1984 Today!

Hatun Tash is a Turkish ex-Muslim turned Christian evangelist who, in September 2024, “won £10,000 in damages and costs from the Metropolitan Police after being arrested, strip searched and unlawfully imprisoned for wearing a Charlie Hebdo t-shirt and having her property stolen at Speakers’ Corner in London”.

Here’s a video of the incident, which happened in 2022.

The stolen property in question was her personal copy of the Quran, which had multiple holes drilled through it in reference to Islamic theologian Dr Yasir Qadhi’s contemporaneous remark that the story of the preservation of the Quran “has holes in it.”

The 2024 settlement was the second payment made to her by the Met. In 2022, she was awarded £10,000 for two wrongful arrests, one of which was caught on camera. In both cases, she donated the money to charity.

Hatun is the founder of Defend Christ Critique Islam (DCCI) Ministries. She is well-known worldwide for denouncing Muhammad as a false prophet, and speaking out against what she perceives as serious issues with the Muslim faith, often drawing on Islamic sources.

Her unabashed anti-Islamic evangelism is not everyone’s cup of tea. The result is not just mistreatment by the British police, but vociferous and violent attacks and threats by Muslims who object to what she says.

She has been surrounded and jostled by jeering mobs, hit in the face while holding up a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, stabbed in the face and arm in Hyde Park, and hunted by an assassin intending to shoot her in public.

She has received multiple Osman warnings, which are issued in the UK “if police have intelligence of a real and immediate threat to the life of an individual.”

She is unable to live in ordinary accommodation because of the risk the threats against her pose to potential housemates. Even holding down a regular job or maintaining a normal social life are nearly impossible.

All of this happened in 21st century Britain, because of violent reactions by ideologues to what Hatun says online and in public, reactions that have mostly gone unpunished by the same police that frequently arrest her. To some observers, this “dogmatic hounding of those who commit the ‘sin’ of giving offence” is tantamount to a back-door blasphemy law.

Brendan O’Neill put it succinctly in the headline of a piece for The Spectator: The plight of Hatun Tash shames Britain.

Hatun spoke with me from an undisclosed location, showing resolve and good humour about the difficulties she faces on a daily basis. Regardless of whether one shares her beliefs or opinions, her unwavering commitment to free speech is inspiring and her refusal to be intimidated should be a shot in the arm for all those who self-censor out of fear.

I’ll give her the last word:

“People should have the right to criticise anything and anyone. None of us is untouchable.”

Find Hatun Tash’s DCCI Ministries on YouTube.

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CJ Hopkins, author, satirist, and playwright, will be re-tried for thought crime in Berlin on Monday 30 September at 10:30am in Room 145a of the Kammergericht, located at Elßholzstraße 30-33.

The trial might as well be in Room 101.

In this handy fact sheet, CJ gives the timeline of his experience being prosecuted by the German government for two tweets he sent in 2022 criticising the country’s lockdown and mask mandate policies. Those tweets had images of his book cover attached, the centrepiece of which is a medical mask beneath which a swastika is faintly visible.

As a result, he was charged with disseminating propaganda in support of a National Socialist organisation, a bizarre allegation given the context.

In January 2024, he was acquitted. The judge made it clear that the charges were baseless: "[W]hen taking into account the text associated with the use of the mask, it can easily be seen that the connection to National Socialism is made in an emphatically negative sense."

Inexplicably, the prosecution appealed the verdict, forcing CJ to go through a second trial.

If his acquittal is confirmed, CJ should be free. If, however, the acquittal is overturned, the case will be kicked back down to the lower court for yet another trial, a “death loop” which could continue indefinitely.

CJ and his lawyer, the litigator and criminal defence attorney Friedemann Däblitz, join me to discuss the case, the procedure of being dragged through the courts by a government with unlimited resources, and the global crackdown on free speech and dissent of which this case is a part.

With the support of his readers and subscribers, CJ has been able to stay the course and, with Friedemann’s help, argue the case where it truly matters: in open court.

It remains to be seen whether justice will be done.

You can find CJ on Substack, X, or at his websites here and here.

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I found out about Sanne Van Oosten’s work on X when she shared her experience of being shunned by media outlets indifferent to her research findings that voters don’t discriminate on the basis of gender and ethnicity.

A social scientist at Oxford University specialising in meta-analysis and intergroup conflict, Sanne is uniquely positioned to comment on Kamala Harris’s prospects in the US presidential election, as well as the social status factors that may drive some of Donald Trump’s supporters.

Sanne’s meta-analysis of 43 studies spanning 10 years and involving over 305,000 respondents shows that voters are overwhelmingly interested in policy, not identity, and that the presumption of voter bias by political apparatchiks is out of step with a public that actually favours female and minority candidates.

Our conversation gets into the detail of her work, taking in the ways that academia as well as media have played a narrative-shaping role not entirely aligned with the reassuring reality that, as a voting public, we are not as divided and prejudiced as some might claim.

You can find Sanne on X and BlueSky as @SBVanOosten.

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In this Summer Special, I take the show on the road to meet people at the London incarnation of a global Day of Visibility called We Are Ready.

From all over the UK, citizens gathered in Parliament Square, facing the seat of Britain’s government, to raise their voices on the issues that matter to them, and to protest what they think has gone wrong.

A common theme was that uncontrollable forces are taking society in an objectionable direction. From Covid vaccines to extraterrestrial Satanists, the list of problems and malefactors was long and varied. What the forces at play were, and whether they were guided deliberately or somehow emergent, changed depending on who I spoke with. The people there were kind, patient, and open to being approached, and I had some great conversations.

I hope you enjoy this field report. We’ll be back to our normal format of long-form one-on-one interviews in our next episode.

Enjoy!

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This episode was a surprise.

After releasing Episode 119, I received the following message from a listener who goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein:

Just listened to your podcast with Jerry Barnett and loved it, but now I feel like kinda HAVING to offer to be you next guest (if you are interested). I can mainly talk about socialism and how I experienced it growing up in East Germany and then later through the communes my mother joined afterwards.

The fact that his pseudonym is taken from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it all the more intriguing.

How could I turn that down?

We set up a date and time, and I went in basically blind, with almost no idea of what he would share with me.

The result was a startling, spontaneous, and deeply personal conversation, about the impact of parental ideology on a child’s development, living with trauma, and learning to think independently after dealing with indoctrination.

From being the privileged child of a Communist Party official in East Germany to living on a Gnostic commune in Bavaria, from being forced to live as a girl to growing into a man, what Emmanuel shared is enough for several lifetimes, of both experience and therapy.

I hope you find it as fascinating and as moving as I did.

Enjoy.

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Jerry Barnett is a technologist, campaigner, and the author of Porn Panic!

His book, and his other writing for outlets like Quillette, examines the junction of free expression, sexuality, and identity, especially recent examples of moral outrage from what he calls “the identitarian Left.”

We had a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, getting his views on identity politics, nationalism, racism, feminism, the way both the modern left and right share a penchant for pearl-clutching, the echoes of Orwell in our current moment, you name it.

He’s always fun to talk to, erudite, mordant, and passionate about reason and individualism.

You can find him on X, as @jerrybarnett, or on Substack at jerrybarnett.substack.com.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

https://www.1984.today

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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

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Christina Dalcher is a professor, linguist, and the best-selling author of the novels like VOX, Q (Master Class in the US), Femlandia, and The Sentence.

In VOX, a religious conservative movement comes to power in the United States. By technological means, the Pure Movement prevents women from speaking more than 100 words a day, and embarks on an unspeakable plot to destroy the very root of human language.

In Q, a strictly stratified educational system relentlessly tests children to measure their Quotient (hence the Q).

In Femlandia, a woman and her daughter encounter a women-only commune where, inexplicably, children continue to be born.

Underpinning Christina’s work is a clear and powerful desire to examine the human condition in tension with government, technology, and social hierarchy. Her central characters tend to be women struggling to protect their children, or driven by a fear of what might happen to their children.

We discuss her background in linguistics as a key part of imagining the worst that could happen to the world, her methods for developing and structuring a thrilling narrative, the way she approaches character and world-building, and some unexpected sources of inspiration for her dark creations.

We had a fun, open, personal conversation which left me with a deeper appreciation of her and her writing. I hope you enjoy it.

You can find Christina at www.christinadalcher.com or on X as CV_Dalcher.

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@1984TodayPod on X

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

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Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter at the New York Times and the author of an excellent book about facial recognition technology called Your Face Belongs To Us.

She very kindly agreed to come on to talk about her book, and how she discovered the existence of Clearview AI, a shady tech company that just lost a court case in the State of Illinois brought against them (thanks to her reporting) by people whose pictures were scraped off of social media without their permission.

In the UK, Clearview managed to beat a similar rap and the Information Commissioner is trying to appeal.

In our conversation, we get into other examples of facial recognition and biometrics gone wrong, the abuses that a search engine for faces makes possible, the creepy concept of LOVEINT (when law enforcement use intelligence tools to track or stalk their love interests), and much more.

Somehow, Kashmir remains hopeful that “the rickety scaffolding of the Panopticon” can be dismantled before it’s too late, although time is running out.

You’ll also find out what a ‘red list’ is, and it’s as Black Mirror as you think.

You can find Kashmir on X as @kashhill, and I can’t recommend her book highly enough. It’s an exposé of the grotty game being played by surveillance technology companies, and a travelogue of her journey into the engine room of the dystopian present.

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Website: https://www.1984.today

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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

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Steve Endacott is the human behind AI Steve, the UK’s first AI parliamentary candidate, and the founder of SmarterUK, a new political party.

AI Steve is competing to become the MP for Brighton Pavilion in the upcoming general election. Unlike a ‘real’ MP, AI Steve is available 24/7, generates policies through dialogue with constituents, and, if elected, will validate those policies through online voting before proposing them in Parliament.

The ‘Real’ Steve Endacott is an entrepreneur, and believes that the widespread adoption of AI is inevitable, as are catastrophic job losses. He thinks AI is very dangerous, that government needs to step up to regulate it and provide some form of Universal Basic Income to mitigate the fallout, and he also wants to drive adoption and deployment of AI through his businesses.

In short, he’s an interesting guy.

We had a fun conversation whipping through his work, his disillusionment with mainstream politics, and his embracing of AI as a catalyst for a better society.

Enjoy!

You can find AI Steve online at https://www.ai-steve.co.uk.

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Bjørn Karmann is a Danish inventor based in Amsterdam who created Paragraphica, a lens-less camera powered by AI that uses data instead of light to create images. It generates a photograph of what it ‘thinks’ you are looking at, using variables like the weather, the time of day, and of course, your location. It also looks wild.

I saw his demo of how it works and had to speak to him.

We know our memories are imperfect, but a photo of a moment is still a snapshot of a point in time in our lives. Now, with Paragraphica, that snapshot of a moment of life is not just mediated by technology, it is generated. Is it real? Is it fake? Something in between? What could a future of moments generated rather than captured look like? What will the past look like from that future? Would it really even be our past?

You can try the online version of Paragraphica on his website.

Bjørn’s work could be called ‘subversive design’; he creates things that comment on or alter existing technology. His previous inventions have included Alias, a “teachable parasite” that gives you more control over your home ‘smart assistant’, and Occlusion Grotesque, a font that changes over time because it is carved into a tree.

We had a great conversation about his work, his philosophy of design, intrusive technology, the relationship between memory and reality, and much more. We even came up with an idea for our own app, but you’ll need to listen to find out what it is.

Bjørn is on X as @BjoernKarmann and his website is https://bjoernkarmann.dk/.

Find us on X, on Instagram, on Substack, or on our website.

Enjoy!

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