The Torches of Freedom
On January 10, 2026, J.K. Rowling posted an image to her followers on X. It was designed to look like a Soviet-era revolutionary poster of a woman, hair loose and wild, lighting a cigarette from a burning photograph of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the word FREEDOM blazing across the bottom in bold capitals, a mass of hands raised beneath her reaching for deliverance. Rowling’s caption was pre-emptive and absolute to weaponize dissent: “If you claim to support human rights yet can’t bring yourself to show solidarity with those fighting for their liberty in Iran, you’ve revealed yourself. You don’t give a damn about people being oppressed and brutalized so long as it’s being done by the enemies of your enemies.“
The post received 15.6 million views so far.
It was in every sense a Torches of Freedom campaign. In 1929 the American publicist Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, architect of modern propaganda, orchestrated a public relations stunt for the American Tobacco Company in which he paid women to smoke cigarettes during New York’s Easter Sunday parade, briefing the press in advance that they were lighting “torches of freedom.” The genius of Bernays was his understanding that the most durable propaganda does not announce itself. It arrives wearing the face of liberation. It borrows the language of freedom, dignity and women’s rights. In doing so it becomes immune to scrutiny. To question it is to reveal yourself as an enemy of the very values it claims to represent.
Rowling’s caption performed exactly this function. It was not an invitation to examine the image. It was a pre-emptive verdict on anyone who might.
But the image was not what it claimed to be. And the story of how it arrived in Rowling’s timeline and then to 15.5 million people, is a story about the infrastructure of regime change propaganda and the useful role that celebrity liberal feminism plays within it.
It’s not as if Rowling herself is a stranger to the use of propaganda to send a message. It’s not an unknown concept to her, drink in hand, cigar aboard a mega yacht to send a message of her own.
The photograph
The woman in the image is not inside Iran. She is a 23 year old Iranian named Melika Barahimi, a refugee in Canada photographed in a parking lot in Richmond Hill, Ontario, one of the largest Persian diaspora communities in the world, sometimes informally called “Tehranto.” The photograph was taken in September 2022, during the period of the Mahsa Amini protests, though one whose scale and character were substantially distorted by Western media and social media amplification. Setareh Sadeghi, an Iranian scholar and researcher living in Esfahan at the time, told The Grayzone that the protests were far smaller on the ground than their social media footprint suggested, that the Mahsa Amini hashtag was being driven by fewer than 300,000 accounts posting repeatedly rather than mass organic participation, and that violent elements with a regime change agenda had infiltrated and exploited what began as a legitimate grievance. Setarah Sadeghi explains it succinctly,
“Obviously, Iranian women would be very happy if those in exile really wanted to be a voice for women inside, but the thing is they are just echoing the voice of, I would say, a minority and just a section of the population in Iran that they agree with.
I think they also believe in the Western liberal notion of freedom for women, and not the notion- they don’t really care. I’m not talking about everyone, obviously, but some of these people who are given a voice and whose voices are amplified over the voices of women inside Iran, they’re just repeating the Western notion of freedom for women. And they do not understand that women in Iran can have a different notion of freedom, and [that] they have other priorities when it comes to women’s rights and women’s activism.
And a lot of women here are working towards that. They are organizing, they are using online campaigns to pursue Iranian women’s rights. But these voices from outside really make our struggle more difficult. Instead of, for example, calling for the US government or the EU to lift sanctions on Iran that are hurting ordinary Iranian people and making it more difficult for women to find, for example, job opportunities or to just be an active part of the society, they are calling for their own notion. They’re calling for something that they believe would be liberating for Iranian women, but that’s not necessarily the case for the majority of Iranian women. And I personally find it kind of insulting, because it is like you are disregarding and discrediting Iranian women.
Iranian women inside Iran are very powerful. A large proportion of Iranian women—or the majority of Iranian women, actually it’s a high percentage—go to colleges and they’re highly educated. We have women in business, we have women in medicine and universities, and women are a very active part of the society, so they know how to pursue reforms. For example, there is this case. You can see online that there is civil disobedience happening inside Iran without any hashtags or calls from outside, and it is helping women here.”
The image of the Persian Canadian woman circulated through these methods, embedded in threads presenting it as being from inside Iran. It was miscaptioned then, as it would be miscaptioned again three and a half years later. The location was geolocated and confirmed by journalistLuís Galrão on January 9, 2026, the day before Rowling posted, with a Google Maps street view match of the specific parking lot where the photo was taken. On January 13, 2026, the image was formally archived on Perma.cc, a preservation service used by journalists and legal researchers, with the label MISCAPTIONED stamped across it in red.
Rowling’s post remained uncorrected.
The woman’s name on X is “Morticia Addams”, account handle @melianouss, based in Toronto, Ontario. She describes herself as a “radical feminist”, though her politics documented extensively in her own posts suggest she means this in the colloquial rather than ideological sense. Her politics, documented inher own posts, are unambiguous. In November 2025, two months before her photograph became the centerpiece of a global propaganda campaign, she wrote in a public reply: “being whore of Netanyahu is much better than being whore of what the media says about Palestine or any other Muslims.” In separate posts the same month she declared that Palestine “never existed,” that it was “just part of Israel anyway,” and that Palestinian historical claims were fabrications, “your imaginary country.” In a post translated from Persian she wrote: “And may God preserve Netanyahu after walking over your filthy corpses.”
This is the woman whose image J.K. Rowling presented to 15.5 million people as a symbol of Iranian women fighting for their liberty. Her devoted followers accept her perspective as benevolent trust.
She is not a woman risking her life inside Iran under the Islamic Republic. She is a member of the monarchist Zionist Iranian diaspora, the external opposition network that serves regime change objectives from the safety of Canadian suburbs, whose politics align perfectly with the apparatus that manufactured and distributed her image as propaganda.
The Diaspora Pipeline
The image did not reach Rowling directly. It passed through a specific infrastructure before arriving on her timeline, and that infrastructure has a name: Visegrád 24.
What is Visegrád 24?
The name is a signal that most of Rowling’s followers would have no reason to decode. The Visegrád Group, also known as the V4, is a political alliance of four Central European nations: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The alliance was formed in 1991 and takes its name from a Hungarian castle town. In recent decades it has become internationally recognized primarily through one figure: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian Prime Minister who has systematically dismantled democratic institutions, persecuted LGBTQ people, restricted press freedom, and built what he openly describes as an “illiberal state.” Orbán is not peripheral to the current American political moment. The Heritage Foundation has explicitly cited him as the inspiration for Project 2025, the governing blueprint now being implemented by the Trump administration.
Visegrád 24 was created in January 2020, presenting itself as an anonymous collective of conservative friends with an interest in the V4 region. Polish investigative outlet OKO.press spent months unraveling its actual origins, identifying two founders: Adam Starzyński, a Polish journalist who had previously worked for TV Republika a hard-right Polish television channel modeled on Fox News and who ran a popular far-right Twitter account called BasedPoland, which spread anti-immigrant content and expressed admiration for Bolsonaro, Salvini and Orbán until Twitter banned it; and Stefan Tompson, a British-born PR professional of Polish and South African descent, based in Poland, working for TVP, the pro-government Polish public broadcaster. Both men were active in MEGA ( Make Europe Great Again) an informal European movement explicitly modeled on Trump’s MAGA, connected to American alt-right figures including Jack Posobiec and Matthew Tyrmand, a former member of the far-right activist group Project Veritas.
Tompson has been candid about his motivations in ways that are worth quoting directly. He told Jewish Insider that he considers himself a public relations expert, not a journalist. He told The Jewish Chronicle that his support for Israel is not altruism but self-interest, framing Israel as a frontline in a culture war against what he calls the Russia-China-Iran bloc. The Columbia Journalism Review reported that he said he was moved to create Visegrád 24 because of what he described as a hegemony of left-wing journalists producing negative coverage of Central Europe he wanted to provide a counter narrative. This is the stated mission of the operation that manufactured and distributed the image J.K. Rowling shared as journalism.
The Iranian women Visegrád 24 platforms are not random. They are drawn consistently from the monarchist Zionist diaspora network. Jemima Shelley, a Senior Research Analyst for United Against Nuclear Iran, an organization that claims to track Iran’s oil smuggling routes but functions as an international deep state organization part of the Israel Lobby. Shelley also appears on Israeli news outlet i24NEWS, and among the women regularly featured as a contributor who uses feminist iconography while sourcing Foundation For Defense of Democracies as source material. Lisa Daftari, part of the Iranian monarchist diaspora campaigners who appears on Fox News, GB News and Newsmax and writes for the New York Post. She amplifies figures including Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Ambassador Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States. These are not voices of internal Iranian dissent. They are the professional infrastructure of externally driven regime change, and Visegrád 24 is their amplifier.
The account’s relationship with the Polish government was intimate despite official denials. OKO.press documented that Visegrád 24 was regularly tagged and amplified by Polish diplomats, the Prime Minister’s Office, and senior politicians from the ruling Law and Justice party. In October 2022, the Chancellery of the Polish Prime Minister quietly awarded the equivalent of €300,000 to a foundation for a project named Visegrád 24, a decision signed by Prime Minister Morawiecki. The foundation later claimed the grant was cancelled and declined further comment. Tompson declined to answer whether the Polish state had become a funder.
Both Visegrád 24 and its newer spinoff Middle East 24 are now operated through a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit called the Intermarium Foundation, incorporated in Delaware in 2022 and granted tax-exempt status in February 2023. The foundation’s 2024 IRS Form 990, publicly available through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, tells a story that contradicts the foundation’s earlier claims of operating on a shoestring. The filing, signed by Alexandra Tompson, listed as CEO, at an address in Dover, Delaware reports gross receipts of $852,312 for fiscal year 2024, with total expenses of $446,131 and net assets of $436,156 at year end. The Columbia Journalism Review had previously reported that the foundation claimed annual revenue under $50,000. The IRS filing suggests the operation has grown considerably, or that earlier claims about its finances were misleading. The foundation’s stated mission on the filing: “a collection of media outlets, designed to inform the public of current events and news coming from the Central and Eastern European region in the English language. The activities will be fully funded by our donors, and in part by revenue coming from subscription and ad fees.”
Program activities are listed as “subscription and ad fees” and “donations for the cause.” There is no newsroom. There are no named journalists. There is a Pennsylvania nonprofit with $852,312 in receipts, a Delaware registered address, a PR professional’s wife listed as CEO, and a reach, according to its own claims, of seven billion annual impressions on X.
The Record Of Misinformation
Visegrád 24 did not arrive at Iran regime change propaganda directly. It built its audience first on the back of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, growing its follower count by 326% between March 2022 and October 2023. That growth was sustained by a consistent pattern of fabrication: false reports that Leonardo DiCaprio had donated $10 million to Ukraine; a fake story claiming Pornhub had blocked Russian users in protest of the invasion; a video presented as showing a recently mobilized Russian soldier that Reuters traced back to at least February 2021; footage of a fire in Crimea misidentified as a crashed helicopter in Belgorod; footage of English football fans misrepresented as Ukrainians celebrating an attack on the Kerch Bridge. These were not errors. They were a pattern, emotionally resonant stories designed for maximum viral spread with corrections either absent or invisible.
The Gaza coverage followed identical logic. Researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public found that in the three days following October 7, 2023, Visegrád 24 accumulated 371 million views, more than CNN, the BBC, The New York Times and Reuters combined. The researchers placed Visegrád 24 at the top of a group they designated the “new elites” of X, a small number of accounts exercising what they described as disproportionate power and influence over what English language audiences read and understood about the conflict. They noted that Visegrád 24’s content was characterized by emotionally charged imagery, divisive culture war framing, and a near-total absence of sourcing, context or verification. When CNN issued corrections about the false claim that Hamas had beheaded babies, a story Visegrád 24 had amplified, no correction appeared on Visegrád 24’s account.
The University of Washington researchers also noted the structural condition enabling this reach: most of the “new elite” accounts had received direct promotion from Elon Musk through replies, follows or explicit recommendations. When Visegrád 24 was banned from X for violating community guidelines, Musk personally intervened to have the account reinstated. The left-leaning Israeli newspaper The Marker, writing in December 2023, warned its own Israeli readers who had been enthusiastically sharing Visegrád 24 content, that the account spreads a blatant pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine narrative through an operation run by Polish right-wing figures taking an Islamophobic and xenophobic line. Even Israeli journalists were telling their audiences not to trust it.
On January 8, 2026, two days before Rowling’s post, Visegrád 24, @visegrad24 published the photographs on X with the caption: “A new trend has emerged among Iranian women.” The framing was very deliberate. A years-old photo of a woman in a Canadian parking lot was presented as evidence of a spontaneous new wave of resistance breaking out inside Iran. Within hours of that post, AI-generated propaganda posters began appearing in the comments. One, posted at 3:10 PM the same day, rendered the image in the style of a revolutionary poster with the pre-revolutionary Iranian tricolor, green, white and red, but without the Islamic Republic emblem, as the background. That flag is not a neutral symbol of Iranian nationalism. It is the specific flag of the Pahlavi monarchist movement, the faction seeking to restore the dynasty overthrown in 1979. Its appearance in AI-generated artwork circulating in Visegrád 24’s comments within hours of the original post tells you everything about the ideological alignment of the campaign.
By January 10, a more polished version of the poster, the one bearing the word FREEDOM, had been produced and was circulating on X. Also on January 10, Visegrád 24 posted photographs of French activists from an organization called Collectif Nemesis recreating the cigarette-burning gesture, with the caption: “The women of France stand in support with the women of Iran! When will left wing feminists show their support!?” The photographer credited on the post was Alice Cordier, the pseudonymous founder of Collectif Nemesis herself. This was not solidarity. This was a coordinated cross-border propaganda operation, and understanding who Collectif Nemesis actually is explains precisely why they were recruited into it.
Collectif Nemesis is not a feminist organization in any meaningful sense. Founded in 2019, it is a French identitarian group that uses the language of protecting women as a vehicle for anti-immigration and anti-Islam politics, systematically linking violence against women to immigration, disrupting genuine feminist marches with slogans demanding mass deportations, and amplifying its message through media controlled by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, including CNews and Europe 1. French researchers have described its strategy plainly as “propaganda agitation – making a lot of noise with few resources.” It claims 300 activists. Visegrád 24 presented them as the voice of French women.
Investigative threads by French journalist Ricardo Parreira established that Alice Cordier wears clothing from a brand whose early posts featured Wehrmacht K98 bayonets alongside religious iconography, a brand popular among French identitarians and neo-Nazis. A fellow Nemesis activist was photographed wearing a “Defend Europe” t-shirt bearing a Kalashnikov, a slogan rooted in European fascism.
Members of this organization have been photographed with the Israeli ambassador to France, which has lent to French observers suspicions that Israel is footing the bill for their brand of activism. The ideological contradictions dissolve the moment you understand what unites them, not feminism, not concern for Iranian women, but Zionism and a shared anti-Islam framework that makes Iran the perfect propaganda target. For Collectif Nemesis, Iran is not a country with women whose lives matter. It is Islam made geopolitically exploitable through misinformation campaigns of the domestic enemy projected onto a foreign state, useful for the same purposes abroad that anti-immigration politics serves at home.
Cordier has been explicit about her ambitions. In an interview with The European Conservative, itself a far-right publication, she described building a pan-European network of what she calls “conservative feminism,” with branches in Switzerland and Belgium already established. She expressed admiration for the British gender-critical movement, noting that Britain is “ahead” on the trans issue, a direct reference to the TERF ecosystem that J.K. Rowling inhabits and that Rowling’s business manager Neil Blair is institutionally embedded in through his extensive work with the UK Israel lobby. That ecosystem has its own transatlantic academic infrastructure. Fairer Disputations, a “sex-realist feminist” journal published by Arizona State University, functions as the respectable intellectual face of this network, its contributors include Helen Joyce, founder of Sex Matters, Economist Editor, author of Trans and published by Viktor Orbán’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium press, and multiple figures with direct connections to the Danube Institute, also Orbán backed, and to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 advisory board. The line from Cordier’s street-level identitarian activism to Rowling’s celebrity platform runs through this network of think tanks, academic journals and government-backed institutions that provide the ideological scaffolding for what presents itself as feminism. Cordier also cited Génération Identitaire, a French identitarian movement dissolved by the government for inciting racial hatred, as one of her primary inspirations.
The relationship between Tommy Robinson and Collectif Nemesis is not a matter of ideological inference. It is documented, reciprocal, and physical. Nemesis founder Alice Cordier has publicly campaigned for Robinson’s release from prison on multiple occasions, addressing Elon Musk directly in January 2025 with the hashtag #FreeTommyRobinson, and falsely posting in July 2024 that Robinson was imprisoned merely for exposing the failures of the British government on grooming gangs. In October 2024, Nemesis members traveled to London to speak at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally, photographed on his stage. Robinson has been unambiguous about what he sees in them. In July 2025 he declared Nemesis and Women’s Safety UK “true feminists actually fighting for women.” Robinson’s actual relationship with the protection of women and children is perhaps better illustrated by a different episode: when he shared a TikTok of a Black grandfather playing in the park with his white granddaughters, his followers descended on the family. The man, Olajuwon Ayeni, was racially abused and falsely labeled a paedophile. The Guardian covered it. The feminism, it turns out, is as racially selective as the concern for children.
Collectif Nemesis claims neutrality on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while naming “Islamist barbarism” as the singular source of women’s suffering across Iran, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Israel, erasing every other perpetrator, including the Western bombs that killed Iranian schoolgirls, the Israeli strikes that killed Palestinian women, and the Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons without charge before a single rocket was fired on October 7. Neutrality that only sees one enemy is not neutrality. It is a position.
What connects Robinson to Nemesis to Visegrád 24 is not merely a shared hostility to Islam and immigration, though that hostility is real and consistent across all three. It is a coherent ideological formation: anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, pro-Israel, pro-white nationalist, and anti-trans, the last of these functioning as the current domestic front through which this politics gains entry into liberal and feminist spaces it could not otherwise penetrate. They are also, in the specific Iran context, pro-Pahlavi, not pro-Iranian women in any meaningful sense, but pro the Iran that would emerge from a successful Western backed monarchist restoration, the client state that would serve Israeli and American imperial interests in the region as the Shah did before 1979. Their solidarity with Iranian women is solidarity with the Iranian women who want the right Iran. The women inside Iran organizing for reform on their own terms, who want sanctions lifted rather than bombs dropped, who do not share the monarchist diaspora’s politics. Those women do not exist in this network exactly as Setareh Sadeghi describes. The woman in the parking lot in Richmond Hill, with her posts denying Palestinian existence and invoking Netanyahu’s blessing over the corpses of his enemies, is not incidentally but perfectly the face they chose.
The rings of influence ripple outward from Rowling’s platform, each circle presenting itself as feminist, each one using the language of women’s protection to launder an agenda that has nothing to do with women and everything to do with Islam as the designated enemy: the gender critical movement in Britain, the identitarian feminists of France, the anti-Islam intellectual circuit of America.
To understand how that American ring was selected, and who chose it, is to understand the entire apparatus this piece has been tracing.
The connection between Hirsi Ali and Robinson is not merely ideological. Robert Shillman funds Robinson’s £10,000 monthly salary directly. He funds Hirsi Ali through the Clarion Project. Unlike Kellie-Jay Keen, Collectif Nemesis, and Women’s Safety UK, she provides the academic and intellectual scaffolding for what they execute through direct action on the streets.
The American ring of this network has no grassroots. It has a manufactured face, selected not because she speaks for American women, or for Black women, or for Muslim women, but because she cannot be easily accused of hating any of them. Though she freely attacks liberal white women with full support from a right wing audience. For Black women in America, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a non-entity. For Somali-American communities she is a threat. For Iranian women inside Iran she is an instrument of the war being dropped on them. For the Zionist billionaire infrastructure and the Christian nationalist right that elevates and deploys her, she is invaluable as the tokenized Black Muslim woman with a fabricated survival narrative that pre-immunizes everything the network wants to say about Islam from the charge of racism or bigotry. This is the specific function Max Blumenthal has termed the Gusano Industrial Complex; the exile class, displaced and professionally aggrieved, serving imperial regime change operations from the safety of Western capitals against the countries and communities they claim to represent. She is one of its most expensively maintained instruments.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali left Somalia at nine. She spent her formative years in Nairobi, where her family established a relatively “comfortable upper-class life” and where she attended the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School, an institution whose staff noted with pride that its graduates became doctors and lawyers, and noted with rather less pride that Hirsi Ali did not graduate. She left Kenya at twenty-two, not from war, not from the Islamic Republic, not from any of the regimes she now testifies against as an expert witness on Fox News, Sky News and GB News, but from a marriage she didn’t want, using a false name, a false age, and a fabricated asylum story she later admitted on camera: “Yeah, I made up the whole thing.” The Dutch state gave her asylum in five weeks, a university education at Leiden, and a seat in parliament. The immigration minister who would have deported her told her so to her face. She was not deported. She was too useful. She has been too useful ever since.
This is the pragmatism of a professional apostate; She calls her first book The Son Factory, a treatise on how Islam uses women’s bodies as demographic instruments, as vessels for producing sons for a patriarchal religious project. She has spent the decades since in the paid service of movements that use women’s bodies as demographic instruments, such as Zionist institutions that measure Jewish survival in birth rates, Christian nationalist networks whose political program depends on restricting women’s reproductive autonomy to increase the white Christian population. She identified this mechanism in Islam and built a career on naming it. She has never named it anywhere else.
Funded by the Kovner Foundation, the Loeb Foundation, the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Los Angeles, and Nina Rosenwald’s Abstraction Fund documented on IRS Form 990 from 2018 onward her AHA Foundation exists to present the political agenda of the same Zionist billionaire infrastructure running beneath every ring in this network as a women’s rights organization. Rosenwald, identified by the Center for American Progress’s Fear Inc. report as one of the seven primary funders of America’s Islamophobia network, does not fund Hirsi Ali in isolation: the same Abstraction Fund maintains annual grants to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, whose Shillman Fellowship funds Tommy Robinson’s £10,000 monthly salary; the Investigative Project on Terrorism; Gatestone Institute, which Rosenwald founded and to which she contributed in excess of $800,000 in a single year; the Middle East Forum, which organized Robinson’s rallies and paid his legal fees; and Friends of United Hatzalah Inc, the American arm of the organization whose British branch is chaired by Neil Blair, Hirsi’s literary agent . She is Executive Producer of the Clarion Project’s Honor Diaries, promoting the view that Islam is inherently anti-women, produced by an organization founded out of Aish HaTorah infrastructure and funded at $18.4 million by the Donors Capital Fund, with additional documented support from Rosenwald’s own foundation. She is a founding faculty fellow of the University of Austin, conceived by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale alongside Bari Weiss and Niall Ferguson, funded by Harlan Crow, Jeff Yass, Peter Thiel, Len Blavatnik, Joseph Edelman and Bill Ackman, whose donor surge came explicitly after October 7 from people “horrified” by campus responses to the Gaza genocide, and restructured in April 2025 around mandatory principles including, by Lonsdale’s own instruction, anti-Islamism. She testified before a Republican Senate committee in 2017 using a statistic that Muslims are responsible for 70 percent of global violence, which the think tank she attributed it to confirmed they never produced. She blamed multiculturalism for driving Anders Breivik, who cited her work in his manifesto alongside Gatestone writers, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer, all recipients of Rosenwald’s documented annual philanthropy, “no other choice but to use violence,” and received a standing ovation. Rosenwald continued funding them all afterward.
In March 2026 she publicly thanked Tommy Robinson for his “sacrifice and courage.” Four days later he filmed their meeting. In the pre-interview exchange, she described a crowd of young Americans, “they’re all white, they’re male, and I love it all”, dismissed his documented criminal record with “blah blah blah,” and declared that Robinson, Elon Musk, and herself share “the same spirit.“. Brigitte Gabriel, founder of America’s largest designated anti-Muslim organization, had been at the same event moments before, a convergence that was not incidental. Gabriel, Hirsi Ali, and Robinson are all documented recipients of Nina Rosenwald’s philanthropy, their shared institutional infrastructure funded by the same heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune. Hirsi Ali through the Clarion Project and the AHA Foundation, Gabriel through ACT for America, and Robinson through the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
She imported the “family voting” panic; the claim that Muslim patriarchs march families into polling booths and dictate their votes, generated by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK after losing a special election by over 4,400 votes, investigated by Greater Manchester Police, and found to have no evidential basis whatsoever into American political commentary on GB News as expert testimony about Somali-American democratic participation. The same week, she appeared on Sky News calling the American bombing of Iran “Operation Epic Fury,” describing Trump’s bombs as divine judgment delivered upon the mullahs, naming Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son, the monarchist restoration candidate whose flag appeared in Visegrád 24’s comments within hours of the original post as Iran’s legitimate future, and urging European governments to close their borders to the Muslims being displaced by the war she was celebrating. “You’re either with America or f_k off,” she told them, an extension of Trump’s own rhetoric in response to the lack of support for this unlawful war.
Globalization has been the biggest threat to the working class white male and his neighborhood. When you talk about these rape gangs and grooming gangs, etc., the way these neighborhoods have been transformed, the people who are affected the most are that group. And the fact that they are standing up now and forming their own organizations, their own political organizations is something I applaud because they no longer can rely on existing political organizations. Nobody speaks for them. That street movement is the most important movement. They are the ones who have been displaced and threatened. Therefore, they have to form their own organizations and they have to walk into the corridors of power on their own terms. That’s very healthy. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In the world according to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, White men seeking justice and representation out on the streets in defense of their values and way of life are the only protestors that aren’t Marxists.
Like her other UATX colleagues, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made her way to the ideal model of what they all strive for..
Rod Dreher has spent five years as a fellow at the Orbán-funded Danube Institute before moving to Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. The pipeline from Budapest to the American neoconservative media ecosystem runs directly through the people amplifying Hirsi Ali’s words.
The pattern of ingratiation is consistent, documented, one-directional, unreturned, persistent. She does not engage as a peer. She performs demure child-like gratitude upward, toward whomever can extend the exemption that keeps her in the room. Which is most often white men, who reference her as the most desirable version of what a feminist voice should sound like. She has spent her adult life becoming indispensable to people who would deport her as a nomad immigrant of six countries, who exploited the system through fraud and deception for citizenship, protection, education and social standing. The transaction is simple: she tells them what they need a Black former Muslim woman to say, and they tell the world she is wise and brave. Less useful immigrant black Muslim women are currently housed in warehouses across the United States, in contrast to Ayan Hirsi Ali, their children with American birthright citizenship, taken from them.
Setareh Sadeghi, an Iranian scholar living in Esfahan, told The Grayzone what Iranian women inside Iran actually need: not bombs, not Reza Pahlavi, not what has been renamed by Iranians as ‘Operation Epstein Fury’, through Max Blumenthal, but the lifting of the sanctions that make it harder for women to find work, to build careers, to pursue the reforms they are already organizing for, without hashtags, without diaspora direction, without a Tel Aviv marketing firm calculating their propaganda value. Iranian women, Sadeghi says, are highly educated, active, powerful, and their struggle is made harder, not easier, by the voices the West amplifies over them. Hirsi Ali, speaking from her secured residence on behalf of her Zionist donors, has spent thirty years amplifying exactly those voices. She did not escape Islam. She escaped a marriage she didn’t want, from a safe country, on a UN scholarship, using a false identity. What she has been running toward, in every country she has occupied since, is the next patron with the power to keep her in the room as long as she rallies against the system she exploited and abused as “one of the good ones”.
Ayaan Hirsi was chosen as the American representative of feminism, unthreatening to the power structure and special interests Helen Joyce serves as a then editor of The Economist. .
Her credibility inside British gender-critical circles flows directly through Helen Joyce, Economist editor, founder of Sex Matters, author of Trans, who provided her book’s most prominent endorsement blurb and appeared on her podcast at publication. What that relationship obscures is instructive. Joyce, as Britain editor of a publication whose most significant minority shareholder was the Rothschild family, travelled to America in February 2020 to interview Jennifer Bilek, the American feminist journalist who had been documenting the billionaire donor infrastructure behind the medicalization of gender since 2013, without institutional salary, without think tank backing, without foreign allegiances. Bilek had followed the money further than anyone. Joyce used her research without attribution, then publicly dismissed her as a conspiracy theorist, protecting from her book’s pages the one major donor Bilek had not yet named, and whose political infrastructure would later arrive to redirect the gender-critical movement away from the billionaire donor class entirely and toward the culture war those donors preferred. The woman who did the actual work was erased. The woman who served the system was platformed. Hirsi Ali, funded by that same donor class, endorsed the result. At the end of this chain, on Hirsi Ali’s own platform, Joyce called Rowling “my heroine.” She is not in Rowling’s timeline. She is in Rowling’s ecosystem, one degree through Helen Joyce, one degree through Neil Blair, who is her agent at The Blair Partnership, and who manages the distance between what this network does and what Rowling can be seen to endorse.
The commonality binding every patron she has served is a term she deploys with the precision of a marketing campaign: “Judeo-Christian civilization.” The phrase is not ancient, nor foundational to the United States. Coined in 1820s England to describe Jews who accepted baptism, repurposed by the American left to oppose fascism, conscripted into Cold War anti-communism, then handed to Reagan Republicans as civilizational cover for settler colonial manifest destiny it is a serial instrument, borrowed by whoever needs an ancient name for a contemporary power arrangement. Not unlike her force-teaming with Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk “we are the same spirit” as application for membership in a white nationalist network built on anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim politics. She arrived in the United States in 2009. The generational reckoning with slavery, with indigenous genocide, with the moral cost of manifest destiny up against Quaker conscience, the abolitionist tradition, the religious objection that runs through American history from inception. None of that is hers to redefine. She inherited none of it, lived none of it, and is now recontextualizing it wholesale to justify its repetition as a Zionist project in Israel. When descendants of original U.S. settlers object to Israel’s settler colonialism precisely because they have reckoned with what that logic produces, she labels it radical Marxism. Carrie Prejean Boller drew on that same American religious conscience to refuse to sanctify Zionist colonialism and the corresponding ethnic cleansing that ideology requires when she took part in the White House Religious Liberty Commission, She was removed within the month. Hirsi Ali adopted Christianity as a strategic credential by her own near admission, a weapon in what she called a civilizational war. It enhanced her authority and opened doors. Carrie Prejean Boller converted to Catholicism and let that faith lead her to refuse what Hirsi Ali was hired to sanctify.
The effort required to establish forced team tactics through different cultural accents, different aesthetics, and beneath every ring, the same foundation: each movement funded by, aligned with, or directly serving the Israeli lobby and its Zionist billionaire infrastructure. Feminism is always the point of entry. The colonization is always the point. This is the “solidarity with Iranian women” that Visegrád 24 manufactured and packaged on January 10, 2026, the same day J.K. Rowling posted the AI poster to 15.5 million people. Not Iranian women. Not French women. A Zionist-aligned identitarian operation with documented sympathy towards other right wing nationalists, 300 activists, and a shared agenda with the Polish propaganda machine that produced the image in the first place all of it dressed in the language of feminist liberation, all of it pointing at Iran.
Always Read The Replies
The replies to Rowling’s post told their own story. Journalist Max Blumenthal, responding directly under her post, identified it precisely: “A billionaire fiction writer tweets an AI rendering of a photo of a monarchist fanatic in Canada. It is then algorithmically astroturfed by the ultra-Zionist defense contractor who owns this site. A perfect symbol of the current round of Iran regime change psy-ops.” Journalist Vanessa Beeley drew the historical line that Rowling’s framing was designed to prevent: “How did these BS campaigns work out for women’s rights in Afghanistan? Or in Syria, where you actively campaigned for regime change and the ethnic cleansing slaughter now being carried out by Jolani? Go sort out your own fascist regime.“
Soroosh Ghorbani stated the central hypocrisy with surgical precision: “The bitter irony is that those responsible for butchering over 160 schoolgirls in Iran, and those who supported or lacked the backbone to condemn it, are now cynically posing as defenders of Iranian women.”
Rowling did not engage with any of these responses substantively. She did respond to a reply accusing her of being “a shill for Jewish supremacy“, which she immediately weaponized as antisemitism with: “Iranian citizens braver than you could dream of being are sacrificing their lives in the fight for their own liberation, and all you can find to say is ‘it’s the Jews’ fault.‘” The move was effective and deliberate: take the reply that most accurately identified what she was doing, reframe it as hatred of Jewish people, and use that reframing to immunize the entire propaganda operation from scrutiny.
This is the pattern. Not ignorance. Not carelessness. A woman with 14 million followers and a documented relationship with the monarchist Iranian diaspora network, amplifying a fabricated image produced by a Polish PR operation with $852,312 in annual receipts and a mission to reshape how Western audiences understand the Middle East, and then using the cover of antisemitism accusations to immunize herself against accountability.
Rowling has mourned Iranian fans by name. In February 2026 she posted condolences for Sina Ashgbousi, a young Iranian Harry Potter fan, writing: “My deepest condolences to all who loved him. Rest in peace, Sina Ashgbousi.” She presents herself, and is received by her followers, as someone with a particular emotional bond with certain fans, especially young people who don’t fit in. Those who find refuge in her books, who look to her as an ally. Her emotional bond with young fans is real. It is also known, mapped, and deliberately activated. Sana Ebrahimi, her Pahlavi flag visible in her header, knew the pattern when she brought Sina to Rowling’s timeline. Visegrád 24 had featured his story four days after distributing the miscaptioned photograph Rowling had already amplified without correction. It is worth noting that Rowling is an extraordinarily valuable asset. In 2020, a Tel Aviv-based marketing firm identified her as the forth most important pro-Israel influencer in the world, after Bari Weiss, Sheryl Sandberg and Gal Gadot, the highest ranked non-Jew on the list. A celebrity of her reach, with a genuine emotional connection to fans, who can be relied upon to amplify the right narrative at the right moment, is not an accident of the network. She is one of its most powerful tools.
Sana Ebrahhimi is a Zionist Monarchist influencer who supports the US/Israeli war on Iran.
Of all the commentary J.K. Rowling has posted in relation to Iran, she said nothing of the Iranian school children killed by American bombs at the behest of Israel while still engaged in peace arrangements. The first casualties of the current war. Not one word.
“It’s not their concern what Iran does and how we advance our human rights struggles, women’s rights struggles. Iranians have proven time and again that they have agency and the power to materialize the changes they want to see.” – Helyeh Doutaghi , human rights lawyer and creator of Still, Minab — a documentary testimony of the Minab Massacre of February 28, 2026, in which a US and Israeli strike on Shajareye Tayebe School killed 155 people, including children between the ages of six and twelve.
Lit up and liberated for Western propaganda. Lit up and liberated by Western bombs