In my immediate family, I have: one husband, two parents, one grandparent, six aunts and uncles (plus their partners), 15 cousins, and then many more cousins of various stripes and tiers (2nd, 3rd, removed, etc., and no, like everyone else on the planet, I don't know the difference). These further-afield ancestral ties exist not just in this country, but in Italy, Poland, America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Now, I personally wouldn't have a hope of giving you a detailed biographical account of what all these people do. For all I know, some of my Italian relations could have ties to the mob (I have no reason to think they do... but that's just the point: I don't know).
It would be very difficult for anyone to suitably scrutinise my - or most people's - familial ties to ensure that if, for example, the security services attempted to kill me in a fake terror incident, there wouldn't be catastrophic implications for them in terms of future ramifications from aggrieved relations.
That was just a brief summary to answer the perennial question of, if the intelligence agencies stage false flag, inside job terror attacks - as we know they do - then why would they just pretend to kill people in these events? Why not kill them for real?
Whilst I'm not saying they never do this, the above is why they often don't: because unless you deploy huge surveillance teams to spend thousands of hours digging into the personal histories of all the potential victims of a planned attack, then you really don't know who you're killing, and what their aggrieved Italian mobster relatives (for example) might do about it.
You could be killing the favoured goddaughter of some top mafia don, or the second cousin of a powerful Rothschild banker. If you blow people up at random, then you really don't know - and you don't know how these relations might react in retaliation.
You don't know much of a headache - or worse - they might cause trying to find out what really happened, or what methods they might invoke to seek revenge. After all, high-profile people and their families do go to the kind of events where "terror" attacks have taken place, and it would jeopardise the integrity of the operation to warn them off.
While it might be something of an improbable extreme to suggest the average pop concert attendee has connections to the mafia, it is still possible, as are other, even more unsavoury connections, so what I'm doing here is using an extreme to illustrate an overarching point: if you kill someone, you don't know how their relatives (mob or not) are going to react, and what kind of ongoing problems they might create for you.
The bottom line is that killing people isn't politically straightforward: even killing just one person can be a diplomatic nightmare, so when it's more than one, or dozens, the potential complications can be unquantifiable.
The intelligence agencies would never take these kind of risks unless there was no other option. Killing random people is far too reckless, and there is absolutely no need to do it, when you can simply fake people's deaths instead. This is far easier, far cleaner, and just as effective at achieving your desired goal as is killing people for real.
Faking a death is not that difficult either, even for a layperson (life insurance fraud units see it quite frequently), so obviously, for the intelligence agencies, it's a pedestrian walk in the park. It's basically akin to putting someone into the witness protection programme (there are around 3,000 people known to be enrolled in this scheme in the UK alone).
Why would someone agree to participate in such a deceptive scheme as faking their own death (or their child's) in a staged terror event, you might ask?
Many reasons.
Maybe they government has some dirt on them and, rather than being exposed and going to prison, they agree to cooperate in staging their own death and then being given a new identity to live elsewhere.
Maybe they're in crippling debt, and the government agrees to pay off their debts, give them a big lump sum, and wave them off to start an exotic new life on a Greek island, if they just agree to let the papers say they've died.
Or maybe they just have a really boring, humdrum life, and the thought of a new luxury lifestyle in Mexico with plenty of money and the thrill of having a secret identity, substantially beats subsisting on the dole in a grotty terraced house in Manchester (sorry, Manchester, but I've lived there and I know how it is).
There are plenty of reasons people might jump at the chance.
Whereas from the intelligence agencies' point of view, actually killing people is incredibly messy and leaves too many loose ends that could come back to severely bite them.
Faking deaths is far neater and safer, so that's what they (generally) do.
It's also important to be aware that the government staging events and passing them off in the media as real for the purposes of propagandising the public is, in fact, a perfectly legal thing to do.
Due to an amendment in the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), the American media is perfectly entitled to engage in an elaborate form of street theatre - working with the government and intelligence agencies to act out "drills", and then presenting them to the public as if they had really happened.
Can anyone give a good reason explaining why the American government passed this amendment, if they never intended to use it?
Clearly, they use it frequently, and as a result (to quote Naomi Wolf, whatever you think of her), "we have entered an era in which it is not crazy to assess media events to see if they're real or not real. In fact, it's kind of crazy not to".
I write this to communicate clearly to the persons who keep engaging in stern finger-wagging every time anyone dares to suggest that a high-profile media event might have been fake.
"How dare you! Won't you think of the families! You monster, you brute! It's people like you who give conspiracists a bad name!"
Look, this really isn't helping.
First of all, telling people how they should or should not feel about media events is just another form of thought-policing. We are not obliged to demonstrate heartbroken devastation every time the media sensationalises various tragedies, it's just as valid to take a pragmatic approach (and probably more helpful), and you're not a better person than anyone else simply because you emote more loudly and publicly than they do.
Sometimes people don't even publicly express grief at the deaths of their own closest family and friends, and I don't think we cynically survey funerals to see "who's acting upset enough", do we? So stop applying this utterly absurd standard to people's reactions to the alleged deaths of total strangers they have absolutely no relationship to.
Secondly, we never have had and never will have a "good name" with the mainstream. Even if we were "just" anti-vaxxers and far-right extremists, the mainstream still thinks we're all deranged whackadoodle conspiraquacks, so we have no credibility left to lose with them.
As for other conspiracists, if we "lose credibility" with them simply for daring to have an opinion that isn't theirs, then they weren't free thinkers in the first place. They're just as dogmatic, intolerant, and authoritarian as any mainstream commentator, it's simply that the subjects that trigger their authoritarian instincts are different.
I made this exact same point when some particularly inflexible thinkers went mental that anyone 'dared' to think the Manchester bombings might have been real (to be clear: I don't think they were, and I still don't trust Richard D. Hall).
People are allowed to think whatever they want about any event they please: if they want to think it was fake, they can; if they want to think it was real, they can.
"But but but THAT'S JUST AN OPINION!" Spluttered one especially aggrieved individual. "THOSE AREN'T ALLOWED! ONLY FACTS ARE!"
Yes, an alleged "free thinker" actually said this (and then even went so far as to contact a podcast I was due to appear on and demanded they interrogate me as to "whether I understood the difference between a fact and an opinion").
Any given person at any given time believes multiple things that are not true: sometimes they later find out these things are not true, sometimes they don't.
That's life...
To say that people are therefore not "allowed" to hold opinions that are wrong is possibly the most absurdly totalitarian declaration I have ever come across.
Yes, people are allowed to hold beliefs that are wrong. What's the alternative? That we appoint a Ministry of Truth gestapo who hound them all over the internet "correcting" their wrongthink (or phoning up podcasts and demanding interrogations...)? Isn't that a bit, er, 77th?
People are allowed to hold views (any views) that others think are wrong. The way we get to the truth is to encourage people to freely air their views, and then we discuss and debate them to see where the truth really lies, accepting that others have the right to reject what we say, no matter how much evidence we produce to support our position. Nobody is "obliged" to believe anything.
If we genuinely see ourselves as free thinkers, then we should be able to freely debate and discuss different ideas - any and all different ideas - without threatening to kick from the conspiracy club anyone who dares to disagree with us.
And if we can't, it's not a club I want to be in - I'm taking my ball earth and going home! (That's a joke, by the way, sorry if it fell a bit flat.)
So - while people are absolutely entitled to believe, and assert their beliefs, that high-profile media "terror" events are real - the fact remains that where it comes to the mainstream media promoting these events, it's far more likely that the media is lying than they are telling the truth, for the simple and obvious reason that they lie all the time.
Over the past four years alone, the legacy press has lied pathologically, relentlessly, and unrepentantly in order to propagandise millions of people, including children and pregnant women, into taking toxic death jabs.
They have colluded with the government to support initiatives that put millions of innocent people under house arrest, destroyed their businesses, and ripped apart their families.
They ruthlessly severed people from elderly parents in care homes and dying relatives in hospital - relatives whose deaths they expedited or even caused, with deadly cocktails of drugs and death-trap ventilators.
All on the basis of literally NOTHING.
There was no "deadly virus" anybody needed protecting from (not that even if there was, any of these measures would be remotely acceptable).
That's how much they lie. As much as any ruthlessly psychopathic depraved serial killer out there.
On the other hand, in the same timeframe the media was doing this, I:
Warned a year in advance there was a fake pandemic coming and that the real danger would be in the vaccine;
Wrote over fifty letter templates to enable people to decline vaccines, masks, and tests, which were successfully used by hundreds of people;
Stood in local council elections multiple times from 2021 specifically to oppose lockdowns and mandates;
Distributed thousands of leaflets all over the country warning people of the dangers of vaccines, masks, and tests;
Wrote hundreds of articles opposing lockdowns, mandates, and all related government corruption, which have been read by thousands of people worldwide.
So, you're trying to tell me that, despite the fact I have this track record - that I have consistently and loudly told the truth about "Covid", vaccines, and all related matters from the start (from before the start, in fact) - and the mainstream media's track record is literally the exact, antithetical opposite, that, nevertheless, when it comes to "tragic terror attacks", I have to defer to them?
I have to believe they're telling the truth now?
Why?
Please give me one good reason (and it really does need to be good).
Please remember the fact that very good actors exist. You cannot possibly tell whether someone is or is not acting (lying) in any high-profile, media saturated current event, not if they're any good at it (that's exactly why so many high-profile politicians have a background in the dramatic arts - because it enables them to be such good and convincing liars).
So to say "I saw a victim testimony and it seemed convincing" is not proof of anything. If "seeming convincing" was enough of a defence against serious crime, very few people would ever even be arrested, never mind go to prison (career criminals are exceptionally good liars).
Unless you personally have been witness to prima facie evidence that death occurred as the media says it did (which in the case of murder, includes proof that the victim is dead and proof that the defendant's actions caused their death), then you've got nothing.
You just have the word of a pathologically lying, psychopathic media, aided and abetted by good actors, as the media invariably is (remember Boris Johnson's star turn pretending he "nearly died of Covid"?).
So, please tell me, why is the burden of proof on me to prove such accomplished liars and actors, are, once again, lying and acting?
Why isn't the burden of proof on them to demonstrate that this time they're telling the truth?
If events are real, then it's easy to find evidence that they are.
And to repeat, after what we have witnessed the last four years and the spectacular shower of lies every single mainstream media vehicle has subjected us to, the burden of proof to demonstrate the media is lying is not on the independent writers and researchers who have consistently told the truth.
It's on the mainstream media who hasn't.
They're the ones alleging "three little girls were stabbed to death by a 17-year-old al-Qaeda extremist", so they have to prove it. They need to prove that this really happened and that they're not simply propagandising the public for political reasons as - as I demonstrated with the NDAA amendment - the media does all the time.
I understand why you might have a hard time believing the media and government would go to these lengths, and why you might think the idea of the media psychologically brutalising people like this with fake events is simply too sick, unhinged, and barbaric to be real.
But please remember what William Blum, expert alternative political commentator said:
"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.”
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Great article to read on a dismal evening Miri. Thank you. Also a very sensible framing of the Aisling, Iain, James and Abi debates and not forgetting your ball earth falling flat inimitable throwaway comic lines.
I’m with you on all this, Miri. I automatically disbelieve the MSM’s version of events and certainly ask, what are they trying to get us to believe now and why? It’s quite a difficult world to live in where things are upside down and back to front, a true Alice in Wonderland world. My trouble is that I’ve always tended to trust people and am probably rather naive - I know that my grandchildren take great delight in tricking me as I tend to fall for their tricks every time (though I am getting better at sussing them out now!). I perhaps too quickly accept people at face value when I should question first…. This Montgomery Toms who Charles Malet of UKC interviewed seems a great guy to me but then a friend wondered where he’d sprung from, who was behind him, etc? Is it never possible for someone genuine to just pop up? It’s a very disillusioning and dark world!