I despise conspiracy theorists. I despise them partially because they and their witterings are a distraction from discussing some of the very real problems that the world suffers from and also because I see conspiracy theories for what they are, which is providing simplistic answers to often complex and nuanced problems. My aversion to conspiracy theorising also comes from knowing that in the worst cases the witterings of those who mistakenly believe that they’ve uncovered a ‘conspiracy’ tend to be picked up and believed by others and sometimes this has both horrific and tragic results. The 20th century we can now see was a time when conspiracy theories about race and class sent millions of people to their deaths in Gulags and Concentration Camps. This history should serve as a warning against cleaving to those who seem to have all the simplistic answers as to why the world is as it is.
Yes, I admit that governments can do and believe heinous things, I’m not naive and have read a little political history and therefore understand that those in power or who would like to gain power do behave without morals or ethics at times. However, knowing that government’s sometimes behave badly does not mean that I have to believe every single shonky tale of wrong doing by ‘the Establishment’ that is brought before me by others. Just because someone claims they were abducted by aliens, afflicted by ‘chemtrails’ or a high altitude radio research station or had their child ‘damaged’ by vaccines, does not mean that they are telling the truth. They are more than likely talking complete bollocks and sometimes, in the case of vaccine refusal, highly dangerous bollocks.
Conspiracy theories abound on all manner of subjects and I’m getting pretty adept at spotting them and disgarding those who promote them as potential sources. This is because I want, as far as possible, for what I write to be based on verifiable truth even though I do put my own personal spin on what I’m writing.
I can spot a pile of Rothschild/vaccine/chemtrails/NWO/Zionist plot horseshit a mile off and reject it accordingly. It is a shame that others, especially up and coming citizen journalists, are not as discerning as I and others who are ‘conspiracy sceptic’ are when it comes to filtering out conspiracy theorising guff. When I see stuff coming from sites that also contain conspiracy guff then I reject everything that is coming from that site lest I be counted among the conspiraloons.
By failing to discriminate between good and bad sources, or even engage in basic fact checking, too many including a number of citizen journalists, have allowed themselves to be used and abused by conspiracy theory promoters. I think that if citizen journalists are to be taken seriously then they need to develop a much more cynical outlook towards those who promote particular narratives, especially those narratives that seem rather shallowly rooted in reality. I need to say at this point that unlike some other opponents of conspiralunacy, I don’t want to see such people banned from expressing their views. I feel that it would be completely wrong to prevent the likes of Alex Jones, David Icke or Brian Gerrish from speaking their brains, even though much or even all of what they say can be refuted. This is because censorship of views, even stupid ones is wrong and allowing the disinfecting properties of sunlight to fall on such people and subjecting them to open challenge, is often a good way of exposing the flaws in their ideas and their concepts.
Conspiracy theorists or conspiraloons or whatever you want to call them are also very good at latching onto matters of public concern and exploiting them for clicks and often for cash. The conspiracy theorists who promote patently false tales of Satanic Ritual Abuse or fraudulent tales of VIP nonce rings for example, are probably earning a good wedge from peddling their guff to the gullible. I find this morally reprehensible as those gullible ones could be contributing their time and their cash to causes that really would aid children in distress instead of just lining the pockets of those who promote such theories. Conspiracy theorists, especially those with their eyes seemingly on the money that their wibblings can earn them by presenting themselves as ‘protectors of children’, were very aptly described by the late great blogger Anna Racoon as ‘social justice entrepreneurs’. These ‘Social Justice Entrepreneurs’ (SJE’s) have over the last decade or so latched on hard to genuine and in some cases well founded public concerns about paedophilia to promote stories that are not only false but in some cases have caused innocent people a great deal of distress. People who have nothing to do with sexual abuse of children have found that they have been targeted for ‘vigilante action’ by some of the conspiraloons more deranged readers and fantasists who have been indulged by conspiracy theorists have dragged through the mud the names of blameless men and women. If you do not believe me on this then look at the innocent lives that were blighted because of the Hollie Grieg hoax in Scotland. In that case a group of conspiracy theorists falsely alleged that a Downs Syndrome girl had been the victim of a VIP sex slave ring. The case was taken up by various conspiracy promoters and the result was that 22 people were unjustly smeared as paedophiles. The conspiracy promoters also named, contrary to the law, children and adults whom they said were ‘victims’ of this alleged but ultimately unproven, abuse. The people behind these sex abuse hoaxes are really not nice people and should be shunned as the charlatans that they so often are.
There seems to be no action that is too low morally for these conspiracy theorists to stoop. Some of them have publicly identified children who were found to have been coached to provide abuse accounts that were later proven to be false, something that I feel the need to remind readers is an illegal act. Others have made wild, completely unsubstantiated and baseless claims against senior political and cultural figures which has resulted in wasteful and pointless police investigations that in one case resulted in the Metropolitan Police having to pay compensation to the family of Leon Brittan for raiding his house after he died over completely false sexual abuse allegations and causing his widow a great deal of distress. As well as creating a situation where the conspiracy theorists put a dying Leon Brittan through an appalling ordeal of false accusations, the actions of these lunatics may well have distracted the public’s attention from real problems such as the increasingly well documented problem of Islamic Rape Gangs for example.
The phenomenon of a whole host of individuals screeching about ‘the Elm Guest House’ or other sexual abuse conspiracy theories has, in my opinion been a useless diversion to the need to unearth and prosecute the sort of real and provable sexual crimes which are causing great harm to individuals, families and communities. I do have to say at this point that not all of those who are involved in disseminating extremely hard to verify ‘paedo’ conspiracy theories are as morally culpable in dishonesty or the exploitation of the vulnerable as others are. I believe that some of the lower levels of the supporters of sex abuse conspiracy theories are decent and caring individuals who really do want the best for children and who want to see children protected from harm. The same cannot be said for those originating these false theories. Sadly, by climbing aboard various sex abuse conspiracy theory bandwagons good people are wasting time and effort that may be better deployed elsewhere and also assisting some pretty questionable groups and individuals.
As I intimated earlier, nothing is seemingly off limits for these conspiraloons, some of them, namely the aforementioned ‘Agent Gibberish’ aka Brian Gerrish, are even OK with exploiting those with catastrophic mental illnesses. We can see this quite clearly Gerrish’s involvement in the sad case of Melanie Shaw. Melanie Shaw is a badly damaged and very sick person who following a recent trial has been convicted of Arson in a prison where she was being held. Ms Shaw is a pathetic figure a person so obviously very mentally ill and one who has a disturbingly long record for arson offences and for attacking a family home. She was also I seem to recall judged to be incapable of caring for her offspring which were removed from her. This poor distressed person, who I admit has been dealt a bad hand by life, requires intense mental health help which I hope she eventually gets. But it also needs to be said that due to her record of arson and violence it is right that the public should be protected from Melanie Shaw until such time as she is deemed safe or stable.
Brian Gerrish, Britain’s Pound Shop Alex Jones, has been all over the Melanie Shaw story like a deeply unpleasant and highly unwanted rash. He and his supporters have made all sorts of unfounded allegations about how Ms Shaw was a ‘whistleblower’, how she could attest to all manner of wicked goings on whilst she was a resident in the Beechwood care home and that she was being oppressed by the state by way of ‘secret courts’ in order to prevent her from ‘naming names’ of ‘VIP paedophiles’. Whilst I accept that Ms Shaw may well have been the victim of past sexual abuse and for which I hope she gets appropriate care to recover from, the rest of Gerrish’s claims are complete baloney.
Brian Gerrish and his UK Column News vehicle has been the major conduit for a lot of the misinformation that is circulating around about this case. It was Brian Gerrish’s site that promoted claims such as Melanie Shaw was being incarcerated to keep her silent, that she was being tried in a secret court, that she was being oppressed by the State and that there were ‘D notice’ style reporting restrictions on Ms Shaw’s case.
These claims are complete and utter bollocks from what I can find out. Ms Shaw was not tried in a secret court but an open court with legal representation and with the right to have her voice heard in court. She was tried not by some shadowy ‘Establishment’ judge but by a jury in a special ‘fact finding’ trial as Ms Shaw was deemed to be too mentally ill to be considered as fit to plead. There has been no attempt to deny Ms Shaw competent legal representation and certainly no restrictions on reporting this case. The case has for example been reported by local media, such as the Huddersfield Examiner. There doesn’t seem to be any conspiracy here to silence Ms Shaw despite Mr Gerrish’s claims to the contrary.
I must admit I feel a great deal of sympathy for Ms Shaw, as I would for anyone who is suffering from catastrophic mental illness, and she deserves help for her affliction. However, her mental health has not been improved by having her case being taken up by Gerrish, and similar conspiraloons, who have promoted her case as one which was linked to alleged ‘VIP paedo rings’, of which of course little or nothing has been proven.
I watched one of the interviews between Ms Shaw and Brian Gerrish when she was not incarcerated of course, and I could not shake the feeling that here was a severely ill woman who was being used to gain website clicks for Brian Gerrish. What I saw on Gerrish’s ‘UK Column News’ video made me extremely uneasy, as I thought that Ms Shaw was to a certain extent being exploited by Brian Gerrish. This video showed a highly disturbed woman who should at the end of the day be in a secure and caring environment, where she can get the help she needs, being seemingly coaxed into speaking the lines that would fit in with Gerrish’s world view. It was a pretty disgusting sight and I felt that I had to call this apparent exploitation out and, in my previous article on the subject, counsel other citizen journalists to step back from the Shaw case to avoid being hoodwinked by the conspiraloons and also to avoid being involved in the exploitation of Melanie Shaw. I take the view that if it was morally wrong for the Islamic Tell Mama organisation to exploit a mentally ill transsexual for political gain , then its also right to call out Gerrish for seemingly doing something similar with Ms Shaw.
The involvement of Gerrish in this case should have rung alarm bells for the citizen journalists who’ve been covering the Shaw story. The alarm bells definitely rang for me, which is why when I looked into the story and I found out who was promoting it, I decided to leave it mostly alone. I did not want to be a party to what could be a false story and neither did I want to take part in exploiting the mad and the sad.
My reason for this decision was because the more I delved into Gerrish’s site and his campaigns, the less actual solid proof I could find for the claims. I was very disturbed to discover that Gerrish, along with another doyen of the ‘VIP paedo conspiracy’ crowd, former police officer Jon Wedger, allegedly have links to some of the protagonists in the horrific Hampstead Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax. In this hoax, conspiracy theorists falsely claimed that babies were being sacrificed in a Hampstead school. I could not and would not take seriously those who have been involved in this hoax. even though Gerrish and Wedger were sometimes peripheral figures in this hoax. I did some digging on the Shaw case but when I looked for confirmation of any of the allegations made by or claimed to have been made by Ms Shaw, I found that, on the matter of Melanie Shaw, all roads led not to Rome, but to Brian Gerrish’s UK Column News website. It appeared to me that the major promoter of the ‘Melanie Shaw as heroine’ narrative was in fact the person, or rather the web entity, that is Gerrish’s outfit, that could have the most to gain both financially and with heightened profile, from greater public interest in the Shaw case.
I’ve watched over recent months various Melanie Shaw ‘supporters’ very quickly and effectively climb onto the bandwagon that has developed over the very real issue of Islamic Grooming Gangs in order to promote the Shaw case and the utter wibble that surrounds it. I’ve watched with alarm how the ‘Justice for Melanie Shaw’ types both those who are outright frauds and those who have been hoodwinked into supporting the case set out by Gerrish et al, have turned up at patriot and anti grooming demonstrations armed with professional looking posters and giving the false impression that the issue of Islamic Rape Gangs and the narrative of the conspiraloons are linked. These ‘Justice for Melanie’ types and similar conspiracy theorists, are a dangerous parasite on the civic nationalist movement and allowing them to ply their guff without question at nationalist demonstrations is going to end really badly and with many high profile types possibly getting a lot of egg on their faces. I’ve been horrified to see some people whom I would normally respect, buying into the narrative that Melanie Shaw is a ‘whistleblower’ and promoting without question stuff that is plainly not rooted in reality.
One thing that really worries me is how the presence of these ‘Justice for Melanie’ types and others pushing similar dodgy conspiracy theories at patriot demonstrations is helping to legitimise that which should not be legitimised, which are the wibblings of the cynical and the misguided.
There are already claims, ones that I hope are untrue, that Tommy Robinson has decided to call for Melanie Shaw’s release from prison. If this is true then this represents a monstrous error of judgement on Mr Robinson’s part as the facts of the case as have been reported in court are worlds away from the narrative promoted by the various tin foil hatters who have latched onto this case.
However, this claim is coming from a journalist at the Huddersfield Examiner who is plainly not a Tommy fan and the pictures from the article in question merely show Mr Robinson being pictured wit h a ‘Free Melanie’ poster being held by one of the pro-Shaw interlopers at a demonstration outside the Central Criminal Court last month. I hope that Mr Robinson clarifies his position with regards the Shaw case and hopefully distances himself from it. This is because if, or rather when, the real facts of the case become more widely known to both the public and the media along with the part played by conspiracy theorists in promoting an untrue narrative regarding ‘secret courts’ and ‘D notices’, then Mr Robinson will find himself tainted by association with exploiters and conspiracy minded types, which would not be a good position to be in. Mr Robinson has done a brilliant and wholly praiseworthy job of highlighting the ongoing scandal of Islamic Rape Gangs in Britain and the fact that these gangs were allowed, often to protect ‘community cohesion’, to continue to abuse. This powerful message, one that is based on verifiable truth, could be diluted by involvement with highly questionable conspiracy theories and those who promote them.
I hoped that after my article counselling citizen journalists to leave the Shaw case alone, that this would be the last time I had to write about this unfortunate and damaged woman. Sadly this has not been the case. Despite what I, as a former court reporter, can see as reasonably accurate accounts in the press of both Ms Shaw’s Leeds case and some of the other occasions she has been arrested or incarcerated in gaol, social media is still filled with wholly baseless claims that she is a ‘whistleblower’, is being ‘tried in a secret court’ and that the State is trying to silence her. I must say that if the State really wanted to silence Melanie Shaw then they would have done a damn sight better job than they seemingly have done.
Melanie Shaw is I believe the victim of abuse that is both historical and ongoing. It is likely that her mental health conditions may have their roots or been exacerbated by childhood abuse and her experience in the care system and she deserves to heal from those experiences. But she is also being abused by various conspiracy theorists who have taken an interest in her case and have exploited it. If like I do, you really care for Melanie Shaw’s future well being and want to see her get better and maybe eventually become a relatively stable and healthy member of society then why not leave the poor woman alone. Stop feeding her delusions, stop flaunting her picture on social media and on banners and leave this woman in peace where she can hopefully heal and don’t let conspiracy theorists grow financially fat on her tragedy.
