Bartholomew's Notes

On GB News, Darren Grimes presents a boilerplate rant against the BBC; among the various reheated and endlessly recylced talking points (H/T Reuben Willmott):

…they’ve been accused of painting illegal immigration in a sympathetic light, and even discussing things like Satanism, of all things.

Here Grimes is referring specifically to an article that appeared in on the BBC News website in May about the Satanic Temple’s SatanCon in Boston the previous month. GB News capitalised this at the time, running a poll:

A study finds people living in the UK are among the least religious.

In the same week, the BBC published an article titled “The Satanic Temple: Think you know about Satanists? Maybe you don’t.” Have we lost our faith, or is there a godless agenda being pushed by sinister forces?

The wording was ambiguous: is the popularity of the Satanic Temple simply an alleged symptom of “a godless agenda being pushed by sinister forces”, or is the group in fact itself one of these “sinister forces”? The latter idea, of course, conflates the provocative and satirical anti-religion of the Satanic Temple with popular beliefs about people supposedly dedicating themselves in secret to the pursuit of wickedness, up to and including sexual abuse and even murder – the tropes of the Satanic Panic. Or was the BBC itself is the target here? That would appear to be what Grimes would like us to infer. Presumably, his view is that the BBC ought not to have reported on SatanCon, or else ought to have written something denouncing it.

The idea that the BBC is promoting Satanism is also currently being spread among new right influencers on account of the “Goblin Song”, a humorous musical number that appeared in Doctor Who on Christmas Day. Goblins sing about their plans to eat a kidnapped baby (who is rescued from a conveyor belt leading to the maw of the Goblin King by the Doctor and his new companion Ruby), with lyrics that include “Baby blood and baby bones / Baby butter for the baby scones”. According to the Reverend Daniel French:

There is a fantastical glorification of flesh eating that seems like moronic innuendo of Christianity. There is something about the lyrics which is just too coincidental. Did you see the Jordan Peterson and Jim Caviezel interview where they discussed how actors who play very dark antagonists (ie the Joker) have to be careful for their soul?

French was billed a “noted podcaster, commentator and writer” at May’s National Conservativism conference, where he delivered content “on behalf of Rod Dreher”; in June, he appeared as one of NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” (a title I blogged here). His comment was posted in response to another vicar, Jamie Franklin, who had expressed the view that the song is “disgusting” and that “the people who wrote it are sick”. Franklin, who calls himself a “based vicar”, is another podcasting cleric. John Bye notes that he is “a member of covid misinformation group HART”, and draws attention to a podcast from a year ago in which Franklin interviewed Andrew Bridgen MP; Bridgen reportedly used the opportunity to make “more wild accusations, including that Pfizer deliberately designed their vaccine to damage our immune systems and that the media is engaged in a smear campaign against him!”

John also notes that the Goblin Song has upset anti-vax activist Mark Sexton, who has urged people to “complaint to the BBC for child sacrifice”. Of course, Satanic conspiracism has an affinity with Covid conspiracism, as shown for example by Michael Yeadon.

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From a blurb on a YouTube channel titled “British Thought Leaders”:

NTD’s Lee Hall sits down with Conservative Member of Parliament Danny Kruger to discuss his latest book ‘Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation’.

Danny talks about restoring the virtues that he says are important in society for making good people, a good nation and a good life.

He talks about the harm done by the sexual revolution and the Western deathwish. And reflects on rebuilding trust between politicians and the people that was damaged by COVID lockdowns.

Kruger’s NTD interview is not the most recent – that honour goes to Lembit Öpik  – but it came to wider attention on Twitter a couple of days ago [1], provoking scoffing at the “Thought Leader” title.

NTD stands for “New Tang Dynasty”, which unsurprisingly signals that we are in Falun Gong territory. As noted by Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins for NBC News back in 2019:

The Epoch Times, digital production company NTD and the heavily advertised dance troupe Shen Yun make up the nonprofit network that [founder and leader of Falun Gong Li Hongzhi] calls “our media.” Financial documents paint a complicated picture of more than a dozen technically separate organizations that appear to share missions, money and executives.

Further:

One… show is “Edge of Wonder,” a verified YouTube channel that releases new NTD-produced videos twice every week and now has more than 33 million views. In addition to claims that alien abductions are real and the drug epidemic was engineered by the “deep state,” the channel pushes the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely posits that the same “Spygate” cabal is a front for a global pedophile ring being taken down by Trump.

One QAnon video, titled “#QANON – 7 facts the MEDIA (MSM) Won’t Admit” has almost 1 million views on YouTube. Other videos in the channel’s QAnon playlist, which include videos about 9/11 conspiracy theories and one titled “13 BLOODLINES & their Diabolical End Game,” gained hundreds of thousands of views each.

We’ve known for years that it’s fairly easy to get a politician or public figure to talk into a television camera, but was Kruger aware of this context?

He’s not alone, though: there are currently 85 “British Thought Leader” videos available, plus one that for some reason is unavailable and “hidden”. Other interviees include Leilani Dowding (“Lockdowns, Gender Politics and the WEF”), Giles Udy (“The British Labour Party, Communism & the Gulag”), David Kurten (“The Fightback against Cultural Marxism”), Lois Perry (“Exposing the Green Agenda”) and Claire Fox (“The Age of Dangerous Ideas”), as well as politicians such as Ian Paisley Jr (“In a Crisis, People Turn to Faith Not Government”), Shaun Bailey (“Tackling London’s Problems”), Lord Moylan (“Will Britian Lose WhatsApp?”) and Graham Brady (“Governments Crossed the Line During Lockdowns”).

There are also some lesser-known figures whose path to the interview chair we can only guess at – with public figures NTD clearly gets more out of the association than do their subjects, but in some cases I suspect interviewees used networks to put themselves forward. One surprising inclusion is Bill Browder (“Putin’s Public Enemy Number One”).

Plus of course there is a comparable collection of Epoch Times “American Thought Leaders“, with more focus on politicians talking about the CCP, but also input from prominent Covid misinformation peddlers such as Robert Malone and Peter McCullough.

Note

1. The occasion was discussion of Kruger’s role as co-chair of the “New Conservatives” grouping. Kruger is involved in various conservative networks: in May, for instance, he was part of the National Conservativism Conference (NATCON 2023); he is also an Advisory Board member for a group called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which held its own conference in London at the end of October; as described by Graham Readfearn in the Guardian, ARC is “a sort of quasi-thinktank fronted by the controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson”.

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Back in October, American “intellectual dark web” pontificator Bret Weinstein lamented that Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre in southern Israel had the effect of being a “coalition dicer-slicer”, working to “divide and conquer in an information landscape”. By this, he meant that the political influencer networks that had developed out of Covid conspiracism risked falling apart over differing interpretations of the subsequent Gaza conflict. He didn’t go so far as to suggest that the conflict had been created for this purpose, although his cautious phrasing “this turn of events… whatever their nature, let’s say that they’re perfectly organic” did not rule out the idea.

In the UK, conspiracy influencers have attempted to navigate and take advantage of the issue in various ways. Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party has characterised pro-Palestine marches in London as a failure of integration and as a conspiracy against Britain, particularly when one march took place on the afternoon of Saturday 11 November. Reclaim Party MP Andrew Bridgen issued a statement falsely describing the protestors as “protestors against the Remembrance service” and wildly alleged that they were “seeking to occupy Whitehall overnight” (1). However, more recently Bridgen has endorsed a statement put out by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò alleging that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane were Mossad agents who sexually compromised world leaders, which is why politicians “do not dare to breathe a word against the massacres of civilians in the Gaza Strip” (2). In contrast, party ideologue Calvin Robinson has attempted to hedge in a different way, pointedly stating that “I haven’t made any pronouncements on Israel vs Palestine” – unlike in the case of Ukraine, where he happily endorsed claims that the conflict was some sort of media spectacle and that political support for Ukraine can be explained in terms of finanical corruption.

Meanwhile, there are no surprises from David Icke, who refers gratuitiously to the “Sabbatian Cult-controlled Israel government” and claims that it and Hamas both “answer to the Global Cult”. The need for a populist conspiracy angle is also evident from Maajid Nawaz, who describes Netanyahu as a “globalist traitor” and speculates that “Netanyahu probably BOUGHT Musk with the promise of WEF smart-city reconstruction military contracts in Gaza”.

Conspiracy influencer James Melville‘s angle is that the conflict is about “oil and gas reserves”, and he recently endorsed a crude statement, as expressed by someone in his social circle, that framed Israel’s actions in Gaza in terms of “genocidal maniacs & their cucked bootlickers”. Support for pro-Palestine marches has been expressed by Niall McCrae of TCW and the Covid anti-vax Workers of England Union, in conversation with Patrick Henningsen.

UPDATE: The anti-vax conspiracy cartoonist Bob Moran has posted online a prurient cartoon of various targets in a Roman bath scene, in which the water is replaced with blood; the tableau includes a figure supposed to be the conservative polemicist Douglas Murray (identified by the “Press” flak jacket he has been wearing recently while reporting from Gaza), in an intimate pose with Jordan Peterson. Netanyahu is depicted in a sexual scene with a masked figure representing Hamas.

Notes

1. Bridgen’s claims extrapolated from government and tabloid rhetoric: the populist then home secretary Suella Braverman described the protests as “hate marches” and whipped up a bogus threat to the Centotaph, while Rishi Sunak said that to protest on 11 November was inherently “disrespectual” – a position he later implicitly backed down from when he acknowledged “those who have chosen to express their views peacefully” at the National March for Palestine.

2. This endorsement (“The brave Archbishop Vigano speaks out again at personal risk to himself, people should listen”) may also be of interest to Matt Hancock, who is currently being sued for libel by Bridgen after stating that Bridgen has been spouting “anti-Semitic, anti-vax, anti-scientific conspiracy theories”.

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