Bartholomew's Notes

Back in December 2021, the cancellation of an anti-cancel culture conference in London caught the journalistic ear for irony and alliteration. The Mirror was a typical example:

Nigel Farage’s anti-cancel culture conference has been cancelled.

‘Counter Conference’, a right-wing talking shop to take place at The O2’s 3,000 capacity Indigo venue next week was set to feature the former Ukip leader, fresh from interviewing Donald Trump on GB News.

Provocateur Laurence Fox, former Trump aide Jason Miller and former US Housing Secretary Ben Carson were also set to appear at the event, organised by Mr Miller’s right-wing Twitter alternative GETTR.

But organisers pulled the plug on Tuesday night, blaming new Covid border rules which require self-isolation on arrival in the UK.

The O2 blurb can be seen here – it was due to take place on 8 December, and was billed as “the inaugural 2021 Counter Conference”.

The initial heads up came from the Spectator, which also included Mahyar Tousi to the list of names and suggested that lack of demand also played a role:

Steerpike understands the event has suffered from poor sales, selling under 400 tickets. Event organisers are said to be blaming the O2’s stringent vaccine passport policies for the lack of demand.

On GB News, Miller told presenter Mark Dolan that the event had merely been postponed to “the first or second week of March” in 2022. He also listed some other speakers on the line up, as Dolan grinned and nodded along:

Seb Gorka, Jack Posobiec, Raheem Kassam… and about 25 or 30 European members of parliament

Elsewhere, Miller also promised “folks from Brazil”, presumably referring to members of the Bolsonaro administration.

Fox’s Reclaim Party later announced that the event would take place on 22 April 2022, but that was the last that was heard of it. The cancelled counter conference thus remains a counter-factual, and we never got to see Laurence Fox on stage with Jack “Pizzagate” Posobiec. However, the affinity is worth noting, given this recent profile of Posobiec.

Collage of three “Counter Conference” flyers

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From a long read on BBC News:

In the past few years, Lighthouse – formally known as Lighthouse International Group and based in the Midlands in England – has received hundreds of thousands of pounds from mentees. It boasts of helping thousands of people.

Set up in 2012 by businessman Paul Waugh, it claims to be different from most life coaching groups.

Its founder, who grew up in South Africa and tells people he was a multimillionaire by the age of 35, says he has developed a revolutionary approach by fixing people’s spiritual wellbeing.

The article, by Catrin Nye, Natalie Truswell and Jamie Bartlett, ties in with their TV and audio documentaries about the group, both titled A Very British Cult. Articles reporting on their investigation have also appeared in The Times, the Sun (articles here and here), and the Daily Mail (which has also run earlier articles about the group). Ex-members describe spending hours and hours listening to and transcribing Waugh’s phone calls, handing over tens of thousands of pounds, being told that sceptical partners and family members were “toxic”, and in some cases being encouraged to move into house-shares. Meanwhile, investigators found no evidence in support of Waugh’s grandiose self-presentation of his past.

As expected, former members and other critics are targeted aggressively, in ways that Waugh thinks look convincing but that to any outsider are self-evidently vile and posturing. As written up in The Times:

A teacher who shared details online about her negative experience claimed that Lighthouse approached her employer. “They wrote an email to my head teacher, basically saying that they had concerns about me and my ability to do my job and that I was a threat to children,” she said. “Then they also began to [copy in] senior executives at the local authority. One email had a 25-page report and an 18-page report about me, making various spurious claims. One of which was that I should be psychologically evaluated.”

The BBC News long-read adds that someone who wrote critically about the group after her brother Kris became involved found herself being reported “to the police for being an internet troll. The police took no action.” Also:

Seven Lighthouse-related accounts were shut down by Twitter for hateful conduct shortly after we first got in touch with Paul Waugh, including one named “Parents Against Trolls”.

The climax of the TV documentary is a confrontation between Waugh and Nye outside the Rolls Building, a court complex round the back of the High Court used for commerical cases, just after Lighthouse had been shut down by the authorities for financial irregularies. Waugh blusters that the outcome was actually what he wanted all along, and he turns on Nye for her BBC credentials:

These parents are child abusers that you’re supporting. And you supported Sir Jimmy Savile. You… You supported Jimmy Savile and his paedophilia… [guesturing to camera] Come close… [points at Nye] Paedophile supporter!

One aspect that was touched on in the TV documentary was that in recent years the group has started to adopt a more overt religiosity. Kris runs a “Fellowship for Christian Gentlemen”, and on its website he writes that he and his “colleagues at Lighthouse began to embrace Christianity” in 2018. He claims that because of this, “we began to face hateful criticism and persecution online, based on malicious lies and disinformation”. Another religious initiative is the “Christian Response Forum”. These groups don’t appear to be linked to any wider Christian organisations.

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Last month, freelance journalist Andrew Connelly drew attention (here and here) to Tweets RTed by Lord Cruddas (Peter Cruddas), an influential figure on the Tory Right, including one from Tommy Robinson (“Let everyone know I’m back”), and an anti-asylum seeker Tweet from Mark Collett of the far-right Patriotic Alternative:

The people of Liverpool were protesting again last night in Knowsley against the housing of illegal migrants in hotels. The resistance against the replacement of the indigenous people of these islands is growing.

This was a reference to an incident in Knowsley during which a police van was set on fire by protestors. Collett is neo-Nazi who was once secretly recorded expressing the view that “Hitler will live on forever”; his explicit neo-Nazism is not immediately apparent from his Twitter profile, but “indigenous people” was an obvious red flag even if Cruddas didn’t recognise the distinctive and notorious name. Cruddas responded to criticism of the Collett RT from Sunder Katwala by blocking Sunder – so we can infer that Cruddas knows exactly who Collett is and does not feel the need to explain himself.

The RTs noted by Connelly are collected in the image below, and include the following claims: that George Soros is in part responsible for censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story; that China is lying about a new wave of Covid-19, in order to deceive the West; the Emmanuel Macron is part of the New World Order (NWO); and that the police are covering up details about the Muslim community that would “start a war” if they were known.

One should be cautious about extrapolating someone’s entire worldview or character from a few problematic social media associations, but it is also reasonable to draw adverse inferences from disreputable material. And when the person concerned has influence in public life, what is going on in their head is of less relevance than the effects of their choices on the rest of us. It is disturbing that the above is regarded as acceptable by the Conservative Party, and one has to wonder if a blind eye is being turned due to his status as a former party treasurer and “billionaire donor” who was ennobled in late 2020 by Boris Johnson against the advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission.

Cruddas’ main vehicle of influence within the Conservative Party is his “Conservative Democratic Organisation”, which is thought to be operating within local branches of the Conservative Party and holding sway over candidate selections (1). He is also hosting a CDO conference in Bournemouth next month, where the “Gala Dinner” speakers include

Priti Patel MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP and Nadine Dorries MP plus various other Members of Parliament, media commentators, the CDO team and VERY special guests

The “CDO team” consists of Lord Stephen Greenhalgh (Vice President), David Campbell Bannerman (Chairman), Claire Bullivant (CEO), Stephen James (Director of Digital), Mike Rouse (Field Director & Constitutional Strategist), Steven Barrett (Barrister & Independent Legal & Constitutional Consultant), John Strafford (Constitutional Consultant) Paul Diamond (Barrister & Independent Legal & Constitutional Consultant) and Alex Story (no role given, although described as a “Political Commentator”). Diamond of course is familar for his work with Christian Concern. One wonders about the guests who are so “VERY SPECIAL” that they cannot be named publicly.

The word “Democratic” in the group’s title refers to Cruddas’ wish to reform how leaders of the Conservative Party are chosen; while the CDO avoids criticising Rishi Sunak personally, it argues that he has become Prime Minister due to a flawed process, and that Boris Johnson ought not to have been removed from power.

Dorries is a good fit for the conference, having herself previously RTed Tommy Robinson (as noted in the Mirror in 2017). Rees-Mogg, meanwhile, infamously attended a dinner with the Traditional Britain Group in 2013, which he got away with on the grounds that he was just an “otherworldly” comedy backbencher who couldn’t be expected to have done due diligence.

Cruddas was also recently reported in The Times as having had “talks” with Aaron Banks.

Click to enlarge. Dates: Mark Collett Tweet: 12 February 2023 (account now suspended, but Tweet previously here); Tommy Robinson Tweet: 12 January (account now suspended, but Tweet previously here); Kyle Becker Tweet: 13 January (Tweet since deleted, but previously here); China Tweet: 29 December 2022 (still online); Macron NWO tweet: 11 February 2023 (still online); Muslim community Tweet: 16 January 2023 (still online). The China Tweet has too many RTs to check and Cruddas has Tweeted too often since to roll back through his timeline, but I was able to see for myself that he had indeed RTed the other two Tweets that are still online.

Note

1. The modus operandi recalls claims made by Norman Tebbit 20 years ago about an alleged group within the party calling itself “the Movement”, the existence of which was never quite established.

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A flyer for a recent event in Gibraltar:

Thursday 30th March 

RESTORA-TIVE

SAFE AND EFFECTIVE ?

Dr Aseem Malhotra | Dr Clare Craig | Dr David Cartland

Hosted by John Bowe

The logos for the two sponsoring organisations then follow: WEU, indicating the Workers of England Union, and FG, a local group called Freedom Gibraltar.

The billed speakers are well-known within the anti-Covid vaccination movement: I’ve previously blogged on Malhotra and Bowe, while Clare Craig of HART is a familiar figure from GB News. David Cartland is also with HART: on social media, he has promoted the idea that Covid vaccination causes magnetism and that areoplanes are responsible for chemtrails; screenshots indicate alignment with the view that SARS-CoV-2 does not exist; that Freemasons “without doubt” control medicine, academia, religion, finance, entertaiment and corporations; and that doctors and nurses involved in Covid vaccination should face public hangings (illustrated with an image frequently misattributed to the Nuremberg Trials).

A video of the proceedings has been helpfully summarised on Twitter by John Bye. Cartland was unable to speak due to a stomach bug, although he was present in the audience. However, disappointed attendees were instead treated to an appearance by David Icke’s son Gareth Icke; there was also a short recorded message from the disgraced MP Andrew Bridgen, and a Zoom call with Steve Kirsch. Kirsch was recently in the news after he approached a woman he didn’t know on an airflight and offered her a large amount of money to remove her face-mask; he’s since followed up by photographing a random woman wearing a face-mask he saw at a sporting event and posting the image online with a derisive comment about her.

Bye adds that the Q&A

got off to a good start when the first ‘question’ from the audience was a lady promoting some alternative health quackery about ‘healing through sound and frequency’, ironically interrupted by constant feedback from the mic. And it didn’t get any better. The other questions asked about vaccine shedding (which Malhotra brushed off as harmless), whether viruses even exist, and terrain theory vs germ theory (all getting huge cheers from the audience).

A lighter moment was when someone accidentally pressed something that set off some disco lights.

A WEU roller banner was displayed prominently on the stage behind the speakers – the organisation also had a stall at the recent TCW “Celebration of Dissent” event in London. As noted by Hope Not Hate last year:

The WEU has thrown its weight behind an increasingly unstable and bewildering anti-vaxx and anti-lockdown movement. Much of this movement is anti-scientific and driven by fear, conspiracy and confusion. The WEU has even taken out advertisements in such places as The Light Paper, whose founder is an exponent of the Flat Earth conspiracy theory.

And that’s not all:

As well as baffling employers and others with a myriad of faux science and legal jargon, the WEU has pushed the idea of non-existent rights of employees under spurious notions of “common law” which, according to the WEU’s General Secretary Stephen Morris, has been around for “1700 years”.

The group got into trouble for issuing bogus press cards to “citizen journalists”, with the Press Association winning an injunction:

The use of these fake cards came to the attention of anti-fascists when a number of far-right activists produced WEU press cards while attempting to antagonise real journalists and trade unionists covering far-right demonstrations and gatherings.

In particular, the cards were brandished by anti-migrant activists as an excuse to follow and harass asylum-seekers, as described in details by the Antifascist Research Collective. Returning to Hope Not Hate:

The WEU was represented in court by Robin Tilbrook, who described himself as the “Chairman of WEU”… The court heard the WEU was considering using the name ‘English Media Group’ in future. Interestingly, though not entirely surprisingly, the ‘English Media Group’ surfaced late last year when far-right fellow travellers Alan Leggett, Nigel Marcham, Steve Laws and Tracey Wiseman were in court in Dover for their activities related to refugee arrivals. Laws is better known as “the migrant hunter” and Marchman as the foul-mouthed reprobate “the tiny veteran”. Again, the WEU described all four as “journalists”.

Tilbrook is leader of the fringe-right English Democrats party (previously blogged here), while the WEU general secretary is a regular ED candidate named Stephen Morris. These details raise some doubts about the WEU’s claim to be politically unaffiliated. The WEU is also the sole affiliate of the “English TUC”; Hope Not Hate notes that they are run out of the same office, and Morris is again general secretary. I’m sure there was no intention to make people think that the WEU is part of the Trades Union Congress.

Also involved with the WEU is one Dr Niall McCrae, whom I previously noted here.

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Andrew Mitchell MP also dragged into conspiracy narrative

From The i Newspaper:

A disgraced MP who was stripped of the Conservative whip for comparing the use of Covid vaccines to the Holocaust is free to raise “dangerous” anti-vax conspiracy theories in Parliament, the Commons Speaker has said.

Andrew Bridgen, who lost the party whip in January, “has a right to express his views whether others agree with them or not”, a spokeswoman for Speaker Lindsay Hoyle.

It came after Mr Bridgen once again used a Commons adjournment debate to make a series of claims about Covid vaccines, including that boosters are “state-sponsored self harm on a national level”.

The claims were thoroughly debunked by Health Minister Will Quince, who said vaccines have “saved tens of thousands of lives, reduced the pressure on the NHS and were instrumental in allowing our economy and society to reopen”.

The exchange can be viewed on Parliament TV here, with the Hansard transcript here. Bridgen also uploaded the segment to his YouTube channel – there was apparently a period of three hours on Friday evening (1) when it was removed “for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines”, but the platform then realised that censoring a video of official Parliamentary proceedings was the wrong call. Bridgen credits the u-turn to “a large public outcry”, although most of those who complained about it on social media were unaware that it was already back online.

Bridgen’s speech was a summary of the anti-Covid vaccination tropes that he is already known for – the only notable detail was that he avoided repeating in Parliament the extravagant “plandemic” claims he has made on social media, such as that members of various security services knew about Covid in advance and had been warned not to get vaccinated, and that it has been “confirmed” to him that the virus and the vaccines were both created by the US Department of Defense at Fort Detrick and in Canada. (2)

Adjournment debates are held at the end of the day’s business in the House of Commons, and the word “debate” is a misnomer – all that happens is that an MP makes a speech and a minister replies. They are a device by which an issue may be entered into the Parliamentary record (or in this case, by which Bridgen can get some free publicity from GB News), and as such they are typically poorly attended. In this instance, the “debate” was on a Friday afternoon, and there weren’t many MPs present even before Bridgen started. Given that Bridgen is disgraced and marginal, there was never much chance that MPs would show up to listen to him, or remain just to hear him when other business had been concluded.

As might have been expected, however, conspiracy influencers claim that MPs failed to attend because they either don’t care about vaccination injury or because their presence would for some unexplained reason be problematic. The strongest version of this narrative alleges that Andrew Mitchell crossed the floor either to urge or to instruct two opposition MPs to leave, and that this precipitated a general flight from the chamber. This claim seems to have begun with the anti-Covid vax retired actor John Bowe, and was amplified by usual suspects (some of whom will be familiar from GB News): John Bye notes Dominque Samuels, Matt Le Tissier, Bernie Spofforth, Leilani Dowding, James Freeman, June Slater, Anna de Buisseret and even Andrew Bridgen’s wife Nevena Bridgen.

Some also posted recent photos of Mitchell with Bill Gates – Mitchell is active in polio eradication efforts, and the conspiracy crowd making him villain of the day is a further sign that conspiratorial anti-vax narratives must by logic expand beyond just Covid vaccination to other vaccines.

The actual context is that Bridgen spoke following the Second Reading of Layla Moran’s  Palestinian Statehood (Recognition) Private Member’s Bill, during which Mitchell responded on behalf of the government. When Mitchell crossed the floor to speak to Moran privately for a moment as Bridgen began, this was most likely a courtesy farewell, or perhaps something to do with the issue they had been discussing. The idea that he approached her to say “Quick, Andrew Bridgen is speaking about vaccine injury, you’ve got to get out” is fantastical and nonsensical. It is also clear from the full video that Moran and an MP sitting next to her were already getting ready to leave before Mitchell came over.

UPDATE (20 March): Antivax YouTuber Dr John Campbell (the “Dr” is a PhD in nursing) has managed to milk the Mitchell non-incident into a five minute video. Campbell’s extensive commentary on a slow-motion running of the footage is particularly impressive given that Campbell fails to identify either Mitchell or Moran by name and appears to be completely ignorant of the adjournment debate context.

Notes

1. Someone posting a link to the video at 7.20 pm said it that had been “nuked”, and Bridgen complained about the removal at 8.19 pm. There is is gap in users posting the link on Twitter until 10.33 pm, indicating that it was restored around then.

2. The latter claim was made on Twitter, and it may be that someone else has access to his account. One sign of this is a Bridgen Tweet that appeared on Friday at 2.49 pm, which was while he was in full flow making his speech. We also know that Bridgen receives “speechwriting support” from Laurence Fox’s “Reclaim the Media” organisation.

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Some conflict within the conspiracy milieu:

I saw a solicitor today about suing Anna Brees for libel. He suggested I set up a campaign with Crowdjustice. So I did! It’s basically for publishing lies about me in an attempt to malign me and damage my reputation and career. She stated that I am “mentally unwell”, “a troublemaker”, here to cause “chaos” and that I am “at best stupid.” She also tagged people I work for in a tweet. All libellous.

The complainant, Jacqui Deevoy, is a professional journalist who has a creditable CV of articles and features across numerous British newspapers and magazines over many years. However, she also provides content for David Icke’s Ickonic channel, including a recent article in which she complained about the “abuse I’ve had on social media for even questioning whether [Nicola Bulley is] real and not just the A.I. face of a sinister government campaign”. Most people would regard the suggestion that Bulley’s tragic death in distressing circumstances was fabricated as beyond reason and beneath contempt, and as such I would be surprised if a judge were to rule that people should not draw negative inferences about the character of anyone willing to entertain the idea as a serious proposition. Deevoy’s explanation is that “My job is to ask questions”.

Anna Brees as the voice of reason, though, is equally difficult to credit – she rose to prominence within the conspiracy milieu in association with Jon Wedger, and in  2018 she was Tweeting references to the Illuminati, “Pizzagate” and “Qanon”. A few days ago she decided to amplfy a discussion between Maajid Nawaz and Mike Yeadon, in which Yeadon made the accusation “that over 100,000 people were killed by government protocols of Midazolam and Morphine” – Brees’s eccentric commentary is not that this is untrue, but that it was a reasonable thing to do due to hospital incapacity (1).

Brees’s estrangement from the main currents of the conspiracist movement in the UK has been confirmed by John Mappin, who was moved to respond to her after she blocked him on Twitter:

By attempting to dilute or water down the actual evil intentions of the decision makers you are assisting their actions and increasing the chance of the same crimes being repeated…

There was a time when you appreciated our friendship advice, and council. You current path will not bring happiness or the result you seek.

UPDATE (April 2023): Brees is also complaining about “abuse” she is getting on social media; this is hard to take if one recalls her 2019 retaliation against Private Eye journalist Rosie Waterhouse, which involved her recording Michael Tarraga unleashing a stream of aggressive abuse after Waterhouse raised the issue of some discrepanices in his misery memoir. Particularly notable was Brees’s smirk while Tarraga was speaking.

Note

1. The idea that a secret programme of euthanasia explains away Covid deaths in the UK has been around for a while, but it recently got a boost thanks to a bogus video from John Campbell which has been debunked by James Lynch here. Isabel Oakeshott, who famously has access to thousands of government WhatsApp messages from during the pandemic, said in December about the claim that “I’ve seen zero evidence whatsoever. This is a very silly conspiracy theory”. Perhaps her partner Richard Tice could raise the matter with Nawaz the next time they have dinner together.

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From the Pink News at the end of last month:

A rally organised by right-wing group Turning Point UK against Magical Storytelling at The Honor Oak pub in Lewisham, south east London, was dwarfed in number by those attending a loud and colourful counter-protest made up up of LGBTQ+ people, allies and anti-fascist groups.

Around 30 protestors – including anti-LGBTQ+ GB News host and Free Church of England member Deacon Calvin Robinson – attended the Turning Point UK protest, which was forced to take place around 100 metres from the pub after the road was blocked by hundreds of people defending the family event, hosted by drag queen That Girl.

Dozens of police attended the scene to prevent the two sides from mixing as LGBTQ+ supporters drowned out a speech from Robinson with a chorus of boos, sirens and chants of “You’re not a real vicar”.

This is part of a trend in recent months – I noted an example last July, at which a Drag Queen Story Hour was protested in Reading by Covid anti-vax activists seeking to broaden the scope of their moral entrepreneurship. Turning Point UK speakers at Honor Oak included “Chairman of the Orthodox Conservatives Colonel James Bogle”, along with TPUK COO Nick Tenconi and Grenadier Roy Brinkley.

The complaint of the protestors is that drag acts are “sexualised” entertainment that should be for adults only. Artistes may excise bawdy references from their routines, but flamboyant, camp and/or skimpy costuming and deportment are deemed to be inherently sexual rather than clownish or comedic. This is useful, as it means that objectors do not have to articulate an argument for censorship on the basis that drag artistes are bad gender role models (a typical moral panic trope unlikely to impress), but can instead focus on the more sinister notion of “grooming”.

Robinson’s formulation of what this means was noted recently by David Aaronovitch:

Robinson demanded with something approaching rhetorical ability: “Ask not why your children are so keen to spend time with drag queens, ask why drag queens are so keen to spend time with your children.” This is not so much an insinuation as an accusation.

On Twitter, Raheem Kassam drew attention to a self-made banner stating “Queer Joy Is For All Ages” as evidence that the counter-protestors were a “pro pedo demonstration” – an interpretation that was amplifed by Robinson.

Turning Point UK will be at it again this Friday, where Robinson will this time be joined by his friend Laurence Fox (no stranger to making “paeodphile” taunts). TPUK branding for the protest is shared with their Bad Law Project.

Also on the line up this time is Pastor Rikki Doolan. Doolan is the spokesman for a British-Zimbabwean evangelist named Uebert Angel, who has the status of “Ambassador at Large” for Zimbabwe’s government. Undercover footage of the two men features in a clip for an upcoming Al-Jaazera documentary about gold smuggling in Zimbabwe.

One protestor who may or may not be present on Friday is Brian Stovell (“Brexit Brian”), who posed with Robinson for a photo-op in Lewisham just before being arrested for doing a Nazi salute at the counter protestors.

UPDATE (11 March): The BBC reports:

Protesters stood outside an empty pub on Friday morning to rally against a non-existent drag event.

Turning Point UK had organised a demonstration at The Great Exhibition pub in East Dulwich for 11:00 GMT.

…A spokesperson for CLIP, which hosted a Drag Storytime event at the venue in July 2022, told BBC London that the venue’s website was still showing the event as running monthly because the listings had not been updated.

Turning Point UK were told beforehand that there was no event, but claimed that the listing showed that one had been planned.

As noted by Matthew Sweet, Stovell was again present and welcome; Fox’s activist associate Martin Daubney, who was also there, has expressed scepticism of images associating Stovell with Hitler-salute gestures.

Matthew also noted that on Christmas Day Tenconi posted a Tweet showing him shaking hands with Kyle Rittenhouse. Tenconi’s message to the man who shot dead two people in Kenosha was “Alpha > Liberal betas” and “huge fan of your work”.

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From the UK’s National Secular Society:

The government recently gave thousands of pounds to a Christian group whose chair said Islam is “demonic” and “spiritual wickedness”, the National Secular Society has found.

Zion Projects, a Christian charity based in Eastleigh, Hampshire, is one of 16 religious organisations given a total of £1.3 million in public money as part of the government’s ‘Faith New Deal’ fund. Zion Projects was awarded £43,220 last year for a project entitled “As One Hampshire”.

A 2020 video… on Vimeo shows Danny Stupple, the chair and a trustee of Zion Projects, making anti-Islam comments during a Covid-19 lockdown meeting of the “Eastleigh Prophetic Hub”.

…In the same video, Stupple also suggests God is using the pandemic to “make the point of the value of life” because he anticipates “the same amount of babies being saved as the number of people who die” as a result of women being unable to get abortions during lockdown.

He also claims that Brexit is “important to the Lord” and that Dominic Cummings has an “anointing” to accomplish it.

According to Third Sector, the “government is urgently investigating” the matter, although it may be hampered by the fact that Stupple’s videos have disappeared from various streaming sites.

However, the segment discussed by the NSS has been reuploaded by a supporter on Bitchute. The context for Stupple’s discourse is Charismatic or Neo-Pentecostal “spritual warfare” beliefs, and he works his way through various “pillars” of society – this is instantly recognisable as the “Seven Mountain Mandate” of Christian dominionism, and they also feature on the Zion Projects website as “7 arenas”. Stupple believes that there is a “shaking” taking place in each “pillar”, but his observations do not necessarily all conform to right-wing conservatism; in particular, as regards the pillar of “business”, he is of the view that “legacy of slavery” is being exposed, and he refers negatively to “big business, represented by statues of people who made fortunes and built cities on the back of slavery”.

Despite the loss of output from streaming sites including Vimeo, Soundcloud and TuneIn, title listings remain visible. In 2021 discussions included “How History Informs Prophecy” in the British Isles from Phillip Quenby; a conversation with “Tomas Sandell Of The European Coalition For Israel”; “Eastleigh to Israel Bridge with Cody and Liat Archer in the Golan Heights”; and a guest appearance from Calvin Robinson. Stupple and his group have particular regard for a French evangelist named Pierre-Daniel Martin, who is based in Marseille (1) – the Bitchute video starts with Stupple referring to “four prophecies” that Martin had made. Zion Projects’ activities include the Annual Eastleigh Creation Conference, which promotes “open-minded scrutiny of the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis and related human ideas which challenge the Christian faith”.

As noted by the NSS, in 2013 Stupple stood as an independent candidate in a local by-election; an archive of his campaign is still available on YouTube. He is also chair of Harvest Vision, a charity that has a trustee Timothy Vince, who in 2019 stood as a Brexit Party candidate in South Thanet.

“Prophetic Hubs” are an initiative of Clifford Hill, assisted by Dr Peter Carruthers. Hill has been a well-known figure in the UK Christian Right for decades, particularly via his magazine Prophecy Today and a stream of books that claim to provide “prophetic insight” into modern Britain. I noted his involvement with the 1980s Satanic Panic here.

Note

1. P.-D. Martin’s background is discussed in a sociological paper here, which is primarily concerned with visits he has made to the island of Moorea in French Polynesia.

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From the Evening Standard:

The Carlton Club, traditional home of the Conservative Party, hosted a champagne reception last week held by Andrew Bridgen MP and featuring other controversial “vaccine sceptic” figures… Organiser John Mappin invited Robert Malone, a vaccine-sceptic doctor, to give “evidence of the harms that the injections have done to innocent civilians”. Guests included Lawrence Fox and Nigel Farage… Not all got in: Richard Fairbrass, of band Right Said Fred, said he was refused entry for wearing the wrong trousers.

The millionaire Mappin famously co-founded Talking Point UK, although the organisation now prefers to downplay the association, and he is known for flying a “Q” flag above his castle-hotel in Cornwall in support of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Conspiracy influencers who have enjoyed his hospitality include Piers Corbyn, Laurence Fox and James Melville, and there was a previous Carlton Club dinner late last year that included Farage and Turning Point’s Charlie Kirk.

Mappin’s invitation card for the more recent event lists “Dr Aseem Malhotra, Dr Robert Malone MD, Dr Ryan Cole MD, Miss Eva Vaardingerbroek and other luminaries”; other attendees included Amanda Eliasch, Lady Victoria Hervey and Dominique Samuels of GB News, as well as Tonia Buxton, Toby Young, Matt Le Tissier and John Bowe. John Bye adds:

Although Mappin doesn’t mention her, HART and UsForThem spokeswoman Ros Jones appears to be skulking in the background of some photos, and Clare Craig may also have been present. Mappin does boast about the presence of Sir Benjamin Slade though, who seems quite a .. character.

Mappin also refers to Juliet Mayhew and claims that “Members of Parliament were in attendance. Other MPs sent along their parliamentary assistants”. He further boasts:

Ambassadors Representatives and press attaches from international embassies and presidential families were there and plans on how to rapidly inform young people as to the dangers of mRNA injections were discussed.

According to David Icke associate Leilani Dowding, the evening was “for people who were on the fence”, and it appears that the conspiracy influencer crowd made at least one new recruit in the form of Victoria Baker-Harber, a reality TV star who appeared on “Made in Chelsea”.

However, Bye notes that not all the conspiracy crowd were pleased to see their movement’s public face enjoying the trappings of an elite London club: having been denied entry, Fairbrass sniffed that he was “pleased I wasn’t there”, and criticised Malhotra for not mentioning the vaccine injured; meanwhile, Sonia Poulton observed “we are dealing with establishment people here” and complained about Malhotra’s ego. (1)

Note

1. There appears to be an anti-Malhotra faction within the conspiracy movement, comprising Bob Moran, Abi Roberts and James Delingpole. Malhotra recently claimed to be vaccine injured himself, two days after Andrew Bridgen made a comparable supposed self-disclosure – both men originally promoted Covid vaccination, and presenting themselves as having suffered harm as a result of their decision may be a strategy to disarm less-forgiving truthers.

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From BBC News:

Thousands of people have joined a protest in Oxford against measures where roads are shut off to stop motorists driving through.

Campaigners gathered in Broad Street against Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and traffic filters in the city.

Oxfordshire County Council says their aims are to cut congestion and air pollution.

Supporters say they improve safety but those against believe the restrictions threaten the freedom of motorists.

It is not unusual for a traffic flow control proposal to have critics, but they don’t usually attract thousands of protestors, including activists from outside the area. The difference is that the conspiracy crowd claim that the proposals for Oxford are a “climate lockdown“, in which residents will be confined to local areas against their will based on fabricated claims about climate change. This is seen as linked to Oxford’s “15-minute city” urban planning framework, although the two issues are actually distinct. The conspiracy milieu’s framing builds on discontent about lockdowns during the Covid pandemic, as well as beliefs about the World Economic Forum as an all-powerful malign entity directing world affairs under the cloak of concern for the environment. The protest movement seems to be a right-libertarian Mirror Universe version of Reclaim the Streets, with cars and carbon-fuel technology now representing resistance rather than the embodiment of corporate interests.

Rhetoric leading up to the protests has been overheated: Toby Young compared Oxfordshire County Council to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and more recently an Oxford hotelier named Jeremy Mogford suggested that council members are “the Mengele equivalent”. Last month, the city was leafleted by “Not Our Future“, a group that has has grown out out of Covid conspiracism; echoing QAnon, the leaflet claimed that the group is “project managing” what it calls “the Great Awakening”.

Yesterday’s protest was covered for the Oxford Mail by their journalist Tom Seaward, who interviewed a number of participants and has uploaded clips. Figures with a public profile he encountered included David Kurten, whose Heritage Party contingent apparently represented a distinct separate demo; the ubiquitious Piers Corbyn; Druid leader King Arthur Uther Pendragon; and GB News’s Laurence Fox. One blast from the past was Jeff Marsh, formerly of Casuals United and now with the far-right Patriotic Alternative – he told Seaward that although he’s a white nationalist, this particular protest is not about about and so he couldn’t see why counter-protestors had a problem with his presence (1). Seaward has also uploaded a leaflet he was given.

Also monitoring the protest was the climate journalist Dave Vetter. His uploads show banners and stickers denouncing the WEF and describing Patrick Vallance, Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Matt Hancock as “globalist puppets” who are wanted for “mass murder”, as well as expressing climate change denial. One protestor he spoke to “told me that the Rothschilds control all governments, and told me that ‘Ashkenazi Jews aren’t like us’; ‘no one knows where they’re really from'”; another “says carbon is good because we’re made of carbon. ‘When they talk about reducing carbon they mean they want to reduce you.'” A leaflet he was given made the argument that oil companies actually benefit from “the Climate Change story” due to increased energy prices.

Of course, individual comments and banners are not necessarily representative of the event overall. In particular, too much significance could be read into the presence of Jeff Marsh – there doesn’t appear to have been any evidence of Patriotic Alternative paraphenalia on display, and most people there wouldn’t have recognised him or known anything about him.

Ahead of the protest, a flyer was posted online by Right Said Fred, billing as speakers Peter Ford, Dan Astin-Gregory, Mark Devlin, Paul Burgess and Jonathan Tilt. The flyer also features the logos of four groups: Resist & Act”, “British Lions for Freedom”, “#uniteforfreedom” and “Keep It Cash”.

Note

1. Jeff Marsh’s background is with football hooliganism, and in 2009 he came to wider prominence with the Welsh Defence League, modelled on the English Defence League. At the time, he denounced neo-Nazi “idiots” – a view he must have revised if he’s now part of Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative. I previously browsed his hooligan memoir Soul Crew Seasiders, in which he fondly recalls antics such as graffiting pub toilets with human faeces.

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