Play the game, or the game plays you

When, as a person of the female persuasion, you have reached the height of five feet seven inches by the age of 12, you tend not to spend your teens tottering around in heels, as it just makes you too tall (unless you are the prescribed person to get served in the off licence, as I generally was, in which case it's quite useful) - and it's a habit that tends to stick: now standing at five feet eight inches tall (I bizarrely grew another inch when I was 23), I rarely wear shoes with a heel... unless I am attending an event where I know the overwhelming majority of people hate and look down upon me, and so I, quite literally and physically, prefer to look down on them too...

So goes the electoral count every year. On Friday, for the fourth consecutive year, I attended the vote count for the local council elections, in which I had stood as an independent candidate, along with Mark, Clare, Lynne, Richard, and Jonathan, who stood for West Yorkshire Mayor (and did exceptionally well - more of which later).

You can see how we all did by clicking on our hyperlinked names above: we nearly all did significantly better than last year, and in most cases, exceeded the vital 5% of the vote share - which is not only the threshold for receiving your deposit back (£5,000 in Jonathan's case), but is also the point you stop being dismissed as a "joke candidate", and start getting interpreted as a legitimate contender (and therefore, a legitimate threat).

So, a huge thank you to everyone who voted for us, campaigned for us, and shared our updates on social media (and a particular shout-out to James in Kirkburton, a long-term reader who was rather surprised to learn I was standing in the very ward in which he resides!). I'd also like to extend my especial thanks to TNT Radio, who have been unwavering supporters of both me and Jonathan, and who gave us vital airtime both in the lead up to, and on the day of, the elections.

(I've also taken note of those with influence and reach who have previously given plenty of coverage to fake political opposition, but who have consistently failed to platform real grassroots candidates.)

Standing as council candidates has become an annual tradition ever since the insanity of 2020, and every year, it's the same: the cliquey, closed shop of bad actors that are local politicians make it absolutely and unequivocally clear how much they hate us.

They refuse to acknowledge us, they openly scowl and veritably sneer, and they even whisper about us, in hushed, huddled circles, as was confirmed by a very revealing little snippet Mark (257 votes, 5.4%) happened to overhear...

At council electoral counts, the room is divided alphabetically by ward, where vote-counters sit behind screens allocating the votes into piles, and candidates tend to stand by their own ward, overseeing the counting process.

My ward was Kirkburton, so, along with the other four candidates (Tory, Labour, Lib Dem, Green) I stood there, looking supervisory, and being ignored as usual by the other candidates... when, to my utter astonishment, the Green Party candidate not only acknowledged my existence, but actually instigated a friendly conversation. To be clear, I have attended this process four times, the room is always packed out, and this is the first time this has ever happened.

We had a brief conversation about the ward of Kirkburton ("are you from Kirkburton?" "Yes, are you?". "No, just down the road in Crosland Moor, but Kirkburton's lovely", "yes, isn't it?".).

The other candidates were huddled together, observing this exchange, and - not realising that somebody connected to me was standing directly behind them - one of them indicated me, and muttered conspiratorially to the others:

"See the girl in the hat? That's the independent candidate."

"Oh," snorted another, his tone a mixture of derision and surprise. "I thought it was [the Green Party candidate's] girlfriend."

This was followed by assorted incoherent mumbles and sniggers.

Now, why would he make such an assumption? Is this an example of medieval misogyny where a female presence in the room can't possibly be assumed to be a serious person and actual contender, but only somebody's girlfriend?

Well, no: there were dozens of women candidates in the room and actually women tend to do slightly better in council elections than men. There were also dozens of men, so why would I be assumed to be this particular man's girlfriend?

The reason I was designated this description is because the Green Party candidate and I were observed to be having a friendly exchange, and as the routine, universal reception from the established political parties to us impertinent outsiders is absolute, undisguised hostility and contempt, it was assumed by observers that the only possible reason for us being civil to each other could be a romantic involvement.

After all, Mr. Green Party couldn't possibly be being friendly to an evil infiltrator. That is not a conceivable possibility, as that is not how things are done around here! So, I must be his "girlfriend" (note, not a grown-up term like "partner", just teenagery "girlfriend" for maximum "put you in your place" derision... this is precisely why I have to elevate my height at these events, and consequently hobble around in agony for the next three days - stupid sadistic heels...).

This tells you everything you need to know about how much the legacy political parties loathe us and our invasion of what they assume to be their cosy little closed club. They, the uni-party, are all friendly to each other, as they're ultimately all engaged in maintaining the same system.

They're not friendly to us, because we actually are a threat, and they're terrified of the day more state dissidents realise this, get actively involved, and turn their cosy little system on its head for good.

And they are more frightened of this than ever after the recent elections, when the results hurled the smug status quo into disarray - Labour lost control of Kirklees Council (where I live), they lost nearby Oldham, and Jonathan Tilt, the independent mayoral candidate (a "notorious anti-masker", according to the local rag) got over 46,000 votes and beat one of the legacy political parties. In Bradford, which has a particularly "awake" voting contingent, he beat all but one of them.

Please note that this is not a meaningless mirage where Labour has just 'lost' to another branch of the uni-party who will adhere to exactly the same agenda - Labour lost to independents, who do not belong to any political party and who openly oppose the lockstep state agenda.

Although the primary issue a lot of independents were campaigning on was Gaza, those who are awake to one genocidal state scam tend to be awake to the others, too - many independent candidates know exactly what the Covid vaccine was designed to do, and that the same people are behind it as are behind the Gaza slaughter, and for the same reasons.

Now, in reporting this, I am very well aware that there is a huge amount of cynicism and dismissal from "the awake" regarding elections and voting.

"Voting is all a fraud. If it made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it."

"It's all rigged anyway. Candidates are selected, not elected."

"Voting is contracting with the government and consenting to what they do."

I've not only heard it all, but I've said it all. I believed all of that until 2020 - I had never voted, let alone contemplated standing as a candidate (I wouldn't have had a clue of how to do this for a start, as the average person generally doesn't).

And because I believed all that myself, I understand exactly where these beliefs come from, and why it's so important to challenge them.

I decided to get active politically in 2020 as the unprecedented insanity of "Covid" required unprecedented responses, and I thought, "well, I've tried not voting up until now and that doesn't seem to have improved anything, so I might as well try the other option and see if that makes any difference".

Becoming politically active was quite the extraordinary learning curve, which has included many memorable highlights, such as being compared to a senior member of the Nazi party by a former protagonist of the BBC show, Dragon's Den, but the overarching message, that I grasped very quickly, was this:

It is not rigged. They want you to believe that so you don't get involved.

I've attended four electoral counts, which are not open to the public, therefore not part of the "world stage show" of performative politics, and I can tell you this first-hand: they are not rigged (not in the way people think they are, at least, but more on that later).

You can tell they're not by the visceral, detectable levels of extraordinary anxiety in the room, where every candidate is obsessively watching their vote count, and demanding a recount if there's even the slightest possibility a single vote might have been missed.

You can tell they're not by the utter, aghast devastation etched all over candidates' faces when they lose (my local Labour councillor looked like she was going to start crying when she lost her seat, and another representative, who shall remain nameless but whose name may rhyme with Mason JcCartney, actually did).

And you can tell they're not by the utter revulsion and undisguised contempt virtually every uni-party candidate has for outsiders (accusing us of being people's "girlfriends"... it was really pretty obvious I wasn't, as, like every other candidate, I was wearing a bright orange lanyard stating CANDIDATE, and not my pastel pink GIRLFRIEND one).

They're not acting out any of this for the benefit of the cameras and public perception: there's no point, as the electoral count is completely closed to the public to the extent even candidates are not allowed to take photos (you will get sternly told off if you even try to speak on your phone, never mind look as if you might be trying to record anything).

The crucial thing to understand, then, is that the count is not rigged in any direct sense, i.e., votes are not shredded, nor are extra ones added in, because this is highly illegal and to do this would run too high a risk of the perpetrators being caught. There are too many low-level people involved in the count who would all have to be "in on it" and so it just wouldn't be practical.

There is a form of rigging, but it is enacted in a much more indirect and entirely legal way, which is by perpetuating the utterly inaccurate and fallacious belief that "it's all rigged anyway, if voting made a difference, they wouldn't let you do it".

So everyone who holds that belief (the vast majority) doesn't vote, thereby allowing the establishment to install in place the candidates they want, virtually unchallenged...

Until this year.

This year has presented unequivocal and undeniable proof that, if only people are prepared to mobilise and get active, we could turn this system on its head and to our advantage.

In "safe seat" Labour strongholds like Oldham, where Labour has controlled the council for well over a decade, they have lost control, all because of independents. Established career politicians have completely lost their standing, as independents topple them from their seats. The former leader of Kirklees Council, Shabir Pandor, has not only lost his leadership position but his council seat entirely - to an independent.

And in the mayoral elections, a "radical" independent candidate, who opposes vaccine mandates, net zero measures, and any future lockdowns (and has since day one of Covid) - someone who the establishment would love to dismiss as a "crazy conspiracy theorist no-one will vote for" - got over 46,000 votes and beat the Liberal Democrat candidate by tens of thousands of votes.

If "it's all rigged anyway", can you explain why this has been allowed to happen? Why didn't they rig it to embarrass the independent candidates into submission, ensuring they only got a tiny handful of votes, lost their deposits (£5,000 in the case of the mayoral elections), and that the big boys dominated as usual?

It's because it's not rigged, and the only reason independent candidates didn't do even better than they did is because the vast majority of people who share their beliefs, won't get up off their sofas and vote for them, believing abstaining entirely is the "anti-establishment" thing to do (I know this is how they feel, as for many years, that was me, too).

So, to respond to this, we have to be clear about how we define "anti-establishment": first and foremost, it's always the minority position, because the establishment possesses the resources to ensure that, for any given issue, the majority believe what the establishment wants them to believe.

For example, the establishment wanted people to believe there was a novel virus called Covid killing millions of people: the majority of people believed this.

The establishment wanted people to take experimental gene therapy injections to combat this "threat": the majority of people did.

The establishment wanted people to mask, test, socially distance, etc: the majority of people did.

Not believing in "Covid", not injecting, masking, or testing, were very much minority beliefs, as genuinely anti-establishment positions always are.

Well, do you know what percentage of people didn't vote in the local elections in my borough?

65%.

Virtually 2 in 3 people, e.g., the sizeable majority.

That means, by definition, not voting is the majority, status quo, establishment position, because if the establishment wanted the majority of people to vote - they would. As we have seen time and again, the establishment is always able to get the majority onside.

If the establishment wanted you to vote, they would festoon local towns centres with advertisements about the importance of doing it (just like they did to promote the "importance" of adhering to Covid measures). Yet on polling day last Thursday, all localities were bereft of any big billboards or attention-grabbing bus-stop signs directing you to the polling booths. There were no expensive media campaigns urging you to do your democratic duty. The only evidence at all there were any elections going on were the sorry-looking tatty placards bearing candidate names and tied to lampposts by the candidates themselves.

"If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it" - well, they didn't used to, remember?

Prior to 1832, a person had to - not only be male - but own property or be in a certain tax band in order to qualify to vote. This made politics an elitist closed shop wholly controlled by the wealthy, as it by definition excluded almost the entirety of the working classes.

Fast forward to 2024, and politics is an elitist closed shop wholly controlled by the wealthy, as the working classes have now excluded themselves. Voter turnout is by far the lowest in the most deprived areas, such as Middlesborough and Hull, where turnout can be as low as 13% - meaning nearly 9 in 10 people don't vote.

That trends in 2024 so closely mirror the trends of 200 years ago is no coincidence. The elites don't want ordinary people involved in politics and they never have, the only difference is that now - understanding human psychology better than they did then - social engineers realise it is more expedient to have people voluntarily exclude themselves from politics, rather than introducing diktats that exclude them by force.

Any armchair psychologist knows the alluring promise of the "forbidden fruit" - e.g., when you tell people they can't do something, they rebel and insist they want to do it. Hence the birth of the universal suffrage movement, which campaigned for voting restrictions based on wealth and class (and gender) to be lifted, and the vote available to all.

The establishment resisted this at first, but eventually granted it, realising that once voting had lost its "forbidden fruit" credentials, it would be easier to put "undesirables" off doing it, by convincing them they were not voting - not because the establishment was prohibiting them from doing so, as it had previously done - but because they had made this decision themselves (because "it's all pointless anyway" etc). This process is called the "manufacture of consent" and it has been successfully used to control the political climate in the West for more than a hundred years, since the term was first coined by political scientist Walter Lippmann in 1922.

Political activist and author Noam Chomsky, who wrote a book of the same name, said of Lippmann:

"[T]he term “manufacturing consent” is not mine, I took it from Walter Lippmann, the leading public intellectual and leading media figure of the twentieth century, who thought it was a great idea. He said we should manufacture consent, that’s the way democracies should work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds."

I mean, it's obvious, isn't it: when people believe they have come to a decision themselves, rather than having it imposed on them by an external authoritarian force, it's a far more effective way of controlling them.

Consider this quote, by George Lincoln Rothwell:

“Revolution is a spectator's sport. The majority will sit in the stands and watch the factions fight. At the end they will choose side with the team that is winning.”

So, if you don't vote - if you're a passive spectator in the electoral process, rather than an active participant - you're doing exactly what the establishment wants you to do, which is precisely why not voting is the majority position. Just as it has always historically been.

If you don't vote, you must ask yourself: if voting is such a fraudulent farce, why did the establishment go to such lengths for so long to stop so many people from doing it? If it's "all rigged anyway", why would it have mattered?

Consider that voting does matter, and, as such, they want to put as many people as possible off doing it - and they've realised that allowing people to vote but sewing the belief there's no point, it's all rigged, etc., results in a lower overall turnout than prohibiting people by force.

"Okay... but there's nobody I want to vote for,", you may well reasonably object.

Fair enough - there wasn't anyone I wanted to vote for last year either, so I spoiled my paper. This is an extremely important and valid form of political protest which sends a clear and direct message.

You abstaining entirely, on the other hand, sends at least one of the following messages, and very likely all three.

1. You're happy with how things are and so don't feel the need to vote for change;

2. You're too apathetic and disengaged to bother making the effort to go to the polling booth;

3. You are endorsing the leading candidate by default, as not voting is a tacit vote for whoever is in the lead, usually Labour or Tory.

In evaluating the results of the recent elections, independent mayoral candidate Jonathan said, "there really is no such thing as not voting. If you don't vote you are by default voting for the winning candidate and in this case that means facilitating [the tyranny they will implement]".

Given that voting is anonymous and doesn't bear any information that could identify you (any ballot papers that contain this information are disqualified and not counted), you are not contracting with the government by voting, nor are you consenting to anything. Whether you vote for a candidate or spoil your paper with a message, you are simply ensuring that your beliefs are communicated accurately, and that you are not voting by default for the establishment candidate.

We may not like it - and I certainly don't, I semi-regularly wish I was Amish - but the fact is, we're not off-grid pioneers entirely detached from the global system: we are here and we are in this system. We have bank accounts, cars, mortgages; we use shops and the internet: while we can make moves to be as autonomous and self-sufficient as is reasonably possible, we are, ultimately, dependent on the system in order to survive, and we can't realistically change that fact. But we can change the system by actively challenging it rather than passively receiving it, and if we don't, then, just as the title says: if we don't play, we'll get played. That's the choice.

So, come elections, if there's no-one you want to vote for, you can still get actively involved in one of two ways: either by spoiling your paper with a message, or by ensuring there definitely is someone you want to vote for, by standing as a candidate yourself.

At the council level, this is very straightforward (and free) - more details here. Admittedly, it's a little more complex at the higher levels (MP, mayor), but not prohibitively so, as Jonathan Tilt has recently demonstrated.

Jonathan got over 46,000 votes with a turnout of just 32% (even lower than the turnout for the council elections).

If everyone on our side resident in West Yorkshire had come out and voted for him, he would have won.

(Estimate based on roughly 10-15% of people being awake and West Yorkshire having a population of 2.325 million people.)

The establishment candidate, Tracey Brabin (another actor…) won for no other reason than their side overwhelmingly votes, and ours overwhelmingly doesn't. It's as simple as that, and that's just how they want it.

If our side stood candidates and voted in every election we're eligible to participate in, we'd win most of them, and the face of the country would change completely. Voting and standing may not be "it", the answer and the meaning to it all, but these tools are definitely significant and we urgently need to reconsider how we, as the anti-establishment minority, responds to the electoral process because, to repeat:

The majority believed Covid was a real deadly threat: they were wrong.

The majority believed the Covid vaccine was safe and effective: they were wrong.

The majority also doesn't vote.

Please ask yourself: are you really "stickin' it to the man" and being a subversive anti-establishment rebel by not voting and repeating the same tired old soundbites about it? ("It's all rigged anyway..." etc etc).

Or are you actually playing right into their hands, not only by allowing establishment candidates to get in again and again, but by keeping voter turnout so low, thereby giving the establishment the justification it needs to scrap democracy entirely and replace it with explicit authoritarian tyranny. "Voters have made it clear they're not interested in democracy, so from now on, we'll just tell everyone what to do."

Plenty of countries don't have democratic governments and these are not places anyone reading this would like to live (e.g., Afghanistan, Myanmar, North Korea). The more voter turnouts plummet at elections, the more we are risking a dramatic and ultra-repressive regression, giving the ruling classes ammunition to scrap our current system and replace it with something much worse - ultimately leading to a fully authoritarian One World Government over which we have no influence or control.

So, I'm going to keep saying it because it's such a central and revealing point: the large majority of people don't vote (the vast, overwhelming majority in poorer areas).

The quote "if voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it" has been attributed to Mark Twain. But please bear in mind, Twain also said, "whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect"...

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