UK Government "Resist" Program Monitors Citizens' Online Posts

Authored by Cam Wakefield via Reclaim The Net,

Let’s begin with a simple question. What do you get when you cross a bloated PR department with a clipboard-wielding surveillance unit?

The answer, apparently, is the British Government Communications Service (GCS). Once a benign squad of slogan-crafting, policy-promoting clipboard enthusiasts, they’ve now evolved (or perhaps mutated) into what can only be described as a cross between MI5 and a neighborhood Reddit moderator with delusions of grandeur.

Yes, your friendly local bureaucrat is now scrolling through Facebook groups, lurking in comment sections, and watching your aunt’s status update about the “new hotel down the road filling up with strangers” like it’s a scene from Homeland. All in the name of “societal cohesion,” of course.

Once upon a time, the GCS churned out posters with perky slogans like Stay Alert or Get Boosted Now, like a government-powered BuzzFeed.

But now, under the updated “Resist” framework (yes, it’s actually called that), the GCS has been reprogrammed to patrol the internet for what they’re calling “high-risk narratives.”

Not terrorism. Not hacking. No, according to The Telegraph, the new public enemy is your neighbor questioning things like whether the council’s sudden housing development has anything to do with the 200 migrants housed in the local hotel.

It’s all in the manual: if your neighbor posts that “certain communities are getting priority housing while local families wait years,” this, apparently, is a red flag. An ideological IED. The sort of thing that could “deepen community divisions” and “create new tensions.”

This isn’t surveillance, we’re told. It’s “risk assessment.” Just a casual read-through of what that lady from your yoga class posted about a planning application. The framework warns of “local parental associations” and “concerned citizens” forming forums.

And why the sudden urgency? The new guidance came hot on the heels of a real incident, protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, following the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian migrant.

Now, instead of looking at how that tragedy happened or what policies allowed it, the government’s solution is to scan the reaction to it.

What we are witnessing is the rhetorical equivalent of chucking all dissent into a bin labelled “disinformation” and slamming the lid shut.

The original Resist framework was cooked up in 2019 as a European-funded toolkit to fight actual lies. Now, it equates perfectly rational community concerns about planning, safety, and who gets housed where with Russian bots and deepfakes. If you squint hard enough, everyone starts to look like a threat.

Local councils have even been drafted into the charade. New guidance urges them to follow online chatter about asylum seekers in hotels or the sudden closure of local businesses.

One case study even panics over a town hall meeting where residents clapped. That’s right. Four hundred people clapped in support of someone they hadn’t properly Googled first. This, we’re told, is dangerous.

So now councils are setting up “cohesion forums” and “prebunking” schemes to manage public anger. Prebunking. Like bunking, but done in advance, before you’ve even heard the thing you’re not meant to believe.

It’s the equivalent of a teacher telling you not to laugh before the joke’s even landed.

Naturally, this is all being wrapped in the cosy language of protecting democracy. A government spokesman insisted, with a straight face: “We are committed to protecting people online while upholding freedom of expression.”

Because let’s be real, this isn’t about illegal content or safeguarding children. It’s about managing perception. When you start labeling ordinary gripes and suspicions as “narratives” that need “countering,” what you’re really saying is: we don’t trust the public to think for themselves.

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, join Reclaim The Net.

Tyler Durden Tue, 11/25/2025 - 06:30

These Are The Most Religious States In America

Religion plays a defining role in American culture and politics, but the degree of religiosity varies dramatically by state.

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist's Niccolo Conte, maps out the share of adults who are highly religious based on survey data from the Pew Research Center.

The survey was of 36,908 adults, conducted July 2023 to March 2024, with religiousness based on prayer frequency, attendance at religious services, belief in God, and the importance of religion in life.

Which U.S. States are the Most Religious?

Mississippi leads as America’s most religious state, with 50% of adults surveyed categorized as highly religious.

The table below shows the share of residents in each U.S. state who are considered highly religious:

South Carolina follows Mississippi with 46% of adults highly religious, with South Dakota and Louisiana tied next at 45%.

The data highlights a strong concentration of religious adherence in the American South. States like Tennessee (44%), North Carolina (41%), and Arkansas (40%) demonstrate the cultural legacy of the “Bible Belt,” where Christianity remains woven into America’s religiosity.

The Least-Religious States in America

In contrast, the Northeast and much of the West Coast are markedly less religious.

New England stands out for its secularism with the three least-religious states in America: Vermont (13%), New Hampshire (15%) and Maine (17%).

Alongside New England, western states like Nevada (20%) and Oregon (21%) show lower levels of religious engagement, with California only slightly higher at 24%.

Overall, the national average of highly religious adults sits at 31%, with the difference between the top and bottom states—Mississippi’s 50% versus Vermont’s 13%—illustrating just how much religiosity varies across the United States.

To learn more about religion around the world, check out this graphic which shows the world’s most popular religions.

Tyler Durden Tue, 11/25/2025 - 05:45

They've Learned Nothing... Because That Would Expose Too Much

Authored by Roger Bate via The Brownstone Institute,

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has finally released the core political chapters of its long-awaited report. After nearly three years of hearings, millions of documents, and tens of millions of pounds spent on legal fees, the conclusion is now unmistakably clear.

They’ve learned nothing, as I detail in my latest research. 

Worse, they may not want to learn.

The Inquiry’s structure, its analytical frame, even its carefully curated narrative all point in the same direction: away from the possibility that Britain’s pandemic response was fundamentally misguided, and toward the politically safer claim that ministers simply “acted too late.”

On November 20, 2025, Jay Bhattacharya captured this perfectly in a single sentence on X: “Fact check; not locking down at all (like Sweden) would have saved lives in UK. Hard to believe how much money the UK spent on its sham covid inquiry.” That tweet was provocative—but it was also accurate in its diagnosis of the Inquiry’s deeper pathologies.

The Inquiry’s Central Mistake: Asking the Wrong Question

From the outset, the Inquiry has framed Britain’s pandemic response as a timing problem. Lockdowns were assumed to be necessary and effective; the only question was whether politicians implemented them quickly enough. The result is a dry recitation of process failures and personality clashes inside Downing Street, all of which are said to have delayed the inevitable “stay-at-home” order.

But that framing was never neutral. It was baked into the Inquiry’s analytical choices—especially its uncritical reliance on the same family of models that drove the UK into lockdown in March 2020.

The centerpiece of that modeling tradition is Imperial College London’s Report 9, the document that forecast hundreds of thousands of UK deaths absent stringent lockdowns. That report assumed near-homogeneous mixing, limited voluntary behavior change, and high fatality rates across the population. Under those assumptions, lockdown becomes not a political choice but a mathematical necessity.

The Inquiry has now rerun the same machinery and, unsurprisingly, produced the same conclusion.

Its headline claim—that delaying lockdown by a week caused roughly 23,000 additional deaths—is not a historical finding. It is not based on observational data. It is simply the output of an Imperial-style model with a different start date.

The Inquiry has restated the model, not tested it.

The Evidence They Chose Not to See

The Inquiry’s blindness becomes fully apparent when we ask the obvious comparative question: if the lockdown paradigm were correct, what would we expect to see among countries that refused to lock down?

We would expect chaos. We would expect mass hospital collapse. We would expect mortality catastrophes to dwarf the UK.

We would expect, in short, to see Sweden in ruins.

Instead, we see the opposite.

Sweden kept primary schools open, avoided stay-at-home orders, relied heavily on voluntary behavior, and preserved civil liberties throughout the pandemic. After correcting early care-home errors, Sweden recorded one of the lowest age-adjusted excess mortality rates in Europe.

The Swedish experience is not a footnote. It is not an “exception.” It is the control case—the real-world test of the lockdown paradigm.

And it falsifies it.

A serious Inquiry would have begun with Sweden. It would have asked why a country that rejected lockdowns achieved better mortality outcomes than Britain while preserving education, normal life, and basic freedoms. It would have integrated that evidence into every chapter. It would have examined whether voluntary behavior changes, targeted protection, and risk-based messaging can substitute for mass coercion.

Instead, Sweden is barely mentioned. When it appears at all, it is described as an anomaly. The Inquiry behaves as though Sweden is politically inconvenient—not analytically essential.

Because it is.

The Modeling Was Wrong. The Inquiry Can’t Admit It.

If the Inquiry were genuinely interested in learning, it would examine whether the models that drove the UK’s response were flawed. It would review the assumptions underpinning Report 9. It would test them against real-world data from multiple countries. It would commission adversarial modeling groups. It would bring in critics. It would examine alternative frameworks.

It did none of these things.

The behavior of the public is a perfect example. Imperial-style models assume that people remain near-normal in their social contacts without legal mandates. But mobility data, workplace activity, and school attendance show that Britons began adjusting their behavior weeks before Boris Johnson held the lockdown press conference. High-risk individuals adapted earliest. Businesses reacted to perceived risks earlier than the state. Families responded faster than the Cabinet Office.

The models were wrong about behavior.

Yet the Inquiry’s analysis still treats people as if they only respond to orders, not information.

The result is a fantasy counterfactual: a Britain that would have carried on as normal in March 2020 had the government not intervened. That Britain never existed.

Where Is the Cost–Benefit Analysis?

The Inquiry promised to evaluate the “relative benefits and disbenefits” of non-pharmaceutical interventions. It has not done so. There is no integrated accounting of:

• the millions of missed cancer screenings

• the explosion in mental-health morbidity

• the delayed cardiovascular care

• the long-term educational loss from school closures

• the widening inequality gaps

• the years-long damage to the NHS backlog

• the economic scarring that will shorten future lives

Lockdowns always look good when you only count Covid deaths. But public health is cumulative. It is intertemporal. Saving a life today by destroying ten years of someone’s earning power is not a victory.

The Inquiry refuses to engage with these trade-offs. It is easier to condemn “late lockdowns” than to ask whether lockdowns were the wrong tool altogether.

The Real Reason the Inquiry Learned Nothing

The central failure of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry is not analytical. It is institutional.

A real investigation would expose catastrophic judgment errors across the political and scientific establishment. It would show that ministers outsourced strategy to a narrow modeling group. It would reveal that the harms of lockdowns were not only foreseeable but foreseen. It would vindicate critics who were ridiculed or censored. It would anger parents whose children suffered educational harm. It would enrage families whose loved ones died because routine care was suspended. It would shatter public trust in Whitehall and SAGE.

That is precisely what the Inquiry cannot do.

Instead, it offers a politically safe narrative. The strategy was sound. The problem was timing. Ministers were slow. Advisors were frustrated. Downing Street was chaotic. But the solution next time is simple: lock down earlier, lock down harder, lock down smarter.

It is a comforting fairy tale for the people who caused the damage.

The Truth Is Already Clear

Bhattacharya’s November 2025 tweet may have been blunt, but it crystallized what the Inquiry is unwilling to say. Sweden shows that not locking down at all could have saved British lives—not merely reduced collateral damage, but saved lives.

That is the final heresy. And that is why the Inquiry cannot confront it.

Learning would expose too much.

The UK did not simply lock down too late. It locked down unnecessarily. The Inquiry should have been a reckoning. Instead, it became a shield—protecting institutions rather than illuminating truth.

Britain deserved better. The world deserved better.

Until we admit what went wrong, we remain doomed to repeat it.

Tyler Durden Tue, 11/25/2025 - 05:00