Sometimes my wife’s newspaper tricks me into reading it. I hate it when this happens, still more so when, as it did the other day, it reduces me to a state of apoplexy.
The story that enticed me was headlined: ‘I Went Off Grid At The End Of My Garden To See If I’d Cope After Armageddon.’ It was accompanied by a picture of the author in woollen hat and anorak, looking glum, superimposed onto a still from one of those post-apocalyptic movies where all the ruined tower blocks are now overgrown with weeds. Well, you can see why I was tempted…
What infuriated me was the very first paragraph:
The Russians have invaded. That’s the most credible scenario, though we can’t rule out a climate catastrophe, deadly pandemic or, indeed, nuclear Armageddon.
‘You bastard!’ I swore at the author, one George Chesterton. ‘You despicable traitor to the human race!’
Possibly this was unfair of me. Chesterton will have been given his brief - ‘Keep it light!’ - and probably thought he was just doing his job. It may well be that, being very likely of a Normie persuasion, he didn’t even notice what he was doing here.
But I noticed.
There is nothing remotely ‘credible’ about the ‘scenario’ of a Russian invasion of the UK. Nor, indeed of a ‘climate catastrophe.’ Nor yet, of a ‘deadly pandemic.’ As for ‘nuclear Armageddon’, for that to happen nukes would first have to exist as viable weapons of mass destruction, which I’m not at all convinced that they do.
Every conceit of that opening paragraph is a lie - and an abominable lie at that because each one of them reinforces in the public imagination a premise which has been designed by some very bad people, the worst in the world, to scare us, to manipulate us, and to exploit us.
This piece is a perfect example of why I so loathe and despise my old trade, print journalism. In the guise of innocuous entertainment, it reinforces our Enemy’s mendacious scare narrative.
People reading that article will have done so with their defences down. “Here’s a bit of fun,” they’ll think, as they approach it, recognising from the comical illustration and the positioning of the article not in the main body of the newspaper but in the lighter-read pull-out supplement that this is not to be taken too seriously.
When you’re relaxed you are much more vulnerable to subliminal messaging. The subliminal message here is: “Russia is a threat. Probably the main thing you should worry about right now. War with Russia is very likely. If it weren’t likely the Swedes wouldn’t have produced this booklet called ‘Om Kristen Ellen Kriget Kommer’ - ‘In case of crisis or war’ - which we are now promoting in this light-hearted piece. So when war with Russia comes, don’t say we didn’t warn you.”
What I find particularly objectionable about this - it’s probably the reason I got so cross - is that I’m still in the midst of reading Two World Wars And Hitler - Who Was Responsible? by Jim Macgregor and John O’Dowd. And what that book makes abundantly clear is that neither the First nor the Second World War started by accident. Both wars were orchestrated by the same kind of people - the Anglo-American Establishment, loosely speaking - who are now pushing us inexorably towards the hot stage of the Third World War, perhaps in the Middle East, perhaps in the Ukraine, using the same methods they used to promulgate the first two wars in their long-planned series of three.
Here, in case you missed it, is my long-read take on that subject.
https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Writing/Articles/how-to-murder-100-million-people-and-come-out-smelling-of-roses
Short version: none of us actually wants war because war is horrible and stops us doing all the much nicer things we’d prefer to do with our lives like having a family, making a home, and not having our friends killed or our limbs blown off. That’s why They - the Predator Class for whom war is a primary business model - can only get us to participate in Their wars through trickery and cajolery and subterfuge.
Subterfuge like that article I just mentioned above. It’s pretending to be a light, frothy, amusing read. But what it really is is pro-war propaganda.
Same goes for the cartoon the same paper - The Daily Telegraph - ran the next day. The cartoon showed someone in a rowing boat flying the white ensign of the Royal Navy shouting through a megaphone “We see you, Putin. We’re ready.” Meanwhile, beneath the waves, in a sinister submarine with some grabby claws at the front, lurks Putin, ready to destroy Britain’s puny defences.
If you went back about 175 years you’d see British newspapers running similarly unfunny cartoons, probably featuring a giant bear (with ‘Russia’ written on it) sneaking up on a lion or a unicorn or maybe a woman draped in a Union flag (with ‘Britannia’ written on her). Plus ça change.
I complained at the beginning about being ‘tricked’ by my wife’s newspaper into reading it. But quite often, if I’m honest, I don’t need to be tricked. As often as not, my incentives are a mix of morbid curiosity and masochism.
When I read the papers, especially The Telegraph where I worked for many years briefly as a specialist news reporter (Arts Correspondent) and mainly as a feature writer and commentator, I feel like a betrayed wife trawling her memory banks in search of all the instances where she should have noticed her husband was having an affair but failed to do so.
Like the injured wife, I now know that my former partner - the mainstream media - is not the decent upstanding chap I thought he was but a creature of monstrous depravity and evil. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether the media isn’t more wicked than even Hollywood or the music industry. Without the media’s relentless lies and social conditioning, after all, we would not be nearly so susceptible to the machinations of our dark overlords. The press is what allows our enemies to get away with murder.
But I didn’t know this at all in the decades I spent working for it. And the question I often ask myself is: “How could I have missed what now seems so obvious to me?”
The answer, I think, is that as with the NASA space programme, only a handful of people need to be in on the secret. The vast majority of NASA employees, I’m sure, genuinely believed that they were sending men to the moon. The vast majority of mainstream media employees, I’m equally sure, believe (or at least have persuaded themselves) that they are speaking truth to power without fear or favour, getting to the bottom of what’s really happening in the world, being the first to ‘break’ ‘the news’, and so on. In both cases, the innocent dupes are so focused on the minutiae of their specific tasks they don’t have time to consider the bigger picture or ask questions like “But whose agenda am I really serving here?”
Consider the place where all the biggest lies are originally promulgated. The news room. If you’re the kind of person who reads my stuff you’re probably the kind of person who knows already that most of what appears in the news pages is literally fake news. “Terrorist” outrages, for example.
Just recently, there was a story all over the UK media - to which I paid little attention because it was all over the UK media - about some immigrant black person on a train going rogue and stabbing lots of people.
“Bollocks!” was my instant mental reaction when my one of my kids told me about it. Miri AF smells a rat too.
https://miri.substack.com/p/on-a-knife-edge
Let’s assume that our hunch is correct and that the entire story was fake, that the participants were all crisis actors, that it was yet another false flag devised by the intelligence services to ramp up fear, justify more state monitoring and regulation, and usher in the planned Nigel Farage/Reform regime… Surely that must make all the news reporters who wrote up the story complicit in the crime?
Well, no. At least not knowingly complicit. When a terror incident story breaks, the chances are that none of the news reporters who write it up initially will be anywhere near the scene. They will be stuck in the newsroom in London - and under pressure to get the ‘story’ out for ‘edition’, ie in time for it to appear in tomorrow’s print edition of the newspaper.
Therefore, in the first instance they will do little if any additional investigation of the story. They will take their stories from ‘the wires’, that is from the various press agencies, Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). All the press agencies are owned and controlled by the Cabal. Their job is to put out the official narrative, as dictated to them by The Powers That Be. But there’s no reason why the grunt hacks who take their stories from ‘the wire’ should know this. As far as most journalists are concerned, the Press Agencies are the gold standard, with bigger budgets, bigger staff, more access to information than anyone. No need to query their ‘facts’ either because all your competitor newspapers will be using the same information, which is all that really matters: consistency.
As the story develops there will be room for more active reporting: human interest stories about the experiences of the ‘victims’, a site trip to the location of the incident perhaps incorporating descriptive colour and the reactions of local people, etc.
But any independent reporting will be heavily constrained. Suppose, say, reporters had wanted to visit the Huddersfield train to see for themselves the blood-stained carriage. Well they wouldn’t have been allowed on board, most likely, because the police would have declared it to be a ‘crime scene.’ Same with access to the ‘victims’: it would be rendered impossible, for any number of reasons, from ‘too traumatised’ or ‘unwilling to speak’ or ‘being treated in hospital.’ So really, why bother? Why not instead do what news rooms do and rewrite stories from the wires….
This explains something I often noticed as a journalist but could never quite put my finger on: why disaster stories always felt slightly unreal and the reporting on them always a bit unsatisfactory.
I remember, for example, the incident in 2013 when a British soldier called Lee Rigby was supposedly beheaded in the streets of London by Islamist terrorists. This is quite an unusual and dramatic and frankly hard-to-pull-off thing to occur. How did they spot him if he was in civilian clothes? How come no one intervened as the baddies were busily chopping his head off? Why were the eye-witness accounts so mysteriously sketchy? Why wasn’t there more blood - I mean isn’t there LOTS of blood when you chop someone’s head off?
Neither on the day when I read the ‘news’ - nor in the subsequent follow-up reports, did I get any sense that what purportedly had happened really had happened. This didn’t mean that I discounted the story. For years afterwards, I trusted - because the newspapers wouldn’t lie, I thought - that there was a soldier called Lee Rigby and that he really had been beheaded in the street by two Islamic terrorists. But something about it just didn’t feel right and it was only years later that I realised why: that the whole thing was another bollocks, staged, false-flag operation.
When The Powers That Be are setting up fake news stories like this, one thing they are careful to factor in is repetition. That is, in order for the Big Lie to embed itself in the public consciousness it has to be repeated over and over again until even the very stupid people at the back of the class have taken the Big Lie onboard. One way the media effects this with news stories is to drip out new pieces of information each day, supposedly reflecting the diligent further inquiries of reporters, but really just reflecting how the lie narrative has been storyboarded: Day One: the sketchy, bare bone facts as the story breaks; Day Two: the shocked aftermath, prayers and tributes; Day Three: tales of heroism and tragedy from plucky survivors and grieving relatives.
With the Huddersfield train story, one of the ways they kept it alive was with human interest stories about passengers who had heroically fought back. A story in the online regional newspaper Nottinghamshire Live, later picked up by all the big league tabloids such as the Mail, told of a “Huntingdon train hero” who had been planning to watch his football team Nottingham Forest play at an away game in Austria. Cruelly and unforgivably, according to the story, the airline Ryanair had refused to refund his flight.
Further down the report is the interesting detail that ‘an online fundraiser via JustGiving’ has been created in the hero’s name ‘with the hopes of financially supporting him while he recovers from his injuries.’ Already, we learn, ‘more than £50,000’ has been raised.
I’d lay £50,000 that no reporters on any newspaper will have been there to examine the scars when he pulled off his bandages. As we journalists used to joke back in the day - and as quite possibly they still do - ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story.’
Everyone who doesn’t work in the media assumes that everyone who does work in the media must be knowingly complicit in the lies that the media spews out every day. My contention, as a former insider, is that this ain’t necessarily so.
So who does know? I suspect by the time you get to the level of editor - or just before you are offered the job - that it is made clear to you what the deal is. Editors, even now that no one buys newspapers, get outrageous pay packages, often including perks like chauffeur-driven cars daily from their agreeable country homes. They also get to become figures of influence. It’s possible that shilling on behalf of evil Satanic elites and destroying their people and their country wasn’t what they signed up for when they started out as cub reporters/got fast tracked to the leader page editorial team thanks to their Oxbridge degree. But big money makes nasty conscience problems go away.
Lower down the feeding chain, it’s hard to say who is genuinely compromised and who is just a useful idiot of the corrupt system. But I’d say that the vast majority of hacks fit into the latter category. One reason I’m pretty sure of this is that I know journalists to be incorrigible gossips. In my day, a lot of them used to drink quite heavily too. What do you talk about over a pint? You talk about work. You trade inside information. And I can assure you that never once in my years as a journalist, including several years as a newspaper staffer, did I ever hear a news hack say anything like: “Well you realise that Diana was still alive and able to walk when they pulled her out of the vehicle. A Merovingian blood sacrifice, that’s what it was, orchestrated by Prince Philip” or “Head chopped off in the streets of Woolwich? You’re bloody kidding me, aren’t you? Everyone in the know knows that this was another MI5 false flag.” Nor, ever, did I hear a hack on the foreign desk intimate that 9/11 was an inside job.
The fact is that most journalists actually believe the crap that goes under their bylines. News reporters, certainly, because most news reporters don’t do any actual reporting. Rather they collate and lightly edit the information that has been handed to them by trusted authorities - the emergency services, the news agencies, etc. Their main sin - and it’s a venial one, not a venal one - is to be far too trusting of their sources. And too lazy - or time pressed - to make independent inquiries.
Because I was never myself a proper news reporter - being Arts Correspondent doesn’t really count because all it involves is going to theatrical first nights and writing about arts funding crises and such like - I don’t consider myself responsible for any of the disgusting Cabal propaganda the Telegraphran in its news pages while I was working for it.
But that doesn’t quite let me off the hook. Earlier I described the news room - though strictly speaking I should have said ‘editorial conference’ - as the place where all the biggest newspaper lies are originally promulgated. It’s the opinion formers, though, in the comment and editorial sections who do the worse damage, in my view. And since I was one of them, I feel I owe you an explanation. But that will have to wait till the second part of this piece…
