Who is Katherine Long?

Marko Elez. If that name means anything, you might spend a little too much time on the internet. Elez is a whizz kid at DoGE, the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, which is currently taking a flamethrower/bazooka/heavy weapon of your choice to whole departments of the federal government. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from politicians, journalists and common-garden liberals everywhere.

On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal article uncovered some embarrassing tweets Elez had made on an anonymous account, and he was forced to resign his post.

What Elez said was no doubt offensive to some — “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” “normalize Indian hate” — but isn’t that always the way? Hardly more offensive, I’d say, than the sort of bile that pours forth from the average college graduate reared on a dyspeptic diet of Ibram X. Kendi and books such as Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People about Race — and it doesn’t harm their career prospects. Not one bit.

What to do with Marko quickly became a test case for the newly enthroned American right: would Pavlovian conditioning kick in and force the usual cringing apologies and concessions? It appeared, for a time, as if it had. Then, after much outcry, DoGE head honcho Elon Musk did one of his polls. Should Marko Elez be reinstated? Elon likes to do this when he knows the outcome is a foregone conclusion — and it was. Marko was back in by a landslide. “Vox populi, vox Dei,” as the billionaire from South Africa likes to say. Soon, Musk had the support of Vice President J.D. Vance, and now he has the support of the president. So it looks like the matter is settled. Marko’s coming back.

Anyway, my interest in the case isn’t so much as a litmus test for whether the much-vaunted “vibe shift” really has happened, as it is a personal connection to the woman who did the dirty on Marko: Katherine Long.

Back in July of last year, while I was still an anonymous poster and writer under the name “Raw Egg Nationalist,” Ms. Long sent an email to one of my local farm shops asking the owner to reveal my personal details to her so she could tell the whole world who I really am.

I discovered this one day when I rocked up to the shop to buy some eggs and artisan cheese. As I entered the shop through the beaded curtain, the owner rushed out from behind the counter waving a piece of paper. “Charlie, Charlie: look at this!”

This is what the piece of paper said:

Hello, My name is Katherine Long.

I’m a journalist for Business Insider. I’m on a reporting quest and I believe you may be able to assist me. I have been interested for some time in an influential blogger named Raw Egg Nationalist. Though he is from the UK, he is increasingly prominent here in the US, where he has affiliations with a well-funded think tank, the Claremont Institute, and has been featured in a Fox News documentary. His primary thesis is that men should eat more raw eggs and more raw milk as part of an ethos of vigorous white, male nationalism based on what he describes as traditional values.

I’m emailing you because, based on photos he has posted on social media, I believe he does much of his grocery shopping — or, at least, he did, at one point — at X farm shop. Do you or any of your staff know of a man who regularly buys large quantities of eggs and milk? (By “large quantities,” I mean dozens of eggs a week — he claims to eat more than 10 raw eggs a day.) If so, I would be very grateful if you could pass along his name. I am happy to keep our conversation confidential, i.e. I would never tell anyone how I had learned his name.

I expect this is not a typical email for your farm shop to receive! I am happy to chat over the phone to share more about my reporting and why I think this person is of such particular interest. I am reachable on Signal at…

Warmly, Katherine

I left the farm shop a little shaken, with the cheese and eggs I’d come for and also a whole heap of questions I hadn’t. I considered it a lucky escape — yes, I had been sloppy and posted an image of a raw-milk carton whose label was still partially visible — but I didn’t think anything more would come of it. I’d tighten my Twitter security and carry on as before.

Two weeks later, I was “doxxed” — had my personal information revealed — by a left-wing activist organization called “HOPE not hate” that has ties to the British government. Hundreds of thousands of taxpayer pounds have been given by successive governments, including Conservative ones, for “anti-extremism” training by HOPE not hate.

I knew this already, so I decided to revisit the email to the farm shop. Could it really just have been a coincidence? Who is Katherine Long?

In the end, I wrote a long article about what I found out about Katherine Long and HOPE not hate. I called it “Disrupting the Right,” because it’s my belief that governments across the Western world collude with journalists and activist organizations to target right-wing figures, including anonymous figures like myself. When journalists and activists produce accounts for the general public they often use a technique called “parallel construction,” by which they fabricate a plausible story to explain how they obtained information that was given to them by intelligence services or using illegal means (or both).

I don’t know if Katherine Long is an intelligence contact. But I looked in detail at publicly available information, including her LinkedIn profile and puff pieces about her work experience, and quickly came to the conclusion that she was precisely the kind of person to could be an intelligence contact in the media. To use internet-speak, she glows. She’s an Ivy League grad, with a BA in Middle East studies focusing on Iran. She did a seven-month internship at the State Department, monitoring Iranian arms shipments. Then a USAID posting in Tajikistan. She’s fluent in Farsi and Tajik. I have no morals qualms about reiterating this information here since she did the same to me.

We shouldn’t be over-conspiratorial about people such Katherine Long. She might just be a fanatical left-liberal with an obsessive hatred of the online right. But we shouldn’t be naive, either. It’s been known for decades that Western intelligence services plant stories and guide public opinion.

Despite high-profile disavowals like the Church Commission Report in 1976, it’s quite obvious this sort of government messaging dressed as independent media has been going on for a long time and is unlikely to stop. In the UK it’s even got a special name: “controlled spontaneity.” Look it up.

So it was interesting to see Katherine Long reappear with a high-profile hit piece just as the new Trump administration was going to town on USAID.

The regime — call it the deep-state if you will — is under threat. Over the past week, as the Trump administration and DoGE have wrested control of government from the claws of their enemies, we’ve seen a deluge of revelations about where and what US money is being spent on via USAID. $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language;” $20 million for a Sesame Street show in Iraq; $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala; $2.1 million to help the British Broadcasting Corporation “value the diversity of Libyan society;” $6.3 million for “men who have sex with men” in South Africa… I could go on, and on, listing insane project after insane project, all financed with US taxpayer money. Your money.

USAID funds, for instance, went to Black Lives Matter and helped pay for the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020 that killed dozens, cost up to $2 billion to the insurance industry and helped swing the election result that year. USAID is the system Trump was elected to burn down.

Katherine Long’s story about Marko Elez was her first at the Wall Street Journal. At some point recently, she deleted her Twitter history and the archived versions of it. That’s odd, to say the least.

Thankfully, it doesn’t really matter. Stock in journalists has probably never been lower. If the Marko Elez case is any indicator, cancel culture is dead, or scheduled for a visit to a euthanasia clinic very soon. Journalists will have to find something else to do instead of ruining promising young men’s lives. Maybe they should learn to code. Remember that? Ha ha.