Thank you David Jensen, Cheech Previti, LeftieProf, 💚🌲Briana Anahata🌲💚, Digital Dopamine LLC, and many others for tuning into my live video with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali! Join me for my next live video in the app.
I had so much fun on this live with Waj! One of my favorite conversations I’ve had on a live to date.
A few of the pieces I referenced during the conversation:
We covered a lot of ground in 45 minutes: how the Iran war mirrors Iraq in ways most people aren’t tracking (not just the foreign policy, but the pattern underneath it, where the same company uses the same windows of war to quietly absorb government data infrastructure while every newsroom is pointed somewhere else). In 2003 with the Iraq invasion, it was Britain’s NHS and identity systems. In 2026, it’s American healthcare, classified military systems, and the largest media merger in history, all landing in the same 17-day window as the bombs dropped in Iran.
We got into the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, why it needed this war, how Larry Ellison is building a media monopoly on top of a surveillance empire, and why Bari Weiss keeps showing up in these conversations. I also hinted at where the ballroom investigation is heading next (stay tuned!).
And we talked about something I’ve been mapping for a while: the UAE funding web connecting sovereign wealth, media acquisitions, and national security exposure that nobody in Washington seems interested in addressing. I told Waj I’d include the diagram I made so you could see the structure we were discussing. Here it is.
Thank you again to Wajahat Ali and the whole team over at THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali for having me on. I hope to see ya again real soon!
Remember: the last time we walked into a war like this, it provided very loud cover for the largest government data grab in modern history, and it took people two decades to fully understand what they lost. This time, you don’t have to wait.
xx Drey
P.s. I also mentioned during the live that if you want to support the people actually fighting data center expansion on the ground, here are two places to start:
Food & Water Watch — they were the first national org to call for a moratorium on new AI data centers and just helped push the Sanders/AOC moratorium bill
MediaJustice — a racial and tech justice organization doing some of the best on-the-ground organizing against data center expansion in the country. Their report "The People Say No" is the first comprehensive regional analysis of how Big Tech is draining communities across the South, and they've published a free organizer toolkit for any community fighting a data center proposal.
