‘Why Can’t We All Get Along?’ would have been my preferred title. But that ship has sailed, unfortunately. There has been so much dissent, bitterness and division in the Awake Not-a-Community of late that I fear we are doomed never again to enjoy that wonderful we’re-all-in-this-together feeling we experienced in the heady days of those Covid resistance marches.

One of the reasons for this division I addressed in a piece titled Everyone Is A Baddie.The resistance has been heavily infiltrated from the start, I argued, even - or perhaps especially - in that era where we thought we were all friends and honest brokers. This isn’t paranoia: merely a rueful observation based on a reluctant acknowledgement of how our enemies roll. Control of the narrative has always been very important to them, not just of the Normie mainstream, but also of the dissenting minority.

But I don’t think it’s the case that literally everyone currently pointing the finger at other people in the Awake Not-a-Community and calling them out as Wrong ‘Uns is himself a Wrong ‘Un working for one of the Enemy’s recently activated divide-and-rule sleeper cells. They might be, I suppose: never underestimate the Enemy’s deviousness or reach. I just think it’s more likely that they’re doing what they are doing in good faith, in the conviction they are helping the cause of truth, beauty, goodness, etc.

The problem is that the victims of their righteous zeal may also be people who are doing what they’re doing in good faith, in the conviction they are helping the cause of truth, beauty, goodness, etc.

I say this with some feeling because I’ve been taking quite a bit of this friendly fire myself in the last few weeks and months. And while I have deep suspicions about one or two of my assailants, in the case of most I suspect our disagreements owe more to unacknowledged differences in temperament and outlook than anything more culpable or malign.

That ‘unacknowledged’ part is, I believe, at the root of this problem. You see one or two people in the Awake Not-a-Community swaggering around as if they own the place - as if it’s their right to set the rules on everything from whom you should and shouldn’t trust to what you’re allowed to say to how you personally should be adjusting your behaviour in the war against the Enemy. What this hectoring arrogance suggests to me is a regrettable failure to grasp at least two basic facts about the truth movement: 1. We don’t like being told what to do by ANYONE. That’s why we’re here and 2. We’re not a one-size-fits-all collective with the same goals, values, interests and preferences but a gigantic cat herd of very opinionated and eccentric individuals whose motivations and personalities may not conform to each others' prejudices of what is and isn’t normal.

Puritans v Cavaliers

Well I’m a cavalier, obviously. And not just because I like prancing about on horses in amusing outfits but because I’m cavalier in my spirit. I know we’re in a war against an implacably evil foe and that we’re all going to die but I’d like to go down fighting with a big smile on my face and with a degree of dash and elan. Also, hateful though our enemies are, I’m not in the business of No Quarter.

From the puritan perspective, I can see this makes me a bit of a liability. I’m too squeamish about unearthing potential traitors in our camp. I lack the necessary killer instinct. But I suppose my counter to this is that, to me, the puritan faction carries more than a whiff of that ghastly chap with the scar on his face in Dr Zhivago; of struggle sessions under the Red Guard; of the Terror in the French Revolution. I thought we were supposed to understand that behaviour like this - where everyone is assumed guilty and until they have proven themselves innocent to the satisfaction of the Revolutionary Committee - was a warning from history, not an instruction manual.

Comedians v Grown Ups

I’ve never wanted to be a grown up and hope I never will be. This, I know, puts me at odds with some of the more serious-minded researchers in our field. Occasionally I’ll get the impression, when I’m chatting to someone who has devoted years of study to an important topic, that they’re thinking: “I do wish James Delingpole wasn’t quite so puerile. This is the future of our civilisation at stake!” It’s true, though I listen very carefully and concentrate hard, a lot of my mental energy is devoted to finding a cue for a silly joke. My view, though, is that I’m not doing them a disservice but a favour. My jokes are the delivery mechanism for their message.

Also, people who are funny are often very clever and intellectually serious underneath. Owen Benjamin is a classic example of this. I’ve found more deep wisdom in his jokes than in many a more serious podcaster’s earnest pieties. And I don’t buy the line, advanced by a Grown Up in my Substack comments the other day, that when Benjamin says stuff like “Pandas aren’t real as described” it undermines our cause. [For a full explanation of why I think it doesn’t, read my eloquent apologia]. Maybe pandas ARE totally legit, though I have my doubts, for reasons similar to those outlined by Benjamin to Tucker Carlson. But is the idea that the Chinese are paying dwarves to dress up in black and white furry outfits and fall over in zoos or bioengineering mutant species really so unlikely, given what we know about how the world works?

Christians v the Rest

I love non-Christian Awake people as much as I do Christian Awake people. But we’d be deluding ourselves if we imagined that there weren’t irreconcilable differences in our world view. Mine is undoubtedly coloured - biased, if you prefer - by my Christian perspective. I believe that God created the world; that He made man in His image; that He sent His only son, Jesus Christ to die for our sins. I also believe what Genesis 6:4 tells us about the Nephilim; and what 2 Corinthians 4:4 tells us about Satan being the god of this world. This, for me, goes a long way to providing the most coherent explanation as to what’s going on in the world (ie an epic struggle between good an evil), what the baddies’ motivation is (they’re working for Satan, who tosses them a few material world baubles in return) and how it all ends (God wins). And because I genuinely believe that all this stuff is real and true - it’s not just some whacko position I adopted because I’m crazy - I’m not in the business of giving equal weight to opposing world views which I think are plain wrong.

This is what I tried to explain to Slavlander (formerly Rurik Skywalker) on my recent podcast. “Your geopolitical theories about what’s really happening in Russia seem well researched and plausible,” I said, more or less. “But I never know how far I can trust your overall picture when you also think that the creature with horns and a forked tail and the face and legs of a goat is the team we should back?”

I exaggerate, somewhat. Slavlander insists he is not a devil-worshipper. But under cross examination he did give me the strong impression that his philosophy is essentially Luciferian. This is a problem for me, as it would be I think for any Christian, in the same way that it’s a big problem for me that David Icke’s metaphysics are essentially those of the New Age. There’s no point kidding ourselves that because we’re all Awake we can just fudge this issue. We’re talking about fundamentally oppositional religious philosophies.

Big Picture Fliers v Details Nerds

Some people like to focus on the fine detail. I don’t, unless I really have to. I can do it (as I did in my book Watermelons) but my preferred entry method to any new and unfamiliar conspiracy theory is pattern recognition. The Enemy uses the same tricks again and again and once you know what they are it’s a bit like identifying a serial killer’s work by his trademark tells. It means when there’s yet another fake ‘terrorist’ attack, you’re in a position to call out the psyop in those very early stages when your more cautious conspiracy theorist brethren are saying “Too soon! We don’t have all the facts yet. This one might be real…”

Despite the name I’ve given them I have great admiration for details nerds. I read the essays of people like Escape Key, Iain Davis, Paul Cudenec, and Simon Elmer and am overwhelmed with gratitude for the time and effort they have put into their research because what it means is that I don’t have to bother. They’ve done all the hard work. I just have to precis it and repackage it and maybe sprinkle a bit of glitter on it in order to bring it to the attention of a wider audience.

The problem with details nerds - not all of them and I’m not accusing any of the names mentioned above of this - is that sometimes they can’t see the wood for the trees. That is, they’re so obsessed with minutiae that they sometimes misunderstand the data in their possession - (Empiricism, in my view, is massively overrated: I think it was a con trick foisted on us by the Cabal as part of their Enlightenment war against God) - and draw inaccurate conclusions. And because they are so receipts-bound, they are reluctant to make the imaginative and conceptual leaps with which Big Picture types are so comfortable. Details nerds are sniffy about conspiracy theories for which there is no ‘hard evidence.’ A Big Picture type might counter that the whole point of conspiracies is that most of the ‘hard evidence’ is so heavily suppressed that sometimes inference or educated guesses are all you’ve got. Just because we haven’t seen the death certificate doesn’t mean that Paul is not Dead.

Pitchforks v Deckchairs

Let me honest (as I always strive to be): I’m supremely relaxed about who is and isn’t ‘Controlled opposition.’ This isn’t because I’m pro-spy, or pro-infiltration, or pro-lying, pro-deception or pro any of the other evil practised by the Enemy. It’s because I’m pretty confident that God will do a much better job of judging these people than I ever could; because I feel more disappointed and sad for them (What if they’re being blackmailed? What if they’re desperate? How hard must it be for them to sleep at night?) than I am angry or vengeful; and because I don’t feel as threatened by them as perhaps I should.

Take Whitney Webb, Candace Owens, Catherine Austin Fitts, James Corbett and Tucker Carlson. All these characters have been accused of being Controlled Opposition but that would certainly not put me off having them on my podcast or indeed going on theirs. Where Awake podcasts I’m a great believer in Caveat Emptor: take what you find useful, discard what you consider useless, always listen with a degree of scepticism. Use your discernment, in other words.

So I guess that would put me into the Deckchair category. Pitchfork types would hate me for my dangerous complacency and probably - because paranoid suspicion tends to go with the territory - see it as evidence that I too am part of The Conspiracy. I know they would because a fellow truther, who shall remain nameless but whom hitherto I had considered a friend and ally, totally threw her toys out of the pram when she saw I had recorded a podcast with Charles Malet of UK Column (another organisation which has accused of being Controlled Opposition). She actually brandished this as evidence, in a very heated Telegram exchange, that this was all the proof she needed that I was myself compromised.

Now if you are yourself one of those mad Pitchfork fuckers then I suppose you’ll agree with her. But I prefer to see it like this: I do not like making enemies of people unless they’ve first made an enemy of me; I do not like confrontation on my podcasts. Famously, I do not. My approach, to use a Normie analogy, is more Graham Norton than Jeremy Paxman. I do not grill or interrogate my guests a) because I don’t particularly enjoy the tension it generates and b) because I think people can often be more revealing when they are relaxed and not on the defensive. You can listen for yourself and decide whether you think it worked with Charles Malet. [I’m biased, obvs, but I think it made for a fascinating conversation. Much more than if I’d gone: “So, evil controlled opposition Cabal operative Malet: how do you defend yourself against the charge that the Chinese government now runs UK Column?”]

Ascetics v Hedonists

Some people in the Awake Not-a-Community were born for this moment. They’ve risked prison in order to fulfil their moral duty not to pay their taxes to the criminal enterprise that is The Gubmint; they live off grid and are now experts in milking goats and pickling home-grown cabbages; they’ve protected their wealth with elaborate trusts or hidden gold caches or self-custody Bitcoin stashes; they home school their kids; they’d rather not travel if it means they have to provide biometric data at the airport; they never use smart phones; they always pay in cash and because they’ve made so many sacrifices for the Cause they feel that everyone else should do the same. They’ve got no time for fair-weather Awake types who won’t fully acknowledge how dire and urgent the situation is, nor how imperative it is that we all take action now.

I totally agree with these Ascetic types. (Or Essenes, as I was tempted to call them.) My problem is that like perhaps most of us in the Awake Not-a-Community, I lack the self-discipline, rigour and, frankly, the masochism needed to follow their example to its fullest extent. I feel a bit like St Augustine: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!” There are some areas I’ve been pretty good at: standing up to all the mask nonsense during Covid; ruining any chances I might have had of continuing my career as a mainstream journalist. But in other areas, I’m definitely not as self-denying as I could be. For example, I could have taken the principled position that, since Russia insists on biometric data at the airport I wouldn’t go there. My view, though, was: do I really want NOT to see Moscow?

It’s the same with stuff like friendships. Though I hardly I ever see any of my friends and colleagues from my Normie days as a journalist, I certainly wouldn’t cut them dead on principle - or even diss them publicly. Partly, it’s a manners thing: I am a creature of my middle-class education and upbringing. Partly, it’s temperamental: I’m loyal and trusting by nature - and though on several occasions I have been burned as a as result - I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and not live in a state of constant paranoia and suspicion.

I Wish We Could All Be Friends

I really do. I find it very dispiriting when I see people in the Awake Not-a-Community turning on one another and splitting into factions, especially when I’m sympathetic to people in both opposing camps and I feel I’m being forced into a position where I have to take a side. And it does, I’m sorry, seem to me a bit navel-gazing and self-indulgent when there are surely so many bigger, worthier targets to aim at. There’s nothing I can do to stop it - not least because, as Miri AF argues here, it’s inevitable. But it’s something I prefer to avoid, as much as I possibly can, because I don’t much like the smell of burning witch any more than I like the priggishly self-righteous glee of the mob who brought her to book. Maybe she did have it coming to her; maybe she didn’t. Either way, the entity who stands most to benefit from the misery and suffering and division and bitterness these unedifying spectacles engender is not one with whom I have any sympathy.

As many of you will know my Dad has just died. Thank you so much for the lovely messages you have all been sending. Every one of them is hugely appreciated.

But without wishing to denigrate any of your kind, thoughtful comments here’s something I just have to get off my chest. Please try to resist using the phrase: “I’m sorry for your loss.”

I know it feels like a sensitive and appropriate formula designed to tread lightly on the delicate feelings of the grieving. But that’s part of the problem. It’s so depressingly, euphemistically greetings-card formulaic. And quite a recent formulation too. It only came into popular usage in the late Twentieth century but now it’s everywhere. People innocently think of it of as ‘the thing you are supposed to say’. If you’re one of them please don’t think I’m criticising you personally. I’d hate that, not least because I’m so grateful that you took the opportunity to say something (of which more in a moment…)

Here’s why I think it doesn’t work, though. It treats the beloved person you’ve just ‘lost’ like a glove or one half of a pair of socks. Or some car keys. Or some spectacles. The dead loved one was not an inanimate object but someone who, till very recently, was living and human and cherished. And the reason they are no longer there is not because they were mislaid on a walk or got stuck to the wall of the drying machine. They didn’t get lost: they DIED.

So what do you say instead? Not ‘my condolences’ - that’s another hideous phrase. The very word ‘condolences’ is so mealy mouthed and prissily formal and doleful (the very sound of it is like a tolling bell) that I wish it could be erased from the dictionary. Originally it had a use: in its singular it meant the state of sharing in another’s pain (‘con’ - with; dolere - to grieve or suffer) but now it’s just another bloody greeting cards formula. I suspect, as with “sorry for your loss”, the Americans are to blame for this development.

Not that I’m advocating silence. That’s even worse. If you know someone’s loved one has just died - and especially if they know that you know - then it’s no use not saying anything just because you are awkward or embarrassed or struggling to find the right phrase. Yes, it’s difficult. But the onus is on you as the grown-up, socially functioning and not-currently-stricken-with-grief person to get over that hurdle. Otherwise you are in danger of causing hurt, even resentment.

In the case of someone’s dad dying, for example, I’d probably say something like “So sorry to hear about your dad.” You don’t need to be any more specific than that. They’re not going to go “Sorry? Which dad?” Or: “My dad? What? Has something happened to him?” But what you’ve done is specifically identified the person being mourned, unlike in the “sorry for your loss” formula which feels almost like a cop-out, as if you know someone has died but you can’t remember exactly who.

There’s no need to tread on eggshells. Special mention here to yet another of my least favourite euphemisms: “pass”/ “pass away”. Not using the word ‘die’ doesn’t make the deceased any less dead. “I was feeling really terrible but because that person used the euphemism ‘passed away’ it feels like my loved one is still with us!” said no grieving person ever.

[I don’t much like the phrase ‘loved one’, either, come to think of it. But I’m not sure there’s any way round that one.]

Anyway, on the ‘no need to tread on eggshells’ front, what I mean is: don’t be afraid to talk about the Elephant in the Room.

The grieving relative is not going to be thinking: “Please nobody remind me that my loved one has just died.” Rather, they are likely going to be all too eager to mention what you might have feared was the unmentionable.

When someone you love has just died you think about them an awful lot. And sometimes it’s nice to put some of those swirling thoughts into words. So being a sympathetic listener is the kindest, most helpful thing to do. You might worry about the risk of being dragged into someone’s grieving psychodrama but this is unlikely to happen. The serious unburdening stuff is reserved for fellow mourners. But when someone less deeply involved asks a follow up question like “And were you close?” you’re not going to bore them rigid with teary reminiscences. You’re just going to be very appreciative that they didn’t look embarrassed and swiftly change the subject as, unfortunately, so many in this grieving-illiterate age of ours tend to do.

One more thing: again - I really do want to stress this - please, please, PLEASE don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed if you used one of my forbidden phrases when writing to me about Dad. You did the most important thing of all. You showed that you cared. Thank you.

Malcolm Hugh Delingpole 1935-2026. If you want to know more about him, check out this great conversation we recorded in 2017 (when we both held rather different views than we did later on issues like Donald Trump)

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Podcasts/2017-11-01-malcolm-delingpole

See also these films where my Dad talks to my brother Dick about some of the cine film he took of his early adventures as a racing driver

May I tell you about something quite interesting that happened to me on Twitter the other day?

I was trolling the Moon Mongs, as you do, with yet another post pouring scorn on their infantile space travel fantasy, when I noticed quite an intelligent-sounding response from someone sceptical of my scepticism.

The impression he gave was of being a veteran conspiracy theorist who had now attained a covetable state of measured enlightenment, giving him insights which he wished to share online with fellow discerning rabbit holers.

For some bizarre reason - and maybe this should have been a clue - this supposedly Awake expert had got it into his head that the various Moon missions were not a conspiracy but were real things that had actually happened.

Here is how he expressed his point:

Most conspiracies turn out to be true, but we need a candle in the Stygian darkness. I choose to believe in human ingenuity and the iterative nature of technological advancement. Believing that the Moon mission is fake, etc., must be a miserable headspace to be in. I'm good

Later, he added:

Put it this way, those of us who have been around the block with conspiracy research, psychedelics, & the occult know that there are particular dangers with it. The later you get redpilled in life (your mental model of reality gets detonated), the more prone you are to them. QED.

And:

[James Delingpole is] the guy who platforms really important people ( i.e. Simon Elmer) but when I recommend it, people say he's the one repeatedly posting on social media about false flags and moon landings being fake. It's exasperating. Credulous normie <middle ground> tinfoil maximalist.

So now you get a fairly good idea of the quality of my correspondent. He’s articulate and intelligent if a bit pretentious (‘Stygian’; ‘iterative’). He’s speaking from a position of insight and good faith because he is a longstanding truth movement insider. He’s a fairly regular listener (familiar with at least one of my podcast guests). And he’s no square, Daddy-O! He has done his share of psychedelics [groovy, baby!] and he knows all about the occult because he has done his ‘conspiracy research.’ All in all, I think we can agree, he’s the kind of commenter whose opinions anyone in the truth movement should treat with at least a modicum of respect because this guy is definitely no Normie.

But here’s the kicker. The guy is completely fake. He’s either a bot programmed with worryingly advanced AI. Or he’s a devious but reasonably bright kid working for one of the intelligence agencies.

We can infer his fakeness by looking at his name M19327t67 [Making up realistic fake names is never fun, especially when you’ve got to do lots of them, so I can see why he couldn’t be bothered]; by noting that he first appeared on Twitter as recently as January 2026 [another hallmark of false accounts]; and that his total ‘Following’ and ‘Followers’ are respectively 0 and 0.

Now obviously I’m not asking you to care very much about what goes on in the comments of a social media site you probably don’t even use. But my point here is a bit broader than that. What I’m trying to illustrate is the extraordinary degree to which what you might call the ‘dissident community’ is infiltrated and manipulated by bad actors. And also to show you just how sophisticated and calculating are the methods used by those bad actors to achieve a very specific effect.

The effect They - in this case the intelligence services, acting on behalf of our Satanic Overlords - are trying to achieve is ‘manufactured doubt.’

This becomes more obvious when you consider the underlying message of what this supposed ‘conspiracy theorist’ who has ‘been around the block’ is saying in his tweets.

He is saying: “C’mon guys. I’m one of you. I’m totally on your side, normally, but on this occasion, with the moon landings you’ve completely got it wrong. This stuff makes you and James look unhinged.”

And: “Look, I love this James Delingpole character as much as the rest of you. But his position on the moon landings betrays a nihilistic bleakness, a mental instability even, which should be of concern to us all.”

And: “And you know what else? It’s kind of damaging to our cause, all this crazy extremism, because it’s getting in the way of our vital mission to win over the Normies.”

Anyone who has spent any length of time in the conspiracy space will be familiar with these arguments. You’ll often find them in the comments sections below pretty much every conspiracy post. And invariably they will purport to come from someone who has long been a fan but who, on this occasion, is a little disappointed in the extreme direction you’ve taken.

Here - to show it’s not just me - is a tweet someone recently addressed to dissident cartoonist Bob Moran:

With Covid, you were on the right side of history.

Now you are utterly confused, but it’s OK nobody’s perfect.

This prompted OffGuardian to comment:

Very common.



“I usually agree with you about [old thing], but I gotta say on [current thing] you’re way off!”



Maybe accompanied by threats to stop reading or subscribing.

Yes. Exactly.

Now as you are probably aware, I haven’t been fully Awake for all that long. Five or six years, maybe. So until quite recently, these shenanigans were new to me. And my instinctive response was to assume that these negative comments came from a position of good faith.

Back then I had yet to come down off the high we’d all experienced during those joyous London marches. “Isn’t this great? Aren’t we all amazing? How lucky I am have met all these wonderful Awake people, like the oldest, bestest friends I never knew I had!”

Sure I was aware of the existence of such nefarious types as ‘Agents provocateurs’. Indeed, I’d seen one in action once, as we all marched - or rather ambled because that was more in keeping with the mood - past 10 Downing Street [official residence of the prime minister]. He was a young man who suddenly started yelling vicious abuse at the police. What made him stick out like a sore thumb was that his behaviour was so totally out of tune with the prevailing peace and love vibe. “Are you OK, mate?” someone asked him kindly, apparently concerned that he was mentally ill or having a fit. But the professional agitator - for that is clearly what he was - irritably waved his would-be helper away and redoubled his efforts to provoke the police. I remember his behaviour vividly because it seemed so wildly over the top, the way he jerked convulsively like one of those zombies in World War Z on the verge of assailing the protective fence surrounding the secure compound.

But bad actors like that young man, I believed back then, were very much the exception rather than the rule. My rules on whom to trust and whom not to trust were about as sophisticated as this: “If they’re nice to me then they’re definitely a goodie”. Partly, I suppose, this was down to congenital naivety; partly to the fact that I find it too exhausting and dispiriting to spend my life treating each new social encounter as the equivalent of dangling my testicles over a Sydney funnel web spider’s tunnel; and partly it came out of what seemed to be a rational calculation. “C’mon James. You’re just not big enough and important enough for the intelligence services to waste any of their valuable time and resources trying to entrap you or even spy on you. You just ain’t worf it, mate!”

How wrong can you be? Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and to an extraordinary document drawn to my attention in a post by a fellow Substacker called alimcforever. Though the document has been in the public domain since 2014, when it was exposed by Glenn Greenwald, this was the first I’d heard of it. I’ll let Alimcforever sum up the contents, which she does in a piece titled The Intelligence Playbook - Co-Ordinated Comment Campaigns Work and How Audiences Can Spot Them.

In February 2014, Glenn Greenwald published a classified GCHQ training presentation from the Snowden archive in The Intercept. It was called “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations” and it was classified SECRET//SI//REL TO USA, FVEY, which means it was shared across the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The presentation came from a GCHQ unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG. According to its own slides, JTRIG had two core purposes: injecting false material onto the internet to destroy the reputation of targets, and using social sciences to manipulate online conversations and activism to produce outcomes the government considered desirable. That is GCHQ’s own description of what they were doing.

The slides laid out what they called a “Disruption Operational Playbook” — infiltration operations, ruse operations, set piece operations, false flag operations, false rescue operations, disruption operations, and sting operations. They also listed named tools. UNDERPASS manipulated online polls. SLIPSTREAM inflated page view counts. GESTATOR amplified approved YouTube content. SILVERLORD censored videos flagged as extremist. SPRING BISHOP found private Facebook photos. CHANGELING spoofed email addresses so messages appeared to come from someone else.

By early 2013, over 150 JTRIG staff were fully trained, and a separate initiative was rolling out a reduced version of the tradecraft to more than 500 other GCHQ analysts.

Did you get that? Thirteen years ago, just one of the three branches of UK intelligence had already trained at least 650 operatives in the art of internet black ops. And not only against ‘terrorists’ or ‘hostile nations’ but, as the article goes on to note, “against people suspected but not charged with ordinary crimes or against people engaged in online protest activity.” Against people like you and me, in other words. If freedom movements were already that heavily infiltrated and manipulated in the pre-Covid, pre-Slava-Ukraini, pre-Gaza, pre 77th Brigade eras, can you imagine how much more so they are now?

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. The article lists, from JTRIG’s Art of Deception training slides, the 10 Principles of Influence which GCHQ staff can use to divide, dispirit and disrupt the State’s enemies. [That’ll be you and me again, btw]

Flattery — compliment the target first, build a sense of connection before introducing doubt. The slides describe this as constructing an experience in the target’s mind that they accept without realising what is happening.

Social Compliance / Authority — invoke expertise or institutional credibility to pressure conformity.

Herd — make it look like everyone disagrees, create the appearance of consensus where none exists.

Consistency — hold people to past statements to trap them in contradictions.

Reciprocity — give something first (praise, engagement, attention) so the target feels obliged to respond.

Distraction — redirect the conversation away from the core point.

Time — create urgency or delay, whichever serves the operation.

Deception — present false information as true.

Dishonesty — misrepresent who you are, what you want, or who you work for.

Need and Greed — exploit what the target wants, whether that is validation, engagement, or audience growth.

For me Ali’s piece - and explanatory TikTok video - were Eureka moments. They opened my eyes to the reasoning behind phenomena which had hitherto made no sense to me, such as all those critical comments I so often get online which employ the “I usually love your work but…” or the “James Delingpole used to talk a lot of sense but…” formulae.

It’s true that for most of my journalistic career I espoused opinions very different from the ones I hold now. So I’m certainly not discounting the possibility that some of these comments really are from genuine former fans upset that their favourite pro-Israel, pro-Monarchy, pro-Empire, pro-Trump conservative has turned into a babbling tin-foil-hatted loon whose new position on all his former likes is that they are baby-eating satanists. But the frequency with which these comments appeared, often in clusters, and usually below pieces destroying particularly cherished Normie sacred cows - a piece for Conservative Woman saying that AIDS was a faked pandemic, say - did make me wonder. I mean, isn’t the normal, natural response when one of your favourite writers goes off just to stop reading them? You don’t lurk in the comments section below their articles like some embittered former lover, pouring out bile to show them how betrayed and rejected you feel. Why - unless you were a psychopath, or maybe a masochist - would you bother? Who has the time for that sort of thing, anyway?

But once I’d realised that these formulae came straight out of the JTRIG playbook it made much more sense. By claiming to have been a fan the intelligence operative/bot assumes the mantle of a trustworthy in-group member. It’s not necessary that all the other commenters should be taken in. The purpose is merely to lay a few breadcrumbs of doubt. All it takes is one or two carefully placed words of scepticism among otherwise enthusiastic comments and on an unconscious level the loyal followers will be set to thinking: “Well not everyone seems to think this podcaster/Tweeter is as great as I do. Might it be that my judgement is awry?”

This offers quite a useful insight into the mindset and strategy aims of the intelligence services - and their Cabal masters - with regards to the Truth movement. Their approach seems to be one of damage limitation. That is, They have realised that They are not going to be able to reprogramme us back to Normiedom because we’re all too far gone for that. And They can’t just kill us all because that would be a bit obvious. So the best way of containing us and neutralising us, they appear to have decided, is to reduce us to lots of bickering, mutually distrusting sub groups incapable of uniting to form a cohesive resistance or indeed of agreeing on which conspiracies are real and which ones have just been invented by our enemies to make us look ridiculous.

An example of the latter is what I call the ‘Discrediting Our Cause’ fallacy. This, or a variant thereon, is something you often encounter if you endorse one of the more outré conspiracy theories - say, Paul is Dead, or ‘dinosaurs never existed but dragons did’, or, the most obvious one, Flat Earth. You find yourself being accused of letting the side down by embracing the kind of lunatic fringe notions that frighten off the Normies and prevent them from ever learning the truth about other, much more important and real conspiracies.

There are lots of good counterarguments to this fallacy, which I rehearsed three years ago in a piece inevitably titled ‘Discrediting Our Cause’.

It began:

“I was all ready to believe that 9/11 was an inside job but then someone mentioned Flat Earth”, said no one ever.

I wrote it because, at the time, I believed that the commenters engaging in this fallacious argument were doing so in good faith and just needed my help reasoning them out of their obtuseness with a few logical home truths. But with hindsight, I think it more likely that most of them were in fact professional disruption agents. There are two reasons I think this. One is the evidence of that JTRIG document which proves that, yes, the security services really are that petty, devious and micromanagerial. The other is more of a gut feeling based on personal observation of how genuine Awake people think and behave.

Suppose for example, you’re listening to a podcast starring Owen Benjamin and you are miffed to discover that he doesn’t think pandas are real. Well if you are genuinely Awake you’ll likely do one of three things: 1. Go and do your own panda research to see whether he might have a point. 2. Shrug your shoulders and maybe send him a message about how you once saw some pandas in San Diego zoo and they looked pretty real to you is all you’re sayin’ or 3. Fast forward to a bit of the podcast you find more congenial. What you’re unlikely to do is publicly to accuse Benjamin of having so poisoned the wells of conspiracy land with his rabid anti-panda nonsense that you can’t take him seriously on anything any more whether it’s livestock maintenance or space travel or the Jews. Nor are you likely to get your favourite AI to produce a long list of ‘pandas are real’ arguments with which you then spam the comments. Nor yet are you going to tell anyone who’ll listen that Benjamin is CIA (because obviously the idea that pandas aren’t real is so outlandish that only a CIA operative would espouse such theories in order to expose the Truth movement to ridicule).

Maybe my instinct is wrong here. But speaking for myself, certainly, I’m just not that interested in policing my fellow conspiracy theorists, let alone harassing them if I consider them to be in error. If I’m going to invest valuable time trolling someone then I’m going to troll someone - an environmental activist say, or a politician or a Rockefeller - whom I consider to be genuinely working for the Enemy, not some comrade down the rabbit hole who might or might not have got things a bit wrong on one tiny but ultimately irrelevant issue.

When I do see supposedly Awake people behaving otherwise it makes me quite suspicious. For example, on one occasion I found myself under fire for entertaining the theory - propounded by Richard D Hall, Iain Davis and others - that the Manchester Arena ‘suicide bombing’ at the Ariana Grande concert which supposedly resulted in 22 deaths was fake. How could I be so heartless, insensitive, click-baity and cynical as to deny the deaths of all those innocent children - such as little Saffie Roussos, 8? Did I realise that not everything is a conspiracy?

Now what interested me about these comments was that they didn’t come from Normies. They came from people who - purportedly - were at least as Awake as I was. One or two of them I’d got to know at Awake events - marches, my podcast live extravaganzas, etc - and had come to think of as friends, allies, kindred spirits. Yet here they were publicly attacking a fellow conspiracy theorist for the crime of, well, being a conspiracy theorist.

It made no sense to me. And if something makes no sense, I’ve come to realise since becoming a battle hardened conspiracy loon, it’s invariably a tell. It means that in one way or another you are being played.

Again, it all comes down to first principles. What is the most basic truth you discover once you’ve been down the rabbit hole for a while? Well, one of them, I would suggest, is that everything you formerly believed to be true is potentially up for grabs. You simply cannot take anything you are told at face value any longer because They lie to you all the time about everything.

Once you’ve accepted this fact - and how could you not with even half an operative brain cell? - you acquirea degree of humility. “Sure I think I think what I know about this or that conspiracy topic,” you say to yourself, “But I’m certainly not going to get too het up about Awake folk who think differently because we’re all on a journey and some of us move at slower speeds.”

What you don’t normally do is pile into the comments section with a “BUT THINK OF THE DEAD CHILDREN!” This is because - as I once tried patiently to explain in a piece titled ‘Will No One Think of the (Probably) Fake Children??’ - guilt-shaming a truth seeker into ducking sensitive issues lest he offend someone is not just to misunderstand entirely the nature and purpose of being a truth seeker - but it’s also like giving the Enemy a free pass.

And maybe, I’ve begun reluctantly to suspect, that is not accidental. I refer you to my earlier point about things that make no sense being a tell. It made absolutely no sense to me, for example, when three podcasters I like and trust - Francis O’Neill, Miri AF and Leo Biddle - took a great deal of flak on Twitter and elsewhere for claiming that a popular online dissident called Lucy Connolly was in fact most likely a disinformation agent working for the intelligence services. The vitriol directed towards them (from ‘Awake’ accounts not Normie ones) was out of all proportion to any offence they might have given. It felt unnatural, co-ordinated - as if the hive had been alerted and ordered: attack mode. Why were these alleged conspiracy theorists getting so very cross with other conspiracy theorists for advancing a conspiracy theory? Was there anything about this particular theory that put it beyond the pale of acceptable conspiracy theorising?

Well not as far as I could see, no. Their suspicions about Lucy Connolly’s authenticity struck me as well-founded. But even had they not been, why the song and dance? Since when has it been the job of anyone in Conspiracy World to declare ex Cathedra which conspiracy theories are true and which ones are unacceptable? Who made any of us the King of Rules?

I smelled a rat at the time. Now that I’m familiar with that JTRIG strategy document I smell an even bigger rat, for I consider it to be more likely than not that the attacks on O’Neill, Miri AF and Biddle were coordinated. This is often the way when you get too close to the truth. You are subjected to an organised pile-on, partly to discredit you and your message, partly as a warning to the more easily-spooked that they had best steer well clear. It’s so common a phenomenon that there’s even a well-worn phrase for it: “When you’re taking flak you’re over the target.”

Any Awake podcaster or blogger worth their salt will have experienced this. The closer-to-the-bone your subject matter - vaccines, ‘The Jews’, moon landings are fake, say - the more likely you are to receive the attentions of the Enemy. And if They are not trying to close you down or at least dick you about in every conceivable way possible, then, I’m sorry, that’s a bad sign: it means They don’t consider you a threat. Either that or it means you’re secretly one of Them.

Bizarrely - but flatteringly - the Enemy do seem to consider me a threat. I know this thanks to the research of Alex Kriel (aka Thinking Coalition) who tells me that I’m one of the most deboosted people on Twitter - 85 per cent deboosted. [Which I think means I get only 15 per cent of the traffic I would get if I wasn’t censored]. Agent 131711 once noticed something similar about the way Substack treats dissident voices; he mentioned my account as one of those which would be much bigger if it weren’t suppressed by the algorithms. I can’t prove this but I don’t doubt it.

On a recent podcast, Alex Thomson - who used to work for GCHQ, so presumably he would know - explained to me why I’m a target. Essentially, it’s because I’m a gamekeeper turned poacher. I used to be semi-Establishment, and therefore an insider in Their system, and I used to be a reasonably well known journalist/commentator with a decent size reach. This makes me more dangerous because my former credibility might tempt some of my old audience into thinking: “Well maybe there’s something in this crazy conspiracy stuff after all.”

You’d think my Normie Establishment background would present the perfect opportunity for one of those media hatchet jobs that papers like the Daily Mail do so well. “He used to be a celebrated columnist, read by the great and the good across the land. But now…” I suppose I can’t rule out the possibility that this might happen one day. But it seems to be not how They operate. If They want to close you down, They prefer to starve you of publicity, almost airbrushing you out of history, if They possibly can. And if They can simultaneously keep your profile suppressed in the Awake realm, so much the better.

This has all made me less trusting and more suspicious than I used to be, which is a shame. I’d much prefer to be able to assume the best in everyone, just like in those heady days in the Plandemic when all had a common enemy and cause and we all felt like we were on the same team.

That said, I’m not a naturally distrustful person so I do still tend to give people the benefit of the doubt until they do something to trigger my alarm system. I find that one of the most effective gauges is how open and frank someone is. If they have to second guess themselves before answering a question, that’s not a good sign. Most genuine Awake people, in my experience, are so committedly, almost monomaniacally truth-driven, that their ego takes a back seat: they’re happy to be proved wrong if you can come up with a more convincing explanation.

I think this is partly why so many of the most authentic conspiracy theorists are Christians. If you are on a quest for truth, beauty and goodness because you see these as expressions of God, therefore making them the noblest of goals, you develop a knack for spotting the insincere, the counterfeit, the deceptive and the dishonest, for these are satanic qualities which your soul finds abhorrent. Your fickle brain might find them enticing; but not your gut.

In fact, it’s likely that our rational brain can too often be our enemy because the intellect - with its concomitant pride - is very much the realm in which the Deceiver likes to operate. Notice how very word-dependent are the big lies - such as the Moon Landings - which They tell us about our world. They seduce and beguile you with what Owen Benjamin calls wizardry and what Peter Duke at the Duke Report calls the EpiWar. With language often laden with pseudo-scientific terminology designed to flatter you into thinking you are clever and part of the inner circle, They dangle sparkly and enticing narratives before you to tempt your intellect. As I said to Bob Moran in a podcast we’ve just recorded - and which you’re going to love: Bob is always great - we imagine ourselves to be marlins, princes of the oceans with our proud dorsal fins and our magnificent spiky snouts, free to swim where we will. But the sad reality is that most of us are already on the hook, being played and slowly reeled in, until finally we’re hoicked inside the boat - and gaffed.

This is why Christians place such a high premium on the quality called ‘discernment’. It enables you - by God’s grace - to sift out the signal from the noise and chatter. Instead of being distracted by the manipulative language of the Deceiver’s minions you discern the true picture through a process of pattern recognition. So, for example, when the media tells you that dozens of babies have had their throats slits by evil Hamas terrorists flying in on hang-gliders, you don’t go: “This is so evil and sick that I am now entirely comfortable with the carpet bombing of tens of thousands of Palestinian children.” Instead you go, “Wait. Isn’t this the same media that assured us during ‘Covid’ that vaccines were safe and effective? And isn’t this story coming from the same Netanyahu regime which, hitherto, has not exactly been synonymous with integrity, saintliness and unvarnished truth-telling?”

When you know, as John tells us, that Satan is the ‘god of this world’ you don’t find it such a stretch to accept that everything you are told is a lie - because you know that lies are Satan’s speciality. This doesn’t mean you become cynical, which is much more a trait of the black-pilled than the white-pilled. It just makes you more savvy - ‘wise as serpents’ - about the nature of the system in which we live, and more alert to the most effective methods of negotiating it.

For this Jesus is the answer. And I say this not in a cheesy evangelical way - don’t frighten the horses! - but in the sense that whether you are a believer or no Jesus’s teachings offer us all a linguistic defence against the dark arts. I’m indebted for this brilliant insight to Peter Duke and his Christian Epistemology theory that ‘the methods demonstrated by Jesus constitute a practical discipline of epistemic defence in an adversarial, confused, or obfuscated information environment.’

One example of this is when Jesus urges us to ‘become as little children’. That’s because, unlike grown-ups, children can’t be fobbed off with elaborate, bullshit answers they don’t understand. But I think probably the most relevant of Jesus’s teachings to the discussion we’re having here is “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

It has certainly been quite helpful to me, at any rate, when I’m trying to work out who the baddies are in a world where lots of the baddies are pretending to be goodies - or at least to be your friends and allies. Quite a few times I’ve found myself being burnt by people wearing a smiley face and told myself “Well they can’t have meant to burn me. They’re wearing a smiley face. So it must have been a mistake.” Then they do it again. And again. And you start to see a pattern emerging. Genuine friends and allies rarely hurt you by accident and when they do, they apologise for it. Fake friends and allies on the other hand…

Knowing better now how the Enemy operates, I find myself increasingly wary of public spats within the Truth movement. I’m not saying there aren’t legitimate reasons to be suspicious of certain Awake influencers, especially ones with massive followings. Nor do I think it necessarily ignoble or vexatious to seek to expose people in our ranks who are seriously compromised. [I have no regrets, for example, about having called out David Icke]. Clearly - as we established earlier - there are traitors among us and if we can catch them bang to rights then why shouldn’t we expose them?

My worry is that is first, too often, these witch hunts end up burning more innocent people at the stake than they do genuinely guilty ones. Second, that they only serve to stir up the paranoia and mutual suspicion and division of which the Truth movement has more than enough already, thank you very much. And third - a bit like malcontents reporting neighbours to whom they’ve long borne a grudge to the Stasi - that they give bad people cover to do harmful things in the guise of public service.

Sure it could be that the authors of these self-righteous essays, pontificating podcasts and snarky comments exposing this or that compromised figure in the Awake movement may be doing it for no other reason than that of selfless service to the higher cause of Truth, Justice and Enlightenment. But they could equally be doing it because they want to boost their flagging traffic; because they want to take out someone they perceive as a rival; because they’re actually more or less right about a lot of things but because they’re so cynical and embittered and angry and battle worn they mistakenly assume everyone else is acting in bad faith even when they’re not; because they have a hang up about how limited their writing and podcasting skills are and also about their lack of hinterland and dearth of original ideas; because they’ve no sense of humour and are up their own arse and agonised, finger-wagging earnestness is all they can do; or because they’re just a dick…

Or, of course, because they have been inserted into the Truth movement by one nefarious agency or another, and they’re just doing their job as a deep cover agent: divide and disrupt.

Anyone who thinks that I’m calling out anyone specific here would be mistaken. [Though, to be fair, I find it hard not to visualise a certain grinning face in the ‘just a dick’ category]. Obviously I have my suspicions about various figures in the movement, as do we all. But I would rarely be so crass or potentially falsely incriminating as to declare them publicly, not least because I know how hurtful it is to be on the receiving end when someone gets it completely wrong about you.

Perhaps my problem is that I’m just not a serious enough person. Maybe if I were a really important and meaningful Awake thought leader I would be knuckling under to my true responsibilities: to write long, detailed essays in several parts, explaining why this or that person in the Awake sphere should not be taken seriously by their 20,000 or so subscribers (and 500 paying ones) because boring, earnest reasons with footnotes and links. But, frivolous buffoon that I am, I tend to take the view that we Awake influencers really ought to have better things to do with our lives.

What I once wrote about my favourite pastime - The World Is Run By Satanists And You’re Worried About Fox Hunting - applies across the board. When you’ve got characters like Hillary doing frazzledrip and Peter Thiel dragging us all into the slave system of his digital panopticon and Netanyahu balls deep in his ritual blood sacrifices - and on and on we could go because there’s no shortage of REAL baddies out there - is it not a bit self-indulgent to use what platform you have in the Awake realm to be throwing shade on relative nonentities whose only crime is to be slightly less correct in their thinking or unimpeachably independent in their funding model than your impossibly high standards demand they should be?

One of the things we Awake folk have in common is that - commendably - we really don’t like to be told what to do or think. That’s how we got to be Awake in the first place: we reach our own conclusions rather than allowing ourselves, Normie-like, to be cattle prodded into the latest fashionable narrative. For the same reason, a lot of us don’t feel terribly comfortable joining gangs. We know how easy it is for gangs to get infiltrated and co-opted. Which, by the way, is another of my tells for spotting wrong ‘uns in our movement: people who participate too frequently in pile-ons. That kind of pack behaviour, especially when deployed to take down a target, is one of the Enemy’s tricks, not one of ours.

In addition to the examples of this swarm-and-destroy tactic mentioned already, I’d like to mention a couple of other heroes I’ve seen being subjected to this treatment - Sasha Latypova and Mike Yeadon. I suppose I could totally have misjudged them and failed to realise that they are in fact baby-eating servants of the Cabal inserted into the Awake movement to discourage us from taking life-enhancing kill shots. But when I see tittle tattle dredged up about their past business affairs, or whatever, and when I see it being amplified online by individuals (or possibly bots) clearly in cahoots with one another, I do not find myself going: “Ooh here’s an interesting piece of goss. Let me share it among my followers. And see whether I can find someone to talk about it on my next podcast.” Instead, I go: “This is a hit job. They are being smeared, yet again, because they are considered dangerous and too close to the target.”

How do I know this? Well I don’t for certain but I can make a pretty good inference using the “Ye shall know them by their fruits” yardstick. I look at their public statements; I read Latypova’s Substack and Yeadon’s Telegram channel; I reflect on my personal interactions with them; I listen to what people whose opinions I value have to say about them; and I ask myself: “Have either of these people ever done anything which gives me cause to suspect them? Have they done anything in their post-Awake lives that gives me reason to doubt that they are anything other than doughty, sincere and trustworthy heroes of the Awake resistance?” And if I changed my mind on this, I don’t think I’d be in any rush to make my reservations public. At least not until I had decided to my own satisfaction that the damning evidence was overwhelming and that they constituted a genuine threat. More immediately, though, what I would do is what I always do when I lose faith in one of my comrades. I just stop paying them any attention.

Isn’t this the point of that discernment we all pride ourselves on having? That it gives us the freedom to decide whom we’re going to listen to occasionally, whom we’re going to avoid like the plague and whom we love so much we’re going to become one of their paid subscribers. No one us is forcing us. It’s totally up to us as individuals to decide where we stand, say, on UK Column’s China coverage or Jerm Warfare’s position on chemtrails and whether we think they’ve jumped the shark or whether it’s all a lot of fuss about not very much.

Happily, I think most of us DO understand this. Something I’ve noticed is that whenever I’ve found myself being knifed in the back or smeared or otherwise mistreated, as happens in Awake world on occasion unfortunately, it always feels very hurtful and personal, but the effect it has on my support base is almost non-existent. I think the last time it happened, I lost a grand total of one follower, whom I like to picture as a Lynda Snell village gossip character, only with delusions of intellectual heft because she has a PhD from some crappy university in something like crochet and My Little Pony studies. Obviously, I hate to blow smoke up my own bottom, but I reckon that this is because it’s quite hard for any intelligent and, yes, discerning person to listen to my podcasts and read my articles and not come to the conclusion that I’m exactly who I say am, because raw, shambolic, self-deprecating honesty is kinda my schtick. Or, to put it another way, if you follow my stuff and you’re so unbelievably stupid as to conclude that I’m a wrong ‘un then you really don’t deserve me and I wouldn’t want you listening to me or reading me, let alone pressing your grubby spare change on me. Go and bother Triggerpod instead, I’m sure it’s much more your style.

But I see I have started to rant. And anyway, I have been banging on for far too long. Let me just conclude by saying that while I’m not so paranoid as to believe that everyone in Awake world is an enemy agent, I do now suspect - and with solid evidence to support it - that they are a lot more prevalent than we might like. They here to spy on us, certainly. But primarily they are here to sow division and confusion. I don’t think we should be in the business of making their job easy, do you?