran’s silence looks a lot more malign than it did before. Matthew Alford reads my latest: jonathancook.substack.com/p/…

Laura Kuenssberg thinks it's a "very controversial, difficult, complicated issue" that Ed Sheeran censored a fellow musician on the orders of a genocide-apologist billionaire. Journalists simply can't grasp the problem. I explain why here: jonathancook.substack.com/pu…

Hmm. Why are journalists who have spent a lifetime working for one billionaire so keen to obscure the real reason for the Ed Sheeran furore: that the musician caved to censorship demanded by another billionaire? I explain what's really going on here: jonathancook.substack.com/pu…

There’s a whole industry of media professionals like Tom Slater responding to the Sheeran furore by play-acting dumb – and pointing in the very opposite direction to the one the public ought to be looking in. I explain why in my latest article: jonathancook.substack.com/p/…

Ed Sheeran does provide a ‘safe space’ – for the billionaires who own him: Lots of journalists do disinformation. After all, it’s often their job: to get you looking in the wrong place or viewing events through the wrong lens. A good illustration is Tom Slater, editor of Spiked magazine. Tom isn’t dumb. But in his latest article, titled “The monstering of Ed Sheeran proves ‘Free Palestine’ has become a cult”, he does a very good job of pretending to be. Why? Because that’s the best way for him to keep his readership dumb. He’s far from alone. Right now, there’s a whole industry of media professionals responding to the Sheeran furore by pointing in the very opposite direction to the one the public ought to be looking in. Like Slater, these journalists and pundits understand that Sheeran isn’t in trouble because of some supposedly out-of-control “Free Palestine” cult. Like Slater, they know that the issue was never about Sheeran’s failure to speak out about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Had it been, this so-called cult – or what Slater preposterously calls the “keffiyeh classes” – would be “monstering” all of the other prominent artists who have been keeping their heads down and refusing to speak up about the genocide. No, people are angry with Sheeran for a quite different – and very obvious – reason. He invited fellow musician and long-standing friend Macklemore to open his tour, knowing that Macklemore would perform a song about the Gaza genocide called Hind’s Hall. Sheeran then immediately reversed his tiny, proxy act of courage by capitulating to a threat from Robert Kraft, a billionaire stadium owner who is also a pal of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and generous donor to the genocidal Israeli military. After conspiring with other billionaire stadium owners, Kraft gave Sheeran an ultimatum: drop Macklemore or we pull the plug on your tour. The pushback seems to have caught Sheeran by surprise. His support acts and backing band withdrew from the tour. That’s not, as Slater and the rest of the establishment media would have you believe, because they suddenly fell under the spell of some powerful cult. The backlash is far more easily explained: Because Sheeran has proved himself a spineless and disloyal friend. Because he has taken a highly political stance, and an ugly one at that, in supporting the genocide apologists who dominate the billionaire class and expect obedience from their political and media flunkeys. Because he has given his implicit consent for a billionaire with a nefarious political agenda to dictate what can be said in our cultural spaces. Because through his cowardly capitulation, Sheeran has given his permission for the billionaire class to continue controlling those cultural spaces. Because the all-too-predictable consequence will be that even fewer artists – certainly any who wish to be “commercial” – will dare to break from the cultural production model preferred by Kraft and the other billionaires of Sheeran-style “soppy love songs” that pose no threat to their power. People are angry with Sheeran because he has just made it even harder to stand up to the power of the oligarchs. If a singer like Sheeran worth untold millions is too fearful, what chance the rest of us? If those who dare to speak up are stabbed in the back even by their allies – by artists like Sheeran who have real leverage within the West’s cultural spaces – what hope is there that we can ever seize back the public realm, including the political sphere, that’s dominated not by some imaginary “keffiyeh class” but by the all-too-real super-rich. The current furore engulfing Sheeran wasn't provoked by his silence on Gaza. But now that the furore has made it all too clear that billionaires such as Kraft dictate what artists are allowed to say in venues, Sheeran’s silence on Gaza looks a lot more malign that it did before. His supposedly “apolitical” stance looks less like it is providing a “safe space” for his audience and more like it is providing a safe space for billionaires like Kraft that Sheeran has aligned himself with. Sheeran’s professed political neutrality, it seems, is a cover story, one in which he continues to collude with the billionaires who allowed him get rich in return for not providing a platform to anyone who might scrutinise the super-rich and their poisonous agenda. Sheeran is just one cog in this machine. In his first public appearance since the row, he took to the stage to demand that we focus on his supposed victimhood, not that of Gaza’s slaughtered children. He whined that his friends, far less powerful than he is, had “betrayed” him by sticking to their principles and refusing to bow to the billionaire bullies. Alongside Sheeran, there stands a media class, courtier journalists like Tom Slater, whose job is to similarly misdirect us. They demand we focus on the chimerical threat of a “keffiyeh class” rather than the tangible threat posed by the billionaire class that pays their wages. For good reason, many ordinary people are angry – with dutiful superstars, servile journalists, and corrupt politicians, all trained to do the bidding of a depraved billionaire class, impervious to the wider good. Those people aren’t in a cult. And they aren’t “monstering” Sheeran. But they are gradually working out for themselves who the real monsters are.

Israel created the largest group of child amputees in the world and then denies them wheelchairs. Just endless depravity.

The media can have us believe anything – that black is white, that up is down. They can, by imposing a new narrative consensus, make us believe the very opposite of what we were encouraged to believe a few moments earlier. Matthew Alford reads my latest: jonathancook.substack.com/p/…

More to the point: Why do featherweight TV personalities paid large salaries always present straightforward issues – such as the fact that billionaires shouldn't be policing what artists are allowed to say – as a "very, very controversial, difficult and complicated issue"?

Zionist authorities have now classified toilets as "dual use items", banning the entry of portable toilets and toilet seats into the Gaza Strip. Toilet seats join tarps, sleeping bags, wheelchairs, sewage pumps, and medical supplies among many other banned items.

Through sheer force of a new, imposed narrative consensus, the media can make us believe the very opposite of what we were encouraged to believe moments earlier. Read my latest here: jonathancook.substack.com/p/…

The media can make us believe anything they want – even that Charles loved Diana: The current narrative of “beloved king shocked by claim he said something nasty 30 years ago” is a perfect example of how, given a bit of time, the media can reinvent the very reality the media itself once created, readily flipping on its head a now inconvenient, earlier narrative. Anyone who lived through the Princess Diana years should be able to recall that, according to the media of that time, Charles was the undoubted villain – a cold-hearted man who cheated from the start of his marriage on a young, beautiful, doting wife he never loved. Charles wanted his old flame Camilla as his bride and future queen – and, with Diana’s untimely death in 1997 at the hands of the press pack as her car was chased through a Paris underpass late at night, he soon got his way. Earl Spencer’s new claim in a book published this week that Charles told him, shortly after Diana’s death, that she would “soon be forgotten” fits all too snugly with that earlier narrative. But not with the new narrative. Now, with Charles a “kindly old king and family man battling to recover from cancer”, the sort of behaviour that made perfect sense in the earlier narrative is a nuisance. Which is why Earl Spencer is receiving a lot more pushback than he would have expected had he made such a claim in the late 1990s. Three decades ago, Charles was portrayed as an unpopular Prince of Wales, a man lacking the common touch of Diana, and a crank obsessed with irrelevant things like the environment and architecture. The Queen, so the story of that time went, was so unsure of his ability to rule effectively that she dared not abdicate. Fast forward to the present day, with Queen Elizabeth II dead and Charles III head of state. The King is now a wise elder statesman bearing lightly the heavy burden of high office, managing Britain’s tricky relations with a deranged Trump administration better than any politician, and doing it all through serious illness. Ever the good father, he is fulfilling his duties as king to provide his son, William, with the chance to raise and enjoy his young family before he himself is crowned. We’re in permanent telenovela land. Who knows which bits of this, if any, are true. But the plot twists serve a purpose, like soap opera, to keep us entertained and distracted from the real problems we desperately need to be focusing on. And most importantly, whichever way the plot switches, the media cash in on the drama of it all. But there is a deeper point. The media, through sustained plot engineering, can have us believe anything – that black is white, and up is down. They can, through sheer force of a new narrative consensus, make us believe the very opposite of what we were encouraged to believe a few moments earlier. That is why billionaires buy up newspapers. Because they can, through their ownership of everything, and most especially the media, shape our minds into believing it is a good thing that billionaires own everything. They make us believe that any change to that order would be catastrophic. They make us believe that our societies are in decline, not because the billionaires have siphoned off all the wealth to their off-shore accounts but because small boats are “invading” our shores. For decades, they had us believing the planet was doing just fine despite what all the scientists said. It was simply down to each individual to be more responsible: to cycle more, to recycle more, and to switch to long-lasting lightbulbs. Now that climate chaos is upon us, they tell us we will just have to adapt to hotter summers and colder, stormier winters. The only consistent element is that the billionaires never address their own role in engineering this ecological disaster. Their choice to prioritise rocketing profits over the health of the planet is never scrutinised by the media they own. Last year the writer Omar El Akkad published the book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This on the West’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. One can already see how prophetic the book’s title is. A British government led by Sir Keir Starmer that deeply colluded in the mass slaughter in Gaza is now recasting itself as an opponent, under the new leadership of Andy Burnham. Similarly, the billionaire-owned media is slowly taking a less enthusiastic stance on Israel, doubtless hoping that Israeli voters evict prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the forthcoming general election so that the media can have a freer hand to rewrite their script. Then they will gradually accept as a given that what Netanyahu did – though not Israel – was a genocide. And of course, they will have always been against it. Any lie can be repackaged as a self-evident truth once you have absolute narrative control. The naked emperor can be magically clothed, if the media so decides. Amid this pervasive unreliability, there is one North Star by which to navigate. Anything that benefits the billionaires cannot be trusted. As long as they are in charge, we will continue squabbling among ourselves, victims of their self-serving story-telling.

UNANIMOUSLY NOT GUILTY: A major victory for free speech and solidarity at the Old Bailey. Student activist Sarah (of the SOAS 2) has been fully acquitted by a jury after facing prosecution for speaking in support of Palestine. Speaking outside court, Sarah described the verdict as an incredible boost of morale for the entire movement: “My case has proved that we have the right to defend the Palestinian people... and that what we’ve shown here today is that speaking about Palestinian resistance is not the same as supporting terrorism. When you stick to your principles, the people united will never be defeated.” The trial saw prosecutors download entire phone records and scrutinize private messages between friends and family, yet failed to produce evidence of illegality—Sarah never once expressed support for Hamas. Instead, this case exposed the ongoing efforts to criminalize dissent, surveil young activists, and silence legitimate advocacy under international law. Today’s verdict sends a resounding message: solidarity is not a crime. #FreeSpeech #SOAS2 #OldBailey #PalestineSolidarity #RightToResist 📽️ @financialeyes Ranjan Balakumaran