Smears, scandals, and splitters

Before commencing the main body of this article, I’d first like to defer to those virtuoso past masters of psychological insight and political analysis... Monty Python.

Behold the moment in the legendary Life of Brian when our eponymous hero tries to join “the resistance“.

BRIAN: Are you the Judean People’s Front?

REG: Fuck off!

BRIAN: What?

REG: Judean People’s Front. We’re the People’s Front of Judea! Judean People’s Front. Cawk.

FRANCIS: Wankers.

BRIAN: Can I... join your group?

REG: No. Piss off.

BRIAN: I didn’t want to sell this stuff. It’s only a job. I hate the Romans as much as anybody.

PEOPLE’S FRONT OF JUDEA: Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhh. Shh. Shhhh.

REG: Stumm.

JUDITH: Are you sure?

BRIAN: Oh, dead sure. I hate the Romans already.

REG: Listen. If you wanted to join the P.F.J., you’d have to really hate the Romans.

BRIAN: I do!

REG: Oh, yeah? How much?

BRIAN: A lot!

REG: Right. You’re in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People’s Front.

P.F.J.: Yeah...

JUDITH: Splitters.

P.F.J.: Splitters...

FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People’s Front.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...

STAN/LORETTA: And the People’s Front of Judea.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...

REG: What?

STAN/LORETTA: The People’s Front of Judea. Splitters.

REG: We’re the People’s Front of Judea!

STAN/LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.

REG: People’s Front! C-huh.

FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?

REG: He’s over there.

P.F.J.: Splitter!

---

Monty Python made this sketch to satirise the fact that “resistance” movements always end up scattered and divided, and that, ultimately, many “resistance” sub-groups end up hating other “resistance” sub-groups more than the actual enemy.

This isn’t new. It isn’t unusual. It’s what always happens to “good cause” movements, and anybody who’s ever been involved in one - whether it’s ‘the truth movement’, political activism, charity work, or whatever - will confirm it.

I illustrate it now because there’s a tedious trend of relatively new “conspiracy theorists” to constantly bemoan the fact that “the movement is divided” and hark back to halcyon days when we were all blissfully united and everybody loved each other and sang hymns and baked (gluten-free) bread - and nobody ever fell out.

Needless to say, this never happened. This was never true of “the truth movement”, just as it’s never been true for any large group of people. There is always bickering, in-fighting, back-stabbing, personality clashes, and “splitting” as described above whenever you assemble a large group of humans and try to get them to work together. So, what tends to happen - as the Monty Python sketch shows - is people naturally organise themselves into smaller, more closely connected “splitter” groups with those with whom they are most closely aligned.

That’s just how humans are.

(And that’s before we even factor in the massive degree of infiltration that always occurs into any resistance movement, from actual state assets who are sent to provoke said bickering, back-stabbing, and in-fighting.)

So the point I want to raise is that, whenever someone in this large, very loosely defined, and often completely incoherent “movement”, critiques someone else in it, to malign that person as “dividing the movement” is a non sequitur. The so-called movement has always been divided, always will be. People in large groups will never always all get on, agree on everything, or like each other, as that is simply not human nature.

However, what we can justifiably hold people to account for when they critique others is - not “dividing the movement” - but the way in which they do it. Or, indeed, don’t.

For a movement that variously refers to itself as ‘the truth movement’ and ‘the freedom movement’, anyone claiming to be in it must, obviously, be deeply committed to the principles of both freedom and truth. That means fearlessly investigating the evidence, without fear or favour, and going wherever it takes you, no matter how jarring or uncomfortable the destination. It also means studying other people - especially those in any kind of ‘leadership’ or otherwise prominent position - and coming to your own conclusions about whether they can be trusted.

If you come to the conclusion that they cannot, you may decide, quite reasonably, that you have a moral responsibility to share this information with others also in pursuit of the truth.

I have come to this conclusion several times myself, and have written a variety of exposés on such contentious characters as Andrew Bridgen, Laurence Fox, and Russell Brand. Most people would now agree with me that these individuals are “controlled opposition”, but I can assure you that this was not the uniform view at the time I wrote the pieces, and I took a lot of flak for them, including all the usual accusations: you’re dividing the movement / you’re just jealous / why are you focusing on them instead of the real enemy, etc.

None of these rebuttals are fair critiques of what I wrote. I am not motivated by jealousy or a specific desire to cause gratuitous “division”, nor to detract from “the real enemy”, because, if these people are, as I very much believe they are, controlled opposition, then they are the real enemy. That’s the point. They’re the enemy cosplaying as the good guys. Classic wolf in sheep’s clothing stuff, which makes them a good deal more dangerous than wolves in wolf’s clothing, as you can see what they are from the start.

I could write lots of long essays exposing Bill Gates, Matt Hancock, and all the people above them, and I have - but there comes a point where only doing that is simply not enough, because we already know they’re our enemy. We know who they are and what they want and that, to a large degree, immunises us (to coin a phrase) from their influence. We are not as highly at risk of being malignly influenced or led astray by overt enemy forces like them because we recognise them as such: it’s the covert, tacit, infiltrators that are far more dangerous, which is why it’s important to expose them.

But it certainly matters very much how we expose them.

Imagine there is some high-profile influencer I am suspicious about, and I present my findings like this:

“Influencer X is an obvious fookin’ plant, piece of absolute scum. Look who he’s connected to, the disgusting twat. And where he’s worked, the evil piece of shit. He’s a fat f*cker too.”

Would you find that a reasonable, persuasive critique of someone? Would you believe it plausible I was genuinely just motivated by a desire to get to the truth if I wrote about someone like that?

Contrast it to a critique written more like this:

“Influencer X is a high-profile contributor to the truth movement, who has a number of questionable connections, including his period working for [dubious company] and operating business ventures with [dubious individuals]. Here we will further delve into his connections and contributions, and explore the possibility that he has undisclosed motives for his involvement with this movement”.

The latter is a reasonable exploration of someone - a genuine investigation, which is obviously a very important facet of journalism, especially alternative journalism.

The former is just a gutter hit job: a smear piece not motivated by moral imperative or regard for the truth, but simply by malice and spite - and, not infrequently, envy. “You’re just jealous” is very likely to be true of people who descend into invective and personal abuse when they critique others - i.e., they’re jealous that the person they are targeting has something they themselves want (influence, significance, talent) and, therefore, they want to take it away from them. That’s how malignant narcissists (who tend to infest “good cause” movements) operate. Others who are more successful than they are provoke within them a toxic and corrosive envy so intense, they can only deal with it by trying to destroy the person who has induced these feelings.

Conversely, people who write reasoned and measured critiques of others are not acting out of these kind of disordered motivations. They are not trying to “destroy” the person they’re investigating nor intentionally trying to cause them harm or distress. They genuinely are trying to get to the truth - and yes, sometimes that process is painful for all involved, but an active desire to produce pain is not the goal. When the personal abuse starts, you can tell it is.

Let me give you an example: I am, somewhat notoriously, a significant critic of Lucy Connolly, the woman supposedly sent to prison for a Tweet, who I believe to be a state asset and actress, involved in a major ongoing psyop.

While I have been extremely critical of Connolly in a variety of ways, I have never joined in the pile-ons abusing her for her weight.

Why have I not done this? Is it because I care about Lucy’s feelings?

No, it is not. I do not care about her feelings. I think she’s a predatory deceiver, involved in unconscionable activity, so of course I don’t care about her feelings.

Rather, the reason I do not insult her weight is because it’s totally irrelevant to her role, and by invoking her weight, I would immediately dilute the strength and significance of the very real and important criticisms to be made of her - given that, as soon as you start getting personal about someone like that, it is so easy to dismiss you as a nasty, bitter individual, motivated either by spite or envy or both.

So why do people do this, when it makes them much easier to dismiss?

It’s because there is a big difference in the reasons a person might write an investigative analysis of someone they are suspicious of, versus a “hit piece” or smear job. And there is a chasm of difference between true investigative journalism, and spite-driven smears.

As regular readers know, the writer Francis O’Neill recently wrote an investigative piece on the cartoonist Bob Moran.

Francis has since been accused of doing a “hit piece” on Bob, but that is not what he has done. There is no personal abuse of Bob. No gratuitous insults. No mocking him or making outlandish or cruel accusations. Francis has simply assembled a number of facts in a reasonably impartial way and suggested they paint a certain picture. It is left up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Conversely, in the aftermath of Francis’s piece, there has been a lot of very nasty abuse of him, including his being labelled jealous, mad, paranoid, mental, and even “autistic”. He has been ridiculed by people as high-up and well-connected as John Mappin. For someone like Mr Mappin (elite hotelier and friend to the stars) to target Francis (an internet blogger with around 5,000 followers) is, to put it mildly, punching down.

It is, therefore, very easy for any impartial observer to assess the enormity of difference between the way Francis wrote about Bob, and the way he is being written about in return.

The insults and personal abuse of Francis represent a type of demoralisation strategy well-known to be employed by the military in subversive propaganda-based operations. It’s called “non-lethal psychological warfare“.

What that basically means is attacking, insulting, and undermining someone so much that eventually they “crack”, and think, this is too awful, it’s too much, I’d better stop what I’m doing and retreat.

We saw a lot of that over the Lucy Connolly episode, where I, Francis, and others who questioned her were ruthlessly abused by a coordinated team of attack dogs over many months. These state assets are trained to use the most crude and degrading language possible, frequently invoking pornographic and scatological language, because it is known most humans have an in-built “disgust” response, and hence find that kind of language particularly repellent, demoralising, and off-putting.

Normal people can’t tolerate even reading very much of that kind of thing, so people who spend many months and years writing it are, by definition, not normal, not psychologically sound, and, very often, in service to some kind of nefarious entity.

The purpose of these kind of attacks is not primarily to “expose” the target to a wider audience - although that can certainly be a partial motivation, as a sort of humiliation thing - as much as it is to simply stop the target doing what they are doing, because it is threatening to the larger entity these attack dogs work for.

One of these accounts assigned to harass me has literally stated “don’t forget that if she doesn’t stop what she’s doing, we know where she lives”, so they are not always that subtle about what they do and why.

Another of them, in response to Francis’ latest article, wished death upon his children.

But they’re totally just freedom fighters after the truth, just like he is, yeah?

No. By their fruits you shall know them, and so - whether you agree with Francis’ article or not - it’s indisputably a genuine attempt at investigation and truth-seeking, and was not written with any other motivation: certainly it was not written intending to cause pain or distress (although the truth inevitably can sometimes do this).

The article has been criticised for not containing “evidence” by which people mean incontrovertible, indisputable evidence, such as the copy of an employment contract or some such. However, this is a total misnomer: the article does contain “evidence”. It’s what would be termed in court ‘circumstantial’ evidence. Not the absolute gold standard of proof, but nevertheless, valid, important, and admissible. People can get convicted on circumstantial evidence alone (not, I hasten to add, that Francis’s article is accusing anyone of any crime). And you can also be falsely convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence - absolutely - and we must always keep that in mind, and refrain from pitchfork wielding “witch-hunting”.

But the point is: Francis has provided evidence. What readers make of it is up to them.

Conversely, people who respond to Francis by defaulting to personal abuse (paranoid, mad, jealous, mental, autistic - and worse) clearly reveal themselves as having a very different motivation to simply seeking the truth.

Indeed, to paraphrase the ever-insightful Monty Python:

“They’re not the messiahs, they’re very naughty boys.”

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