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 and the cover up of [vaccine] deaths and injuries", and claiming "covid jabs have finally been withdrawn" ..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? 🤔
QAnon fan John Mappin seems to have taken MP Andrew Bridgen under his wing. Following his interview with Bridgen last week, Mappin apparently summoned Robert Malone to the UK to support Bridgen (and enjoy a fancy dinner and invite-only reception with fellow cranks). 🙄
Robert Malone, Aseem Malhotra and Ryan Cole all spoke at a "private reception" in support of Bridgen at the Carlton Club the next day, seemingly organised by Mappin. The invited audience of "key influencers" included John Bowe and GB News' Leilani Dowding and Dominique Samuels.
Not everyone is impressed. Right Said Fred were apparently refused entry for being too scruffy for their club, while various people who weren't invited accused attendees of being "establishment people", "patting themselves on the back", or having an "ego off the charts".
Neil Oliver's apparently upset at being labelled a right wing, swivel eyed, anti-vax, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist (his words, not mine). Maybe it would help if Neil didn't .. 1) interview an actual Holocaust denier? 🤔
Maybe it would help if .. 2) Neil didn't hang out with a group that thinks Israel created ISIS, "9/11 was an inside job", and a "deep state criminal cabal" has a "direct affiliation with satanic indoctrination" .. and freemasons, apparently.
Maybe it would help if .. 3) Neil didn't interview a woman who runs a group of anti-vaxxers and 5G nuts, who claimed (based on her own hilariously poor "lab analysis" of stolen vaccine vials) that covid vaccines contain graphene and "metallic objects".
In case anyone still takes HART seriously, here's co-chair Clare Craig and spokesperson Ros Jones giving a rapturous reception today to their mate Michael Yeadon .. who claims there's a plot to depopulate the Earth using covid vaccines. 🤦♂️
Other guests included luminaries such as Right Said Fred, disgraced MP Andrew Bridgen, contrarian MP Christopher Chope, rentagob priest Calvin Robinson, fired Telegraph cartoonist Bob Moran, and James Delingpole. The event was run by conspiracy rag The Conservative Woman.
While Michael Yeadon was never officially acknowledged as being a HART member, he was a founding member, an active participant on their internal chat server, and even wrote HART bulletins to MPs for the first few weeks!
Andrew Bridgen continued his descent into the rabbit hole this week. First, an interview with Charlie Ward, in which Bridgen worried that "there's other pandemics in the pipeline", and repeatedly said he's been speaking with convicted fraudster Richard Fleming. 🧵
Bridgen blamed excess deaths on covid vaccines, talking about a "life insurance" report from the US he promoted this week, which claimed states with high vax rates had more excess deaths in 2022.
In fact it showed they had less covid deaths in 2021. 🤦♂️
HART's @profnfenton and @MartinNeil9 have made a clearly ludicrous claim that a study showed "37.2% of all vaccinated participants who were tested within 14 days of the first dose were confirmed as covid cases".
Needless to say, they misunderstood or misrepresented the study. 🧵
Fenton and Neil have assumed each row in this table represents all the people tested in each period, and the ones on the left caught covid and the ones on the right didn't. Adding the first two rows, this gives them 353 out of 948, or 37%.
But that's not how the study worked. 🙄
Ironically, Fenton and Neil explain this themselves, directly below the table! The "case participants" (left) are picked from people who tested positive at any point during a 19 week period. The "control" (right) is a group of similar people who tested negative during that time.
Former nurse John Campbell's descent into covid crankery has proven very profitable. Company accounts for the year to June 2022 show he had over £1m cash in hand, with net assets of £800,000, up from just £150,000 a year earlier!
Not bad for a year of underlining things. 🙄
Most of this cash presumably came from John Campbell's YouTube channel, which went from being cited by UNICEF as a good example to counter online misinformation in 2020, to increasingly spreading misinformation itself from 2021 onwards.
The period covered by these accounts. 😞
Campbell's YouTube subscribers rapidly increased in late 2021, after he started making false claims about everything from ivermectin and vaccines to covid death figures, and featuring the likes of Tess Lawrie, Norman Fenton and Neil Oliver.