A Bridgen way too far

A rather notable anniversary is coming up this month regarding my massive missives (and more), as the 19th May 2024 marks the one year commemoration of one of my most widely read, broadly shared, and hotly hated epistolary contributions ever... my open letter to "lone hero" Andrew Bridgen.

If you are a newer reader, please take a few moments to read the letter, which was initially published on my health resource, Informed Consent Matters, and sent to Mr. Bridgen that same day.

The letter was co-signed by my friend and colleague, Jonathan Tilt, who was mentioned in my last article in his capacity as independent West Yorkshire Mayor candidate. Jonathan has run a political party himself, as well as having stood in several elections as both a party and independent candidate, so he is well placed to understand the inner machinations of politics, and why Bridgen's account of himself and his subsequent political decisions after "awakening" don't add up.

In short, Jonathan and I wrote to Mr. Bridgen because we did not, and do not, trust him nor his motives, for reasons clearly laid out in the letter.

A year later, Bridgen has not seen fit to reply to either of us, despite confirming on camera months ago he has read the letter. When asked why he wouldn't be responding, he declared that it wasn't worth his time (and then made the bizarre claim that the government had extracted £20 million from him... yet still continues to pay his large salary and expenses every month. I have yet to hear him explain precisely how or why the government has taken this money from him, and I highly doubt I ever will).

As such, I was most surprised to receive an email from a friend on Friday, alerting me to the fact that Bridgen had made a lengthy appearance on the podcast of one Ahmad Malik where, apparently, he had addressed the concerns laid out in the letter.

The friend warned me in the email that the two men "were not my biggest fans".

While it's pretty obvious why I would not be Bridgen's favourite person, what "beef" (to use his words) does Malik have with me? Aren't we fighting for the same things?

Well, he opens the podcast by informing his (large, international) audience that I am "too negative", "inaccurate" and even "dark", and that I "leave people with a sense of helplessness".

Nevertheless, he then goes on to spend the next two hours quoting my work extensively, and at times word for word (to say he uses my letter as a "template" for the interview, which is what he does say, is the understatement of the century - he effectively reads the entire thing out verbatim, as well as borrowing from my other articles on Bridgen, Reclaim, and Democracy 3.0).

It's hard to quite quantify the extent of the astonishing audacity and arrogance to introduce somebody and their work to one's audience in such a derogatory way, but then to go on to effectively plagiarise it - but that is the kind of person Malik is, which I already knew based on my previous experiences with him.

The astute observer will note that, after ensuring his entire audience knows I am a negative, inaccurate, dark force of disempowerment, he informs them that he has "beef" with me because I won't communicate with him (why he would want to communicate with such a horrendous-sounding character is an intriguing question in itself).

However, on that score at least, he is right: I won't. And the reason I won't is that last year, he directed towards me a campaign of deeply inappropriate over-contact which some might describe as "harassment". I have never publicly commented on this anywhere because I had no desire to have a public spat with the man and just wanted him to leave me alone, but now he has escalated the situation in this way, I will - and that will be followed by my comments on his "interview" with Bridgen.

In August last year, Malik - a former doctor who alleges he lost his job due to a video he posted on social media - contacted me over Twitter, said he was a big fan of my work, and asked if we could speak that evening. It was a Thursday, and I informed him I was busy that evening but could speak to him on Friday. He said he was busy Friday, so we agreed on Saturday. I sent him my phone number so we could be in touch then.

I am usually very cautious with who I give my phone number to, but seeing that Malik had a large following and seemed to be endorsed by some very credible people, I assumed there was no danger of him misusing my private information.

How wrong I was.

Just a few hours after this exchange, and on an evening I had just told him I was busy, he started sending me WhatsApp messages. Not just one or two, but no less than 13 in a row. Despite the fact I did not even open, much less respond, to any of them, they kept coming.

Then started the text messages. And then the phone calls and voicemails. Plus more messages over social media.

Needless to say, I did not keep to our agreed Saturday phone call as this man had already displayed the kind of person he was - that he had a complete lack of interest in or respect for other's people's boundaries, or the fact that they are busy and have other commitments.

Like many people in the modern world, I am constantly overwhelmed with emails and messages, and as it says on my website, I am unable to respond to everyone who emails me because at times the volume is so high.

If a close friend or family member bombarded me with messages on a night I had just told them I was busy, I would be displeased enough, but for a complete stranger with whom I had no relationship, it was outrageous and extremely unnerving, especially as his contacting me continued over months (although the volume did decrease). His most recent phone call to me was earlier this year, where he left a message on my answerphone describing me as "a funny one", a bizarre and over-familiar epithet for someone he does not know (to be clear, after our initial, very brief Twitter exchange in August 2023, I have never once responded to or engaged with him).

I did seriously consider sending him a message telling him to desist and leave me alone, but decided against it, because somebody who needs to explicitly be told that repeat over-contact with a stranger is inappropriate (particularly a female stranger when you are a man), is a person who is inherently unreasonable and so will not respond to such a communication well.

I suspected (and have now had my suspicion vindicated) that such a communication would simply cause him to lash out at me, possibly publicly, and I therefore decided the best thing to do was simply not respond at all and eventually he would get the message and stop. As a wise friend once told me, when advising me how to deal with inappropriate contact, "no response is a response".

That approach did seem to have worked, and I hadn't been contacted by Malik for a few months - and, as I said, I had absolutely no intention of bringing any public attention to this matter or commenting on Malik at all, until his interview with Bridgen, and Malik's comments about me.

He reveals the veracity of what I say above by qualifying all his insults about me with "I have beef with her because she won't communicate with me".

This is an exceptionally arrogant and entitled statement, begging the question of who, exactly, he thinks he is (the old joke about doctors and God comes to mind...). I do not know him. We are not friends or colleagues or even acquaintances. I have no obligation whatsoever to communicate with him, or indeed with anyone I don't explicitly wish to communicate with (as is so for everyone). And, by definition, anyone who bombards me with unsolicited messages in the way he did is not someone I wish to communicate with.

Yet he clearly felt and feels entirely entitled to my time and attention, and that I don't give it to him means he is very angry with me, and therefore has decided I must be publicly dressed down in front of his (to quote) "big audience around the world", whilst he simultaneously exploits my work at length.

He claims he used my letter as a "template" for his interview with Bridgen, but goes on to frame the queries he puts to Bridgen as "his" questions, when they are not. They are mine. My original work, my hours of research, which Mr. Malik is not only claiming some intellectual credit for but also soliciting donations for.

But even more galling than this is that he has used my work - not to give Bridgen the rigorous grilling he deserves - but to whitewash him and to present him as more of a "hero" than ever (whilst presenting the villain of the piece - the "dark, negative" character - as me).

He repeatedly gives Bridgen easy "outs", sometimes explicitly answering questions for him (I've never previously listened to any of Malik's podcasts, but I understand he has form for repeatedly talking over and interrupting guests).

He starts by asking Bridgen why he joined "joke" party Reclaim... but is all too quick to give him an out, that he just "made a mistake", didn't he?

Yeah, sure, a 58-year-old career politician with a decade's experience in senior, top-tier politics didn't know that a novice political party fronted by an actor with zero political experience, a party which doesn't accept members nor stand candidates (except for performance artists) was a joke.

That's plausible to people who don't know anything about politics (which is most people, as I covered in my previous article, and it used to be me, too). But it's not remotely plausible to anyone who does, as I spelled out to Bridgen in my letter and as other politicians publicly commented on at the time.

Bridgen was not a layperson who could be forgiven for championing Reclaim, sincerely believing they were a legitimate outfit: he was a seasoned, high-level politician who knew exactly what the effect of joining Reclaim would be on his credibility.

And if he seriously didn't know, then he's thick as two short planks and that makes him just as dangerous as if he were "evil" - as they say, whether a powerful person's poor decisions are motivated by stupidity or evil, it doesn't ultimately matter, because the results are the same.

Andrew Bridgen cannot be whitewashed and forgiven as "just making mistakes" because of the enormity of the consequences of his "mistakes". Andrew Bridgen is not Joe Bloggs next door. If Joe initially believed in Covid, advocated lockdown, and took the vaccine, but then realised he'd been conned and changed his mind, good for Joe. His initial mistakes only directly affected him, because as a layperson, he is not in a position to influence the lives of millions of other people.

Andrew Bridgen, on the other hand, had that power.

"Covid" and its attendant tyrannies didn't happen magically or by accident. They were engineered and enforced by a (relatively small) group of people.

Andrew Bridgen was one of those people.

Covid measures were enforced on the public because of what Members of Parliament (MPs) voted for.

Andrew Bridgen MP voted FOR lockdowns.

He voted FOR mandatory vaccinations for care workers.

How many millions of lives have been harmed, perhaps irreparably, because of what he personally did?

(He also publicly promoted the vaccination on his Twitter, where he got the vaccination at "Mason's" pharmacy, and makes sure to mention the number "33" early on in his interview with Malik, but that's just a coincidence, I'm sure...)

The point is that someone who is personally responsible for inflicting so much evil - whilst thousands of us were on the ground from day one fighting back, opposing mandates, attending protests, etc - is no hero, regardless of whether he claims to have had an eleventh-hour change of heart, and he deserves rigorous grilling and cross-examination, not pats on the back.

The issue of Bridgen's voting record is brought up in the interview, where he reluctantly and with some irritation admits he did the wrong thing, but swiftly claims he has "done his penance".

WHAT? How? Please let me repeat once again, Bridgen has remained in lucrative employment since his alleged "brave stand", still enjoying his enormous MP's salary - bankrolled by we tax-payers - of nearly £100,000 per annum, a handsome sum further supplemented by generous expenses, donations, and gifts.

Care workers, on the other hand, some of the lowest paid and most underprivileged members of society, were forced into a bleak and terrible "choice" of losing their livelihoods or gambling with their health and even lives. How many have faced financial ruin, been irreparably harmed, or even killed because of Bridgen's decisions?

In what way has he "paid his penance" for this level of colossal harm? How, exactly, has he made amends for the incalculable devastation caused by the lockdowns he voted for? Businesses destroyed, families ripped apart, children and young people plunged into psychological crisis up to and including suicide?

That's why I wrote him my letter: because his "change of heart" is too cynically strategic, coming after the damage has already been done, and when there's money to be made as a high-profile "hero" of the conspiracy movement. Bridgen confirms in the interview with Malik that since his "awakening", he has received more than five million pounds from his (as his ex-wife calls him) "go-to multi-millionaire", Mr. Jeremy Hosking.

Bridgen also confirms (as I have repeatedly said, including to him) that Reclaim is a joke, defunct operation and Laurence Fox is a workshy alcoholic, who is nevertheless paid £300,000 a year by Hosking.

It is unequivocally clear at this point that Hosking can only be lavishing such extraordinary funding on Fox in order to deeply discredit and undermine the alternative movement.

Given that Fox is completely inactive as a "leader of a political party", declines to have members or candidates for this party, spends the entire working week in the pub, and engages in increasingly excruciating public gaffes thereby wrecking any remaining slivers of his credibility, and his boss responds to this - not by firing him - but by giving him a pay rise (his annual remuneration recently increased from £250,000 to £300,000), there is no other conclusion to draw than Fox is being paid to be an ineffectual disaster, in order to neutralise and discredit the political wing of this movement.

He, as a professionally trained actor from a world-famous acting dynasty, is being paid by Hosking - not a politician's salary (MPs earn £91,346 and even the Prime Minister "only" earns £167,391) - but an actor's salary, because he is playing the part of crazy, gaffe-prone "conspiracy theorist" politician in order to discredit by association the entire political resistance.

What conclusions would we draw, then, from the fact Hosking is also funding Andrew Bridgen? Bridgen is always exceptionally evasive on the matter of Hosking, and has given us no clear insight at all into why this incredibly rich man is funnelling so much money his way. He claims the five and a half million given to him by Hosking has "all gone on lawyers" in his dispute with his family firm.

But WHY is Hosking financing this dispute? What does he care if Bridgen is having an elaborate spat with his brother over turnips?

There's only one reason moneymen like Hosking put this kind of finance behind something (or rather, someone), and that's because they're expecting a considerable return on their investment.

So what is that return, Andrew?

Leading on from this, it's very easy to determine that Andrew Bridgen is being manoeuvred and manipulated by an external force by what he doesn't do, as much as by what he does.

Listeners will note that in Malik's interview with Bridgen, Jonathan Tilt's name is mentioned, both at the beginning and the end. Malik tells Bridgen Jonathan is an independent political candidate who also runs a resource to help support other independent candidates, and that Malik can "put them in touch".

Bridgen says singularly nothing in response to this, because of course he already knows exactly who Jonathan is (a fact Malik also knows), not only because Jonathan is the co-signatory of the letter the whole interview is based on, but because they are both independent political candidates in the same small movement campaigning for the same things, and so are already connected via multiple groups, organisations, and people.

Indeed, Andrew could learn a lot from Jonathan, because while Andrew was busy swanning around parliament on his lavish MP's salary (which, to repeat, he still receives), voting to plunge the nation into lockdown and needles into unwilling people's arms, Jonathan was campaigning from the start (whilst his own business was forcibly shut down) against all of this.

He was one of the first like-minded people I met in person at the beginning of the madness in 2020, and while the phrase "nobody has done more" is thrown around so much it's become a bit of a cliché, it could actually be accurately applied to Jonathan (a fact which he will deny, because he's not a massive egotist - it's true, though).

However, lacking the resources, celebrity, or go-to-multi millionaire of Mr. Bridgen, Jonathan has struggled in relative obscurity to get the recognition and platforms so easily granted to Bridgen. As Bridgen knows, publicity is everything in politics - the public vote for you if they know who you are (hence why the current Mayor of West Yorkshire is an ex-Coronation Street star) - and so the one thing prohibiting Jonathan from being more renowned and more successful in elections, is lack of publicity.

Bridgen could easily use his own platforms and connections to give Jonathan this publicity. A simple ReTweet would bring Jonathan's campaigning to the further attention of thousands.

Has Bridgen ever done this, or indeed endorsed or publicly supported any genuine grassroots independent political candidate in any way?

No, he has not. Rather, he prefers to martyr himself by presenting himself as a "lone voice" in politics, the only "brave hero" fighting for us, blah blah, a nauseatingly self-aggrandising position enormously reinforced and left unchallenged in Malik's interview with him.

It's all a con. He's just there, just like Lozza is, to keep you entertained and distracted with false hope (and absurd, ludicrous, but very expensive "defamation suits"), believing that this "hero" is going to solve all our woes and so you don't have to do anything (apart from pay for his ridiculous lawsuits, which interestingly are the one thing his oligarch pal Hosking won't finance).

When people accuse me of being "too negative", what they mean is that I don't uncritically fall for every high-profile slick media "hero" the mainstream media presents to us (and the MSM has indeed platformed Bridgen at length - yes, they've criticised him, but obviously he wouldn't have any credentials as "alternative" if they were nice about him. Hit pieces in MSM are great publicity for alternative "heroes", that's why real grassroots heroes never get any).

So, let's be clear: I am not irrationally "negative", merely vigilant and a critical thinker, and in such deeply murky and shark-infested waters as politics, I require cast-iron evidence before I will trust someone (including and especially someone who has voted for the public to be locked down and force vaccinated). The rather overly self-indulgent 2.5 hour (!) interview between Malik and Bridgen could have been condensed considerably by Malik simply asking Bridgen, "why haven't you responded to the two people who first put all these queries to you a year ago?"

Bridgen's previous "explanation" for this - that he didn't have time - is revealed as the typical politician's dissembling lie it is by the fact he made a four-hour round-trip to Malik's home to spend a further 2.5 hours talking to him, specifically and almost exclusively about the issues I raised.

The reason he wouldn't address them with me is because he knew I wouldn't let him off the hook like Malik did.

While I would have been perfectly polite and professional to him, as I always am in interviews, I am simply not a starry-eyed Bridgen groupie, and would have held him to account properly, not giving him easy "outs". You are never going to get the truth out of someone in this situation (a politician, no less) if they are being interviewed by a self-confessed fan, who will inevitably want to ingratiate themselves with the person and make excuses for them, not conduct a clear-sighted and rigorous interview.

To be clear, the entire essence of Malik's exchange with Bridgen boils down to Malik telling us that Bridgen is a wonderful brave hero, who, sure, has made one or two mistakes, but nobody's perfect! We need to stop nitpicking and get behind this champion of the people!

I do not believe this assessment for a second, for reasons laid out in this essay, but let's consider for a moment that it is true: let us consider that Bridgen is not a devious shyster intentionally misleading us, but that he has simply "made mistakes" - again and again and again.

That means we are being asked to put our confidence and trust in someone who repeatedly makes catastrophically poor errors of judgement in literally life and death situations.

Andrew Bridgen "mistakenly" voted for lockdown - millions were irreparably harmed by this mistake.

He "mistakenly" voted for scores of vulnerable people to be vaccinated by force - the consequences of this are unquantifiable.

He claims we should listen to him on vaccines now because he "has a science background".

Yet his science background not only failed to prevent him from taking and publicly promoting the vaccine (twice), but to vote for it to be applied to others by force!

You do not need a "science background" - you do not need any educational qualifications at all - to know that forcibly penetrating other people's bodies with invasive and risky medical products they do not want is wrong.

Andrew Bridgen, however, clearly did not know this, nor, he claims, did he know that the Reclaim political party was a disingenuous joke that would destroy his credibility whilst extorting money from the public via dodgy fundraisers.

These were all just "honest mistakes", he claims.

If this is really so, and as I said earlier, it doesn't make him any less of a dangerous liability than if he was misleading and manipulating us on purpose: if he is honestly too stupid and too lacking in basic ethical standards to have known instantly that medical force is wrong; that government tyranny is never acceptable; that Laurence Fox is the biggest political joke since Screaming Lord Sutch (with apologies to Mr. Sutch for the comparison)... well, why would we put one iota of faith or trust in this character to get it right now or in the future? Obviously, extrapolating from his long and distinguished history of "mistakes", he is just going to keep making them.

People want to believe in Bridgen and his supposed "heroic crusades" and I understand why that narrative is appealing: but the reality is, as I have emphasised time and again: no hero-daddy is coming to save us, it's up to us to get active and save ourselves.

A lot of people deeply dislike that message - and our social controllers know that, they know how many people are desperate for a hero, so they cynically use that to mislead and exploit us, again and again and again. "When the people need a hero, we shall supply him", said Bridgen's fellow Freemason (allegedly...) Albert Pike.

Perhaps some people prefer to twist what I'm saying and use it as a basis to attack me, by claiming that, in my rejection of "saviour heroes", I "leave people feeling helpless". So, just to let newer readers who may not be aware of this know, my initial inroads into activism were all focused on empowering others, and I spent the first couple of years of "Covid" studying the law and helping people to use it to their advantage to decline jabs, masks, and tests. I ran a service for a while where I would write letters on other people's behalf to employers, schools, hospitals, to help them assert their rights, and I turned these letters into templates which are freely available on my website for anyone to use.

There's about fifty of them, and apparently they've been used successfully hundreds of times, including enabling a little boy who had survived cancer to get his urgently-needed cataract surgery, which the hospital were refusing to do unless his parents submitted him to Covid testing (when they declined, the hospital threatened them with social services). This family has let me know that, courtesy of my letters, this little boy successfully had his surgery with no further requests for testing - and certainly no involvement from social services.

I also co-run Informed Consent Matters, which is all about empowering individuals with facts to make informed choices about their health, and ICM also has a leaflet store where people can order leaflets on such such issues as informed consent, and why jabs / masks / tests don't work, and disseminate them at events and in their neighbourhoods. To date, many thousands have been distributed.

So, I may be a lot of things (a "puritanical right-wing wokie", according to Laurence Fox, and a high-ranking member of the Nazi Party, according to Rachel Elnaugh), but "leave people feeling helpless" I do not.

Further than that, though, it's important to emphasise that neither I nor anyone else is actually obliged to "offer solutions". That's not the only valid contribution. People who write articles and make videos exposing multiple aspects of the global conspiracy, using their time and skill to raise awareness and disseminate the truth, are making a valid contribution already. If others find their content too "dark", they are not obliged to read it. Of course the subjects I tackle are "dark" - look at what's going on in the world!

However, I certainly noticed that Malik did not make the distinction to clarify that the subjects I cover can be dark, but rather, he stated that I personally am, which is a very serious allegation indeed. When I consulted the online thesaurus and asked for some synonyms for "dark" as a personality trait, I got "Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, and spitefulness". 

So, having reviewed this situation at length, I find the comments made about me by Mr. Malik on his show to be rather "defamatory". I wonder if his pal Bridgen could recommend any good lawyers...

(Note, this is a joke! Obviously if I was going to sue, I would never use Bridgen's lawyers...)

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