The UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, recently announced that the government just backed down on mandatory digital IDs. This is categorically a victory of the prayers of the Church, which was coupled with much activism and resistance from lawmakers and citizens in the UK, and for this we must truly thank God, and not dimmish what this incredible triumph represents. At the same time, we must remain vigilant and not be ignorant of the enemy’s devices, especially considering that one thing that has been consistent with the proponents of diabolical agendas (from COVID, to the climate change hoax and CBDCs) is that they are unrelenting. As such, today, we will address plans that are also being pursued by diabolical and shadow actors, in light of efforts to build a digital and media control complex, occurring parallel to the announced U-turn on digital IDs. Because digital IDs were one battle in a broader war on individual and mind control.

KIER STARMER ANNOUNCES UK GOVERNMENT’S U-TURN ON DIGITAL IDs

And now onto our main discussion, regarding “The War Against a Digital & Media Control Complex”; and we ought to begin with the UK government’s recent announcement. As alluded to earlier, in a significant policy reversal, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has abandoned the compulsory element of his government’s proposed digital identity scheme. What was once touted as a flagship measure to combat illegal immigration and streamline right-to-work checks will now be entirely voluntary when rolled out in 2029. 

And yet, the original plan, unveiled by Starmer in September 2025 ahead of the Labour Party conference, was unequivocal: individuals would NOT be able to work in the United Kingdom without a digital ID. This was even framed as a tough stance on illegal working, as the policy was said to be aimed at replacing outdated paper-based systems with modern digital verification, ostensibly making it harder for unauthorized migrants to secure employment. Now, what is obviously disingenuous about this is that the immigration crises in various parts of the world were manufactured through the sponsorship of more than lax border security and immigration policies, by entities like the UN and the EU (as has been argued by president Trump and various leaders in Europe, such as Victor Orban). AND SO, digital IDs were not solving illegal immigration, INSTEAD the illegal immigration that was intentionally enabled was being used as a sensitisation tool that would be employed to create legitimacy for digital IDs.

In any case, the September 2025 announcement to make digital IDs compulsory from Kier Starmer triggered immediate and widespread backlash. A parliamentary petition opposing mandatory digital IDs garnered nearly three million signatures, one of the largest in recent history. Privacy advocates, civil liberties groups like Big Brother Watch, and even some Labour MPs voiced deep concerns over potential state overreach, mass surveillance, and data security risks.

Additionally, the scheme was likened to previous failed ID card proposals, including Tony Blair’s scrapped national identity cards from the 2000s. And, as you can imagine, opposition parties also seized the moment, seen with conservative leader Kemi Badenoch mocked the digital ID scheme as a “rubbish policy” during Prime Minister’s Questions, while Reform UK and others hailed the reversal as a win for individual liberty against authoritarian tendencies. 

Now, here’s what (in part) influenced today’s discussion. While it was facing mounting pressure from backbenchers, public petitions, and plummeting poll numbers, the UK government did not just quietly ditch the mandatory requirement, BUT, officials now insist the change is merely a “technical tweak” ahead of full consultation, while emphasizing that digital right-to-work checks will remain, but citizens can use alternative forms of digital documentation – such as e-passports or e-visas – without needing the government’s official digital ID. In a world where it matters who we and our governments listen to, this should sound an alarm. But, before we delve into this, here’s a response that captured the majority sentiment from lawmakers and citizens in the UK, following the announced u-turn.

THE UK GOVERNMENT IS QUIETLY ADVANCING A MORE INTRUSIVE DIGITAL SYSTEM

So, let’s proceed to address what was unsaid, following the announced u-turn on digital IDs. In essence, while the UK government appears to retreat on one front of digital control, a more intrusive system is advancing quietly under the Online Safety Act. This legislation, which received Royal Assent in October 2023 and has rolled out in phases through 2025, and grants the regulator Ofcom significant powers over online platforms. And the most alarming aspect involves the potential for real-time monitoring of private communications.

In more detail, Section 121 of the Online Safety Act empowers Ofcom to require tech companies to deploy so-called “accredited technology” to detect and block illegal content – which they presently frame ad being content such as child sexual abuse material (also called CSAM) or terrorism-related material – in private messages, including on end-to-end encrypted services like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal. This would likely involve client-side scanning: which is analyzing content on users’ devices before encryption (or after decryption), and then flagging what is deemed suspicious material to authorities without a warrant or individualised suspicion.

In light of this, recent developments in early 2026 have intensified concerns. And this is because new regulations effective January 8, 2026, expanded “priority offenses” to include cyberflashing and encouraging serious self-harm, triggering stricter duties. The UK government has thus directed Ofcom to explore these scanning capabilities further, with reports due by April 2026 and potential full enforcement then to follow. In addition, officials have also confirmed intentions to use client-side scanning on encrypted chats, meaning that every message could be checked in real time by the UK government.

But, once again, the same government that has notoriously shielded grooming gangs from accountability, INSISTS that this is all about child protection and public safety, as opposed to mass surveillance, and even claims that no technology currently exists to scan encrypted messages without breaking security – hence the powers remain on hold until “feasible.” But, amid these claims from the UK government, tech companies like Apple, Meta (or WhatsApp), and Signal have fiercely resisted, threatening to exit the UK market rather than weaken encryption, arguing that any scanning creates exploitable vulnerabilities for hackers, criminals, and foreign states. And, not to put tech companies on a pedestal, but their argument is crucial to note because it brings to light what the UK government is pretending to be ignorant of – which is that these measures that they claim are intended at protectionist purposes like catching people consuming and sharing child sexual abuse material CAN be hijacked and corrupted, because they are not impervious to vulnerabilities.

In fact, privacy advocates even warn of a slippery slope: which is that what starts with child sexual abuse material detection could expand to other content, thus eroding the fundamental privacy of personal conversations. As such, your phone, which is supposed to be a sanctuary for private thoughts shared with loved ones, journalists, or dissidents, could become a tool of constant PRE-EMPTIVE oversight.

This then means that, while the digital ID u-turn offers relief, the Online Safety Act’s trajectory suggests a shift toward normalised surveillance. As such, even the “voluntary” label on digital IDs may actually be a tactical pause, while the push for scanning private messages reveals a deeper ambition: which is that the UK government wants to treat ALL digital communication as potential evidence in need of monitoring. 

And so, I do not even think that the UK government was unaware of the risks pointed out by the referenced tech companies. If anything it seems more like they are following the same playbook where they use a valid issue that they worsened to create a sensitisation tool that will be employed to legitimise an authoritarian digital system. For digital IDs, it was illegal immigration. For preemptive oversight on your messages, it is the sexual abuse of children.

HE DIGITAL CONTROL COMPLEX IS BEING MODELLED AFTER THE US’ MK-ULTRA PROJECT

We then ought to bring the US into this discussion, and this is for two reasons. The first reason is that a number of people in the US (including even Republicans) advocate for a form of a digital control apparatus. For example, Texas came very close to adults being mandated to link their IDs in order to be allowed to use Apple services. The second reason we are bringing in the US here is because a number of plans to build a digital control complex are the offspring of the US’s project MKUltra.

For some contextual background, like many horrific inventions, Project MK-Ultra was formulated against the backdrop of war. In particular, during the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies. The project operated from the 1950s until the early ’60s, and was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb.

Some of Gottlieb’s experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD. And, in essence, the chemist Sidney Gottlieb had an objective to create a way to seize control of people’s minds, and was said to have had the epiphany that this would be a two-part process. First, he had to blast away the existing mind; and second, he then had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. Well, he did not get too far on number two, but he certainly did a lot of work on number one.

Now, how his work started was with bringing LSD to America. And as part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MK-ULTRA. Actually, the MK-ULTRA director, (again) being Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.

In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world’s entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control.

Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, who went on to become a purveyor of LSD culture. There was also Allen Ginsberg, the poet who spoke about the value of the allegedly great personal adventure of using LSD – he also got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. Although, of course, he never knew that name.

And so, the CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly, and actually it’s a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended.

THE CIA’S LYSERGIC ACID DIETHYLAMIDE (LSD) EXPERIMENTS

To zoom in on LSD, which is an initialism for the name Lysergic acid diethylamide; it is a psychedelic substance referred to informally as acid and lucy. Additionally, this psychedelic drug is a semisynthetic, hallucinogenic compound derived from ergot, known for its powerful psychological effects and serotonergic activity. LSD is also exceptionally potent, producing its effects at very small doses, measured in micrograms. It induces altered states of consciousness, including visual and auditory hallucinations, and can cause changes in perception, thought, and mood.

Now, as we established, LSD was not only brought to the US by the CIA, but it was also often ingested to unwitting persons in a long line of LSD experiments. For instance, Whitey Bulger (a very notorious crime boss at the time) – he was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people’s long-term reactions to LSD was. Essentially, through Mr Whitey, the CIA was trying to find out if LSD could make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period?

HE CIA HIRED NAZI DOCTORS AND JAPANESE TORTURERS TO LEARN METHODS FOR MK-ULTRA

Well, Whitey Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, “I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me.” And his remarks are not far-fetched. And this is primarily because – in actual fact – MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps! Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.

Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.

By the way, Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early ’50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn’t have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places. Well, CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called “expendable.” They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb the most prolific torturer of his generation. Well, here is Norman Ohler explaining the story of how LSD was studied as a mind-control drug by the Nazis and, later, the CIA.

CRUCIAL: SIDNEY GOTTLIEB HAD RECEIVED PERMISSION FROM HIS SUPERIORS

Now, here’s what I think is crucial to note. Sidney Gottlieb was not some psychotic non-conformist, rather – all his actions were permitted by his superior. Not only that but Gottlieb operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, being Richard Helms, and from the CIA director of the time, being Allen Dulles. Of course, none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. And so, Sidney Gottlieb essentially had a license to torture and kill! He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder, and he never had to file serious reports to anybody! Likely, this is because the mentality from his leadership was that this project is so important — and that mind control, if it can be mastered, would be a key to global world power.

But, not only did Sidney Gottlieb have a licence to torture and kill, he also had an exit plan! The end of Gottlieb’s career came in [1973], when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by [President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records. … However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early ’70s has an impact.

Furthermore, the top-secret nature of Gottlieb’s work makes it difficult to measure the human cost of his experiments, in that we do not have all the information on how many people died (because a number of them did), and also how many lives were permanently destroyed. However, ultimately, Gottlieb eventually concluded that mind control was NOT possible. And after MK-ULTRA was then shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use.

TODAY, MK-ULTRA HAS INSPIRED A DIGITAL CONTROL COMPLEX

Well, as you can imagine, there has been no extensive accountability following MKUltra, and the CIA’s experiments with LSD persisted until 1963 before coming to a fairly anticlimactic end. In the spring of 1963, John Vance, a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff, learned about the project’s “surreptitious administration to unwitting nonvoluntary human subjects.” Though the MK-Ultra directors tried to convince the CIA’s independent audit board that the research should continue, the Inspector General insisted the agency follow new research ethics guidelines and bring all the programs on non-consenting volunteers to an end.

In 1977, Senator Edward Kennedy oversaw congressional hearings investigating the effects of MK-Ultra. Congress brought in a roster of ex-CIA employees for questioning, interrogating them about who oversaw these programs, how participants were identified, and if any of these programs had been continued. The Hearings turned over a number of disturbing details, particularly about the 1953 suicide of Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who jumped out of a hotel window several days after unwittingly consuming a drink spiked with LSD. Amid growing criminalization of drug users, and just a few years after President Nixon declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” the ironies of the U.S.’s troubling experimentation with drugs appeared in sharp relief.

But, now throughout the hearings, Congress kept hitting roadblocks: CIA staffers claimed they “couldn’t remember” details about many of the human experimentation projects, or even the number of people involved. The obvious next step would be to consult the records, but that presented a small problem: those files were destroyed as part of Sidney Gottlieb’s exit strategy!

And the tendency for a lack of accountability is to embolden the offender to see how far they can continue to go without there being any consequence. Which brings us to the status quo, and the testimony from James Martinez, who is ringing the alarm about the deep state building a digital control matrix. In essence, James Martinez has been involved in exposing the work of MKUltra, and was especially noted for contributing nuance of the technological aspects to the project in the 1990s. And now, he is warning of a progression, which is the deep state’s futile efforts at building a digital control matrix.

So, when we consider that the Nazi were interested in LSD because they were paranoid; and the CIA was interested in it for controlling a person’s mind, in pursuit of an avenue for global dominance, it sounds like the motives behind those efforts were never abandoned, but have rather been inherited by a cabal of individuals who are bent on holding nations and people captive – and so, Nazi concentration camps and MKUltra were essentially precursors to a digital control matrix – because the motives are the same.

THE RISE OF QUIETLY BOUGHT “INDEPENDENT” INFLUENCERS

Here is where the media also comes in. In today’s world, many so-called “independent” journalists are being silently purchased, often for six-figure sums, and the vast majority never reveal who’s writing the checks. And I say this not to undermine the importance of independent journalism, but to highlight a threat to this very independence. In more detail, recent revelations and ongoing disclosures highlight a troubling trend: which is that covert influence campaigns, funded by hidden foreign governments and powerful corporate interests, deliberately target audiences through popular influencers, which now even includes independent journalists. These operations dangle lucrative deals – such as cash payments, luxury perks, and ready-made scripts – crafted to mold public opinion while leaving almost no traceable fingerprints, pointing to engineered manipulation.

High-profile examples have exposed how foreign entities have funneled millions into US-based media companies to pay even right-wing commentators for content that amplifies division and aligns with external agendas – often without the creators even knowing the true source. And I remember when this story broke, it was such an awkward conversation for everyone because it was even known conservative commentators that were caught in the middle of the discussion, having been sponsored to have luxurious trips to foreign nations that were lobbying the US for more weapons, for example. But, ultimately, this is to say that even foreign nations are quietly recruiting influencers to push favorable narratives, bypassing traditional lobbying rules that demand transparency.

And by the way, even domestic players are not immune. Dark-money groups and political surrogates pour funds into creators to manufacture the illusion of widespread organic support, whether for candidates, policies, or products. And so, what we see happen is that once outspoken critics of authority are now echoing establishment talking points with eerie consistency, sidestepping even the very censorship fights that genuine dissidents face daily.

As you would imagine, this erosion of trust is insidious. When audiences believe they’re hearing unfiltered, independent perspectives, they lower their defenses. Yet behind the scenes, opinions are bought and sold like sponsored products – except the so-called “product” is your worldview. Not only this, but the result of this scheme has been a fractured information landscape where truth becomes optional, or drowned out by the highest bidder. Real dissent also gets marginalized, while manufactured consensus grows louder.

Written By Lindokuhle Mabaso