Tara O'Connor

Your enemy arrives by private jet not a small boat. Farage literally is part of the establishment. Never Vote Reform

There’s bins full of shredded documents outside the ministry of foreign affairs in Budapest because the government handover became a crime scene this week. Lots of Orban’s circle will be fleeing to Moscow.

5D Chess: It’s a $55 billion war just to go back to the Barack Obama deal. Wait. Pay 21x more than Obama did. Same deal.

In 2018, I had weird eye-popping experience of how this all worked. I went to 'An Entertaining evening with Nigel Farage' in Melbourne. And discovered an audience of almost entirely young men. Jordan Peterson fans!🤯 Who'd found Farage via YouTube's 'Up Next' algo 4/

RT cultivated UKIP from at least 2011. First Gerard Batten. And then Farage. He was paid £2k an appearance, I was told. And as @benimmo explained in our 2018 @ObserverUK investigation. The Kremlin was always explicit. RT was as essential as the Ministry of Defence 4/

And who was RT's favourite man in the West? This man. It's not just that Farage was paid by RT - the Russian state - for appearances over years. Though he was. It's that RT - the biggest news channel on YouTube - made him a star. 3/

RT is not just a TV channel. It's at centre of a whole ecosystem of Kremlin propaganda. Clips uploaded to YouTube were laced between mesmerising videos of tsunamis & tornadoes. It was clickbait wizardry. As ex-YouTuber @gchaslot told me no-one milked YouTube's algo like RT. 2/

Britain has a Russia problem. And his name is Nigel Farage. Today, Ofcom finally banned RT. 8 long years after Russia illegally invaded Crimea. But this is their man. RT - whose editor described it as a "weapon" of the Russian state - is what made Farage into who is today. 1/

This

I love this pope. And I’m Protestant

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” # First preparatory talks for the inaugural session of Parliament.

Steve Bannon: If we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison, myself included.

No: foreign secretary appoints ambassadors… CEO expects his lieutenants cabinet ministers - and their staffers (civil servants) to deliver within their remit, best advice and law. If not CEO fires them….

Every one should be investigated. All are PEPS.

20 billion for Iran. 0 for Ukraine. Go figure.

Our first day in the world’s most beautiful building, the Hungarian Parliament. Every day, we will work to live up to the enormous trust and mandate the Hungarian people have given us. God bless Hungary!

“Orbán’s banishment is a blow to the fatalism that has become so fashionable in western democracies. There’s nothing inevitable about the march of the populist-oligarch right.” My Swamp Notes with @gideonrachman. ft.com/content/1bcb66…

“The damage and destruction that we will see over the course of the next several years will end up being one of the most impactful policy decisions that the Trump administration made.” Former USAID official Nicholas Enrich, author of “Into the Woodchipper,” warns me about the global impact of the White House dismantling the agency.

Chaos

"Sanctions on Russian Oil Giants Rosneft and Lukoil Are Back" Positive surprise. This is important. kyivpost.com/post/74018?utm…