Bartholomew's Notes

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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A Tweet from conspiracy influencer James Melville from back in September:

▪️Nord Stream 1 recently stopped sending gas to Germany
▪️Nord Stream 2 isn’t yet in service
▪️Nord Stream is Russia’s economic brinkmanship trump card

So why would Russia “sabotage” their own gas supply infrastructure when there is absolutely nothing to gain from doing so?

In response to a query about who he thought was responsible, he posted a clip of the Pet Shop Boys singing “Go West”, clearly implying western Europe and/or the USA.

At GB News, Mark Steyn was so impressed by Melville’s “I can’t think of a reason for Russia to blow up the pipelines, so therefore there can’t be one” line of non-reasoning that he invited him onto his show. Melville’s smug “it’s obvious it wasn’t Russia” talking point was typical of the conspirisphere, with Tucker Carlson making the same suggestion in the US.

In fact, there are several reasons why Russia might have done it, and an analyst named Emma Ashford came up with several suggestions: (1) Putin signaling that he can damage European energy infrastructure at will; (2) Putin “was tying his own hands and that of any future Russian leader by making it harder to back down from the war in Ukraine”; and (3) a “force majeure” basis to counter lawsuits against Gazprom for failure to supply. A further possibility was (4) Russian hawks acting independently of Putin, although Ashford regarded this as “improbable”.

Henry Farrell, a professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins, then added the observation that Russia is “the least vulnerable” to adverse outcomes: “The pipelines are obsolescing assets anyway – its leaders know that Europeans will never again rely on Russian gas supply, after it has been weaponized against them. Russia does not have any allies who’d be upset if it was fingered for it”.

Of course, none of this proves anything, but the contrast to the glib pronouncements of rent-a-gob all-purpose “commentators” is stark.

Several months on, the suggestion that the pipelines were bombed by the US rather than Russia has now received a boost from Seymour Hersh, who has made his case in a much-discussed 5000-word Substack post. Hersh’s account relies on “a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning”; as added context, he dredges up American controversies from the 1970s (the period appears to be his interpretative filter half a century later), and he includes public quotes from Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland as supposed gotchas. The story has been taken at face value by many, with coverage from Carlson, and pro-Russian Irish MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly raising the matter in the European Parliament. Donald Trump Jr suggests that recent the train derailment in Ohio may be Russian retaliation for the bombing.

The UK’s Daily Mail has also gone all-in, with an article headlined “Did Biden give the order to destroy Putin’s Nord Stream pipeline after Ukraine invasion? Bombshell report claims Navy divers carried out mission to kill Russia’s gas stranglehold on Europe in audacious mission overseen by president”, complete with graphics and maps. One wonders why the word “report” was chosen over “article” – “report” has connotations of formal findings at the end of an investigative process. The Mail‘s hack, one Lewis Pennock, describes Hersh’s essay as “compelling”, and only near the end does he mention that Hersh’s “reporting has previously been criticized for its heavy reliance on unnamed and anonymous sources”.

However, Hersh’s article does not fare well under scrutiny. An OSINT analysis of specific details of the supposed “operation” has been published by Oliver Alexander, while Hersh’s underlying assumptions and narrative framing have been picked apart by the historian and energy researcher Simon Pirani. One small detail spotted by the military affairs reporter Wesley Morgan is that Hersh’s source describes the attack planning as a “goat fuck” – an unusual expression that just happens to have appeared previously in Hersh’s reporting. Norway is supposed to have been part of the US conspiracy, and Harald S. Klungtveit, an editor at Filter Nyheter, has further criticisms.

As regards the two “gotcha” quotes, Pirani deals with one:

Hersh refers to a press conference by US president Joe Biden and German chancellor Olaf Scholz on 7 February 2022, where Biden said: “If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will put an end to it.”

…Biden was answering the question, “did you receive assurances from chancellor Scholz that Germany will pull the plug on this project if Russia invades Ukraine?” Everyone in the room understood, and anyone who views the clip will see, that this is a conversation about whether the United States could convince Germany to nix the project.

And on 22 February, that’s what happened. The Kremlin formally recognised the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk – the clearest signal yet that it intended to invade Ukraine – and Scholz announced that German approval for Nord Stream was withdrawn. That meant the pipeline could not be used for the foreseeable future.

Any serious account of what led up to the explosions would have to explain this vital reversal of German policy. Hersh does not mention it.

Hersh similarly misleads on Nuland:

More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

This echoes Sergei Lavrov’s interpretation of her comment, which had already been addressed by Newsweek:

Her comment clearly meant that the Biden administration was pleased that the $11 billion Russian-owned pipeline—which the U.S. had opposed for years on the grounds that it increased European reliance on Russian energy—is not being used. Germany halted the recently finished project just before the invasion last February after Russia formally recognized two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine.

The magazine also notes that she previously used the phrase in January 2022, and there’s also an example from March 2022 – in other words, the US administration already regarded Nord Stream as useless and defunct months before the bombings. If something that basic falls apart after a moment’s investigation, why should we believe anything else in Hersh’s piece? And why didn’t the Daily Mail spot this?

It’s doubtful that criticisms or calls for caution will have any effect – one of the best ways to con someone is to flatter them into thinking that they’ve seen through a con, and American denials will feed into this tendency. This may apply to Hersh himself – has he simply made up his source, or is he being manipulated by someone who has come to him with a tall tale that he was predisposed to accept?

UPDATE (21 February): Hersh has been doing a round of sympathetic interviews, ranging from Russell Brand through to the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano. Here’s his blustering and incoherent reaction to the OSINT critique (square brackets in source):

The idea that you can’t change the markings on a plane, that you can’t have American pilots on a Norwegian plane, or Norwegian pilots on an American plane [is illogical]. Do you understand what I’m talking about? It’s not that hard [to manipulate it]. And when you use data only, the problem is, it still doesn’t explain a lot of other stuff. If they say “the ship wasn’t there,” are they saying that it didn’t happen? If they say “well the ship couldn’t have been there,” the next question is “So are you saying that there wasn’t an explosion there?” “Oh no, there was an explosion there, clearly it blew up, but it couldn’t have been that ship.” So then the issue still is: who blew it up? The basic issue doesn’t change.

(var. spelling: Nordstream)

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A flyer for a recent event that took place at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster:

“TCW” here is “TCW Defending Freedom”; the initials stand for “The Conservative Woman”, and there has been some mockery of the (wearily familiar) all-male line-up. In response, an aggrieved Calvin Robinson has posted photos showing that women were on stage at some points during the proceedings, although he doesn’t identify them.

“Dissent” here of course means Covid vaccination alarmism within the context of broader conspiricist currents: the only person with scientific credentials on the flyer is the UKIP oncologist Angus Dalgleish, although on the night he was joined by Mike Yeadon, as well as HART’s Clare Craig and Ros Jones. A generally sympathetic write-up of the evening on Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic website includes some criticism that Yeadon “strayed well off course on to central bank digital currencies”; the author should be grateful that Yeadon didn’t start talking about the moon landings or Satanic Ritual Abuse, given his range of conspiricist interests.

Despite the advertising, the evening was not in fact “hosted by Mark Dolan” – there was apparently a clash with his GB News show, which perhaps was just as well for him: according to Peter Walker, a journalist who was present (and who wrote the recent Guardian article about Neil Oliver), “GB News got a loud boo because of the way Mark Steyn left the channel”. From online clips, it appears that James Delingpole took over the compèring duties.

The evening ended, suprisingly, with what TCW’s Kathy Gyngell called “a rousing spontaneous audience rendition of #TheLordsPrayer”. However, the person leading the chant added a couple of modifications:

…Forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us PFIZER, and lead us not into temptation BILL GATES…

This is isn’t actually a call to “forgive” Pfizer, and Gyngell wrote it up as “save us from #Pfizer who trespass against us”. Thus the Lord’s Prayer is modified into a chant of accusation and ideological denunciation – a distortion so at odds with its intended purpose in Christian worship that the performance must surely amount to blasphemy. Rev. Robinson appeared to be OK with it, though.

The event also included input from members of the public who have experienced vaccine injury, although it’s not clear to what extent they are also on board with the wider agendas of the conspiricist influencers who are using them. According to TCW, Andrew Bridgen now claims that he himself is vaccine injured – if so, this would appear to be something that he has come to realise following his sudden (and conveniently timed) conversion to Covid conspiricism.

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From the Guardian:

The UK’s leading Jewish organisation and a group of MPs have called on GB News and the media regulator Ofcom to tackle the broadcaster’s indulgence of conspiracy theories, warning that some recent segments and guests risked spreading ideas linked to antisemitism.

In particular, the article focuses on a recent monologue by Neil Oliver:

Oliver, who delivers trademark monologues to camera, used the show last Saturday to discuss what he called a “silent war” by generations of politicians to take “total control of the people” and impose a “one-world government”.

The striking phrase “silent war” appears to echo the title Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, “supposedly a secret manual for world government found by chance in 1986” that includes a section on the Rothschild banking family. On Twitter, the connection was made by GB News critic Matthew Sweet (1), although some of Oliver’s supporters also drew the same inference.

Further:

On the same show, one of Oliver’s guests was a man called William Keyte, introduced as a “constitutional expert”, who is a supporter of a fringe campaign group called the New Chartist Movement.

“Supporter” can mean a lot of things, and in this case it means active and high-profile involvement: several of Keyte’s presentations are posted on the New Chartist Movement website, with headlines thar refer to him informally as “Will”. One video shows a talk he gave to the fringe-right Democrats and Veterans Party in 2018, at an event I discussed here.

Keyte’s talk with Oliver was concerned only with “the supposed primacy of common law over parliament”. However:

the New Chartist Movement website contains articles written by other members and contributors that contain antisemitic-linked ideas… [These] include one arguing that the “corporate and banking Deep State, completely supported by the Zionist state of Israel” plans to take control of UK politics… Another argues that the “House of Rothschild” has a pivotal role in world affairs.

Oliver’s supporters complain that it is unfair to link him with these wider claims: on Twitter, he has RTed a number of supportive messages along these lines, including from Israelis. However, he hasn’t directly addressed where he stands in relation to the discourses that he has effectively signposted. If he didn’t mean to evoke Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, why not say so? If he thinks the document has some value but he doesn’t believe its Rothschild conspiracy content, why doesn’t he clarify this, and explain his reasoning for nevertheless drawing on it? Does he think that the New Chartist Movement website has no bearing on Keyte’s credibility?

This is not “guilt by association”: when activists make a public show of political and personal affinity it’s reasonable to press them on how far the mutual endorsement goes, even though they may prefer ambiguity.

Those expressing their support for Oliver include Laurence Fox, who objects to Matthew noting the apparent Silent Weapons link (“Seriously close to defamation, you quintuple jabbed man sheep”); Calvin Robinson, who calls his GB New colleague “The Prophet” and suggests that the Guardian article was written at the behest of Bill Gates (2); and from the USA Emerald Robinson (“the communist frauds at @guardian are trying to get him fired”) (3).

Matthew was already in the sights of GB News supporters, having urged broadcasting regulator Ofcom to act regarding its presenter Mark Steyn. Steyn has now quit the channel, to the fury of fans. Those complaining include Godrey Bloom, who was at the same 2018 event as Keyte (“Do you feel your vilification of a fellow journalist is somehow morally superior?”) and a Loose Women regular named Carol McGiffin (“You are sick. Get help”). Former Crimewatch host Sue Cook chipped in with an “angry face” emjoi.

Last August, GB News decided to delete an interview between Oliver and Peter Sweden rather than offer a defence.

UPDATE: In a follow-up thread, Matthew notes a new podcast in which Keyte “celebrates his appearance on @GBNews, admiring Oliver’s facility for relaying his ideas”. He quotes Keyre as saying Oliver is “a great guy, very much on his journey” and “reading a lot of things that I had written and thinking”. As well as the New Chartist Movement, Keyte is also involved with a group called the Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecoology, and according to Matthew “Keyte claims that he and his friends at the Hardwick Alliance have been meeting and chatting with Neil Oliver for weeks”.

This is significant, as the Hardwick Alliance’s Twitter account has various references to “Zionist bankers”, “Fake Jews” and the Rothschilds, and David Icke is billed as involved. Matthew also notes that the group’s website explicitly uses the phrase “silent weapons for quiet wars”. It’s possible that Oliver was unaware that this was also the title of a conspiracy document, but what he may or may not know is of less urgency than the fact that the group is using him and GB News to spread their message and amplify their leaders.

Notes

1. Matthew initially misquoted the title as “Secret Weapons for Silent Wars” before correcting himself.

2. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports the paper’s Global Development section, and items that receive funding are clearly marked as such. Conspiricists, however, believe that the influence goes further, and that the Guardian‘s coverage in general can therefore be disregarded. George Monbiot responded to the false allegation that he writes to order last August.

One person replying to Calvin Robinson drew a distinction between “Conservative/Orthodox Jews whom are pro-Israel, pro-America, pro-Trump” and “secular Jews”, writing that “Secular Jews own the American Marxist Movement that has damaged America”. This analysis got a “Like” from Robinson, although he has since removed it. Former MEP Lance Forman, who is Jewish, meanwhile made some weak criticism that this was “a very broad generalisation for which there will be many exceptions”.

3. Robinson was removed from Newsmax in 2021 after claiming that Covid vaccinations contain “a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked”, which she then linked to the Book of Revelation. Oliver has responded to her support with an expression of mutual solidarity.

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Stories about health and wellbeing have long been a newspaper staple – unlike many news subjects, claims about whether a particular food or lifestyle practice might extend or cut short one’s time on earth are directly relevant to readers’ lives. The material is often taken from genuine scientific studies, which are frequently sensationalised for journalistic effect. Perhaps the most famous outcome is the “Daily Mail Cancer List”, which has been made into a song.

However, the genre is also now of interest to conspiracy theorists, who allege that articles are being planted in the media as a cover story for deaths and injuries caused by Covid vaccination – as such, like public defibrillators, the existence of such stories is evidence of vaccine harm even though they appear to be about something else.

In particular, James Melville regularly boosts his engagement by posting a collage of headlines along with the commentary “They are gaslighting us”. Thousands of followers immediately feel that they have cleverly seen through a deceptive and sinister narrative. This impression is perhaps helped by the fact that the process by which an academic study eventually reaches the media is often opaque and seems to be random – there may be a transmission chain from one source to another over an extended period before a journalist chances upon a bit of easy work.

Are journalists trawling through studies to produce misleading material? Or are scientists creating bogus studies in order to manipulate the media? Melville doesn’t say, but his claim is primarily emotional rather than a reasoned argument built on evidence. His collage is hardly a dataset – it’s a random collection without clearly defined inclusion criteria as regards either time period or location; nor is it contextualised within broader health-reporting trends. However, it has been unpicked in some detail by James Nite, whose Twitter thread can be seen here. Melville’s sources, as logged by Nite, are as follows:

Express article “Heart attack: Does skipping breakfast increase your risk?”: published 12 December 2021, based on a 2019 study [link];

Times article “Lonely older women at greater risk of heart attack, study shows”: published 2 February 2022, based on a 2022 study using retrospective data from 2011-2019 [link];

CNN article “Climate change could hurt babies’ hearts, study says”: published 30 January 2019, based on a 2019 study using 1995-2007 data and projection data [link];

Daily Mail article “Expert warns that shoveling snow can be a deadly way to discover underlying cardiovascular conditions as straining the heart with physical activity could cause sudden death”: published 2 February 2022, quotes a cardiologist who has been researching the stress of exercise on the heart since 2017 [link];

Sunday Times article “Rise in heart attacks attributed to pandemic stress and poor diet”: published 16 October 2022 and ironically based a rent-a-quote from Aseem Malhotra, from before he found new audiences as a prominent Covid vaccination alarmist [link];

Irish Times article “Physical activity may increase heart attack risk, study suggests”: published 20 September 2021, based on a 2021 study using data from 2011-2017; [link];

Express article “Heart attack: The drink that could trigger a ‘sudden’ cardiac arrest – ‘catastrophic'”: published 2 February 2022, based on a short 2017 letter to an academic journal [link];

New York Post article “The little-known heart attack that’s striking ‘fit and healthy’ women as young as 22”: published 26 October 2021, based on a 2017 Mayo Clinic article on SCAD and reports dating back more than 10 years [link];

Mail Online article “Do YOU live under a flight path? You may be at risk of a heart attack: Study finds rates are 70 PER CENT higher in noisiest areas”: published 23 March 2022, based on a 2022 poster abstract using a dataset from 2018 [link];

Guardian article “Hotter nights increase risk of death from heart disease for men in early 60s”: published 29 March 2022, based on a 2021 study using 2001-2015 data [link];

Sun article “GREEN FINGERS Urgent warning to gardeners as soil ‘increases risk of killer heart disease'”: published 14 November 2022, based on studies (here, here and here) using 2005-2017 datasets [link]; and

New York Post article “Falling asleep with the TV on could bring early death: study”: published 28 June 2022, based on a 2022 study using 2007-2010 data [link].

Alongside Melville’s collage we can add a few more examples:

Express article “Blood clots: Compound found in eggs linked to an enhanced risk of blood clotting”: published 26 January 2022, based on a 2017 study from the Cleveland clinic.

Fake news website YourNewsWire re-wrote this article as “Scientists warn eggs are causing thousands of people to ‘suddenly’ form blood clots”, playing on “Died Suddenly” sensationalism and obviously implying that the study was concocted to explain away some “sudden” public health crisis. That one was promoted by conspiricist novelty pop-duo Right Said Fred.

Also:

BMJ study “Artificial sweeteners and risk of cardiovascular diseases: results from the prospective NutriNet-Santé cohort”: published 7 September 2022.

Fake news website Slay News wrote this one up as “Artificial sweeteners behind spike in sudden deaths, heart attacks, ‘experts’ claim”. The BMJ article of course referenced no such “spike”, although Melville didn’t bother to check when he chose to promote the bogus headline with “eyes” emoji, his way of indicating that a headline reveals some hidden truth to the discerning.

One more item doing the rounds (but not promoted by Melville):

Falsely attributed to BBC News: “Breathing too many times a day could raise your risk of a deadly heart attack”.

That one was a hoax, as discussed by Reuters.

Nite theorises that such stories are being used by the media to “stoke” the idea of vaccine injury, and that “they actively exploit public paranoia & their own negative perception”. It is reasonable to suppose that increased anxiety about heart attacks is likely to drive media content creation.

There is also some suspicion that the phrase “died suddenly” is making its way into headlines to take advantage of public fears. This is certainly the case with some fringe-right sites: Breibart recently ran a piece headlined “Simon Dunn, famed Australian Olympian and rugby player, dies suddenly at 35”, which was then amplified by Nigel Farage. However, the trend towards clickbait headlines mean that the phrase has opportunistic as well as ideological attractions.

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From Christopher Hope at the Telegraph:

Andrew Bridgen is suing Matt Hancock for £100,000 over a Twitter message in which the former health secretary accused him of spouting “anti-Semitic, anti-vax, anti-scientific conspiracy theories” about the Covid-19 vaccine.

…In a letter to Mr Hancock five days later on Jan 18, as seen by The Telegraph, Mr Bridgen’s legal team… said: “By inclusion of the phrases ‘anti-semitic’, ‘anti-vax’, ‘anti-scientific’ and ‘conspiracy theories’ the words are defamatory at common law.”

…Mr Bridgen’s legal action is being funded by the Reclaim Party and the ‘Bad Law Project’.

Laurence Fox, the leader of Reclaim, said: “The Reclaim Party and the Bad Law Project is providing its full support to Mr Bridgen and we want a full apology from Mr Hancock.

The letter is “as seen by the Telegraph” because Hope has long been a friendly media channel both for Fox and for the crank fringes of the Tory right – and we must wonder why the name of the “legal team” is not provided.

The “Bad Law Project” was set up last year as a vehicle for Fox and various associates (including Sarah Phillimore) “to challenge and depoliticise our democratic foundational institutions”. It defines “bad law” as “discrimination disguised as equality and human rights”, citing as examples “the shameful arrest of army veteran Mr [Darren] Brady” and “how wokery hounded Amy Gallagher, a nurse and psychotherapist, out of the #NHS”. An early cause was that of Fox’s friend Calvin Robinson, who was denied ordination into the Church of England (1). It is not immediately clear how such cases are comparable to Andrew Bridgen’s libel claim, although I expect the line of thought is that Bridgen has been “cancelled” by Hancock’s Tweet. Fox is also highly sympathetic to Bridgen’s Covid vaccination alarmism, seeing easy political capital in fear and resentment.

Bridgen famously stated on Twitter in reference to Covid vaccination that “As one consultant cardiologist said to me this is the biggest crime against humanity since the holocaust”. Hancock’s opinion is that this statement is anti-semitic, presumably because it trivialises the actual Holocaust. However, he did not allege that Bridgen is himself anti-semitic, and this seems to me to be a substantive distinction that Bridgen will struggle to overcome in court (2).

The same also applies to the other elements of Hancock’s Tweet (or “Twitter message”, to use the Telegraph‘s stuffy style) – besides which, there is a strong argument that the other epithets complained of can indeed apply to Bridgen personally as well as to his statement. For instance, Bridgen claims that members of security services in various countries were warned about a coming pandmenic in 2019, and were told not to take the vaccine or even to be tested for infection. This this an anti-vax conspiracy theory by definiton, and it is notable that Bridgen is not apparently suing The Times for framing his views as conspiricist.

We must wonder whether Bridgen will now join Fox’s political party and start to refer to himself as Reclaim Party MP. He no longer holds the Conservative Party whip, and he has persuaded activists that his recent suspension from Parliament was due to his views on Covid vaccination, rather than the finding that he had engaged in paid lobbying (3).

Notes

1. Robinson later received ordination from a breakaway Anglican group, and he now usually wears a cassock when presenting his show on GB News or making appearances on right-wing American shows. His media activities have recently expanded to working for Ezra Levant’s Rebel News.

2. In a video statement, Bridgen has said “the Israeli doctor I quoted in my tweet has stated that there was noting anti-Semitic about the statement”. Given that his Tweet began with “As one consultant cardiologist said to me”, it was reasonable to suppose that this is what he meant by “quoted”. However, in an argument with Iain Dale, he has now clarified that he was referring to an Israeli academic named Josh Guetzkow, whose work he had linked to in his Tweet. Most people would have understood “Israeli doctor” to refer to a medical professional rather than a social science academic, and one wonders why Bridgen wasn’t clearer. However, the effect was misdirection away from the actual “consultant cardiologist” he was referring to – almost certainly Aseem Malhotra.

3. Richard Tice, who leads the slightly more respectable fringe-right Reform UK party, recently told Andrew Marr that he does not want Bridgen, saying that he had “got it wrong with regard to his approach to vaccines”. Tice’s relative moderation is perhaps surprising, given his recent willingness to be seen dining in public in Soho with Maajid Nawaz. Tice’s partner is Isabel Oakeshott, who recently ghost-wrote Hancock’s self-regarding pandemic memoir.

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The Times takes a look at what it calls an “unregistered school” run by HOPE Sussex near the village of Netherfield in East Sussex:

A full curriculum of subjects is taught, albeit through the prism of conspiracy. In a history lesson, children were taught that the US government knew in advance of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, and discussed the possibility that stars were not real and were in fact lights.

…Last year, Ofsted sent inspectors from its illegal schools team to visit Hope Sussex, but they were stopped at the perimeter by two “obstructive and unco-operative” members of staff…

HOPE Sussex maintains that they are not in fact running  a school, but rather “a community centre that hires its facilities to allow home-educating families to supplement their children’s education with wholesome and critically thinking tutors”.

The group also held a music festival at the site last summer, which was covered by Vice and which I discussed here and here – participants included the novelty pop-duo and conspiricists Right Said Fred, and also James Delingpole in conversation with antivax activist Michael Chaves. Vice also noted children taking “classes” at the location, some months ahead of the UK’s newpaper of record, and the involvement of Matt and Sadie Single. As The Times now reports:

Hope Sussex was founded last year by Sadie Single, 44, and her husband Matthew, 51, both former members of the British National Party (BNP) who were expelled in 2009 for leaking the names and details of thousands of party members online after an internal dispute. Before joining the BNP, Sadie had lived in Australia where she was linked to a neo-Nazi group, according to Hope not Hate, the anti-fascist organisation. (1)

The Times also writes that the alleged school “has won the endorsement of Mike Fairclough, the head teacher of West Rise Junior School, a state primary in Eastbourne”, and that his wife is involved. It adds that Fairclough

gave a talk last month in which he spoke about a plan by “globalists” to “disempower people and take away their freedoms”, and praised the “global freedom movement” — the term used to describe the loose conglomeration of anti-establishment conspiracy theorists worldwide.

Fairclough has semi-celebrity status for his approach to teaching, which involves an emphasis on outdoor skills; he also has an unusually rugged and informal appearance, and he was described by the Daily Mail in 2021 as “the hunky headmaster”. Despite making occasional media apppearances (including, inevitably, on GB News), and also a being profiled for The Times last July (“comes across as both wildly unconventional and eminently sensible”, according to the paper’s Anna Maxted), in this instance he “did not respond to a request for comment”. On Twitter, John Bye notes that Fairclough is involved with UsForThem; he “was credited as contributing to their book [The Children’s Inquiry] last summer, and was the lead education signatory on their ‘Not For Them’ campaign against vaccinating children” (2).

The Times article also refers to Sadie Single addressing “an activist meeting in Bexhill last summer” – this detail comes from a video upload to YouTube that can be seen here. The event appears to have been an outside booking at the Bexhill Conservative Club for a group calling itself the 1066 Assembly, and she co-presented with Katy-Jo Murfin, who is also mentioned by The Times. Murfin (daughter of the actor Karl Howman) introduced herself as coming from “an awake family, on my mum’s side”, having been given her first David Icke book to read by her aunt at the age of 17; a second video from the same event shows her in conversion with Dr Niall McCrae, a senior mental health lecturer at Kings College London and Brexit activist who appears to concur with Murfin’s assessment that Dolly Parton’s pro-vaccine adaptation of Jolene is evidence that she has gone through “MK-Ultra mind control”.

Another speaker in Bexhill who is also involved with HOPE Sussex was the DJ Danny Rampling, who spoke about how he became bankrupt after a property development project fell through due to the credit crunch (3).

Note

(1) To repeat something I noted previously, Larry O’Hara wrote about Sadie Single (formerly Sadie Graham) in Notes from the Borderland magazine during her BNP period (issue 5 [2003], p. 62 and issue 7 [2006], p. 32). He described her as having “surfaced in the mid-1990s hunt-sabbing and anarcho-punk scene” and as having worked for a Brighton law firm specialising in animal rights and briefly even the GANDALF case. Her BNP activism brought her some attention, but Larry noted an odd lack of media interest in her unusual history (including at Searchlight magazine). In 2008 it was claimed that “she was one half of an anti-Nick Griffin split last year”. Matt Single was expelled from the BNP in 2007; he told the Mail he had been “naive” to have joined in 2001, and they have both since repudiated the far right.

(2) UsForThem was co-founded by one Molly Kingsley (“Parent, Entrepreneur, Campaigner”). She is critical of the Times article, complaining that by describing the “global freedom movement” as comprising conspiracy theorists the paper is identifing the idea of freedom with conspiracy theories.

(3) Rampling is also involved with the #Together group; another YouTube video shows him in a #together t-shirt chatting with Matt Gubba, who has recently been restored to Twitter shortly after his friend James Melville got some personal attention from Elon Musk. Like Melville, Gubba is a World Economic Forum obsessive, and Rampling expressed his support for Gubba’s grandiose anti-WEF “International Liberty Forum” project.

One thing I’ve noticed is that “anti-globalist” conspiracy rhetoric seems to have a special appeal for people with entrepreneurial backgrounds: when capitalism brings rewards disproportionate to effort, this is the natural order and a just reward for superior business acumen; but when the result is loss rather than profit, this is due to the machinations of globalists rather than because of how the system works.

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A particularly egregious piece of bad-faith fear-mongering from GB News presenter and fringe political activist Laurence Fox: a video of a public access defibrillator in an old telephone box in the village of Corfe Castle in southern England, to which he has added as sarcastic commentary “Move along. Nothing to see here.”

Google Street View shows that this particular defibrillator is in the village of Corfe Castle in southern England, and that it has been there since at least July 2018, probably a few months earlier. It was installed as a part of an initiative that goes back to 2011.

Why doesn’t Fox articulate exactly what the problem is meant to be? I can think of two reasons. First, it means that he doesn’t have to defend any particular substantive proposition. Second, by inviting his followers to draw an inference for themselves, he gives them an opportunity to see themselves an intellectual elite who can discern secret meanings amid the commonplace that the sheeple will overlook.

In this case, the obvious context given Fox’s anti-vax positioning is that the presence of public defibrillators indicates that the government is aware that there is an increased risk of sudden cardiac arrest among the general population, and that this is because of Covid vaccination. This is part of a wider strategy of looking for signs that Covid vaccination alarmism has not been a failed prophecy. Other examples involve attempting to prove the case by finding hidden significance in statistics; affirming vaccine death or injury as the cause whenever it is reported that someone has died suddenly or been unexpectedly hospitalised; and claiming that media stories about heart health risks in various contexts are being planted as a cover story.

Is Fox simply ignorant, and prone to jumping to conclusions based on an over-inflated belief in his own intelligence? Or is his post just a cynical, even nihilistic, “post-truth” narrative?

(For some reason, the video has also caught the attention of Francophone social media; one Tweet I saw claims “Le Deep-State installe des défibrillateurs dans les villes d’Angleterre”)

UPDATE: Fox has now issued a sulky and sarcastic corrective: “This has been around since 2012 apparently. I have spread the misinformations. I shall chastise and admonish myself for the remainder of the morning. My bad.”

UPDATE 2: It appears that Fox may have been inspired by novelty-pop-duo-turned-conspiracists Right Said Fred. On Saturday they posted photos showing “defibrillators on the street and outside schools”.

Excurcus

Fox recently upset some allies within the conspiracy movement with a statement about abortion, in which he affirmed that “A woman who willingly aborts a child should be regarded in exactly the same way as a man who willingly commits rape”. The tone did not strike me as particularly “pro-life” (and what exactly is “willing rape” to be contrasted with?) – the juxtaposition seemed to me to be instead a bitter complaint that women supposedly do something just as bad as a male crime that is highly stigmatised, but are not being made accountable for it. This impression was strengthened when he went on (in a Tweet since deleted) to reject poverty and absent fathers as a reason for abortion, claiming that “women have it easy” and referring to his own expenditure as a divorced father.

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An announcement from cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra:

I’m considering taking legal action against the Guardian and the Times for racism. This is sickening.

Malhotra, as is well known, has recently beome a high-profile Covid vaccination alarmist: a few months ago, he published a review article in an obscure journal called the Journal of Insulin Resistance in which he made extravagant claims about the risks of vaccination; since then, he has been engaged in relentless media amplification and activist networking (assisted by former Brexit Party MEP James Freeman Wells), which most recently led to him being championed in the House of Commons by Andrew Bridgen MP.

Prior to his anti-Covid vaccination activism, Malhotra was known for his criticisms of statin prescriptions, and it was in this capacity that he was invited onto the BBC News channel on Friday to respond to advice by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence that the NHS should make them more widely available. However, he predictably seized the opportunity to promote vaccination alarmism:

…my own father suffered a cardiac arrest at home… and when his post-mortem came out he had very severe coronary artery disease which is unexplainable. I then published in a peer reviewed journal, they accepted my findings that the likely cause of his death was two doses of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine he had six months earlier….

He also referred to an article by other authors, published in Vaccine – this can be identified as a paper by Joseph Fraiman et al., which has come under criticism. Perhaps concious of how far he could push his digression, Malhotra toned down his absolute rejection of Covid vaccination, adding that it “has certainly helped people who are high risk” and suggesting that the rollout should be paused due to the mildness of the Omicron variant.

Following his interview, he uploaded the clip to Twitter, along with a boast: “We did it. We broke mainstream broadcast media”. Just as he milks his review article’s peer reviewed status as evidence of scientific standing, we can expect “as featured on BBC News” to now be another rhetorical strategy to compensate for the fact that his scientific peers have raised numerous criticisms and objections to his claims that remain unaddressed.

Why was he invited onto BBC News? He is candid on Twitter:

I’ve been the most vocal publishing papers & discussing in mainstream more than anyone in the world criticising statin prescription over the years. They came to me last minute & junior BBC producer had no idea I’d mention mRNA. Spontaneous by me as had 7 min.

Later the same morning, BBC News invited on an immunologist named Peter Openshaw to provide, in his words, a “rapid response interview”; he says that “the staff seemed alarmed and embarrassed that they had given [Malhotra] a platform”. Frustratingly, however, it is impossible to see it anywhere. Malhotra’s interview appeared during the segment from 9 am to 10 am, which is then uploaded to the BBC iPlayer for 24 hours, whereas Openshaw’s response featured during the segment following, which is not made available online at all. Further, Malhotra’s uploaded clip has had millions of views on social media.

The BBC fiasco was written up by the Guardian under the headline “BBC criticised for letting cardiologist ‘hijack’ interview with false Covid jab claim”, and featuring responses from Dr Stephen Griffin, virologist at the University of Leeds (who made the “hijack” comment); Prof Marc Dweck, chair of clinical cardiology at the University of Edinburgh; and Dr Matt Kneale, the co-chair of the Doctors’ Association. In response to the responses, Malhotra has amplified a Tweet from someone alleging that they have conflicts of interest and that this is “the real story”. Similarly, Malhotra supporter James Melville pointed to the fact that the Guardian has a Global Development section that receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The word “hijack” in the Guardian headline caught the attention of fringe-right activist and GB News presenter Laurence Fox, who alleged that this is the “language of terrorism” being used to “smear a cardiologist of colour”. Malhotra quotes Fox’s Tweet directly in his legal threat against the paper.

Malhotra’s legal threat to The Times, meanwhile, relates to an article headlined “Andrew Bridgen, the MP who was ‘groomed by gangs of antivaxers'”. This was published yesterday as further context for Bridgen losing the whip:

Those involved in the government’s vaccine roll-out, which Bridgen had lauded, said his case was a classic example of “radicalisation” by antivaxers who operate like “grooming gangs”.

In the tweet that prompted his suspension, Bridgen recounted a conversation about vaccine safety with an unnamed consultant who told him: “This is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.”

This unnamed source, according to Bridgen, was an Israeli (2), but it is Malhotra who features prominently in the article, which includes a photograph of Bridgen and Malhotra standing together on the terrace at the Houses of Parliament (3). Malhotra and his supporters, including Fox, suggest that the juxtaposition of an Asian man next to a headline about “grooming” was deliberately meant to evoke stereotypical connotations.

Bridgen is also currently considering legal action to protect his reputation: his Holocaust comparison caused great offence, and former Health Secretary Matt Hancock has gone so far as to call it not just irresponsible or in bad taste but as being actually anti-semitic. In response, Bridgen says “I will allow Matt three days to apologise publicy for calling me an antisemite and racist or he will be contacted by my legal team”. This sense of grievance is difficult to take given that Bridgen has implied that Hancock has been involved in the worst crime since the Holocaust.

If Malhotra is in need of a lawyer, perhaps Fox can help – he knows several via his “Bad Law Project“, and he is currently being sued for libel.

Notes

(1) Malhotra had no “findings” about his father’s death – he instead deployed dubious statistics in the service of a speculation derived from his personal incredulity. As far as I know, Malhotra has never addressed whether or not his father had stopped taking statins on his advice, or if he was following his controversial dietary advice.

(2) Bridgen has been supported by Josh Guetzkow, a senior lecturer in criminology and sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was quoted in Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic as saying that “there is nothing at all anti-Semitic about his statement”. It’s possible that Bridgen has become confused in his recollection about who made the Holocaust comparison, although his belated attribution to a Jewish source after being criticised and condemned is convenient.

UPDATE (19 Jan): In an argument with Iain Dale, Bridgen now complains:

You also state that I was quoting an anonymous cardiologist who is also Israeli – ‘how convenient’ – this is untrue. My now deleted tweet referred to a paper written by an Israeli social scientist. Dr Josh Guetzkow. At no point have I stated the cardiologist I was referring to is an Israeli, in fact, I have not named them.

In his video statement, Bridgen said “the Israeli doctor I quoted in my tweet has stated that there was noting anti-Semitic about the statement”. Given that his Tweet began with “As one consultant cardiologist said to me”, it was reasonable to suppose that this is what he meant by the “quote”, and this is why The Times wrote it up as “the MP said the cardiologist he quoted was an Israeli”.

However, his Tweet also included a link to Zerohedge page entitled “CDC Finally Releases VAERS Safety Monitoring Analyses For COVID Vaccines”. The page consists of a long piece authored by Guetzkow, re-uploaded from somewhere else.

So, as I suspected, it was indeed Guetzkow who provided Bridgen with his defence. For some reason, Bridgen referred to him in his statement as “an Israeli doctor” rather than as “an Israeli academic”, and he said he “quoted” him rather than that he linked to his work. This created a misleading impression, that he is now complaining about. It also directed attention away from the actual source of his Holocaust quote.

(3) I noted how Bridgen has come under the influence of the conspiracy movement last week.

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