The sinister surrogate power of the screen

A few days ago, I was struck with the strange, strong, and thoroughly insatiable urge to watch old '90s clips of (long-running Australian soap opera) Neighbours on YouTube.

Like most people who were school-aged in the 1990s, I loved Neighbours - and one of the biggest attractions of negotiating a day off school was getting to watch it twice: not just at the normal time of 5:30pm, but also, thrillingly, at 1:30pm, before everyone else.

However, I abruptly fell out with television, particularly soap operas, around the year 2000. I have a few hypotheses as to why this was, which I won't digress off into now, but suffice to say, it was an essential step to my later conversion to all things conspiratorial, since, as we all know, the most consummate conspiracists don't watch television.

Not coincidentally, my falling out with television also coincided with my burgeoning suspicions of pharmaceuticals, and I was the only person in my sixth-form not to get the meningitis vaccine, when the college told us "we had to have it to get into university" (a barefaced lie, although the university I later attended did try - and epically failed - to kick me out for not being vaccinated enough).

Anyway: I said I wouldn't digress and I did (but any excuse to slam toxic eugenic bioweapons, eh?). Back to Neighbours....

I don't know why I recently felt a sudden compulsion to watch it, but when I did, a rather extraordinary - and deeply unnerving - thing happened.

Obviously, I instantly recognised the big-name, long-running characters, like Jim Robinson, Harold Bishop, and Bouncer the Dog, but I was stunned to find that, as the clips went on, and the faces of much more minor and shorter-lived characters came on screen, names instantly lit up in my brain.

"Mark."

"Rick."

"Hannah."

I couldn't have told you much more about these characters, their backstories or family histories, but their faces and character names were instantly recognisable thirty years later. I didn't need to think. Their names just flashed into my brain the instant I saw their faces.

And to be clear: I don't mean the names of the actors playing these characters, about which I wouldn't have a clue, but the names of the fictional creations.

Now, compare this to a recent photo I was sent of a family gathering. The family in question was my own, the extended members of which I don't see much, as they live hundreds of miles away, but they congregated at an aunt's house recently, and various aunts, uncles, partners, and children were present.

I had to ask my mother to identify various people in the photograph, because I didn't recognise all of them. Not just people's new partners, who I may not have met before, but some of my own cousins.

Yes, children change and grow and sometimes it's difficult to recognise someone you haven't seen for a few years, but I was startled by this stunning anomaly and deeply revealing indictment:

I recognise fictional characters on screen thirty years later.

I don't recognise some of my own family now.

And, needless to say, I'll be far from alone in this experience.

If you look up clips of whatever the big show was when you were at school, that everyone rushed home to see, and were all talking about the next day, I'll bet you have the same experience: of being stunned at the level of recall this provokes, and the details that suddenly come flooding back.

Conversely, if you saw a photo of a big family gathering, with all your aunts, uncles, cousins and so on, would you be confident of recognising all of them straightaway?

This rather disturbing phenomenon is a predictable consequence of the fact that, whilst we were growing up - our brains at their most malleable and formative - we saw our favourite characters on-screen daily (sometimes, if we were "lucky", twice a day).

We saw our extended family how often?

Although frequency can of course vary wildly, and is influenced by a lot of factors, for me, and for most of those I knew from middle-class families, you saw your aunts, uncles, and cousins at Christmas, and that was about it.

Of course, the engineered fracturing of the extended family and real-life communities was exactly why the overlords gave us soap operas in the first place. Human beings are hardwired to require close, frequent interaction with about 150 other people, and the requirements for this are particularly intense as we grow up (hence teenage girls talking on the phone for three hours to friends they have just spent all day at school with).

So, as social engineers decimated our real-life communities, and easy access to the relationships we required in the real world, they gave us soap operas instead.

At the most fundamental and primal levels, our brains can't tell the difference between real people standing in front of us, and scripted characters playing parts on screens, so essentially, we feel our social requirements are being met by watching soap operas.

These vehicles are, as the title of this essay suggests, surrogates for what we really require: and, as the title also suggests, deeply sinister.

By separating us from our real-life communities and getting us hooked on soap operas instead, the ruling classes have achieved two key, and especially dangerous, agenda items:

1. Control of the narrative: social engineers can't control what your friends and family say to you in the real world, and how that influences you. They can, of course, entirely control what their scripted creations say on screen.

2. Isolation and disempowerment: if you are getting your social needs met by real people, bonds form which are mutually strengthening and empowering, and can help protect in a crisis. If, conversely, your social energies are taken up by watching soaps, then obviously there is a complete dearth of real bonds and protections there when it matters.

On the subject of 1), it is a fact of human psychology that we humans, as intensely social creatures, take our cues on how to behave and what to believe from people around us. Whatever humans - especially in their younger and most formative years - see trusted faces saying and doing, they internalise as true and copy. That's why, if the cool kid at school wears a certain pair of trainers, every kid wants them. Even if they realistically look ridiculous. That's the power of suggestion - of monkey see, monkey do - from trusted and familiar faces.

So, the social engineers masterfully hijacked this phenomenon with soap operas.

Every time the ruling classes want to introduce, normalise, or exacerbate a certain belief or behaviour in society, they simply introduce it through a soap opera, knowing how the audience will respond. Changing family formations, non-traditional relationships, immigration, and vaccinations have all been effectively publicised to the populace via soap operas.

Which leads us on to 2). If your friend in the real world recommends - for example - that you receive a vaccination, and you take their advice and have a terrible reaction to it, you can confront your friend, explain your reaction, and ask for some accountability.

Obviously, however, there is no such follow-up with fictional characters on screens when they push vaccinations, as fictional characters on screens often do.

Now, none of the above may appear like particularly profound revelations - I think everybody reading this would agree that televisions and soap operas are bad - but I've realised there's another aspect to this that we have to be equally cautious about:

It's the universal ability of flickering screens to hoodwink - to literally hypnotise - even when the people performing on them are ostensibly "on our side".

I've written a lot about "controlled opposition", and the general trajectory of my experience in doing so is this: when I first identify a certain character as a misleading pied piper, I get a lot of angry opposition from that person's fans. I remember when I first called out Andrew Tate: the Facebook fulminations that resulted were really quite phenomenal...

Yet now, nobody takes that guy remotely seriously, and it's beyond obvious that he's simply some sort of parody comedic character.

I have had the same experience with quite a lot of other world stage characters, including, most recently, Trump and RFK Jr., who I've said for years (since 2016 in Trump's case) are obviously frauds. Now that RFK is both endorsing the MMR and openly pushing a new mRNA vaccine, most people would tend to agree.

Of course, I haven't got a crystal ball, and a lot of other people have correctly called out these charlatans as well, but what I'm interested in is, why do I seem to find it relatively easy to see through these people, and others find it harder?

I submit this hypothesis for your consideration:

Because I don't watch them on screens.

I really hate watching videos, and inwardly groan every time anyone sends me one which is any longer than about 15 minutes (sorry folks, I know you mean well). I always ask whether there's a written version available instead.

(That's why pretty much literally the only video you will ever see me link in my articles, is Naomi Wolf's concise explanation of hoaxed "terror attacks", which is an eminently digestible 9 minutes long.)

I don't know why, but I simply don't like absorbing information by watching. I infinitely prefer to read (or, if it's a podcast, listen - or read the transcript). And, while I can happily read for hours on end with no lapse in concentration, I find concentrating on videos much harder, and my mind tends to wander.

Conversely, most people I come across who get really passionately involved with whatever big name, media-publicised hero is being pushed to "save us" currently, watch them a lot on video.

This really matters because - and as I demonstrated with my opening anecdote about Neighbours - the power of the screen really is phenomenal and unparalleled, reaching deeply into the most primal areas of our brains... and still lingering there thirty years later.

As such, the screen as a manipulative medium far eclipses anything the written or spoken word can do. That's why the "big names" in "the resistance" all do lots of video - Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, et al.

In short, the biggest names aren't primarily writers or audio podcasters: they're on-screen performers, and that's for a reason.

That's how you most powerfully manipulate people.

Human beings respond so strongly to images of the human face, and create such intense attachments to it, that ultimately, it bypasses our reason and allows "trusted faces" on hypnotic screens to feed things persuasively into our minds that we would never otherwise accept.

So, I think one of the best methods of protection we can employ where it comes to remaining discerning, and being able to optimally identify when we are being lied to, is to be very careful indeed about what and who we are prepared watch on-screen.

We would agree with that in an instant where it comes to mainstream screen content - television, the news, Netflix, Amazon, etc. We know immediately that this is simply regime propaganda there to manipulate us, and so we should largely avoid it, whilst being very sceptical and discerning when we do view it.

Yet somehow, we believe the same weapons aren't being deployed by those attempting to manipulate "our side".

They are.

And you're much better able to identify weaponised content - to identify deceptive people - if you haven't formed at attachment to them by spending a lot of time looking at their faces on a flickering, hypnotic screen.

I do not watch videos - other than the occasional brief clip - of Trump, RFK, Andrew Tate, or whoever. Rather, I read. I read their own words on social media and their websites; I read transcripts of their speeches; I read how the press is framing them and how much attention it is drawing to them.

For podcasts, if it's a video, I watch the first few minutes, but then I revert to listening - which I believe is what a lot of people do, so they can do other things whilst listening.

It's wise to do this, because we get attached to people we see on screens a lot, even if we have never, and will never, meet them. We simply cannot help this fact.

But we can be aware of it, and, therefore, take precautions to stop it being used against us.

Of course, we can still be manipulated by audio and written content too, but not to anything like the same degree. That is why television, and flickering screens generally, are so much more popular than radio or books as an entertainment medium - they're so much more immersive and addictive, and, therefore, far more dangerous.

Or to put it another way: if the overlords could sufficiently propagandise us with books and radio, they never would have bothered inventing the screen. Screens are, in effect, to books and radio, what methamphetamine is to coffee.

Can you get addicted to coffee and can it have bad effects? Absolutely. But nevertheless, the chasm between coffee and meth, is really quite substantial (not a sentence I ever imagined I'd end up seriously writing in my life, but the rabbit hole takes you to some strange places).

We must remember what the late Rik Mayall said on the set of his chillingly prophetic "conspiracy" film, One by One.

"Destroy your television sets, now. You must listen to no orders. That's all I can tell you from this point in humanity."

Mayall said this in 2013, but had he said it today, I don't think he would just be warning about conventional "television" - which is fast falling out of favour - but all popular visual screen-based content. Netflix. Amazon. Joe Rogan. Tucker Carlson.

All of these mediums have the same unparalleled power to hoodwink and mislead.

Interestingly, Richard D. Hall - who I have also attracted a lot of boos and hisses for criticising - says something similar. Hall's slogan, for which he has become known, instructs us to believe only "half of what we see".

This acknowledges that visual mediums have a unique ability to manipulate, and therefore, to control. I'm not suggesting we should never watch any videos at all, or that everyone who produces them is "suspicious" (a lot of people prefer speaking to writing, and watching to reading, so I quite understand why many legitimate people do videos instead of essays - I do a few myself). Merely that we must be extremely discerning about what - and who - we choose to look at for prolonged periods on screens, knowing the inevitable power we are giving to them if we do.

Particularly if someone is getting significant attention in the mainstream media (regardless of whether the attention is good or bad). That means the media wants you to look at them, so you should be especially cautious of viewing their performance through a screen.

In closing, I never expected my nostalgic forays into '90s soap clips to quite spark such a treatise. But as I said, the flickering screen does funny things to our brains...

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