Here is a comment from an earlier piece I wrote expressing scepticism about a widely reported story concerning the alleged slaughter of young Taylor Swift fans in Southport, supposedly by a 17 year old man of Rwandan heritage.
“Whatever fake thing they have cooked up in Southport”….sorry James that is a sick and disgusting comment right now…you have lost a fan
I have no idea whether this fan ‘David’ is who he claims to be. At times like this, any articles questioning the official narrative tend to get swamped with intelligence service bots sowing doubt and division. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, assume he is real, and allay his concerns.
David: you really aren’t the only person out there who finds the murder of innocents, children especially, abhorrent, upsetting and senseless. Everybody else does too. Everyone, that is, who is not a psychopath. You are not special. You are not privy to a peculiar degree of empathy and insight in which others, less sensitive, are cruelly deficient. You are just responding in the way that John Donne described when he wrote:
Any man’s death diminisheth me because I am involved with mankind.
The last time I quoted that oft-cited line was at the time of the alleged October 7th massacre in Gaza. [https://delingpole.substack.com/p/israel-and-palestine-this-time-it?utm_source=publication-search]
On that occasion, the story dominating the headlines concerned the murder of dozens of dead babies who - we were told - had had their throats cut by brutal Hamas terrorists.
The story, it subsequently emerged, was a total fabrication - likely by Israel’s next-level propaganda departments keen to whip the world’s media into the desired state of frenzied outrage.
As the Israel newspaper Haaretz - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-05/ty-article-magazine/deepfakes-from-the-gaza-war-increase-fears-about-ais-power-to-mislead/0000018c-3a07-dc03-a9ec-3e7fadf10000 - reported on the use of fake images and videos (by both sides, it claimed) to manipulate people’s emotions:
“The more abhorrent the image, the more likely a user is to remember it and to share it, unwittingly spreading the disinformation further.
‘People are being told right now: look at this picture of a baby’, Ahmed said. ‘The disinformation is designed to make you engage with it.’
I’m sure all the Davids out there - real ones, not just tragically small penised intelligence operatives, too-thick-even-for-cannon-fodder working for 77th Brigade - would have got jolly upset had you tried to explain at the time that they were being played and had fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.
But they were and they did. I don’t expect any contrition or self-awareness from these dupes any time soon. After all, they’ll be far too busy getting worked up about the (likely) fake victims of the next big psyop.
As usual - is the girl ever wrong? - the wonderful Miriaf is with me on this. https://open.substack.com/pub/miri/p/the-whole-of-the-moon?r=8sxau&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The first thing we have to acknowledge is that none of us really know for sure what happened. I don't and you don't, but if the event has provoked a strong emotional response in you, then you're even less likely to be able to assess it impartially and accurately.
"What do you mean impartially, you monster! Don't you know that children have just died?!"
No, I don't know that, actually, and nor do you. We only know the media has told us they have.
Did they really die?
Of course it's entirely possible and plausible that they did. Devastatingly, children die every day, and sometimes in horrific, brutal circumstances. This is - obviously - always an unspeakable tragedy for them and their loved ones.
The stark truth is, however, that every time a child meets a violent death - and children who are murdered are most often killed by parents or step-parents - the whole nation isn't up in arms about it.
That's because we don't generally know about it, and we don't generally know about it, because the media doesn't generally tell us, and when it does, it's usually a few short paragraphs on the back pages, not sensationalist front page news everywhere.
Miri’s piece applies, of course, not just to Southport but also to Gaza, the Manchester Arena ‘bombing’ [Do read Iain Davis’s superb coverage of the showtrial of Richard D Hall, the researcher who was all over that nonsense
and indeed to every other incident heavily promoted in the mainstream media in which innocent people (especially if they are children) are murdered or maimed.
Really it should be printed out on a card so that we can carry around in our pockets ready to flash in the face of anyone who looks across at us piteously from their newspaper or TV screen and tries to engage us in the emotional psychodrama of the latest, murdered babies du jour fabrication.
I say ‘fabrication.’ Obviously, as Miriaf - who is much more sensible than me - correctly points out, we cannot be sure in any given instance whether on this occasion real people were killed or not. What we can and should do, though, every time another of these incidents grabs the headlines (and there’s your first clue by the way) is too look out for the ‘tells’.
Among the obvious tells in this Southport story are: the invocation of Taylor Swift (he’s a wrong ‘un, for sure); the bizarre Rwandan connection (ties in with Normies’ idea about where all those machete-wielding immigrants should properly be sent); the deeply unconvincing interviews given by the supposed witnesses and relatives; the suspiciously quickly set up GoFundMe operations (which, as Miriaf correctly observes, are how participants in these alleged psyops are generally rewarded for their duplicity); and the way the event was successfully used by various dubious media players and influencers to persuade a bunch of idiots to attack a mosque (why?), and then, after that, to enable Cabal Manchurian Candidate Keir Starmer to prepare the ground for the closure of ‘far-right’ channels like Telegram.
And lots of you fell for it. Including the woman on my Telegram channel who protested “But they’ve named the children.”
Yes, they always name the children. Remember little Saffie Rose Roussos [note the three names] from the Manchester Arena bombing?