Bartholomew's Notes

From Joseph Menn at the Washington Post:

Elon Musk escalated his battle of words with previous managers of Twitter into risky new territory over the weekend… implying that the company’s former head of trust and safety had a permissive view of sexual activity by minors.

…In the Spaces session late Friday, Musk seemed to agree with a host known as Eliza Bleu that [former Twitter safety chief Yoel] Roth and his staff had been too busy censoring conservatives to provide resources to identify and block abusive child sex material. Bleu is an activist podcaster who wrote three columns this year on conspiracy promoter Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze…. Bleu, who last year tweeted a photo of herself with Pizzagate promoter and alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich, was joined on the Spaces session by Ella Irwin, who was hired by Twitter in June and was promoted to trust and safety head after Roth’s departure.

…In response Sunday to questions she said she’d received about her own claim of having been trafficked, which she has not detailed, Bleu tweeted that she had reluctantly come forward as a public advocate in 2020 by speaking to conservative Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire.

On Twitter, Bleu also drew Musk’s attention to a 2010 Tweet by Roth asking “Can high school students ever meaningly consent to sex with their teachers?” as evidence that Roth would have been predisposed to corrupting Twitter’s safety standards – the old “bit.ly” url included with the Tweet failed to show that he was referring to a Salon article about a teacher charged over sex with an 18-year-old student. Roth is now reportedly in hiding due to threats against him, some of which have been allowed to persist on Twitter despite reports. Menn is also now being subjected to “pedo”-themed abuse (see replies and quote-tweets here).

At various times last year, Bleu Tweeted that “the world is ran by a satanic pedo ring” or “evil pedo ring”, each time for some reason using “is ran” rather than “is run”. Menn has RTed one example of this, presumably as evidence that Musk is aligning with QAnon-esque excesses, although it doesn’t feature in his article. Perhaps her assertion was meant to express frustration at the injustices of the world rather than being a serious proposition, but without an explanation it can only serve to inflame conspiracy worldviews. (1)

Shortly after Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Bleu wrote a Newsweek op-ed headlined “While Blue Checks Whine About Extremism, Elon Musk Is Protecting Sexually Exploited Children”. Bleu referred to an ongoing legal action involving two complainants who that allege Twitter failed to remove images of their underage sexual exploitation, and on the issue more broadly she says that she found a meeting with Twitter corporate arranged personally by then CEO Jack Dorsey to be “a waste of time”.

Bleu has been cited in the media as a “survivor” more than once, but it is difficult to reconcile the centrality of her personal experience to her credentials as a moral entrepreneur with the fact that, as Menn notes, she has “not detailed” her story. She has, however, stated that she was exploited after relocating to Los Angeles aged 17 in search of fame, and that “the man who promised her heaven on earth sold her to another man for a mere $500”. She further claims that this was “the beginning of an ordeal that was to last for over 15 years”.

Bleu was 17 years old in 2002; during the same period she was a student who was earning extra money cutting hair for pop bands on tour. In this capacity she met and started dating Gerard Way, frontman of the band My Chemical Romance, stating that Way dominated her life “for the next 4-5 years”. In 2006 she appeared on Blind Date, and from there went on to gain an online profile associated with social media influencers.

This doesn’t preclude the possibility that there was also some hidden malign and coercive presence in her life, perhaps appearing intermittently, but it raises reasonable questions. However, when Menn contacted her for comment, she did not reply, “instead tagging the reporter in a tweeted obscenity”. We might also ask why no police reports have been made or legal actions launched, particularly now that she has Musk’s patronage.

UPDATE (2 February 2023): Bleu’s backstory has come under critical scrutiny from the Daily Beast, under the headline “Eliza Bleu’s Own Friends Aren’t Buying Her Trafficking Story”. The story confirms her original identity as Eliza Morthland, daughter of Richard Morthland. Her father is a “former Illinois state representative who ran unsuccessfully on the GOP ticket for lieutenant governor in 2018”. I noticed an exchange on Twitter in which it was claimed that Bleu’s father had run for governor – I thought it was a tell that she seized on this as an error made by a critic but failed to clarify that it was close to the truth.

Note

1. Despite refusing to engage with Menn ahead of publication (“go fuck yourself” – here), she now complains that he failed to mention that she had previously spoken against QAnon “misinformation”. She cites a 2020 NBC News article by Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, even though that article refers to her only as “Eliza”, whose “last name is being withheld to protect her identity from former abusers”; and a November 2022 Washington Post article by Taylor Lorenz which noted that she had “attempted to swat down” conspiracy theories about the “Gas” app.

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From Isabel Oakeshott in The Spectator:

Published this week, co-authored by me, [Matt] Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries are the first insider account from the heart of government of the most seismic political, economic and public health crisis of our times.

…As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down. His account shows how quickly the suppression of genuine medical misinformation – a worthy endeavour during a public health crisis – morphed into an aggressive government-driven campaign to smear and silence those who criticised the response. Aided by the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health harnessed the full power of the state to crush individuals and groups whose views were seen as a threat to public acceptance of official messages and policy. As early as January 2020, Hancock reveals that his special adviser was speaking to Twitter about ‘tweaking their algorithms’. Later he personally texted his old coalition colleague Nick Clegg, now a big cheese at Facebook, to enlist his help. The former Lib Dem deputy prime minister was happy to oblige.

Such was the fear of ‘anti-vaxxers’ that the Cabinet Office used a team hitherto dedicated to tackling Isis propaganda to curb their influence. The zero-tolerance approach extended to dissenting doctors and academics. The eminent scientists behind the so-called Barrington Declaration, which argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the general population to build up natural immunity to the virus, were widely vilified: Hancock genuinely considered their views a threat to public health.

This passage is being celebrated by the conspiracy crowd as evidence that the way in which the UK responded to the Covid pandemic crisis was no more than a  contrived “narrative” created by government-directed media manipulation, but which they themselves saw through and resisted.

However, having had a look at the relevant passages in Hancock’s memoir on Google Books, it seems to me that Oakeshott is sensationalising and even misrepresenting the work that she helped to create. On the Cabinet Office team, Hancock refers to

…worrying research suggesting that as many as half of Americans and a fifth of people living in the UK will decline the jab. A load of nutters are putting it about that it is part of some great global conspiracy, and we need to limit their influence.

We’ve pulled together a team from the Cabinet Office that was involved in tackling Daesh propaganda during the existence of the Caliphate. The online campaign they led was based on providing an overwhelming counter-narrative. Instead of focusing on responding directly to false claims, the main effort is to provide clear, objective positive material.

Nothing here about a campaign to “smear and silence” – and it’s not at all clear how this relates to the supposed “vilification” of Barrington authors. Oakeshott merely juxtaposes Hancock’s scepticism about the authors with a reference to the cabinet team to create an impression.

Further:

We are starting to think about how the social media companies can help. Jamie has spoken to Twitter and they’re going to tweak their algorithms so when people search for ‘coronavirus’ and various other key terms, they’ll go to our offical guidance page

…Clegg may have looked a mess when he Zoomed me from Yellowstone, but he got straight onto it re. combatting fake news. Facebook has taken down a wild-eyed Trump post declaring that children are ‘almost immune’ to coronovirus. Twitter followed suit.

Hancock’s media adviser Jamie Njoku-Goodwin speaking to Twitter is hardly “harnessing the full power of the state to crush individuals and groups”, a ludicrously overheated interpretation.

Some Spectator readers may infer that Oakeshott is giving an an unexpurgated account that goes beyond Hancock’s own authorised version. But she doesn’t say that, and she doesn’t provide any extra context that would justify the spin she’s put on her cherry-picked details. Indeed, context has actually been removed.

Oakeshott came under some criticism from the conspiracy crowd for agreeing to write the book with (for?) Hancock, and also when she coaxed Hancock into a recording studio in June for an interview alongside James Melville on the subject of cryptocurrency. However, all is now forgiven – one “social media campaigner” and GB News regular, June Slater, has written:

I apologise for doubting Richard Tice and Isabel Oakshott’s [sic] involvement with Matt Hancock’s book.

As her Spectator article proves today, it was a long game, a quest for truth, to ensure the government and minister could never lock us down or mandate drugs again.

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From Newsweek:

The owner of fashion brand Balenciaga has been targeted on social media over what some have branded a “disturbing” selection of child-themed art pieces that have been hosted and sold on its auction website.

…The mannequins featured on the Christie’s website were made by artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and show depictions of naked children, a number of whom are conjoined.

The children depicted are not just naked or conjoined: in one item sold by Christie’s auction house and archived on its website is entitled Fuckface, and consists of a boy with a phallus for a nose above a gaping orifice.

François-Henri Pinault is CEO Groupe Artémis, which owns Christie’s along with a number of other high-end companies and brands. This includes Kering, a fashion group that in turn includes Balenciaga. The suggestion is that Balenciaga’s recent regrettable photo-shoots and the Chapman Brothers’ artwork are both examples of a sinister conspiracy that Newsweek does not delve into but which presumably involves co-oridinated efforts to “normalise” the unspeakable, or to taunt the public with hints and signs of “elite” degeneracy.

The are obvious parallels here with Pizzagate and QAnon – significantly, Pinault’s wife is the Hollywood actress Selma Hayek – as well as other attempts to discern sinister hidden meanings in art and symbols. Some social media coverage also gives the false impression that the mannequins are being mass produced as sex dolls (e.g. Dominique Samuels: “The CEO of Balenciaga’s parent company, Kering, sells sickening child sex mannequins”), despite their grotesque characteristics.

Also drawn into the story is a Russian-born stylist named Lotta Volkova, who has worked with Balenciaga in the past. Another Newsweek article has the details:

Following the backlash some people dug up content of several former and current staff at Balenciaga, including Volkova.

Christian commentator Oli London took four posts from her Instagram which portrayed scenes of violence and Satanic images.

…The images shared by London included one of a woman who is nude from the waist down, lying on a pentagram on the floor where she is tied up by rope.

A satanic-looking figure sits on a pentagram-shaped throne at her head, also nude from the waist down, with smoke coming out of his upturned hands.

Shades here of the Pizzagate obsession with Marina Abramovic. Oli London has also targeted Rachel Chandler, a modelling agent worked with Balenciaga in 2016. London alleges that Chandler had visited Jeffrey Epstein‘s island (unconfirmed, and perhaps extrapolated from a photo of Chandler with Bill Clinton), and from this he asserts that “Balenciaga is deeply involved in child abuse and exploitation”. He outlined this theory in the UK on GB News, in conversation with the broadcaster’s resident televangelist Calvin Robinson.

The Chapman brothers’ child mannequins date from the mid-1990s, and they have always been controversial. Police visited the Victoria Miro Gallery in London when some were displayed there in 1994, and one item was removed from display in Italy in 2014 following protests following allegations that it was “paedo-pornographic”.

The mannequins have been put into context by Kieran Cashell in a book called Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (I.B.Tauris, 2009). His interpretation is that the Chapmans may “cynically and shamelessly appropriate morally transgressive material purely for its controversial currency”, but that their work may also “be considered a critical interrogation of the capacity of the culture industry to indemnify every artistic transgression according to the implicit moral approbation conferred by the aesthetic attitude”. Further:

…the idea of their bizarre configurations being considered conduits of paedophilic desire seems highly unlikely… The specific distortions the plastic children have endured at the hands of the Chapman brothers become successful objective analogues of psychological damage caused by sexual abuse. Physical interference, in this instance, is transformed into an effective simulacrum of aggravated psychological harm.

Perhaps, in 2022, such art is even more problematic now than it was in previous decades, and its visibility should be weighed against other considerations – although if the work of the Chapman brothers disappears from view I look forward to the usual laments about “cancel culture” and assertions of the right to cause offence and upset.

UPDATE: Another claim is that one photo includes a roll of Balenciaga yellow tape, which has been deliberately misprinted as “BAALENCIAGA” as a reference to Baal. In the photo only the letters “AALEN” are properly visible. It seems to me more likely that the tape starts with a truncacted “ALENCIAGA” and then wraps around so that the second printing of “BALENCIAGA”  – or perhaps the first “BA” of the third printing – aligns with the first word on the top layer, creating a double-A effect. However, even if that is the explanation believers will just say it was staged that way deliberately.

In the UK, the claim featured on GB News in a conversation between Mark Steyn and Eva Vlaardingerbroek, billed as a “legal philosopher” but better known as a former FvD candidate now based in Sweden and associated with the Sweden Democrats.

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In 2013 David Icke wrote and published a post entitled “Sandy Hook was a blatantly staged event with endless inconsistences and countless contradictions”. Rather than provide any evidence, he instead commended readers to a site called Intellihub, where two authors named Shepard Ambellas and Alex Thomas raised the possibility that “crisis actors might have been used”. Both posts were later removed, presumably because of the legal actions against Alex Jones.

However, Sandy Hook trutherism libelling bereaved parents remains alive within the Icke operation, and as noted by Matthew Sweet it was recently expressed by his son Gareth Icke on Icke’s “Icktonic” video-streaming site, during a segment in which he lamented the legal finding against Jones. Describing one bereaved Sandy Hook father at a press conference the day after the massacre, G. Icke says

…he’s laughing, and saying ‘are we ready to get started?’ and then he gets into character…

Icke’s co-presenter was Leilani Dowding, and his interlocutors included Dominique Samuels (who complains that Jones is being “silenced”). Dowding and Samuels will both be familiar to viewers of GB News; the latter is also a regular on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. Also part of the discussion were John Mappin, Abi Roberts and Charlotte Emma.

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The Daily Telegraph reports on “newly released emails from early 2020” involving authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, a peer-reviewed correspondence item that was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 and made the case for the coronavirus being a zoonotic spillover rather than a bio-engineered virus that had escaped from the lab in Wuhan:

The lead author of the paper, Prof Kristian Andersen, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, had earlier told colleagues that features of the virus looked as if they’d been engineered in a lab.

…In an email chain debating the original draft, one of the authors even admitted that the virus would look the same whether it had evolved naturally or in lab mice in a process known as “serial passaging”

However, no mention of this was made in the paper.

…The email release will add more fuel to accusations that eminent scientists effectively publicly shut down investigations into a lab leak so as not to upset China, while believing privately it was possible.

Lab-leak prononent Matt Ridley followed up with an opinion piece with the inflammatory headline “Top virologists betrayed science with their Covid lab leak cover-up”. The Telegraph has invested heavily in this particular narrative: in September last year it gave us “Scientists created false narrative over suspected Covid leak from Wuhan lab, say experts”, and in June 2020 it tried to bolster a lab-leak theory rejected by peer review by getting a former head of MI6 to give it his irrelevant imprimatur.

In the meantime, scientific research has proceeded apace, with various new articles adding to the evidence of zoonotic spillover and natural origins: these include two 2022 studies (Pekar et al. here and Worobey et al. here) involving “Proximal Origin” authors alongside others, one of which argues that “geographical clustering of the earliest known COVID-19 cases and the proximity of positive environmental samples to live-animal vendors suggest that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the site of origin of the COVID-19 pandemic” (an account that also undercuts the possibility of a non-engineered virus brought from elsewhere leaking from the Wuhan lab). Writing earlier this month, one of the “Proximal Origin” authors laid out the case that “The evidence remains clear: SARS-CoV-2 emerged via the wildlife trade”.

Such studies have largely been ignored by the media, but there doesn’t seem to be much new evidence for a bio-engineered virus either. Instead, then, we have a journalistic quest for “gotchas” intended to undermine the personal integrity of scientists. In case of the new emails (also known in some reports as the “Fauci emails”, due to his involvement in the discussion), the fact that the authors gave due consideration to lab leak theories two and a half years ago is now being weaponised against them.

Fuller coverage of what the emails contain and their significance can be found on Twitter than in sensationalising media reports. In particular, there is a long thread by Angela Rasmussen here, including screenshots. There is nothing to justify the (tellingly unattributed) accusation in the Telegraph that they wanted to “shut down investigations into a lab leak so as not to upset China”. Indeed, Anthony Fauci’s initial reaction was that a group of biologists should get together “to carefully examine the data to determine if [Andersen’s] concerns are validated”, and if so then the authorities should be alerted. The authors also discussed the need for a balanced approach: in one email, from 8 February, Jeremy Farar wrote of the need “to bring a neutral, respected, scientific group together to look at the data and in a neutral, considered way provide an opinion and we hoped to focus the discussion on the science”.

What the emails do confirm, though, is that the authors were impressed by new evidence as it came in. Farrar believed the argument was made “even clearer” by “additional information on the pangolin virus, information not available even 24 hours ago”; Andersen concurred – specifically stating that while he currently didn’t have “high confidence” in anti-lab leak theories, “I am very hopeful that the viruses from pangolins will help provide the mssing pieces”.

This is in accordance with the public record. As reported in the New York Times in March 2021, the authors originally saw “bits of genetic material that looked like they might have been put there through genetic engineering” but then changed their minds in the light of further information (H/T @flodebarre):

Soon afterward, Dr. Holmes helped researchers at the University of Hong Kong analyze a coronavirus, found in a pangolin, that was closely related to SARS-CoV-2. The virus looked especially similar in its surface protein, called spike, which the virus uses to enter cells.

Finding such a distinct biological signature in a virus from a wild animal strengthened Dr. Holmes’s confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was not the product of genetic engineering. “Suddenly what looks odd is clearly natural,” Dr. Holmes said.

Matt Ridley argues that the pangolin evidence “was a red herring”, being “too distantly related, lacking a furin cleavage site, only 2 infected animals, not in Wuhan”. However, as a biologist named Flo Débarre points out, this does not reflect how the pangolin evidence was actually used: the sequences cited were the receptor-binding domains (RBDs). As quoted from “Proximal Origin”:

Although the RaTG13 bat virus remains the closest to SARS-CoV-2 across the genome, some pangolin coronaviruses exhibit strong similarity to SARS-CoV-2 in the RBD, including all six key RBD residues…. This clearly shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein optimized for binding to human-like ACE2 is the result of natural selection.

Now, I’m not a scientist, and so I can only appreciate scientific discussion through a glass darkly. However, I can recognise media and activist framings and narrative strategies, and these are why “lab-leak” claims (and wilder “bio-weapon” conspiracy theories) have been so prominent. This aspect is the subject of a Twitter thread by a science blogger named Philipp Markolin here.

UPDATE (January 2023): A fuller account by Markolin can now be seen here.

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The latest bit of networking for (mostly) British conspiracists:

Not Our Future exists purely to fight for the survival of our way of life as we know it.

The organisation was founded by David Fleming, who also founded the Covid19 Assembly and the Together Declaration. David departed the Together Declaration at the end of 2021 but still oversees the Covid19 Assembly, which has a few ongoing long-term projects.

Visitors to the website are encouraged to sign a pledge saying that they “reject the future that is being forced upon us”, starting with measures against the spread of Covid but then extrapolating into a wider list of grievances:  “Rampant inflation and unsustainable debt caused by uncontrolled money printing”; “belligerently supporting war instead of negotiating for peace” (i.e. support for Ukraine); “Unaffordable food and energy prices exacerbated by war” (i.e. Ukraine again); “De-industrialisation caused by the NetZero energy crisis”; corporate censorship of “news and facts” and legislation “to curtail freedom of speech”; “identity politics”; “Looming food shortages resulting from forced buy-out of productive farmland”; “Attempting to grant the World Health Organisation power to direct worldwide pandemic management policies”; amd “Digital IDs and programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies”. The masterplan is explained as “United Nations Agendas 21 & 30 and the Sustainable Development Goals”.

There is also a short video statement from 1990s novelty pop duo Right Said Fred, and a list, with headshots, of prominent signatories. A useful guide to many of these has been posted to Twitter by John Bye, which I here quote more or less in full for the record:

Many HART members signed up to stop this apocalyptic conspiracy theorist’s vision of the future, including Clare Craig (“seeding the thought vaccines cause covid”), Gary Sidley (anti-mask campaigner), Michael Yeadon (“depopulation agenda”) and Patrick Fagan (Cambridge Analytica). Other HART members on the founding signatories list include Tess Lawrie (also of BIRD, World Council for Health etc) and Bob Moran (an ex Telegraph cartoonist who accused a prominent scientist of “promoting the idea of ritualistic child sacrifice”). [1]

PANDA founder Nick Hudson (who recently said the lives of people involved in lockdowns should be destroyed) and PANDA executive committee member Piers Robinson (who defends dictators accused of chemical weapon attacks) are also founding signatories. Even further out on the fringe are funeral director John O’Looney (who claims there were no excess deaths in 2020), Dolores Cahill (international fugitive), Reiner Fuellmich (accused by his own group of embezzling their funds) and Robin Monotti (Putin apologist and Yeadon’s BFF).

Other signatories include veteran anti-vaxxer Del Bigtree (who produced Andrew Wakefield’s film about the MMR vaccine), Vernon Coleman (AIDS denier), Robert Malone (who claims to have invented mRNA vaccines) and long time New World Order conspiracy theorist Patrick Wood. Then there’s a host of journos who amplified Yeadon’s paranoid claims: Neil Oliver (GB News’ lead conspiracy theorist), Maajid Nawaz… Kathy Gyngell (of conspiracy rag Conservative Woman) and James Delingpole (ex Breitbart London). And last and least, the hangers on: out of work actors Laurence Fox (Reclaim UK) and John Bowe (who setup a vaccine injury “helpline” that refers people to homeopaths), ex-footballer Matt Le Tissier (fired by Sky Sports) and Right Said Fred (novelty pop act turned anti-vaxxers).

Also:

Mike Stock is one third of Stock Aitken Waterman, the 1980s pop factory behind Kylie Minogue’s early hits... He joins Right Said Fred and DJ Danny Rampling, who ironically founded a “carbon neutral DJ campaign” .. but has now signed a pledge against Net Zero.

Simon Elmer co-founded Architects for Social Housing, and went from campaigning for council houses to writing a book “Road to Fascism: A Critique of the Global Biosecurity State”…. Frank Furedi co-founded the Revolutionary Communist Party, and writes about a “culture of fear”.

David Charalambous runs Reaching People, a “coalition partner” of Tess Lawrie’s World Council for Health, apparently giving advice on how covid contrarians can get through to us normies. Tom Woods is a libertarian author from America, who was a founding member of the League of the South .. a neo-Confederate group! His colleagues there included the AIER’s Jeffrey Tucker, who was behind the Great Barrington Declaration and the Brownstone Institute.

As for Fleming himself, Bye explains that he’s “responsible for a long line of companies that were struck off without ever filing accounts. Most recently the Covid-19 Assembly. He claims he just set it up wrong, but it conveniently lets him dodge filing accounts for yet another year.”

Note

1. Bob Moran was recently at a Carlton Club dinner party hosted by British QAnon (and Putin) enthusiast and millionaire hotelier John Mappin. Other guests included Nigel Farage, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Charlie Kirk and Lois Perry (along with the lesser-known Amanda Eliasch and Andrew M Fox). Mappin also Tweeted that he wished that Kim Dotcom had been present, and that he had been “much discussed”. Presumably Kirk was taking the photos posted by Mappin, as he does not appear in them – Mappin helped Kirk with setting up Turning Point UK, although TPUK is now keen to downplay the association.

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One of the best episodes from the first series of Frasier is “Death Becomes Him“, in which Frasier Crane becomes so disturbed by the sudden death of a physician from a heart attack that he gatecrashes the doctor’s funeral reception in a futile attempt to discover an underlying cause. To his dismay, the doctor’s relatives tell him that the deceased had no history of heart disease, high blood pressure or high cholesterol; that he was a “total health fanatic” who avoided fattening desserts; and that he regularly attended a gym and played basketball four times a week:

Gail: Gary was in phenomenal shape.
Bobbie: He didn’t smoke, never touched caffeine…
Allen: Did you know he had less than 10 percent body fat on him?
Frasier: My goodness. Has anybody checked to see if he’s really dead?

The show satirises a natural human instinct to seek out existential reassurance in the face of the knowledge that, despite however we live our lives, death may still come like a thief in the night. Surely, that victim of illness or sudden death must have done something that I can avoid or that doesn’t apply to me?

This tendency is now being ruthlessly exploited by anti-vaxxers and vaccine alarmists, who appear now to attribute any unexpected natural death to Covid vaccination. In the UK, for instance, Aseem Malhotra now claims that Covid vaccination likely explains “all unexplained heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias, & heart failure since 2021”. On Twitter, he amplifies and endorses any anecdotal claim that he believes supports this assertion. Meanwhile, GB News has run a sarcastically titled segment called “Nothing to See Here”, in which Mark Steyn cited a random selection of sudden deaths. News of any celebrity death on social media attracts comments either speculating or asserting that Covid vaccination was the cause.

In the USA, meanwhile, we have “Died Suddenly”. As noted in the Guardian:

One phrase that is picking up steam in the anti-vax world is “died suddenly”, which may be used in official media reports to talk about any sudden death, making it harder to moderate automatically.

A Died Suddenly Twitter account, which was verified through the paid Twitter Blue program, plans to release a documentary on Monday that promotes vaccine misinformation.

In a trailer for the film, 12 people are shown fainting or seizing, with the implication that they died from vaccines. In fact, at least four of the people shown did not die, and there were no links to the vaccines in their fainting episodes.

The trailer also shows footage of Megyn Kelly, a SiriusXM host, talking about her sister’s heart attack. But the trailer doesn’t show Kelly’s discussion of their family history of heart attacks.

A detailed debunking of the trailer was posted to Twitter by “The Real Truther” at the end of October: clips the trailer uses include the on-court (and non-fatal) collapse of basketball star Keyontae Johnson in December 2020, before vaccines were even available; a woman who fainted at a train station in Argentina (actually due to low blood pressure); a royal guard fainting while standing vigil at Queen Elizabeth’s coffin (a well-known phenonmenon caused by standing still for long periods); and comedian Heather McDonald fainting on stage (due to not eating and drinking). (1)

The trailer describes the documentary as a “Stew Peters Network EXCLUSIVE”, and it follows his earlier efforts Watch the Waters and These Little Ones. The former apparently claims that “the coronavirus is not a virus, but a synthetic version of snake venom that evil forces are spreading through remdesivir, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and drinking water to “make you a hybrid of Satan”, while the latter is concerned with how “millions of children vanish each year”.

This context might suggest a marginal effort unlikely to be embraced by the wider community of Covid vaccination alarmists – indeed, Robert Malone (who had previously been on Peters’ show) denounced Watch the Waters, leading Peters to allege that Malone is working for the CIA. However, Peters is sponsored by Mike Lindell of MyPillow and election truther fame, and Lindell’s support of anti-vaxxers was noted a few days ago by Business Insider:

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell recently became a sponsor for the prominent anti-vaxxer Dr Sherri Tenpenny, an example of Lindell’s growing penchant for funding fringe media figures.

…In June, Slate [sic – actually Salon] described Tenpenny as an “adviser” to the pillow salesman, without specifying any details of the arrangement.

…Lindell and Tenpenny met, she said, at sessions of the “ReAwaken America” tour, which as The Guardian reported showed a growing alliance between conservative Christians, Trump supporters and anti-vaccine activists.

More on ReAwaken America here.

UPDATE: Within the vaccine alarmist movement,  Died Suddenly has come under fire from a sociologist named Josh Guetzkow. On his Substack blog, Guetzkow describes it as “trash”, and his post has been reposted by Toby Young on his Daily Sceptic website. Guetzkow’s view has also been endorsed by Aseem Malhotra and Clare Craig. Craig speculates that the documentary may be “an intent to muddy the waters”.

Note

1. A similar collage, called “Until Proven Otherwise” was uploaded to Twitter earlier this month by “Texas Kate” and endorsed by Malhotra. The first example given is Charlbi Dean, an actress who died aged 32 of a lung infection and who previously had had her spleen removed. Also in the video is a 15-year-old girl named Jorja Halliday, who died on the day she was due to receive her Covid vaccination; in this case there was a misleading headline (“15-year-old girl died suddenly from Covid complication on day of her vaccine”) which was later amended to “15-year-old girl died suddenly from Covid complication on day her vaccine was due”.

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In 1991, Michael Palin crossed the border from Sudan into Ethiopia as part of his Pole to Pole BBC travel series. As he writes in his account of the journey:

It all looks unfamiliar and potentially threatening but to our enormous relief our Ethiopian contacts — Graham Hancock, a journalist and Santha Faiia, a Malaysian photographer who has lived a long time in the country — are there to meet us… Graham has a well-researched theory that the Ark of the Covenant is held in a chapel not far from here, and he has just completed a book on his findings.

Palin of course had no way of knowing that Hancock’s book, The Sign and the Seal, would be a popular bestseller and launch Hancock’s career as a celebrity pseudo-historian. Publishers packaged it to look like an earlier “crypto-history” sensation, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, while the title of his 1995 follow-up, Fingerprints of the Gods, recalled Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Hancock is now identified with extravagant claims about the existence of a global pre-Ice Age civilisation, evidence for which can supposedly be discerned in various archaeological remains, but which professional archaeologists have either failed to notice or refuse to accept.

As well as the books themselves, there have been lucrative Daily Mail serialisations and documentaries on British television. Now, there is a series (produced by ITN Productions) on Netflix, where his son is a senior manager. The title, Ancient Apocalyse, echoes Ancient Aliens, although as recently quoted in the Telegraph Hancock says that he’s “so pissed at the f—ing ancient-aliens lobby. They’ve turned this entire field into a laughing stock”.

The series of eight half-hour episodes also features Hancock’s collaborator Randall Carlson; the two men appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2017, in debate with Michael Shermer, and Rogan is an interviewee in the Netflix series. These associations show how Hancock here serves as a gateway into the wider conspiracy milieu – Rogan is infamous for Covid misinformation, while Carlson’s YouTube output includes “They’re Lying to Us About Global Warming” and “Why Aren’t COVID Vaccines Working?”

As for the documentary series itself, a professional archaeologist named Flint Dibble has an overview:

Hancock argues that viewers should “not rely on the so-called experts”, implying they should rely on his narrative instead. His attacks against “mainstream archaeologists”, the “so-called experts” who “practice censorship” are strident and frequent. After all, as he puts in in episode six, “archaeologists have been wrong before and they could be wrong again”.

One particular problem with Hancock’s theories is the idea that sophisticated ancient remains cannot have arisen out of the ancient civilisations themselves:

Scholars and journalists have pointed out that Hancock’s ideas recycle the long since discredited conclusions drawn by American congressman Ignatius Donnelly in his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882.

…Like many forms of pseudo archaeology, these claims act to reinforce white supremacist ideas, stripping Indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or white people.

Further criticisms have been expressed in Twitter threads by (among others) Ella Al-Shamahi, Jonathan Jarry, Jens Notroff, John Hoopes and Holly Walters.

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Election denialism in the USA is alive and well, despite a more muted response to the midterm results than we saw in 2020. Case in point: “wealth guru” Robert Kiyosaki, on Twitter:

STALIN said: “It’s not who votes that counts. It is who counts the votes that counts.” America is dying. Our votes no longer count. Speak out. Fight back. Demand recounts now, not next election. Democracy is at stake and worth fighting for. Don’t let Communists steal our freedom.

Kiyosaki is a leading figure the “wealth guru” subculture. His Rich Dad, Poor Dad books have sold millions, and thousands have paid to attend his seminars in various countries. Repeated predictions of an imminent financial crash have kept him in the news for years.

Kiyosaki has also long been associated with Donald Trump; in 2007 the two men co-authored Why We Want You Be Rich, publicity material for which also featured Trump’s prosperity gospel evangelist Paula White (1). Presumably, Kiyosaki’s investment in election conspiracy rhetoric is an example of the debasing influence that holds sway over all those who embrace Trump’s movement.

Ahead of the midterms, Kiyosaki endorsed election conspiracy theorist Kari Lake in Arizona and appeared on stage with her; his most recent Tweets denounce the “Clinton and Obama Crime Families”, and perhaps inevitably he has also jumped on the World Economic Forum conspiracy theory bandwagon. He also commends Jordan Peterson’s “words of wisdom” to his 2.2 million followers.

Despite formerly promoting real estate investment, he now says that “Marxist took over the US in the 2020” and will raise property taxes; instead, “I recommend gold, silver, Bitcoin”. His latest book, Capitalist Manifesto (2), is a boilerplate rant if the blurb is anything to go by:

Marx’s ideology was spreading through America via the education system. In 2020, protestors are parents, protesting mandatory vaccines for their children, wearing of masks, and the teaching of Critical Race Theory, gender identity, and Post-Modernist Education… all Marxist in heritage.

His view of the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccination is that both are “fishy” and a way for Bill Gates to make money.

In 2010 a journalistic investigation into Kiyosaki’s seminars in Canada found “aggressive sales tactics… where participants are urged to increase their credit card limits after being pressured to spend tens of thousands of dollars on advanced courses”. In 2012 one of his companies declared bankruptcy following a legal dispute.

Note

1. In terms of religion, Kiyosaki describes God as “the best business partner that I’ve ever had”, and he recommends tithing 10% to “charitable organizations”. However, he doesn’t appear to be affiliated with Christianity and one of his books, Rich Brother Rich Sister: Two Different Paths to God, Money and Happiness, was co-authored with his sister Tenzin (Emi) Kiyosaki, a former Buddhist nun who was ordained by the Dalai Lama.

2. According to some listings, the full title is Capitalist Manifesto: Money for Nothing – Gold, Silver and Bitcoin for Free. However, that absurd and self-parodying subtitle does not appear on the cover and it’s possible there’s been some automated confusion somewhere.

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From Coindesk:

Last week, a theory spread on Twitter and right-wing websites suggesting the U.S. government’s massive aid to the besieged nation rebounded to the U.S. Democratic party via the failed FTX crypto exchange, which was an official partner of Ukrainian government for the crypto fundraising campaign.

…Neither Ukrainian government nor FTX ever announced an investment event of any sorts. Such a move would have been extravagant for a nation fielding a full-scale military invasion from Russia using military and financial aid from the U.S., E.U., U.K. and other countries, observers have been quick to point out.

The false claim of an “investment” is a wild extrapolation from old news that Ukraine had “partnered with FTX in March to cash out crypto donations and turn them into ammunition and humanitarian aid”. As Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, now writes:

A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March. Ukraine’s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly 🤦‍♂️

This is also confirmed by someone involved with Aid for Ukraine:

The funds were converted to fiat, then transferred immediately to the government account in the National Bank of Ukraine and spent. 54 Million+ of those was spent this summer – you can check the monthly reports at https://aid-for-ukraine.io.

Despite the lack of evidence for any “investment”, the inherent inplausiblity of the claim, and the obvious way the allegation has been concocted by twisting the story from March, the false narrative is currently dominating social media.

Its rise via Zerohedge and Gateway Pundit is charted on a blog called Did Nothing Wrong, written by Jay McKenzie, who also provides a detailed critique and an explanation for its popularity:

This narrative is an excuse for the poor Republican performance in the midterms. It’s an attack line against Joe Biden by tying him and the Democratic Party to “corruption in Ukraine”—with the search for this supposed corruption still a MAGA open wound that led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment. It also gives further justification for ending aid to Ukraine, as increasing numbers of politicians and voters on the right are pushing for. The usual reasons for astroturfed disinformation campaigns also apply. This is about sowing doubt and confusion. It’s an opportunity for junk news purveyors to convince more people to click on a link and provide them with ad revenue.

In the UK, the conspiracy theory has been promoted with trademark smugness by James Melville, a frequent commentator on GB News and Talk TV whose public profile is based purely on self-promotion rather than expertise in anything. Melville’s engagement is typically superficial: seeing an extravagant claim makes him feel clever, and amplifying it to his 360,000 followers creates a mutual appreciation feedback loop that disincentivises due diligence, caution or common sense. In this case, he further argues that the story shows that the term “conspiracy theory” has been used to suppress true information.

Also on board is another GB News regular: Calvin Robinson, who now appears on the channel wearing a cassock and dog collar after having been ordained into a fringe breakaway Anglican denomination. The reverend suggests that Ukraine “was a money laundering operation all along”, claiming that “the West donated billions to the ‘war effort'” and that “Zelensky invested that money into FTX”. In a follow up, he clarifies “no evidence of Zelenskyy investing in FTX” (followed by an enigmatic asterisk), before linking FTX to Covid conspiricism: “FTX backed the research that found ivermectin to be ‘ineffective’. FTX donated $39m to Dems, but also donated $ to Republicans who were ‘prepared for next pandemic'”.

Another part of the FTX conspiracy theory is the detail that FTX used to be listed as a “partner” on the website of the World Economic Forum, but the WEF has now deleted its webpage announcing this. The New York Post has reported this under the headline “How World Economic Forum, others are hiding their past ties with FTX”; this implies something underhand, although one wonders what the WEF ought to have done instead. According to the article itself:

“FTX was a World Economic Forum partner. In light of last week’s events, their partnership was suspended and they were removed from the Partners section of our website,” a spokesman for the Geneva-based organization headed by Klaus Schwab told The Post on Monday.

According to one WEF insider, Bankman-Fried likely landed on the group’s site because he donated cash to the group, in addition to his upcoming speaking gig.

The former partnership is seen by conspiricists as further evidence of the WEF’s supposed control over world events, rather than as an example of how it has has a tendency to latch onto anything big in order to promote itself and in this instance has been embarrassed.

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