After much prevarication, in February the former Charity Commission supremo William Shawcross’s highly critical review of the government’s useless Prevent anti-terror strategy was finally released, unsurprisingly concluding that politically correct Prevent staff had applied a “double standard” towards perceived Islamist and Far-Right terrorist threats. Established in 2006 and now costing £49m per year, Prevent has apparently preferred to neglect Islamists in favour of the far easier target of conservative-minded individuals who, argued Shawcross, held views “well below the threshold of even non-violent extremism.”
Advised by alleged ‘anti-fascist’ groups whose definition of ‘fascist’ appeared to be ‘anyone who doesn’t think exactly like we do,’ Prevent drifted down the road of defining the majority of the population who voted Brexit, or consider immigration to be too high, as being at danger of becoming the next Unabomber.
Even reading mainstream conservative columnists who write for such popular, mass-market publications as The Times and The Spectator—like Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray—was deemed a likely gateway to racist, Nazi-style white supremacism. Hearing this, Murray himself obtained research undertaken by Prevent’s ‘Research Information and Communications Unit’ (RICU), whose findings proved alarming and amusing in equal measure.
Loose Canon
Most bizarre was the RICU’s list of books, films, and TV shows deemed likely to facilitate radicalisation. Texts of identified concern included Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, together with works by C.S. Lewis and Adam Smith—that is to say, anything which might provide a sound intellectual underpinning for such ‘extremist’ creeds as Christianity, free markets, or a suspicion of revolutionary totalitarianism and overly-large and powerful central government.
Other classic authors like Shakespeare, Tennyson, Conrad, Chesterton, Tolkien, Chaucer, Kipling, and Milton were considered “key texts” for “white nationalists/supremacists.” Sir Kenneth Clark’s feted 1960s BBC TV documentary series “Civilization” was also named and shamed. Merely believing there is such a thing as Western Civilization apparently constitutes white supremacy, according to the RICU. As Murray also noted, the fact that George Orwell’s 1984 was another book slated for necessary disposal down the Prevent Memory-Hole proved satire was finally dead.
Comically, the early evening Michael Portillo TV travelogue series Great British Railway Journeys, previously thought safe family viewing, should really have been titled Shameful British Railway Journeys instead, to better reflect the official tenor of our times. The inclusion of classic British war-films like The Bridge On the River Kwai, The Dam Busters, and The Great Escape on their blacklist suggests Prevent both fears the rise of right-wing militarism across the nation, and possesses zero knowledge of what Britain was actually fighting during World War II.
The most revealing television programmes smeared were the BBC comedies Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, and 1990s drama serial House of Cards. What could Prevent’s possible problem have been with Francis Urquhart, Sir Humphrey Appleby, and sweary Malcolm Tucker (no relation)? Presumably it’s because all three shows present a cynical (or realistic) view of government in which elected representatives are effortlessly given the run-around by shadowy and corrupt cabals of unelected civil servants, spin-doctors, and quangocrats.
In other words, viewers of what were previously thought to be classic TV shows from a bygone era (when the BBC still deigned to produce such things) were somehow being groomed to become conspiracy theorists: disillusioned right-wingers believing real-life Sir Humphries had conspired behind closed doors in Whitehall or at Davos to thwart a true Brexit occurring was a consequence of such suspicious seeds being planted in their heads by politically extremist sit-coms disguised as innocuous entertainment. One day, might such sitcom-primed viewers begin planting bombs? If Prevent staff really did believe such an absurd narrative, you have to ask: who were the real deluded conspiracy theorists here?
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
February saw the release of polling by the political website UnHerd, which sought the general UK public’s response to the statement “The world is controlled by a secretive elite.” Some 38% of respondents agreed, 33% disagreed and 30% were unsure.
Interestingly, the top ten locations which provided the highest percentage of agreement were all safe Labour seats in poor, ethnically diverse, inner-city areas, whereas all but one of the top ten locations which returned the highest percentage of disagreement were all safe Conservative seats in leafy, majority-white, affluent areas. As UnHerd perceived, in these latter seats, “the elites likely seem less distant and more on your side.” Largely unaffected by the deleterious effects of mass crime and mass immigration, prosperous voters in such conspiracy-sceptical seats saw no need to believe in any Secret Rulers of the World trying to destroy their way of life or thwart their electorally expressed will.
Yet, according to Prevent’s apparent view of matters, it is evil, white conservative-types who are most likely to fall down the conspiracy theory rabbit-hole and become terrorists. Well, not according to UnHerd’s data. The single most reliable predictor of whether you believe shadowy Sir Humphreys, Shylocks, or Davos Men rule the world is whether or not you are white: 56% of minorities agreed, compared to 36% of whites, the most conspiratorial-minded being Asians (re: Muslims) at 55%, and black people at 53%.
So, if adherence to conspiracy theories really is a key indicator of a likely descent into terrorism, presumably the key demographic targeted for Prevent-related monitoring will be Muslims, won’t it? No, because, as the Shawcross Report clearly demonstrated, Prevent was run along biased left-leaning politicised lines, not rational ones.
Schools for Scandal
In September 2022, revelations emerged from Nick Timothy, former chief of staff to ex-PM Theresa May, about training for school staff who were being told to monitor pupils for signs of extremism. Alerted by a friend who worked in education, Timothy found that certain freelance training-providers holding Prevent-related ‘spot a terrorist’ sessions for school governors were using a viral online graphic named The Conspiracy Chart to determine which viral conspiracy theories were harmless for students to hold, and which were going to immediately make them begin sourcing Semtex.
Predictably, the chart demonstrated the usual blind bias which identifies reputed Far-Right causes as the greatest terror-threats to the UK. Annoyed by this, Timothy tweeted that “2/3 of jailed terrorists and 9 in 10 on MI5 watchlists are Islamists. The Shawcross Report can’t come quickly enough.” Timothy was correct. Figures from 2020-2021 demonstrate that, during this period, 310 schoolchildren were referred to Prevent because of supposed Far-Right sympathies or links, compared with only 157 deemed susceptible to Islamist rhetoric.
Such data is used by left-wingers to ‘prove’ that right-wingers are more of a terror-threat than Islamists—even though they aren’t. But what actually constitutes being ‘Far-Right’ here? Is it expressing a desire to persecute Jews? Or simply a child saying “I watched The Great Escape last night”? Or someone expressing an admiration for the “Once more unto the breach” scene in Henry V? Or chuckling along to an episode of Yes, Minister?
When these figures were released, one Prevent co-ordinator for Leicestershire, Sean Arbuthnot, complained that Far-Right groups were leafleting households in the area with leaflets “purporting that white people are going to be a minority in Britain” some day, which he clearly considered a conspiracy theory. Perhaps the leaflets were indeed unpleasant, but the idea that, on current demographic trends, white British people in certain parts of Leicestershire really will one day be rendered a minority in their own ancestral homeland is a simple statistical fact, not a tinfoil-hat fantasy. Recent census data demonstrate how Leicester itself is now Britain’s first white-minority city, so this has already happened.
This idea is not a conspiracy, therefore. It is just a simple numerical fact—but not to those ideologically blinkered souls at Prevent. Not only do the genuinely unaccountable activists of Prevent determine what can be deemed extremism (i.e. not Islamism, if you can possibly avoid it), they also apparently possess the power to define what is and is not a conspiracy theory.
Studies have consistently shown that Muslims in the UK are more likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories, particularly anti-Semitic ones: one Policy Exchange poll in 2016 found 31% of Muslims thought the U.S. Government was responsible for 9/11, whilst 7% blamed the Jews, and only 4% acknowledged al-Qaeda’s minor role in these events. These results were described as “slightly alarming.” By comparison, 71% of the wider British public blamed al-Qaeda, 10% the U.S. Deep State, and only 1% chose to maliciously blood-libel the Jews.
Regardless, the Prevent training tool (which the Home Office said was not officially authorised by them, and is simply used by unnamed freelance training providers) criticised by Nick Timothy, named The Conspiracy Chart, makes no obvious mention of Islamist conspiracy theories being ones to watch out for. This, despite the lies identified as the most dangerous for pupils being dubbed collectively “THE ANTISEMITIC POINT OF NO RETURN.” Instead, the worst threats to the nation’s safety were apparently fringe extreme right-wing fantasies about Nazis living on the moon, or the alleged existence of “Jewish space lasers.”
A more surprising flaw, however, concerns The Conspiracy Chart’s original creator, who could easily be described as a conspiracy theorist herself …
Crazy Golf
Abbie Richards is a millennial U.S.-born TikTok influencer, feminist, stand-up comedian, science communicator, environmental doom-monger, and aspiring “disinformation researcher”—i.e. an idiot. Rather than radical Islam, Richards has identified a far worse threat to humanity: golf.
According to her website, Abbie is “currently pursuing her MSc, where she studies the intersection of climate change and disinformation,” as demonstrated by her inane whining about harmless ball-games temporarily going viral on TikTok back in 2020.
Explaining the origins of her doctrine of “golf hatred,” Richards tells how, in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, she was jogging past her local course when she realised it was closed to the general public, triggering a sudden outburst of rage that “the rich” were “able to privatise their green spaces” to keep people like her out. Making a joke video for TikTok, she proposed running for President on the single-issue platform “to make golf illegal.” But then the video went viral, she entered the rabbit-hole, and her joke became serious.
Donald Trump spent a lot of time putting during his time in power and famously owns several courses. To Abbie, footage of The Donald teeing off whilst people died from COVID and our planet burned from climate change—to which golf courses suddenly became a major contributor, particularly Trump’s favourite one at Mar-a-Lago—became “like a visual representation of our leaders not only failing to combat a grave issue facing our generation but then playing a game on top of their destruction” of humanity. Thus, Intersectional Abbie launched her new #cancelgolf movement on TikTok, campaigning partly via the medium of dance.
“Society has evolved past the need for golf,” Richards announced, with the fertilisers used to maintain their greens causing polluting algal blooms. Golf has been the sole preserve of rich white male elites, as exemplified by Tiger Woods, and as such it was now time that “we, as a society, admit that golf was a bad idea and move on.” Solar-power stations, community farms, and affordable housing should be built on all golf course land instead.
Awkwardly for her conspiratorial thesis, however, whilst the laws of the game we know today were codified in wicked white Scotland, there were far older versions of a similar sport invented independently worldwide, in nations like China. Thankfully, Richards’ scientific background allowed her to discern that, via the Darwinian laws of convergent evolution, “given enough time, every society will invent golf.”
Yet only the U.S. had been sick-brained enough to combine golf with capitalism, thus ensuring its “transition from sport to ecological villain.” Having revealed this insight in an essay on euronews.com, Richards issued a classically woke mea culpa: “Now is when I should disclose I am an American. And I’m sorry about that, deeply, deeply sorry.”
After their initial flurry of fame, people stopped watching Abbie’s vids, perhaps because they were incredibly stupid. But Richards could not accept this fact, accusing the evil capitalists of TikTok (whose ultimate master is the Chinese Communist Party …) of ‘shadowbanning’ her, that is, secretly manipulating their algorithms to ensure she got fewer views. In other words, she began posing as the victim of a conspiracy.
Bunker Mentality
Richards was awakened to the dangers of online conspiracy nuts due to her own father arguing that COVID-19 had been made in a bio-lab by the Chinese Communist Party. This made her “furious” as “the molecular structure” of the disease allegedly proved this “rejection of scientific consensus” impossible—even though this is not so and the Chinese lab-origin theory is now widely considered plausible. Initial mainstream Western scientific and media resistance to this idea appeared motivated largely by political considerations (i.e., Donald Trump had been one of the first to suggest it, and he could never be allowed to be right about anything).
Abbie now felt compelled to prevent others from making the same ‘mistakes’ her father had made, hence the launch of her Conspiracy Chart which went big online. An inverted triangle, in its various iterations it features a list of conspiracy theories known to be true at the bottom, a series of potentially half-true but relatively harmless or comical ones (such as dinosaurs never having existed, King Charles III being a vampire, or Stevie Wonder not really being blind) in the middle, culminating in the most dangerous and untrue ones at the top. Sadly, the assessment of what was credible or insane, harmful or benign, lay entirely at the discretion of Ms Richards—just like with Prevent.
Hence, certain wholly plausible ideas, like the notion that indigenous Europeans may in the long-term end up demographically outnumbered in Europe, are dishonestly rated as less truthful than truly crazy claims like Denver International Airport concealing tunnels full of aliens and having runways shaped like swastikas. And you can’t help but notice all the most dangerous-ranked conspiracies are those most often believed by certain hard-line ‘deplorable’ Trump voters and Republicans: QAnon, PizzaGate, and so forth. If you believe that the world is ruled by “SUPREME SHADOW ELITES,” the chart says you must “GET HELP.” Unless these same shadow elites happen to be white male golfers, that is.
Richards wants to indicate to web-users the importance of getting info from reliable sources. Hence, you can click on each conspiracy listed, and it will take you to one such reliable source—including The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a U.S. campaigning organisation which promotes itself as combatting hate-groups, but whose critics say specialises in disingenuously smearing conservative and Christian groups as extremists, with sometimes violent results: the same kind of ‘anti-fascist’ group who helped advise Prevent in the UK, then.
The basic technique here is to conflate legitimate public concerns with parasitic racist conspiracy theories, which a minority of deluded adherents erect atop of them in order to tar everyone who shares such worries with the same ga-ga brush. Click on the entry for ‘Cultural Marxism’—a synonym for the sort of ultra-leftist wokery the work of Abbie Richards herself proves really does exist—and you will find an SPLC essay arguing it is all a racist exaggeration based on the fact that some of the intellectual originators of the Cultural Marxism movement were Jewish, and therefore all people who complain about it must automatically be paranoid, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazis.
And, now, this biased tool of left-liberal prejudice is being used to help train British school governors (and thus presumably teachers) to identify which of their pupils must be hauled in and questioned by the Prevent thought-police. That’s precisely the kind of disturbing experience that will make alienated young people feel even more resentful of mainstream society and help push them into the hands of more genuine extremists. Well done, Abbie!
Or, then again, am I the one who’s being paranoid? After all, I’ve read quite a lot of Shakespeare and seen every episode of Yes, Minister …
When Prevent Is Worse Than the Cure
After much prevarication, in February the former Charity Commission supremo William Shawcross’s highly critical review of the government’s useless Prevent anti-terror strategy was finally released, unsurprisingly concluding that politically correct Prevent staff had applied a “double standard” towards perceived Islamist and Far-Right terrorist threats. Established in 2006 and now costing £49m per year, Prevent has apparently preferred to neglect Islamists in favour of the far easier target of conservative-minded individuals who, argued Shawcross, held views “well below the threshold of even non-violent extremism.”
Advised by alleged ‘anti-fascist’ groups whose definition of ‘fascist’ appeared to be ‘anyone who doesn’t think exactly like we do,’ Prevent drifted down the road of defining the majority of the population who voted Brexit, or consider immigration to be too high, as being at danger of becoming the next Unabomber.
Even reading mainstream conservative columnists who write for such popular, mass-market publications as The Times and The Spectator—like Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray—was deemed a likely gateway to racist, Nazi-style white supremacism. Hearing this, Murray himself obtained research undertaken by Prevent’s ‘Research Information and Communications Unit’ (RICU), whose findings proved alarming and amusing in equal measure.
Loose Canon
Most bizarre was the RICU’s list of books, films, and TV shows deemed likely to facilitate radicalisation. Texts of identified concern included Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, together with works by C.S. Lewis and Adam Smith—that is to say, anything which might provide a sound intellectual underpinning for such ‘extremist’ creeds as Christianity, free markets, or a suspicion of revolutionary totalitarianism and overly-large and powerful central government.
Other classic authors like Shakespeare, Tennyson, Conrad, Chesterton, Tolkien, Chaucer, Kipling, and Milton were considered “key texts” for “white nationalists/supremacists.” Sir Kenneth Clark’s feted 1960s BBC TV documentary series “Civilization” was also named and shamed. Merely believing there is such a thing as Western Civilization apparently constitutes white supremacy, according to the RICU. As Murray also noted, the fact that George Orwell’s 1984 was another book slated for necessary disposal down the Prevent Memory-Hole proved satire was finally dead.
Comically, the early evening Michael Portillo TV travelogue series Great British Railway Journeys, previously thought safe family viewing, should really have been titled Shameful British Railway Journeys instead, to better reflect the official tenor of our times. The inclusion of classic British war-films like The Bridge On the River Kwai, The Dam Busters, and The Great Escape on their blacklist suggests Prevent both fears the rise of right-wing militarism across the nation, and possesses zero knowledge of what Britain was actually fighting during World War II.
The most revealing television programmes smeared were the BBC comedies Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, and 1990s drama serial House of Cards. What could Prevent’s possible problem have been with Francis Urquhart, Sir Humphrey Appleby, and sweary Malcolm Tucker (no relation)? Presumably it’s because all three shows present a cynical (or realistic) view of government in which elected representatives are effortlessly given the run-around by shadowy and corrupt cabals of unelected civil servants, spin-doctors, and quangocrats.
In other words, viewers of what were previously thought to be classic TV shows from a bygone era (when the BBC still deigned to produce such things) were somehow being groomed to become conspiracy theorists: disillusioned right-wingers believing real-life Sir Humphries had conspired behind closed doors in Whitehall or at Davos to thwart a true Brexit occurring was a consequence of such suspicious seeds being planted in their heads by politically extremist sit-coms disguised as innocuous entertainment. One day, might such sitcom-primed viewers begin planting bombs? If Prevent staff really did believe such an absurd narrative, you have to ask: who were the real deluded conspiracy theorists here?
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
February saw the release of polling by the political website UnHerd, which sought the general UK public’s response to the statement “The world is controlled by a secretive elite.” Some 38% of respondents agreed, 33% disagreed and 30% were unsure.
Interestingly, the top ten locations which provided the highest percentage of agreement were all safe Labour seats in poor, ethnically diverse, inner-city areas, whereas all but one of the top ten locations which returned the highest percentage of disagreement were all safe Conservative seats in leafy, majority-white, affluent areas. As UnHerd perceived, in these latter seats, “the elites likely seem less distant and more on your side.” Largely unaffected by the deleterious effects of mass crime and mass immigration, prosperous voters in such conspiracy-sceptical seats saw no need to believe in any Secret Rulers of the World trying to destroy their way of life or thwart their electorally expressed will.
Yet, according to Prevent’s apparent view of matters, it is evil, white conservative-types who are most likely to fall down the conspiracy theory rabbit-hole and become terrorists. Well, not according to UnHerd’s data. The single most reliable predictor of whether you believe shadowy Sir Humphreys, Shylocks, or Davos Men rule the world is whether or not you are white: 56% of minorities agreed, compared to 36% of whites, the most conspiratorial-minded being Asians (re: Muslims) at 55%, and black people at 53%.
So, if adherence to conspiracy theories really is a key indicator of a likely descent into terrorism, presumably the key demographic targeted for Prevent-related monitoring will be Muslims, won’t it? No, because, as the Shawcross Report clearly demonstrated, Prevent was run along biased left-leaning politicised lines, not rational ones.
Schools for Scandal
In September 2022, revelations emerged from Nick Timothy, former chief of staff to ex-PM Theresa May, about training for school staff who were being told to monitor pupils for signs of extremism. Alerted by a friend who worked in education, Timothy found that certain freelance training-providers holding Prevent-related ‘spot a terrorist’ sessions for school governors were using a viral online graphic named The Conspiracy Chart to determine which viral conspiracy theories were harmless for students to hold, and which were going to immediately make them begin sourcing Semtex.
Predictably, the chart demonstrated the usual blind bias which identifies reputed Far-Right causes as the greatest terror-threats to the UK. Annoyed by this, Timothy tweeted that “2/3 of jailed terrorists and 9 in 10 on MI5 watchlists are Islamists. The Shawcross Report can’t come quickly enough.” Timothy was correct. Figures from 2020-2021 demonstrate that, during this period, 310 schoolchildren were referred to Prevent because of supposed Far-Right sympathies or links, compared with only 157 deemed susceptible to Islamist rhetoric.
Such data is used by left-wingers to ‘prove’ that right-wingers are more of a terror-threat than Islamists—even though they aren’t. But what actually constitutes being ‘Far-Right’ here? Is it expressing a desire to persecute Jews? Or simply a child saying “I watched The Great Escape last night”? Or someone expressing an admiration for the “Once more unto the breach” scene in Henry V? Or chuckling along to an episode of Yes, Minister?
When these figures were released, one Prevent co-ordinator for Leicestershire, Sean Arbuthnot, complained that Far-Right groups were leafleting households in the area with leaflets “purporting that white people are going to be a minority in Britain” some day, which he clearly considered a conspiracy theory. Perhaps the leaflets were indeed unpleasant, but the idea that, on current demographic trends, white British people in certain parts of Leicestershire really will one day be rendered a minority in their own ancestral homeland is a simple statistical fact, not a tinfoil-hat fantasy. Recent census data demonstrate how Leicester itself is now Britain’s first white-minority city, so this has already happened.
This idea is not a conspiracy, therefore. It is just a simple numerical fact—but not to those ideologically blinkered souls at Prevent. Not only do the genuinely unaccountable activists of Prevent determine what can be deemed extremism (i.e. not Islamism, if you can possibly avoid it), they also apparently possess the power to define what is and is not a conspiracy theory.
Studies have consistently shown that Muslims in the UK are more likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories, particularly anti-Semitic ones: one Policy Exchange poll in 2016 found 31% of Muslims thought the U.S. Government was responsible for 9/11, whilst 7% blamed the Jews, and only 4% acknowledged al-Qaeda’s minor role in these events. These results were described as “slightly alarming.” By comparison, 71% of the wider British public blamed al-Qaeda, 10% the U.S. Deep State, and only 1% chose to maliciously blood-libel the Jews.
Regardless, the Prevent training tool (which the Home Office said was not officially authorised by them, and is simply used by unnamed freelance training providers) criticised by Nick Timothy, named The Conspiracy Chart, makes no obvious mention of Islamist conspiracy theories being ones to watch out for. This, despite the lies identified as the most dangerous for pupils being dubbed collectively “THE ANTISEMITIC POINT OF NO RETURN.” Instead, the worst threats to the nation’s safety were apparently fringe extreme right-wing fantasies about Nazis living on the moon, or the alleged existence of “Jewish space lasers.”
A more surprising flaw, however, concerns The Conspiracy Chart’s original creator, who could easily be described as a conspiracy theorist herself …
Crazy Golf
Abbie Richards is a millennial U.S.-born TikTok influencer, feminist, stand-up comedian, science communicator, environmental doom-monger, and aspiring “disinformation researcher”—i.e. an idiot. Rather than radical Islam, Richards has identified a far worse threat to humanity: golf.
According to her website, Abbie is “currently pursuing her MSc, where she studies the intersection of climate change and disinformation,” as demonstrated by her inane whining about harmless ball-games temporarily going viral on TikTok back in 2020.
Explaining the origins of her doctrine of “golf hatred,” Richards tells how, in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, she was jogging past her local course when she realised it was closed to the general public, triggering a sudden outburst of rage that “the rich” were “able to privatise their green spaces” to keep people like her out. Making a joke video for TikTok, she proposed running for President on the single-issue platform “to make golf illegal.” But then the video went viral, she entered the rabbit-hole, and her joke became serious.
Donald Trump spent a lot of time putting during his time in power and famously owns several courses. To Abbie, footage of The Donald teeing off whilst people died from COVID and our planet burned from climate change—to which golf courses suddenly became a major contributor, particularly Trump’s favourite one at Mar-a-Lago—became “like a visual representation of our leaders not only failing to combat a grave issue facing our generation but then playing a game on top of their destruction” of humanity. Thus, Intersectional Abbie launched her new #cancelgolf movement on TikTok, campaigning partly via the medium of dance.
“Society has evolved past the need for golf,” Richards announced, with the fertilisers used to maintain their greens causing polluting algal blooms. Golf has been the sole preserve of rich white male elites, as exemplified by Tiger Woods, and as such it was now time that “we, as a society, admit that golf was a bad idea and move on.” Solar-power stations, community farms, and affordable housing should be built on all golf course land instead.
Awkwardly for her conspiratorial thesis, however, whilst the laws of the game we know today were codified in wicked white Scotland, there were far older versions of a similar sport invented independently worldwide, in nations like China. Thankfully, Richards’ scientific background allowed her to discern that, via the Darwinian laws of convergent evolution, “given enough time, every society will invent golf.”
Yet only the U.S. had been sick-brained enough to combine golf with capitalism, thus ensuring its “transition from sport to ecological villain.” Having revealed this insight in an essay on euronews.com, Richards issued a classically woke mea culpa: “Now is when I should disclose I am an American. And I’m sorry about that, deeply, deeply sorry.”
After their initial flurry of fame, people stopped watching Abbie’s vids, perhaps because they were incredibly stupid. But Richards could not accept this fact, accusing the evil capitalists of TikTok (whose ultimate master is the Chinese Communist Party …) of ‘shadowbanning’ her, that is, secretly manipulating their algorithms to ensure she got fewer views. In other words, she began posing as the victim of a conspiracy.
Bunker Mentality
Richards was awakened to the dangers of online conspiracy nuts due to her own father arguing that COVID-19 had been made in a bio-lab by the Chinese Communist Party. This made her “furious” as “the molecular structure” of the disease allegedly proved this “rejection of scientific consensus” impossible—even though this is not so and the Chinese lab-origin theory is now widely considered plausible. Initial mainstream Western scientific and media resistance to this idea appeared motivated largely by political considerations (i.e., Donald Trump had been one of the first to suggest it, and he could never be allowed to be right about anything).
Abbie now felt compelled to prevent others from making the same ‘mistakes’ her father had made, hence the launch of her Conspiracy Chart which went big online. An inverted triangle, in its various iterations it features a list of conspiracy theories known to be true at the bottom, a series of potentially half-true but relatively harmless or comical ones (such as dinosaurs never having existed, King Charles III being a vampire, or Stevie Wonder not really being blind) in the middle, culminating in the most dangerous and untrue ones at the top. Sadly, the assessment of what was credible or insane, harmful or benign, lay entirely at the discretion of Ms Richards—just like with Prevent.
Hence, certain wholly plausible ideas, like the notion that indigenous Europeans may in the long-term end up demographically outnumbered in Europe, are dishonestly rated as less truthful than truly crazy claims like Denver International Airport concealing tunnels full of aliens and having runways shaped like swastikas. And you can’t help but notice all the most dangerous-ranked conspiracies are those most often believed by certain hard-line ‘deplorable’ Trump voters and Republicans: QAnon, PizzaGate, and so forth. If you believe that the world is ruled by “SUPREME SHADOW ELITES,” the chart says you must “GET HELP.” Unless these same shadow elites happen to be white male golfers, that is.
Richards wants to indicate to web-users the importance of getting info from reliable sources. Hence, you can click on each conspiracy listed, and it will take you to one such reliable source—including The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a U.S. campaigning organisation which promotes itself as combatting hate-groups, but whose critics say specialises in disingenuously smearing conservative and Christian groups as extremists, with sometimes violent results: the same kind of ‘anti-fascist’ group who helped advise Prevent in the UK, then.
The basic technique here is to conflate legitimate public concerns with parasitic racist conspiracy theories, which a minority of deluded adherents erect atop of them in order to tar everyone who shares such worries with the same ga-ga brush. Click on the entry for ‘Cultural Marxism’—a synonym for the sort of ultra-leftist wokery the work of Abbie Richards herself proves really does exist—and you will find an SPLC essay arguing it is all a racist exaggeration based on the fact that some of the intellectual originators of the Cultural Marxism movement were Jewish, and therefore all people who complain about it must automatically be paranoid, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazis.
And, now, this biased tool of left-liberal prejudice is being used to help train British school governors (and thus presumably teachers) to identify which of their pupils must be hauled in and questioned by the Prevent thought-police. That’s precisely the kind of disturbing experience that will make alienated young people feel even more resentful of mainstream society and help push them into the hands of more genuine extremists. Well done, Abbie!
Or, then again, am I the one who’s being paranoid? After all, I’ve read quite a lot of Shakespeare and seen every episode of Yes, Minister …
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