TCW have released a (somewhat edited) video of their recent "Celebration of Dissent" event, which featured everyone from Michael Yeadon and Clare Craig to Andrew Bridgen and Right Said Fred. Unsurprisingly it was a cavalcade of crankery. Here's what you didn't miss... 🧵
Things got off to a bad start, as intended host Mark Dolan had apparently forgotten he has a GB News show on Thursday evenings. 🤦♂️
So conspiracist James Delingpole stood in as host, and promptly accused the government of "poisoning us with this experimental gene therapy". 🙄
It's perhaps just as well Dolan wasn't there, as Delingpole bemoaned the fact that "even GB News has fallen" after Mark Steyn's departure, and suggested remaining staff aren't as brave as people in "the shield wall". He then blamed Ofcom, prompting pantomime boos from the crowd.
After screening the documentary "Safe And Effective", the first panel included the film's producer Mark Sharman, Charlotte Wright from @VIBUK1, whose husband died after vaccination, and two representatives from @ukcvfamily who have suffered adverse reactions to covid vaccines.
Sharman didn't help their cause by accusing Ofcom of being "complicit in the spread of fear, the exaggeration of covid deaths .. and the cover up of [vaccine] deaths and injuries", and claiming "covid jabs have finally been withdrawn" .. because the autumn booster campaign ended.
Caroline Pover of @ukcvfamily then asked the audience to stop using "words like sheep, pureblood or poison" that make it harder to seriously discuss their plight.
Half an hour later Delingpole referred to covid vaccines as "clot shot, death jab, whatever you want to call it". 🤦♂️
Pover also said that "some people wanted us to join their fight" but "don't believe that we deserve compassion". One woman who contacted her even told her "she wasn't interested" in supporting her group, while asking *her* for help!
"I wondered, just what was she fighting for?"
As her colleague Charlet Crichton pointed out, @ukcvfamily "steer clear from any public commentary regarding vaccination" because "conversations around the topic [are] distracting to [the] urgent health needs of our members".
Sadly the rest of the event proved that point. 😞
The second panel at TCW's Celebration of Dissent featured Angus Dalgleish, HART's Clare Craig and Ros Jones, and a surprise appearance by their old colleague Michael Yeadon, who promptly stole the limelight and turned the event into a clown show with his wild conspiracy theories.
Yeadon called covid "this alleged pandemic virus" and questioned if viruses "even exist" or if that's "how diseases spread". He's "come to the conclusion [covid] wasn't a new illness, there wasn't even a new virus", and that "severe respiratory disease pandemics are impossible"!
What about Spanish Flu? Yeadon now claims "it's a lie, it didn't happen". 😳 Based on one document from 1923 not listing influenza, he believes "it wasn't this major thing, which then they're using to make me believe another [pandemic] could happen".
So, a 100 year conspiracy.
Yeadon veered off topic by claiming "it's obvious this whole thing is ultimately to take over humanity", and a "group of people seek to impose a digital totalitarian tyranny". He then spent several minutes talking about his bank's biometric security and using cash at Argos. 🤷♂️
Yeadon wrapped up by attacking ALL vaccines, and encouraging the audience to "invest some effort" in reading anti-vax books.
"I no longer have trust in the industry in which I worked for 35 years. All trust is gone. All normal sources of information I regard as corrupted." 😬
Yeadon then joined his fellow HART members in a panel. Clare Craig kicked off by claiming that "we were taught at medical school" that anti-vaxxers and "anybody that spoke out during a pandemic" were on the same level as Harold Shipman.
Which seems unlikely over 20 years ago. 🙄
HART's Clare Craig also claimed "we've got to the stage where [doctors] damn well know" that covid vaccines are harmful. "They know, and they are too scared to say anything".
Or maybe after 2 years in an echo chamber she can't understand why most doctors don't agree with her? 🤔
Ros Jones admitted that she "failed dismally" to get any "actual real life paediatricians" to join HART (she's retired), then attacked the College of Paediatrics for "changing its advice" on vaccines, suggesting that "somebody told them 'now it's policy you have to support it'".
And Angus Dalgleish launched into a series of wild claims, starting by saying that covid "had been interfered with, it was not natural, so it had to have escaped from the laboratory", and vaccines cause side effects because "80%" of the spike protein "was the same as humans". 🤔
Dalgleish also repeated his recent claims that people with cancer have been relapsing, and "what they all had in common was they'd all had a booster".
Of course, people who've had cancer would be first in line for booster shots, so that's like saying "they'd all had a cuppa". 🙄
But Michael Yeadon topped them all by claiming covid vaccines are "toxic by design" and "calibrated" to kill people, but not so many that we'd notice.
"The only way they could have known is to have done human experiments somewhere on the planet. I'm confident they've done that."
And so we get to the final panel of the TCW event, featuring MPs Andrew Bridgen and Christopher Chope alongside one hit wonders Right Said Fred, HART cartoonist Bob Moran, and the "priest" you can always rely on to be on the wrong side of absolutely any argument, Calvin Robinson.
James Delingpole and Bob Moran discussed "why is our profession so shit" (apparently they both still identify as journalists). Moran had a pop at his former Telegraph colleagues' "Bill Gates sponsored science pieces" and the "layers of control" and "self censorship" in the media.
Delingpole then asked Christopher Chope if "MPs were never required to get the clot shot?" Chope just let this slide, and instead went off on a rant about his colleagues being "lazy, prepared to accept whatever's handed down to them, discouraged from thinking".
Delingpole kept at it though, suggesting MPs had been given saline instead of covid shots, because "people from every other field have been dropping dead, but not enough MPs"! 😱
Chope just boasted about being the only MP never to wear a mask in Parliament. 🙄
Next was Andrew Bridgen, who's hopped down a rabbit hole in recent months and just kept digging. Apparently he's always had an issue "sneezing at sunlight, coming out of a dark room", but insists he never had allergies, and a recent bout of hay fever must be a vaccine injury. 🤔
Bridgen aptly talks about "being in a sort of parallel universe". He claims the "cleaners, security guards, cooks, clerks" working in Parliament congratulate him for speaking out about covid vaccines, but "the people who've got real power, politicians, don't want to talk to me".
Delingpole then turned to GB News' high priest of anti-woke, Calvin Robinson, who described the church as "the biggest let down" of the pandemic and said it was "run by the same middle class, metropolitan, liberal progressives that are in Parliament, journalism, big pharma".
Robinson also turned his ire on journalists, accusing them of being "complacent, if not complicit, for the most part" and that they "didn't ask the same questions" as during the swine flu pandemic "because the government got in there first, the nudge units, the Gates Foundation".
Last and least to speak were Right Said Fred. Richard Fairbrass called the music industry "infantile", and claimed artists "back off" when "the proverbial shit hits the fan", "because their sponsors tell them to, their managers tell them to, their record companies tell them to".
Host James Delingpole, meanwhile, seemed obsessed with Satanism, talking about Sam Smith's Grammys performance, and later asking if "the music industry is demonstrably more Satanic and evil and pro-vax" (like those are all linked) than it was in the Freds' own (very brief) era.
And that's about it. Oddly most of the Q&A session is missing, including the audience chanting the Lord's Prayer with references to Bill Gates and Pfizer crowbarred in (see below).
If this is what they felt was fit to share, what else did they cut? 🤔
Dilbert creator Scott Adams has sadly got prostate cancer. After going down a rabbit hole during the pandemic though, he turned to Canadian quack William Makis who (as always) recommended ivermectin and fenbendazole. Which did not work. Now they're in an unseemly row over it. 🧵
Ivermectin pusher William Makis responded to Scott Adams' post by claiming he didn't follow his "protocol" (which Adams denies), his cancer was "probably" caused by covid vaccines, and that he "didn't discount the possibility" that Adams was part of a plot to discredit him. 😬
Unsurprisingly Scott Adams is giving short shrift to Makis and other quacks and their followers, who are trying to blame his cancer on covid vaccines or encourage him to try anti-parasitics, vitamins, fasting, diets and other dodgy "cures" for his cancer.
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...