But we hadn’t. In fact, two or three years on from those halcyon days of love and hugs and shared purpose, it now feels like we’ve lost all our gains in a welter of backbiting, mutual distrust and division.
Why can’t we all get along?
Well I’ll tell you exactly why. And it’s not a message some of us want to hear, as I’ve noticed whenever I introduce the awkward topic of ‘People who seem to be on our side but are not really’.
There are lots of different terms for these people - ‘controlled opposition’, ‘gatekeepers’, ‘Judas goats’, ‘limited hangout’, ‘traitor scum’, and so on - but whichever one you use, it always causes upset among those who think we shouldn’t be pointing fingers but should be uniting as one big happy family.
“We shouldn’t be divided by petty squabbling because it’s what They want!”, you’ll often hear. And: “Why the purity spiralling? Of course we’re not going to agree on everything!”. And: “Even if he is controlled opposition - and I’m not saying he is - he’s dropping truth bombs to an audience of millions.” And: “I’m perfectly capable of deciding which of his stuff is useful to me and which of it is disinformation.”
I have a lot of sympathy with these arguments because I used to think that way myself. One of my bitterest rows on Telegram was when I staunchly defended Andrew Bridgen against the charge that he was just another Establishment shill posing as one of us either to advance his career or to infiltrate and undermine our movement - or both. Some people thought I was a gullible idiot swayed by the loyalties of misguided friendship. It all got quite heated.
Since then - that was about a year ago - I’ve come round to the view that no one purporting to represent our cause can be wholly beyond scrutiny, especially not those with any public profile. As that doughty witchfinder Miri Finch likes to say “If you know their name, they’re in the game.” I like to think that somewhere out there there must be noble exceptions to this rule. But, call me jaded and cynical, I’ve yet to see one.
The latest of our ‘heroes’ under suspicion is Steve Kirsch. Up until this week, I’d had him down as a goodie, even a potential Delingpod guest. What little I knew about him sounded quite promising. He is an American tech entrepreneur - supposedly worth $230 million - who was radicalised by ‘Covid’, and now stakes part of his fortune on anti-vax publicity stunts.
Among his proffered bets: $500,000 to anyone who can show mRNA vaccines have saved more lives than deaths they caused; $1 million for anyone who could prove that prior to November 2021 fewer than 1000 people had been killed by ‘Covid’ vaccines; $5 million to anyone who can prove that vaccines don’t trigger autism. At the height of the ‘Covid’ nonsense, he also reportedly offered a woman sitting next to him on the plane $100,000 if she removed her mask for the rest of the flight.
Personally - and perhaps this should have been a red flag - I’ve long thought these bets to be a vulgar distraction. But I had hitherto given him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that this was just an American thing designed to get people’s attention. And so it seems to have done for Kirsch has acquired a certain cachet on the vaccine sceptical circuit, appearing on numerous podcasts, putting out anti-vax messaging both on social media and on his Substack to his hundreds of thousands of followers.
But Alex Kriel (Thinking Slow on Twitter) has his doubts and so, after chatting to Kriel on the Delingpod, do I. What got Kriel’s antennae twitching was Kirsch’s excessively energetic promotion of a slightly suspect story that has been doing the rounds on social media lately about a New Zealand IT worker by the name of Barry Young.
Young, if you believe the narrative, is a heroic Kiwi whistleblower responsible for what has been billed as the Mother Of All Revelations (‘M.O.A.R’): that vaccine deaths and injuries in New Zealand are much, much higher than previously acknowledged. This, of course, is exactly the kind of smoking gun evidence that sceptics have been yearning for. So it’s no wonder that when the story broke about his arrest for data breaches it should have been widely circulated in Awake groups on social media.
It’s quite possible that I retweeted this story myself. I can’t remember whether or not I did but it’s the sort of thing I would do: flicking through Telegram, seeing a breaking story of apparent importance which other Awake types are sharing, and jumping on it without checking the details. It’s what we all do, isn’t it?
And that of course is the problem. A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on. Not that I can say for certain that the story IS definitely a lie. All I know is that there are elements that don’t quite stack up. How, for example, was Barry Young allowed subsequent to his arrest to give an interview about his findings on the Alex Jones show? Surely, if as the New Zealand state claimed this was stolen information then the matter would have been sub judice? And why did it get coverage in such terminally mainstream publications as Newsweek?
Then there’s the issue of the data itself. According to the interpretation put out by the Loyal Party - a micro political party in New Zealand - on its M.O.A.R video, the vaccine death rate could be as high as 20 percent. Huge if true - it would mean that getting on for 1 million out of New Zealand’s 5.2 million population are goners - but for reasons discussed by statistician William Briggs, it is very unlikely to be so. Essentially the statistics derived from the data are meaningless.
This is the point in the argument where the “Why can’t we all get along?” faction tend to come over all defensive. “Instead of witch hunting and purity spiralling we should accentuate the positive!”, they’ll say - and indeed are saying. “Even if the figures are wrong or if Young may be slightly suspect, the important thing is that a lot more members of the public are now aware of the vaccine injury issue.”
You often hear the same excuse made to defend Russell Brand. “Sure he may once have been Katy Perry’s Monarch handler and he may flirt with Illuminati symbolism every now and then - but he’s redpilling a Twitter following of 11.3 million, which is a lot more than you’ll ever reach.” Or, Dr John Campbell: “Blah blah blah 2.94 million subscribers on YouTube.”
But I think these excuses are less a killer rebuttal than a coping mechanism. Going down the rabbit hole is a lonely experience. When someone with a large public profile repeats some of the truths you believe in, it feels comforting, validating. You desperately want them to be the real deal so, rather than acknowledge that they might possibly be an imposter, you’ll invent all manner of superficially plausible reasons as to why despite everything they’re on our team.
The main flaw with this cope is that it requires epic quantities of cognitive dissonance. If you believe - as all Truthers must or they wouldn’t be Truthers - that much of our reality is just a succession of false narratives invented by the Predator Class to manipulate and control us, then it simply doesn’t wash to go: “But happily, these deceivers would never do anything so devious as to infiltrate our movement with spies and double agents and Judas Goats…” Because, obviously, that is what They have been doing since time immemorial.
They do this for any number of reasons, from intelligence gathering to sowing false information. One of their techniques is known as ‘flooding the zone.’ That is, They insinuate one of their agents into a position of trust in Awake circles, and then use him or her to disseminate all manner of information, some of it true, some of it risibly, demonstrably false. The demonstrably false information, when repeated, can then be used to discredit the Truth community. “See these idiots. They actually believe that 20 per cent of the entire New Zealand population - that’s a million people - are going to DIE of vaccine injury!”
Because psyops like this are by nature opaque and secretive, and because they are planned and executed by devious, untrustworthy, slippery, mendacious paranoiacs who think too much and have a Plan B for every situation, it’s not always easy for the victims - ie us - to discern what their true purpose is. Often, quite likely, they serve a number of purposes. Alex Kriel has identified at least two reasons for the Steve Kirsch/Barry Young psyop. One, as we’ve already mentioned, is to discredit the Awake community/antivax movement by encouraging it to gloat about information which is essentially useless. Another is to distract from more credible, less hysterical evidence of vaccine injury provided by more trustworthy sources.
If only this were the last piece I ever had to write on this subject I would be very happy. Unfortunately, the Pollyanna/Kumbaya faction is so vocal - and indeed indignant and rude - on this subject that I’m afraid I find it too hard to resist rising to the bait whenever one tells me that this or that obvious shill is actually a lovely, brave, decent bloke or blokess whom I have cruelly maligned. Look, as I’ve said before and will no doubt say again a thousand times more, just because someone tells you what you want to hear doesn’t necessarily mean they’re on your team. When the snake hissed into Eve’s ear in the Garden did he have her best interests at heart? When Russell Brand tells your sister or daughter how amazingly clever and funny she is does he have her best interests at heart? It’s so obvious it ought scarcely need to be restating. Yet it does, again and again, because we’re so used to people disagreeing with us and mocking us that we become quite embarrassingly credulous on those rare occasions when we encounter someone, especially someone semi-famous, who appears to understand us and sympathise with us.
That’s how the trap works. You don’t attract the mouse into the cage by offering it a lump of poo. You do so using tempting, delicious morsels of cheese or chocolate.
Why can’t we all get along? Because They designed it that way. Think about that next time you’re about to jump down the throat of someone who has called into question the integrity of your personal favourite resistance hero. What if they’re right? And even if they’re not right on this occasion, why get angry with someone on your own side when their only crime is the kind of robust scepticism which ought to be the default state of any Truther? Surely, if our rage is going to be directed at anyone it should be towards the people who first sowed the seeds of this division: our true enemies in the Predator Class.
Article by James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, broadcaster and truth seeker. He hosts the Delingpod - the world’s most entertainingly shambolic ‘conspiracy’ podcast.
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