The pearl-clutching plight of the persecuted people's hero

Alternate title, "Andrew bloody Bridgen again...." - but I thought what I went with was both slightly more poetic, and substantially more accurate, in terms of concisely encapsulating what the interminable bloody Bridgen is up to now...

Newer readers may wish to familiarise themselves with the history of Mr. Bridgen's "persecution", not least that which emanated from me, when I asked him some pertinent, or perhaps impertinent, questions in a widely-read open letter, regarding his alleged Damascene conversion to all things conspiratorial...

To briefly sum up, Andrew Bridgen is a former Conservative MP (2010-2023), who, during the fake plague, enthusiastically supported some of the most draconian and destructive measures proposed by government, including repeat lockdowns and forced vaccinations.

And, just in case his voting record left us in any doubt as to where his true loyalties really lay, he even treated us to a photo of himself receiving the vaccine at "Masons" pharmacy, of all places...

Then, very abruptly in 2022, and directly following some severe financial difficulties relating to a feud with his family firm and various expensive ex-wives, he "miraculously" had a complete political transformation and decided he was now a fearless freedom fighter opposed to government tyranny and would join the resistance to fight the good fight!

This he did by joining the defunct joke political party, Reclaim, fronted by the actor Laurence Fox and bankrolled by the multi-millionaire, Jeremy Hosking, who Bridgen is currently indebted to to the tune of some £3.9 million.

Naturally, this eye-watering sum had nothing to do with Bridgen's sudden and abrupt political transformation, and, clearly, only a conspiracy theorist would suggest that Hosking lent him the money strictly on the proviso that he joined Reclaim (which at the time, and subsequently, has no MPs) and then did whatever Hosking told him to.

Of course, I am a conspiracy theorist, and you probably are too, so...

Joining the joke outfit Reclaim (which does not accept members nor stand candidates - even its own leader doesn't stand for the party in elections) instantly torpedoed all Bridgen's political credibility - as I told him in my letter it would and as he knew perfectly well himself - so then he started thrashing around desperately, engaging in increasingly ridiculous publicity stunts such as claiming he would "sue Matt Hancock for defamation" (anyone know what's happening with that, by the way, or with the £171,000+ Bridgen's taken from the public to bankroll it? Apart from the £40k that went straight to Matt Hancock, of course).

I and many others called out this charlatan from the start (you can see all the issues I put to him in my letter), where we would inevitably be countered by his supporters with:

"So he made some mistakes!! Isn't he allowed to change his mind?!"

Well, yes - but with some very serious caveats.

Andrew Bridgen is not - or more precisely, was not during the Covid chapter - simply a layman. He was not an ordinary citizen whose decisions or beliefs about "Covid" only affected himself.

If your neighbour Joe, for instance, was initially an ardent supporter of lockdown and vaccination, but later realised he'd been conned and changed his mind, good for Joe - because his abiding by lockdown rules or deciding to get vaccinated, only directly affected him.

Not so for Andrew Bridgen, or for any sitting MP during the corona episode, because they are the ones who cast the votes to plunge us into the dystopian hell of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and all of their hideous corollaries.

That is the point: everything that was done to this country in the name of "Covid" wasn't simply imposed upon us by Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty, or even Bill Gates, but rather, it came into being because of what 650 specific people - namely, our "elected representatives" in parliament - voted for.

Those 650 people - or rather, those of them who voted for lockdowns and vaccine mandates, as most of them did - are wholly culpable for what happened to the country between 2020 and 2022, as well as all the horrific consequences still resonating throughout our communities to this day.

How many businesses were ruined, relationships destroyed, livelihoods obliterated, and people irreparably harmed in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including death, because of what MPs, including Andrew Bridgen, voted for?

So, no, he doesn't just get to "change his mind" after having imposed all this horror on millions of innocent people, and then - not only expect to instantly wipe clean the slate of his own conscience by so doing - but to be appointed a hallowed leader and "hero" of this movement, as well!

There is simply no way that that is happening. Not on my watch, and not for the thousands of people who have been so egregiously harmed by what he did.

So while, yes, he can "change his mind" on whatever he wants, the central point remains that, to get it so catastrophically wrong when he was in such a powerful position of authority, and when the consequences for the rest of the country of his decisions were so extraordinarily high, matters a great deal and cannot simply be whitewashed.

His behaviour then, which is in the very recent past, shows that his ethical compass is so dramatically off that he should be permanently disqualified from ever holding any sort of "leadership" position in any movement based on protecting people's human and civic rights.

Bleating on as he does that "the science changed" is no defence and is in fact irrelevant. You don't need to know anything about science to know that dismantling the country's economy, locking people in their houses, and, most seriously of all, injecting them with experimental drugs by force, is wrong. If he didn't know that - as he claims he didn't - then obviously he cannot be trusted with any kind of leadership position now.

Further, it is my contention and always has been that he doesn't actually care about 'freedom' issues - or any issues - at all: he is simply, like most politicians, on sale to the highest bidder (he has a long standing history of accepting generous "gifts" from donors).

So when, as a Tory MP, he faced dire financial straits and Jeremy Hosking offered to bail him out, he simply became owned by Hosking and therefore had to parrot whatever Hosking demanded (after all, why else would Reclaim-bankroller Hosking lend Bridgen several million pounds to settle a dispute with his brother over turnips? Is Mr. Hosking really that concerned about the fate of the humble root vegetable, or, as a savvy businessman who has always used his wealth to influence politics, did he have different ambitions in mind with this "loan"?).

Eventually, after having thoroughly decimated any shred of credibility he might have retained by joining forces with Reclaim, Bridgen finally parted company with them (effectively confirming everything I said in my letter to him about why he shouldn't join them in the first place) and announced his intentions to stand in the 2024 General Election as an independent.

I said at the time he made this announcement that he would never get elected and that he himself knew this perfectly well, but that he was staging an "election campaign" so that when the inevitable defeat was delivered, he could ham it up with, "oh, I'm such a poor persecuted saint, I've sacrificed everything to fight for the cause and now I've lost my political career over it! I'm such a noble hero, please give me my own show on GB News".... or something to that general effect.

However, it has recently come to my attention that Bridgen has gone one deeply disingenuous step further, by playing the "it's all rigged anyway, guv" card to explain his crushing electoral defeat.

Of course, this declaration is bound to get a vigorously enthusiastic response from the conspiracy community who have been claiming for years that elections are "all rigged anyway", hence why they don't vote... and hence why we don't get any pro-freedom candidates into parliament.

So by acting to reinforce the utterly fallacious belief (more on that shortly) that "it's all rigged anyway", Bridgen has served to ensure genuine pro-freedom candidates have less chance than ever of getting elected, because now even more pro-freedom people will say, "see? I knew it was rigged. I knew there was no point in voting".

So let's have a closer look at Mr. Bridgen's "rigging" claims, shall we?

Well, first of all, he admits he has no actual evidence for them, stating:

‘If there was any skulduggery relating to the vote, it would have had to have been before the ballot boxes got to the leisure centre. I have no idea who would have been behind it. I tell constituents who ask that I’m trying to get to the bottom of it but without a whistleblower, I’m not sure I ever will.’

So, have you got that? No suspects. No whistleblowers. No evidence.

He's got nothing, so he's just cynically tapping into his "market" and confirming their biases that "it's all rigged anyway", without a single scintilla of evidence to support this claim, and because it bolsters his own persecuted hero credentials by suggesting he is so important and such a threat, that "they" would illegally sabotage an election to keep him out of power.

To which I say summarily... ha!

Andrew Bridgen is no threat. Rather, he's a joke. Nobody in parliament took him remotely seriously once he joined the non-party Reclaim, and they knew with that move alone he had completely sabotaged his own chances of ever getting re-elected (and as I say, he knew this too).

Bridgen's supporters are trying to make much of the fact that he got enormously more votes as a mainstream Conservative MP, and substantially less as an independent "conspiracist" MP, as if that somehow "proves" there's a fix, but come on people...

The audience he was appealing to as a mainstream Tory MP are completely different to the audience he is appealing to now. His prior support base now overwhelmingly sees him as "a loon", and his new support base - as I have brought attention to time and again - overwhelmingly doesn't vote.

So of course he's going to do substantially worse in elections now.

For anyone who's actually been involved in the political process these last few years, as I have, Bridgen's results are entirely plausible and completely consistent with what other pro-freedom independents generally get, especially when they are standing on a freedom ticket for the first time.

In the recent GE, Bridgen received 1,568 votes (far outshining the other independent who stood in his constituency, who got just 136). This result brought him very close to the Lib Dem candidate (who got just 61 more votes than him), but left him lagging far behind Reform, Conservative, and Labour.

So, please let me re-emphasise once again: this result is completely consistent with the results pro-freedom independents up and down the country generally received. They often didn't come last, and tended to come very close to or beat the Lib Dems (and, not infrequently, Greens), but largely failed to get close to Labour or Conservative. That is the pattern all over the country. Why should Bridgen expect to so dramatically buck this trend?

He did do better than the average independent (note he got more than ten times the votes of the other independent in his constituency, and twice the votes of even Heritage's David Kurten), reflecting that he is relatively well known, but simply not very popular with the vital demographic in elections - people who vote.

To repeat, most "anti-vaxxers" and those with similar anti-establishment beliefs, don't...

So of course you're not going to do as well in elections courting a largely non-voting demographic, as you are appealing to people with more mainstream beliefs, who are far more likely to vote. That is what explains the difference in his results as a mainstream Tory MP, compared to anti-establishment conspiracy candidate.

Not any "rigging".

Furthermore, look at the gargantuan gap between Bridgen and the candidate (Labour) who won: Bridgen received 1,568 votes; the winning candidate received 16,871.

If Bridgen had been beaten by a few dozen or even a few hundred votes, I might be inclined to take his claims of skullduggery slightly seriously.

But he was beaten by more than 15,000 votes!

To "rig" to that degree is simply not plausible.

The Conservative candidate, Craig Smith, who only lost by a few hundred votes, would have had a much stronger case for suspecting foul play, but of course, he isn't alleging anything, because there was no rigging (indeed, Mr. Smith has written a blog addressing and refuting all of Bridgen's claims. If you can get past the fact he calls Bridgen a conspiracy theorist - although in this instance, he may have a point - it's a worthwhile read).

Bridgen just lost, as anyone with the slightest bit of political acumen always knew he would.

Yet rather than taking his (inevitable and predictable) defeat on the chin and regrouping towards his next move, he's weaponising this defeat in an extremely egregious way, by throwing further inflammatory fuel on the already extremely heated debate of whether or not we should engage politically.

Unfortunately, Bridgen's spurious "rigging" claims have ensured a great deal more people now will not.

Most people simply do not possess the interior knowledge of politics and elections to do an analysis and see there's nothing suspicious at all about Bridgen's results, so they will leap on things like "but he has loads of social media followers! Way more than the person that won! Something is clearly going on!".

But social media following is completely irrelevant where it comes to politics, and large social media followings do not reliably translate into votes.

For instance, when I stood in the council elections most recently, I stood in the ward of Kirkburton and I came fifth with 129 votes. The person who won, with 1,995 votes, was a guy called Richard Smith, who has just 514 followers on Twitter, whilst I have more than ten times that amount (over 7,000), plus several thousand more on Substack and Instagram.

So, where it comes to predicting electoral success, social media following really doesn't mean anything. Many/most councillors and a lot of MPs have pretty poor social media visibility, because people who are very active on social media, and people who vote, are not reliably the same demographic.

Plenty of people who voted for winning candidates don't follow them on social media, or even have social media. Equally, large numbers of people who follow Bridgen (or me, or whoever) don't vote at all.

So I am telling you now, based on several years' experience standing in elections and attending counts myself, that the election in North-West Leicestershire was not rigged, and Bridgen is claiming it was (with, he admits, no evidence) for what are, at the very best, self-aggrandising reasons, e.g., to paint himself as so persecuted and such a threat to the establishment that they would go to all these lengths to sabotage him (so, lucrative gig on GB News please, or maybe in Trump's administration, for this poor people's hero!).

But I think his intentions may be even more nefarious than that, and, just like all "good" controlled opposition, he's trying to neutralise you.

Indeed, I just covered in my last piece (and have done in several previous pieces) that we have real power at the local political level - and the one big obstacle that stops us realising it is the relentless mythical mantra that "it's all rigged anyway" which stops people from both standing and voting.

Bridgen has just reinforced this myth ten-fold with his specious "rigging" claims. If he had genuine suspicions that something was amiss, he could have conducted a proper investigation privately, collated some actual evidence, and then made the accusation - but instead he's made a big sensationalist splash based on nothing, which will have the inevitable effect of further disempowering the freedom community.

It's also of note that Bridgen has the endorsement of none other than scion of America's most famous family, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Er, why?

Where, after all, is Mr. Kennedy's backing for David Kurten, Jonathan Tilt, Teck Khong, Cath Evans and any number of other pro-freedom political candidates who have been challenging illiberal and unethical lockdown and mandate measures from the start?

(Incidentally, David Kurten has 31,000 Facebook followers, but got just 708 votes in the General Election, The candidate who won, with over 15,000 votes, has less than 500 Facebook fans. So, as I say, there really is no relationship between social media popularity and success in elections.)

The aforementioned people all lead, or have led, genuine pro-freedom political parties that have stood hundreds, if not thousands, of candidates between them since the corona madness started in 2020. They have all been consistently anti-tyranny from day one - and their parties are actually democratic, in that they accept members who can vote in leadership elections and decide the direction the party will take.

Reclaim, meanwhile is an out-and-out dictatorship which does not accept members, meaning there is absolutely no way to remove the fraudulent Mr. Fox from power or for supporters to have any say at all in what the party does.

So why on Earth is ardent democrat Mr. Kennedy lending his enthusiasm and support to someone who - not only voted for both lockdowns and vaccine mandates - but joined a defunct and anti-democratic political party that doesn't accept members or stand candidates? (It stood three token celebrities in 2021 and has been completely inert ever since.)

Doesn't really stack up, does it?

Unless and until you remember there's a certain club, it's rather big, and neither we, nor the aforementioned David, Jonathan, Teck or Cath, are in it.

Were Kennedy to share so much as a single Tweet endorsing any of these people or their parties, their support would instantly go through the roof and give them a much more robust chance of making gains politically.

So why wouldn't he do that? Why would he only publicly support such a shady, inconsistent, and unreliable character as Bridgen?

It's all one big elaborate ruse to keep our eyes on these manufactured establishment "heroes" who are really only there to keep us distracted, neutralised, and misled.

And honestly, I sometimes almost feel a bit sorry for Bridgen (I said almost...).

He's not up there with the big boys in terms of totally ruthless "evil", rather, he just strikes me as a chaotic opportunist who is basically not very bright. As a result, he is too easily manipulated by his own vanity and greed, leading him to where he is now, which is completely out of his depth.

But you know what they say: in the end, it doesn't matter whether someone's destructive behaviour is driven by stupidity or evil. Because the end result is always exactly the same.

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