Episode 154: Covid Conspiracy Lobbyists in the UK feat Jordan Wildon & Nick Backovic
An influence operation by people who believe the vaccine is magnetic and the pandemic is overblown. Annie Kelly whisks us to the United Kingdom where anti-vaccine movements are flourishing despite a recent loosening of the anti-covid government measures. We speak to Nick Backovic and Jordan Wildon from Logically, open-source data analysts and journalists who co-authored a recent article entitled 'The HART Files: Inside the Group Trying to Smuggle Anti-Vaccine Myths into Westminster'.
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Episode music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com)
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 154 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Conspiracy Lobbyists episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Travis View, Ani Kelly, Julian Fields, and Liv Vakar.
Today, Jake is on vacation.
I hope he and his partner are having a lovely time.
And Julian got into the spirit of the episode by getting very sick.
Too sick, in fact, to either write or read an intro.
So, how you feeling, man?
We're still waiting to see if it's COVID, right?
It feels more like a moral weakness.
Well, rest easy, my friend.
I will do all the bullying and obscure anime references for this one.
Nice, thank you.
The COVID-19 pandemic, once on its back heels, is surging around the world again.
A contributing factor to the newest COVID wave is the refusal by many to accept free and effective medicine in the form of vaccines.
Now, some vaccine conspiracy theorists are transparently absurd.
They might, for example, act fearful that Bill Gates is plotting to inject them with tracking microchips.
Others, however, put on a more respectable front.
Such is the case with the UK-based group Health Advisory and Recovery Team, or HEART.
On its website, HEART describes itself as a group of highly qualified UK doctors, scientists, economists, psychologists and other academic experts who came together over shared concerns about policy and guidance recommendations relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Oh, I recognize this.
This is a wine club.
Right, yeah, sounds perfectly friendly.
Sounds like someone I'd like to join.
You get together, you have a few drinks, you question, you know, COVID-19 policy.
You question all of vaccine history.
However, leaked chat logs from the group reveal a more malicious story about their intentions.
It also reveals that their respectable public face doesn't quite match the wild conspiracy theories that they believe in private.
On today's show, the QAnon Anonymous UK correspondent Annie Kelly will walk us through the organization's plot to smuggle COVID disinformation into the government and media.
She will also interview Nick Bakovic and Jordan Wilden from Logically AI, who received and reviewed the leaked chat logs.
So let's take a look at how some conspiracy theorists work together to push fringe nonsense into the mainstream.
Conspiracy Lobbyists What's up gamers?
It's your UK correspondent Annie Kelly speaking.
I thought I'd pop on the pod to give you an update on the state of the nation here from my sunny and beautiful homeland.
More specifically, I came to discuss the anti-lockdown movement here, and I'm afraid it's not good news.
The UK recently celebrated Freedom Day, meaning a total relaxation of nearly all Covid restrictions for the first time in over a year.
You might think that this would have stopped the movement in its tracks, but due to a heady mix of poor government messaging, misinformation and the quirk of the British character that has resolved to never be happy at anything, it has only gotten angrier.
Marches in London's city centre have become a regular weekend feature, with violent clashes outside Buckingham Palace just last weekend and dozens of arrests.
To understand why this is happening, it's important to understand that anti-lockdown is a bit of a misleading catch-all term, and that for most of the movement, it's not particularly about lockdown restrictions anymore.
The movement here is a broad tent which comprises of several different political tendencies and actual positions on Covid itself.
So it's sort of like the DSA of anti-COVID movements?
Yeah, except much more better organized.
I mean, in France, anti-COVID people have been a weird mix into the Gilets Jaunes movement and some of the actions by the president have kind of forced that to happen.
And it's very convenient, of course, because then you get to throw out the baby with the bathwater and be like, look at all of these wackos.
Right.
Anyone who opposes Macron must be... COVID denier.
...this crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah and actually it's quite interesting because a lot of them have been really really watching what's happening in France as well and being like this is going to be us next with the kind of very strict vaccine passport rules and everything so they're definitely borrowing from one another.
Many in the anti-lockdown movement do believe that Covid is a serious disease but for whatever reason do not trust either lockdowns or vaccines as a pathway out of the pandemic.
There's a pretty mild argument that vaccine passports as a coercive measure to pressure people into getting vaccinated are a bad idea, and it's this that's been the rallying cry for the most recent marches.
Then there's the line that Covid is either a hoax or exaggerated beyond proportion, and the vaccines contain a chemical agent of some kind to hasten mass depopulation, possibly by killing the patient or rendering them infertile.
All of this is to say that calling the entire movement far-right or conspiracy theorists is a pretty simplistic description.
But there's no doubt that a conspiratorial strain of belief runs through the network pretty strongly.
Part of this is because nobody wants to think of themselves as a bad person.
When you come out against lockdowns, you're going to have to be prepared for someone to respond that you're saying the virus should kill more people.
You can hold your ground and say you don't care, or something more complicated about shielding, but a much more comfortable psychological avenue out of that confrontation is to say that in fact, you don't think the virus will kill more people.
Because maybe it's not even real.
The figures who rise to the very top of this movement, though, like many political movements, tend to be very certain.
People want leaders who seem confident and assured in their beliefs, even if they personally aren't.
This is how people like Kate Shimirani, a former nurse, have gained fame and notoriety in the movement, by claiming with absolute conviction that the vaccine is a poison, and in one speech comparing National Health Service workers to Nazi war criminals.
Has there been any deaths?
Ask them what is in it.
Ask them.
Get their names.
You email them to me, themedicalrevolutionaries at protonmail.com.
We're the group of lawyers.
We are collating all that.
At the Nuremberg trials, the doctors and nurses stood trial at their home.
If you are a doctor or a nurse, now is the time to get off that bus!
Get off it and stand with us, the people!
All around the world they are running!
That is quite a packed crowd.
Rather disappointing for the UK, which has gifted us, not just with philosophical empiricism, but so many great scientists.
Yeah, I mean, technically they are organizing against vaccine passports, right?
Which is why It sort of seemed to me just like even leaving aside the kind of policy like of vaccine passports why it seemed like such a silly idea to me like the minute lockdown was ending to be like to kind of float this idea that we might do vaccine passports in two months time it just seemed to really like galvanize the movement in a way that you could have feasibly seen it taper off I think.
But while these figures are loud, inflammatory, and great at grabbing press headlines, there's clearly a lot going on behind the scenes of this movement which we don't see.
I'm aware I may run the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself when I say this, but someone had to pay for that big, expensive-looking sound system Shemirani stood in front of when she made her comments.
And given how rapidly the movement's emerged, I'm not quite convinced it's running on small grassroots donations.
The idea that at least some in the movement could be bought seemed confirmed when video was released of Piers Corbyn, another prominent British anti-vaxxer, appearing to receive a substantial bribe from two AstraZeneca investors, urging him to focus his efforts on Moderna and Pfizer instead.
The reason we know about this is because the investors weren't investors at all,
but a YouTube prank channel.
Remarkably, Piers was delighted with the money made from the vaccine company,
but claimed he couldn't be influenced.
Well, as long as I can accept it with...
there's no insistence on any policy changes or anything.
But, because we hadn't yet switched the money, we hadn't handed him the envelope.
So we tested if he really couldn't be influenced.
And I appreciate you're not, we obviously are not asking for a change of policy or anything,
but if there is anything that can be done to focus a bit on Pfizer or Moderna, that might be a...
That would be helpful for us.
That would be a useful thing.
So, knowing that I was an investor in AstraZeneca with a financial interest in other vaccines doing
badly, Piers Corbin started writing down benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Okay, is that not, um, a...
Yeah, you know it just...
Which is a fact, but... It is.
I mean, we're not saying change any policy, but if they could be slightly ignored more, that would obviously be helpful for us.
And said yeah to our request for AstraZeneca to be ignored.
Now, of course, we weren't insisting on any policy changes, but it seems Mr Corbyn was open to the idea of accepting our donation and focusing his efforts on Pfizer and Moderna.
It was time for Archie and his magic mate Henry to switch the cash, with the help of my selfie-loving girlfriend.
Never report that.
Sorry, I'm really sorry to interrupt.
I'm really good.
Sorry.
I didn't know you were the celebrity.
I'm totally confusing you.
I know.
Sorry.
Alright.
As long as you're not wearing a mask, I'm OK.
Thank you.
Sorry, my mum's also... Is that alright?
Oh, absolutely.
Where do we start?
Just here.
You live right here?
Yes, yes.
Henry had passed Go and collected £10,000 and we were ready to give Piers all the Monopoly money a conspiracy theorist could ever want.
This is actually just depressing.
They look like Logan Paul age.
How could you not figure out that these people are not from a big company?
They're all doing their first summer jobs.
I'm not gonna lie, it does feel slightly like you're watching elder abuse when you see that.
That's exactly it.
A bunch of little Velociraptor youth are taking down a very old, very cranky T-Rex.
Once you get to a certain age, everyone from the age of like 15 to 26 looks exactly the same age to you.
Yeah, and I think lots of people kind of when they responded to that video were like, oh, it's all rubbish.
He doesn't believe anything that he's saying.
But in a way, I think that Corbyn's gullibility and accepting that the two pranksters were who they said they were.
seemed to reflect a certain sincerity in his beliefs.
If you truly think that COVID itself is a made-up tool of shadowy elites with sinister intentions, and you're a prominent part of the resistance, it almost seems reasonable to believe that those elites would eventually try to work with you.
I mean, these are children and YouTubers.
You should be able to recognize the new race of, like, world leaders.
The YouTubers.
It's easy.
Yeah, this guy is not- he needs, like, a Zoomer interpreter with him at all times.
Yeah, those kids look like they have a summer job at AstraZeneca.
Like they're not investors.
We're meme lords for AstraZeneca, sir.
Could we give you some money?
All of this got me thinking, though.
Could an anti-vax group be so convinced of a conspiracy theory that they essentially organise a conspiracy themselves?
This is why an article for Logically, a tech company dedicated to countering misinformation, caught my eye last week.
The piece was about an organisation called HEART, which as Travis says, stands for the obliquely named Health Advisory and Recovery Team.
The website for Heart looks like a pretty normal think tank, complete with tasteful graphic design
and black and white headshots of its fellows, described as a group of doctors, scientists,
and economists, psychologists, and other academic experts.
So far, so boring.
The website summary reads thus.
The data is in.
Lockdowns serve no useful purpose and cause catastrophic societal and economic harms.
They must never be repeated in this country.
After a year of pain, suffering, and enormous loss, the UK must reach for new solutions to the COVID-19 problem and any future respiratory disease outbreaks.
We must learn from errors, acknowledge the harms of the measures we have taken, and account for them moving forward.
We now need a more holistic, measured approach.
That's fine with me.
I like holistic, measured approaches too.
But there's a few things that ring alarm bells in the site's mission statement.
For one thing, in its eight recommended steps, it urges… 2.
Stop mass testing healthy people.
Return to the principles of respiratory disease diagnosis, the requirements of symptoms, that were well researched and accepted before 2020.
Manufacturer's guidelines state that these tests are diagnosed to assist the diagnosis of symptomatic patients, not to find disease in otherwise healthy people.
Now, if you're advocating against lockdowns, that seems like a really weird request to me.
Most of the more sensible anti-lockdown arguments have proposed robust test and trace programmes which allow for, and crucially fund, rapid, no-questions-asked isolation.
To be against both either sounds like an argument to essentially let the virus rip through society, or it suggests that you don't think the disease is actually all that bad.
This second point seems to be implied by the fifth step, Five, devise a public education program to help redress the severe distortions in beliefs around disease transmission, likelihood of dying, and possible treatment options.
A messaging style based on a calm presentation of facts is urgently needed.
Because the site is so cagey about what it thinks these severe distortions are, it's not explicit, but with the combination of anti-masking, anti-testing, anti-lockdown strategy, it feels as if it's pretty much teetering on the edge of saying Covid has been overblown here.
This is just simply not true.
As of the 30th of July, we have had the highest number of confirmed coronavirus deaths in Europe.
And even when we look at the more conservative excess death rates, where we drop behind countries like Poland and Bulgaria, it's worth noting that we remain the second worst hit of all the G7 countries, meaning we essentially underperform when compared to other countries of similar wealth and development.
In case you were curious about the worst hit G7 country by excess death rates, that belongs to our friends in the United States.
British excellence exported!
Incidentally, here's what Hart says about the US's Covid strategy.
"We must find the courage to do things differently and to admit mistakes.
The USA is leading the charge here, with more and more states turning their backs
on lockdowns and mask mandates."
But it's clear that the site is designed to stop just shy of explicit "Covid is a hoax" messaging,
which makes it difficult to discuss what they're hinting at without coming across as a conspiracy theorist yourself.
What's so fascinating about the Logically piece, then?
is their access to Members of Heart's chat logs from behind the scenes,
provided to them from someone inside the group who had noticed a friend sharing
materials from the Heart website and decided to investigate.
The chat logs reveal an organised lobbying group comprised of former
doctors, business executives and activists, all focused on making
misinformation about Covid-19 more palatable to persuade Members of Parliament, known
here as MPs, and high-profile journalists. Let's start with their
beliefs.
As the article reads...
While the group does not believe, by and large, that the vaccines don't work or that COVID doesn't exist, they do frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D, at times claiming the vaccine isn't a vaccine, as well as laundering views from more extreme and questionable sources such as the Daily Expose, Children's Health Defense, known as an anti-vax group in the U.S., and dubious news sources.
A screenshotted discussion between two group members, Dr Liz Evans, a former GP who recently co-founded the UK Medical Freedom Alliance, and Norise Bernard, a businessman and activist, reveal what this softer version of Covid scepticism looks like and how it relates to the group's mission.
Here's what Dr Evans said.
The key is getting enough MPs on our side to challenge the government.
Not expecting us to change the government's mind ourselves.
Not wanting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if there is, as I believe, an underlying, more malign agenda, unrelated to the virus, but using it to advance its own ends, which is being pursued by the government, then they will not want to weigh out, and are very happy as things are.
Whether the hidden agenda is the advancement to the fourth industrial revolution, which the government have openly signed up to, or just a drive for increased medicalization, surveillance, and power slash profits to big tech and big pharma, I don't know, and is importantly not important.
But to enable the government to continue in this vein, they have to have MPs on board, who will not be signed up, supportive, or aware of a malign agenda, so will be persuaded by our science and our economic voice of reason.
So our primary target, I believe, is MPs.
So I looked up the fourth industrial revolution and yeah that seemed to be it's another World Economic Forum thing which is kind of talking about a relation of kind of like cybernetics and tech that sort of deals with kind of like making meat and biology and all of this kind of stuff so you can kind of see how it how it fits in essentially to this kind of strain of conspiracy theorism around transhumanism and the great reset and all of this sort of stuff.
Yeah this could be like a Metal Gear Solid briefing.
So this seems to be an agreed-upon strategy in Hart, with them sending out a weekly MP bulletin promoting their aims to politicians.
But getting MPs on side members of the group seem to agree means toning down some of the more fanciful rhetoric and associations with overt conspiracy theorists.
When they are discussing who to recruit to join Hart, some of the co-chairs will reject potential members who are seen as too well-known for other kinds of conspiracy theories, about things like 9-11 or the Great Reset.
Even if they admit some members may share their views.
At other times they workshop each other's language to avoid being too obvious.
The article writes...
Among the files shared were copies of letters and briefings the group drafted to send to politicians, members of the press, and in one case, the University of Edinburgh.
In the letter, signed by only one group member, the author called for the dismissal of University of Edinburgh professor Devi Shrindar for promoting propaganda on vaccines to innocent children, adding, I would call this taking part in a genocide program.
Nearing the end of the letter, the author writes, Not only is their behavior unethical, but criminal.
This is a crime against humanity.
Upon sharing the draft letter with the group, members workshopped it.
Quote, I would strongly suggest removing terms like genocide and Bill Gates stuff.
It is unnecessary.
The university will be concerned about reputational risk, wrote one of the organization's co-chairs.
If we hit the universities, this is where they're getting paid from.
Cut off their source of oxygen, replied the original author.
That's crazy to think about.
If they genuinely do think there's a genocide going on, they're like, we need to not talk about it, we can reform it.
Imagine if there was an equivalent anti-Nazi reformist group.
That's actually such a good point.
I would like some democratic input on this genocide, which I agree with.
We need to have a strongly worded letter to the Nazi governments.
Do not say that they're doing a genocide.
They might get angry.
Like it doesn't.
Yeah, they're always they're always so so image conscious, at least there seem to have this level of awareness that that you know, What they actually sort of believe in their heart of hearts sounds crazy because on some level it doesn't exactly match what's really going out in the real world.
Right, but it's what they feel.
This reveals an interesting two-track style of marketing in the anti-lockdown movement.
When marketing itself to the public, it's difficult to miss the deliberately inflammatory, evocative language like genocide and crimes against humanity.
This style is often just an effective communication strategy on social media in general.
It grabs attention, engagement, and makes it more likely your post will rise to the top.
But to MPs or people with actual public profiles and influence, you have to try a different, soft attack.
You know, so much of this reminds me of when I was researching, I was at Intelligent Design Creationism because it was the same exact deal because there was this group of people who wanted to push creationism in public schools because it was part of their logic project.
to create a theocratic state, basically.
They were Christian Dominionists, and they thought that pushing creationism was part of this larger project.
But they knew that they would sound crazy if they said that, we want to push creationism in public schools because we want everyone to believe in the Christian God.
So instead, they decided to say, oh, we want to teach both sides of Darwinian evolution because they could more easily smuggle their agenda with this kind of softer, more reasonable language.
Yeah, it's that kind of age-old technique of almost kind of like using liberal kind of values against themselves.
It is obvious, however, that many of the same themes of anxiety and rage surrounding vaccines and public health care workers are felt by some of the group members, even if they're careful not to express them somewhere they think is public.
In an almost dire After the direct echo of Kate Shemirani, that nurse who was calling for the NHS workers to be hanged, some of the group members start warning darkly about, quote, Nuremberg 2.0 in relation to doctors promoting the vaccine.
The article also notes that they spend a significant amount of time discussing the completely discredited theory that the vaccines contain materials that make patients magnetic, even dedicating a channel in the chat to the topic.
The question then remains, how far did Hart get with their attempts at influence?
I actually remember asking a question similar to this about digital anti-feminism when I was doing my thesis, and finding out how hard it is to measure digital influence when there's not like a product you can measure people buying at the end.
The Logically Journalists point out that there's no smoking gun here, so to speak.
We can't see any actual participation from MPs in the chats themselves.
Members sometimes seem to brag about having the ear of a certain lockdown-sceptic politician, but it's just not clear if that's actually borne out.
One thing that is clear, though, is that the Hart team are dedicated to creating a far-reaching body of work that's designed to look as convincing and respectable as possible.
The chat logs and documents provided to Logically also revealed the deeper connections of heart to other activists and political groups, such as the UK Medical Freedom Alliance, Us For Them, Lockdown Skeptics, now The Daily Skeptic, and Liberal Spring.
Despite the group claiming to maintain a quote, impartial public presence, Committed to complete transparency in respect of any affiliation or conflict of interest of its members, leading members of each of these groups are members of the Heart Chat, and all of them cite each other in publications, giving an impression of independent experts coming together in agreement on points, while actually coordinating behind the scenes.
It's always worth remembering when you research anti-vax movements here in the UK, that despite all the noise and fury, anti-vax sentiment here is pretty low.
Some studies even claim that it's the lowest in all of Europe, and I think this has a lot to do with the fact that most people here generally tend to trust and like the NHS.
Despite their stated target to work from the top down by pressuring MPs, this public trust is clearly a problem for the Hart Group.
Even if they don't say it in those exact words, preferring to talk instead of media bias and brainwashing.
At the thematic center of the group's beliefs is a distrust of mainstream media and a conviction that the government's agenda was to keep the UK population under lockdown indefinitely.
In particular, there is clear distrust of the BBC throughout the chat logs, with members calling the outlet a massive problem and questioning who's pulling their strings.
Now, Rhys Bernard suggests figuring out ways to intimidate the BBC into airing their views.
They're just going to become the Unabomber, aren't they?
And so, Liv, so are you.
Yeah, that's true.
Listen.
It's now a race.
I see the first symptoms on social media.
I see them.
I just want to have a discussion about industrial society.
Maybe I should look up this fourth industrial revolution thing.
Yeah.
Well, you need a document that your generation probably doesn't know about.
It's called the Anarchist Cookbook.
Introduce Zoomers to that.
Yeah.
Just a TXT, just a TXT away, just a little pay spin away.
Yeah, inventing like an anarchist cookbook TikTok dance or something like that.
Summer's hottest trend.
It includes the instructions on how to build a bomb in the dance.
Another conversation, documented by Logically, apparently shows the group discussing how the government is using covert, quote, nudges, and discreet psychological operations to increase compliance with COVID restrictions.
They then discuss plans to create a, quote, counter-nudge unit, essentially a counter-PSYOP team, using behavioral science to, quote, give the public the resources to spot and resist nudges.
This is definitely just JPEGs.
Blurry JPEGs, right?
Let's be honest.
Yeah, I really would have liked to have seen more about that, actually.
Maybe, yeah, when we get Nick and Jordan on, I'm going to ask them about that.
I just love the idea of being part of an elite counter-nudge unit.
It's possible, of course, that none of this came to anything.
But even then, it seems incredibly ironic that a group of relatively well-connected people would plot to subtly destabilise public trust in healthcare through spreading misinformation and applying pressure to politicians and journalists, all the while claiming to be the victims of a conspiracy.
As the article concludes, As social media is awash with medical misinformation claiming that the pandemic is fake, that the vaccine isn't really a vaccine, that the vaccination drive is genocide, findings like these can serve as a reminder that such misinformation isn't always as organic as it may seem.
Many alternative news sites launder misinformation into the mainstream from the ground up, often using anonymity to cover up their tracks of credentials or to simply hide from accountability.
Heart works in both directions, from the ground up, by using third parties to spread its message anonymously and coordinating its efforts to make that spread appear authentic, but also from the top down, as demonstrated by its attempts to lobby MPs.
This seems like a point that's really worth repeating, that a lot of what we see online that looks like a purely people-driven idea that's gained traction organically has very often been through a pretty thoughtful process to give it that exact appearance.
That was one of my findings in my research on digital anti-feminism, that influencers found what worked on social media to get the most engagement and imitated one another, affecting both the style and the political character of their content.
It's only natural to assume that something similar happens to politicians, even if nobody on this podcast would ever dream of suggesting that they would be capable of such dishonesty.
This leak has the potential to teach us a lot about how misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid filter through both the online and political ecosphere, and I wanted to find out more.
So I arranged an interview with two of the article's authors, Nick Bakovic and Jordan Wilden, two open source intelligence analysts who, together with their colleague Ernie Piper, analysed the Hart chat logs and co-wrote the piece for Logically.
Thanks so much for joining us, guys.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks for having us.
Logically have been doing really great in-depth work over the course of the pandemic on tracking misinformation.
Particularly here in the UK, you guys have been like such an indispensable resource.
So one thing I wanted was, were HAARP on your radar before you wrote this article?
And where do they fit into the broader anti-lockdown movement here?
As a group, they were definitely on our radar because we do monitor a lot of misinformation here in the UK, especially related to COVID.
I wouldn't say as we we didn't really think that you know something like this would come out of it but there were some somebody that we were keeping an eye on and a lot of the individuals that happen to be associated with Hart are particularly people that we have been monitoring in these past few months.
So this was such a cool piece to me, because the anti-lockdown movement here is so incredibly online that in a way it feels like we only ever get to see them performing for the camera, so to speak.
So it was really interesting to see Hart's conversations unfold in a way that at least they thought wouldn't be public.
What surprised you most about what you found in those chat locks?
From my point of view, really.
The fact that they kind of did think that these could go public at some point.
There's occasional messages where they're like, oh, in case of a leak, let's be careful about X, Y, Z. But I mean, the reality of it is just the sort of connectiveness of everything.
You know, you see a lot of the names that are both part of Heart, part of a lot of other groups.
That when you see it laid out like that, it becomes really clear where everything is joined and how different people are communicating with each other.
That's really interesting that they were kind of, I mean, I don't want to say paranoid about a leak because, I mean, they were actually right to be paranoid, right?
But it seems really interesting to me, like, yeah, that they're sort of talking about, like, things like, you know, they're kind of writing stuff like Nuremberg 2.0 just on, like, an essay by a doctor saying you should get the vaccine and stuff like that.
But they were, like, also aware that this could go public at any point?
That seems really strange.
Yeah, I can't imagine if this is them holding back, I can't imagine what their private signal chats look like.
Yeah, exactly.
Already there's such stark contrast between what we saw in the chats and how they appear on the surface in their own communications on their own website.
And I mean, this is after spending the initial two days looking into what's in the chats so that we can figure out, is this in public interest?
Is this newsworthy?
And once we saw that like we looked at all these what was going on there and like you said like these mentions of Nuremberg openly embracing a lot of these your fringe conspiracy theories where you know It's very different from what's going on on the surface for Heart.
Yeah, I mean the startling thing for me was this like big discussion, I think an entire channel dedicated to biomagnetism, and them like really seriously investigating and talking about this idea that like they're all gonna like be able to stick metal to their arms, and that kind of thing Obviously hadn't made it anywhere publicly in a way that's very obvious that we had picked up and spotted, but was there and had been discussed.
Yeah, I mean, the whole thing was that they were kind of considering any idea.
But when you look at that and go, okay, but how do you expect this to biologically happen?
And then just leaning into it was wild to me.
Did any of them suggest telling MPs about biomagnetism or something?
Or were they all sort of like, kind of savvy enough to know that that would just sound mad?
They seemed very conscious of what needed to go in the communication so that they get mainstream attention.
So there's one particular example that we cited is one member of the group telling somebody else that, you know, we need to remove all the Bill Gates or depopulation agenda stuff.
That's not going to help with our mainstream goals.
So they knew exactly what they were doing on that front.
And what's really interesting is that they were talking about, we should remove the Bill Gates stuff, we should remove the references to genocide, not necessarily because we think that's false, but because we think that will make us look bad, which is very, very strange.
Because it's like, if you actually believe that the vaccine is part of a genocide, euthanasia plot, you ought to be screaming that from the hilltops, you would think, instead of, you know, keeping quiet about it.
I think that pretty much sums up our entire experience of our, you know, two days diving into these chats, that they're very much concerned about how they look like, you know, believe what you want, and they believe a lot of fringe things, but they're also very careful about how they appear.
I wonder, like, with the biomagnetic stuff, was there anyone in the chat that was like, oh, well, there isn't enough evidence here, clearly it's not true.
Is the conclusion like, well, we obviously know it's true, but there's not enough evidence to convince people?
I mean, they have actual videos of them trying it out.
Yeah, there was a video of them trying it.
Seemingly successfully, so I guess that could have egged them on a bit.
But no, there was no clear, like, this definitely isn't.
But then again, there's also, what, 65,000 messages or something, and there's only so much that we can read at the same time, as well as using sort of good, like, heavy searching to be able to pull out stuff.
So the kind of look that we have is really a top-down view and a really open, like, across everything as opposed to the specific nuance in tiny parts of conversations.
But no, absolutely not.
There wasn't like a clear, this is ridiculous, why are we talking about it?
They had a channel dedicated to it.
So a lot of work on misinformation will kind of like naturally focus on social media, right?
And what I find really interesting about this article is how it's talking about that less kind of public side of misinformation, which is meant to target politicians and high profile journalists.
So in our episode we talked a little bit about how the Heart Team tried to sort of soften their language and make it seem less conspiratorial, but like what other tactics do they use in terms of like communications with like obviously like some quite high-profile people who are like yeah maybe not particularly easy to reach or get the ear of?
Yeah, I mean, they did a pretty good job in getting that group of people together.
Because, yes, this is probably a lot of these people are independently wealthy and have political contacts to begin
with.
Something that is probably for an actually a new organization coming out of nowhere.
That would be very hard to achieve.
So that is, you know, this in combination with what you just said, is something that allows them, I think, you know, that this, this goal to influence not only from the ground up, but from the top down.
And, you know, obviously, a lot of the stuff that we monitor is from the ground up, what's seen in social media and alternative news sites, but here, and I mean, especially when you compare the thing to the political landscape in the US, for example, where you have, you know, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Um here it's not at that stage yet so I mean this is you know this is uh probably this is something significant so that people are trying to just to launder that kind of
Yeah, that's such a good point.
And I was, the whole time I was actually reading it, I was thinking about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And yeah, just the way that the difference in the US and the UK and the way the kind of vaccine and kind of COVID war has, I suppose, like become so partisan in the US.
And it seems like to be this really specific kind of like, you know, if you're MAGA, you're a COVID skeptic and all of the rest of it.
And it just kind of hasn't sort of drawn along those lines in quite the same way here in the UK.
And yeah, it's kind of interesting almost thinking about like, who would our Marjorie Taylor Greene be?
But I won't, I'm sure I've got some ideas and I'm sure you do, but I won't say just in case we get sued.
Somehow even worse than actual Marjorie Taylor Greene, the British version.
Yeah.
So I know you both work in counter misinformation and so are probably fairly used to attracting the animus of conspiracy theorists when you publish about them.
But this must have still been quite an intimidating piece to write because it's not just like ordinary internet users but people who, as you say, are potentially quite well connected.
Some of them have money.
What has the response to this piece been like?
It was published last week, right?
And has there been any backlash that you've noticed?
Probably not as much as we expected, because some of the previous pieces that we put out attracted some backlash from the anti-vaxxer community, mainly.
So we sort of expected something similar here, but yes, you had some backlash.
I mean, the typical type of... I'm sure you guys are very familiar with.
But it was nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing too different from what we usually get.
Yeah, just a lot of people kind of banding together to just really go hard on us, both from the attacking logically point of view, but also us personally.
But as Nick says, this kind of happens all the time, and there's a certain level of becoming desensitized to it.
And on top of that, just having fantastic Twitter filters, which means that you only really see the worst of it when you turn it all off and go, okay, I hate myself today, let's have a look, see what people are saying.
I had one person that went and replied to nearly all of my tweets and then photoshopped my profile image to make it look bloodstained or something, or mildly red, and really it just made me ask questions more than have any sense of, like, Unsettlement over it.
Like it just becomes odd by this point rather than deeply threatening.
There's definitely like a point of effort when you're trying to own someone in which you kind of just own yourself, do you know?
When you're like, yeah.
When it's gone to like opening up photoshop and downloading someone's profile picture and stuff like that.
Or asking the author if they've read the article.
I think that often the saving grace of extremely online conspiracists, even though they can do a lot of damage in the real world by spreading disinformation, They often think about like, you know, the war that they imagine they're fighting only in terms of posting.
So the worst that they can do is post really hard at you.
So this is a bit more of a future facing speculative question, but given you guys sort of area of work and research, I expect you'll have interesting answers.
Where do you see the anti-lockdown movement in the UK going next?
Because it doesn't particularly seem to be dying down from what I can see.
So I'm curious to see, yeah, what you, how you think it's going to evolve.
I mean, it's a good point, especially when, you know, one of the last anti-lockdown protests were on the schedule on the same day as, quote unquote, Freedom Day.
When, you know, when we have like very few restrictions in place, you know, like I go outside, it's like it doesn't feel like there are any restrictions left.
Yet they still vary.
I mean, there are reasons why these lockdown protests are still happening.
But it's something that's also very reactionary.
So it really might depend on Um, some, some, some things that we can't predict, like if, you know, we have to have, you know, restrictions added in the fall, if there are new waves, um, depending on various things.
So, I mean, I think that's, you know, until this is, um, completely in the clear, like the chances of lockdown, um, protests happening again are still quite probable.
I think on top of that as well is there's a certain level of kind of opportunity especially at these protests like if someone had taken the first step to make it get a bit worse it could have gone that way.
The general impression sort of watching through various live streams at once and looking through everything was it felt like they wanted this to be their January the 6th like there was a lot of like hang the politicians and the police should be going in and dragging everyone out and And then standing outside the parliament trying to declare common law and vote on these like various laws that would like be instated by all of the people there because they could do that and two of them were the same anti-vax law.
The kind of feeling of it is if it had just at any one point someone had just gone right let's just push past this police line everyone would have followed but everyone was too cautious to do that.
And that's the thing where it kind of feels like who can say what happens next?
Like it seems benign and most of the time when these protests happen they do seem relatively benign but it takes like one person to take a step forward and then who knows?
There's a lot of good points in there especially going back to Annie's original question that there is some escalation in there at least in the rhetoric like we've maybe not passed that point where you know We're seeing that violence, but when you do have these public COVID skeptics and COVID deniers calling for Nuremberg 2.0 and Hankins, it's like, the escalation is there.
And also ideologically as well, this like rooting of the sort of sovereign citizen stuff, which kind of is quiet, but then keeps getting louder, especially at protests.
That's something that feels like it won't go away past COVID, like that's something to then kind of latch onto and that's like the next thing.
Whether that comes to pass or not is a totally different matter though.
You know, what I suspect what made a lot of participants in January 6 so bold, even though they were otherwise, you know, regular people in their everyday lives, is the fact that they were highly confident that they had an ally in the government in the form of Donald Trump.
In the UK, it's my understanding that this sort of conspiracism is not as well supported in the government, which is why they felt at heart organizations felt so compelled to I mean, that sounds exactly right.
Like you said, you know, in the US, it makes a difference in how you play the whole thing if you think you have the backing of the president.
And here, yeah, you're absolutely right there that, you know, there is no equivalent at the moment, luckily.
And, you know, when you see these lobbying campaigns, it is concerning, no doubt.
Yeah, this just makes me think, I mean, yeah, this is a bit of the off-the-cuff question.
I know you guys are, like, information analysts, not political scientists, but do you think there is room for a figure like that to kind of emerge?
A politician who's, yeah, kind of sort of galvanises these kind of Covid-sceptic sort of conspiratorial sort of forces?
I mean, I'd always be cautious of saying no to that question in any circumstance.
Even when we think there's no room, that room seems to... There's a certain level of, kind of, without wanting to be too optimistic uncharacteristically, there's a certain level of, like, we saw attempts with the, like, London elections and where did that go?
Nothing changed.
And that had been, like, the various candidates that fall into this kind of, like, Covid or lockdown sceptic They got a lot of traction but just not in the right places.
It wasn't in the polling booth.
And whether that's a trend we continue to see or whether there's something that actually changes in the future is kind of a totally different matter.
Who's to say?
Yeah, in a way it almost feels as if people like Lawrence Fox and Piers Corbyn on one hand and Hart Group on the other are sort of two different political strategies for the Covid-sceptic like groups, right?
One of them is trying to kind of forge a new kind of party, you know, a new sort of like electoral coalition from the Covid-sceptics and another one is sort of just trying to alter what's already there, right?
And it almost feels like we don't know how successful Hart were or are, but that's a better, certainly a better political instinct, right?
That certainly makes more sense to me.
I think yeah, and like it's hard to imagine Hart in America because they can just be explicit.
And I think that also relates, it like relates to the amount of people that I have trust in like public health systems.
You see this in like even vaccination rights that in Britain it's harder to work with that idea that like you know the vaccine is genocide because less proportionally people in the population support that notion.
Yeah, I mean in the UK there is a stable health system to support, so that is also a factor that plays in.
There are a lot of people that will be very upset with you if you say you want to try and disband the NHS, and that's a thing that people have a huge amount of pride for.
There's kind of this different dynamic as well of just like healthcare existing in a way that's actually accessible and there generally being more trust of it.
even in a lot of the mis- and disinformation that we do see that's kind of focused around official numbers
and trying to sort of have influence, it does try and play off like this kind of symbology
of like, you'll see posters that are made to look like they're from the NHS,
or look like, supposed to look like they're from one of these things to kind of pull people in,
because there's still like a good level of trust there to a certain extent amongst a big chunk
of this sort of group of people more broadly, even the ones that don't necessarily like,
believe that, you know, organisations are okay and are very sort of anti-institutionalist.
There's still a certain element of trust there in at least how they're trying to communicate.
Yeah, I have a more broad question about like the kind of work that you do as like open source investigators, because I think I remember reading that you actually consult, you've done some work actually doxing some people, such as such as Neon Revolt, such as the individual who is behind the Qt drop aggregation site qmap.pub.
Now, doxing people is kind of an ethically fraught kind of thing.
So how do you decide whether or not to move forward with making someone public like that?
I mean, that's a very good question.
Generally, there is a fermentatorial process in place that we have.
If we're going to do an expose on someone, it's like we were saying earlier, it has to be in public interest.
They have to be at a certain level where their information, we're not going to be giving them publicity.
So if they're pretty low level, that's not something we're going to do.
In these cases, at that particular moment, the person behind qmap.pub was the most popular QML website on the internet, pretty much.
It was hitting about 10 million views.
So in that respect, I think this was the The best chance we had at taking that stuff off the internet, and the guy did take down the website a couple of days later.
In Neon Revolt's case, it was in line chronologically with the events of January 6th, and as you've covered, everything that happened between Ron Watkins and Neon Revolt, putting it out there that, you know, Pence is a traitor, and if you're in D.C., you have to make it count.
So there is that level of accountability at play that we're sort of working with when we do these exposés.
Yeah, the accountability, I think, is a big thing.
It's something that, I mean, we discuss this back and forth all the time whenever we're looking at whether or not to do something and trying to find out, okay, is this worth publishing?
Is there enough public interest?
The accountability is one of those big things which is It ultimately comes down to has this person had a huge amount of influence and they're doing this sort of in the shadows of the internet and have no accountability and no one's like calling them out for it in a way that's at least I guess keeping them in check is the only way I can word that because anyone with a huge amount of influence has a certain level of accountability like we can't just publicly go and you know say that Hillary Clinton is
Drinking the blood of children.
Well, you know, in the US, well.
But there's this definite weight of if you're pushing out a huge amount of misinformation and you're doing that when no one knows who you are and you can still go around and live life in a totally normal way when you're actually impacting people, sometimes in a life-threatening way.
Absolutely.
There's kind of that balance of like, well, maybe there is a very good case, a very good public interest case for people knowing who you are.
It's hard and, you know, there's times that we pass on things and It's just weighing up each on an individual basis and kind of calculating it.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Yeah, thanks.
Thank you so much for having us.
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It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
With every passing day, the lines in the sand grow deeper and deeper.
There are things we can say, and there are things that we simply cannot say.
And the rules keep changing.
Some champion this as progress towards a better society, while others see its logical conclusion as the establishment of authoritarian control over once-free societies.
It's 50 percent of this country that will not speak their mind for fear of losing their job.
Today I sit down with Lawrence Fox, the UK actor and singer who launched the new Reclaim Party last summer in the UK.
Free speech and open discourse are centerpieces of his platform.
How can you create decent policy without a full debate?
Just today, Lawrence Fox announced he is running for mayor of London.
Well, I am going to stand to be mayor.
Why?
Well, I want to reclaim your freedom.
He's been a harsh critic of woke ideology.
It's a religion, it feels to me, a new secular religion, as Douglas Murray says, with no redemption and no forgiveness.
