Who really runs the world? It’s a question I’ve asked before and no doubt will again. But I think Catherine Austin Fitts has got about as close as any of us are likely to get with her latest explanation.

Previously, she has defined the problem somewhat evasively as ‘There’s a committee at the top which makes all the big decisions. My nickname for it is Mister Global’.

Now, on a podcast with Danny Jones, she gets down to specifics.

“I think you have intergenerational pools of capital. And right now they are over-influenced by the occult. You have inter dimensional intelligence which is operating. Demonic intelligence. So I think this thing about good and evil is real.”

Yes. I’ve long suspected something similar. But when it comes from me it sounds like so much woo, whereas coming from someone with the bottom, gravitas and deliberative caution of Catherine Austin Fitts it’s much more of a bombshell revelation.

With her background in finance and government - she was managing director of Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co and served as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing in the George HW Bush administration - Fitts is just about the last person you’d expect to be talking about the reality of demons.

Why would she put her credibility on the line like this if she didn’t have good reason to believe it were true?

Well there are, of course, various dismissive explanations in conspiracy circles - most of them to do with the idea that Catherine Austin Fitts isn’t really ‘one of us’ but some kind of Limited Hangout or Gatekeeper, a deep cover Establishment agent whose mission is to infiltrate the Awake community and sow misinformation.

Amazing Polly on Twitter, for example, is sceptical. Brandishing Fitts’s CV - Member, Advisory Board, Arlington Institute; etc - she asks, not unreasonably:

“Is this the CV of your typical deep stater or do we give some people a pass bc they do the rounds on podcasts?

Wharton, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, MIT

Learned Mandarin in HK.”

Good question. I do not know the answer. There are lots of reasons to be suspicious of Catherine Austin Fitts but then, as one or two commenters are wont to point out, there are quite a few reasons to be suspicious of me.

But I’m not sure this criticism is relevant here. Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept that Catherine Austin Fitts is another wrong ‘un, I still find it pretty remarkable that someone so Establishment - or ex-Establishment, depending on your point of view - should state the case for supernatural involvement in the current horror show quite so unequivocally.

Better still is the distinction she makes between demons and aliens, whose significance quite a few Truther commenters have misunderstood.

“So I’ve just reading a book called Final Events by Nick Redfern and it’s an explanation of a group of military intelligence in the United States called the Collins Elite. And they came to believe that the ET phenomenon was a demonic phenomenon. It was not people from another planet. It was demonic intelligence.

And one of the things he discovered was that the Collins Elite apparently discovered that in many ET abduction events if you called on Jesus Christ it would stop.”

I’m amazed - though perhaps I shouldn’t be - how many David Icke fans have misunderstood this as an endorsement of their guru’s theories.

“David Icke has been saying this stuff for years”, one or two commented on Twitter.

No, he hasn’t. This is the exact opposite of what he has been saying. Icke’s theories concern extraterrestrial beings and planetary forces which have trapped us all in some kind of ‘simulation.’ He violently rejects the Christian schemata being proposed here by Fitts. And he certainly wouldn’t agree that you could ward off ‘aliens’ by calling on Jesus Christ because in at least one of his books he argues that Jesus Christ never existed.

I am not a fan of Icke. I have no problem with people who are but I do think there are one or two key questions they need to ask themselves about his philosophical position and its sources.

https://delingpole.substack.com/p/david-ickes-gingerbread-cottage

The other criticism being levelled by certain Awake types against Fitts is that by blaming - or at least partly blaming - supernatural forces, she is somehow absolving all the usual suspects (the bloodline families; the Black Nobility; the Jesuits; the ‘Jews’; the World Economic Forum; etc) of responsibility for their nefarious deeds.

No, she’s really not. She’s just pointing out that ‘the intergenerational pools of capital’ are working as a tag team with the supernatural forces of darkness. Which I think they probably are because I don’t think they’d be capable doing what they do without them.

If you read the Old Testament, you’ll find lots of moments where God makes it clear to the Children of Israel that without Him they are nothing but that with His help anything is possible. Gideon’s victory over the Midianites with an army of just 300, for example.

As Psalm 33 puts it: “There is no king that can be saved by the multitude of an host; neither is any mighty man delivered by much strength.”

Well similar rules appear to apply to the followers of Satan, who has a habit of ripping off all God’s best ideas. Sure, thanks to generations of cultivated psychopathy and repeated practice, his servants have developed all manner of skills and traits that make them really good at running the world: cruelty, ruthlessness, arrogance, deviousness, brutality, trickery, manipulativeness, and so on. But the icing on the cake is the supernatural fire support they get from Satan and his fellow fallen angels.

Can I prove to you beyond reasonable doubt that the world is swarming with largely invisible demons and evil junior gods and princes of the air and Nephilim, all manipulating the affairs of men in the service of Satan? Well ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is a bit of an ask. The problem with the spiritual realm is that it is by nature occluded. You’re not going to have demons rolling up on your doorstep and going: “Now do you believe James?” As with so many other conspiracies, a lot of it is down to intelligent inference, based on piecing together different scraps of evidence.

So, from scripture you have everything from the appearance of the Nephilim in Genesis 6 (“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children unto them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown”) to Jesus (and later his disciples) casting out demons. Then you have the various occultists and mystics through the ages who claim to have experienced the demonic realm through visions or the use of grimoires. In modern times, we have the testimony of exorcists, not to mention lots of videos on social media of people who are quite possibly possessed. We also have interesting characters like Jerry Marzinsky, the Arizona psychiatrist who discovered that the voices in his mental patients’ heads were demonic, not self-generated. (The two podcasts I did with him here and here are well worth a listen). And this won’t necessarily convince you but it does me: I have a very good friend who was born with the gift of being able to see demonic entities (though only the lower tier, bottom feeder variety) feeding on victims’ negative emotions.

But I think the two best reasons for believing Catherine Austin Fitts’s theory can be derived from observation of the people who run the world. The first of these is their spooky levels of super competence. Most committees could scarcely run a bath, let alone a global conspiracy. Yet this handful of psychologically damaged, brain-fractured, sexually abused, psychopathic plutocrats are so next level genius at planning and executing their very long term schemes they can conjure fake phenomena - global warming! - out of thin air, and even stage entire World Wars to their advantage. Do you reckon they could achieve such things without supernatural aid? I don’t.

The other reason, as we’ve heard from whistleblowers like Ronald Bernard, is that these Elites are utterly obsessed with the occult, including stuff like ritual sacrifice of children. They do it in homage to the evil deities they worship - the same ones, historically, worshipped by the Canaanites and the Edomites and the Phoenicians and all the other tribal groups that practised child sacrifice. In return, the evil deities grant them their earthly wishes, a bit like the genie in the bottle. They are given power, success, fame, even on occasion special skills that render them superhuman, as former Illuminati bloodlines hitman Nathan Reynolds explained on a podcast we did together. Are these evil deities just figments of the Cabal’s wicked imagination? Well maybe. But if they are, these non-existent beings have a pretty damn powerful placebo effect…

https://delingpole.substack.com/p/nathan-reynolds

Now I concede that what I’m saying here would seem utterly far fetched to any Normie reader. And that includes Normies who are Christians, by the way. I was a little surprised to read when I previously wrote on this subject some comments saying: “Christians know this already.”

Er, actually, no most of them very much don’t. In my various picturesque, rustic local churches on Sunday, I take communion with a number of decent, God-fearing country folk, and I doubt a single one of them understands that the world is run by Illuminati bloodlines types in league with the actual Devil and his crew of demons. These people, I’d say, are much more representative of your typical Christian than us crazy, Christian, rabbit hole awake types. Sorry. I wish it were otherwise. But most Christians are Normies.

Personally I have no beef with the Normies. a) I used to be one myself and b) it’s not their fault that they think the way they do because they’ve been put under a huge spell.

But the Awake have no such excuse. At least those among the Awake who resolutely insist that there’s an earthbound explanation for everything that is happening in the world right now and that we need to focus our attention on the human perpetrators and on resisting such iniquitous impositions as Central Bank Digital Currencies.

Well of course we should be resisting CBDCs and digital passports and the World Health Organisation. Of course we should be growing our own vegetables, rearing unregistered chickens and taking our children out of Their brainwashing education system. No one is saying we shouldn’t.

But I’m not buying the fatuous argument that if we talk about the supernatural stuff it somehow ‘discredits our cause’ or that it lets the Du Ponts and the Van Duyns and the Russells and the Orsinis and the Payseurs off the hook or - particularly absurd this one - that it credits our Enemies with powers They don’t have.

Really? These people have been running the world for a good 6,000 years. And you’re trying to tell me that we shouldn’t overestimate how powerful and evil they are because that’s a counsel of despair? If that’s what you think - though perhaps ‘think’ is a bit of a stretch given how little thought you’ve obviously given it - then you really need to look up the phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’, and maybe try to understand it this time.

I totally get that Normies won’t go there because they’re Normies and that’s fine, it simply does not compute for them. But the Awake people who refuse to accept the spiritual dimension of this war we’re fighting I do not get at all.

My question to these Awake supernatural deniers is this: where was it, exactly, that you decided to draw the line under your researches down the rabbit hole?

So you got as far as JFK, and 9/11 and maybe the Moon Landings. You’ll have worked out that most of the history that’s sold to us is fake and that the entertainment, music and media industries are giant brainwashing exercises and that the people in government are just puppets of a predatory, parasite class with a one world government agenda. But once you’d got that far, did not your curiosity pique you to research the whys and wherefores?

What did you make it of it when you got to DUMBs, underground tunnels, adrenochrome, Satanic Ritual Abuse and child trafficking being one of the world’s richest black market industries?

Did you shrug your shoulders and go: “Nah. Too unpleasant. So I’m going to tell myself that this stuff doesn’t happen?” Or did you accept it does happen but choose to play down its ritual occult connotations by telling yourself: “Hey, it’s just what Elites do. They’re a bunch of pervs. Oh and also, they find it useful for collecting Kompromat and enforcing blackmail.”?

And when you were engaged in all your researches down the rabbit hole did you impose on yourself some kind of arbitrary rule, where you decided: “I’m fine with stuff that points the finger at the Venetians, or the City of London, or the Jews or the Jesuits or the freemasons. But I’m absolutely not going to engage with anything esoteric. So I don’t want to know about the Kabbala, or the Babylonian Mystery Religions, or John Dee, or miracles, or demonic possession, or exorcism, or Aleister Crowley, or any of that mumbo jumbo?”

Oh, and the Bible. What about the Bible? It’s the bestselling book in history by far and it has influenced quite a few people, some of them not stupid, so it must have something going for it. Did you just discount the whole lot because you were satisfied with the claim you read somewhere on the internet that it was all just made up as some kind of control mechanism to keep mankind in check or that Christianity was invented by the Jews or the Romans or something?

I read the Bible every day, partly, yes, because I’m a Christian. But partly because it really ought to be a sine qua non for any half way decent conspiracy theorist. That’s because the Bible, more than any other book I’ve read, supplies a coherent explanation for what’s happening in the world right now. Most helpfully, it explains the baddies’ motive.

They’re not in it merely for the money, power, helicopters, volcano island lairs, perverted sex and 33 Club membership, though obviously those are some of the perks. They’re in it, above all, because they hate God and want to make Him redundant - just like in the Tower of Babel story - by showing that anything He can do they can do better. Sure it’s a bit more complicated and nuanced than that but that’s the basic deal. In particular, the baddies hate God’s creation - which is you and me - and so take great delight in torturing us, immiserating us, enslaving us, killing us etc.

Well this is the explanation that I personally find most intellectually persuasive. It makes intuitive sense; the internal logic is coherent; it is an understanding of the world which has been shared by many of the cleverest people who ever lived - over many generations.

But I have absolutely no problem with people who disagree with me. We’re a very disparate bunch, we Awake folk and we’re all at different stages of our journey. I don’t expect everyone who is down the rabbit hole to share my Christian outlook. All I do insist on is that if you ARE going to try inflicting on me your competing theory - whether it’s the Annunaki or ‘We’re all in a simulation’ or ‘Christianity is a Jewish plot’ or whatever - you at least present me with a coherent argument and show me your sources. [“I read it in one of David Icke’s books” won’t cut it, I’m afraid, because his own sourcing, as I establish in my essay, is abysmal].

I believe, for example, as Catherine Austin Fitts seems to do that the creatures flying around in flying saucers and beaming up unsuspecting humans to give them anal probes are NOT aliens from Outer Space (which in my view is fake and gay) but demonic entities related to the fallen angels. Feel free to go: “No. You’re wrong. They’re definitely aliens from outer space” - but first I’d like to see your evidence for outer space actually existing, and secondly I’d like you to explain to me who you think it was that made these aliens and why? (And I’m not buying Big Bang, which was a Jesuit invention).

So yes: a combination of demons and bloodline families is the hill I’m currently prepared to die on.

And because I quite like Catherine Austin Fitts - even if I’m not ruling out the possibility that she might be an Enemy Agent - I’m taking her statement which elides with my own position as a ‘win’ for the cause of truth, justice and general Awakeness.

In my recent piece You Really Don’t Want To Be Famous, I mentioned the fact that Leonard Cohen was an Illuminati Secret Agent.

https://jamesdelingpole.locals.com/upost/6953961/you-really-dont-want-to-be-famous

No one in the comments thus far sounds particularly surprised, so I’m assuming that the information must be common knowledge, at least among my discerning readership.

But if you don't mind, I’d like briefly to enlarge on this subject because I don’t think it’s of negligible significance. Perhaps I should have done this in the original piece but I thought it had gone on quite long enough and that it was already filled with sufficient Ferrero Rocher treatlets for one article.

I mentioned that I originally got my information on Cohen from a 2015 article on the Henry Makow website. The bit that especially piqued my interest was the remark in the comments from someone called Dan. It was referring to the cover of Cohen’s 1992 album The Future which depicted a hummingbird rising up from a black and blue heart. Below it are some open handcuffs.

Here is the comment:

The hummingbird and handcuffs on the album jacket of 'The Future' always made me think of this passage from the novel 'Cockpit' by another mysterious fellow, Jerzy Kosinski.

"I was one of the specially trained groups of agents called "the hummingbirds". The men and women of this group are so valuable that to protect their covers no central file is kept on them and their identities are seldom divulged to other agents. Most hummingbirds remain on assignment as long as they lead active cover lives, usually as high-ranking government officials, military or cultural officials based in foreign countries. Others serve as businessmen, scientists, editors, writers and artists. But I always used to wonder what would happen if a hummingbird vanished, leaving no proof..."

[Jerzy Kosiński was a Polish-American author who, if we are to believe Wikipedia, had sold an estimated 70 million books by 1991. His most famous novel, The Painted Bird, was ‘for many years regarded as an essential part of the literary Holocaust canon’ because - spiced up with rape, bestiality, etc - it was widely thought to be a lightly fictionalised account of his genuine experiences as a Jew in wartime Eastern Europe. It fell out of fashion when it was exposed as completely made up. Kosinski and his family had spent the war years hiding with a Polish Catholic family who had sheltered them from the Germans and he had never been mistreated. He was also revealed to be a plagiarist]

They have to tell us, don’t They?

My instincts, at any rate, tell me that these ‘hummingbirds’ are not a literary invention but a genuine thing. Readers with time on their hands might find it amusing to speculate on which other characters in the public eye - businessmen, scientists, editors, writers and artists - are deep cover Illuminati agents. Is Russell Brand too obvious a choice? What about Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Borat?

I think the case of Leonard Cohen lays to rest a claim commonly made by sceptical Normies: that the notion of a Grand Universal Conspiracy is preposterous because no group of people, however rich, powerful and devious, could micromanage a plot on such a scale.

The life and career of Leonard Cohen proves that They can by illustrating both their extraordinary attention to detail and their ability to get things done.

Cohen was as manufactured as Backstreet Boys, Take That, or One Direction. The difference is that Cohen was manufactured as a star not in the notoriously synthetic realm of boy band pop music but into areas - first poetry, then folk music, then coffee table, lightly arty mood music for grown ups - where authenticity is supposed to be everything. And They did it so well that for years, no one rumbled him.

Really this ought not to be a surprise to anyone who has read David McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon about how the CIA et al effectively invented all your favourite late Sixties anthems from For What It’s Worth to Monday Monday. Nor to anyone familiar with Sage of Quay’s deep dives into the true history of Tavistock Institute creations The Beatles.

But it often does surprise us because even those of us who ought to know better can rarely wholly free themselves from the influence of a lifetime’s programming. If you’re an old hippy who spent your late teenage years skinning up on your cherished, dogeared copy of Songs for Leonard Cohen, or you still fondly remember the driving Eighties synth beats and cool female backing vocals on First We Take Manhattan or you’ve ever enjoyed one of the umpteen cover versions of his (overrated)Hallelujah, it’s quite hard simultaneously to hold in your nostalgia-warped brain the concept that this guy was a fraud, a fake, and a liar who hated you and wanted to destroy everything you held dear.

That’s why people like Leonard Cohen - and the people who create and control characters like Leonard Cohen - still rule the world. Because they’ve had millennia of practice and they’re really good at it.

And when I say millennia I do mean millennia.

Here, by way of a parting titbit, is another intriguing comment from that Henry Makow article.

According to Rothschilds own biography "Prophets of Money, chapter: a royal Caucasian family" it is said that they are really proud of having married into THE Cohen family. Who are THE Cohen versus the masses of ordinary Cohens? THE Cohens can trace their ancestry back to Babylon!!! There is refrain of a Cohen song: and I belong at last to Babylon....

I think it refers to the Niall Ferguson’s 1998 authorised biography whose correct title is The House of Rothschild: Volume 1; Money’s Prophets. Perhaps someone who has access to a copy might care to verify if this reference is correct. Huge if true: an Illuminati bloodline so august and ancient that even the Rothschilds stand in awe…

When I was younger, my brother Dick has just reminded me, we went to a psychic fair and had our readings done by some kind of medium.

“Am I going to be famous?” I asked eagerly.

“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” the medium replied.

How wise that medium was. But I’m sure at the time that wisdom would have gone right over my head. Fame was the thing I wanted more than anything, even more than money.

“Ah but when you’re famous you get loads of money anyway”, would probably have been my reply to that particular point. “And lots of sex,” I would likely have been thinking also, this being my late adolescence when I thought of little else.

Why am I now so grateful to God that my dream never came true?

Here are a few reasons.

I was never required to marry a man pretending to be a woman nor to have to go to that celebrity hospital they all go to in LA where they pretend to have a baby which they then have to rear as if it is their own - but bring it up transgender, obviously, in homage to Baphomet.

I never had to be gang-raped by P Diddy (or similar) and his chums, then pretend it was completely normal and I hadn’t been affected by this thing I obviously couldn’t talk about.

I never have to remember to flash occult symbols - the all-seeing eye, the concealed hand, 666 etc - whenever I’m being photographed.

I don’t have to torture, rape and murder small children because Satan and his crew of junior evil deities find it pleasing.

I never have to attend award ceremonies.

I never had to participate in a humiliation ritual, like posing on the front of GQ in a dress. [It’s not just movie stars and rock stars who have to do this shit. Even F1 champions are not exempt]

I never have to worry that when I’m bustling about town or I’m out for a nice country walk someone might approach me from the bushes to whisper the trigger word that turns me suddenly into an MK Ultra assassin or means I suddenly shave my head and have to be dragged off to the clinic by my handler where I’m coshed with drugs until my reprogramming is complete.

I never had to sign the deal where in turn for selling your soul for all eternity you get a few years flying around in private jets - being bummed occasionally by P Diddy, obviously, but still - so long as you play your role and keep appearing on stage or screen long after your knackered limbs are begging you to retire.

Obviously, some readers will think that this is just “James being funny” or “James exaggerating.” And I’m happy for people to think that way, if it makes them feel better. But I do hope there’s at least one thing we can all agree on however far down the rabbit hole we might or not be: that becoming ‘famous’ is an experience so seductive in the youthful imagination and so unbearably hideous in reality that it can only be the work of the devil.

I mean this quite literally, of course. You are welcome to conceive of the devil as a figurative character if you prefer. But whether you understand the reality of the supernatural or you’re still hedging your bits the truth remains the same: you don’t get to be famous without selling your soul - and thereafter paying an unimaginably terrible price for it.

If you do agree with me on this, though, I think you’ll find that, even now, even after all we’ve seen - from MeToo to Epstein Island to Diddy , and all the way back to Fatty Arbuckle and beyond - we are still very much in the minority. I’d say most people out there in the world look at the lives of the famous and think: “I wouldn’t mind some of that.” And I’d say that, unfortunately, many young people continue to imagine - as I once did - that if only they could become famous it would solve all their problems.

There are lots of reasons why this is so but most of them can be summed up in one word: brainwashing. Or better still two words: Satanic brainwashing.

From birth we are put under an evil spell. A key part of this spell is relentless propaganda.

Look, if you can bear it, at any ‘serious’ newspaper on a Saturday or Sunday. It will be full of lovingly crafted articles by the best feature writers - I know because I used to be one of them - all of which start from the same basic premise: “This person is worthy of our attention because he or she is famous. Therefore what they say, however stupid, is really interesting. And we’re all kind of lucky to have spent time in their company - you to be reading about them and me to have landed the great gig of seeing them in the flesh.”

Meanwhile the tabloids are doing a similar job of keeping these celebrity creatures in the public eye by writing tittle tattle about their private lives in a way that implies that if you don’t know this stuff you are out of the loop.

And TV is doing the same by feting them on chat shows.

And charities and similar organisations are doing the same by appointing them as representatives or ambassadors.

Ditto all the major fashion labels who give them free clothes.

And the politicians who want to be seen rubbing shoulders with them because it shows they’re in touch with the kind of people the public like.

And the restaurants who put photographs of them on their walls because that will impress customers.

And the publishers who publish their (ghost-written) books.

And so on.

Essentially, it’s hard to go anywhere without getting this message, rammed down your throat, that being famous is where it’s at; and that if you’re not famous you are some kind of lesser being.

That’s why I don’t particularly blame myself for all the years I spent as a journalist bigging up all these tragic creatures, and wanting to rub shoulders with them in the hope that that some of their stardust might sprinkle onto me. It would be like blaming a Korean War prisoner who’d spent years being brainwashed in a Chinese POW camp for not saying anything critical about communism.

But I do find it interesting to analyse why it is that despite all the evidence out there to the contrary - and there’s an awful lot of it - so many of us are still beguiled by the cult of celebrity.

What it comes down to, I think, is the combination of the stories they (the deceivers) tell us - and the stories we tell ourselves as a consequence.

https://jamesdelingpole.locals.com/upost/6925787/jasun-horsley

Let me give you some thoughts arising from my recent podcast with Jasun Horsley who, like me, spent most of his life entranced by the fantasy of what he calls an ‘epic-Hollywood-sponsored life’ and ‘the culturally incepted dream of being a “star”’

He first visited it as a 20-year old, in recent receipt of a large inheritance, and has been infatuated with Hollywood ever since, writing a number of books on films and the movie industry, including 16 Maps of Hell, which I highly recommend.

Its subtitle - The Unraveling of Hollywood Superculture - gives you the gist. He describes the book as ‘a 600-page denunciation of pop culture and mass media as one giant mafia of soul control, heavily regulated by old seers hungry to fill their inner emptiness with endless slices of world domination.’

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to enjoy the book. In fact it probably wouldn’t help if you are because in the chapter called Conspiracy Theory, the author tries rather too hard to keep a foot in the door of Normiedom by bracketing all conspiracy theorists with Alex Jones and David Icke and by pontificating, straw-man-ishly that ‘accurate interpretations of reality that are illegitimately arrived at are worse than worthless.’

[I have a go at him about this in our chat because I think it’s bollocks. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out why]

But I think that this is to the book’s advantage. It will help it sell more. Also, if readers think they are reading a Normie book it deactivates their deflector shield. This means that Horsley can get lots of viciously antipathetical home truths about fame and the entertainment industry through readers’ defences without their feeling that they are the victim of a secret authorial agenda to turn them into a tinfoil hat loon.

What Horsley very clearly demonstrates, with numerous facts and anecdotes, is that the movie industry, like the music industry, is and always has been operated by some very evil people and has always been about criminality and propaganda foremost, with entertainment coming a very poor third.

Take The Godfather, rated by many as among Hollywood’s top ten greats. It was financed with mob money - movies being handy for money-laundering because their accounting is so labyrinthine and opaque - and served a number of propaganda purposes. One was humanising ruthless criminal gangs by pretending that, really, it’s all about family - and we can all relate to family. Another, which Horsley doesn’t cover because I don’t think he’s quite far enough down that rabbit hole, was to misdirect attention towards the Italian mob and away from the (probably more dangerous and powerful) Jewish mob, which has called the shots in the US underworld since the days of Meyer Lansky.

You may have seen - perhaps even on my recommendation - The Offer, which was Paramount Plus’s seductive but sanitised take on the making of The Godfather, based on the memoirs of its producer Al Ruddy. The good guys - such as producer Robert Evans - are envy-inducingly cool and glamorous; even the bad guys, such as the mob bosses who supposedly wanted in on the project because they were just little kids at heart thrilled to see themselves on screen, are just lovable rogues. And the goal - in the teeth of resistance from shadowy, Philistine studio executives - is just to hang the expense and try to create as great a piece of art as possible, with the help of crazy genius talents like Marlon Brando and “Marty” Scorsese.

It’s fairytale nonsense of course. Real Hollywood is a shark-eat-shark world of gangsters, predatory paedophiles, Satanic ritual, blood sacrifice, mind-controlled stars and starlets from bloodline families being sexually abused, ripped off and exploited by their ruthless handlers.

Rarely has it displayed its evil more blatantly and vauntingly than in wife-beater, convicted paedophile and probably-much-closer-to-the-Manson-Family-murders-than-he-lets-on Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror ‘classic’ Rosemary’s Baby - in which (alleged) paedophile Woody Allen’s future wife Mia Farrow is drugged and coerced by a friendly-seeming coven in New York’s Dakota Building (where John Lennon was shot, probably by a US intelligence services assassin, who ensured that a mind-controlled patsy called Mark Chapman carried the can) into becoming pregnant with, quite literally, the spawn of the devil. [Sorry if I’ve spoiled the ending for you}.

If you read the preceding paragraph carefully, you may notice one or two clues which might raise the suspicion that there’s something not altogether right about Rosemary’s Baby. Never mind the artistry and the Oscar-winning acting and that killer twist at the end which I’ve ruined for you: this movie is a homage to Satan made by people who, if not in bed with Satan, not all of them anyway, are most definitely on his Christmas card list and would very likely have sat next to him on flights to Little St James had Epstein been in business at the time. If they’d advertised it as “Made by and for the Devil”, they could scarcely have been more blatant about its affiliations.

So how come nobody notices? Because we’ve all been programmed not to notice. We’ve been trained - good doggie - to use phrases like: “Oh c’mon. It’s only a movie.” We’ve been taught that films are primarily there to entertain us. We’ve been encouraged to think of actors’ ‘performances’ as something special which we should admire and maybe discuss afterwards. We’ve learned that if we’re really clever we should be capable of noticing more complicated stuff like lighting or cinematography or even colour palettes. We’ve become emotionally invested in the lives of these people thanks to the chat shows where they ‘reveal’ themselves to be charming, funny and likeable.

These people - the actors, the directors, and, most importantly, the people running them - are pros. They’ve got us looking at all the things they want us to look at. And ignoring all the things they want us to ignore.

And they’ve got us to do it by our own consent, that’s the key. If they had to tell us “Look. Don’t talk about the Satan/gangster/paedo/intelligence services/mind control stuff or we’ll sue you. Or kill you!”, they would have a much harder job. Endless injunctions and assassinations. But nobody, almost nobody, wants to think about the darkest underbelly of the entertainment industry because it’s just not in their interests. What the media wants, partly for the sales and partly because it’s complicit, is not the truth but the access. What the public wants is the dream. It’s not that, on some level or another, we’re any of us unaware that bad stuff goes on. It’s just that we’ve all acquired the mental knack of toning it down or even excusing it. Like: “Yeah, but that’s the Industry. People who go into it know the deal is. It’s always been that way…”

I was part of this lie factory for a while but I honestly didn’t know it was a lie factory. I just delighted to be paid to hang out with famous people, sometimes with foreign travel thrown in, and then write about it afterwards in a way that made both them and me look good. Obviously, if they were really unpleasant - the guy I found most obnoxious was the movie director Michael Mann - I wasn’t going to pull my punches. But what I mean is that I didn’t go into these encounters looking for trouble. I wanted to see the best in these people and take them more or less at their word because I wanted to feel like they were my new friends who would be nice to me if I ever bumped into them again. (Oddly, this did happen with Alan Rickman, whom I saw once or twice afterwards in our favourite clothes shop Margaret Howell). Which is why, for example, I could spend an hour in the company of Tom Hanks - who, I’ve since learned, is just about as loathsome a specimen as Hollywood has ever produced - and come away with the conclusion that he was just about the nicest guy you could ever meet and whom you’d happily trust to babysit your young kids.

But the thing I did even more often than movie star interviews and film reviews was write about rock music. I was a pop critic - and interviewer - for many years, and one of the people I would most have loved to interview, but never did, was Leonard Cohen.

Why Leonard Cohen? Well, obviously, for starters because his music was the sort of thing anyone with pretences to being one of the critical cognoscenti was supposed to like. Which I did - or thought I did - very much. Bird On A Wire, Suzanne, Famous Blue Raincoat and so on seemed to me to be great shagging music, great break up music, great music-to-slit-your-wrists-to music. Probably I would have used terms like ‘plangent’ and ‘melancholy’, which for critics, and rock connoisseurs generally are terms of great approbation. It’s considered a mark of sophistication to appreciate music - usually in minor keys - that makes you feel depressed.

Now that I’m Awake, I find it much harder to decide which of the music classics I like are objectively good, and which I was merely conditioned into thinking were good. But that’s a whole other essay.

Another thing I liked about Cohen is that he was clearly ironic. Clever people, or people who think they are clever, just love ‘irony’ because irony is something that goes over the head of the dumb masses. I now wonder whether the heavy promotion of ‘irony’ as a desirable thing wasn’t devised by sinister people at places like the Tavistock Institute to enable intellectuals to provide cover for the otherwise inexcusable. “Oh Tarantino isn’t actually endorsing and celebrating ultra violence. It’s just his ironic take on it,” etc.

Oh and yes, I’m sure his Jewishness would have appealed to me too. Back then I was under the Loxification spell which teaches us that though we’re all God’s creation and He loves us all, there’s a reason why the Jews are His favourites: they're just that little bit more intelligent, funny, talented. [Discovering that I secretly had Jewish ancestry was another thing I wanted to happen to me when I was younger]

Then, maybe most importantly, Cohen was known to give good interview: wry, amused, deadpan, droll, with lots of famous people from his past - Andy Warhol, Joni Mitchell etc to namecheck - and lots of life and career ups-and-downs to talk about, like the various cover versions of Hallelujah, his venture into synth-pop with Everybody Knows, the stint as a Zen Buddhist monk, and losing all his money to a dodgy accountant which forced him to go on the road once more to try to earn a crust.

But this story, as you may or may not know, has a massive twist. Jasun Horsley has a chapter on it in his book, though I was first alerted to it by this piece, published in January 2015, by Henry Makow.

The twist is this: all along Cohen was an Illuminati secret agent.

Yup. While we were all busy getting warm and gooey about what a charming, ironic, sexy, witty, lovable, talented, hummable, quotable old curmudgeon he was, Leonard Cohen was busy helping engineer our enslavement by the New World Order.

He was born into a bloodlines family that traced its roots back to Babylon. Trained under the MKUltra mind control programme, he first met Jacob Rothschild in 1959 (and went on to hang out with Barbara Hutchinson, Victor Rothschild’s ex-wife on the Greek island of Hydra), happened to be in Havana in Spring 1961 just days before the Bay of Pigs invasion (when he was arrested as a suspected CIA agent) and, as the Makow article puts it, ‘has an impressive record of appearing in distant locations just ahead of historical coups’.

Greece before the Colonels. London for Jimi Hendrix's death. Montreal on the eve of the War Measures Act. Israel just days before the Yom Kippur War broke out in a "surprise attack" by Egypt (September 1973). Asmara, Ethiopia for the CIA and Mossad-backed overthrow of Haile Selassie. Manhattan, when John Lennon died (December 1980).

He even - true to the Illuminati karmic laws: you’ve got to tell them what you’re doing - spells it out in his lyrics.

Field Commander Cohen was our most important spy
Wounded in the line of duty
Parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties.

And what his mission is:

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

But we all just thought he was being clever and ironic, right?

I don't want to over-explain what ought to be an obvious point. But there’s a reason why the intelligence services term for a secret agent’s deep cover story is the same as the one we often apply to the biggest stars of the movie and music industries: legend.