Two More Media Outlets Promote Jon Wedger

From a website called the Consumer Watch Foundation:

A former UK Justice Minister is supporting a retired detective who claims Metropolitan police deliberately ruined his life after he tried to expose horrific cases of child sex abuse.

John Wedger claims he was forced into early retirement after a breakdown while working to expose Britain’s perverts.

…Hemel Hempstead MP Sir Mike Penning has given his full support to Wedger in a campaign to protect police whistle-blowers.

….Now Wedger has also made claims about the Satanic abuse of children in the upper echelons of British society, claims investigated for many years by consumerwatchfoundation.com editor Leigh G Banks.

CWF has contacted Sir Mike’s offices on five occasions asking for his views on Wedger’s Satanism claims and to confirm he is still supporting him in his battle. We have not received a response.

Penning’s original statement supporting Wedger is still published on his website, although his silence on Wedger’s more recent claims may indicate some doubt or embarrassment.

The article is written by Leigh G. Banks, apparently a former Fleet Street tabloid journalist; Consumer Watch Foundation appears to be an offshoot of Radio Tatras International (RTI), an English-language online radio station based in Slovakia that he helped to set up. Banks claims to have investigated Satanic Ritual Abuse in the 1980s, and for some reason quoting himself in third-person, he adds in his article that:

“…I worked with an organisation called Reachout.

“One of its clients claimed that since childhood she was being used as ‘factory’ to produce babies for sacrifice by a coven in the North-west of England. Members of the organisation claimed to have rescued at least 70 young people from covens.”

The Reachout Trust is an evangelical Christian “counter-cult” organisation that has been much criticised for its sensationalist claims about occult groups, conflated with “Satanism”.

Banks also appears in podcasts with Rodney Hearth, who runs an online television service called A1R.tv International (formerly A1R.tv Family Focus) through his company “Heaven Sent Productions”. A1R.tv describes itself as “Free Family Safe Worldwide Television”, and it carries a number of channels that stream vintage pop music, jazz, and old films, as well as polemics with titles such as “Pat Condell Tell [sic] The Truth About Islam” and “Nigel Farage Smashes The Irish PM“. Content includes re-uploads from elsewhere but also original material in which Hearth – an evangelical in his 70s – interviews various people. Hearth’s most recent interview is with Wedger, perhaps facilitated through Banks.

Some of Hearth’s interviewees are musicians, while others are activists such as Anglican Mainstream’s Rev. Lynda Rose (on “The Way Sex is Being Taught in Schools“), the American anti-gay obsessive Scott Lively (last blogged here), a certain Cyrus Leone, and numerous items with Greg Jackson of CitizenGo, a “global pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom grassroots organization” that is part of the Spanish HatzeOirl (previously blogged here) – in one conversation, the two men discuss transgender issues under the title “The Liverpool Penis“. For some reason, a talk by Rev. James Leggett of St. James Church in Ryde on “Straight Talk for Gays” appears to have been removed.

Outright conspiracy material on the site includes uploads from the likes of Liz Crokin (blogged here), but it is on social media that a1r.tv really lets it all hang out, promoting itself via the hashtags #QAnon, #GoodbyeDemocrats, #GreatAwakening, #PresidentTrump and #WWG1WGA.

British interest in the “QAnon” conspiracy theory may seem unexpected, but I recently noticed that it forms part of the worldview of a political group called The Peoples Revolution Party. A1R.tv was recently listed as a supporter of a fringe-right “Brexit Alliance” that TPRP was apparently assembling alongside the Democrats and Veterans Party, as I noted here.