Baby Reindeer: A modern, military-grade morality tale

Currently the number one Netflix offering in more than 30 different countries, and viewed more than 2.6 million times by UK audiences in its first week alone, it's fair to say 'Baby Reindeer' - the hit new show created by comedian Richard Gadd - is a fairly significant cultural offering.

Even for those who don't watch Netflix, the Baby Reindeer sensation is unlikely to have completely passed them by, receiving as it has extensive media coverage, and becoming the topic of many intense debates, online and off.

But just in case you have recently returned from a lengthy pilgrimage to Georgia's Krubera Cave (one of the few locations in the world not to have internet access) - or if you just sensibly tune out a lot of the cultural cacophony - please allow me to briefly summarise the premise of the show:

Creator Gadd penned Baby Reindeer based on his own real-life experiences, and in the show, plays a version of himself, a character he has named Donny Dunn. Dunn, like Gadd, is an aspiring comedian who has moved from his native Scotland to London, to seek success as a stand-up comic. Having very little success in this notoriously tough to crack industry, he is paying the bills by working in a Camden pub.

One day, an eccentric older woman comes in and spins a yarn about being a hotshot lawyer to top political stars... yet she can't afford to purchase a cup of tea. Barman Donny takes pity on her and buys her a cup.

This small act of kindness triggers in this woman - called Martha in the show - an intense obsession, which quickly spirals into an increasingly bizarre and disruptive stalking campaign, which goes on to target Donny's friends, family, and career, and appears on the verge of ruining his life... when he turns it into an act for his stand-up comedy show, and it proves an enormous hit, launching him into the big time and eventually becoming a Netflix show.

Although nominally the show is about Gadd / Donny's stalker ('Baby Reindeer' being her pet name for him), there's also an equally central storyline regarding the violent sexual assaults Donny endures as an aspiring comic. Whilst still in his early twenties, he is approached by a successful, older TV producer, who promises to make him a star, but instead ends up drugging him on multiple occasions, sexually assaulting him each time, and eventually raping him.

If you were to think, "obsessive stalking and serial sexual assault seem unlikely topics for a comedy", you would be right. There isn't, in reality, anything funny about Baby Reindeer - and I don't think there's meant to be. I think billing it as a "dark comedy" was how Netflix got it past cultural critics, who otherwise might have taken a very different view - because they might have realised what it's really about.

As we've explored at this site many times, including in this recent article, Western countries are on the precipice of a seismic social revolution, set to see the cultural landscape ricochet from the ultra-liberal environment we currently inhabit, to its exact opposite.

An ultra-conservative cultural revolution is imminent, but to build momentum and attract widespread support for this dramatic shift, social engineers are doing what they do best - practicing "problem-reaction-solution" (otherwise known as the manufacture of consent).

Rather than have explicit, top-down tyranny, where authorities declare, "right, we've had enough of liberalism now, it's achieved what we wanted it to - so now we're going to plunge you into arch-conservatism", they instead manicure the mass mind to start loudly rejecting liberalism and howling for change, by insinuating high-profile cultural offerings (films, TV shows, books) into the national discourse, demonstrating to us just how toxic the current climate has become.

I wrote last week about how the book 'Ten Men', charting its 20-something author's horrific experiences with "casual sex", was being so heavily promoted in the mainstream press in order for provoke a backlash against liberal attitudes to sex and relationships: well, Baby Reindeer has become so high-profile for the same reason. It's just this time, we are being shown the dangers of liberalism to men, rather than women - including from other men.

Quite extraordinarily for a nominally progressive, politically correct institution, by releasing Baby Reindeer, Netflix has promoted the age-old, very conservative belief that homosexuality is caused by sexual abuse.

In the show, it is made explicitly clear that, prior to being assaulted multiple times by an older man, the main character, Donny, is entirely heterosexual. He has a girlfriend with whom he lives and there is no suggestion this is anything but a genuine relationship.

However, several episodes in, Donny declares to the audience that, after being assaulted and raped by a predatory abuser, he - for the first time in his life - starts to question his sexuality and feel attracted to men, going on to have a series of risky, short-term encounters with men he encounters in bars.

One would have thought that LGBT advocate groups would have come down on this portrayal like a ton of bricks, sternly reprimanding Netflix for reinforcing dangerous stereotypes about homosexuality - e.g., that it can be caused by abuse, and is characterised by anonymous promiscuity.

Oddly enough, they haven't, and rather have applauded the show for its unflinching honesty. Jeffrey Ingold, who functioned as the LGBT consultant for the show, said:

"Baby Reindeer strikes a painful chord for gay and bi men, and I know why: grooming and rape are common."

Ingold went on to say, in an article for The Guardian, that nearly half (45%) of gay and bi men have experienced sexual assault, while more recent research from Glasgow Caledonian University found that one in four have experienced some form of violence in same-sex relationships.

These kind of figures are not new: but the point is that, up until now, they have only widely been reported on by very conservative, often religious, groups, and hotly denied or dismissed by the cultural and political left.

Yet now, the liberal shibboleth, The Guardian, is uncritically promoting them, whilst endorsing a television show that explicitly advocates the theory that homosexuality can be caused by abuse.

This is a staggeringly significant shift, and tells us much about how cultural attitudes are set to change: as does the overall cultural backdrop of Baby Reindeer.

The show is set almost entirely in pubs and stand-up comedy venues.

What were two of the first venues to be sacrificed in 'lockdown', and some of the last to fully open up?

Pubs and comedy venues.

I remember how quick the authorities were to ban comedy at the start of "the pandemic", and I wrote this about it at the time:

"There's a reason all classic comedies are being taken down as "offensive", and why live comedy gigs are forevermore banned as "too dangerous" - it is because comedy is an exceptionally powerful instrument for revealing the truth, and when you're trying to impose the most oppressive Orwellian dictatorship ever known to man on the basis of a pack of pathological lies, you can't really take that chance.

I mean, just imagine a stand-up comic in the age of face-muzzling, anti-social-distancing, regulation hair-lengths, rules about when and for how long you can hug Granny.... So much material! So much to mock and lampoon!And that is why it has been banned. A gifted comic would immediately shed far too much light on how completely absurd and anti-human all this is, how it is - in effect - all one big, bad joke - and that can't be allowed, because we are all being required to take this farcical pantomime very, very seriously.

The light energy of laughter (light in both senses) would be too much of a polson dart to the dark forces orchestrating all this. In the children's film Monsters Inc. ("hey, guys, I know, let's have a kid's film about a whole civilisation run on the trauma of children generated by inter-dimensional beings terrorising them!" - "Great idea, nothing weird or creepy about that!") there is one thing, and one thing only, shown as more powerful than fear - laughter! The monsters live in dread of the terrorised children laughing, because they know the energy is too powerful and would shut down their whole society.

At the moment, the "monsters" of our society have the masses in a terrorised trance, a total state of trauma-based mind-control, where they are able to completely manipulate people's thoughts and actions via their own fear. Well, a very effective way of breaking out of that spell is laughter. What power would these beasts have left if we all heartily laughed at them, and refused to take any of this nonsense in the slightest bit seriously?None. They know this, they're petrified of it, and that is why the ban-hammer has come down so heavily on comedy."

Tyrannical regimes always try to stamp out comedy for the reasons afore-cited, but, as we saw earlier, explicitly banning things isn't the modern-day dictator's control mechanism of choice: rather, he works to manipulate people into calling for this ban themselves (problem-reaction-solution / the manufacture of consent).

So, how to manipulate audiences into turning against comedy? Well, how about by launching an ultra-popular TV series, one that everyone's talking about, that depicts the comedy circuit as a dark, dank sewer of predation and abuse, where even strong young men aren't safe from brutal, life-ruining assaults?

Like I said, Baby Reindeer isn't funny: it isn't meant to be funny, because it's not meant to be about showcasing the merits of comedy: rather, it is meant to be about the exact opposite.

And because Baby Reindeer makes repeatedly clear it's "based on a true story" (it reminds us of this at the beginning of every episode), but doesn't reveal the true identity of Gadd's abuser, inevitably, every top comedy producer in the country is now under the microscope as a possible suspect.

Utterly absurdly, Gadd has declared he is shocked and appalled that people have speculated in this way on who the man who raped him might be, because "that isn't the point of the show".

There is absolutely no possible way that Gadd, or the team of highly accomplished producers, promoters, scriptwriters and lawyers behind Baby Reindeer, had not realised the first thing viewers would do upon watching the show, was speculate upon the identity of Gadd's (stalker and) abuser.

But by not releasing this information, they have ensured that the whole comedy industry is now under suspicion. Who was the abuser? Who knew about it? Who covered it up?

This speculation and accusation is such an obvious and predictable effect of depicting a "mystery abuser" in a "true life" drama, that there can be no other conclusion to draw than this is the intended effect.

I would say "you don't have to be Freud" to predict that that is how human psychology works, but funnily enough - and not at all incidentally - the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix is Marc Randolph, descendant of the Freud dynasty. Randolph's great-grand uncle was Sigmund Freud himself, and his great uncle was Edward Bernays, the so-called father of PR, who famously harnessed his uncle Sigmund's psychoanalytic theories, and used them to manipulate the mass mind through public relations and propaganda (he changed the face of the twentieth century by so-doing, as was illustrated in the excellent documentary, The Century of The Self).

That's the "family business" and it's what Randolph founded Netflix to do: to use powerful psychoanalytic techniques to capture the mass mind and influence it in the direction he and his socially engineering associates want it to go.

Where they want it to go now is towards mass revulsion with, and rejection of, liberalism, so they are creating shocking, harrowing "exposés" like Baby Reindeer to have that effect.

One of the first things extremist conservative regimes, such as Afghanistan and Iran in the real world and The Handmaid's Tale on screen, come down hard on is non-traditional relationships, especially same-sex ones.

Baby Reindeer dispenses with the liberal attitude that same-sex relationships are on an equal footing to heterosexual ones, and depicts them only in a negative light: there are no stable, loving same-sex relationships shown, only discordant and abusive ones, typically fuelled by drugs, or defined by mental illness and mutilation (Donny has an ultimately doomed relationship with a post-op "trans woman").

Moreover, the show suggests that it is night-time economy venues like pubs and comedy clubs that facilitate abusive encounters between men, which are always initially fuelled by alcohol. It is notable that before offering him drugs, Donny's abuser first has many drinking sessions with him: alcohol is portrayed here as the gateway intoxicant to far more powerful substances and toxic encounters.

Note that alcohol, and by virtue establishments that primarily make their money from retailing it, are banned in ultra-conservative regimes like Iran.

In the UK, and courtesy of the harsh lockdown rules that shut down alcohol-retailing establishments for many months, the entire sector is now in free-fall and officially "teetering on the brink of collapse".

Concurrently, there is more and more anti-alcohol propaganda in the press, alleging that alcohol-related deaths are at an all time high and that "something must be done".

Dr Katherine Severi, chief executive of the Institute of Alcohol Studies, was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying ominously: 'How many more deaths are needed before the UK government wakes up?'

The government has already put all sorts of restrictive laws in place around alcohol, including increasingly heavy-handed ID requirements, which regularly see people in their thirties being asked to prove they are over 18, whilst government agencies promulgate relentless 'safety' messaging about how much (or how little) we ought to be drinking. The fact that millions of drinkers lie to their doctors about their alcohol consumption clearly qualifies that the average Briton is all too aware that alcohol can carry health risks - but, as consenting adults, choose to take those risks.

So, what could be being implied by a public statement from the Institute of Alcohol Studies that the government needs to "wake up" to alcohol's dangers?

That they need to ban it entirely, because - so we are being engineered to believe - their current attempts at safely regulating the product aren't working.

An alcohol ban is, I believe, clearly imminent (South Africa already enforced one in response to "the pandemic"), and cultural offerings like Baby Reindeer are part of the propaganda offensive to gain public support for such a ban: that alcohol fuels degenerate and abusive environments and puts people in extremely dangerous situations (also messaging pushed by the book Ten Men).

In reality, the social engineers want to ban alcohol because it fuels too much sociability and networking in the real world (South Africa explicitly stated they were banning it "to stop people gathering"), which the ruling classes are desperate to eliminate, reinventing us all as "indoor humans", living our lives entirely inside, alone, online. One big obstacle to this currently is how much the British public enjoys alcohol, and environments that serve it.

If, therefore, the establishment can ban alcohol on the premise that it's "too dangerous", this ensures the inevitable collapse of pubs and comedy clubs, because they simply aren't environments that enough people will patronise sober.

But to ensure people don't protest this collapse, and actively welcome and advocate for it, these environments must be demonised as too dangerous to operate. Not just when there's "a pandemic", but all the time.

That's what Baby Reindeer is really about: it's not a comedy, it's an epitaph, depicting end-stage, terminal liberalism. The purpose of it is to shock and traumatise its viewers into thinking, "this culture is awful. Something must be done".

And what can be done? What measures could possibly be taken to stop such horrifying abuse and life-upending discordance from happening to people?

Only one thing: eliminate the environments where such things appear to thrive.

It is notable that the stalker who so torments Donny does not encounter him in a park, on a bus, or in a coffee shop, but in a pub.

Message: pubs attract unhinged, dangerous people.

Donny is not an aspiring doctor or architect or engineer: but a wannabe stand-up comedian, performing in comedy clubs and networking with comedy producers.

Message: comedy is a degenerate world full of abusive predators.

Donny begins the series straight, but becomes sexually confused after an abusive assault.

Message: same-sex relationships are trauma responses borne out of abuse.

None of these messages are accidental or incidental. Netflix is an exorbitantly wealthy, enormously powerful military-grade mind-control weapon, devised by top intergenerational social engineers to control mass cultural perception. The streaming giant has released Baby Reindeer now, and given it such extraordinary publicity all around the world, for a reason.

Why is the show called Baby Reindeer? We are told it's because this was Gadd's stalker's pet name for him, inspired by a childhood toy.

But bear in mind that the deer is also rich in symbolism (the occult black magicians behind modern cult-ure just love their symbolism), and refers to regeneration and rebirth.

Therefore, that this show is named for the deer could also be seen as a message that our culture is symbolically shedding the cultural antlers it has worn for the last 60+ years, and is about to regenerate into something new.

We can see what form the overlords would like this regeneration to take. But as always, whether their dystopian vision is realised, remains entirely up to us.

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