When national treasure Captain Sir Tom Moore died from pneumonia, @hartgroup_org members asked whether his death was vaccine related, suggested there was a cover up, joked about him leaving his money to Lockdown Sceptics, and described him as "a control mechanism".
When news first broke that Sir Tom was in hospital with pneumonia and covid, HART members questioned the diagnosis, said his illness was "expected", described him as being "used as a control mechanism", and tried to link his condition to covid vaccines.
When he died the next day, HART founder Narice Bernard joked that "he left all his money to Lockdown Sceptics".
Patrick Fagan (ex Cambridge Analytica) commented "oh God, prepare for hysteria to dial up to 11".
Tasteful. 🙄
They were also upset at people clapping for Sir Tom, saying "vested interests" were "waiting for a trigger to advance their cause", and it was "propaganda", "weaponised virtue signalling".
Political fixer Bernie de Haldevang said "it's using the Tom agenda to clap for the NHS".
Meanwhile members quibbled over the diagnosis that Sir Tom had died "with" covid (possibly caught on an earlier visit to hospital).
Jonathan Engler (one of HART's public facing members) said a news story shouldn't say Sir Tom "caught covid", just "received a positive PCR test".
Prominent HART members like Liz Evans even suggested there was a cover up about Sir Tom being vaccinated.
In fact what seems to have happened is earlier stories were corrected after his family released a statement that he wasn't vaccinated.
But that didn't fit HART's narrative.
So two days later they were still arguing about whether the news (and internet archives and search engines!) had been censored, and trying to find hard copies of old newspapers.
Even after it was pointed out that Sir Tom's family had clearly said that he hadn't been vaccinated.
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This week sees the second "ARC Forum" in London, a right wing talking shop with overtones of Islamophobia, transphobia and climate change denial, funded by Paul Marshall and Legatum, who are also behind GB News.
Unsurprisingly there are a lot of familiar faces there... 🧵
Alan Miller from anti-lockdown turned anti-everything group Together is on a panel.
He was interviewed at ARC Forum by right wing channel Newsmax Australia, and was apparently "shocked to learn" that, according to them, Australia has no free speech and supports trans people. 🤷♂️
Toby Young founded Daily Sceptic, which like Together started out as anti-lockdown but then branched out into culture war outrage farming and omni-contrarianism.
It's still edited by a member of anti-vax misinformation group HART, who laundered their work through the site.
Struggling to get papers published? Why not start your own scientific journal? 🤷♂️ That's what the Great Barrington Declaration's authors have done.
Martin Kulldorff is editor-in-chief, and Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta are on the editorial board. But wait, there's more. 🧵
The editorial board of the GBD's journal also includes their Collateral Global colleagues David Livermore (ex-HART), Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson (whose recent work includes dumpster diving "studies" misrepresenting responses to FOI requests from random members of the public).
Other familiar names include Scott Atlas (former Trump advisor, and co-founder with Kulldorff and Bhattacharya of the "Academy for Science and Freedom"), John Ioannidis (who, like Gupta, underestimated covid's fatality rate) and Marty Makary (Trump's nominee to head the FDA).
BREAKING: None of this is true.
The father was 18 at the time of the Rwandan genocide, and living in Uganda.
He's also a Tutsi - the victims of the genocide, not its perpetrators.
And Keir Starmer didn't represent him.
Needless to say, former Brexit Party MEP turned conspiracy theorist Jim Ferguson gives absolutely no evidence to support these claims, which seem to be based on social media rumours that have been circulating for months.
Conspiracy X's meltdown over Trump backing mRNA cancer vaccines is a thing of beauty. 😆
🧵
Apparently the mRNA cancer vaccines are "all part of the depopulation agenda".
Conspiracy X went from "Make America Healthy Again" to "oh my God, Trump's trying to kill us all" so fast they'll get whiplash. 😆
And if you thought "the depopulation agenda" was wild, how about mRNA cancer vaccines as a CIA assassination tool to off people chosen for termination by AI, or to "shut off people's connection to God"? 🤯
As wildfires continue to burn in LA, Naomi Wolf has falsely claimed they were fueled by cloud seeding, and shared stories linking them to anything from 15 minute cities and a supposed "globalist deindustrialization plan" to the 2028 Olympics and space lasers. 🤨
Whenever there's a fire, conspiracy theorists always blame "directed energy weapons". Although often the videos they share show a far more plausible cause. In this case, it's a sparking power line banging against a tree amidst high winds...
One of the weirder conspiracy theories I've come across in the past is that there's a vast network of tunnels under LA used to traffick children to the stars, linked to the Getty Museum. 🤷♂️
Unsurprisingly QAnon types are linking the nearby Palisades fire to this bizarre story...
After the horrific attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, all the people you'd expect immediately blamed Islam and called for Muslims to be deported en masse for one man's crime. Just one problem... Apparently the suspect isn't a Muslim. 🧵
The apparent suspect in the attack on the Magdeburg market is a Saudi refugee who denounced Islam, accuses Germany of a "secret project to Islamize Europe", and regularly shared posts by far right accounts using similar language to the people who assumed he was an Islamist.
Even after the suspect's identity and beliefs were reported, racists and bigots on X were still blaming Islamists for the attack, or even claiming it was an attempt to "gaslight us" and "we all know why the terrorist carried out the attack".