Ghost hunters often have the best intentions when it comes to the methods they use to investigate alleged hauntings. However, their attempts to introduce a scientific methodology into proceedings usually fail to reach the mark. This outcome, I believe, is mainly because the ghost-hunting subculture is rife with issues of confirmation bias. In simpler terms, ghost hunters are too often led by their desire to find evidence that ghosts exist, rather than taking a more open-minded approach. They may not be sure how to introduce scientific controls or rigour into their ghost-hunting activities, and may even be unaware of the need for such controls. As a result, ghost hunters reinvent the wheel in an attempt to be scientific, only to find it’s a wheel that never worked in the first place, and now they’ve made it even worse.
The latest trend sweeping through ghost-hunting groups is an excellent example of this issue. A modern twist on traditional spirit communication, the Estes Method (invented by American ghost tour operators), offers a new take on the Spirit Box, which ghost hunters have used to attempt communication with ghosts for decades. The Spirit Box rapidly sweeps through radio frequencies, creating a stream of white noise and audio snippets from different broadcast sources. Advocates claim that spirits can manipulate these audio fragments to form words or sentences to communicate with the living. The method is simple; the ghost hunter asks a question, and the ghost uses the audio from the Spirit Box to answer them.
In reality, the messages of ghostly origin result from listener bias, suggestion, and audio illusions. Sentences from the broadcasts are often incomplete, meaning that the phonemes (human speech sounds) can be misheard and, more importantly, misinterpreted as relevant to whatever ghost a ghost hunter is trying to communicate with. Prior knowledge of an alleged haunting can influence ghost hunters to interpret audio as direct answers to questions asked when this is unlikely to be the case. Choppy audio with gaps in words and sentences can cause one word to merge into another, resulting in something which sounds familiar, or the ghost hunter fills in the gaps (often without even realising they’re doing so).
The Estes Method builds on this spirit communication method and tries to scientifically improve it by adding noise-isolating headphones and blindfolds to ensure the person listening to the audio (referred to as the “Receiver”) can’t hear the questions being asked or read the lips of the person asking them. The Receiver listens for messages from ghosts through the Spirit Box in response to questions asked by the “Operator,” another group member. By channelling the audio through headphones so only one person hears it, the Estes Method tries to overcome the influence that listener bias has on Spirit Box sessions, as the Receiver does not hear the questions asked.
However, these controls are less effective than ghost hunters intend. The audio through the headphones is still open to the Receiver’s interpretation, influenced by their knowledge of the very ghost stories that tempted the ghost hunters to visit a haunting location in the first place. Additionally, the Operator (the person asking questions) also knows about the haunting, influencing their questions and their interpretation of the answers given. Though Operators are not supposed to tailor questions based on received answers, they inevitably do because of the biased nature of their search for evidence of ghosts.
When examined in the broader context, it’s easy to see that the Estes Method falls foul of the same unscientific behaviours typical of ghost hunters. For example, there are instances of the Estes Method used in ghost-hunting television shows or online videos where a question gets asked, and an “answer” is given that makes no sense, or the Receiver says something not in response to a question. The ghost hunters will likely ignore these out-of-context statements, with only the positive responses shared as evidence. This practice of selectively presenting data that supports your hypothesis while ignoring data that contradicts it is an unethical practice known as cherry-picking, which results in biased and often misleading research outcomes. It is also a habit that has plagued ghost hunters for as long as they’ve been around.
The biggest flaw of the Estes Method is the lack of scientific evidence supporting the claim that spirits can communicate by manipulating radio frequencies. As commendable as it is to see ghost hunters trying to add some form of control to the controversial Spirit Box methodology, it is essential to acknowledge that the Spirit Box itself is a redevelopment of an older ghost-hunting practice known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) where ghost hunters use audio recording devices in haunted locations, believing they may capture supposed ghostly voices or messages during the recording process.
Ghost hunters play back these recordings to identify strange sounds or voices. Often, recordings occur while the ghost hunter asks questions, pausing between questions to allow ghosts to respond. Electronic spirit communication methods such as EVP, the Spirit Box, and the new kid on the block—the Estes Method—heavily rely on subjective interpretation and are susceptible to psychological phenomena like pareidolia and confirmation bias, which undermine the credibility and reliability of these so-called scientific approaches to ghost hunting.
Research has consistently shown that paranormal beliefs are often inversely related to science literacy. That is, the higher the levels of paranormal belief a person reports, the lower their science literacy rates. Science literacy and critical thinking skills are mutually reinforcing, empowering people to question assumptions while analysing evidence objectively. No matter how hard ghost hunters try to become more scientific in their work, if their activities aim to find proof of ghosts, their attempts will often fall short of scientific rigour. Ultimately, this means that no amount of gimmicky techniques or reinventing traditional methods will change the quality and reliability of ghost-hunting conclusions unless ghost hunters develop a genuinely open-minded approach to their research.
As someone with a chronic health condition, I’m prone to having periodic flare-ups. The nature of the flare-up can vary, but often it means that I’m in a little extra pain, struggling with extra fatigue and need a lot more sleep, or generally just feeling a bit off.
Fortunately, I tend not to have people in my life who take this as a sign to offer me unsolicited health advice. Just as fortunately, I also have people in my life who know I love to dig into other people’s unsolicited health advice – which is why a friend of mine forwarded me a link that outlined all the incredible benefits of Tesla BioHealing Med Beds.
For those not familiar with these remarkable devices, they are apparently capable of all manner of wondrous healing effects, including:
* Recharging the energetic state of all cells of the body directly allowing the cells to activate their own self-repair mechanisms. * Increasing the millivolt levels of the cells from as little as 15 millivolts up to the optimal healthy range of 70-90 millivolts. * Increasing Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) levels naturally. ATP is known as the energy carrying molecule of the cell found in all forms of life. * Increasing cellular repair rates while decreasing and even ceasing cellular destruction rates * Facilitating DNA synthesis and the natural production of stem cells * Strengthening the cells’ resistance to harmful environmental factors such as man-made electromagnetic frequencies and radiation. * Harmonizing the hemispheres of the brain and acting as a natural anti-depressant. * Facilitating a natural sense of calm and improving quality of sleep. * Improving mental clarity and cognitive function. * Normalizing blood pressure levels and blood sugar levels. * Increasing circulation and decreasing inflammation thus facilitating the distribution of oxygen and providing a great deal of pain relief. * Boosting libido and enhancing sexual health including improving fertility. * Improving cell wall permeability thus enhancing nutritional intake as well as the body’s natural detoxification processes. * Strengthening the immune system and protecting DNA from damage by increasing the energy of the hydrogen bonds that hold DNA together. * Energizes the body naturally by increasing cellular energy directly, thus reducing fatigue while increasing strength and vitality.
Despite all of these amazing effects, every single page of the site promoting these devices was clear to state in at least two separate places:
Tesla BioHealing does not provide any medical advice. Our products, FDA-registered Tesla BioHealing OTC (Over-The-Counter) Medical Devices, and services are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or medical condition. Please consult your own healthcare provider if you have any medical issues.
So, what is the Tesla BioHealing medical device and how does it work? According to Tesla BioHealing’s brochure:
This FDA Registered OTC medical device generates a field of pure Biophoton Life Force Energy that the cells of your body can use at will and as needed to promote self-repair.
They claim that this Biophoton Life Force Energy is actually produced and used by all living things – so we can make our own… but sadly (and somehow unsurprisingly), that’s not enough. Once our life force is reduced, due to age or sickness, then we’re told we need to apply life force therapeutically in a concentrated dose. Which is interesting advice from a company that keeps telling us they’re not providing medical advice, and that’s selling us a device they say can’t be used to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or medical condition.
The company I found sells two devices and one service. The first device is a budget version, costing just $599 dollars per device… though they recommend we buy one to two units if we have mild conditions, and two to four if our conditions are moderate. We’ll come back to what we need for severe conditions because, yes, they offer advice for serious conditions.
Already, that means spending up to $2359 (or around £2000) for four units, which look like little canisters – they’re around 3.5 inches wide and 4 inches tall, and each weighs one kilogram. They are also all completely opaque, so we cannot see what’s inside. The idea, according to the company, is that these small devices generate life force energy that your body can use. They release the energy continuously for three years, at which point they need replacing (how convenient).
To operate the device, you simply place it within three feet of the affected area, and then stay there for at least eight hours a day. Hey presto, all your ailments will be “self-repair[ed] naturally, non-invasively, and effectively.” That is a direct quote from the company. As is, you’ll recall, “FDA-registered Tesla BioHealing OTC (Over-The-Counter) Medical Devices, and services are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or medical condition.”
Alternatively, you could fork out for the Med Bed generator. This also looks like a canister, but it’s much, much bigger. According to the website, one Med Bed generator is equivalent to 100 Bio Healers, so of course it makes sense that you can only buy them in pairs, for $19,999 (a little over £16,000). They weigh around 12kg and are 8.25 inches wide and tall.
The final thing Tesla BioHealing offers is a service – they have 8 Med Bed centres dotted across the US where you can pay $150 for a BioWell scan, and then $120 to spend one hour in one of their Med Beds, or $300 to stay overnight. One person who took up this service is investigative journalist Mike Wendling, for BBC Trending. He described his experience:
In my room, I felt nothing more than curiosity and a slight sense of unease as I gazed out the window at a mostly empty car park. The Tesla Med bed canisters were sealed in wooden boxes and a bedside table.
At the end of his session, he was given a second BioWell scan, which showed that his life force energy was already increasing – so while he felt nothing at all, the company’s own scanner offered proof that their service had been a total success.
While Wendling noted that all of the med bed canisters were blocked from view during the time he was there, the BBC Trending team did find some customers online who managed to open their canister to take a look inside.
We came across a TikTok video where an upset punter appears to have opened up a canister, only to find a concrete-like substance.
This isn’t merely a story about how people with ill health are persuaded to spend tens of thousands of dollars on useless devices to help with conditions that are hard to treat, especially in a country where healthcare also costs tens of thousands of dollars (it is worth grimly noting how the website is littered with invitations to set up finance options in order to afford these costly devices). There’s actually more to the med bed story.
The med bed lore
Med beds are not unique to Tesla BioHealing, they’re trading off a name that is well established in conspiracy theory communities. One Facebook post from 2020 says that med beds are here, and “… Here is a description of what med beds can do. They exist. And sooner than later, they will be available for all”. The accompanying text is a description taken from a site called Blissful Visions in 2018, and reads:
…There are three (3) types of Med Beds: (1) Holographic Med Beds; (2) Regenerative Med Beds which regenerates tissue and body parts, that’s powered by a different source; (3) Re-atomization Med Beds that in about two-and-half to three minutes will regenerate the whole human body, head to toe. What does this advanced technology mean for an 80-year old woman? She could be 30-years old again in less than three (3) minutes. Fifty years pealed off her life. Now, she can have children again. She could have a whole new family if she wants. It looks like to this writer that the Med Bed technology is a perpetual fountain of youth.
The Med Bed looks at the body and corrects imperfections. The technology has been around for quite some time. It’s not something out of the clear blue sky. It’s just been kept hidden from the human race for a very long time.
The technology of the Med Beds is not from planet Earth. It is not human-created technology. It is a technology that has been given to humanity by off-world ET’s. A Med Bed is based on tachyon particle energy and plasma (plasmatic) energy. The soil, the atmosphere, the water, everything is plasma energy, everything in the universe is plasma energy, it’s just a different form through vibrational frequency…
So, we’re told, these amazing alien medical beds exist on Earth, and should be available to us. But when will we get access to them? According to conspiracy theory documenters The Q Origins Project on Twitter, in 2021:
Med beds are, basically, magical devices that can heal any illness or injury. The Q Team is supposedly going to release them to the public after the Storm.
As the account points out, it seems an electoral mis-step by Donald Trump not to have released his magic curative devices ahead of the election, and then ride the wave of goodwill back into the White House.
The belief that Donald Trump had access to med beds was so routine among QAnon believers that one supporter even wrote him an open letter in 2021, saying:
On a personal level, my wife is struggling physically. She has an autoimmune disease that is greatly and increasingly causing her more pain and suffering as the weeks drag on… She could use a MED BED. And so could two of our children who have taken the vaccine. They think I am a nut for believing in all this. And how many millions more across the country need a MED BED? My family is struggling, and so is our country.
According to adherents, med bed technology does more than just heal – Daily Beast journalist Kelly Weill encountered one Dallas-based QAnon group that “falsely believes that John F. Kennedy is still alive and youthful, and attributes his remarkable longevity to the curative powers of med beds.”
Weill also covered Romana Didulo, the self-proclaimed ‘Queen of the World’, whose sovereign citizen ideas and QAnon beliefs sit alongside claims that med beds are right around the corner, and that they “will be made available for FREE to all Canadians” after her revolution.
This is yet another example of the damage done by conspiracism; supporters of people like Romana Didulo or Donald Trump genuinely believe that miraculous medical cures are soon to be made available, to save themselves or their loved ones from deeply harmful conditions, and their distrust in conventional medicine grows with the claims that these cures are being cynically withheld from the population.
You might be forgiven for thinking the two types of med beds I’ve discussed here are two very different things. In a way, you’d be right. The conspiracy theorist med beds are far more magical in their claims than the likes of Tesla BioHealing, and the other companies trading off the name. But, knowingly or unknowingly, those companies are still taking advantage of conspiratorial beliefs, and encouraging spending large sums of money looking for cures that don’t exist.
Meanwhile Trump and Didulo and QAnon are selling an idea – the idea that they are on your side. That they will do everything they can to give you the cure, or the financial solutions or the legal support that will turn your life around… as long as you offer them your unwavering support.
Science communication is often about relating complex ideas in a clear and concise way. Unfortunately, the discourse around the placebo effect is anything but. The term ‘placebo effect’ is often used in casual conversation, popular media, and even academia as if it represents a single, well-understood phenomenon. In reality, ‘the’ placebo effect is a convoluted mess of unrelated effects that confound clinical trials.
For example, the National Institutes of Health in the US says the placebo effect works by ‘turning on the body’s natural mechanisms for helping us feel better.’ This statement is a gross oversimplification. Some placebo responses may be due to triggering the release of dopamine or endorphins, but not every placebo response can be chalked up to these mechanisms.
WebMD posits that ‘the placebo effect is due to a person’s expectations’. Again, this is not universally true. Beliefs and expectations can influence what patients report, but this does not account for all placebo effects.
The problem is that we use the same term, ‘the placebo effect’ to describe a wide array of phenomena, when the reality is that there is no singular effect. What we have instead is a morass of non-specific, inconsistent effects that confound clinical trials so perniciously they are often mistaken for clinical effects in their own right. They vary enormously depending on the context, and can include regression to the mean, experimenter bias, parallel interventions, classical conditioning, and more.
It’s like a magic trick. A good magician will have many ways to achieve the same effect. Something performed by sleight of hand in one show might be a stooge in another, or a camera trick or rigged prop in another. To the audience it all looks like the same trick, so we naively assume the trick is always performed the same way.
So when headlines appear claiming ‘We may finally know how the placebo effect relieves pain’ (New Scientist, 24 July 2024), we have good reason to be skeptical. There is no singular placebo effect, and no singular mechanism by which it modifies pain. Conditioning, bias, and mood can all influence reported pain to varying extents, and all are part of the placebo response. At best this discovery, whatever it is, may explain some parts of some placebo effects, but can we really say, ‘we finally know’?
What happened in the study
This particular headline was in reference to a recent study published in Nature titled ‘Neural Circuit Basis of Placebo Pain Relief’. The researchers divided twenty mice into two groups: a Test Group and a Control Group. The Test Group mice were placed into an apparatus consisting of two chambers, with distinct visual clues for the mice within each chamber. Over the course of three days, the mice were permitted to move between the two chambers as desired.
After three days, the researchers raised the temperature in one of the two chambers from 30°C to 48°C, which would have caused the mice some discomfort. They did this by heating the floor in the chamber, so the mice would suddenly have found the hot floor painful to walk on. This prompted nocifensive (nervous responses protecting against injury) indications of pain from the mice, such as licking their paws, jumping suddenly, or rearing up. The mice quickly fled to the second chamber, which remained at 30°C.
This was repeated for a further three days. The temperature in one chamber (always the same one) was increased to an uncomfortable level, so the mice fled to the other chamber. The researchers explain that the mice began to associate the second chamber with pain relief, as indicated by a reduction in nocifensive behaviours when in that chamber.
Meanwhile, the Control Group mice were left to roam both chambers without any temperature changes for all six days.
Finally, on the seventh day, the researchers set the temperature in both chambers to 48°C, making both chambers uncomfortable to be in. What they observed was that the mice from the Test Group fled to what had been the cooler chamber before, despite there being no temperature difference anymore. Mice in the Control Group showed no preference for which chamber they were in, and showed more nocifensive behaviours than the Test Group mice. The Test Group mice appeared to experience pain relief in the second chamber, even when it was just as uncomfortable as the first.
In a further test, the researchers administered naloxone, an opioid blocker, to a further set of twenty mice, before putting them through the same protocol. In this experiment, while the Test Group mice still fled to the second chamber on the seventh day, they did not exhibit fewer nocifensive behaviours. This strongly suggests that the pain relief observed in the previous experiment was the result of the release of endorphins. Endorphins that, in the second experiment, are prevented from working by the naloxone.
What it did(n’t) tell us
While this study is fascinating, it is far from a definitive explanation of the placebo effect, or even how placebo effects mediate pain. It is a clear demonstration of classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning. Classical conditioning probably does account for some of the placebo effects seen in some studies but many placebo effects, even for pain, have nothing at all to do with endorphins, naloxone, or conditioning.
The researchers also performed a slew of other experiments to identify neural pathways that we previously had not considered to be part of the endogenous pain relief mechanisms, and speculate that stimulating those pathways directly could induce endogenous pain relief (though I would add that a single shot of morphine will offer more pain relief than endorphins are ever likely to manage alone). One test confined the conditioned mice to a single chamber and observed that, in this case, their nocifensive behaviours were the same in both chambers, suggesting that perhaps the conditioned endorphin release was triggered by the pain itself rather than which chamber the mice were in.
Either way, headlines claiming ‘researchers explain how the placebo effect works’ are not only reductive but imply a singular mechanism where none exists. Much of the public confusion surrounding the placebo effect is rooted in this persistent oversimplification, which glosses over what is a complex set of phenomena.
The conditioning observed in these mice is a specific mechanism that might contribute to some placebo responses, particularly those involving learned associations. However, it is just one part of a much larger, more intricate picture that includes other effects like regression to the mean, reporting biases, parallel interventions, and so on.
Using a single term to describe all these distinct processes under one umbrella suggests a uniformity and simplicity that does not exist, and it muddies the waters of scientific communication. While this study is valuable, it should be recognised as one part of a much larger puzzle, not the definitive explanation of the placebo effect.
There is a well-established scientific consensus that the division of the human species into races makes no biological sense. “Race”, when we talk about Homo sapiens, is a social phenomenon – and one with very real social effects. We know, however, that many consensuses that are obvious to the scientific community are not always easy to convey.
Just look at the difficulty of explaining consensuses such as human-caused global warming and evolution. Perhaps the unreality of biological races is an even more complicated case – after all, people are culturally conditioned to take some differences in individual appearance as markers of “race.” But these markers are completely arbitrary; biologically, talking about the “white” (or black) race makes as much sense as referring to the “bald” (or hairy) race.
It doesn’t help, of course, when major universities try to use people’s appearance to decide whether or not they suffer from racism, misappropriating terms originated in biology, such as “phenotype.”
To make it perfectly clear how absurd the notion of “biological races” in humanity actually is, a group of researchers from the USA decided to use as an example a species in which talking about races does indeed make biological sense: dogs.
In a scientific article, the authors begin by showing that 27% of the genetic differences between dogs can be attributed to races. In humans, only 3-4% of genetic differences can be attributed to different populations of origin. Furthermore, in humans, the greatest genetic variation occurs within populations, and not between different populations; two people with the same skin tone from any African country probably have more DNA variations between them than if they were compared to people from another continent. And these differences are found in only 0.1% of the genome: we humans are 99.9% identical in DNA.
The opposite occurs in dogs. Breeds considered pure have very little internal genetic variation, but there are significant differences between breeds. In other words, dogs of the same breed are very similar to each other.
The authors also explain the difference between the pressures generated by natural selection in humans, and the artificial selection to which dogs have been subjected. In humans, no population has ever undergone complete genetic isolation. And even when selective pressures such as UV light incidence favoured different skin colors, or warmer or colder regions selected different body shapes, these selected characteristics are usually polygenic (involving many genes) and determined by different genes in different cases.
In other words, the same skin tone (or the same physiological characteristic, such as lactose intolerance) can be determined by different genes in different groups. The same characteristic, different genetic origins.
In dogs, most physical characteristics, such as color and height, are determined by a few genes, almost all known, and from the same origin. For example, the same mutant gene causes hairlessness in three different breeds, and can be traced back to one ancestor. There are only nine genes for coat pattern in dogs, five specifically for color. In humans, the authors cite more than 50 genes that influence skin pigmentation in the African continent alone.
This happens mainly because artificial selection allows the breeder to completely isolate one breed from another, preventing them from breeding “outside” the desired population. The breeder has total control over the “matrices”, those few animals that can produce offspring, keeping the breed pure. Some dogs have had more than 2,500 puppies. In humans, to this day, this radical isolation has never happened, as much as some fanatical racists have toyed with the idea. We are all mongrels, and that’s a good thing.
“Extra-terrestrial beings may be living underground or in a base inside the Moon, according to a new Harvard Study”, reads the headline from a tabloid website that I had never heard of, but a similar headline from the American Mirror also pointed to a “Harvard Study” about the same subject. Well, probably-AI-written clickbait article, you almost had my attention, but then guerrilla skeptic Susan Gerbic posted a link about the same subject, so now I’m curious.
The first thing I want to share about the subject is that there is a difference between a “Harvard Study” and a study by people who have some kind of affiliation with Harvard University. The former is a study either run or funded by the university. The latter is not a “Harvard Study” any more than we might consider Texas Senator Ted Cruz a Harvard lawyer. Sure, he graduated from the school, but he’s not employed by them or endorsed by them.
The difference is important, because the latter trades on the respect of the former. We call something a Harvard Experiment (or I’ve seen the same thing happen with Oxford) so that people think “Oooh, a Harvard experiment” – if even they think that… But this isn’t a Harvard study, it’s a research paper. And, like the former distinction, this distinction is also important.
I’m a philosophy academic so I don’t generally write studies; I write research papers. The impression that “study” gives is that there exists some physical artifact or biological entity – some concrete thing that was looked at. A research paper is a survey of the previously written work that draws a conclusion. I’m being a bit glib, but there’s a lot to unpack here and we’ve not even gotten to the paper yet. These are all false impressions that the headlines is designed to generate, so let’s find the actual paper.
The paper itself appears in the Journal of Philosophy and Cosmology, a peer-reviewed academic journal dealing with the intersection of Philosophy and Cosmology. Nothing seems wrong or suspect here. This isn’t a pay-to-play journal, or some AI-generated journal for the specific purpose of fooling people. In fact, the bland title is a good indicator. Academic journals with the most boring titles are often the best regarded. A journal about the physical world, “Nature”, a journal about medicine, “The New England Journal of Medicine” (as that is where both Harvard and Yale are located); the Lancet is an outlier but that is because its original purpose was to cut out (with a lancet or scalpel) medical malpractice, charlatans, and quackery.
Everything about this paper seems legitimate, except for the content of the paper itself. Right away I will dispense with the false claim in the headline from above. The paper is not arguing that that a secret race of beings is living on the moon or in caves underneath us. It is, however, claiming that we should take the possibility of such a claim seriously. They argue, ostensibly, that “in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness”we ought not to dismiss the explanation out of hand. The context of this paper is the popularity that UAPs enjoyed last summer.
This paper was written to buttress the possibility that maybe the UAPs are not coming from above, but from below… or to the side.
The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis
The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis (CTH) seeks to accommodate the existence of UAPs as originating from a non-human intelligence, while at the same time trying to argue away those pesky problems that extraterrestrials pose. The paper points out, rightly, in one of its broken clock moments, that the CTH does not have “to appeal to interstellar space travel – an extraordinary technological feat for any species – to account for UAP.”
I would further add that a UAP, if they’re real craft and not odd anomalies, is unique in that there exists zero trace of the craft (radiation, exhaust, impact on the surrounding environment) once the UAP has left the blurry image of the recording. CTH does not get around this problem, but it does solve the travel issue.
The paper is a testament to the informal fallacy of argument from ignorance. This is the fallacy that makes a conclusion based on the lack of evidence otherwise. The best examples are those that claim aliens have been captured and are interred at the US military base known as Area 51. Since we don’t know what is there, the conclusion must be that aliens are.
The paper wants to claim a veneer of epistemic honesty, but it does so under false pretenses. The problem is the central claim it wishes us to consider – that there exists a sentient intelligence that has been living undetected among (or under) us. The paper’s claimed point is not that this possibility is true, but that it is possible that it could be true. This is where the title of this article comes from; they want us to accept that there exists the potential for the suggestion that this hypothesis is true. This is a dodgy claim because we don’t need extraordinary evidence to accept a possibility, but we do need some evidence.
There are some concessions that the authors make a few times where they admit that even they think some of this stuff is too crazy to accept, but, you never know… I doubt the sincerity of these concessions, and I think this is merely a ploy to mitigate our incredulity at what they are saying. They place the possibility of the CTH hypothesis being true at 10%, which they confess is an increase from 1% before last year.
The problem with this percentage is that we are given no documentation for the increase. Statisticians (or people who understand how statistics work) should be demanding the dataset. Even I, who cannot do maths with more than one letter in it, would like to take a look at it as well. I may not be able to compute advanced maths, but I do know that in an academic paper, if you have a number indicating a probability that sometimes is true and that number goes up, you should be able to demonstrate why. Instead, we are left with the same kind of statistical analysis an android provides about navigating an asteroid field. The number is just there to look impressive.
Our main problem, as skeptics, should be that such an incredible claim ought to have some kind of evidence in favour of it. Yes, I’ve butchered the Carl Sagan quote but I did so because this paper is allegedly not claiming that the CTH is true but that we should take seriously that idea that it could be.
Yet, what we are left with is a very long-winded exercise in the special pleading fallacy. This fallacy is committed when an argument asks you to overlook certain restrictions on an earlier premise so that the conclusion can be considered true. Here we are being asked to believe that a non-human intelligence lives either among us or underneath us without having first established that such an intelligence exists in the first place.
Unsheathing Occam’s Razor
Let’s examine the CTH for what it is: an untenable claim on its own. The paper wants us to accept the claim that it is possible an underground race/species (the difference matters here) has been living among/below (again the difference matters) us and has escaped detection. Ok, fine, but we need some kind of evidence for it.
The authors lean on a few different archaeological finds for proof. None of these are salient to the CTH’s possibility. Their chief piece of evidence is the settlement of Gobekli Tepe in modern Turkey. The site, recognised by UNESCO, is famous for being a human settlement much earlier than was previously thought. The site is estimated to have been settled around 9500 BCE, just after the end of the last ice age. Does this prove that the CTH is true? No. Does it prove that the CTH is worthy of legitimate inquiry? Again, no. What it proves is that humans were settling down in an era that predates the Ussher chronology. It also shows us that there are swathes of human history that we are ignorant of – but I don’t think that is news to anyone with a curiosity about the history of human civilisation.
Their other evidence doesn’t fare any better. They point out a discovery in Kolombo Falls, Zambia, where “researchers in 2019 discovered an example of wood craftsmanship and technology – involving two pieces of wood fashioned to ‘interlock’ together…”, which they claim is dated to 500,000 years ago. This would place the wood objects before the emergence of HomoSapiens. If we accept this discovery, it just means that we(?) have had wooden tools for far longer than known. It does not argue, or even imply, that a different species of intelligence currently exists on this planet.
Occam’s Razor posits that between two explanations, the one with the fewest assumptions is superior. There are, of course, different interpretations of this, and I should stress that it is not a hard rule. Sometimes those assumptions pan out, but the assumptions need to be “discharged” from being assumptions.
What our authors are claiming is that, because Gobekli Tepe and these wooden tools exist, we should take seriously the notion that an advanced species lives undetected among us. Their assumption is that the people in Zambia, who were not Homo Sapiens, evolved along a different branch line, were able to create flying objects that fool our best methods of detection, and then continue to remain undetected among (or below) us.
The other alternative is that the few anomalous UAP encounters are just that: anomalous unknown events. This is just another argument from ignorance, not knowing what it is does not allow us to make any claim we want. If they’re going to posit a different evolutionary line, why don’t they just claim that dinosaurs survived and evolved to fly the UAPs. Well, about that…
The Troodon Conspiracy
My biggest issue with the paper, of many, is that they pull a bait and switch a bunch of times. The largest comes toward the end of the writing (the paper is 42 pages long but the writing only pushes 17 pages) when we begin a very strange and detailed divergence into considering whether or not David Icke has a point: “Even so, it is intriguing that ‘reptilians’ have long been associated with the UAP topic, with speculation that some such species does indeed represent an NHI that may be responsible for some UAP.”
They make the assumption but then later rest their entire contention on that assumption. David Icke just picked lizard people for his Non-Human Intelligence because they’re sufficiently different to us, and they reference people’s latent fear of snakes. Spiders would have been more universal, but it’s more difficult to fit spiders inside skin suits. I’ve never considered that Icke would be correct because his theory requires way too much, but here we have an academic journal publication that wants us to consider that Icke’s lizards could be real. And if you’re wondering, do they really mean lizard people? Well, yes, they do.
The contention that they want us to consider as plausible is an alternative evolutionary branch where dinosaurs evolved into sentient creatures alongside and completely hidden from their primate counterparts. The article does offer some support in the form of the dinosauroid hypothesis from Russell and Sequin (1982), as well as the possibility that the “Silurian hypothesis” is true from a later paper by Scmidt and Frank (2019).
The 1982 paper has eluded me, but the 2019 paper has not. That paper argues that finding evidence of an industrial society in the geologic record would be difficult… it does not argue that a race of underground sword-wielding Victorian detectives exists (that was a fun sentence to write).
While Troodons are the smartest dinosaurs (here’s one explaining how a time-traveling train works) there are several devastating issues with this claim. The Russell and Sequin “dinosauroid” was criticised heavily from the start. The form of the creature was criticised as being too human. While the Troodon could have evolved into a sentient creature, making the Super Mario Bros. movie essentially a documentary, it is unlikely to have gone unnoticed in a competitive environment during the ice ages.
I’m going to skip the section on how magical beings might be responsible for UAP phenomenon, because I could easily write another few thousand words on that and I have to limit myself. I’ll only say that, while I don’t think it’s Troodons, at least Troodons really existed, unlike faeries. I’m also ignoring the stuff about the Moon, because that makes even less sense to the CTH.
The paper’s point is to argue that we should take seriously the CTH as a possible explanation for UAP. As someone who researches conspiracy theories, I read a lot of alternative explanations for things. The CTH as an explanation for UAP is an alternative explanation’s alternative explanation.
The CTH suffers because it rests too much on special pleading. The dinosauroid alternative, for example, requires us to assent to the idea that not only could a 2.5m-long 25kg dinosaur survive and then evolve into a sentient creature, but also that such a creature could create a society with an infrastructure that could create highly advanced flying vehicles. Further, that all of this would remain undetected by the world at large.
What’s needed is evidence that begins a journey toward the possibility of the CTH. The authors do nothing of the sort.
In May, the city government of São Paulo in Brazil published an advertorial to the website of Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Globo, boasting about offering, in the municipal health system, many of the 29 integrative and complementary practices (PICs) approved by the Ministry of Health for use in Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS). To be clear, this was “paid content” (or, in the current euphemism, “branded content”), published not because the newspaper editor thinks it is important, but because someone bought the space.
We can leave it to political analysts to figure out why São Paulo taxpayers’ money is being used to buy online space in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper. The issue here, after all, is science. The acronym “PICs” serves as an umbrella for a series of therapeutic proposals and medications that have one thing in common: either their risks and benefits have never been properly evaluated by science, or they have been evaluated and ultimately rejected.
The provision of PICs by the government is unethical and uneconomical, an argument that we have made extensively across a series of previous publications in Revista Questão de Ciência (some of which can be found here , here and here ).
The examples cited in São Paulo city government’s advertorial include herbal remedies such as valerian, for which there is some evidence of efficacy, albeit weak and inconclusive, plus some which do not even have a completed clinical trial, such as espinheira-santa, as well as low-impact physical activity modalities, such as yoga and tai-chi, from which it is reasonable to expect some benefit, even if nonspecific. It goes on to cover absurd and unscientific practices, such as auriculotherapy, and others that are clearly placebos, such as acupuncture.
The paid article is exemplary in the sense that it exercises several of the fallacies and contradictions normally used to justify the unjustifiable – the provision of unfounded or dubious therapies by the public service. One of them is the contrast between “treating the symptom” (which is supposedly what science-based medicine does) and “treating the patient as a whole” (supposedly the province of PICs).
This is obviously false; conventional medicine also requires a holistic view. Where it falls short of this goal, it is a flaw that needs to be corrected – it is not reason to turn to nonsense. As British doctor, journalist and researcher Ben Goldacre has pointed out, just because airplanes are uncomfortable and sometimes crash, we are not better off turning to flying carpets.
In this respect, PICs end up acting as an accidental pretext for maintaining the industrial, cold and impersonal nature of typical medical care in the public system and in private health plans: to continue the aeronautical metaphor, instead of improving the seats and the quality of the on-board service, we are offered flying carpets, which may be beautiful and soft but, at the end of the day, go nowhere.
Satisfied customer fallacy
This does not mean that the softness of the carpet does not provide some momentary comfort, and that the beautiful patterns of the fabric do not help the patient to distract themselves and forget that they have not moved. The problems are the lack of objective change – the trip did not happen, and the real illness was not treated; there is intrinsic dishonesty in selling illusions.
Illusions of causality – when the mind ends up accepting as true cause and effect relationships that are, in reality, false – are favoured when there is high “cause density” and high “effect density”.
In the case of health issues, a high effect density means that the disease in question is either chronic – the symptoms come and go – or has a high rate of spontaneous remission. In other words, there are diseases that tend to resolve themselves, or with symptoms that go through cycles of relief. This is why any cold remedy “works,” whether it’s chicken soup, a multivitamin pill, or homeopathy: the cold was going to go away anyway.
High “cause density,” in turn, occurs when the number of people trying the pseudo-cure is high, which increases the chance of “positive results” arising by mere chance. It is overly optimistic to imagine that this mechanism is unsustainable in the long term – that random cures cannot sustain the popularity of an ineffective (or even ineffective and highly dangerous) treatment for years or even centuries. One need only recall the example of bloodletting, popular for three millennia.
The two densities appear very clearly in the publicity material of the São Paulo city government published in O Globo – both, of course, falsely interpreted as real evidence of effectiveness. The text cites huge numbers of attendance:
Auriculotherapy (derived from acupuncture which consists of pressing nerve points on the ear) and acupuncture are the main individual modalities performed. There were, respectively, 192,403 sessions (equivalent to 51% of all services) and 45,417 procedures in the first half of 2023.
And, a few paragraphs later:
From January to November 16, 2023, the municipal administration delivered 13,996,700 herbal medicines to pharmacies in the municipal health network, an increase of 29.78% compared to the same period in 2022. In the last nine years, more than 60 million units were released.
These data are interspersed with testimonials from four satisfied users, two of whom have chronic conditions. Given the extremely high cause density and prevalence of chronic cases, and therefore high effect density, it would probably have been possible to find hundreds or even thousands of positive testimonials. But the same can be said of chloroquine or ivermectin for Covid-19, and for the same reasons: a huge number of patients treated and a condition that, in most cases, tends to resolve itself.
Using the glow of popularity to overshadow the lack of concrete evidence of effectiveness is a common rhetorical strategy in the PIC universe.
How much does it cost?
One piece of information that is notable for its absence from the press release is the amount of spending (or “investment”) involved in offering “more than one million alternative procedures” in “471 Basic Health Units.” We read that the “city government invests in training and updating professionals in this area”, but we are not told how much is invested.
As a matter of principle, any penny of public health funds spent on procedures and therapies of zero or highly dubious effectiveness is a waste; as a practical matter, in times of fiscal tightening and limited funding, any waste is irresponsible.
Direct financial loss, however, is just one of the problems brought about by the endorsement of alternative therapies by the government. Added to this are the very real dangers to citizens’ health and a profound miseducation effect.
The danger exists, either because the risk profile of the practice offered is unknown, since most PICs have never been adequately tested for safety or efficacy, or because the illusion of the flying carpet can mask serious health conditions, or lead the patient to neglect real treatments. The miseducation comes from the false equivalence proposed between scientific knowledge and mythologies such as vital energy and water memory; between Aeronautical Engineering and fairytale magic.
This is sabotage against the most fundamental scientific literacy of the population.
On 29th July, a knifeman entered a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, 20 miles from where we are right now, and stabbed nine children and two adults. Three of the girls died – six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar. A community and a country was in shock. This doesn’t happen in the UK. People were angry, and they were scared, and they were sad. They planned a vigil to the memory of those three girls, in Southport, on July 30th.
Initially, information on the perpetrator was scarce. In the vacuum, rumours circulated. Channel 3 Now News released the name of the murderer – Ali Al-Shakati, a young Muslim who had recently arrived by boat. This was soon amplified far and wide, initially on Telegram, starting with a 55-year-old ‘social commentator’ who had appeared multiple times on GB News and Talk TV, called Bernie Spofforth. Bernie, aka Artemisfornow, is an influential conspiracy theorist, who has grown a following for her denial of the pandemic, her warnings over vaccine harms, her scaremongering about 15-minute cities, and all the usual stuff. At one point, she had 250k followers on Twitter.
The killer’s name was soon in every Telegram chat I’ve been following since the White Rose investigation. It came up multiple times in Tommy Robinson’s channel, the far-right former leader of the EDL, who grew a mammoth Telegram following during the pandemic, after pivoting to Covid conspiracism. It made it to Twitter, where people like Andrew Tate, Lawrence Fox, Tommy Robinson, Isabelle Oakenshot, and Darren Grimes started speculating about what had happened and who was to blame. Was the month-old Labour government too soft on immigration? Is this further proof we need to stop the boats? Had we been too accepting to people from other places? Were we undergoing an invasion, and was this the first sign?
A message in the Telegram group “Liverpools Peoples Resistance” claims the Southport riot was triggered by the arrest of an “Arab man” with a balaclava and machete.
Nigel Farage, the new MP for Clacton, had questions, so he took to Twitter to ask them, pointing out that the police hadn’t said anything about the murderer, so what aren’t we being told? What are they hiding?
People were angry, and now they had a name, a group to blame and a venue. They descended on the Southport vigil, some wearing hoods, many carrying cans of alcohol, many from outside of the region but plenty from within it. If things were struggling to remain peaceful, the next bit of news lit the tinderbox: spreading around Telegram and other online groups was an image of a man being arrested, apparently a Muslim with a machete who was stopped on his way to the vigil, intent on doing harm.
That was all it took, and from there carnage ensued. Vehicles were set alight, locals were attacked, the police – who had responded to the murder of three children just over 24 hours earlier – were pelted with bricks chipped out of walls and dug out of the very road itself. It became a riot, and it headed to Southport Mosque. Thankfully, nobody was killed.
Misinformation and propaganda
It was all based on lies. Ali Al-Shakati didn’t exist; the killer was called Axel Rudakubana. Rather than a recent arrival on a small boat, he was born and raised in Wales. Rather than a Muslim, he was Christian, born to strongly religious Rwandan parents. And rather than covering this up in a sinister fashion, the silence from the police was because he was 17, and therefore a minor, with a legal right to anonymity until a trial judge releases his name, which in the cases of minors usually only happens after sentencing.
So how had Channel 3 Now News, the original source of the name, got this so wrong? It’s because there is no Channel3Now – in the UK, the third TV channel is called ITV, we don’t have a Channel 3. The source called Channel3Now is a now-suspended YouTube channel, whose first videos were Russian language motor racing videos. The channel was bought, repurposed, renamed, and retooled to try to generate income by mass producing news articles, regardless of their veracity. It’s unclear who first sent it to Bernie Spofforth – though she has since been arrested, so we may find out its route to her in due course – but once it was with her the existing conspiracist infrastructure of the UK went into full force, flinging lies to every confused and angry person in the network.
Farage, for his part, has since admitted that his source for his rumour mongering and questions to just-ask was… alleged sex trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate. These are the waters in which the Right Honourable Member for Clacton-on-Sea swims, apparently. As Labour MP Jess Phillips pointed out, if he truly had genuine questions about what was going on, Farage could have turned up for work and asked those questions of the people who knew, but instead he decided to put out an opportunistic video on Twitter. Far from apologising, Farage has only doubled down, releasing further videos warning that the worst is to come unless immigration is curbed.
And what of that Muslim with a machete, whose arrest further nudged the mob into violence? His name was Jordan Davies, and rather than being an immigrant, he was from Southport. Rather than a machete, it was a flick knife. And rather than being a Muslim, he was attending the riot as one of the far-right sympathisers, having posted to his Instagram: “Show these dirty little rat bastards who there fuckin dealing with. Gunna be hard to keep it peaceful not going to lie”. Again, he messaged that while carrying a knife.
The rumour about him being Muslim seems to have been based on him having a beard in a grainy photo of his arrest. The source of it is still being investigated, as presumably is their intent and how aware they were of his identity at the time they lied about him being a Muslim agitator.
For the complete avoidance of any doubt, there were no Muslims involved in this horrible crime – the killer wasn’t Muslim, and the people inciting the violence were not Muslim. But on Friday – apparently in response to the crime and in the memory of those girls – a mob gathered outside of the Abdullah Quilliam Society Mosque in Liverpool, whipped up on social media by all these same forces. Fortunately, they were hugely outnumbered, and the leader of the Mosque, Adam Kelwick, even came out to speak directly with some of the protesters, talking some down from their fears, listening to what they had to say, and hugging one of them.
We went to see Adam speaking at an anti-racism event, and he was a great speaker, calling for compassion and humanity, even for those who are yelling slurs and aggressive things at us, because everyone is a human being, and people are scared and confused. And he also made the absolutely correct point that the killer was not a Muslim, but even if he had been a Muslim, that in no way justifies a mob attacking a random mosque, any more than we should be burning down churches because the killer was Christian. This wasn’t justice, and it wasn’t even vengeance, it was a race riot. And it wasn’t the only one.
Riots and racism
Over the next few days, riots would break out at cities and towns across the UK. There were nazi salutes on the streets of Leicester, swastika tattoos on rioters who had travelled from Stoke to join the mob in Sunderland, and people going house to house in Middlesbrough, kicking in doors and stopping cars to try to find people who weren’t white. In Rotherham and in Tamworth, crowds gathered outside of hotels where asylum seekers were being kept, putting out the windows, daubing racist graffiti, and trying to set alight to the building to burn the families inside. All of this purportedly in the name of legitimate concerns, all of it denied as being influenced by the far right. The swastika tattoos were on people who had reasonable concerns. A hotel filled with families and kids was torched in the name of children’s safety.
Even the anti-racism demonstration we joined in Liverpool was convened in order to march down to the waterfront to oppose a rally that had been gathering there, where six or seven hundred people – mostly, but not all, men – had been gathering. We left before their protest turned violent, and before they fought with the police, and broke their way into a phone shop in town, one that happened to be owned by a Muslim. They eventually left the town centre, only to reconvene in Walton, supposedly to gather outside of a Mosque, before eventually setting fire to a community library.
Ostensibly, this was all meant to be a protest, but what they were protesting wasn’t clear. Some of the crowd in Liverpool and elsewhere were yelling “Who the fuck is Allah?” – none of this was to do with Muslims at all. They were also holding signs saying “Save Our Kids” and yelling about “nonces”, and again, this wasn’t a case of child sexual abuse. Nine children had been stabbed by a 17-year-old. In many of the riots, they were yelling “we want our country back”.
The “Save Our Kids” banners, of course, give away some of the origins of this movement and how the confused crowd had been convened: it is a QAnon slogan, notionally about an epidemic of children being trafficked into sexual slavery by a shadowy cabal of elites. It also crosses into the anti-Muslim narrative around ‘grooming gangs’ – the far right talking point which takes the real-life instances of paedophile rings among some Muslim communities in some towns across the UK, and emphasises it in order to falsely insinuate that the majority of child abuse in the UK is committed by Muslims. The same might also explain the gentleman who had constructed a seven-foot tall Christian cross out of plywood and daubed it with slogans – because the same spaces that favour QAnon have also been amplifying Christian Nationalist imagery.
That QAnon slogans and Christian Nationalism had spilled out onto the streets of Liverpool ought to have been a shock, except this was not the first time we’ve seen it happen – in my first-ever editorial for The Skeptic magazine, back in September 2020, I highlighted how anti-vaccine marches that were organised on Telegram were seeing people take to Merseyside streets with QAnon banners. Those anti-vaccine marches went away, but the groups didn’t, and the influences on those groups didn’t – they continued to boil away, simmering in a soup of conspiracism, Satanic Panic, culture war provocateuring, and anti-woke virtue signalling. They bubbled their way through claims around people who died suddenly, through Andrew Bridgen and Aseem Malhotra telling them the vaccines were deadly, through warnings about 15-minute cities and central bank digital currencies and drag show story hours and transvestigations, and they were kept on the boil by cynical actors stoking the flames.
Those cynical actors are, in my opinion, particularly responsible for the cries of “We want our country back”. The rioters wanted to take ‘our’ country back from the immigrants, Muslims and people of colour (the rioters were not asking about country of origin before they meted out their racially-motivated ‘justice’). It would be easy to see this as simple racism, but I think we should also not overlook the impact of conspiracy theory and conspiracist dog-whistling in fomenting the rage, specifically the “Great Replacement” or “White Genocide” conspiracy theory.
The role of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory
According to the Great Replacement, white people are under threat in their native UK, due to the influx of immigrants from outside of Europe. This influx is, the conspiracists argue, no coincidence – it is deliberate, intentional, and coordinated. It will be no surprise as to who the conspiracists think is behind this concerted attack on the white British people: when the neo-Nazis marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville they chanted, “Jews will not replace us”. They weren’t afraid that their place would be taken by Jewish people; they feared that a shadowy cabal of influential Jews was trying to destabilise ‘native’ white countries by co-ordinating the mass influx of people of colour, who would soon replace the white race in their ‘own’ country.
References to the Kalergi Great Replacement plan in Liverpool-based conspiracy groups, as spotted and reported in 2021. Note the warning about refugees ‘chasing them down the street with a machete’ – an uncanny portent to the fake news which kicked off the Southport riot.
The trope that most refugees are “fighting age men” is constantly brought up as a gotcha, despite there being good reason why men are more likely to seek refuge before their family. It’s also deliberate that they’re described as of “fighting age” rather than “working age”, or simply “adult”. The effect is to create and stoke the fear that refugees are here to fight, with the inevitable implication being that the white people of the UK must fight back, or lose ‘our’ land.
White Christian Nationalist posts in Covid conspiracy Telegram groups, as spotted and reported in 2021. The Christian Knight post on the left was re-shared subsequently in the wake of the riots.
Arguably, nobody is more central to the point at which mainstream dog whistles met with closed-group extremism than Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka “Tommy Robinson”.
Tommy Robinson
Back when I was investigating the White Rose antivax movement on Telegram, I warned that those conspiracy spaces I was monitoring were being constantly filled by antivax content originating with Tommy Robinson’s channel. To the point where, when I was talking to our friend Lewi, who was the mod of some of those channels, I even asked why Tommy Robinson’s content appeared so frequently, and he admitted that he needed to get better sources, but it was hard to find things elsewhere that had the kind of antivax messages Tommy Robinson’s channel was reliably pumping out.
Whenever I give talks about the antivax movement, I’ve pointed this out, that Tommy Robinson would prolifically post dozens of times per day, antivax and conspiracist posts, that would go viral across Telegram. And either it was because when the pandemic came along, Tommy and his crew became instantly radicalised into antivaxxers… or, they simply recognised that there were a lot of confused, scared and disaffected people during the pandemic, and if you pivoted to producing the kind of content they liked, plenty of them would follow you. Sure enough, Tommy Robinson started singing their song, and they started buying his album – his channel amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. And once they were following, he could start to feed them the kind of messaging he wanted them to believe – about Islam, about immigrants, and about England.
It is likely that the riots would not have happened were it not for Tommy Robinson. In the week before the killings, he held a rally in London and attracted 30,000 people – where he screened a film in which he falsely accused a Syrian teenager Jamal Hijazi of a violent assault, resulting in Hijazi receiving death threats. Robinson was successfully sued by Hijazi for defamation and owed £100,000 in damages. He didn’t pay. Instead, he repeated the claims and then fled the country to avoid the law.
Robinson was in a luxury hotel in Cyprus when, a few days later, the murders happened in Southport. He used his Twitter to amplify the misinformation about the killer, pointing almost a million followers in the direction of the riots. His Telegram channel shared the times and places of other planned riots and shared a hit list of immigration offices to target. On August 2nd, he appeared on Info Wars, where he told Alex Jones that “Between now and October, I’m going to pour petrol on the fire.” Whether that use of imagery was intentional or not, two days later, his followers tried to burn down two hotels filled with asylum seekers, while chanting his name.
“Stop the fucking boats. Get them out of them hotels. Get them gone. Put them on boats and send them back. They shouldn’t be here. They’re endangering the safety of our families. Men will rise up – they were always going to rise up. They have to rise up to defend their families. You’ve brought this war on our shores (sic).”
Musk’s inability to distinguish right-wing agitators from legitimate sources of news is incredibly concerning. We’ve seen him amplifying a post from propagandist Andy Ngo about William Nelson Morgan, a rioter who was convicted “for refusing to disperse and holding a stick at a library riot in Walton West Yorkshire”. “Messed up”, commented Musk. For what it’s worth, the man in question was holding a truncheon and was threatening people with it, and required three police officers to restrain him. Also for what it’s worth, the library attack was the one in Walton, Liverpool – not Walton, the village in West Yorkshire. When one of the most powerful men in the country gets his crime reporting from someone who doesn’t even bother to find out where the crime happened, we should be concerned.
Elon Musk shares Andy Ngo’s misleading summary of the arrest of William Nelson Morgan, including misidentifying the location of the crime (image has been edited to include the entirety of Ngo’s tweet)
After the dust settles
Since the riots last week, the dust has somewhat settled, and order appears to have been restored. As a nation, we’re left with a clean-up job – something that community members across the country got on with very quickly, with people quickly volunteering to replace smashed windows, rebuild damaged walls, and repair broken trusts.
But while the physical damage has been all but repaired, the social damage will take a lot longer, and it will start by trying to understand the forces that drove the riots, and that provoked people into violence and disorder.
It’s impossible to deny the amount to which racism was responsible, including racism from within those communities. Mosques were targeted for a reason, but more than that, people weren’t pausing to ask who was Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Hindu or atheist; people were attacked for the colour of their skin and their perceived differences. We saw people doing Nazi salutes on the street, and proudly showing off swastika tattoos. They were there because they dislike people who don’t look like them. Equally, as was evidenced by the looting of shops (including Lush and Greggs), and by the number of rioters who turned out to have long criminal records, some of the riots attracted people who wanted to be part of the chaos.
However, there were undeniably a large number of people who were drawn to the riots for reasons that were not explicitly or consciously malign – people who were confused, angry and scared, who saw some children had been senselessly attacked and killed, and who worried that theirs could be next. Their fear and confusion made them malleable, and easy for cynical actors to manipulate them into directing that anger at scapegoats and political targets. There are still people, now, who believe that the killer was Muslim, or was a refugee, even though it’s unequivocally the case that he was not.
That anger, confusion and fear has been built and stoked for years, behind the scenes, in private Telegram groups where people are trained to accept dubious sources, and rewarded for spreading unconfirmed conjecture. It has been amplified on Twitter, where extremists like Tommy Robinson’s path heads in the same direction as people like Nigel Farage, Darren Grimes, Douglas Murray, Isabelle Oakenshot, Andy Ngo, and a carnival of other ‘social commentators’ who willingly stoke the immigration culture war if it happens to gain them money and influence.
This isn’t to say that last week’s riots were inevitable. But in many ways, they were predictable, and the warning signs had been gathering for a while. These riots had nothing to do with the deaths of three young girls, or the wounding of six others, and two adults; they had everything to do with a country which has ignored the role of conspiracism in growing the far right, a government that has actively fanned the flames of that growing fire, and a culture of social media sites who would rather monetise the people pouring on petrol than to turn off the fuel at the source.
Keeping your epistemological toolkit up to date is vitally important, but amongst the meticulous intellectual minutiae, a pearl of wisdom from over half a century ago is frequently forgotten. Thankfully, there’s a song to help you remember it: in 1968 Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett had a goal to create a television program to help young children, particularly those in deprived areas, prepare for school.
That program was Sesame Street and, on the very first episode, the kindergarten crop was invited to investigate the complex phenomenon of dissimilarity with the bona fide earworm “One of these things is not like the others”.
Considering the near ubiquitous nature of Sesame Street in the public consciousness, it’s disappointing that some of the simple lessons easily learned by children are forgotten by adults when discussing matters of concern. This may be deliberate in some cases, but not always, I suspect.
So, to facilitate a recap, let’s look for some divergent properties in the ongoing discourse around so-called ‘cancel culture’ and/or ‘consequence culture’ in comedy. Particularly relevant at the time of writing as Joe Rogan has taken a break from platforming pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists on his podcast to release yet another comedy special on Netflix, where he reminds us how controversial he is and how many times he has been cancelled.
Mans-laughter
Can you imagine a comedian today getting away with jokes about domestic violence, race, sexual assault, the Holocaust, 9/11, the LGBTQ community, and a host of other taboos? Surely not possible in the current climate, yet Anthony Jeselnik not only exists, but his career continues to go from strength to strength. Later this year he will bring his comedic marmite to the UK, performing in 3,000-capacity theatres rather than the low-budget comedy clubs you might expect to be hosting someone so far over the line of political correctness.
There has been some controversy around some of his content, but in general there are no calls for a boycott, even though there’s a significant portion of his most recent special for Netflix dedicated to his proficiency in dropping babies. Despite all this, no noticeable pitchforks or flaming torches outside his shows. So, why is this one not like the others?
The answer is simple: it’s intention.
Jeselnik’s entire schtick is that he’s the bad guy. His villainy is so pronounced and absurd that it’s beyond pantomime, and his audience is clearly aware of that. Even the casual observer who happens upon his material can easily spot the fact that his jokes are so far past the boundaries of good taste that it has to be an act.
Brent out of shape
So, shouldn’t this apply to all comedians? Well, no. One of these things is not like the others.
Joe Rogan is only one of many out there lashing out at those who are crying foul at their content: let’s consider the current self-proclaimed Christ in the crucifixion crosshairs of cancel culture, Ricky Gervais.
Over the years he has built up his stand-up comedy reputation as a dropper of truth bombs, ridiculing the absurd, and taking those who (supposedly) deserve it down a peg or two. His ruthless assassinations of those around him in the film and television industry during the Golden Globes is viewed by many as a righteous skewering of powerful and successful people, and by others as somewhat mean spirited. Either way, he’s referring to real-life people, many of whom have made real-life mistakes.
There’s occasionally exaggeration, some level of artistic licence, but a significant part of the impact his comedy makes is because he appears to actually mean what he says.
The approach that a comedian takes to their content will therefore have an effect on the type of audience they may attract but, more importantly, on the beliefs and sentiments of those people. People walking out of an Anthony Jeselnik show will, for the most part, be saying “That was so wrong!”, whereas Gervais’ audience might be saying “That was so right!”. The latter would almost certainly bring some of that baggage home with them, and absorb it into their worldview.
Target audience
The principle of influencing people, hopefully for the better, or speaking truth to power using comedy isn’t a new one. As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s I feasted on politically motivated comedy from the likes of Ben Elton, Mark Thomas, and television programs such as Spitting Image, doing their best to highlight the harms done to the UK (and beyond) under the Prime Ministerial reign of Margaret Thatcher.
In more recent times we’ve seen the likes of Ricky Gervais target organised religion, and Dave Chappelle being a constant thorn in the side of American white supremacy. Those are seen as fair targets, so it’s particularly disappointing that both Gervais and Chappelle have recently turned their attention to much more marginalised demographics. Once again, one of these things is not like the others.
Gervais goes a little way to show his commitment to environmentalism by recycling the seemingly perpetual “I identify as [object]” attempted joke in his latest special. Credit where credit’s due though, he at least tries to approach it from a slightly different angle, unlike Joe Rogan who haplessly hammers his way through some of the most brainless stereotypes about trans people with all the subtlety of, and a fair amount of physical similarity to, Ram Man from Masters of the Universe.
Gervais isn’t just satisfied with transphobia though, as he takes some time to have a pop at refugees as well. While making keen observations to the howling crowd about why those risking their lives to get to the UK are majority male, he conveniently fails to elucidate on some of the heartbreaking reasons that this is the case.
This is commonly known as punching down instead of punching up, a phrase that was misconstrued badly by Jimmy Carr in an interview with Conan O’Brien, where his response to such accusations was “So you think there’s people below me?”. Carr is intelligent enough to be aware of the existence of metaphors, and he leans much more in the direction of the Jeselnik camp than the Gervais camp in terms of how seriously he takes his own jokes, so his misinterpretation and deflection seems strange, particularly considering he’d already spoken about the relevance of intent earlier in the interview.
To make it clear, when someone says “punching down”, it usually means that the butt of the joke may be the target of some form of vilification or discrimination in much more serious ways. It’s disappointing to have to spell it out, but at least we have Sesame Street to help with our spelling.
Harm offensive
In his latest special for Netflix, Gervais takes a pop at his detractors. “You can’t say that!” he says in a whiny voice, mimicking those who have complained about his content. He then turns to look at his audience, returns to his regular voice and coldly proclaims “I just did”. The crowd goes wild. Rapturous applause and cheers ring out through the massive auditorium. No laughter, but that’s not important right now. The shared glowing warmth of imagined righteousness is all that matters here.
This straw manning of valid criticisms of content is commonplace. Frequently you will hear comedians, or their fans, claiming that the baying mob is describing their content as “offensive”, and then going on to (sometimes correctly) say that the right to offend is an important part of any society that values free speech. Right enough, some people do use the word “offensive”, but not all. It gives the comedians in question justification enough to dismiss all the criticism coming in their direction, but one of these things is not like the others.
What is seemingly ignored is that many of the complaints come from people who are saying that the content is harmful rather than offensive. It could be both, of course, but it’s the harmful nature of some of the rhetoric that deserves attention.
It’s no secret that there’s an overtly hateful and dehumanising attitude towards immigrants and refugees in a disturbingly large percentage of the UK’s population. Look no further than Reform UK’s brazen “Stop the boats” rhetoric for evidence of that sentiment.
So, when Ricky Gervais takes an ignorant potshot at refugees, he’s not just being offensive, he’s fanning the flames of intolerance. Of course, maybe he could really just be joking, and being misunderstood by some of the less pleasant members of our society, in a similar way to Alf Garnett or Al Murray’s Pub Landlord character. It seems strange that no one has asked him about this during interviews.
This brings us on to the final defence of the ‘offensive’ comedian: the timeless classic, “It’s just a joke”.
Joe Rogan is quite the master of this art, setting himself up as the comedy goofball as he compares gay men to mountain lions, and reminds his audience that they shouldn’t be getting their medical information from him, forgetting that it’s frequently the people he invites on to his podcast and allows to spout misinformation that people are listening to (one of these things isn’t like the other, Joe!).
The best way to wave off any criticism without any kind of introspection is just to remind people you’re a comedian and you shouldn’t be taken seriously, except when you should.
YouTube comments are awash with people, presumably in a more advanced age bracket, complaining that people can’t take a joke anymore like they could in the ‘good old days’, and if you don’t like it then you should just move along. Let’s kick the tyres of that argument with some examples. See if you can spot which one of these things is not like the others:
Joke 1:
I recently commented on the choice of actors to appear in a movie about ancient Iran. - Cast as Persians? No, I was very complimentary.
Joke 2:
What's the best dressed geometrical shape?- Apparellelogram.
Joke 3:
I've heard that the former Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities is now focusing his attention on rural air pollution. - That awful country smog? Yeah, that's him.
All three jokes are forms of torturous wordplay penned by me (yes, I’m an absolute joy to follow on social media), but the last of them alludes to a left-leaning political stance, and it has a specific human ‘target’. So, it’s pretty easy to see that a joke might not just be a joke. Those who are subjected to the joke may be influenced by it and may make a judgment on the values and ideals of the teller of the joke because of it.
The teller of any joke should consider this carefully, particularly if they have a massive global audience. For a beautiful illustration of this, check out Stewart Lee’s dismantling of the ‘classic’ lineup of Top Gear.
Can sell culture
So, we can see that comedy is always a complex landscape. Many performers skate the lines of good taste, and push boundaries. Some have a confusing mixture of good and bad intentions and it’s hard to tease them apart at times.
In terms of audiences, every individual has their own boundaries in terms of what they find palatable, both in terms of content, character, values, and the personal behaviour of the performer in question (Louis CK comes to mind particularly, in terms of conduct). They will vote with their feet accordingly. In certain circumstances they may be compelled to encourage other people to do the same, and at the extreme they may ask the same of venues and streaming platforms. They have the freedom to do so.
It seems though that those who consistently draw negative attention for various reasons somehow manage to continue with their careers. Rogan, Gervais and Chappelle continue to release specials on massive streaming platforms and play to massive audiences wherever they travel. Louis CK bafflingly still has a career.
Scroll your way through the stand-up comedy of any streaming platform and you’ll see a plethora of people with provocative show titles to illustrate just how much they’ve been cancelled, or how offensive they are. Some appear to thrive on the controversy. There may of course be some cases out there where a career has been fatally harmed by the so-called joke police, but as we have seen again and again, one of these things is not like the others.
