Category: General

My Life With Icke – Part 4

On the rulers of this prison planet

If you have been waiting anxiously for talk of reptiles, people of Jewish descent and Satanists, this is the post for you. Having covered Icke’s phenomenology and theories about the Moon and Saturn, let me move on to the third section of his eleven hour talk, where he described, in angry tones, the four groups which he claims have control over us, the denizens of the prison planet/our hologrammatic reality.

For reasons which will become all too clear, Icke decided to initially talk about three of the four controlling interests, which are:

  • The Freemasons
  • Satanists
  • Child-abusers (and their support networks)
  • That’s quite a trinity all on its own.

    It’s also not a surprising set of “bad people who ruin the world for the rest of us:” for example, Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu’s (New Zealand) Greg Hallet and the Spymaster (the Spymaster has a real name but won’t let anyone know it… or is Greg Hallet’s alter-ego, much like HORansome is mine) have argued for a long time that our political masters are non-Christian child abusers who also happen to be homosexuals. Child abuse and Satanism is a well-worn link in many conspiracy theories, and Satanism and Freemasonry has a similar association.

    Icke argued that whilst not all Freemasons are child abusers, all child abusers are Freemasons. He thinks there are some honest Freemasons who are utterly unaware that their organisation is really just a child abusers’ social club, but to become a high-ranking Mason requires that you are, or become, a child abuser.

    Given that Icke thinks that Saturn is the source for the signal that prisons us in five-sense reality and he also believes that Saturn and Satan are one and the same, Satanists are a logical choice for yet another of the groups which control the prison planet. Still, I suspect Icke’s newfound interest in Satanic Saturn comes from his pre-existing fascination with Satanism in general, and given that the Freemasons have long been attacked for their engagement in the Black Arts ((This is the organisation, remember, that apparently was founded by the Knights Templar, who were, apparently, notorious Satanists… Or, if you don’t buy that origin story, the Freemasons are a pre-Christian cult, and most world religions are apparently based around snake worship, so obviously the Freemasons are snake-cum-Satanists… Or something like that.)), they are obviously part of the system of control.

    All three of these groups engage in vampiric activity: you might recall that the entities that control us feed upon our base fears: child abusers are just another kind of vampire, one that prays on base emotion rather than (solely) on blood. “They” abuse children because it provides “them” with energy. When the child is completely drained, their bodies are sent off to crematoria where the bodies are then disposed of: yes, the reptilian hybrids control the furnaces too.

    Still, all of this was really a prelude to the “Yes, but…” moment that is Icke and the Jewish people. For, as you probably expected, the fourth group which Icke singles out as being part of the system of control is the Jews.

    Well, not the Jews. Zionists.

    Well, not Zionists exactly: Rothschild-Zionists.

    Confused? Read on.

    Icke has been accused of being an anti-Semite. He has been accused an awful lot. As my friend Isaac pointed out in one of the breaks, Icke’s response to that accusation is always a “Yes, but…” manoeuvre, which is meant to signal “No, I’m not an anti-semite, really” but almost always makes the problem look so much worse.

    Icke denies that he is an anti-Semite. Rather, he is anti-Zionist. Well, specifically, an anti-Rothschild-Zionist. In some cases he will claim that he is an anti-Semite, but only with respect to hybrid Jewish people: he’s fine with human’s who have Jewish ancestry. Every time he tries to lay out these distinctions, he gets into trouble. This is because when you finesse Icke’s claims about what he really believes about the state of Israel, Zionism and Judaism, he really does seem to be an anti-Semite (although you also get the impression that he doesn’t realise this). Despite his claims, his theory seems to lead him to anti-Semitism.

    So, what is this Rothschild-Zionism that Icke is so concerned with. Well, Zionism is obviously Zionism (I say, channeling the spectre of the terrible Ayn Rand), but Rothschild-Zionism is the claim that the State of Israel is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Rothschild family and their interests. For Icke, Israel is not a nation but part of a global conglomerate that is run for and by business.

    Icke does not like the Rothschilds. Amongst the list of things the Rothschilds are responsible for are the Simon Wiesenthal Center (a “worthless” instituition, according to Icke) and Mossad (the enforcement arm of the Rothschild family). Claiming that the Simon Wiensthal Centre is worthless is an interesting claim: I would have thought that if you were distinguishing between Rothschild-Zionists and the Jewish people (I hesitate to say “proper” here), you might think that the Wiesenthal Centre’s work might be tarnished but still worthy.

    Let us not forget (although first we might need to know) that the Arab Spring is a Rothschild plot. Well, let us imagine that it is before we forget about it. Icke is deadset against the revolutions in the Arab world, because he thinks they are a precursor to the third world war. He heaped especial scorn on the role of social media and Google in the fomenting of these revolutions, because Google, et al, are all Rothschild organisations.

    But back to Israel.

    Icke argues quite reasonably that we need to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. He, correctly, pointed out that you can be Jewish without being a Zionist and that there are Zionists who are not Jewish. He singles out Zionists as being the problem but he then falls back on the usual canards of anti-Semites. He talks about the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as being a blueprint for a master plan to take over the world (he admits that the work itself is fake but buys into the notion that it’s fake that happens to reveal an actual masterplan: remember, the hybrids like to hide evidence of their plans everywhere). He talks about the purported practice of Jewish people drinking the blood of Gentiles (since it ties in the vampirism he says the hybrids practice) and the infiltration of the media industry. These are not new arguments, and they come straight out of the anti-Semite playbook.

    More importantly, why Rothschild-Zionism? Why the Rothschilds? Why this group which, really, isn’t actually that big or important on the world stage (for example, why not talk about China and Falun Gong?)? I hate to be so frank, but Zionism is one of those things which seems bigger than it really is. Don’t get me wrong: the conflict between Israel and Palestine is a terrible thing, the Holocaust was a terrible thing, but the actual role of Israel and the weight of Zionism as a movement is not as big a political issue as maybe we, in the West, think it is. To say that Rothschild-Zionism is one of the four great evils really just seems to be a way of preserving traditional European anti-Semitism and dressing it up with a new name and a new reason as to why we can be suspicious of, or dislike, the Jewish people. In the old days they drank the blood of children: now they are the vassals of inter-dimensional big business. Signalling out the Rothschilds (a Jewish family) as being of similar kind to Satanists and child abusers is, at the very least, a weird thing to do and seems suspiciously like the kind of thing people like Icke have been doing for centuries: blaming a group of outsiders for their self-made problems.

    So, what is it that these people (the Four) want, you might ask? Well, an electric one world currency, for a start. If we had a completely electronic commerce system, then “they” could control what we can and cannot buy. This, combined with their complete control of the ratings agencies and baking systems, means they can control us economically, which is important to know, because this will lead to a war with China, a war we will lose.

    Ah, yes, the forthcoming war. The Arab Spring, fomented by the Rothschilds and Google, will lead to a fight with China. We in the West will not win this fight and when China takes over the Illuminati will be able to take complete control over our lives. I spent some time trying to work out why this Illuminati plot is so convoluted, because it seems to me that a far simpler way to gain this control over our lives would simply to not let the Enlightenment have ever happened. Icke thinks of China as a monolithic state which controls everything (a dramatic simplification that ignores the role of regional authorities in China and overemphasises the power of Beijing), which looks an awful lot like Europe several centuries ago. Why let the Enlightenment project ever take hold if all you are going to do is take it all back? I’m assuming it has something to do with giving us the illusion of choice and tapping into our base fears and the like, but this is hardly a convincing argument. The West likes to think it is exciting and modern and trendy, and that all nation states aspire to be Western and that most states are like us, but that simply isn’t true. Icke, like so many Westerners, sees the rest of the world as being, if not Western, Western-like. He fails to realise just how small the West, and its culture, really is.

    Let me finish this section on a curious note. Isaac and I began to notice that Icke kept saying “You humans…” this and “You humans…” that, as if he was not human anymore. Does Icke think he has advanced beyond mere human identity, or is he, in some way, admitting what he really is. Is Icke part of the system of control, a messiah of disinformation designed to keep us trapped in this five-sense reality? Certainly, it is interesting that the masters of the prison planet let Icke talk about his revelations. If what he says is true, then surely they would want to be rid of him. Perhaps he is one of them. Part of Icke’s thesis about the masters is that they can’t help but leave clues to their existence in our culture and their works. Is Icke one of them? Or is he just completely wrong aboout the prison planet, the hologrammatic nature of reality and science?

    Yes. Yes he is. More on that next time.

    Shelley Bridgeman – Addendum

    Fans of Shelley Bridgeman (the subject of my previous post), will be delighted to read her latest opinion piece, which contains this gem:

    I did research, identified the experts, asked the difficult questions, took notes and felt grateful that, as a journalist, these procedures were almost second nature to me.

    Laugh or cry: take your pick.

    Shelley Bridgeman – Chemtrails Enthusiast

    One of the worst opinion piece writers in Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu is Shelley Bridgeman, whose opinion pieces show a shallow understanding of the way the world works combined with a love of name-dropping. Her work is so astoundingly banal and predictable that there is now a bit of a game going on at the Dim Post to emulate the “heights” of her writing with respect to classic New Zealand novels.

    However, nothing bets the real thing, and Bridgeman’s latest piece is terrible to behold, for she has found out about HAARP and chemtrails, and is asking the hard questions:

    Unlike aircraft condensation trails, these lines didn’t dissipate and disappear. They seemed to be almost permanent fixtures – not moving, changing or fading in any way. My mind went back to when I first became aware of claims that chemtrails with a purpose were being laid across our skies.

    and:

    It’s been difficult separating fact from fiction on this issue but here’s my best attempt. HAARP? It does exist. Can it trigger earthquakes? I have no idea but it has inspired a couple of great titles: specifically an article called Is baked Alaska half-baked? and a book entitled Angels Don’t Play this HAARP.

    I don’t really have anything to say: I just want to note that, yes, I’m aware that the largest newspaper in the country has published an opinion piece about chemtrails and that, yes, it seems to be endorsing, rather than critiquing, the notion that someone, somewhere, is up to evil weather manipulation. We are, I think, doing quite well at the moment, as a nation, in the “Being stupid” stakes.

    You can read more of Bridgeman’s wisdom here.

    On the Twitter account that is @NoamChomski

    I have become fascinated with @NoamChomski ((This account now longer exists.)), the Twitter account whose bio reads:

    This is Noam Chomski, I am the author of Manufacturing Dissent and other revolutionary pamphlets. No relation at all to Noam Chomsky.

    Note the “No relation at all to Noam Chomsky.” I didn’t, and ended up writing a fulsome post about the errors of Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and sometime political philosopher, a post that, had it been published, would have been a plunder en par with my “Naomi Wolf/Naomi Klein” case of mistaken identity of a few weeks back ((I’m not sure why I’m telling you this: I suppose it’s a faint attempt at looking humble.)) Anyway…

    @NoamChomski is a parody of Noam Chomsky, the aforementioned noted linguist and sometime political philosopher. I’m more fascinated with @NoamChomski than I am with Noam Chomsky, truth be told, which is odd really, given that I have mixed feelings about real Chomsky (feels that I need to sort out). I find his (Chomsky’s, not @NoamChomski’s) political philosophy both overly complex and yet sometimes naively simplistic. Chomsky’s institutional analyses are fascinating (and I often resort to them when explaining why some conspiracy-like behaviours are just the way institutions work) but his views on the causes of suffering, et al, in the political world often boil down to an “us” vs. “them” thesis which I think makes matters less explicable rather than more.

    @NoamChomski, though, as impersonations go, is a bizarre construct precisely because it captures the essence of Chomsky, in tweet-form, whilst at the same time branching out into the weird and wacky. Here are a few of @NoamChomski’s recent tweets:

    Find psychological techniques that work in awakening the people from their 100 year stupor.

    Part of the revolutionary struggle is to reverse the psychological ‘gains’ of the advertising-brainwashing machine.

    and:

    Prime your fellow citizens with thoughts about the revolution, scenarios about a better world, a more humane, social existence.

    which would all work well in Marxist Fortune Cookies, as I’m sure you would agree. More importantly, this is the kind of thing you can imagine the real Noam Chomsky saying.

    Then there are the tweets which skirt close to the kind of things David Icke and his ilk say and yet are still the kind of thing the real Noam Chomsky might quickly note in a tweet:

    The people have been conditioned for years, many believe that everything these see on TV is absolutely real, bust this myth.

    and:

    The people have been wired to accept the false modalities of their rulers, short-circuit this interaction.

    Then there are tweets like this:

    You must find ways to convince Lady GaGa fans that she’s a fraud used by the system to control the emotions and psychology of millions.

    which seem to deliberate reference specific conspiracy theories, like those about the Illuminati’s control of the pop music world, which show just how far down the rabbit hole you can go whilst staying on message.

    The reason why I find this so fascinating is that if @NoamChomski existed in a world where there was no “Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and sometime political philosopher,” then @NoamChomski would probably be treated as a spambot spouting inane political comments, with occasional “WTF?” moments thrown in for good measure. But, because Chomsky exists, @NoamChomski is in some way notable and its tweets are interesting rather than inane.

    Now, I could end this by saying that if Noam Chomsky didn’t exist, we’d have to make up someone like @NoamChomski, but I think that is both a trite way to end a post and is (a tad) unfair to Chomsky. I’m not sure Chomsky would approve of @NoamChomski, partly because Noam Chomsky is a little long-winded and thus isn’t really amendable to tweet-based discourse and partly because Chomsky wouldn’t accept that his philosophy can be expressed in koans.

    The problem with @NoamChomski is that either it is a parody account that isn’t exactly very funny, or it is a pastiche that does little more than confuse a philosopher like myself into writing a rant against Chomsky, only to find that @NoamChomski isn’t Chomsky at all.

    Which maybe is the point of it after all.

    The Lion Sleeps No More – My Life with Icke – Part 3

    Ampli-fly me to the Moon…

    Icke’s eleven-hour presentation started with a discussion of his philosophy and ends up with his pointing the finger at those who are responsible for all the bad things in our reality. However, to get there he had to take us to Saturn and back, in a move that can only be called “audacious.” He makes this move in a haphazard way: the second section of the talk was scatty and a little vague on particulars (I was going to say that it was the weakest section, but, really, the final two and an half hours were an hour too long). Thus this section might seem a bit scatty (a bit like the last one, really), but it’s all going to come together (admittedly in a weird way) when we get down to the four groups who control our prison planet.

    On with the show.

    In what can only be described as a moment of having it both ways, Icke revealed that people like the Bilderbergers are not the people who are really in charge. Rather, it is the people behind the Bilderbergers et al who are in control of the prison planet. Now, this is a case of having it both ways because, should you challenge Icke, he can always say “Well, yes, I’ve been talking a lot about the Rothschilds and you are right to say they aren’t the real threat: it’s the people who control them who are the real threat!” His views about who is in control cannot be falsified because he has a built-in escape clause that allows him to suggest (yet) another shadowy group is behind the shadowy group you don’t think is really to blame ((There’s also an interesting problem here about conceding too much to Icke and his views. At one point, when Icke was waxing lyrical on the evils of paedophiles, the Freemason’s and the like, I ended up thinking “Surely these people can’t be responsible for all of this” (“this” being “The evils of the prison planet”). It was only a few seconds later that I realised that I had just implicitly accepted the existence of a conspiratorial group and was merely denying that they were as bad as Icke made them out to be ((Maybe, in retrospect, making my example here about paedophiles was a bad idea: I don’t want to make it sound like I’m not denying that paedophiles are bad people. They are bad people. I’m just not sure they are conspiring against us.)) This is the kind of easy mistake I warn others about: if you spend hours listening to someone explain their controversial thesis to you, you will, at some point, end up going “Okay, I’ll accept this point for the time being to see where they go with it” and moments later you forget that you only provisionally accepted that claim, start believing it and thus end up going ever deeper into the rabbit hole.)).

    Icke, in developing his talk of who is (or, really, when you gloss him properly, might be) in control touched on the recent report by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In short, they did an analysis of which companies own other companies and discovered that about 150 companies control near half the world’s wealth. Icke puts this forward as both proof of his thesis ((Which, I would argue, it isn’t. If the number of controlling interests had turned out to be a small band of, say, 12 companies, that might have suggested tight collusion amongst a set of people with shared interests, but the number of interests the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reports indicates controls a chunk of the world’s finances looks more like the normal operation of capitalist interests: big companies like to invest in other big companies just in case mistakes are made at home.)) and yet manages to say that as it was put out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich group it can’t be trusted because, as we all know, the Gnomes of Zurich are part of the system of control over the prison planet and therefore nothing they say should be taken seriously.

    Icke likes to have it both ways a lot.

    Still, all that was by-the-by and fairly standard stuff. What I wasn’t expecting was to find out that the Moon is a spaceship and that Saturn is a giant transmitter, part of the system of control that locks us into this holographic reality.

    The second part (of Icke’s four-part journey into his belief system) ends up on Saturn, via the Moon, but first he gave a potted history of his thesis that the Illuminati bloodlines have been interbreeding with humans for most of our history. I suspect I can’t really do his radical reinterpretation of all human history much justice, given how sweeping and ahistorical it is. Wikipedia is probably your safest bet.

    Anyway, for some reason the Illuminati focused their attention on Europe (and ignored, it seemed, the vast majority of the rest of the world), but during the Colonial Era (i.e. that time when Europeans decided to visit their patent brand of destruction upon other cultures) ((Icke’s view of the world is oddly Euro-centric. Whilst he talks about how world cultures share common traits and thus show that the reptilian shape-shifters have been interfering in all of out lives for the a very long time, he also seems to think that the Illumanti’s control of world politics is relatively recent.)) they moved out of Europe and set up secret societies to control the world as their traditional systems of control (monarchial bloodlines) were being disestablished (which was, of course, part of the plot to make us think we were gaining back control of our destinies) ((One dastardly thing these reptilians did was to forbid artists from depicting them in their reptilian form. Icke believes some artists tried to get around this by giving the shape-shifters reptilian features when they depicted them, and some radical artists just drew other reptiles as placeholders for the public figures they wanted to expose or lampoon. Any image that is even slightly reptilian, then, could be an image of the reptilians.)).

    Anyway, that was sort of by-the-by: the potted history of humanity and the Illuminati was there to provide a backdrop to Icke’s startling claims about the Moon and Saturn. Icke has a theory about who controls the world, and for how long, and now he has a revised theory about how that control is maintained.

    By a giant spaceship in orbit around the Earth, amplifying signals sent from Saturn.

    Icke’s revelation started with a thoughtform (an idea that was placed into his mind by another (higher) entity). The thoughtform contained the revelation that the Moon was an non-natural satellite. Now Icke, as previously established, is a firm believer in synchronicity and thus this thoughtform was shown to be true because because he then, within days, found that other people had had exactly the same thought(form) as well ((Which means it might not be synchronic at all: if you accept that there are alien entities putting thoughts into peoples’ heads, then the fact that Icke found supporting evidence might well be evidence of a conspiracy by those entities. Why are they trustworthy? Who do they work for?) and had even written books about it (and Icke does seem to treat publication as showing that the idea has passed the process of peer-review (well, independent publication. Obviously academic publishers are just in it to help the status quo keep pushing out disinformation)).

    Now, how do we know that the Moon is non-natural and thus a spaceship.

    Because it’s hollow, silly.

    It’s hollow because the centre of the Moon is an empty fuel tank ((The Moon has other secrets: the dark side of the Moon (the side we don’t see) is apparently covered in bases. Icke showed a series of images of what he claimed were badly doctored photos released by NASA of the dark side of the Moon as proof that NASA is trying to hide something. Now, it is true that the photos he displayed looked badly doctored, but they also looked as if they were digital images that had been spliced together, with all the attendant faults and distortions you would expect from such a process. Whilst the photos might be doctored, the job is so bad that it seems much more likely that the images have errors in them. If NASA can’t afford to doctor an image properly, then I don’t want to be in league with them.)).

    Icke tells a story about how NASA set-off explosions on the Moon to record how long it would take for the concussion wave to travel to the centre and back again, and how the results where startling. “It rang like a bell for thirty minutes,” Icke exclaimed (he didn’t froth at the mouth: indeed, there was no frothing at all during the day). Icke rightfully points out this stumped the scientists, but that the answer is simple: the Moon must be hollow. However, what Icke fails to point out (and perhaps this is because he isn’t aware of it, given that once he finds a supporting reference to one of his claims he doesn’t really look for countervailing evidence) is that the result was striking because it didn’t fit with the then current model of how the Moon was thought to be composed. The result meant that that model had to be revised and a new model formulated. The new model doesn’t say the Moon is hollow, though ((So many footnotes. Icke also believes the moon landings were faked and that Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the footage. As my friend Isaac pointed out, this was the only time in the presentation that the audience seemed to laugh at Icke rather than with him. Kubrick, apparently was a Hollywood insider and thus was aware of the Illuminati and their plots/capers. Icke suggested that Kubrick used his films to reveal how the Illuminati worked, so “2001: A Space Odyssey” was made to reveal things about NASA and the space programme, whilst “Eyes Wide Shut” was meant to show how Hollywood is infested with Satanists (Icke believes the Hollywood execs killed Kubrick so they could edit out twenty-eight minutes of Satanistic revelation from that film). Not only that, but the “Star Wars” films of George Lucas also contain clues about the real nature of the Moon. I kid you not: Icke showed an image of the Death Star and an image of the Moon side-by-side and claimed that one was meant to symbolise the other. It gets better, though: one of the people who worked on the “Star Wars” films was director John Carpenter, and his film “They Live,” Icke claimed, was proof positive of the existence of the reptilians. Now, why Hollywood lets these films play is anyone’s business. They do seem to be giving the game away.)).

    Other planets also have non-natural “moons:” Icke seemed to suggest that Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, has also been placed there artificially ((I’m a little confused about Icke and his contention that the universe is teeming with life. He claims that if we were able to see the other vibrational realities we would realise there is life everywhere. So, presumably, there is life on Mars but it is invisible to us but is being controlled by a visible moon. Whatever it is these Illuminati are up to, it’s very confusing to someone trapped in five-sense reality.)). What these non-natural satellites do is amplify a signal that emanates from Saturn.

    Icke’s theories on Saturn are all rather new and I (and my colleague in crime) rather felt that it was apparent that Icke was still formulating how to talk about this whilst he was on stage. He started off by pointing out that worship of the Sun was really worship of Saturn (a claim which seemed implausible when I heard it but seems impossible now I’ve written it down: the Sun can be easily seen by the naked eye and plays a very obvious role in the day-to-day life of most human beings. Saturn: not so much) and that Satan and Saturn (the god Saturn) are one and the same. Not only that, but Santa is also Satan: because Christmas occurs in the traditional period of Saturnalia, and worship of Saturn is actually worship of Satan, it is obvious, in retrospect, that Satan is Santa ((There you go: if you want to explain why you aren’t giving Christmas gifts this year, all you need to say is that you don’t engage in Satanist festivities.)).

    Anyway, Saturn is sending out a signal, a sub-Matrix, which gets amplified by our Moon (and presumably by Phobos to whoever it is who lives on Mars) and has been since the Moon first appeared ((Icke has a number of theories as to when the Moon first appeared, some of which don’t fit in with the conventional wisdom of its necessity for the evolution of life on this planet. Icke is also a subscriber to the “Words in Collision” thesis that states the solar system is in a different arrangement now to the way it formed. So, basically, he can explain away any discrepancy between his view and the theories about abiogensis and the subsequent evolution of life by claiming that whatever role the Moon might have played was played in whatever arrangement the solar system was in prior to that Moon arriving in orbit.)).

    The signal sent from Saturn, and amplified by the Moon, affects our DNA. Icke makes a lot out of the claim that scientists don’t really know what a lot of our DNA actually does (he claims that 98% of our DNA is unexplained) but that the answer is simple: through interbreeding, the reptilians have control over our genetic characteristics and thus the signal allows them to control us. They have built up our civilisation to allow them to control and use us for cattle.

    As to who “they” are, exactly… Well, more on that soon.

    Next time: Freemasons, Satanists, Child Abusers and Jews… Sorry, “Rothschild-Zionists.”

    Naomi Wolf on #OWS

    Jake Pollock, over at Facebook, asked me for my opinion on this Naomi Wolf piece on Occupy Wall Street (which, because I am addicted to Twitter, I think of as #OWS). My comments were as follows (with quoted text from the article as context for those of you who can’t be bothered opening another tag):

    I’m less than impressed. 2 things to note:

    1. Wolf claims the oppression of #OWS can only be an organised activity emanating from the top, but given the causal and sometimes unorganised way in which it is going, it seems equally likely that its people in authority acting in similar fashion with similar goals without necessarily colluding towards those goals.

    In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on “how to suppress” Occupy protests.

    To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

    I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors’, city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

    2. Wolf’s list of what the #OWS people want is a bit weird: she’s presenting her findings as somehow being a definitive and exhaustive list of what the protestors want, but other journalists and academics have come up with different lists (or come to the conclusion that there is no one set of take home messages).

    That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

    The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

    The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

    No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

    When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

    I’ve actually become increasingly wary of Wolf post her support for the claim that Assange’s sexual assault allegations are a honeytrap. This seems like more of that kind of analysis.

    Our discussion then went on to the topic of Denver Airport (which apparently lays out, in the artwork on its walls, the New World Order’s plan for human domination), but it set me to thinking. Wolf is engaging in the same kind of joining the dots that people like David Icke engage in. Indeed, she even makes this explicit when she writes:

    So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence.

    Note how she says “properly understood:” like Icke, she is claiming that if you don’t connect the dots the same way she has, then you don’t have a handle on what is really going on. This is, as some writers on conspiracy theories will remark, the thesis of hidden history. Things are not what they seem, they will say: only when you wear the right kind of conceptual glasses can you see what events really mean in the grand scheme of things.

    Now, some theses of hidden history will be correct (for example, my beloved Moscow Show Trials example is a classic case of there being a hidden history behind the official explanation of what happened in 1930s Soviet Russia), but you need more of an argument for such a claim than the one Wolf is offering. Her argument seems to be the standard “America is an awful place, one under the thrall of the monied classes: therefore, the oppression of #OWS must be a conspiracy to shut up the 1%,” which may be true but also might not be. You could run an institutional analysis here which explains the same set of data but doesn’t mention conspiratorial behaviour. To warrant the inference to the existence of a conspiracy you need to show that conspiratorial activity is the most likely explanation of the event.

    Wolf does not do that. Indeed, she seems to not only present a simple answer to the question “What is going on with the crackdown on #OWS?” as the explanation but also claims that it is the only candidate explanation worth considering. That is, frankly, not good enough. Yeah, sure, I agree that America is a terrible place and the monied classes have far too much power. I agree that it’s possible that, at some level, there is collusion going on to stop the #OWS protests. That doesn’t mean I think the crackdown is necessarily conspiratorial: there are a host of rival explanatory hypotheses which are consistent with those beliefs in which the people in power are acting in their own interests without necessarily having to organise a co-ordinated response, in secret.

    And, most importantly, I’m willing to debate some of my assumptions about America and its internal power dynamics.

    Claims of conspiracy are not just hard to prove but they should not be made lightly. Especially when you have a recognised pulpit and an adoring crowd.

    Message ends.