part 3:
He had a disrupted education: first, at a US high school on the Frankfurt military base where he spent much of his childhood with his English mother and American stepfather, who was serving in the US air force; later, at a college in England, from which he was expelled (for smoking weed) and started playing in a band. He spent hours on music production on his computer and developed sophisticated internet skills, at a time when most people were barely online. This gave him early access to sites run by conspiracy theorists such as
David Icke; soon he was spending nine hours at a stretch consuming truther content online.
His friends, family and fellow band members were bored by his obsessions and he gradually withdrew to focus on online friendships with people who were also ready to believe that the Illuminati and Freemasons had infiltrated global governments.
When the
7/7 attacks took place in London in 2005, killing 52 people, Lee was online, searching with fellow truthers for evidence that the terror attack was orchestrated by the UK government. They examined footage of the attackers going to the train station in Luton and were made suspicious by the way railings appeared to slice through the leg of one of the attackers; they decided the image had been Photoshopped before being released by the police. Now he acknowledges that the glitches might simply have been the result of shaky CCTV technology rather than the work of cultist masterminds.
OK, finally a tiny bit of concrete information, but for me at least on some obscure event, perhaps not so obscure to the English.
He spent months building an alternative explanation for the attacks and disseminating his theories through his blog. “I’m ashamed of putting so many lies out there. I didn’t mean to lie, I just had the wrong picture.” He maintains this came from a good place. “I wanted to find the real people who had organised the attacks; I wanted justice for the victims. But I was wrong and it took away guilt from the real perpetrators, people who did something atrocious.”
Naomi Klein examines the mushrooming of conspiracism in her new book Doppelganger, noting that people often come under its sway because they are searching for a practical solution to a sense of unfairness. Conspiracists have a “fantasy of justice”, hoping that the evil-doing elites can be arrested and stopped. “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the
feelings right,” she writes. “The feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit … the feeling that important truths are being hidden.” She quotes digital journalism scholar Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s conclusion that: “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”
Lee’s appetite for conspiracies started to wane when the “alt-right” US broadcaster Alex Jones began claiming that the 2012
Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, that no one died and the parents of the 20 children who died were “crisis actors” – hired to play disaster victims.
I don’t consider Jones a reliable source and don’t trust anything he says, so I don’t bother following him, though occasionally I used to run across his stuff in my feeds. Not so much for the last number of years as he has been banned from YouTube. However, I did watch a good bit of the documentary hit piece on Jones. IMO he can’t be trusted because he puts a sensationalized spin on everything he touches. His take on Sandy Hook was complete garbage and I never gave it a second thought. However the one thing that was conspicuously absent in the documentary on Jones was his coverage of Waco. He was an unknown local public access show host in Texas before Waco. Waco was his big break and everything he said about it turned out to be pretty much right on. So he wasn’t given a fair shake in that documentary, which is not a good look. Lee found this implausible and felt irritated by other wild theories swirling around the internet – that Justin Bieber and Eminem were Illuminati clones, that a paedophile ring, involving people at the highest level of the Democratic party, was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant. “I
looked at Pizzagate and thought, ‘Well that’s just stupid.’” (He spends six podcast episodes debunking the Pizzagate conspiracy; this seems a pithier summary.)
When Covid triggered a popularity surge for conspiracy theorists, Lee was already done with it, and simply noted that if there really was a global movement working to establish a new world order through the pandemic, they were going about it in a strikingly ill-coordinated and muddled manner. “The governments weren’t acting in lockstep with each other. There was no well-oiled machine; it was disorganised. No one was in charge
.” That’s complete Bullshit.. the WHO and national health agencies were in change and they did act pretty much in lockstep with lockdowns and vaccine policies and lies about effectiveness etc. Covid ushered in massive suspensions in civil rights and greatly expanded governmental powers, while it crushed the middle class and made a good number of people extremely wealthy.
He understands
why other people were attracted to the idea: “Just like 9/11 brought people into conspiracies, Covid was another moment when people were scared and wanted answers, and they found conspiracy influencers saying: ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not real.’
” What about all the people that were saying it was real and made in a lab, funded by Fauci etc. That’s what I was saying.. There was almost no one that said it wasn’t real.. so that again is complete BS.
Lee was an early adopter of ideas that have surged in popularity as people spend more time online, and as trust in the mainstream media falters with the suggestion (much propagated by the former US president Donald Trump) that they are spreaders of fake news. The emergence of QAnon (which propagates the baseless theory that Trump was battling a cabal of sex-trafficking satanists, some of whom were Democrats) has attracted more people to this world. Lee’s interests preceded the arrival of powerful opinion-shaping algorithms pushing people into closed loops of fact-free narratives. Since leaving the fold he has developed a sharp clarity about the self-interested financial motivations of conspiracists who work to monetise their online presence with increasingly wild, clickbaity dispatches
. I don’t know too many people that are getting rich from spreading conspiracy theories, but they may exist. You can also look at people like Mercola that were demonetized for speaking the truth about Covid. He was making big $$ from his information about holistic health and took a big hit as a result of Covid.
www.facebook.com
Got my tinfoil on.
