Adolescence is toxic, we can all agree on that. But I wonder whether Reacher isn’t more dangerous.

Unlike Adolescence, which you’d only watch if you were a member of the brainwashed Normie chattering classes gulled by the notion that it’s landmark, important, state-of-the-nation TV, Reacher is the sort of thing you might easily mistake for harmless escapism.

I did so myself when I watched the first season, which I reviewed in the Spectator. “It sounds contrived, cartoonish and formulaic, which indeed it is a bit, but it’s done in so delightful a way that you really don’t mind,” I wrote. And: “…Great fun, one of those series you look forward to and could happily binge-watch, even though you know it’s not going to add much to your quotient of brain cells.”

Well, at least I was right about the brain cells. But Reacher isn’t just dumbed-down TV so moronically stupid it makes even retards feel brainy. It also serves a very deliberate and cynical propaganda purpose, which is stunningly obvious when you notice it but which most of its audience never will notice because they’re so busy congratulating themselves on what dumb-ass, so-bad-it’s-good, old fashioned entertainment they’re enjoying.

Perhaps the most shameless propaganda lurks within the central premise. Jack Reacher is an ex-Army investigator. His dad - Semper fi - was a Marine. He regularly collaborates with the police and with the three-letter agencies, sometimes going to bed with them if they are female and implausibly hot which at least one of them is per season. The guys he prefers to hang out with are all ex-military. The values he upholds are those of the military. Everything that is good about America is embodied in the military and, for the most part, by the mostly honest, decent, courageous, long-suffering, wise-cracking cops and the mostly brave, efficient, if frustratingly by-the-book three-letter agencies.

Do you see what might be wrong with any of that? Well, no, obviously if you’re a Normie, you wouldn’t. And therein lies the problem.

I’m reminded of my early days venturing down the rabbit hole and coming upon the work of Alan Watt, host of the Cutting Through The Matrix podcast. Watt knew more about the conspiracy realm than I’ll ever know and his podcasts were part of my education. Such a shame that I never got to have him on the Delingpod before he died (not unmysteriously, as is the way when you are too much over the target).

Anyway, I remember listening to one of Watt’s monologues where he was explaining that TV and film drama served two purposes - the ulterior one of entertainment and the hidden one of mass mind manipulation. The key to spotting the hidden one, he said, was to ignore the distractions of plot, character and incident and instead to focus on the broader overview of its depiction of the world.

So, for example, screen drama is a relentless promoter of sexual infidelity - to the point where if you’re not having an affair in your own life you feel like you’re missing out. Ditto drug and alcohol use. And - definitely worth listening to the podcast I did with Jason Christoff on this subject because it’s a real eye-opener - coffee-drinking.

But perhaps of all the narratives that TV drama pushes, none is so prevalent as the one that Reacher, and series like Reacher, ram down your throat until you almost choke: Authority is your Friend; the cops are there to help you; police corruption is so rare as to deserve its own BBC TV series Line of Duty illustrating just how exceptional it is; crimes get solved in the end, even if it has to be by one of those cold-case sleuths; and in the unlikely event that the police can’t help, well there’s always the super police - those amazingly talented, committed and professional three-letter agencies which are the last line of defence protecting all us humble, grateful ordinary folk from Those Who Would Seek To Destroy Us.

Rarely, if ever, is it mentioned that among Those Who Would Seek To Destroy Us are those three-letter agencies themselves. Nothing personal. They’re just doing their job. The three letter agencies - MI5 and MI6; the CIA; the FBI; the DEA; etc - do not work for us useless eaters and never have. Like the police, like the military, like all the various branches of the ‘security state’, they are there to serve the interests of the true rulers of this world, whom we might term the Predator Class or the Cabal.

Some readers may be offended at so bleak a characterisation of our heroic forces of law and order. Look, I’m not saying everyone who works for them is bad. Ted Gunderson: he was FBI, so there’s at least one exception straight off. But I am saying they are all bad institutionally because that is how they were designed. [See, eg, just how many police departments across the US states have the Masonic square and compass in their logo. Do you think in the eyes of such institutions everyone is equal before the law?]

It’s a hard pill for many of us to swallow, this notion that the Authorities are NOT our friend. And the reason it’s so unswallowable a pill is because it contradicts everything we’ve been told throughout our lives, not least by the idiot box in our sitting room. Dixon of Dock Green; Hawaii Five-O; The Sweeney; Kojak; Starsky and Hutch; The Professionals… I shudder now to think how many hours of my impressionable early years might have been squandered allowing myself to be brainwashed while under the delusion that I was being entertained.

Big-budget, mass market entertainment series like Reacher play an important role of this deception process. As Alan Watt used to explain, most of us have a false understanding of why it is that leading newscasters, top actors, high profile movie directors and bestselling writers are paid so much. We think - because we have been trained to do so - that it is all the result of public demand or market value. But it’s not. The real reason these people are paid so much is because their services are so valuable to the Cabal, which derives much of its power - and maintains that power - from their ongoing ability to push false narratives on the mass of the populace.

One of these false narratives concerns the identity of all those scary baddies who are out to get us. We are told, depending on the mood of the times, that we are threatened by evil Commies or Mafiosi or wicked Muslim terrorists or deranged serial killers or merciless drug dealers or - in the case of Adolescence - 13 year old white kids radicalised by Andrew Tate. I’m not trying to claim that there are not people in these categories who may pose a threat. (Well, apart from the 13-year old white kid one, which is the purest bollocks). What I am saying is that in reality most of these threats emanate, ultimately, from the small number of ‘elite’ families who run the world like a criminal cartel. Their business model includes: disaster capitalism; drugs; child trafficking; revolution; war. The ‘security services’ are there to facilitate this process, whether in the form of cover ups and misdirection (eg the police) or in the form of the assassinations and other black ops carried out by the Special Forces and the three-letter agencies.

Perhaps it now becomes clearer why the Reacher series of novels were allowed by the publishing industry and book trade to become such massive bestsellers. And why the latest TV adaptation is enjoying its third season on Amazon Prime. While its mainly Normie audience and readership are going “Tee hee! Reacher just did that cool thing where he breaks the dead guy’s limbs with his bare hands so he can hide the body in the trunk of the car!”, they are quietly being programmed into becoming the compliant idiots of the controlling elites.

Once you’ve started noticing, you can’t stop noticing. Another thing heavily promoted on Reacher is junk food consumption. Reacher himself is ludicrously buff, with the kind of physique you could only acquire as the result of hours, daily, in the gym, and a diet comprising raw eggs and grass fed beef. His crew are lean and agile. The women - at least the designated love interest ones - are toned. Yet not once do we see any of them doing anything that might contribute to this health and fitness. On the contrary, they are forever visibly bingeing on take outs and the kind of trash you might find on sale in gas stations. None of the good guys smokes, it’s true. (In Reacher, smoking is a bad-guy signifier). But I doubt that is for audience health-promotion reasons. More likely, it’s because the Cabal have realised that tobacco or nicotine are actually beneficial in warding off the ill-effects of some of the other stuff they use to poison us, like vaccines or 5G.

Then there are the baddies. The baddies in Reacher are baddies because they’re just EVIL. They’re guys like the latest baddie Xavier Quinn, a wrong un of indeterminate ethnicity whose main purpose in life - whatever he might imagine to the contrary - is to be so horrible, so brutal, so cacklingly villainous that when he is eventually killed by Reacher we can all go “Yay! Reacher finally nailed the bastard!”

But why is this series so eager to whip us up into a state where we don’t merely want the bad guys brought to justice but killed - and the more mercilessly the better? Because, of course, it wants to make us morally complicit in the kind of thing the security state already does, all the time, anyway - albeit unofficially. “I don’t want this bastard to have the luxury of a fair trial and life in prison,” you’re meant to go. “I want to see him die now!” So many cop films and TV shows do this - the tradition goes at least as far back as Dirty Harry (1971) where we just can’t wait to see that horrible, crazy evil guy wasted by Clint Eastwood’s .45 Magnum - that we now take it almost for granted. Reacher simply takes this formula to the next level. That is, if you are a baddie in Reacher, even if you’re just some kind of low-level henchman, the likelihood is that you’re going to exit the show not in handcuffs but via some savage, extra-judicial summary justice courtesy of our friend Jack Reacher.

In one particularly revolting scene in Season Three - well, I found it revolting, anyway - Reacher and his cute but capable girl DEA squeeze leave a wounded bad guy stranded on a blazing boat and rejoice as he goes up in flames. Really? Is this where we now are in our civilisational advancement? Where popular TV encourages us to rejoice in someone being burned alive because, hey, he deserves it, he’s a bad guy? Whatever happened to the rule of law? Whatever happened to the Christian possibility of redemption? Oh - and if summary justice is such a cool, sexy thing, how would we all feel if it were being administered against us, by some security state apparatchik without quite the same exaggeratedly refined sense of justice of the impeccably, nay almost tediously, moralistic Jack Reacher?

The other main function of the baddies in Reacher, of course, is to distract the viewer from thinking too hard about who is really behind the world’s worst criminal activity. Xavier Quinn is presented to us as some random, deus ex machina, mastermind of a gun-running operation attempting to supply all those cells of evil foreign terrorists who have infiltrated America and are trying to destroy it from within. Of course, in real life there would be no need for Reacher to spy on this operation and bust it wide open because the Authorities would already be aware of it and steering well clear, for fear of jeopardising a vital, Elites revenue stream run by the CIA. That’s why series like Reacher tend to get large amounts of technical advice and even financial support from the three letter-agencies. They tell the public exactly what the three-letter agencies want them to hear.

Watching Reacher with Awake eyes transforms your viewing experience. It’s unintentionally hilarious. There’s a scene in season three where one of the characters suddenly announces: “Pack your sunscreen. We’re going to LA.” Excuse me? You’ve got to admire the diabolical genius of this shoehorning-in, on the flimsiest of pretexts, of a product which every half-Awake person - but not Normies sadly - knows damn well to avoid like the plague. (Mind you, for the ‘no-sunscreen’ protocol properly to work you need to steer clear of seed oils. Which obviously Reacher and his crew don’t do: their diet is drowning in them…).

I guess the Normie hot-take counter to my thesis might be that Reacher, who is continually on the move, staying in cheap motels because he has no fixed abode, living out of a suitcase in the same rancid t-shirt which he has picked up in the local thrift store, is actually some kind of anti-Establishment off-grid role model. Nope. That doesn’t wash with me. If anything, he’s the poster boy for Klaus Schwab’s “You will own nothing and be happy.”

Every idiot knows that the world is a globe. It’s so obvious - duh - it really doesn’t need explaining.

But you still want me to explain? Really??

OK, well let’s start with the basics. Do you remember how, when you were at school, your teacher had an actual model of the globe sitting on his - or, depending on your age - her desk? Do you honestly think a trusted authority figure like your teacher would have done that if globes weren’t real?

Now the BBC. For over fifty years now the BBC’s logo has been a globe. The BBC is a trusted news organisation which broadcasts to billions of people, every day, all over the world. Do you think an institution of such unimpeachable authority and augustness as the BBC would have allowed their logo to promulgate a lie for more than half a century? And do you think one of their vast teams of highly-trained fact-checkers wouldn’t have noticed?

And don’t get me started on the main theatre in early 17th century London where they put on the plays of the most famous playwright in history, William Shakespeare, who could barely write his own name but was definitely responsible for all the masterpieces attributed to him. No, not the Rose, you fool. I mean the other one. Yes. Blimey, you are slow. The Globe. Yes. The Globe!

I could, of course, go on with further unarguable proofs that the world is a spinning ball. But I feel I have done enough to make my case. The world is a spinning ball because, well it obviously just is.

Or is it?

The last time I broached this subject, about a year ago, I was more or less on the fence as to whether the world was a globe, or whether it was flat - or hollow or whatever.

https://delingpole.substack.com/p/some-of-the-cleverest-people-i-know

It’s not that I can prove for certain that the earth is flat. Just that I find that ‘spinning globe theory’ has rather too much in common with all the other theories we are taught at school as accepted fact - evolutionary theory; man-made global warming theory; contagion theory; etc - but which have turned out, on closer examination by those few who can be bothered to look, to be a busted flush.

I can’t remember now whether it’s Delingpole’s First Law or Delingpole’s Second Law, but whichever it is it goes like this: The more often They tell us something, the less likely it is that it is actually true.

So, for example, we know that dinosaurs never existed because small children, boys especially, are taught about little else. Kids can’t even escape these made-up beasts when they go to bed because they’re printed all over their pyjamas, on the wall posters they got from the Natural History Museum and probably on their pillowcases too.

Ditto space travel, which is the other thing children, small boys especially, get rammed down their throats almost from infancy. Buzz Lightyear, space rockets, Tintin Destination Moon, aliens, the Clangers, Star Trek, Star Wars, planets and stars on your bedroom ceiling that glow in the dark. And spaceman pyjamas - and pillowcases, obviously.

We know that the Titanic didn’t sink from hitting an iceberg because of A Night To Remember (1958), Raise The Titanic (1980) and Titanic (1997).

We know that airships were safe and effective because of The Hindenburg (1975).

We know that nuclear power is safe because of The China Syndrome (1979) and the 2019 miniseries Chernobyl.

We know that climate change is bollocks because they never stop talking about it.

I think we can apply the same rule, fairly comfortably, to the concept of ‘the globe’, don’t you?

It’s so ubiquitous that even though I now believe in spinning ball theory about as much as I do the notion that 9/11 was planned by a man in a cave, I still find it hard to exorcise it from my vocabulary. When you’re reaching for a synonym for ‘worldwide’ it’s ‘global’. When you’ve exhausted Planet Earth (not that it is a planet, I don’t think), it’s ‘the globe.’

Still, I’m aware that Delingpole’s Law will not be nearly enough to persuade die-hard globetards. If the earth is flat, they’re going to need hard evidence - and a lot more of it than anyone has presented so far.

But I don’t think, to be honest, they’re ever going to get it. Personally I find the Flat Earth evidence I’ve looked at so far pretty persuasive - the ultra-long lens photos refuting the supposed curvature; the ‘flat non rotating earth assumption’ used in aircraft navigation; emergency landings in places inconsistent with the globe model; etc. If you’re expecting anything stronger than that, though, let me put to you a question. Suppose, for a moment, that the Flat Earthers are right and that there has been a massive elite conspiracy since the 16th century to conceal the true shape of our dwelling place, a conspiracy which includes all the scientists, all the seats of learning, all the schools and all the conduits (books, TV, movies, newspapers, the internet) which dispense information. Do you not think, maybe, that such a long-standing, far-reaching conspiracy would take scrupulous care to render it all but impossible for you to acquire the kind of proof you are demanding?

Here, I would argue, is a much more sensible way for Awake types to approach the question.

It comes by kind courtesy of my latest podcast guest Steven Young, who shares my scepticism of the spinning globe model. Unlike me, Young has the benefit of a scientific background, which renders him proof to one of the charges commonly levelled at Flat Earthers by globetards: “You don’t understand basic science.” 

Dr Young does very much understand the science. He has a PhD in theoretical physics and is fully capable of explaining abstruse concepts like Schrödinger’s Cat or the various bizarre contortions Newton went through in order to explain planetary motion while cramming in those important numerals 66. He just now happens to think it’s all made up bollocks.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/steven-young-124414767

What Young gets is that while individual elements in flat earth theory may have flaws - his claims about flight times from Capetown to Santiago in Chile, for example, took some flak in my Telegram channel - the overall picture points very much away from the globe theory model. [Young’s Substack is here by the way]

I would never expect a Normie to become a flat earther because they have too much baggage in the way, starting with the gigantic trunk marked “But why would they lie to us?” But I’m surprised by how much resistance there is to Flat Earth from some Awake people, given how generally aware Awake people are that everything they have been taught about the world is a lie.

If, for example, you know that the Moon Landings were all fake, then it hardly requires a giant leap to understand that NASA is a black budget project, that all the various unmanned missions we’ve sent to Mars are equally fake, and that Elon Musk’s rocket programme is fake. In fact, it has all started to look so embarrassingly fake of late - eg those dolphins greeting the escape capsule of the gammon-faced man and straggly haired woman who are supposed to have spent the last nine months trapped on the Space Station - that you wonder if they haven’t now given up even pretending to try to fool us and just simply want to laugh in our faces.

Once you’ve got to the point where you accept - as how could you not? - that our trusted authorities routinely and flagrantly lie to us about space, it hardly seems to me much of a stretch to deduce that they’ve been doing the same, for centuries, about the shape and nature of our ‘planet’.

Why would they lie to us about globe earth? Surely the more pertinent question is: Why would they not lie about globe earth? They lie about everything else, after all.

One of the things I didn’t want to discover when I first started venturing down the rabbit hole was that ‘the Jews’ might be responsible for everything bad in the world.

This was partly for cowardice reasons: no one wants to be cancelled and being labelled ‘antisemitic’ is, for some odd reason, the world’s most cancellable offence.

But mainly it was for personal ones: how would my Jewish friends feel if I suddenly decided that they were all part of some sinister conspiracy?

I do hate to play the ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish/black/gay/trans/whatever’ card because I now know it’s part of the Enemy’s trap, designed to lure us into the dangerous and divisive idiocy that there are categories of people out there with protected minority status that ought to earn them special privileges. Nevertheless, it’s an inescapable fact that some of my favourite people from my past - raffish-uncles-by-marriage; generous benefactors; witty, loyal and well loved friends; mentors; adorable podcast guests; etc - do happen to be of a Jewish persuasion and I continue to love them as much as I did and would hate to cause them any upset.

That said, I’m on a mission. Since becoming a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and a fully-fledged Christian almost simultaneously, I have come to realise that the truth is just about the most precious commodity we have. “And the truth shall make you free” said our Lord and, as ever, He was on the money. Truth is pure. Truth is absolute. Truth is divine. Truth does not come with special provisos and get-out-clauses which permit you to shirk it under certain circumstances like, say, that ‘some people might find it offensive’ or ‘some races get a free pass because of historical persecution, so you can’t criticise them even if what you say is true.’

What I’m saying here is that I’ll go wherever the truth takes me, even if it means getting myself into hot water. If, when I eventually get to the bottom of the rabbit hole, I discover a big sign saying: “Yup. It’s the Jews. Sorry”, I’m not going to paint it over lest it get me into trouble or make a few people upset. Nor, though, am I going to join the “It’s the Jews” club unless I find more compelling evidence than I have so far.

My main difficulty with the “It’s the Jews” theory is the timeline. Most of the world’s “Jews” (which is a fake term anyway, probably no older than a 14th century mistranslation of the Vulgate Bible by John Wycliffe) are descended from the pagan khanate of Khazaria which mass converted to Judaism in the 9th or 10th century. I’m not going to suggest that the Khazarians - brigands, name-stealers, into child sacrifice - weren’t horrible, devious people. They’re likely descended from the Edomites whom God found so abominable He wished them to be wiped out of existence. But it still seems to me a bit of a stretch to believe that a bunch of goat-shaggers from what is now Ukraine could, in the space of just a millennium, go on to infiltrate and displace all the ancient power structures that existed prior to their appearance on the scene.

What about the Black Nobility, for example, who can trace their lineage at least as far back as Ancient Rome? Where do the 13 Satanic bloodline families fit in? What about the Grey, Black and White Popes? And whither the Phoenician Navy? Each of these factions has its champions in conspiracy circles - “No! It’s the Jesuits!” is one of the more fashionable arguments - but I don’t believe it’s that simple. Rather I think we need to think of them all as competing crime families united by a common cause - doing evil - and all ultimately answerable to the capo di tutti i capi.

That capo di tutti i capi, as John tells us three times in his gospel, is the devil himself - ‘the prince of this world.’ Non-Christian readers might differ on this one. But to me the Christian explanation makes perfect sense. God has granted the devil temporary permission to rule the world as the price we must pay for free will. If we didn’t have free will, we’d still be prancing naked round the Garden of Eden - which would be lovely, except that we’d be like NPCs in a video game. Now that we’re cast out of Eden, we get to be heroes who decide our own adventure but our path is fraught with temptations designed by the devil to lure us astray, which is what makes doing the right thing more challenging and ultimately more rewarding.

In the end Christ returns and God wins. But the families who run the world - Satan’s minions - prefer to overlook this inconvenient truth and to focus on the more immediate, viz, if you suck up to the current Chief Executive you are given all manner of perks. What the ruling class understands and most Normies don’t understand - despite all the massive clues they were given in the Satanic revelation-of-the-method series Harry Potter - is that magic does actually work. If you perform the right rituals, commit yourself to evil, seeking constantly to thwart God’s will, then Satan and his demonic forces can reward you with all manner of earthly riches. This has been known to the ruling elites since at least the era of Babylon, whence much occult tradition - ‘the Babylonian mystery religions’ - emanates. So far it has worked very well for them, which is why they’ve managed to amass all that intergenerational wealth. And why they are generally so reluctant to marry outside their traditions: they want to keep it all in the family, within the bloodlines.

If you find this sort of thing interesting - and how could you not? - then I highly recommend you check out immediately the podcast I’ve just recorded with Tobias Nuttall. Of course I love all my children equally but I have to admit that this is among my favourite podcast chats because Tobias - despite being Australian and - briefly - a former member of Aleister Crowley’s deeply dodgy Ordo Templi Orientis cult - is very much a man after my own heart: excitable, irreverent, slightly silly but clever really, well read, relentlessly curious, determined to get the bottom of everything even if he ends up being killed trying…

In the course of our meandering conversation, Nuttall provides some useful pointers towards how the system works. These are partly gleaned from an encounter - described in more detail in this Waking World podcast episode - with an upper class Englishman, whom he met hiding out in a remote part of Australia and whom he believes to be connected to one of the Illuminati bloodlines families. Of course, you can never be sure with these inside-the-Illuminati whistleblowing types whether they are for real or whether they are just bullshitting. It’s a bit like Special Forces. For every person you’ve ever met who has actually been in the SAS, there’s another half a dozen who claims to have been but wasn’t.

So how can you be sure what they are telling you is true? Well you can’t. Obviously you can’t. The nature of secret societies, especially the higher up the ladder you go, is that their inner workings tend to remain quite opaque, not least because there are dread penalties for those who spill the beans. But that doesn’t mean that, over the centuries, sufficient information hasn’t leaked out one way or another for us curious non-Illuminati types to have been able to construct a reasonably accurate picture. So when a new person speaks out - like this Illuminati-adjacent Englishman in the Outback - you can set his claims against what you know already and judge accordingly.

The comment from the Illuminati-adjacent Englishman that most struck a chord with me was when he said something to this effect: “If you’re not bloodlines, you’re never going to get anywhere. They’re just not interested in you.” Even if he’s just relaying high-level gossip he heard, I think he’s on the money here. We all know about the nuances of the English class system, with all the various subtle traps laid to catch out the unwary, such as how to pronounce surnames like Cholmondeley, whether you put your milk into your tea first, what kind of dog you own, etc. Americans have their own version. But though these stratified systems are sold to us as pure snobbery I think that this is a handy cover story which conceals something much more sinister. I’m not saying the snobbery isn’t real, and deeply felt, and instinctive: it is. But the reason it has been nurtured and developed over time is because it ingrains in people of the right caste the vital importance of keeping outsiders out.

And why would that be so necessary? Because of the other most revealing thing the Illuminati-adjacent Englishman said: that the old families are mostly practitioners of what they call the “Old Religion”. This is a euphemism for those occult practices dating at least back to Babylon. Officially and publicly these families may identify as Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, Jews or even Atheists. But behind the scenes they observe the same barbaric, pagan rites - up to and including sacrifice of the first born - which God repeatedly rails against in the Old Testament because they are an affront to His creation and because they deify His enemies, led by the fallen, rebel angel Lucifer.

“Oh, by the way, when we have our first child we will of course be expected to sacrifice it to Satan so we can keep the grouse moor/the home in the Hamptons/the shack on Martinique…” is a tough sell to a prospective wife/husband who wasn’t born into the tradition. That’s why these bloodline families prefer to intermingle with other bloodline families where everyone knows the score and where everyone can be relied upon to serve the same master and no one is going to do anything so foolish as squeal about the family secrets.

Obviously some of the families I describe here will have Jewish surnames. But in terms of the world’s Jewish population we’re talking probably less than the richest one per cent of the richest one per cent. I doubt very much that any of the Jews that I know or you know are secretly worshipping Satan. They just happen, in the lottery of life, to have been born to a woman whose mother was also Jewish. They’re no more responsible for what the Evil Rulers of The World do to us than, say, I am just because I happen to have been to university with some of these evil rulers and possibly met them at the occasional house weekend.

Now that I am properly down the rabbit hole I think I have a much better idea of what F Scott Fitzgerald meant when he said that ‘the very rich’ are ‘different from you and me.’ It’s not so much that they have more money than they know what to do with; rather it’s that deadness of the soul which comes from belonging to a caste whose membership requirements include setting yourself in opposition to God. These people can be witty company, generous hosts, even give you the illusion of having a degree of intimacy with them. But there’s a divide between them and you that you're never going to be able to cross, and just occasionally, in their rare unguarded moments you see it.

What it is, you realise, is that they don’t consider you to be fully human. They might appreciate you as an engaging plaything or an amusing conversationalist or an agreeable pheasant-shooting companion or an invaluable source of girlie gossip. But they’ll never view you as an equal because you’re not one of them. You haven’t been through the personality-shattering, ritualised sexual abuse they had to experience as a routine part of their upbringing. You’re not privy to the secrets of the occult which grant them their money and power. You might even have been fooled by all that childish nonsense about Jesus being your saviour and God being the good guy. Again, “JK Rowling” is your guide here. The bloodline families view us a bit like the magical families in Harry Potter view the Muggles: with a superior air of puzzlement, amusement and light disdain.

In some ways, you can’t blame them for thinking as they do. Not only has it been beaten into them, over generations. But also, they only have to look around themselves - at their magnificent homes, their fancy cars, their island retreats - to be reassured that the ‘Old Religion’ is the way to go. In fact, all the evidence has shown over the centuries, it enables them continually to get away with murder.

They are like the ungodly in Psalm 73 who gloat that they can defy God’s will with impunity:

Tush, say they, how should God perceive it?

is there knowledge in the most High?

Spoiler alert. It doesn’t end well for them, according to the psalm.

Oh how suddenly do they consume,

perish, and come to a fearful end!

Couldn’t happen to nicer people…