Showing posts with label Steve_Topple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve_Topple. Show all posts

1 April 2016

Govt cowers under benefits protest

The Blog


A London protest against homicidal Tory disability benefit reforms was silenced on the air, with absurd reasons being offered by UK state and corporate media, Steve Topple writes.


Accusing the government of acting like a vicious mob while protesters assembled peacefully, Topple noted the protest was nevertheless a "triumph".

In the account, which appears at the blog Mutterings from the Left, skepticism about Britain's supposed democratic system is expressed. "MP’s are permitted to shout, hurl insults, espouse lies and propaganda and generally behave like a braying mob in one part of Parliament", Topple writes, while at the same time the very voters these rulers get their mandate from are not allowed to stage a peaceful benefits protest using banners nearby.

Commenting on the disaster of Tory benefits reforms, which were cruel enough to be mentioned by Iain Duncan Smith as a reason for his recent resignation, facts are pointed out by Topple:
  • "1000s of individuals have died after being declared “fit for work”"
  • "countless more have committed suicide after being left destitute by sanctions"
  • "rough sleeping has doubled since 2010"
  • "500,000 more children are in poverty.""
  • "£30 a week cut to ESA"
  • "the chaos that is Universal Credit"
  • "unnecessary stress surrounding the move from DLA to PIP"
  • "800,000 people are set to lose out because of clandestine changes to the tax credit system"
  • "Independent Living Fund that was abolished last year"
  • "there are already two UN investigations into possible human rights breaches by this Government going on (due to their “benefits reforms”)"

Topple says the UK mainstream media is completely ignoring these facts and refusing the cover them, as well as the benefits protest.


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22 March 2016

Would a Brexit make any difference?

The Blog


Britain's future in the European Union has been on a lot of minds leading up to the 23 June referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain a member.


One view is that it ultimately doesn't matter. It is a hollow debate, with either outcome of the Brexit referendum doing nothing to prevent the further subversion of political power in the UK for the interests of corporations.

Blogger Steve Topple draws attention to numerous media materials featuring his work and the European Union in a recent post on 20th March, including seven articles and one video. In one article, Topple notes, "I don’t think a vote either way will make one damned bit of difference as both the EU and UK Governments, as institutions, are controlled by forces greater than themselves – the multinational corporations." He promises to sleep through the entire thing, not caring much for either outcome.

A similarly abstaining view is given at Beliefnet, where a post takes note of the threat to scientific research funding and welfare posed by Britain exiting the EU, but at the same time praises the referendum as "a crucial step in pressuring the EU to rethink its future". The post speculates that Britain leaving the EU could destroy the EU, something that is not in fact the intention of Brexit campaigners who are concerned merely with Britain's future.


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15 March 2016

Cameron's PMQs fail gets him 1 star

The Blog


Weighing in on the incumbent Conservative government's poor record on support for vulnerable members of society, writer Steve Topple comments "Cameron spectacularly failed to answer one single question" from Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn during a recent session of Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs).


Topple dismissed PM David Cameron's responses as "dodgy statistics and retorts about a “growing economy”" that evidently are cherry picked from studies that also contained not-so-friendly analysis of the government's performance in welfare (conveniently omitted by Cameron). According to Topple:
"Ignoring Corbyn’s challenge to the utterly nefarious £30 cut to Employment and Support Allowance for those in the “Work-related Activity Group” (going against the House of Lords, and unending calls from charities and trade unions), Cameron trotted out his guff about a growing economy, and incredulously said that “reforming welfare” was helping to “get the deficit down… helping to deliver for working people in Britain”. (Working? Those 800,000 people on zero-hours contracts, perhaps.)"
Deeming such a response "contemptable", Topple gives some praise to Jeremy Corbyn, noting "Corbyn was actually asking him quite direct questions this week", departing from his previous excessive polite form. What Topple saw was a "more impassioned performance at PMQs", harrying the incumbent regime over the "overall disregard the Tories have for those at the lower rungs of society". Challenging the Prime Minister on the profound contribution of the current state to deepening child poverty in the name of reducing public spending, Corbyn also noted that "99%" of Cameron's responses to his questions had been insufficient.

Read Steve Topple's full post here

Ultimately, Steve Topple gives a tally: "Cameron – 2/10" (1 star); "Corbyn – 7/10" (3.5 stars), thus making Cameron's attempts to fend off Corbyn's questions and challenges a big fail.



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19 February 2016

Trident nuked by Steve Topple article

The Blog


Journalist Steve Topple got right to the point in a hard-hitting article for Common Space, offering some stunning facts you probably never considered about Britain's "independent" nuclear arsenal.


Rather than presenting moral arguments against nuclear weapons or military-strategic arguments about how only the US benefits from the tiny and weak British island state acting as a second policeman to contain Russian "aggression", Topple goes after the ones who support Trident for financial gain. This is much the way Topple addressed dark money in British politics in another recent article.

Most surprising of all is the role of UK-headquartered banks in the investment in the nuclear deterrents of the western countries as well as Russia. Apparently, these banks, their related companies and pro-Trident politicians in the UK are so driven by profit that they work to keep the nonexistent "threat" of nuclear war alive in the public consciousness, while financing both sides. Ultimately, the entire thing often just amounts to con against the public. Although a tense situation exists in Syria and Ukraine, Topple is certain that it will not lead to a nuclear war because globalization is currently too pervasive to allow that.

Topple defuses the apparent nuclear threat skillfully in his article as follows:
Multinational corporate banks are playing one big chess game – except it’s all make-believe and there will never be a checkmate, because that would be unprofitable. Governments willingly participate - those in charge are invariably shareholders in weapons manufacturing companies or their financiers. 
We are not living in some Sean Connery-era James Bond film. The world is intrinsically too financially entwined for either the East or West to ever press 'the button' – and to believe they would is, in my opinion, deluded.
This is no conspiracy theory. Barclays, HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland are specifically identified as having a hand in investing in both sides' nuclear deterrents, and this largely links together the financial players behind the nuclear arms industries of Russia and the UK.

In conclusion, Topple states, "There is no threat – except from our own foolhardiness for sleep-walking for decades and allowing this to continue happening."

Topple is a listed member of the Mont Order society, which declared a short set of shared values between its global disparate members in October 2015.


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12 February 2016

Steve Topple on UK dark money

The Blog


Contributing an article to Common Space on 8 February, journalist Steve Topple criticized the relations between leading UK politicians, corporations, and tax havens.


Particular focus is on Bermuda as a tax haven in the article, with its role in protecting the wealth of unscrupulous corporations and British political campaign donors explained.

Offering a list of the worst offenders, which includes Google shareholders and Conservative donors "Lord Green (serial HSBC wrong-un and Tory crony), Lord Lloyd-Webber (all-round bad-egg and party cheerleader), and Lord Glendonbrook (donated £700,000 to the Conservatives in the past 18 months)", Topple noted that the Labour Party is also blackened by the same financial dependence on tax havens.

Exposing the unethical dark money obtained by Labour Party-affiliated think tank the Fabian Society, Topple wrote:
I wonder why beacons of social democracy the Fabians, then, have accepted £60,000 in donations from Cuadrilla (them of nefarious fracking ventures) – which is registered in Bermuda? Or £13,500 from corporate banking degenerates HSBC – who have eight subsidiaries on the island? Or £26,000 from Iglo Group (Birds Eye, Findus) - which at the time was dodging tax via Luxembourg and the Channel Islands?
Topple additionally criticized civil society organizations for talking about global wealth inequality while using investment over the stock market as a means of combating it, despite the stock market arguably being to blame for such inequality (if we ask the Occupy movement, for example).

In addition, the article mocked people's faith in the corrupt political system in the UK, arguing as follows:
Politicians can wring their silver-crossed palms, bestow us with platitudes, and give rhetorical diatribes about the scourge of inequality all they want, but the truth of the matter is that corporations are now the organ-grinders running the planet – we merely vote for performing monkeys.
The Mont Order, which Steve Topple is a listed member of, holds the same skepticism towards present forms of democracy in the UK and the US, viewing these as shallow performances to keep corrupt elites in power with false appearances of legitimacy.


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5 February 2016

Topple: deport all bigots, not refugees

The Blog


Op-ed writer Steve Topple has appealed to Europeans to learn their history lessons again before calling for Nazi-like collective measures against refugees fleeing conflict zones such as Syria.


Topple does not hesitate to point out the west is to blame for the war in Syria. The west must make space for refugees, as it must face the consequences of its actions and atone for what it has done.

The post accuses Western societies of ignoring their own hand in creating a crisis for themselves, which they now try to shirk responsibility for by wanting to turn refugees away:
The anti-refugee rhetoric appeared to be systematically ratcheted up in nearly every country across the continent, without the smallest whiff of hypocrisy that the West’s agenda had largely contributed to this man-made crisis.
Elaborating on this responsibility, Topple writes that "Western foreign policy is partly to blame for the situation in the Middle East, which is rapidly spiralling out of control. Decade after decade we have geopolitically been led by our unquenchable thirst for oil and gas, regardless of the consequences." Amidst the hysteria spreading through Europe at the inevitable globalization of displacement and misery caused by western military aggression, many have called for all refugees (with particular emphasis on Muslims) to be deported.

Topple has an alternative suggestion of who deport:
Expatriate all the loathsome, lobotomised right-wing bigots and replace them with refugees. 
Because I, for one, would rather we have a diverse, socially-rich, colourful society where the quality of life for everyone was far greater, than an insular, closeted, angry and scared country where the opinions of loathsome, vile bigots whose views belong in a 1970’s sitcom were the norm.
Tackling the specific hysteria of many right wing groups and commentators, Topple strikes back at their assertions:
Oh – and the individuals screaming “Rapefugees!” and “Women and girls aren’t safe!” when discussing refugees after we have just observed Holocaust Memorial Day, may wish to Google “Collective Responsibility” – although I doubt their myopic brains would be able to cope with the resonance.
Although many right-wing figures in the west are obsessed with World War II and the idea of supporting the Israeli apartheid regime to atone for the Holocaust, they are just as interested in committing a new genocide against Muslims. The additional inability to condemn Israeli expansion and ethnic cleansing and to support it, no matter how untenable, shows nothing was really learned from the Holocaust.


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26 January 2016

Govt, media ignore suffering in Yemen

The Blog


Government and media in Britain are too focused on the Syrian Civil War to notice the greater scale of the suffering in Yemen.


In fact, as Steve Topple writes in an opinion piece at Common Space, the UK has even taken sides in the Yemen conflict, supporting the Saudi-led forces who imposed mass killings and starvation in the country after pro-Saudi President Hadi was driven from power.

The violence and displacement reported in Yemen, in what reports are available amid the pro-Saudi media blackout, is "a humanitarian disaster of even more catastrophic proportions " than anything seen in Syria. Topple writes that the war in Yemen is driven by Saudi Arabia's decline, as is found in recent events such as the lifting of anti-Iran sanctions, projected depletion of Saudi Arabia's oil fields in future years.

Noting that sectarianism suits Saudi Arabia and is part of its strategy, Topple criticizes the UK government's role in supporting the Saudi regime. "We, as a nation, need to take a long, hard look at our current government, its seemingly morally-bankrupt foreign policy and its preference for the pound over human life", he wrote.

The loss of the sanctions against Iran diminishes Saudi Arabia's position as a leading global oil supplier, and with this might reduce its political influence on other powers including the US.

In Syria, much like Yemen, all the violence is driven and funded by Western-backed forces who refuse to tolerate the government and are using terror against the general population to force their way to power.


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8 January 2016

The "OffGuardians" proliferate online

The Blog


At the heart of the crossroads of radicalism and technology today is the emergence of new, off-the-spectrum political forces and media sources.


These organisations or circles rapidly expand their readership, influence and credibility at a pace that alarms mainstream journalists and politicians. Because our blog is all about that irrepressible reformation at the tip of the sword of modern communication technologies, we are reporting again following our similar post last week in response to Steve Topple's predictions.

Petition: Google must end its censorship

According to the Mont-friendly L'Ordre blog based at the world-famous Beliefnet website,
What of all the tech-empowered bloggers from a background of powerlessness – that group Steve offers himself as an example of? What of media disintegration, the formation of the OffGuardian and the thousands of other OffGuardians that are tearing readers away from the Guardian? What about all the small Alex Joneses tearing people away from the real Alex Jones. These hundreds, perhaps thousands of independent radicals (the kind the Mont Order has intended to gather and support) have no real strategy but they corrode and disintegrate the more authoritarian media environment. There are no authorities on the web.

Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2016/01/media-disintegration.html#ixzz3wSz0Yae9
Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2016/01/media-disintegration.html#pDz6kUPtj4C0vAHS.99
The OffGuardian was a website set up to host the conversations that the Guardian would not tolerate, and preferred to delete. It is possible that the website was set up due to the Guardian's staunch support of British regime policies after its hard drives were smashed and it was forced to never displease the regime again. This spectacle followed after the Guardian printed stories from whistleblower Edward Snowden on NSA (US National Security Agency) and GCHQ (Britain's equivalent body) mass surveillance of domestic populations.

Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis (book)

Since they were threatened into submission by the British regime, Guardian journalists and editors have taken a less critical view of foreign policy, portraying Western government authorities as morally superior and taking a jingoist anti-Russian stance on the Ukrainian conflict.


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1 January 2016

Steve Topple on the future of media

The Blog


Britain-based blogger Steve Topple reflected on his writing career so far and his views on the future of media, in a recent post.


The following commentary offered is of great relevance to The clubof.info Blog's mission and readership:
I do this because in the current political and socioeconomic climate we are barraged day in, day out, with lie after lie after lie – and I’m of the opinion that the more people out there shouting at the tops of their voices in any way they can to counter these lies can only be a good thing.
Our mainstream media is corrupt – we all know that. 
Unfortunately, our “new media” (many of the sites you can find on Twitter)... are all (still) a Russell Group, self-serving chumocracy, albeit one which tows the line of what is fast becoming the new centre-left (that is, “Corbynism”), and will not deviate from the message which they perceive will garner them the most views, followers, re-tweets – whatever. 
This is not the future of journalism. The future of journalism (in my opinion), is one where every person, if they feel inclined, can write, record or express in any way they see fit “their truth”, and share it with the world – then the world can make up their own mind.
Steve Topple can be followed on Twitter here. In addition to his writing accomplishments, he is connected up with the Mont Order society's loose coalition of bloggers. His effective role as a firebrand on the British political blogosphere is the main reason people are drawn to his work and the causes he supports.


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17 November 2015

UK govt assassins get bombed by op-ed

The Blog


The killing of Mohammed Emwazi, so-called Jihadi John, by the UK government without a trial is a terrible precedent that opens the door to arbitrary executions by the British state.


Certainly, sentiments that he was a "scumbag" who deserved death or worse for his involvement in the Takfiri militant group ISIL were not misplaced. However, that isn't a sufficient reason for society to throw the law out the window and just trust the government to kill whoever it wants.

Such behavior by the assassins of the British government was recently struck hard in an op-ed by Steve Topple for Common Space, published 13 November. He accused the UK's ruling Conservative regime of demagoguery, using a "self-defense" argument and emotional appeals to the population to justify extrajudicial killings.

The killing, Topple says, shows that the UK government can now summarily execute anyone and not be held accountable. He wrote that the state is now "saying that they can decide who among their citizens are classed as 'threats', summarily do away with them first and then ask the questions later."

Describing the illegal assassinations by the British and American regimes as "psychopathy", the op-ed gave the following warning for all readers to consider:
The precedent it (and the killings of Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin in September) sets should not be underestimated. Who, in the next few years, will be deemed as a threat to national security, requiring action in 'self-defence'? The Marxist PKK in Turkey? The socialist coalition in Portugal which has just overthrown the right-wing government? Domestic extremist Jenny Jones of the Green Party?
As with out-of-control surveillance of the population, the hand of the assassins has been freed by Western governments to kill with impunity, on the basis that the population is sufficiently frightened by the "terror threat" that they'll allow the government to do anything. Ironically, Western regimes make constant references to preserving the "rule of law" to defeat terrorism, but are not afraid to break the law themselves.

In the US, the people are so determined to protect their Constitution from "foreign" enemies that they don't notice their own government violating it on a daily basis.


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6 November 2015

The Tory housing disaster to come?

The Blog


The UK's Housing and Planning Bill, which extends the “Right to Buy” to housing association properties and forces local authorities to sell off their most valuable stock is a "potential catastrophe", a political analyst predicts.


What the Tories call an "opportunity" is in fact threatening only to "further enhance their poor-beater CV", Steve Topple has argued in an op-ed at the Political Sift political and social commentary blog.

Statistics already show 1.4 million households on social housing waiting lists in 2014, which contrasts with only 43,000 new homes being built. Cameron's UK has also witnessed a devastating 55% rise in homelessness since he came to power in 2010. Calling the new bill "self-serving" Topple predicted such legislation would only worsen these already horrifying statistics.

Agreeing with other commentators that the legislation especially attacks poorer families living in rural areas, with no guarantees of where new housing stock will be built, Topple had the following commentary:
The proposed plans to force local authorities to sell off their most valuable properties looks disastrous, at best. Aside from the fact the government is ignoring the fact many of these properties are adapted for the disabled, it also appears to brush over the serious effect it will have on council’s ability to replace these homes.
In addition, Topple comments that the "Right to Buy" will further inflate the housing bubble, which is projected to burst, although the real victims of the bill will be poor families in desperate need of social housing. Accusing the Tory government of running a "chumocracy", he points out that personal debt is already at record levels, but it will not stop Cameron's regime and his cronies from getting the helpless and the poor further into debt.

Housing Associations have already backed the "Right to Buy" legislation, but Topple urges opposition parties to "do everything in their power to stop this despicable legislation" when it comes to a vote in the Commons.


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13 October 2015

"Brexit" may need to be prior to 2017

The Blog


The European Union is an "undemocratically corporatized leviathan" and a "proxy for the agendas of the Western Establishment".


This is the view of Steve Topple, breaking with the perspective of much of the proclaimed British political left. Captured in an op-ed at PoliticalSift on 9 October 2015, Topple advocates a strategic British exit ("Brexit") from the EU before 2017.

From the op-ed:
Everything else we now recognise – the EEC, free trade agreements, free movement of people, the ECB – have all been installed as nothing more than levers to further (and protect) the rise of globalised capitalism.
Topple quotes Robert Griffiths, who described the EU as a "monopoly capitalist United States of Europe", explaining that it has become an imperialist actor competing at an increasingly military and economic level with other powers. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which the EU and the US have been negotiating, is sure to undermine the rights of workers and the sovereignty of the public by enabling private firms to sue the public (i.e. their national government). Further criticism is aimed at the European Central Bank and the European Court of Auditors, both of them being corrupt as their members belong to the same financial and corporate special interest groups.

The op-ed warns us that in 2017, EU states are projected to lose their veto rights over key areas of legislation. The EU will become drastically more powerful, with a mere 55% approval for a law in the EU resulting in the implementation of the law, thereby potentially being forced down the throats of entire populations protesting such law. According to Topple, this means the surrender of popular self-determination.

Even more worrying is the fact that states will in that year become unable to withdraw from the EU, according to the EU's new rules, Topple argues. Countries will need, again, 55% approval by the other countries in order to withdraw, and their own people's demands are to be excluded from any say in the process.


UK Prime Minister David Cameron promised a referendum in late 2017, after the British people will have lost any sovereign right to withdraw from the EU, if Topple's analysis is solid. While the possibility of unilateral withdrawal would still exist, the EU's increasing federalization and calls to construct an army hint at a possible conflict in the event of such "separatism".

Rather than a pure chauvinist iteration of Britain demanded by rightists as the alternative to the EU, however, Topple advocates a "borderless, socialist union" based on majority citizen interests rather than minority financial interests.


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6 October 2015

"Refugee crisis", anti-Syria propaganda

The Blog


The so-called refugee crisis affecting Europe, as Syrians flee the war zone created by Western states supporting a violent "transition" to fake democracy in their country, is not sudden or unexpected. As one columnist argues, it is deliberate and coordinated propaganda.


According to Steve Topple, writing at Middle East Monitor (MEM) at the very end of September, the supposed crisis may be "stage-managed" to justify more Western involvement in the Syrian Civil War. This involvement is ultimately aiming to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power, which the United States has been attempting to achieve since 2006.

In essence, Western countries have deliberately and maliciously created the refugee "problem" they are now swooping into action to solve. Facts show that only a fraction of the refugees are Syrian and that many others come from other regions affected by US-led Western wars to spread fake democracy in the Islamic world.

Western leaders have portrayed the cause of the refugee problem as ISIL (ISIS, Islamic State, Daesh), rather than Western support for terrorism in Syria, thus suggesting ISIL is their main target, but the real goal of all Western involvement in Syria is to remove the government of Bashar al-Assad. Topple refers to the Wikileaks document exposing how such 'regime change' was US policy throughout the entire crisis and even earlier in 2006.

While UK Prime Minister David Cameron has cried crocodile tears with his statements in the media for Aylan Kurdi (pictured), a Syrian refugee boy who washed up on European shores after drowning in an attempt to reach the continent, "megalomaniac" Turkish President Erdogan does nothing to help the refugees. Erdogan's main goal has instead been to enlarge his tiny "no-fly zone" in the north of Syria, which he sees as a great military conquest over Syria and the Kurds by Turkey.

Topple pointed out that the so-called "Friends of Syria", which includes the Erdogan regime, are cynical devotees of the war in Syria and have no compassion for the Syrian people, supplying nothing but weapons into the embattled country.

War has raged in Syria since Western governments started the Civil War in the country in 2011 to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power. Since that time, these governments have used every channel to lie about the existence of non-extremist armed militants fighting the government, while allowing weapon supplies to reach ISIL and other Takfiri extremists fighting Assad's forces.


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18 September 2015

Topple: press "clowns" attack Corbyn

The Blog


Steve Topple has penned an analysis slamming the UK mainstream media's coverage of Jeremy Corbyn's new leadership of the Labour Party and calling for "boots on the ground" activism to derail public reliance on mainstream media.


An unreserved left wing writer, Topple praised Corbyn's party leadership election campaign as "grassroots activism, social media mobilisation and people telling an Establishment organisation to “get stuffed”". However, there is also a warning that these very modern methods used by Corbyn to win leadership of the party might not work on the whole national electorate.

"It was 251,417 people, to be precise – out of an electorate of 45 million", Topple pointed out. Most people still rely on a couple of mainstream television stations as the source of all their news shaping their worldview.

Topple's conclusion that "editorial rooms are not “cut off” from what the public think – they decide what we think, as has always been the case" resembles the arguments advanced in the booklet Media Control by Noam Chomsky. Namely, the idea that we live in fraudulent democracies in which, rather than deciding on the values of the state and putting the questions to our leaders as citizens of a true democracy would do, we instead get all our information stuffed down our throats and told what to believe.


Since all the questions and options posed to "democratic" leaders are pre-scriped in a studio, it is legitimate to question whether these leaders have any mandate from the public at all. According to Glen Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, the problem is worse in the US regime, but many of the facets of this problem have infected the British mainstream press corps as well.

Contacted for comment on his article, Topple explained his meaning of the "boots on the ground" action. The idea revolves mainly around direct action, including possibly DDOS cyber sit-ins, protest actions and strikes, as well as possible offensive cyber actions by groups like Anonymous.

Steve Topple is an anti-establishment writer, prolific Twitter user and contributor to Common Space who has been a listed brother of the Mont Order dissident society since April 2015.




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