Tag: media

British man charged over mock Disneyland wedding to child had been investigated by BBC

The British paedophile charged in connection with organising a “mock wedding” to a child in Disneyland Paris is Jacky Jhaj, who was found guilty of sexual activity with two 15-year-olds in 2016, the BBC understands.

Jhaj, 39, has been charged in connection with organising the fake ceremony on Saturday, in which a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl was due to feature as his bride.

He was arrested when police were called on Saturday morning by an actor who said he had been hired by Jhaj to play the father of the bride.

The BBC has previously investigated how Jhaj was able to hire hundreds of children to act as his fawning fans at a fake film premiere in London’s Leicester Square in 2023.

Some of the children, who had been hired from casting agencies, were as young as six.

Teenage girls told the BBC that they had been asked to scream for him and try to touch him, without being told his real identity by the agencies.

Then in June last year, Jhaj was seen giving gifts to children outside dance auditions for another production – he was recognised by a parent who had seen the BBC article.

Two months later, and following the BBC’s further investigation, Jhaj was filmed posing naked in front of a mocked-up BBC News lorry in London which had been set on fire.

For the mock wedding at Disneyland Paris, which was to be filmed by Jhaj’s team, around 100 French extras had been recruited to take part.

The BBC understands that he appeared in front of a judge in Meaux, north-east of Paris, on Monday and was charged with fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, and identity theft and placed in pretrial detention.

Preliminary findings also stated that he had allegedly been “made-up professionally so that his face appeared totally different from his own”, according to the French prosecutor.

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Insanity: ESPN Announcer Apologizes for Calling America ‘Great’ During WNBA Broadcast

Calling America “great” is apparently a flagrant foul in the WNBA.

ESPN basketball analyst Rebecca Lobo was essentially forced to eat her words after an off-the-cuff comment led to some awkward seconds of silence during a game between the Indiana Fever and the Las Vegas Aces on Sunday.

Not only did she backtrack on calling her own country “great,” she actually apologized afterward. And the public backlash has been scathing.

As Fox News reported, the embarrassing incident occurred when Lobo took issue with a foul call issued by officials in the closing minute of the contest.

You have to see it to believe it.

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Democrats Got Caught in a Huge Lie About Trump’s Iran Strike

The Democrat-media complex got caught red-handed peddling yet another false narrative, only to have it blow up in its face when the facts came crashing down. 

The latest chapter in the Democrats’ never-ending war against the Trump administration centers on the successful strike against Iran’s nuclear sites. As you’ve likely seen, Democrats and their media allies wasted no time launching a coordinated campaign of phony outrage. 

Their claim? The White House recklessly bypassed congressional leadership — specifically Democrats — before the operation, supposedly violating the Constitution. It’s a laughable accusation, especially considering that they had no such concerns when Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden launched military strikes without congressional approval or proper notification.

CNN tried to stir controversy by reporting that while House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune were briefed ahead of time, Democrat leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries were only informed shortly before the public announcement, after the operation had already taken place. But as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained on Fox News, this was nothing more than a misleading narrative designed to distract from a major American victory. Leavitt didn’t just push back; she dismantled the lie piece by piece.

“We did make bipartisan calls,” Leavitt stated, setting the record straight from the outset. “Thomas Massie and the Democrats — he should be a Democrat ’cause he’s more aligned with them than with the Republican Party — were given notice. The White House made calls to congressional leadership. They were bipartisan calls.”

The White House, contrary to the manufactured narrative, conducted its due diligence and reached out to leaders on both sides of the aisle. The administration’s outreach efforts were comprehensive, but in a detail that speaks volumes, the top Democrat in the House was apparently unavailable to take a call of such national security importance. 

Leavitt revealed the specifics of the outreach, exposing the disingenuous nature of the complaints.

“In fact, Hakeem Jeffries couldn’t be reached,” she explained. “We tried him before the strike and he didn’t pick up the phone, but he was briefed after, as well as Chuck Schumer was briefed prior to the strike.”

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NYT Gave Green Light to Trump’s Iran Attack by Treating It as a Question of When

In the wake of the US-supported Israeli attack on Iran, and days before the direct US bombing that followed, the New York Times editorial board (6/18/25) argued that “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.”

This language was as shifty as it was deliberate. Rather than oppose a policy of unprovoked aggression and mass murder, the Times editorialists suggested such a campaign was happening too hastily, and it should be preceded by more debate.

The opinion writers at the most important paper in the world were fully in favor of attacking Iran; they only worried that Trump would go about it the wrong way. In fact, the Times’ justification for war was identical to that of the Trump administration’s explanation after the fact.  It laid it out in the first paragraph:

A nuclear-armed Iran would make the world less safe. It would destabilize the already volatile Middle East. It could imperil Israel’s existence. It would encourage other nations to acquire their own nuclear weapons, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

The New York Times‘ echo of the standard Israeli and US propaganda line offers an opportunity to critically examine this most recent justification for aggressive war.

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French Newspaper Le Monde FINALLY Discovers That the Ukrainian Army Is Rife With Neo-Nazis – Hundreds of Soldiers From 3rd Assault Brigade Openly Display 3rd Reich Symbols

It’s like they say: better late than never.

The western media has been willingly blind to one of the worst-kept geopolitical secrets of our times: that the heroic ‘defenders of democracy’ in Ukraine are, in many cases, a bunch of Neo-Nazis running around unchecked.

The French premier newspaper Le Monde has just released the result of a 10-day investigation on the 3rd assault brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and to their ‘surprise’ and dismay found out that the militants go around openly and proudly wearing neo-Nazi symbols.

Of course, no one needed the Le Monde deep dive, since the information is readily available about the Nazi Azov Brigades and their heirs of the 3rd assault brigade.

And, what’s more, no one is hiding the fact that the Nazi collaborator and war criminal Stephan Bandera has been turned into a Ukrainian national hero.

Just between us: they don’t make much of an effort to hide their extremist ideologies.

Slavyangrad reported:

“According to Le Monde, hundreds of servicemen of the 3rd Assault Brigade — the direct heirs of the Azov Regiment — continue to openly use Nazi symbols. The photo shows swastikas, greeting gestures, and SS emblems.

Despite the ‘reform’ and the formal inclusion of the brigade in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, radical symbols have not disappeared. Journalists note: this is not a matter of chance, but of a conscious choice – either based on ideological convictions or as a tool of intimidation.

On June 14, in Kiev, on the day of the ‘March of Equality’ [Gay Pride], radicals from the ‘Carpathian Sich’ held an alternative ‘March of Tradition’. Participants were captured on camera demonstrating a Nazi salute.”

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Watergate’s Continuing Legacy: Dishonest Media and Clueless Republicans

June 17, 2025, the recent 53rd anniversary of the Watergate break-in, should remind us of the scandal’s scurrilous aftermath. What was promised to be a new millennium of aggressive, yet punctilious, journalism turned out to be a continuation of the Washington Post‘s reckless, essentially untruthful, Watergate reporting, clearly biased in favor of Democrats.

While Republicans in the wake of Watergate vowed to be beyond reproach, like Caesar’s wife, they were indeed generally rectitudinous but yet continued the same stupidity that ruined the Nixon administration. Because neither side addressed these failures, they persist today.

We have written extensively about the Post‘s fraud during Watergate, but not enough about the Nixon Administration’s idiocy in dealing with what should have been nothing more than an embarrassing dustup.

While the FBI was diligently investigating the Watergate burglary and the Post was sleuthing (however conspiratorially with the DNC), the White House reacted by rigorously keeping itself in the dark. The occupants of the Oval Office assumed that someone within their associated group had done something wrong, but were afraid to pinpoint exactly what it was and who did it.

The White House inner circle could not have been more wrong-footed in its own deliberately restrained inquiry. For instance, it immediately assumed it should go into cover-up mode without knowing what it was covering up. It unwisely chose White House counsel John Dean to be its hub, even though Dean had no relevant experience, and any modest inquiry would have cast a suspicious eye toward him. To be fair, the entire group assumed from the outset that all involved must keep quiet, including among themselves.

One avenue of knowledge the White House, through Dean, shut off was G. Gordon Liddy, the burglary supervisor who, seemingly heroically, refused to talk for six years. But more harmful was the CRP lawyers’ decision not to provide legal representation for wiretap monitor Alfred Baldwin, III. In so doing, the reputedly savvy Republicans lost the opportunity to determine what he was listening to and what burglary team leader James McCord had said and done in Baldwin’s presence. So two key witnesses, who could have provided exculpatory information absolving higher officials, were lost to the Oval Office.

The Nixon Administration would have learned what Democrats later suppressed: that the project was aimed at listening to out-of-town Democrats talking to young ladies about their upcoming tawdry assignations. They would have gained clues that this may well have been a CIA operation run by infiltrating agents, the “retired” CIA agent James McCord working as his cover for the campaign (“CRP”), and White House consultant and “retired” CIA agent Howard Hunt.

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Now We Know Why the Minnesota Assassin Story Disappeared Overnight

Have you wondered why the story of the Minnesota assassin Vance Boelter has suddenly vanished from the news? Now we have a pretty good idea why.

Boelter, who murdered State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband while also shooting State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, unleashed terror that sparked a massive manhunt before his capture late Sunday. Initial media coverage was rife with speculation, with left-leaning outlets eager to cast Boelter as a MAGA Republican, hastily blaming the GOP and even President Donald Trump for inciting his shooting spree. 

Yet the letter found in Boelter’s abandoned vehicle tells a radically different story, one that not only exposes the media’s rush to judgment and political opportunism but sudden drop in coverage.

According to Minnesota’s largest newspaper, the Star-Tribune, Boelter believed he was acting under the supposed orders of Democrat Gov. Tim Walz. Boelter’s incoherent letter, about a page and a half long, bizarrely claimed that killing Sen. Amy Klobuchar was necessary to clear the way for Walz to run for the U.S. Senate. 

The letter is the clearest evidence yet of Boelter’s mindset after the targeted violence against Minnesota politicians last week. It is incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read, according to two people familiar with the letter’s contents. It includes Boelter alleging he had been trained by the U.S. military off the books, and that Walz, who is not running for Senate, had asked him to kill Klobuchar and others.

Asked to comment about the letter, Hennepin County Attorney spokesperson Daniel Borgertpoepping said the office cannot comment on an open investigation but “due to the seriousness of the allegations it contains, we will state only that we have seen no evidence that the allegations regarding Governor Walz are based in fact.”

What’s more, as we previously reported, Walz appointed Boelter to a government workforce board, a fact that seemingly fueled his delusion of a personal relationship with the governor. But this imagined relationship was the extent of any link, as the letter’s ramblings make clear. There is no evidence that support for Trump or any conservative cause motivated Boelter’s actions. Instead, his violent spree was rooted in a deranged fixation on Walz, a far cry from the media’s initial narrative that sought to weaponize the tragedy against the pro-Trump right.

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The Censorship-Industrial Complex Has Now Become Self-Perpetuating

I’ve covered a lot of speech crime indictments here at the plague chronicle.

Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened.

Occasionally you’d find the odd article about a dumb tourist who was cited for throwing a Nazi salute in public or something, but that was it. The whole area just didn’t matter.

The German state acquired a kind of political Long Covid from the pandemic.

Its agents learned from their virus repressions that they could get away with a lot more than they ever thought, and they also learned to view ordinary people as their adversaries.

A third thing happened too, in that lockdowns moved a lot of discourse to the internet, and the German elite discovered for the first time that they and their policies suffer a popularity deficit there. To explain this, our baffled and offended if powerful social media naifs borrowed the malevolent concept of “disinformation” from the Anglosphere. They began whining and crying and beating their breasts and clutching their pearls about disinformation. None of them did this so hard and so insistently as the Greens, because the Greens represent the views of the German political elite, and as an elite they feel entitled to scold, control discourse, and tell other people what to do.

That’s my potted history of how we got to this world, with pensioners being sent to jail for typing the wrong three-word phrase on the internet and YouTubers being fined thousands of Euros because some computer programme hallucinated into their banal complaints about poor internet reception a contextually incoherent Nazism. If you’re unlucky enough, you can get nailed for literally anything, and we only hear about a tiny minority of these cases. For a lot of people, the summary judgements they receive from the court are embarrassing, baffling and not worth the trouble. Those who can will just quietly eat the fine and try to get on with their lives.

In past pieces, I’ve drawn comparisons to the DDR, and I’ve also tried to characterise political repression as something that all states get up to when their ruling classes become threatened. I stand by all of that, but I’ve neglected to explain why our present situation is unique.

Europe and particularly Germany have entered a totally new era when it comes to government interference with personal expression. We’ve never seen anything like this before, it is going to get a lot worse, and nobody anywhere has the slightest interest in dialling this back. The prosecutions are escalating and they will only become more pervasive and ridiculous.

What is happening resembles classic “totalitarian” political tactics only superficially. The DDR employed literal bureaucrats and secret policemen whose job it was to censor speech according to defined standards and to punish or intimidate those who said inconvenient things. An analogy would be the farmer who decides there are too many rabbits eating his cabbages, and so he goes out and shoots them.

Modern Germany just can’t go out and shoot rabbits, and the reason has nothing to do with liberal democratic freedoms. We can’t even build bridges. Over a century ago, the Kingdom of Saxony required only two or three years to build the first Carola Bridge over the Elbe in Dresden. The SS destroyed that monument in 1945 to slow the Soviet advance, but the DDR needed only four years to build a replacement – the one that finally collapsed in September of last year. Today, in the best Germany of all time, we will require at least ten years and almost certainly more to build our third Carola Bridge. That is a very rough scale of how much ability the state has lost in the space of just a few generations.

The sclerotic, hyper-managerialised state that cannot build an uncomplicated 500-metre bridge across a river also finds censorship really, really hard. And so it has signed over this project to a whole world of NGOs, many of which now devote incredible resources to policing the internet all day.

We once had a farmer shooting rabbits, and that was bad enough if you happened to be a rabbit. Now we have an obese, bed-ridden, day-drinking farmer who can no longer fit through his front door. To solve his rabbit problem he has deputised a lot of autonomous agents, like the myxoma virus, to get rid of the hated rabbits instead.

This means he’s no longer in control of the process at all. The censorship happens all on its own, and for reasons of its own too.

It’s just something that a growing number of state-adjacent organisations do now, because there are institutional interests (jobs, funding) behind it.

How this happened is insidious.

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Loss of Narrative Control: How State Power Struggles Against Free Speech

The state is losing control over the dominant narratives in the competition of prevailing stories. Its apparatus of power responds predictably invasively and reveals its hostility toward dissenting opinions.

The German Bundestag’s Vice President Bodo Ramelow calls for stricter control of social media. “The platforms must be regulated,” Ramelow warns, demanding that operators “be held liable for what happens on their platforms.” In view of the “coarsening of language and writing” in the digital space, he advocates clear identity verification of users.

Of course, the former Prime Minister of Thuringia and self-confessed fanboy of cultivated socialism is as far removed from protecting free speech as he is from a fair exchange of arguments among different interest groups on an equal footing, where the state takes on the role of a passive guardian. No, Ramelow is a representative of the autonomously reproducing caste of statists, whose clearly articulated goal is to develop the state from a referee role into the dominant actor in the societal power field.

Socialism as a Viral Disease

A state that abandons its neutral role inevitably degenerates into an overbearing actor — socialism as a power construct is the consequence. One can also understand socialism in its revolving character as a kind of intellectual viral disease. Resentment, inferiority complexes, and failure translate in unstable personalities prone to one-dimensionality in societal disputes into vulgar fantasies of expropriation. Economic and cultural crises cause the rapid spread of this civilizationally deforming ideology — a mental pandemic gaining energy, whose discharge dissolves the pillars of civilization: private property, autonomy of action, family, religion, and cultural life.

It is of fundamental importance to understand at what point in the cyclical course of our society we have arrived. Ramelow’s talk can of course be dismissed as infantile utterances of a provincial politician and salon communist, who, like so many of his comrades, has carved a path through bureaucratic positions, public service, and NGO activism to eke out a life at maximum distance from normal reality. Yet in my opinion, this would be a superficial judgment. Ramelow’s unrestrained demands for control of the supposed sovereign are an expression of the final phase of the societal cycle. We stand at a turning point where representatives of the state feel the overstretching of their power, shaped in growing public debt, collapsing economies, and an as yet unspecific unrest among the people.

State Activates Last Resources

The left-wing power machine’s fight against dissenting opinions and political movements has long been institutionalized. In laws such as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the EU undertakes as a kind of “Ministry of Truth” the obscene attempt to bring social media platforms under state control to counteract its loss of power. Soft, emotionally charged, the enforcers of control cite transparency and youth protection to justify their overreach. The obligation to moderate content and disclose algorithms opens the door wide to political influence.

The citizen’s digital sovereignty as a counter-public, as a new regulatory mechanism against state media dominance, has become the newest battlefield of a society that passively watched the rise of initially gentle socialism and must now experience how from climate moralism and diversity hype emerges a passive-aggressive classic control socialism, which spares no effort to deploy state organs like the judiciary apparatus against the growing dissident movement. In this way, the state forges ever new weapons in the war of memes, a war long lost but seemingly continued as a rearguard action until the bitter end. Consider the flood of lawsuits with which failed representatives of societal transformation like Robert Habeck defend their criticism-immune safe zones.

The judiciary’s assault on U.S. President Donald Trump during last year’s election campaign, intended to sideline the Republican, will go down as a unique case in American judicial history. These cases accumulate into a fundamental problem, drawing the battle line between the state apparatus and the civic sphere so sharply that one can already fairly confidently predict the failure of this pathological control fetish. That the U.S. government has actually managed in recent geopolitical turmoil to initiate the first budget cuts to the propaganda vehicle USAID can be seen as a milestone victory in the open culture war against civic freedom.

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Israel Cracks Down on Foreign Media Outlets with New ‘Zero Tolerance’ Censorship Policy

Israel is placing strict limits on video that news organizations can take at the scene of Iranian missile attacks.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi announced the policy, which requires prior approval from “the Israel Police, the Government Press Office (GPO), and the military [Israel Defense Forces] censor,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

“In accordance with new zero-tolerance enforcement measures led by the national security minister and the police commissioner, any transmission — live or recorded — from areas under missile fire must receive explicit clearance from the IDF censor,” GPO Director Nitzan Chen said.

The new policy was enacted after missile attacks in Beersheba, Holon, and Ramat Gan.

In those incidents, footage was appearing on Al Jazeera. The Jerusalem Post report said CNN and The New York Times were targeted by the new rule in addition to Al Jazeera.

Although some photographers said they represented other outlets, Israeli officials said the footage was used by Al Jazeera, regardless of who might have recorded it.

On Tuesday, Israeli police confiscated photo equipment used by journalists in Haifa.

Al Jazeera has made an unauthorized broadcast of a rocket strike on an Israeli oil refinery compound, something no Israeli media outlet was allowed to do.

“Following the successful coordinated enforcement against Al Jazeera broadcasts and others that violate censorship instructions and harm state security, we are implementing a new policy: All foreign journalists who wish to broadcast from Israel during wartime must receive specific written approval from the military censor — not only for the broadcast itself, but for the precise location, as well,” Ben Gvir and Karhi said.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid responded, criticizing the decision.

“Their decision to impose sweeping censorship will not be enforceable as long as people have cell phones with cameras, and it simply crushes the support that has emerged worldwide over the past week for the just war we are waging,” Lapid noted.

But Ben Gvir said broadcasts can be used as weapons.

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