Real Left Turns Five in 2026
The 2026 editorial celebrates a milestone, reflects on the current political landscape, announces Real Left’s participation in the ‘Writers Against AI’ campaign, and reveals plans for events we will be hosting later in the year.
The first ever article published on Left Lockdown Sceptics, an editorial entitled ‘Our analysis of lockdown and covid-fascism’, was posted on 11th January 2021. That makes Real Left – established as Left Lockdown Sceptics until our name change at the beginning of 2023 – just over five years old.
Since then, we have published over 350 articles and held ten in person meetings disseminating consistently incisive, original, and outside-the Overton-window analysis, news, and research; work which has attracted mentions in several books (Simon Elmer’s The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State and Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State by David Hughes) as well as featuring in an interview for the 55th edition of the UK’s largest circulating ‘people’s paper’ – The Light.
In that time, the analytical framework scaffolding our opposition to biosecurity fascism, makeup of our membership, and direction of the group have evolved significantly. Notwithstanding these developments, two constants can be identified over our half-decade of operations.
Firstly, our unwavering commitment to radical truth telling as a necessary catalyst for overturning ruling class power – now reaching its zenith through deployment of the colonising and enslaving technologies of the fourth industrial revolution against all organic life.
And secondly, our continued political isolation and marginalisation on the left as anti-capitalist ‘conspiracy realists’: i.e. those who refuse to uncritically accept any of the false narratives perpetuated by those who own the means of mental production, and consequently to betray the interests of the working class, in exchange for respectability, mass appeal, or simply (short term) self-preservation from retaliation by the powerful. This, at a critical temporal juncture of the transhumanist era: the end game of a centuries long brutal and bloody class war waged by the ‘haves’ against the ‘have nots’.
The carrying out of Exercise Pegasus in the UK last Autumn – a national level pandemic preparedness exercise – suggests another simulated contagion emergency may be on the cards in the near future. It remains to be seen whether a detonation of a future pandemic will be the moment the rest of the left (finally) catches up to the fact that the Covid Emperor never had any clothes.
The Epstein files release: a vindication for Covid conspiracists?
On that note, commentators over at the pro-freedom corner of X (formerly twitter) have lately been meme-ing congratulations to those who declined to accept medical advice touted by ‘satanic pedophiles’ during the Covid event. Such sentiments seem particularly apposite for UK citizens, given the conviction of the former head of the UK’s Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for child sex offences in the same fortnight as the Epstein files dump.
The alt-media has been divided over whether or not the files release can be counted as a win for those resisting the Great Reset. Some have argued that the irrefutable evidence of systemic and sustained corruption and criminal activity at the highest rungs of power – including evidence of direct backing by Epstein of specific agendas including the gender industry and plans for pandemic profiteering – may serve to dispel misplaced trust and loyalty towards institutions of power amongst those still mentally and spiritually tethered to the illusion of legitimacy of a thoroughly rotten system. Could this be the threshold concept or ‘awakening’ trigger for some, as lockdowns or 9/11 was for others?
At the very least, might the files provide a common reference point for the existence of systemic corruption and depravity between people occupying increasingly incompatible, algorithmically curated and reinforced, ‘reality tunnels’? Without such shared understandings, engaging in constructive dialogue with those living within fundamentally different stories about how the world works, is rendered an insuperable challenge – yet such communication remains essential to the building of a mass resistance movement.
More pessimistically, it could be reasoned that the fact that the disclosures are receiving heavy coverage in the corporate media should, ipso facto, raise red flags. The opinion piece by ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, on ‘the elite’s corruption and depravity’ in the UK’s largest readership news outlet, the Daily Mail, certainly lends weight to the idea that a steering of our attention is at play. (Although this wouldn’t be the first time that Johnson has opportunistically engaged in diversionary tactics to bolster his own standing.) Some sceptics have contended that technocracy and AI governance are the ‘solution’ poised ready to fill the vacuum of total disillusionment with the current political governing class, in Hegelian Dialectical fashion. Moreover, given that no judicial processes appear to be in motion to prosecute offenders, the evidence drop seemingly equates to little beyond hollow gesture: perhaps more advantageous than damaging to the power network of elite level abusers, due to the impressing of vicarious trauma and feelings of learned helplessness on the wider populace: We can do all this, even in plain sight, and still get away with it.
The billionaire class orchestrated rise of far right populism
In our 2025 editorial we critiqued the rise of the ‘street fascists’ incited by the likes of Tommy Robinson/Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – financed and promoted by the ‘boardroom fascists’ of the public-private partnership – as a ‘dead end diversion’ from the critical work of resisting incoming techno-totalitarianism. This phenomenon, entailing the harnessing and redirection of legitimate anger and desperation at the state’s escalating political repression and deprivation of basic material means of its subjects onto strategic scapegoats, has become only more evident over the year following.
Both Nigel Farage and Yaxley-Lennon’s establishment asset status has recently been (further) cemented by confirmation of their links to Steve Bannon, a puppeteer of ‘The Movement’: a project to interlink nationalist movements worldwide, on whose behalf Epstein worked as ‘host, cheerleader, and fixer’.
Real Left has published research evidencing that, in contrast to propaganda (pushed most aggressively by the Zionist lobby) about the grave threat to Western freedoms posed by Hamas and other factions of radical Islam, it is Israeli founded or connected health-tech and surveillance companies, such as Palantir, that are directly implicated in building a totalitarian panopticon for all UK citizens. It is smart contracts, not sharia law, that represent the genuinely live threat to our basic rights and freedoms.
The mass opposition from across the political spectrum that was mounted to the proposed introduction of Brit Cards – culminating in a petition of nearly three million signatures – resulted in a government climbdown in January, and arguably showed the kind of unifying potential that such attacks on civil liberties inherently carry. Not one of us wants to live a virtual existence; have their movements confined to tiny geo-fenced localities; or be forced to eat a diet of lab-grown/cell-cultivated food stuffs, which is why the establishment continually seeks to redirect our attention to issues that more easily divide along racial, ethnic, or cultural lines.
Any hope of Your Party offering a socialist(ish) alternative prospect to those vulnerable to getting swept up in the far right populist tide, however, has been definitively extinguished since its launch in July last year. Initial sign-up figures of 800,000 have dwindled to just over 40,000 at latest count, thanks to the joint bumblings and missteps of the eternally hapless Corbyn – seemingly too blockheaded to learn from his previous mistakes, instead surrounding himself with the same nest of deep state-allied vipers that sabotaged his Labour leadership – and careerist, bullish and dogmatic Sultana.
Meanwhile, we continue to plug away at Real Left, doing what we can to carry a torch for all our comrades in the class struggle who are discerning enough to comprehend just what it is we must struggle against in the 2020s!
Real left joins ‘Writers Against AI’ campaign
Relatedly, 2026 is being tipped as the year that the impact of AI on white collar jobs becomes critically disruptive. At Real Left, we have noticed the increasing use of Large Language Model generated content proliferating on the Substack platform, along with the appearance of AI bots in the comments section. October 2025 potentially marked a tipping point at which more than half of all online articles were produced by AI, according to one study, surpassing human-written content for the first time. We are likely still in the early stages of ultimate saturation levels, as ever more human intellectual and creative activity is usurped, willingly or otherwise, by AI ‘tools’.
Partly in response to these developments Real Left has decided to join the campaign recently initiated by author Paul Kingsnorth, ‘Writers Against AI’, to resist the deskilling and the dehumanising impacts of AI within the tiny publishing sphere over which we have influence, and to take a stand against the ‘Ignorance machine of Artificial Intelligence’.
In practical terms what this means is as follows:
1. We commit to never using ChatGPT or other AI models to create content ascribed to ‘Real Left’.
2. We will hereafter be asking those who submit articles for publication to declare that they have not used AI in the production of their submitted work, (excepting for research purposes, equivalent to the functionality provided by a search engine) as a condition of our acceptance of the submission.
3. In consequence of 1 and 2, in a positive sense our platform will serve as a space to celebrate the work of writers (and editors) who produce fully human work, created ‘with soul’.
The Writers Against AI campaign is decentralised and non-organised; there are open-source logos available for the use of anyone who wishes to join, with additional ‘Readers Against AI’ designs.
The objection may (justifiably) be raised that such a stance renders Real Left selective in our rejection of technology, since we run an online publishing platform, which utilises IT and the internet. Moreover, since the red line we are drawing lies beyond acceptance of the use of intellectual labour saving devices such as calculators (usurping arithmetic), GPS (replacing map-reading), and computer keyboards (supplanting hand-writing), does this make the endeavour misguided or even hypocritical?
To this we would respond, why should we not be allowed to determine for ourselves which technologies diminish and degrade, rather than enhance, our pursuit of a fully actualised human life? LLM users have already begun testifying about the detrimental effects they have noticed on their own cognitive abilities and will forces. To the extent to which we still retain agency over the ways in which we interact with AI, we feel it is imperative that we continue to exert it.
At a minimum, we hope our adoption of such a stance will provoke conversation and reflection on how consciously, or otherwise, we are adopting and adapting to these technological ‘aids’: technologies which we know are not ‘neutral’ as often flippantly claimed, but developed by the ruling class as enabling instruments of its despicable digital enslavement agenda. Ultimately, every time we use AI we are training our virtual prison guards.
The taking of such a stance on generative AI, by ourselves and others, is an affirmation of the value of conscious, human writing, with its imperfections, pace, and its originality. Arguably, it is the human creative power – a unique capacity, shared nether by other ensouled beings of the animal kingdoms, nor existent in the mechanical and digital realms – which above all else illuminates the human beings proximity to the divine. We know the dark oligarchs are attempting to erase this distinction, and our innate connection to source, through their bioconvergence project, which encompasses the ‘zombifying’ digitisation of human beings and the Frankensteinesque creations of biologically embodied computers. To refuse the outsourcing of our power to think, express, and communicate, is to refuse our silencing and erasure by the machine!
Reminder of the Real Left website
Newer subscribers may not be aware that we have our own website, where all content posted on Substack is mirror published.
We maintained our WordPress site following the move to Substack, specifically for the eventuality that Substack reneged on its initial promise as a censorship free platform. Since its voluntary adoption of age verification for users in the UK and Australia, it has now done so. We plan to maintain dual posting across both channels for now, for maximum visibility, but do not rule out an eventual exodus.
We have not had any reports of age verification blocks preventing access of any of our articles by readers to date, but please let us know if you have encountered this issue. We are currently working through spam comments on the WordPress platform, and it is for this reason that comments are currently disabled on it; feel free to email us your thoughts on any articles though, if you wish to eschew substack (see below address).
Save the date(s)!
Before concluding this editorial, we are pleased to announce two in-person events planned for later this year.
On Saturday 3rd October, we will be holding our annual full day conference on the topic of ‘Critical Fronts of the Class War in 2026’. It will take place in the south of England, with the exact venue to be confirmed nearer the time. In case any supporters need any extra incentive to come, we can reveal on top of our serving free cake for our (belated) Fifth Anniversary, the event will feature several never before platformed (by us) and highly requested speakers! Stay tuned for the release of further details in due course.
Additionally, on the afternoon of Saturday 28th November, Jeremy Naydler, philosopher, cultural historian and anthroposophist, and author of several books including ‘Struggle for a Human Future: 5G, Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things’ will be presenting for us on the subject of technology, totalitarianism and human freedom at a Central London venue.
Putting on well run and well attended real life events necessitates a significant time commitment from a number of individuals. We are always in need of more help than we have! If you would like to get involved in the organising of either event, editing or editorial work, we would love to hear from you. Please drop us a line at llsinbox@posteo.net.
In addition, we are always interested in receiving quality (AI free!) submissions on topics relevant to the group’s political remit. We also republish articles which we feel deserving of a wider audience and welcome suggestions on this front.
Finally, we would like to warmly thank all paying subscribers for your valued contributions. The small income we receive from your subscriptions enables us to pay upfront hire costs for venues, as well as other expenses incurred from hosting events, whilst keeping our ticket prices affordable for all. This includes the provision of some free places for those on very low incomes, who would otherwise be excluded from participation.
We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible later in the year.
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