Bartholomew's Notes

At Foreign Policy, Justin Ling discusses Glenn Greenwald’s extrapolation from evidence given by U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland to Marco Rubio concerning biolabs in Ukraine:

Writer Glenn Greenwald, increasingly aligned with far-right polemicists, spun an imaginary narrative where Rubio was “visibly stunned,” characterizing Nuland’s comments as confirmation of U.S-controlled or created biological weapons in Ukraine.

Greenwald’s theory was quickly endorsed by Fox News host and de facto voice of the American far-right Tucker Carlson. Carlson dismissed the idea that QAnon (“whatever that is,” Carlson said) was responsible for the original theory—despite the theory’s originator being a longtime QAnon follower. Carlson declared Nuland’s testimony confirmation that “the Russian disinformation they’ve been telling us for days is a lie, and a conspiracy theory, and crazy, and immoral to believe is, in fact, totally and completely true,” he said. “Woah.”

Greenwald also cited the story as evidence that “disinformation” trackers cannot be trusted, and he responded to criticisms that he was spouting Russian propaganda by denouncing “drooling McCarthyite cretins like @peterjukes”. Of course, for characters such as Greenwald the way to deal with apparently new information is to assimilate it into a pre-existing narrative, rather than to Google around for a bit and look for the actual wider context. In this instance, Russia and Greenwald also capitalised on an increasing sense among the public that biolabs are inherently sinister and nefarious, a view engendered by sensationalising articles about the origins of Covid-19.

The reality – that US funding assisted Ukraine with upgrading legacy ex-Soviet institutions involved in useful pathogen research – has now been dealt with in detail across the mainstream media, including even on Fox News itself (see also here).

One particular line of bogus intrigue that caught my eye was in a post by Natalie Winters at Raheem Kassam’s National Pulse, which referred to a “deleted” page on a site called BioPrepWatch.com. That page featured a brief news item from 2010 called “Biolab opens in Ukraine”, which included the following details:

U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar applauded the opening of the Interim Central Reference Laboratory in Odessa, Ukraine, this week, announcing that it will be instrumental in researching dangerous pathogens used by bioterrorists.

…Lugar said plans for the facility began in 2005 when he and then Senator Barack Obama entered a partnership with Ukrainian officials. Lugar and Obama also helped coordinate efforts between the U.S and Ukrainian researchers that year in an effort to study and help prevent avian flu.

This is all consistent with information that is easily available online, and the piece itself is obviously derivative of some press release (the article is attributed to one “Tina Redlup”, but this is probably a house name for a team tasked with generating all kinds of “bio”-related news content). The only reason that anyone would bother to refer to it now is because its deletion might appear suspicious – but for the fact that all of the site’s old news content was deleted in 2017, before the site was revamped in 2020.

Meanwhile, the academic Marc Owen Jones has done a cluster analysis of Twitter accounts. He found a “few tight clusters mentioning biolabs, and seemingly helping push the conspiratorial narrative including numerous Americans, such as @JackPosobiec @ChuckCallesto @bennyjohnson”. There is also further analysis by Kate Starbird.

UPDATE: Greenwald’s interpretation has also been amplified on YouTube by Russell Brand, a middle-aged former comedian turned conspiracy-peddler.

UPDATE 2: At GB News, Mark Steyn gave a monologue titled “Wuhan 2.0?”, which was afterwards re-uploaded by RT to Gab. As summarised by RT on the same post:

Steyn’s eight-minute speech targeted Dr Anthony Fauci’s involvement and apparent cover-up of US gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and slammed the “court eunuchs of the legacy media” for insisting the Ukrainian biolabs were innocent.

UPDATE 3: A useful debunking thread has appeared on Twitter by Olga V. Pettersson, a Russian geneticist living in Sweden. It is in Russian, but has been translated into English by Ilya Lozovsky, senior editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

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A sensational allegation from Julie Bindel on Unherd:

Pornhub has a new category: “Ukrainian girls and war rape videos”; it is dominated by Russian soldiers documenting disgustingly brutal crimes.

The quote also appears on Unherd‘s Twitter stream.

Unfortunately, Bindel does not provide any source for her allegation, and it is astonishing that such material could be uploaded anywhere (let alone to a commercial website in the US) without coming under immediate and intense global scrutiny. Russia’s war atrocities in Ukraine are many, but crimes against humanity of rape and sexual assault are particularly egregious and would provoke universal outrage and disgust. We would expect front-page headlines, statements from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and extensive commentary from OSINT activists. Yet there is nothing.

The most likely explanation is that Bindel has extrapolated carelessly from the observation made by the anti-sex trafficking activist Tom Farr in late February that “trending searches” listed on Pornhub recently included “ukrainian” and “ukrainian girls”. Farr’s commentary on this was that

The absolute depths of human suffering and misery is just another “category” for the porn industry. It takes every aspect of our humanity, turns it into the most depraved and dehumanised product imaginable, and then sells it back to us. It is a truly horrific industry. 

This comment was later incorporated into an article posted by an anti-trafficking site called Exodus Cry, which added that

On Pornhub, terms such as “Ukrainian girls,” “Ukrainian porn,” and “war porn” have become trending searches in the week since Russian forces attacked Ukraine.

Certainly, the “trending searches” are both disturbing and repellent, but they do not mean that images depicting sexual war crimes in Ukraine (whether real or staged for fetishistic purposes) are available. Responses to the Unherd Tweet include a Tweet from a journalist who said that he “tried a search and got a warning such content would be illegal”. Someone else has posted a screenshot of a notice on the site stating that “Actual or staged depictions of coerced or non-consensual sexual acts… is not permitted on our site”.

Footnote

In 2015, Bindel wrote an article for Standpoint on “Britain’s Apologists For Child Abuse”, in which she segued polemically from the effusions of Tom O’Carroll to “a two-part investigation for BBC Radio 4’s Analysis” that “sought to question how what were described as the ‘bizarre ideas’ of Satanic abuse gained traction among police and social care professionals in the 1980s and early 1990s”. I discussed the radio documentary here.

Her article was written during Operation Conifer, and she also claimed that according to child protection campaigners it was “widely known” that Edward Heath “was involved in organised child abuse rings”

In April 2018, Bindel denounced Jeremy Corbyn for his failure to accept that Russia was responsible for the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury, although a few months later she appeared on a podcast produced by the Russian media outlet Sputnik, in which she discussed “the trans Taliban”.

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Turning Point UK issues a stern corrective to Jessica Simor QC:

Hi Jessica, John Mappin is not “of Turning Point UK”, he does not and has not held any position in the organisation.

As for our stance on Ukraine I’m sure it is fairly obvious from our tweets.

As a QC I would’ve expected you to have done your homework before tweeting nonsense.

The millionaire hotelier Mappin has long described himself as the “co-founder” of Turning Point UK, and Simor responded with a 2019 Tweet from Channel 4 News that quoted him thus:

I’ve been helping with the Trump movement since he announced his election. I co-founded Turning Point UK and it has a duty to-to share good ideas with the Conservative party. Trump is absolutely a political phenomenon and it’s global.

TPUK’s response to this was to say that the media “just print whatever they want”, although they did not explain how the quote is misleading or false.

Of course, just because someone has co-founded a group it does not mean that they have an ongoing interest in its activities. However, it reasonable to assume some kind of continuing association unless stated overwise. At an event at in Pall Mall in late 2018, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA reportedly told attendees that potential donors “can talk to John [Mappin] or some of our other very good friends in the room” (1), and in 2019 Mappin spoke in first-person plural of having “appointed” the head of Turning Point UK (Oliver Anisfeld).

Simor had referred to the link between Mappin and TPUK in response to a Tweet by Tom Scott that included a screenshot of Mappin writing in support of Putin on 24 February (2). Mappin had Tweeted:

What President Putin @KremlinRussia_E has done is a gift for the freedom of the world.

Those who love freedom have a duty to back him up.

It is so important that the deep state’s Nazi collaborator’s are fully confronted,

The deep state is on the ropes, the whole world sees.

Mappin subsequently deleted this, along with a Tweet from the same day stating “I stand with Russian Bear“. However, his output remains pro-Putin, and he is currently speculating about the possibility of the British government staging “a Nuclear False Flag just to cover up vax side effects”.

Mappin’s hotel is a castle in Cornwall that he calls Camelot, and he previously achieved notoriety for flying a “Q” flag in support of the QAnon conspiracy theory. He is in good standing with various activists who have expressed scepticism either of Covid-19 or of measures to protect against it: those who have enjoyed his hospitality include Piers Corbyn, James Melville and Laurence Fox, and early last month he was out on the town with Melville and with GB News’s Neil Oliver (3).

He is also a friend of Nigel Farage, who sits on the advisory board of a company in which Mappin and his wife have a 30% stake (4).

TPUK’s Tweets to Simor appear to be an attempt to distance the organisation from Mappin without being drawn into an explicit repudiation.

Notes

1. This has long been described as TPUK’s launch event, but TPUK now state that it was “a TPUSA event in the UK, as TPUK did not exist until 2020”. This is either a ret-con or a very pedantic distinction given the event’s purpose.

2. Tom Scott previously wrote about Mappin and Camelot for West Country Voices, in an article called “QAnon in Cornwall”.

3. According to Mappin, the night out was co-organised by Emma Sayle – it was through Sayle that Times journalist Kate Spicer got an introduction to Mappin for her profile of him published last year.

4. The company, Dutch Green Business, is based in the Netherlands. According to The Times:

All of the key figures behind DGB are linked to Scientology. Mappin, who is company chairman, and his wife, a board member, are followers of the cult and frequently recommend Dianetics — one of Scientology’s central texts — to followers as a “cure for depression”.

Selwyn Duijvestijn, DGB’s chief executive, is an ambassador for the Scientology-run Youth for Human Rights (YHR), as is Hilda van der Muelen, a former Miss Netherlands, who was introduced to Scientology by Mappin while both were living in Hollywood in the 1990s.

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From an online audio discussion co-hosted by Leilani Dowding and James Melville, on the subject of “Russia Ukraine questions” (28 February):

Dowding:
Lots of people, if you look at what’s happened to Russian currency, it has dropped at least like 30% in the past week… so if they’ve sold it then all these people who have got millions – the globalists, the bankers, the currency traders, they’ve got millions to play with. There’s a lot of people that have made a lot of money knowing that sanctions would cause havoc with Russian currency.

Participant:
You’re talking about trillions here, though. I mean, Look at people, families like the Rothschilds, the Black Rock Vanguard, all the rest of them, you know, there’s actually trillions of dollars, not just millions. These guys, I mean, they don’t have our best interests at heart at all.

Melville:
But that’s the other thing with sanctions as well, I mean it’s quid pro quo, it does work the other way as well. Sanctions massively hurt other economies but fundamentally they’ll hurt all of us if we go down the hardballing sanctions.

Melville then moved on to another participant. The exchange has been preserved on Twitter by @CovidRadicals, which describes itself as “Highlighting the radicalisation of people by covid 19 pandemic conspiracists”.

It’s not clear why Melville doesn’t push back against the notorious “Rothschild” trope; however, the following day he posted a list of “those who gain from pandemics and military conflicts”, at the head of which he placed “financiers”. In fairness, it may be that he didn’t want to turn an open forum where “we can all discuss” into a debate (i.e. the discussion was a “safe space”), but what might have been going through his head is of less interest than the objective fact that his acquiescence here means that he is helping to normalise “Rothschild” conspiracy mongering.

Also of note is Melville’s co-host. Leilani Dowding is a former model and television celebrity, apparently best known for appearing in an ITV reality show called Real Housewives of Cheshire. However, she is also a long-time associate of David Icke – back in 2013 the Sun reported on her beliefs under the headline “Leilani: Royals are a bunch of shape-shifting lizards”, claiming:

At a private dinner party during LA fashion week, the bonkers babe told pals she believed the human race comes from a planet called Zeta Reticuli, and a mothership will land on earth to take us all back home.

Dowding is now displayed as a presenter alongside David Icke himself on a conspiracy streaming site called Ickonic. Icke, of course, is himself heavily invested in anti-Rothschild rhetoric, which he denies is anti-Semitic despite illustrating his point via explicitly anti-Jewish imagery (such as this David Dees cartoon).

The point here is not “guilt by association”, although some alliances are discreditable and quite properly bring reputational damage. Rather, the point is to show how online influencers and pundits facilitate the spread of harmful ideas through networks of mutually reinforcing endorsements and associations that serve to make them appear less disreputable or outlandish.

Melville makes regular appearances on GB News (1) and he recently posted a photograph of himself posing with Nigel Farage. He wrote “My journey is now complete”, having previously been a supporter of the Remain cause, but from the above it looks more like he’s still on a trajectory (2).

Notes

1. GB News gives Melville authority by billing him as “James Melville, MD of East Points West Communication” – “MD” here meaning “Managing Director”. However, this company, officially called “Eastpointswest”, appears to be dormant.

2. Melville has also enjoyed the hospitality of John Mappin, the millionaire Cornwall hotelier who flies a “Q” flag from above his property to signify his support of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Mappin has also had tête-à-têtes with Piers Corbyn and Laurence Fox (see here).

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