INTRODUCTION
This is an odd article to have to write, it’s not one that I wanted to write but it’s one that I feel that I have to write. It is a long multi-chaptered article, that I was first propelled to write because of a desire not to be hypocritical about groups and individuals who exploit the mentally damaged or give credence to fantasists for online clicks, cash or even for political gain. The second reason for writing this piece is I could see with some alarm how those promoting wholly false and unprovable allegations against individuals, accusing them of committing the most appalling crimes, are now targeting various British patriot movements, especially those campaigns concerned with the issue of Islamic sexual crime. This drawing together of those who purvey false allegations about sexual abuse or who promote the myth of Satanic Ritual Abuse with groups that are fighting against the very real, as in proven in courts to be beyond reasonable doubt, problem of Islamic sex crime, could be seriously damaging to the patriot movement in the United Kingdom, for reasons that I will explain shortly.
What I’ve noticed is happening is this. At various patriot demonstrations I have attended over the course of this year, I’ve seen those who are using the size and anger of these patriot demonstrations as a platform to promote their own particular conspiracy theories. I’m seeing groups and individuals at these demonstrations promoting this or that case or cause which when I’ve looked into these cases myself, not only seem very different from how these activists are portraying them, but are being fuelled by those who are seemingly making a lot of money and prestige out of the gullibility of the public at large. Some of the individuals and entities who are fuelling unnecessary panic and possibly fleecing the gullible have had links, some tenuous and some not so tenuous, with now disproven Satanic Ritual Abuse hoaxes and these hoaxes have had devastating effects on both individuals who have been unjustly smeared as abusers, but also the communities from which they come.
I have little doubt that some of those who are carrying banners promoting these causes or who are turning up at various courts calling for justice for ‘whistleblowers’ and ‘survivors’ are well meaning and decent individuals, as are the patriots who are helping to promote these cases and causes. But there is a great risk in patriot groups linking up with such people, entities and causes. The risk as I see it is this: By mixing fraudulent claims with the by now well proven problem of Islamic sex crime there is a strong chance that the bad, as in the false claims and wildly inaccurate theories, will drive out the good, which is the growing and increasingly public campaign for an honest debate about Islam and in particular the sex crime that afflicts many British towns and cities. It is far easier for both the media and the public at large, who are generally apolitical, to dismiss stories of Islamic Rape Gangs if these truthful accounts are mixed up with for example fake accounts of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
I feel a great sense of alarm when I see normally solid sensible patriots, people who are as far as I can ascertain, rooted in the worlds of fact, buying into causes which are less than solid when it comes to the matter of evidence to prove them. I may not be the only person out there who when looking at the writing, audio or video produce of seemingly decent patriots dealing with cogent issues, suddenly lose trust for them when I see them spouting stuff that has either been disproved in a criminal court, doesn’t meet the evidential standards of a criminal court and is not even meeting the civil standard of ‘balance of probabilities. In order to spare the embarrassment of said patriots who’ve been hoodwinked I will do my utmost not to directly criticise or name them as I believe that they may be well meaning but have been fooled in a very bad way. I hope these people read this article and recognise themselves in it and take on board what I am saying in this piece and take the appropriate action and be more cynically honest. They should also not deal with or promote those who are likely to be exposed as either outright liars or people who have been exploited by those who have something to gain by said exploitation.
Listening to charlatans and those telling seemingly true stories that are liable to be either false or have a more likely and more plausible explanation, could be politically damaging to patriot groups and movements. Spouting easily disprovable stuff ruins one’s credibility and in my view credibility is, or rather should be, King.
A FEW RELEVANT BITS OF INFORMATION ABOUT MYSELF
It’s probably a good idea to let readers know where I stand philosophically and how my own experiences have contributed to a desire or rather the necessity to write this piece. I used to be a journalist/photographer and for about 6 or 7 years I concentrated on court reporting during the 1980’s. Whilst reporting on courts I got to cover a lot of paedophile and child abuse cases, some of which haunt me to this day, such was the cruelty inflicted on the child victims. I saw many child sex offenders gaoled and all but one or two who I believed were mad enough to be hospitalised, deserved the term of imprisonment that they got. I also saw cases where the complainant was so vague in their allegations that they had the strong odour of untruth about them. In some of these cases the juries agreed with my assessment of ‘bullshit’ and in others they did not and convicted the defendant. My experience with the court system as a relatively impartial observer gave me a great respect for the concept that allegations, whether they are of theft, murder or sexual abuse, need to be proven with appropriate evidence.
Later on, I had a terrible relationship with a woman who psychologically abused me and who was on the charlatan therapist treadmill. This experience also honed my sense that not every one who makes wild outlandish claims should be believed unless there is corroborating evidence. At first I thought my ex was sane but eccentric (a description that could also be applied to yours truly) but instead she was someone who was severely psychotic and manipulative. She made wild unprovable claims (prompted by ‘recovered memory therapists’) about members of her family who being dead could not defend themselves.
I saw with my own eyes how she browbeat her family members into accepting her story that her late war veteran grandfather had anally raped her whilst on a day out, even though there was very little in the way of evidence that could be found to prove this or back up her claim. There was however, my ex’s very dubious ‘recovered memories’ of ‘butterflies on a flower’ which the therapist said was a image that had been implanted in her at the time of her alleged trauma as a way for the mind to protect itself. I must admit that for a while, mostly because of my ex’s bullying and screaming at me whenever I was not obsequious enough to her ‘victimhood’, I bought into her bullshit. However, the more I read about recovered memories and the more cash I saw being screwed out of desperate and deluded people like my ex, the more questions I had and the more cynical I became. I became especially cynical about some people’s claims about bad things that had happened to them and the willingness of others to exploit said claims for their own ends.
I found out later that there is little psychiatric consensus for the idea that trauma can be buried in such a way as my ex had claimed it had been and even less evidence for her claim that she was suffering from multiple personality disorder with distinct names and mannerisms. I now believe that she was bullshitting me in order to manipulate me and for the attention that being a claimed ‘survivor’ garnered her. This background information is something that I wished I had known when I was being subjected to four hour long harangues from my ex how I ‘owed her obedience and support’ because she was a ‘victim’. Thankfully I grew some balls, refused to be used as psychological punchbag any more, decided to live my own life and went on to have much better and more healthy relationships.
In the late 1990’s I had a lot of friends who were neo-Pagans and I heard from quite a few people involved in the neo-Pagan scene how the Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) myth started with Christian Evangelists who ran courses on SRA for social workers in the 1980’s, but became a full blown Satanic Panic in the early ’90s. Because of this Satanic Panic, ordinary decent people, some who may or may not have been neo-Pagans themselves, had found themselves accused of the most appalling crimes of which they were innocent. It seems a whole industry had grown up promoting the myth of SRA to social workers with tragic and damaging results for the unjustly accused families.
It’s difficult to ascertain just how many children were removed from their loving parents on the basis of an easily disprovable myth, but from the first incarnation of this myth, the Orkney case, it must be dozens upon dozens at least. Around this time, I was present at a pagan discussion meeting called Talking Stick in London when the anthropologist Jean La Fontaine spoke there about her report into satanic ritual abuse allegations. She had been appointed by the government to investigate the ‘Satanic Panics’ and in this meeting she talked about her report and took part in a Q and A. I was shocked to find, both from this meeting and from reading her report, that so many highly trained and well renumerated social services workers could be caught up in a panic about a type of sexual abuse for which no corroborating evidence had been found, either in the UK or the Netherlands where similar Satanic panics had occurred.
Whilst decrying as normal people should do, any form of non consensual sex or the abuse of children, I feel that the promotion of false stories of sexual abuse for reasons of personal gain whether that be monetary or self-aggrandisement, does a grave disservice to those who have genuinely been abused. We do have in Britain a number of problems of sexual abuse. There is sexual abuse that occurs within families, or is committed by those in other positions of trust, along with the very particular problem of Islamic sex crime. All these problems need to be investigated and the perpetrators punished, but the promotion of wholly false stories about devil worshippers eating babies in schools, as was the case with some of the stories, gets in the way of punishing those who commit abuse, preventing future abuse and caring for the victims of sexual abuse.
For the record I do not believe that there is such a thing as Satan. Some people may think so but I do not. There are however people who do bad things, people who all too readily submit to the very human impulse to do wrong, an impulse that is called in Hebrew, the Yetzer Ha Ra as opposed to the impulse to do good which is called the Yetzer Ha Tov. As far as I am concerned people do not help the civic nationalist or the patriot cause by getting up on stage and shouting ‘we are being governed by satanic paedophiles’ at the top of their voices, frankly such people look to me like dickheads who will probably believe any old tin foil hat nonsense.
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
A few years back I wrote an article where I criticised the Tell Mama organisation for exploiting a transsexual who had converted to Islam, but was a person who was saddled with a long history of mental illness and delusions. It is my belief that this organisation unethically exploited this person for political gain. Tell Mama basically paraded this unfortunate soul in front of police and Crown Prosecution Service members as a way of promoting their Islamic victimhood narrative. This to me said a lot about Tell Mama’s corporate ethics and their cynical willingness to exploit anyone and anything to promote their narrative.
When I wrote the article, I called Tell Mama out on what I saw at the time as exploitation of someone who was mentally vulnerable. It disturbed me that a person with a long record of delusions was not only being taken seriously but also those delusions were being fed by attention. This person had a long history of concerning behaviour which included promoting themselves as a sort of intersex Hindu deity and making expressions that a reasonable person may see as extreme paranoia and some that were flat out racist towards black people. This person was to my mind a very sad, confused and mentally sick individual who should not have been used as a pawn in a political game.
BRIAN GERRISH AND THE EXPLOITATION OF A MENTALLY ILL WOMAN.
Fast forward to today or nearabouts and I see another example of a mentally ill person being exploited, not one this time from Tell Mama but from a site fond of conspiracy theories called UK Column News which is a vehicle for a man called Brian Gerrish, a person known to his detractors as Agent Gibberish. I would never normally look at Gerrish’s stuff as too much of it looks like stuff I feel I could not trust enough to put my name next to if I had quoted it or used it as a source.
I was prompted to look at a particular story on UK Column News by the rising online fuss over another mentally ill person called Melanie Shaw. Now for those who do not know, Melanie Shaw is a woman who Gerrish and his acolytes claim is a ‘whistleblower’ and who others say is being kept in prison in order to keep her from revealing details about some dastardly ‘elite paedo ring’. The reality is that Melanie Shaw is on remand on a number of arson charges, a serious offence that often involves remand in custody. But, because of her mental condition, there is some debate about her fitness to plead. Ms Shaw cannot move on with her life until she can become fit to plead, get her charges out of the way and either serve the prison time that’s likely to be imposed or, preferably in my view, be committed to a secure or semi-secure hospital where she can get the help she needs. I think on a balance of probabilities basis Melanie Shaw may well have been sexually abused as a child and this may be at the bottom of her ongoing problems but I find it difficult to take seriously some of the more lurid allegations made about this case by the tin foil hat brigade. I have seen little solid evidence that the more wild claims being made in connection to this case have any substance. There is an interesting thread, one that questions the narrative that the tin foil hatters have put about concerning Ms Shaw on the Quatloos board.
Ms Shaw was interviewed on Brian Gerrish’s online video show UK Column News and what I saw both shocked and disgusted me. What I saw was an incredibly sick woman who should really be in a place of safety getting her head sorted out, but instead she seemed to be having her delusions fed by the attention she was getting from Gerrish and his cronies. What occurred on this UK Column News video struck me as equally as abusive and exploitative as what Tell Mama had done to the mentally ill transsexual convert to Islam. Gerrish paraded someone in public who may have been better off left to recover in private from her mental distress or at least get her condition stabilised away from the public eye. I think that it would also be better for Ms Shaw if she kept away from the many people who send her letters and emails saying how they believe her and that she is a ‘heroine’ to them. Such people who are writing to Ms Shaw may well be messing with Ms Shaw’s head to such an extent that it may be difficult if not impossible for her to get better whilst she is involved with them.
As I said earlier, I’ve little doubt that Melanie Shaw had a traumatic and abusive upbringing which has affected her adversely and it is also pretty likely that her time at Beechwood children’s home in Nottinghamshire was also unpleasant and possibly abusive. However, the facts are that here we have a damaged person who needs to get better and I believe that it is highly unethical for the likes of Gerrish and his acolytes to parade her in public as they have done and use her for clicks and page views.
I did some digging into Gerrish and UK Column News and I found a lot of stuff which bothers me and puts them into the category ‘do not trust’. I found a lot of stuff that could fairly be described as conspiracy theory and news items that have been very heavily spun to reflect a particular agenda. It’s not a site that I would cite. My experience gathered in both my professional and personal life as I have detailed above, has given me enough cynicism to sniff out bullshit like this.
Probably one of the most disturbing things that I found out about UK Column News and in particular Mr Gerrish was that he was in communication with those who were part of a massive Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax that blew up in Hampstead in North London a few years back. According to a site that was set up as a rebuttal site to the tin foil hatters who claimed that there was SRA going on at a school in Hampstead called ‘Hoaxstead Research’, there were links between some of the players in this hoax and Brian Gerrish. There are also said to be links to this hoax with another doyen of those who promote the conspiracy theory narrative of ‘elite paedo rings’ former police officer Jon Wedger. I would strongly advise readers of this piece to study the Hoaxsted site with its copious documentation. If you were to ask me who out of Hoaxsted or Gerrish is more likely to tell the truth about any issue, including sexual abuse, then it would be Hoaxsted. For more information about the background of the Hampstead SRA hoax then these links below may be helpful to read alongside the Hoaxted documentation.
Timeline of hoax
Police investigating perpetrators of Hampstead hoax
Good article about the ‘Satanic panic’ from Spiked.
Innocent father smeared by ‘Satanic abuse campaigners’ as a ‘Satanist’ speaks out
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32357195
To be quite frank, I’d be embarrassed to write an article and cite UK Column News as a source. Of course I defend the right, on freedom of speech grounds, of UK Column News and the likes of Alex Jones to spout their stuff, but that doesn’t mean that I have to believe it, use it or am forbidden from criticising it. The involvement in this massive and damaging hoax by the tin foil hat crowd and the contact between key players and Brian Gerrish gives me a lot of concern. This was a hoax that has destroyed innocent people’s lives and his unethical exploitation of Melanie Shaw for clicks means that I cannot trust him and I would advise others to have the same attitude towards him and his work.
Although my personal and private life has given me a reasonable bullshit detector when it comes to tin foil hat shite such as that pumped out by UK Column News (some of their obsessions such as Agenda 21 appear to have been thoroughly debunked by Metabunk), some others don’t have such a bullshit sensor. Unfortunately there are others, some sadly in the patriot community, whose senses may not be as honed as mine have been through court work and being in a relationship with an attention seeking fraggle. I was watching some You Tube videos the other day and I saw a patriot personality, one whom I like and respect as an individual and do not care to name at this stage, who said ‘On the Melanie Shaw case, the UK Coluumn News is putting out a lot on this case’. When I heard this I said ‘No’ and facepalmed. Even a bit of basic digging around, as I have done, will show that Gerrish isn’t exactly a solid source. This statement by this person who I would otherwise have wished to trust has now made me less likely to either quote or trust what they have said. If a person can’t see that UK Column News is a conspiracy theorist shit show where a lot of what they say doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, then what else are they getting badly wrong?
At the moment we have a lot of ‘Citizen Journalists’ running round, who do not yet have the experience to know what is real and what is the ravings of what I and my press colleagues used to call ‘green ink correspondents’. These were members of the public who sent us rambling letters and who made claims that to the untrained eye may have looked newsworthy but which all too often fell down when examined. This, in my opinion, is something that needs to change. This is because we could have citizen journalists who have truth to speak about, for example, the effects of Islam on our towns and cities but they are not going to be listened to because they’ve also promoted some easily debunked wibble from some conspiracy site. If you are claiming that you are wielding the sword of justice and the shield of truth and fair play and you are acting as a mouthpiece for the likes of Brian Gerrish, then you are on shaky legal and ethical ground.
ON JON WEDGER
This character is also getting heavily quoted by patriot citizen journalists but he also is a person who, according to Hoaxsted documents, not only has links to the Hampstead hoax, via his police work but also had contacts with Gerrish and similar individuals. He also may have embellished the story of his retirement from the police. I’ve viewed several videos in which Mr Wedger has been interviewed and there appears to be little to corroborate his claims of how police shut his child sex investigations down because he was ‘getting too close to the truth’. I tend to agree with Hoaxted’s assessment of Mr Wedger that some of what he says has the ring of truth but some of his claims do not bear close scrutiny. Sometimes when people are quoting others, as Mr Wedger has done, the use of unnatural and overly dramatic language, as Mr Wedger is said to have heard used in connection with his police life, may indicate that there may be a bit of a worm in the bud of this flower of ‘truthtelling’
Jon Wedger is I believe a person who cannot back up the claims that he makes. He may sincerely believe them, but he can no more prove what he claims than I can definitely prove that G-d spoke to an individual called Moses on a specific date at a specific time at a specific place. This lack of corroborating evidence, along with his alleged contacts with those involved with the Hampstead Hoax, mean to me that Jon Wedger is a person whom I find that I cannot trust, until he coughs up sufficient evidence to allay my suspicions.
Here’s Hoaxsted on Wedger
Fact checking Jon Wedger
https://hoaxteadresearch.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/fact-checking-jon-wedger/
Jon Wedger unwittingly reveals the existence of the hoax.
I feel that patriot citizen journalists should exercise a degree of caution when it comes to dealing with Mr Wedger and those like him. To me, being suspicious of people with seemingly unique tales to tell is now normal, but alas, too many citizen journalists seem to be swallowing what he says hook line and sinker because he may come over as plausible to them. If it turns out at some point in the future that Mr Wedger is mistaken in his beliefs, or is revealed as a fantasist, then there are a lot of citizen journalists and nationalist You Tube stars who are going to be left with an awful lot of egg on their faces. This will, I’m afraid, damage the reputation of those citizen journalists to such an extent that they will not be listened to, even when they may be telling the truth on matters such as Islamic Rape Gangs.
A SHORT NOTE ON THE VIABILITY OF PAEDO CONSPIRACY THEORIES IN GENERAL
Since the dawn of human existence, there have been individuals who have been perversely sexually attracted to children. It is a perversity not just because it involves the sexual abuse of those who cannot mentally consent to sexual activity and cannot physically deal with such activity, but also because there is no social, cultural or biological reason for it. We can find social and cultural reasons for homosexuality in various societies. We can almost understand to a certain extent how ephebophilia, a primary attraction to late adolescents aged 15 to 19 can have at its roots a biological basis (young and fit women in some cultures may be seen by some as more likely to produce healthy children than older women) but despite the biological background to this paraphilia, there is no excuse for sexual relations that are below the legal age of consent. Paedophilia has no logical cultural, social or biological basis and therefore there is no justification or excuse whatsoever for paedophilia itself. It is, for want of a better phrase, a nonsense crime, from which we derive the description for paedophiles as ‘nonces’. In Britain we have had an age of heterosexual consent that has gone from 12 in the year 1275 to 13 in the 1875 Offences Against the Person Act and finally 16 under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. British society quite rightly recognises, and has done for centuries, that sexual activity with children is morally wrong.
We have also had many instances when individuals have conspired together to gain an advantage. This could be a political, dynastic, financial or social advantage over those outside the conspiring group. We have had princes conspire with others to dethrone kings and individuals conspiring with others to offload stocks and shares that they’ve been informed may be about to drop in price drastically, which has had the result of robbing normal investors in these stocks of their investment, but leaving the conspirators to make a huge profit. Some conspiracies have been only two or three people but others have been slightly larger. However, what is noticeable is that the larger the group of conspirators, the greater the likelihood of the conspiracy being exposed, either to the King, the markets or the public at large. Guido Fawkes conspiracy against King James I in part failed because the number of conspirators got too big for security to be maintained and information about the plot leaked out, leading to the busting of the Gunpowder Plot.
The main credibility problem I see with the ‘elite paedo conspiracy’ claims that are floating around at the moment is the same credibility problem that affect conspiracy theories over 9/11 or Princess Diana or President Kennedy and it is this: To effectively run a conspiracy of bad actors that could topple the Twin Towers or bump off President Kennedy or Princess Diana, or acquire large numbers of children that can be abused and murdered for the gratification of ‘the elite’, would take a truly enormous number of people in order to make the conspiracy work.
As we can see from the example of the Gunpowder Plotters, the more individuals brought into the conspiracy the more likely it is that someone will talk, either because they are self aggrandising by boasting about their ‘connections’ with the powerful or because they get drunk, or get arrested for something and then spill the beans in order to save themselves, or are simply incompetent. Of course there are instances when people have turned a blind eye to evil and the allegations against the late MP Cyril Smith are a good example of that, but I find it difficult to believe that there is a widespread nationwide ‘elite paedo ring’ of massive proportions. It would be too big to succeed, as too many people would have to be involved in it to make it work. I do believe that some Chief Whips in political parties may have used information about a particular MP’s dubious and possibly illegal peccadillos to gain a blackmail advantage over said MP in order to keep them voting along party lines, but that is one-on-one blackmail, not a widespread conspiracy.
Paedophiles, despicable as they are, exist and some political and business conspiracies exist, but I have yet to see any solid evidence, of the sort that I could put my hand on my heart and rely on in a court of law, be it civil or criminal, to corroborate some of the claims made by those who scream that we are ‘governed by a cabal of satanic paedophiles’. Even the issue of Islamic sex crime and the Home Office’s cowardly but somewhat understandable reluctance to make an issue of this problem, lest it cause civil disturbance, has been beset by genuine whistle-blowers. These whistle-blowers are not just chancers like Jon Wedger or the sad and the mad like Melanie Shaw, but are people in positions of authority who have become frustrated at the lack of action being taken against Islamic Rape Gangs. These individuals have, at great cost to their careers, whether it be in police or social services, have managed to provide documentary evidence that Britain has an Islamic sex crime problem which is not being effectively dealt with. I see no such credible evidence being provided by the purveyors of either the ‘elite paedo ring’ conspiracy theory or for the claims that that Britain is dogged by gangs of baby killing satanists.
If the government cannot even hide a massive Islam related rape problem from the public, then consider how much more difficult it would be for the government to hide the sort of widespread paedophilia and child murder rings that the tin foil hatters insist exists? There are bad people in all walks of life, it is known that some paedophiles will gravitate towards jobs and vocations that give them access to children, which is somewhat at the heart of the abuse problems in the Catholic and Anglican churches. In some organisations, and this applies to the churches, there may be a culture of protecting the organisation at all costs or abusers may protect other abusers, but these are matters pertaining to specific organisations, not to government and administration as a whole. However it goes without saying that those organisations, and I have in mind the Catholic Church here, that have tacitly tolerated abusers for decades, do need to be cleaned up.
If not even those organisations that are wedded to secrecy and have a culture of secrecy, such as the Catholic Church, the Freemasons and the Mafia, can hold onto their secrets, how much more difficult would this be for an entire government to do the same? Just think of how many ministers, MP’s, civil servants, military types, police and local administrators would have to be involved, in order to make it work. In that scenario with the number of conspirators running into the hundreds, then the conspiracy would be very leaky indeed, An ‘elite paedo conspiracy’ operating in Britain would also be a tempting target for exposure by any backbench MP who had no ministerial ambitions but a desire to be thought of as a good and just person. The sort of things that the tin foil hatters are alleging would be very difficult to hide in the long term. Even the Catholic church is now finding out that an organisation cannot hide serious wrongdoers forever.
To give an analogy as to how difficult it would be, here is a down to earth scenario that you may wish to consider. Let’s say that you are a person who despises the ideology of Islam. You may have no wish to harm individual Muslims, but you want to inform people in your small to medium sized town that the local mosque is promoting jihadist hate preachers. You want to put up a series of posters pointing out the jihadi hate preachers, but you can’t organise the posters and put them up in as many places as you need to on your own. You ask a mate to help and he recruits three more people to assist the project. You now have five people involved instead of the original one or two. The project expands in the planning and before you know it you’ve got ten people involved and any one of them could be gobby about the project at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It would only take one person to be a little too talkative and before you know it Inspector Knacker is knocking on as many doors as they can and the little group is busted and heading for the courts on a dubious ‘hate speech’ charge. Once a conspiracy goes beyond two or three people, then it becomes vulnerable to exposure and the sort of conspiracy that those who believe in ‘elite paedo rings would have to involve a lot more people from many different jobs and backgrounds than a mere ten individuals.
CONCLUSION
Not everything we hear or read or see is the unvarnished truth. Not everyone is scrupulously honest in their dealings with others and people have their own agendas that may be guiding them to say and do what they do. Just because someone says this or that happens, doesn’t mean that this is the case. There are people who love to be admired and adored by the public, who are adept at self promotion and who may say stuff that has no credibility but which fits into the prejudices of the listener. Everyone has an ‘angle’ and we should be savvy enough to suss out what that angle is.
I fear that no good will come of decent patriots, civic nationalists or those who have done sterling work in exposing the Islamic sex crime problem, lining up with those who promote easily debunked conspiracy theories or who have links to those involved in appalling sex abuse hoaxes. To be seen consorting with or legitimising those who either promote conspiracy theories or hoaxes is a credibility killer. I believe that sooner or later, some citizen journalists and patriot activists are going to be subjected to a ‘gotcha’ moment when mainstream media workers or politicians use the fact that citizen journalists have promoted unsubstantiated rubbish alongside decent truthful news as a weapon against the alternative news media. I count as friends and friendly acquaintances some of those citizen journalists and patriot activists who are currently not being suspicious enough of the information that they are being given by the likes of UK Column and others. This upsets me greatly and I believe that friends should not let friends embarrass themselves by acting as unthinking conduits for stories that are lacking in credibility, corroborating evidence or substantiation or those who behave unethically towards their sources.
We must fact check what we are told as much as humanly possible. We must resist the temptation to go massively public with stories that can be easily dismissed with a bit of research and we must be very careful about who we listen to and look critically at what our interlocutors have said in the past. If a person came to me for example, with an allegation of serious wrongdoing that they wanted me to expose, I would not use any information until I had examined some of what they may have said either contemporaneously to others, or in the past. If I found this person ran or contributed to a website where he stated that he believed that we are being controlled by extraterrestrial lizards or some other such guff, then it would make me disinclined to accept his word about the alleged wrongdoing without some form of documentary evidence. In this case I would look carefully for either an alternative sane source of information or some form of corroboration about the contact’s assertions.
If citizen journalists are to be respected and taken seriously because they are raising the sword of truth, then these citizen journalists need to make sure that the sword of truth is at all times suitably sharp. I have a great fear that patriots consorting with those whose credibility is questionable will one day come back to haunt the entire patriot and civic nationalist movement and maybe even destroy it. I don’t want to see this happen and one way that we can prevent this is by being much more professional in how we behave and much more selective in what we believe and in what we promote. We are already seeing some people, individuals whose politics puts them in opposition to the populist and patriot political current, starting to draw false comparisons between the public anger and concern over the Islamic Rape Gangs and the Satanic Ritual Abuse myth and panic. When this comparison is examined we can see that this is incorrect as there has never been any corroboration for SRA but there has been plenty, including from the courts, of corroboration of the existence of Islamic Rape Gangs. We must not allow this sort of narrative to gain traction as not only is it false, it puts the very real problem of Islamic sex crime on a par with the stories cooked up by fantasists and those who believe, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that SRA exists. By treating patently false or difficult to prove allegations with some scepticism, we can keep the truth we tell pure and avoid tainting it with speculative or provably untrue guff.
I would counsel any citizen journalist to be very aware of those with bad intentions and to be very careful of who you believe. Remember there are a lot of hoaxers, entryists and exploiters out there who want to use the recent and massive growth of the patriot and civic nationalist movement for their own ends. Keep one hand on the sword of truth and another hand on the shield of cynicism and disaster may well be averted.
POSTSCRIPT
This has been an enormously difficult article to write. What started out as a warning to citizen journalists to be a bit more cynical about what they are being told and to be truthful and ethical lest untruth and bad ethics become a cudgel to batter people with, has turned into something quite different. It has propelled me into seeing stuff that even being a bit hard boiled with regards to news has shocked me, such as the moral vacuum that some of those who perpetrate SRA hoaxes inhabit. I mean what sort of sick mind invents this sort of stuff and then use this invention to smear totally innocent people as ‘devil worshippers’, ‘child murderers’ or ‘ritual sexual abusers’? To have such a blatant disregard for those they have smeared, to such an extent that the victims of these smears end up living in fear for their safety, smacks to me of sociopathy. This article has been particularly personally painful to write as I have also been forced, in order to give background to exactly why I am cynical about SRA ‘recovered memories’ and similar matters, to give details about my relationship with an abusive woman, who is one of the few people on this planet whom I would not piss on if they were on fire.
Digging into the world of false allegations of SRA and in particular how the way that the ‘elite paedo’ allegations been originally sourced, along with the influence of extremist Evangelical Christians in promoting the SRA myth, has been profoundly depressing. It’s depressing to think of how bad child protection was back in the 1970’s, how poorly sexual abuse of children was understood, how readily some social workers bought into the SRA myth and how inadequate the laws on possession of child pornography were. At that time, late 1970’s early 1980’s it was perfectly legal (if not socially acceptable) to possess child porn but producing it was explicitly against the law. Therefore the Crown had to work very hard to prove that any particular nonces had ‘produced’ the material. Sometimes they were successful in prosecution and sometimes they were not.
As an aside, I sat in once for a short time at the Central Criminal Court at the trial of one of the infamous PIE-men from the Paedophile Information Exchange. Although thirty-odd years have elapsed since then, and I have long forgotten the name of this defendant, I am in little doubt that sitting in the dock was, if not the personification of evil, then someone who had completely surrendered to the Yetzer Ha Ra or man’s evil inclination.
The Crown tried the best they could to bring these PIE men to justice, using as many of the legal devices as they had at the time including, if I recall correctly, laws regarding appropriate material to be sent through the post. Ironically, although it may not seem like it, the situation is far better today with regards to criminalising child porn than it was in the past. The advent of the internet woke successive governments up to the fact that what was once a very difficult to prosecute niche crime, the production of physical obscene publications, was liable to become a much greater problem with digital technology. Now the loophole on possession has gone and nonces can be prosecuted for possessing obscene images, a power that the modern Crown Prosecution Service has that would have been welcomed by the Crown lawyers of the past.
Looking at the issues of the Hampstead hoax, the Orkney and similar SRA cases is like jumping down a giant multi-chambered rabbit hole that contains a multitude of liars and those who promote lies for their own political, financial or personal ends. It makes me extremely angry that for thirty years or more, a small group of obsessives have banged the drum for SRA and have even got major children’s charities to focus on this issue, even though the whole SRA castle was built on shifting sand. It also makes me angry that whilst there was a considerable focus by charities, police, social services etc on the non-existent problem of SRA, real abuse, such as the abuse that is now being revealed has been occurring in the churches and the by now very well proven problem of Islamic Rape Gangs, were all being ignored. I can’t help but wonder how many children would have been saved from real abuse if so much time and resources had not been wasted on chasing phantoms and instead had been deployed on real problems?
There are a number of points where I disagree with some of the SRA mythbusters, such as Hoaxsted’s favourability to censoring conspiracy theorists and others, such as Swallowing the Camel’s dislike of Tommy Robinson and treating the very real issue of Islamic Rape Gangs as similar to ‘Satanic Panic’. I don’t think that you can have free speech without allowing nutcases to speak freely as well as sane people. It also seems to me that although public concern about Islamic Rape Gangs may look to some as if it is a classic moral panic, there is a great deal more evidence, both witness evidence and physical evidence for the Islamic Rape Gangs, than there ever was for Satanic Ritual Abuse.
I would like to end this postscript by reiterating my exhortation to citizen journalists and patriot activists to be more wary of whom you publicise and believe. It would also be helpful to learn some way to judge which information is good and which is bunk and dig more deeply than you may have done in the past into the backgrounds of those who bring you what may seem to be compelling stories.
Related Links
Interesting article on the Jean La Fontaine report into SRA
Gunpowder Plot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot
Ephebophilia definition. Although there is a biological
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia
Hampstead SRA hoax busted unwitingly by Wedger
Debunking Agenda 21
https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-agenda-21-iclei-sovereignty-un-depopulation.t363/
UK Column news
Abstract of BMJ on SRA
https://www.bmj.com/content/308/6943/1527.2.full
Jean La Fontaine bio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_La_Fontaine
SRA claims almost certainly based on false memories
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/18/satanic-child-abuse-false-memories-scotland
SAFF article. SAFF, a left leaning group representing small countercultural groups has some pretty interesting research into some of the documents linked to the ‘VIP Paedo scandal’ and some of the personalities involved in publicising it.
