At a recent signing, a lady who was a great fan of the original version of my book Watermelons told me she wished I hadn’t updated it because it was no longer suitable reading material for her resolutely Normie husband.

She was referring to the content of the two new chapters I had written explaining just how deep the conspiracy goes. Her husband - and people like her husband - would have been comfortable enough with the original chapters, which pointed out how little scientific evidence there was to support Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. But the additional stuff about it being a deliberate, long-planned, top-down conspiracy by the Predator Class to immiserate us, impoverish us and enslave us in their New World Order was, she felt, a bit off putting for the general reader.

Yes. I do see her point. But I still have no regrets for reasons I have outlined in the short piece below. Some influencers in the Awake movement see the battle for hearts and minds as a sort of marketing exercise, in which the important thing is to gauge which of our ideas might have broad appeal and which ones are a turn off for our target audience. But I’m not one of those people. I prefer the “If they don’t like it, **** ‘em, approach.”

This may or may not make me a poor tactician but I really don’t care. I’m not in the business of winning friends and influencing people. What matters to me is the truth. If I think it’s true, then I will usually say it, regardless of how unpopular it makes me or how uncomfortable it makes my audience.

Please don’t think I’m trying to emulate those blunt professional Yorkshireman types who delight in boring you rigid and simultaneously offending you by banging on about how ruggedly plain-speaking they are. That’s not what I mean at all: those people are bloody annoying - and also they’re mostly incorrigible Normies. Rather what I mean is that I don’t believe in pulling my punches or softening my argument to make it more palatable, more Normie-friendly. I think the short article below explains pretty well why.

Some years ago I wrote a book called Watermelons in which I examined the various claims made the green movement and discovered - not to put too fine a point upon it - that they were all complete bollocks.

Instead of destroying the planet, the hated trace gas CO2 was actually making it greener. Instead of shrinking, polar bear populations were exploding to the point where they were becoming a pest. Instead of saving the natural world and harnessing free energy, wind turbines were slicing and dicing birds and bats, and costing us all a fortune.

But the biggest lie of all, I found, was the doomsday narrative about so-called Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. It wasn’t as if the climate alarmists had just got it a little bit wrong, here and there. Their entire thesis - that industrial civilisation was causing unprecedentedly large increases in global mean temperatures, requiring urgent action to stave off disaster - was the purest nonsense. None of the so-called ‘science’ backed up their claims; all their forecasts were based on computer models biased towards catastrophe; everything they were telling us was flat out untrue.

After I’d finished the book, I thought: “Job done.” I didn’t delude myself, by any means, that I’d written the last word on the subject. But I did believe that the tide was about to turn. So cast-iron was the case against the global warming industry it could only be a matter of time before everybody else woke up, said “Enough is enough!”, and brought this extravagantly unnecessary and destructive scam to an immediate end.

Instead, here we all are, nearly fifteen years on and the problem is worse than ever. Not climate, obviously, but the metastasising climate industrial complex. In Britain, we see this reflected in everything from the rocketing cost of air travel and the worsening headache of car ownership to the clumsy attempts to force everyone to install a smart meter and an expensive new boiler which won’t keep you warm when it’s cold.

Apart from the mostly paid agitators of pretend-grassroots protest groups like Extinction Rebellion, hardly anyone seems to support this war on liberty and private property being waged by the State against the populace in the name of Net Zero. Yet the policy - despite the glaring absence of any real evidence justify it - steamrolls ahead anyway. Why? How on earth are they still getting away with it?

The answer is that ‘climate change’ was a faked crisis issue designed from the very start to bypass the democratic process. A bit like HS2 - imposed on you, against your will, by similar vested interests - ‘climate change’ was never going to be one of those things you could vote against or which could be derailed by overwhelming contradictory evidence or a change of government.

It dates back to the 1950s when the grandsons of the US oil magnate JD Rockefeller were looking for new ways increase their stupendous family fortune and expand their global influence. What they needed was to invent an issue of international importance which would require supranational governance. Climate change fit the bill just perfectly.

For most people this would have been an impossible ambition. But not for the Rockefellers. Their influence extended over banks (Chase Manhattan); universities (Chicago; Columbia in New York; plus 70 other top colleges); the United Nations (which they had co-founded); the media (Time and Life magazines); and more than 50 environmental organisations including the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and the Intergovernmental on Climate Change (IPCC).

‘Global warming’, you could reasonably argue, would never have existed without the Rockefellers. They invented it, they promoted it, they bankrolled it.

Which isn’t to say, of course, that other stupendously wealthy people weren’t in on the game. For example, in the first versions of Watermelons, I fingered the Club of Rome as the most influential of the various billionaires’ think tanks pushing the climate change scare narrative. What I hadn’t realised when I named its co-founder Aurelio Peccei as ‘another of those secretive billionaire industrialists you’ve never heard of’ is that Peccei was merely a frontman for a secretive billionaire industrialist you definitely have heard of, Gianni Agnelli.

But why would such people want to wage war on industrial civilisation? Surely they would want to oppose the climate change narrative, not bolster it? Yes, you’d certainly think so. But while the world’s oldest and most powerful families - say the 1 per cent of the 1 per cent of the 1 per cent - aren’t averse to making money, what they value far more is control. The global warming scare has provided the perfect excuse they need to bring us closer to their long-desired one world government tyranny, while persuading us that it’s in our interests because it means saving the planet.

If you think this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, I really don’t blame you. I was pretty gobsmacked myself when I first became aware of it, via Jacob Nordangård, a Swedish academic (and part time heavy metal singer). Nordangård used to be an ardent environmentalist, a member of the Swedish green party. But then he began asking awkward questions like “how come so many green groups are funded by their supposed enemies in the oil industry?”. His research led him to the Rockefellers, resulting in a detailed study Rockefeller - Controlling the Game.

The next question you might well ask is: “If this is all in the public domain, why have I never heard of it before?” Why do you think? This is a scam perpetrated by unimaginably rich vested interests which control not just the universities, the corporations and the politicians, but also all the think tanks and the media organisations.

When I was preparing a revised edition of Watermelons earlier this year - about time: it was out of print and the problems it describes are worse than ever - I did wonder how much of this controversial new information to include. Should I, for example, mention ‘geoengineering’ - aka chemtrails - the mostly clandestine yet widespread man-made weather manipulation whose sometimes disastrous effects are blamed by the complicit mainstream media on ‘climate change’?

What I realised is that when you pull your punches you are doing the enemy’s work for them. Of course, they want you to believe that the very notion that ‘climate change’ is a hoax, orchestrated from above, is just one of those crazy conspiracy theories. Of course, they want the ‘debate’ to be focused on the how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin speculation as to how much of our anthropogenic CO2 input contributes to global warming. Of course, they want you to distract and divide you with Marmite characters like Greta Thunberg, fabricated in order to give you the illusion that this is an issue of real public concern which MUST be addressed. That’s how they win.

Watermelons - 2025 revised edition - can be purchased here https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/Products/Watermelons-2025.html

I was originally going to give this piece a different title. Something along the lines of: “What do Brigitte Macron, Michelle Obama and Dame Edna Everage Have In Common?” or “Which World Leader’s ‘Wife’ Has The Biggest Hairiest Bollocks?” or “If Mrs Macron Is A Woman Then I’m The Secret Love Child of Serge Gainsbourg.” But then I heard the shock news that the French president and his fragrant and definitely-not-a-bloke wife are suing Candace Owens for defamation.

When the story broke in the mainstream media, I happened to have been sitting next to an old friend of mine who is a total Normie. “I’m no fan of the Macrons but I hope they take her for every penny. Who is this Candace Owens person anyway?” he said.

This, I suspect, will be typical of the reactions across Normieland. And designedly so. When I read the story my immediate thought was: “This is another Alex Jones and Sandy Hook psyop.” The law suit by the Macrons appears to have been calculated to have the same effect on ‘conspiracy theorists’ talking about Elite Gender Inversion (EGI) as the Alex Jones case did on ‘conspiracy theorists’ talking about faked high school shootings: ridicule them; marginalise them; frighten them; shut ‘em down.

Whether or not I’m right will only become clear as the law suit progresses. Is Mrs Macron really going to subject herself to the indignity of a full examination to ascertain whether she is the sex she claims to be? Well yes, possibly, if she really was born a woman. But if she wasn’t, then aren’t the Macrons taking an almighty risk here?

My guess is that the intimate personal examination is never going to happen. And that the law suit will be settled out of court, with Candace Owens being forced to pay some kind of salutary settlement - a bit like the person pretending to be ‘Alex Jones’ very publicly had to do over Sandy Hook.

I could be wrong. But if I’m right it will justify the suspicions I’ve had for some time about Candace Owens. Yes she is attractive and articulate but she has risen, almost without trace, to enjoy a platform far larger than people pushing ‘conspiracy theory’ material about subjects ranging from the Jews to Elite Gender Inversion are generally permitted.

Was the purpose of Owens’s success, all along, to gain a huge profile in Awake circles before being ‘exposed’ in the mainstream as a dangerous charlatan not a single one of whose wacky ideas should be taken seriously by any rational human being? If so it wouldn’t be the first time They have played this trick.

Alex Jones and Sandy Hook provides the template. Though the case never went to court - thus ensuring that none of the questions about the authenticity of a mass shooting in a school which had been closed for many months were ever subject to legal niceties like disclosure and cross-examination - the general public is now convinced that the official Sandy Hook narrative has been proven beyond reasonable doubt.

In the UK, currently, we have a cut price version of this propaganda technique being deployed in the case of one Lucy Connolly. Connolly, if you believe the official narrative, is an otherwise blameless mother currently serving a 31 month jail term for something supposedly inflammatory she said on Twitter in the wake of the Southport ‘killings’ in which three little girls were allegedly stabbed to death at a ‘Taylor Swift’ ballet class by a scary-looking black immigrant.

You may guess from my inverted commas deployment that I don’t believe the official narrative. Nor - and I do recommend reading their takes, below - do Miri AF or Francis O’Neill.

Francis’s Substack

A Letter to Lucy Connolly

On 31st October 2024, Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison, “the particulars of the offence being that “on 29 July 2024 she published and distributed written material on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) which was threatening, abusive or insulting with the intent thereby to stir up racial hatred or whereby, having regard to al…

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7 days ago · 75 likes · 8 comments · Francis O'Neill

Whenever you write pieces like this you will - as night follows day - attract comments, purportedly from fellow ‘Awake’ people, accusing you of paranoia, purity spiralling and needless divisiveness. This is just what has happened to Miri AF and O’Neill on social media.

On Twitter, for example, Miri has been attacked for her catchphrase “If you know their name they’re in the game.”

Here is a tweet from Fiona Rose Diamond, ‘Truth Be Told Founder, Activist, Law Student, Human Rights Advocate, Campaigning for Truth, Justice & Freedom’.

"If you know their name, they're in the game."

What an absolutely ridiculous, self-defeating mindset. That phrase gets tossed around in the freedom/truth movement like gospel, but it's pure poison.

Think about it: You're saying that every single person who's publicly standing up, risking their life, reputation, career, family - for truth, freedom, and justice - is automatically a plant or controlled opposition... just because you’ve heard of them?

Seriously? That’s not critical thinking. That’s indoctrination wearing a tinfoil hat.

This kind of thinking does exactly what 'they' want; it ensures there's zero unity, zero leadership, zero momentum. It breeds suspicion, paralysis, and nihilism.

So you trust no one, follow no one, build nothing, and fight nothing. You sit in a corner, pointing fingers at everyone who’s actually moving.

Newsflash: If they’ve got a name, it usually means they’ve DONE something. Said something. Moved something.

Here is a tweet from an accountant called Graham Kemp.

"If you know their name, they are in the game" might sound edgy, but in practice, it undermines unity, discredits effort, and isolates people who are doing real work.

When I read responses like this I often find myself thinking: “Tu Quoque.”

This is not, sadly, because I am so incredibly clever that I spend all my time thinking in Latin. Rather it’s that Tu Quoque is the name often given to the rhetorical fallacy in which you accuse someone - it means ‘you too’ or ‘you also’ - of doing the very thing of which you yourself are guilty.

So, in this example, both Fiona Rose Diamond and Graham Kemp are accusing Miri AF of fomenting division in the Awake community when they themselves, by tweeting in this way, are fomenting division in the Awake community.

They could have just shrugged their shoulders and gone: “Ah. That’ll be Miri being Miri.” Or they could have gone: “Damn it! I’m sick of this woman with her furry hats and her pesky arguments which make no sense to me, so I shan’t read her stuff any more.”

Instead, though, they’ve decided to turn Miri’s contention that lots of prominent people in the Awake movement might secretly be enemy agents or collaborators into The Hill They’re Prepared To Die On.

Which seems to me a pretty weird Hill To Choose To Die On for anyone who purports to be Awake.

If you fancy my long read take on this, I can highly recommend a scorching essay I wrote a couple of years ago. [You can tell this has been a pet peeve of mine for some time…]

For those without the time, here is the key paragraph.

If you accept - as all the red-pilled must because it is the foundation of Awake awareness - that the world as it has been sold to us is a tissue of lies, half-truths and deceptions, then it naturally follows that everything we think we know about the world is potentially fallacious.

That is, it is not an intellectually tenable position for anyone who is truly Awake to pour scorn on anything they deem to be a ‘conspiracy theory too far’ - be it Flat Earth or Paul is Dead or Lucy Connolly is a Psyop - because this would require them to have perfect knowledge that they cannot possibly possess.

Sure they might be right that ‘Lucy Connolly’ is a blameless freedom fighter genuinely serving a draconian prison sentence - rendered even more cruel and horrible by having to endure prison visits from Reform MP Richard Tice - for the crime of getting momentarily upset on Twitter about all the evil immigrants murdering our babies at Taylor Swift dance classes and such like.

But they might - especially given the prevalence of such psyops - be wrong. And unless they can prove their case beyond all reasonable doubt, what they are engaging in is mere, idle speculation. Mere idle speculation does not put you in a position of such authority that you can reasonably traduce those arguing a different point of view.

Nor does it give you the moral high ground. Quite the opposite in fact because what you are doing is standing in the way of perhaps the purest and most noble mission of the Awake community - the pursuit of the truth.

Pursuing the truth in a world of lies requires courage. Attacking truth seekers for asking difficult questions, on the other hand, requires no courage whatsoever because all you are doing - whether unwittingly or otherwise - is announcing that you agree with the Current Thing.

A good example of this was immediate aftermath of October 7 when we were told, inter alia, that no fewer than 40 babies had been beheaded by the evil, bloodthirsty terrorists of Hamas.

It took a brave soul indeed to declare in those early days of orchestrated hysteria and mendacity: “Not buying this. It makes no sense”.

It required all the courage of the bastard offspring of Brave Sir Robin and the Cowardly Lion, on the other hand, to declare how disgusted you were by all those hateful, antisemitic conspiracy theorists peddling outrageous nonsense about those 40 murdered innocents not being real.

[See also: all the innocent children killed by an evil terrorist at the Ariana Grande concert]

Or, to put it another way, the price of claiming that 40 babies weren’t beheaded - and it later being proved that they really were - is embarrassment, opprobrium and reputational damage.

The price of claiming that 40 babies were beheaded - and then it subsequently emerging that they weren’t - is zero.

But - as so often - I digress. To return to my main point, I think it highly likely that many influencers within the Awake movement have been positioned there for disruptive purposes. And that the bigger their reach, the more likely it is that they are compromised.

This ought to be so obvious to anyone even half-awake as scarcely to need explaining. But let me do so anyway, perhaps with special reference to the Brigitte Macron story which first inspired this article.

OK. So the world is run by a tiny cabal of Satanic paedophiles who hate us and want to kill us. But they can’t kill us all - not immediately, there are too many of us - so instead they have to settle for keeping us like mind-controlled slaves (‘cattle’ as they fondly refer to us).

Mind control is very important to them, a) because it appeals to their sick sense of humour and makes them feel like they are outwitting us (which indeed they mostly are) and b) because if ever we woke up, en masse, to what’s really going on the game would be over and they wouldn’t be able to treat us like cattle any longer.

Hence the high premium They place on deception, on the agencies of deception (the media, the movie and TV industry, pop music, social media, etc), and on the individual agents of deception (which is why pop stars, movie stars, chat show hosts, newscasters, etc get paid so much). They rely on these institutions to keep everyone fooled.

But some people aren’t fooled. A small percentage of the population knows that the world is run by a cabal of Satanic paedophiles. As long that percentage remains small then these people don’t pose too much of a problem. So the important thing with this lot is to keep them contained and stop their ideas spreading and infecting the broader culture with their dangerous truth virus. (Not that we believe in viruses, obviously, but that’s another story.)

How do The Powers That Be contain the Awake threat? Lots of ways, obviously, from shadow banning all the way to killing. But one of their favourite methods - because it involves doing what they do best - is mind games.

So, they take various plausible characters and insert them into Awake circles, like sleeper agents who can be activated at any moment - now or a long time in the future - according to requirement.

“Release Agent Connolly,” They might decide. And suddenly Agent Connolly will find herself deployed in a psychological operation designed to work up segments of the UK populace into so furious a state that they begin rioting and looting. Which has, of course, been the plan for some time because then the state can respond by crushing the populace with draconian new regulation, introduced Für ihre sicherheit.

Then, a few weeks later, They might decide: “The cattle are getting too wise to this crazy, perverted thing we Dark Overlords do where most of our US presidents’ wives are actually blokes, and where we have to bring up our male children as females and vice versa…” [See my podcast with Mr E for further details]

“Unleash Agent Candace,” some Illuminati player might suggest.

“No. Not Agent Candace. She is too valuable to squander on an issue so trivial,” another Evil Overlord - one of the Du Ponts, maybe, or Elon Musk, or the Grey Pope - might chip in.

“Trivial? To us it might be trivial. We Illuminati take it for granted that all our beautiful wives secretly have huge hairy bollocks and swinging lunchpacks like ‘Big Mike’ Obama. We don’t bat an eyelid when we hear that Ellen De Generes is one of the Rockefellers’ grandsons or that Barbara Bush was sired by Aleister Crowley. But if the Normie cattle ever got to find this stuff out it wouldn’t go down well. They’d think it was proof that we were all paedophiles from ancient bloodlines with more reptilian DNA than human DNA, all of us sworn to the service of our master Lucifer.”

“Well tbf that IS exactly who we are,” might respond David Bowie, not unreasonably.

“Yeah. But the Normie cattle don’t know that. They think it’s all just crazy conspiracy theory stuff. And we need to keep it that way.”

Grey Pope: “All right. Sigh. Pains me to do this but I guess it’s gotta be done. Unleash Agent Candace.”

Did you know that Ozzy Osbourne was a closet Christian?

No, I didn’t either but here is a post someone kindly sent me from the Telegram channel of Paul Fleuret (Absolute 1776). (If I knew how to do links to people’s Telegram posts I would link to it.)

Contrary to popular belief - Ozzy was actually a Christian. And had been for at least the past 30 years.

His lead guitarist Zakk Wylde is also a Christian.

Ozzy never had any demons, pentagrams or Satanic imagery onstage. Quite the opposite - His stages were almost always adorned with angels and crosses (and not upside down ones).

And even Black Sabbath, whilst touching upon Occult themes, was not Satanic. Tony Iommi is a Christian as well.

Ozzy has openly stated his belief in Jesus Christ.

Ozzy also never beat his kids or cheated on his wife. Sharon did, however, cheat on him and he forgave her.

Sometimes to fight the darkness, you have to work within it and learn about it. You cannot defeat an enemy without knowledge of said enemy.

Working in the dark to serve the light is a thing.

Even the bat incident was overblown - he thought it was a plastic bat, and was too hammered drunk to know the difference.

Was Ozzy perfect? Hell no. Not at all. Was he a role model? Probably not. But he also owned his imperfections.

And FWIW: He is NOWHERE near any of the Pedo lists.

Ozzy is NOT who many believe he was.

Water-muddying posts like Fleuret’s are why I now somewhat regret having set out to write a piece inquiring about Ozzy Osbourne’s Satanic affiliations. My excuses are as follows: I was raised in the Birmingham area, which is where most of the early heavy metal bands came from (My uncle, for example, was Robert Plant’s lunch table monitor at Stourbridge grammar); when I was at school, a lot of the older boys in my house were into heavy metal and definitely the first time I heard the word ‘paranoid’ was in the context of that rather catchy Black Sabbath track; the more I understand about the world, the more excruciatingly aware I become of the key role played by popular music in shaping and subverting mass consciousness.

As Leon Trotsky probably would have said if he’d lived long enough: “You may not be interested in heavy metal but heavy metal is interested in you.”

The other thing that piqued my interest in the topic was reading tosh like this from Osbourne’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph.

Osbourne always ridiculed accusations of the band’s connections with Satanism, remarking that ‘the nearest we ever came to Black Magic was a box of chocolates.’

It’s quite a good line - even if it probably only makes sense if you’re English. (Black Magic were a brand of faux-up-market chocolates, heavily marketed in the 1970s and 1980s with a series of inescapable TV ads).

But like a lot of the stories and quotes in the obituary it feels a bit too pat. It’s not that I don’t believe Osbourne could conceivably have come up with such a quip - by all accounts he was an amiable, amusing, down-to-earth, and unscary character - but rather that I have learned to take with a huge pinch of salt anything we are ever told about any pop or rock band of any significance. Almost certainly it will have been dreamed up not by the ‘stars’ themselves (who are merely puppets) but by the publicists and image-makers acting on behalf of the sinister interests who really call the shots.

The rumours and counter-rumours now circulating about the ‘real’ Ozzy Osbourne are part of this misinformation and disinformation process. Take the ‘famous’ story about the bat. (Which is only famous because They made it famous).

Was it a live bat or a dead one or a fake one? Was Ozzy aware of what he was doing or so pissed out of his brain that he hadn’t a clue? Oh, and did or did he not have to a rabies injection afterwards?

If you are seriously pondering any of these questions then you have been taken for a ride. They are all designed to distract you, like a conjuror’s prestidigitation, from what is really going on here. The truth is that there is nothing particularly shocking, or even mildly interesting, about a schlocky, druggy, boozy vaudeville act biting a head off a tiny airborne mammal. Even if he did it on stage in the middle of a concert - in January 1982 at Des Moines Veterans Memorial Auditorium, apparently - hardly anyone will have realised what was going on (not least because in those days they didn’t have huge screens showing rock stars in close up). The Ozzy Osbourne bat story is and always was a nothingburger. And the only reason any of us think otherwise is because we have been told so often that it is outrageous that we have been persuaded to believe in the PR spin rather than trust our own instincts.

This is why I’m disinclined to believe the stories about Ozzy Osbourne being a secret Christian. Sure, he may well have thought that Jesus was, like, an amazing guy from whom we can learn an awful lot. Yes, he might have worn a cross - many crosses, actually - an awful lot, both on stage and off stage. Yes, he may well have believed in God. But so do lots of non-Christians, including Goths, New Agers and, let’s be brutally frank here, closet Satanists and Luciferians who profess Christianity as part of their cover. As ‘Shakespeare’ said “The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”

Sure there are lots of stories that one can dredge up from the internet to ‘prove’ that Black Sabbath were just innocent Brummie lads having fun and in no way serving the Dark Lord of Evil. I was planning on citing a few more of them myself, just to show I’d done my homework and I knew the guitarist was called Tony Iommi and that it was the bass player Geezer Butler who wrote the lyrics to Paranoid and so on, when I suddenly remembered: “Hang on. You’re just playing the enemy’s game here…”

To understand what I mean you need to take a step back, not get distracted by the largely fabricated detail and faked-up tittle tattle about what the band did or didn’t do, and remind yourselves of the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is this: the music industry is a gigantic brainwashing instrument, run by and for gangsters and Satanic paedophiles for the purposes of destroying the family, waging war on Christianity, promoting drug and alcohol use and sexual excess, engendering cultural division and celebrating occult ritual magic in the guise of concerts. Everyone working in the industry knows this because that is part of the pact they signed - whether literally or metaphorically - when they sold their souls in return for their place in the rock and roll hall of fame.

I think it highly unlikely that there are any exceptions to this rule. But of course, we’d all like to think that there were, as I argued in Why You Can No Longer Listen To The Dark Side Of The Moon.

https://delingpole.substack.com/p/why-you-can-no-longer-listen-to-the

It’s what I call ‘But Not Kate Bush’ Syndrome. This is the delusion whereby you know everyone on the industry is evil, everyone except your personal favourite artistes who are magically exempt because their music is so great and because you saw them on stage once and they were obviously lovely people who had a real rapport with you.

I suppose in the case of Ozzy Osbourne, lots of people want to believe that he was all right because of his lovably bumbling, out-of-it persona, lank hair and silly round sunglasses. He came across like everyone’s favourite useless Dad, much put-upon and mocked by his grumpy kids Kelly and Jack [he has three older ones too, but we don’t know about them because they weren’t on the MTV series The Osbournes] and his incredibly pushy, ruthless wife (and handler) Sharon [daughter of industry thug Don Arden - born Harry Levy].

Yeah, right. If Ozzy Osbourne was so sweet and innocent, what possessed him, do you think, to write lyrics like the ones in this little charmer called Mr Tinker Train?

Would you like some sweeties little girl?
Come a little closer
I’m gonna show you a brand new world tonight

I’ve got a palace full of fantasy
Ready made just for you and me
Once you’re there I’m gonna take you for a ride

I got a one way ticket
To take you to the other side
I got a one way ticket
So come along and don’t be shy

They call me Mr. Tinker Train
That’s how I got to get my name
They call me Mr. Tinker Train
So come along and play my game

You’ll never be the same

Close the curtains and turn out the lights
Beneath my wing it’s gonna be alright
A little secret just for you and me

I’ve got the kind of toys you’ve never seen
Manmade and a bit obscene
Little angel come and sit upon my knee

Presumably he was being ‘ironic’, right? Or maybe he was satirising the unhealthy attitudes displayed by so many of his confreres within the heavy metal industry, but, as per the claims made by Paul Fleuret and quoted at the beginning, he was ‘working in the dark to serve the light.’

lol.

Anyone who buys into this kind of risible apologism needs to hand in their Awake card right away because it reveals such sublime ignorance of how the world really works.

Always but always - whether it’s the back story of four preternaturally talented Liverpool lads who decided to form a band or that tall tale told by ‘economists’ about how we need more immigrants ‘to do the jobs English people won’t do’ - there is the Approved Narrative lovingly curated to fool the well-intentioned but gullible masses.

And then there is the unpleasant Underlying Truth.

The Approved Narrative on Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath is the one you’ll have read - or more likely not read - in papers like the Daily Telegraph.

Here we ‘learn’ that young John Michael Osbourne - ‘Ozzy’ to his mates - had a chequered early career as a ‘plumber’s mate before moving on to work as a mortuary attendant and car factory horn-tuner, finally settling at an abattoir where he slaughtered cows for two years’ before a ‘brief life of crime in which he spent three months in prison for trying to steal a television set.’ Then ‘when he was 18 he renamed himself Zig and placed a card in the window of his local music shop announcing Ozzy Zig Needs Gig - Has Own PA.’ His subsequent band called themselves Black Sabbath after a 1935 Boris Karloff film because their original name Earth was already taken. Their name - and their record company’s decision to put an inverted crucifix on the gatefold sleeve of their first album - attracted the attention of Satanists who asked Sabbath to play their Night of Satan at Stonehenge. When Sabbath chastely refused, the Satanists put a hex on them, prompting Ozzy to ask his dad, a toolmaker, to kit out the band with some aluminium crosses… etc.

Some of this might even be true. But the only bit that really matters is what they don’t tell you. Just as gangster rap was invented by the elites to put more black people in prison, so heavy metal was devised to turn white boys to suicidal despair and dark occultism. In order to conceal this truth - see the Approved Narrative, above - it was deemed necessary to create a cover story in which heavy metal acts were basically just amiable LARPers, wearing scary make up, sporting inverted crosses, flashing the devil’s horns signs and suchlike not because they remotely believed in any of the Satanic imagery with which they were flirting, but because a) they were a bit thick and didn’t really understand what they were doing and b) it just helped sell the records.

This Big Lie attained its apotheosis in This Is Spinal Tap - which used to be one of my favourite movies. I still find it funny - as how could you not? But director Rob Reiner is definitely in the Big Club, as of course, are players like Christopher “Nigel Tufnel” Guest. Here is Hollywood doing what it does best: deploying its full battery of skills from genius-one-liner-writing to brilliant, pastiche song-writing to lull you into an utterly false sense of security about the nature of the entertainment and music industry: to reassure that it’s all just harmless fun.

But it isn’t harmless fun. Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t harmless fun. None of it is harmless fun.

Only an industry run by and for the devil could fool you into believing otherwise.