This month has seen an election in the UK, and a change in government. And while it’s true that skepticism as a toolset should remain politically neutral, that isn’t to say there is no role for a skeptical view of politics, or that politics is wholly separate from skepticism. Politics is relevant to everything, because everything is influenced by – and can influence in return – the political landscape. Where policies mis-cite evidence, or cite misleading evidence, or tell outright falsehoods, skeptics should take keen interest.
With that, I’d like to first of all congratulate Dr Danny Chambers, who, on top of being a practicing vet and a writer for this magazine, has now been elected as the Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester. I’d also like to congratulate the new Labour MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, Lizzi Collinge, who is a long-time skeptic and regular attendee of skeptical events like the QED conference. I’m certain both will take a strong skeptical attitude and appreciation for the value of good evidence into their constituency work, and that both will be assets to parliament.
In further good news, the election saw a change of representative in Leicestershire North West. Its incumbent MP – former Tory-turned-independent-turned-Reclaim Party MP-turned-independent-again, Andrew Bridgen – lost his seat to Labour’s Amanda Hack. Parliament will be a better place without Bridgen, not least because he used his time there to push for multiple debates about the supposed harms of Covid-19 vaccines, wasting parliamentary time with misleading statistics and misinterpreted studies in the process, following his very public radicalisation.
Andrew Bridgen tweeted dramatic and unfounded accusations about Covid vaccines
Bridgen continues to enjoy great support within the conspiracy theory circles – most recently, when an interview he gave to a conspiracy theory channel back in April resurfaced in which he claimed that Joe Biden and “his controllers” were so desperate to stop Donald Trump from getting winning the election that they’d be willing to start WWIII… or even, Bridgen feared, actively try to assassinate Trump.
This is now being claimed as cause for a victory lap by Bridgen and his supporters, though it remains… let’s charitably say “unconfirmed” that Thomas Matthew Crooks’ assassination attempt was ordered by “Joe Biden and his controllers”.
Despite being the incumbent MP, and despite having such ardent support among frequenters of conspiracy Telegram and parts of the right-wing press, Bridgen amassed just 1,568 votes, or 3.2% of his constituency. The result was, suffice to say, disappointing to him and his supporters, including among readers of the conspiracy-tinged blog “Conservative Woman”, where they published the following letter:
Dear Editor
Andrew Bridgen has achieved heroic status for his statements on vaccine injuries from those knowledgeable of the injuries suffered from the covid intervention. He has received various abuses on the parliamentary estate and declined offers to benefit his circumstances to remain silent in his criticism of the vaccines.
After 14 years as the efficient and successful MP for his North West Leicestershire constituency, increasing his majority at each election, he received a miserly 1,568 votes as an independent in the recent general election.
Something does not add up.
Conspiracies upon conspiracies, clearly.
Save Us Now
Bridgen is not the only fan of conspiracy theories to have been running in the election. In Gateshead Central & Whickham, voters had the chance to put their cross in the box for Graham Steele of the Save Us Now party – a prospect I found particularly interesting, as I have twice interviewed the leader of the party.
Mark Steele, brother of Graham Steele and founder of Save Us Now, first made his name when he tried to take Gateshead council to court, accusing them of installing 5G transmitters in their street lights, which were “causing cancer and microwaving babies in their beds”. Gateshead council, for their part, denied being part of the New World Order, and pointed out that their street lights do not contain 5G transmitters.
Some 5G fears on public display
I first spoke to him about this in April 2018, where he claimed his background as a weapons engineer for the Ministry of Defence gave him the technological insights to understand how dangerous the (non) 5G streetlights could be. It is worth pointing out that there is no evidence for Mark having a background in weaponry, aside from a 1993 conviction for shooting a teenage girl outside a pub, for which he served eight years.
Three years later, I requested an interview with the leaders of the new Save Us Now campaign group, unaware of who those leaders were, only to be somewhat surprised when my Zoom call was answered by Mark Steele. That was July 2021, and the 5G fears had merged with anti-vaccination scaremongering. During the call, Mark told me that 5G, Covid, and the vaccine were all created by Satan himself, with the aim of planetary depopulation – in fact, by the end of 2021, the death toll in the UK would have reached 55 million. 82% of the population. Suffice to say, he was wrong.
Save Us Now received 170 votes in Gateshead Central & Whickham, with at least some of those people knowing what Graham and Mark Steele stood for. Thankfully, those votes represented just 0.4% of the constituency.
The Freedom Alliance
While Save Us Now stood in just one seat, the same can’t be said for anti-vaccination party, The Freedom Alliance. An informal collection of candidates, the Freedom Alliance has prolific support among conspiracy groups on Telegram, or at least the ones I regularly follow. They were founded during the pandemic as a way of protesting and defying measures to control the virus, and from there they rolled into anti-vaccine misinformation, and onward through a variety of conspiracy theory panics.
The Freedom Alliance says it stands for “individuals, families and communities to be freed from state and global corporate control”, but mostly their output suggests their priorities are opposing 15-minute cities, central bank digital currencies, the great reset, net zero, and social credit scores.
The party ran five candidates, none of whom secured a seat, all of whom lost their deposit:
Catherine Evans in Birkenhead – 324 votes, 0.8% of the vote share
Ian Pugh in Wallasey – 197 votes, 0.5% of the vote share
Earl Jesse in Newbury – 131 votes, 0.3% of the vote share
Mark Turnbull in Paisley & Renfrewshire South – 113 votes, 0.3% of the vote share
And Wesley Massumbukoly in Derbyshire North East – 108 votes, 0.2% of the vote share
The English Constitution Party
Elsewhere on the fringes of politics is the English Constitution Party, a nationalist outfit whose political platform was “MEGA – Make England Great Again”. The use of “England” in the acronym is not merely for convenience; the party argues we need to void the Act of Union and disband the United Kingdom, so that England can stand alone, run under a system of common law. They argue that parliament contains Scottish MPs, Welsh MPs, Irish MPs, but “not a single English MP”… because they’re British, not English.
The desire of the party is to make England self-determined and Independent, with:
Separation of powers restored in favour of the people, in whom sovereignty lies in perpetuity, not the state. Individual rights respected again in law.
Understandably, such a change could result in some legal challenges, but the party has a proposal for how a self-determined and independent England should handle those challenges:
Common law and Constitutional Rights final appeal heard in USA not Continental Europe. America did not Americanise the English, the English anglicised America, America as a Protégé of England became the master of the common law and the protector of the Christian faith, God’s Law. The English common law.
In short, if we have any legal issues, we take them to a court in America, and only then will England be truly independent.
The English Constitution Party are run by Graham Moore, who goes by the pseudonym “Daddy Dragon”. He is a former QAnon promoter, and vocal supporter of Donald Trump, who called for supporters to protest the coronation of King Charles in 2023 by bringing rape alarms and throwing eggs. His website also currently includes a page selling the benefits of Ivermectin, and a recipe for a fruit smoothie that will treat cancer.
The English Constitution Party ran four candidates:
Joe Greenhalgh in St Helen’s – 274 votes, 0.7% of the vote share
Colin Birch in Romford – 195 votes, 0.4% of the vote share
Brett Frewin in Broxbourne – 87 votes, 0.2% of the vote share
Their final candidate was Daddy Dragon himself, Graham Moore, who ran in Chorley gaining 1007 votes, or 3% of the vote share. This might seem unusually high, but Chorley is the constituency of the House speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, and it’s conventional for none of the big parties to campaign against the speaker, allowing them to get back in unopposed. So the higher vote share to the English Constitution Party might reflect that.
According to campaigners DeSmog, there were more than 30 MPs with links to the Global Warming Policy Foundation prior to this election – of those, 28 have now left office, including prominent and influential figures like Philip Davies, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Miriam Cates, Andrea Jenkyns, Jonathan Gullis, Craig Mackinlay, Julian Knight, and Damien Moore, as well as Net Zero Scrutiny Group founder and Global Warming Policy Foundation trustee, Steve Baker.
Of those 36 MPs who are supporters of – and are in turn supported by – a climate change denialist group, the only ones who still have a seat are Esther McVey, Sammy Wilson, Mark Francois, Lee Anderson, Greg Smith, John Whittigdale, Bob Blackman and Iain Duncan Smith.
It is not ideal that there are twice as many still associated with the GWPF as there are Green MPs, but for now at least, their influence will be greatly reduced, and the GWPF will need to start over in wooing sitting politicians. Hopefully there will be fewer from this intake willing to take those meetings than there were from the last government.
I do too much. I run a skeptics in the pub group with events and socials, a magazine, a podcast, a conference, I give talks at skeptics in the pub groups all over the country, I do undercover investigations that I sometimes travel to. I have a job that involves the peaks and troughs in workload that are common when you’re wrangling academics, and it is seriously under-resourced, so I pick up lots of various odd jobs and side projects – often travelling to engage with events and meetings, requiring lots of task or role switching, which is often extra challenging for us neurospicy folks. I work on an entirely separate side project with some academics in Scotland, again requiring travel.
All of those plates are challenging to spin at the best of times, but on top of that I have ongoing health issues that come with a whole chunk of admin and emotion. I actually wrote this piece from my bed while dealing with neck pain.
As much as this sounds like me complaining – it really isn’t. I love that I get to do a bunch of exciting, varied, important and interesting things with my job, with the various other projects I work on and all the skeptical activity. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do stuff I love doing.
In a way, I thrive on stress – it helps me get things done. And I also know that everyone on the planet is stressed in one way or another. Whether it’s financial, parental, or disability… or more likely a combination of different stresses all layered on top of each other until it feels like we can’t cope. Humans are a stressed bunch, and these are particularly stressful times.
The list of symptoms associated with chronic stress is long and can include anxiety, depression, headaches or dizziness, muscle tension or pain, heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes, and problems with digestion, sleep, sex, weight, memory and focus. Stress can cause us to be irritable and snappy, to sleep too much or too little, to eat too much or too little, to avoid certain places or people, and to turn more to habits like drinking or smoking.
That’s why I find how we talk about the consequences of stress particularly problematic. We see news articles all the time with headlines like “Stuck in fight-or-flight mode? 5 ways to complete the ‘stress cycle’ and avoid burnout or depression”. Meanwhile, there are constant news articles telling us that study X showed that chronic stress will reduce your life expectancy. Or give you a heart attack. Or make your hair fall out, or your toes fall off.
On top of all that, according to a whole range of ‘wellness’ people, chronic stress can exhaust your adrenal glands. This is rooted in the false notion that the body is such a finely-tuned machine that we can overwhelm it with toxins or chemicals, and it simply won’t know what to do with those things.
Adrenal fatigue has become the popular explanation for burnout. It’s not that we’re exhausted from doing too much, or that our mental health is suffering and can cause physical symptoms, or even that we have another underlying health problem that we should get investigated – no, apparently, it’s adrenal fatigue. According to an article in Goop:
Common symptoms of adrenal exhaustion are a general lack of energy, difficulty sleeping, clouded mind, depression, weak immunity with frequent colds or other infections, and difficulty digesting. But pretty much anything else can go wrong when our adrenals are exhausted, such as infertility, low blood pressure, and anemia.
Many of those are actually symptoms that we know chronic stress can cause – but they’re not due to an entire organ in our body collapsing.
The adrenal glands
The adrenal glands sit on the top of each kidney. Their job is to produce a variety of hormones that the body needs to function, some of which are an important part of our stress response.
Position of the adrenal glands on the kidneys, above the bladder. By Cancer Research UK, via Wikimedia Commons
When humans encounter stress there are two main pathways that help regulate our response. The autonomic nervous system – that’s your flight or fight/rest and digest system – and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Both of these systems can stimulate the adrenal glands to do their thing and start producing relevant hormones to help us handle the stressful situation.
These two pathways stimulate a range of different responses and feedback loops. It’s a finely tuned and complicated system that can affect basically the entire body.
Hormones are important signalling molecules in the human body because they can act at long distances. Many others only interact with nearby cells, but hormones spread great distances through our blood supply and cause changes all over the body. Hormones produced by the adrenal glands at the top of the kidney can therefore trigger a response in our brain.
There are lots of hormones and other signalling molecules that are triggered by stress pathways. One is adrenaline, a hormone that increases blood flow to muscles and triggers the release of glucose so there’s more energy available for those muscles. It also dilates our pupils and airways and increases our heart output, allowing us to get ready to fight or to run away from danger.
The other hormone we hear a lot about is cortisol. Cortisol is also involved in the fight or flight response, but it’s also important for generally managing our stress response. It essentially tells the body, “Look, we’ve got some sort of imminent danger so let’s turn down some of our longer-term survival processes to focus on the immediate threat”. Cortisol reduces our immune function, alters our digestion, increases our glucose metabolism and it can even decrease bone repair and increase muscle breakdown with long-term exposure. It’s also important for day-to-day regulation in the body, and follows a circadian rhythm – meaning we have more or less of it depending on the time of day.
These systems are indeed incredibly finely balanced – our bodies are constantly adjusting and tweaking things according to a range of different stimuli, including the presence of these hormones in the first place. Too much of a hormone for too long, and the body will try to bring the levels down; too little, and it’ll bring the levels back up. Homeostasis is what our bodies do.
Inappropriately high cortisol levels can, for example, have long-term effects on the whole stress system. Studies have even shown that after periods of high stress – like famines – the offspring of people who experienced that stress have genetic changes that impact their stress response. It’s these sorts of long-term changes that wellness people cling to when they discuss things like adrenal fatigue.
Adrenal fatigue is a deficiency in adrenal gland functioning that can result in debilitating symptoms ranging from lethargy to lowered sex drive to weight gain. James Wilson draws on 24 years of clinical experience [that’s clinical experience as a chiropractor] and research to help readers determine if they have adrenal fatigue and learn how to treat it. Beginning with a diagnostic questionnaire, he moves through the causes, symptoms, and treatment of the condition through lifestyle and dietary modification.
Except, adrenal fatigue doesn’t actually exist. There is absolutely no evidence to support this theory. It has been examined, and debunked or disputed, by experts in the field. Adrenal insufficiency does exist, but those who have experience it suffer serious health consequences far beyond those we attribute to stress.
Addison’s Disease is a condition usually caused by an autoimmune response, where the body’s immune system attacks the adrenal glands. It comes with a huge range of symptoms including: fatigue, malaise, muscle and joint pain, reduced appetite, weight loss, increased sensitivity to cold, nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, craving salty foods, low blood pressure that leads to dizziness upon standing, and hyperpigmentation in the skin. In women it can cause dry and itchy skin, loss of armpit and pubic hair, and reduced sexual drive. Left untreated, Addison’s Disease can cause severe, penetrating pain, bouts of vomiting, loss of consciousness, slurred speech, and convulsions; it can lead to adrenal crisis, which is life threatening.
Addison’s Disease is a specific, defined condition we can identify and treat, whereas adrenal fatigue is just not supported by evidence. That doesn’t mean that people who believe they have adrenal fatigue aren’t experiencing symptoms of fatigue, or burnout, or another health condition – but, by focusing on a debunked condition, we lead people away from getting a diagnosis of something they might actually have and towards a treatment plan that is useless to them.
How not to treat ‘adrenal fatigue’
If you scroll through TikTok and hear mention of adrenal fatigue, cortisol cocktails are probably not far behind. Proponents claim that you can boost your cortisol levels with supplementation. They claim it will help you lose weight, boost your energy, help with carb ‘craving’, reduce panic attacks.
Adrenal cocktail – AKA “Orange Creamsicle” – is a magical elixir that supports hormone balance, HPA axis health, and blood sugar regulation… The central theme here is balance. We want to make sure that we are supporting our body’s natural ability to regulate blood sugar, increase insulin sensitivity, and improve metabolic flexibility.
Her recipe includes four to six ounces of freshly squeezed orange juice, two tablespoons of coconut milk or cream, one scoop of collagen, and a generous pinch of sea salt. Most recipes include coconut water and cream of tartar, orange juice and salt. These are claimed to increase your levels potassium, vitamin C and sodium. Others involve a complicated series of powders and elixirs to boost the power of the drinks. And, of course, those powders and potions cost a lot of money and are sold by a wide range of wellness companies.
These cocktails, potions and elixirs are nonsense. They’re probably not going to cause too much direct harm – they’re pretty safe ingredients – but the reasons people turn to these solutions are indicative of a wider problem.
As I mentioned earlier, we experience significant stressors on a daily basis, and things only feel like they are getting worse. Many of those stressors are caused by things outside of our control like stressful jobs, or financial difficulties when welfare support has been significantly reduced. But, if we go to our employers to help with stress at work, we end up on courses that tell us to manage our own stress by writing lists or practising good work life balance – but without any meaningful support in encouraging our employers to reduce our workloads.
We are constantly told that stress will kill us early, but if we’re too stressed it’s apparently our own fault. We need to work harder at “relaxing” – an oxymoron if ever there was one. We need to prioritise our sleep – some employers will even pay more if we sleep more – but “trying” to sleep better is a sure-fire way to make sleep impossible if you’re someone who already struggles with it. The guilt and responsibility is piled on to us as we’re told to not feel stressed or anxious about it. Mental health waiting lists are growing, and private therapy is an expensive minefield.
There are no readily available solutions, there is inadequate support.
So if someone on TikTok tells you this one simple trick to help you make it through the day with a little more energy, with fewer panic attacks, and without the stress you have little control over harming your body – who wouldn’t want to try that? Plus, you say, it’ll help me lose weight and feel a bit better about my body, too? Great. Sign me up.
Of course people are turning to woo. Our stress systems are broken. But the cause absolutely is not what’s happening in our adrenal glands, it’s what’s happening out there in the world around us.
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, many of his supporters have interpreted the events from a religious perspective. Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that “before [the shooting] happened, the flag above got blown in the wind and got tied into literally what looked like an angel. Did you see that video?”
If you watch the video, you will notice that, yes, with a bit of imagination, the image might vaguely resemble some aerial being with wings. It could also resemble the Mercedes Benz logo. Your perception will ultimately depend on your previous state of mind.
The flag got tangled today at the Trump rally, before Trump came on stage. Looks like an angel. pic.twitter.com/1BwjHTvotu
Skeptics have long been aware of pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon where people perceive recognisable patterns, such as faces, shapes, or objects, in random, unrelated stimuli. These stimuli can include things like clouds, rock formations, or even inanimate objects like a toaster or a piece of toast. Essentially, pareidolia involves the brain’s tendency to make sense of ambiguous or random visual information by attributing familiar patterns to it, often leading to seeing things that are not actually there. This phenomenon is a result of the human brain’s natural inclination to seek and identify meaningful patterns in the environment.
But absent angels, many other of Trump’s supporters still insist that a miracle took place, and that he was saved by “God’s hand.” Senator Tim Scott said: “If you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday [the day of the assassination attempt], you better be believing right now!”
This is very disingenuous talk. There was nothing physically impossible in the course of events. The bullet followed the expected trajectory it would if fired in those very same circumstances. Yes, the bullet missed Trump’s body narrowly, but failed assassination attempts of high-profile politicians do take place on occasion. Furthermore, even if Trump’s survival can be considered highly unlikely, it is still not a miracle. A miracle is not merely an improbable event, but rather one that defies the known laws of nature. Nothing of the sort happened that day.
Suppose there is a lottery in which the entire world population (ie, roughly 6 billion) participates, and you win the ticket. Before knowing the result, how probable would you consider winning it? Extremely unlikely. And yet, you won. Is that a miracle? No, after all, one person on the planet did have to win the lottery, and you just happened to be that one person. Those who deem this event a miracle are falling into what skeptics call the “sharpshooter fallacy.” Imagine a shooter fires shots, and afterwards, paints a shooting target centred on some of the clusters of shots, claiming to be a sharpshooter. Likewise, those who interpret Trump’s survival as some sort of miracle do something to similar effect: after an unlikely event occurs, they attribute it to God’s direct intervention, providing a retrospective explanation that fits their belief system.
The theological interpretation of Trump’s assassination attempt stems from a deficiency in critical thinking. But I am afraid that there are darker forces at play. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tim Scott may or may not sincerely believe what they claim, but it is quite obvious that the theological interpretation of these events is very convenient to Trump’s political comeback.
Many of Trump’s supporters have long framed his political activities in religious terms. He has been called a “modern-day Cyrus.” As per this narrative, very much as the Persian king of Biblical times, Trump has been divinely chosen to carry out a mission, even if he himself is an unlikely vessel for God’s plans. Cyrus allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon— and for that, the book of Isaiah styles him as God’s shepherd. Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem has been religiously interpreted as a modern-day version of allowing Jews to return to their homeland, and by extension, he too is God’s shepherd. Narrowly surviving an assassination attempt inevitably adds to this mysticism in many people’s minds.
This is an old trick in politics. On May 13th, 1981, Pope John Paul II survived an assassination attempt. That day commemorates the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, and John Paul II came to believe that Virgin of Fatima intervened to save him. Regardless of whether the Pope really believed such a claim, the event suited very well the political dimension of the Fatima cult within Catholic ranks, as ultimately, devotion for the Fatima apparition played an important role in the ideological stance against Communism, of which John Paul II was a staunch exponent.
John Paul II claimed that “a maternal hand guided the bullet.” In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins sarcastically – but very effectively – quips: “One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided. The relevant point is that it wasn’t just Our Lady who, in the Pope’s opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of Fatima. Presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on other errands at the time.”
Dawkins’ point is not to gratuitously hurt religious sensitivities, but rather, to encourage critical thinking about unlikely events. Trump’s supporters need to do the same. Some questions ought to be asked: why did God wait until the last minute to intervene? Wouldn’t it have been better a divine intervention to make the rifle malfunction from the onset, and thus save the one person who did die in the shooting (or even spare Trump the inconvenience of having an injured ear)? Where was God when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated? Did God also intervene to save Hitler in the assassination attempt of 1944 in the Wolf’s Lair?
To be fair, perhaps something good can come out of this. I would like to think that people who come close to dying come out with a deeper valuing and understanding of life. Samuel Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction uses religious themes cynically when he kills people – even citing a spurious passage of the biblical book of Ezekiel prior to pulling the trigger. But upon coming off intact after a round of bullets is shot at him, he comes to believe a miracle has happened (his sidekick, John Travolta’s character, tries to persuade him otherwise), and a transformation ensues: after that experience, he is no longer interested in pursuing criminal activities. The belief in miracles brought about his redemption.
However, in politics, things can easily go in the inverse direction. The temptation to misuse power is ever-present, and politicians might be eager to discover self-righteous excuses to evade accountability. In their mind, they may become convinced that, to the extent that God has intervened in their favour by saving them from an assassination, they are indeed the chosen ones, and that suffices to carry out their designs as they see best fit, regardless of what their constituents might think.
Only time will tell how Donald Trump interprets the events. Not being a particularly religious man – yet at the same time aware of the immense influence of religion in American politics – he is likely to play along with the theological interpretations laid out by his followers, but not to promote them himself. In the meantime, we skeptics have the duty to remind the public of a simple truth: improbable events are not necessarily miracles.
Content note: this article discusses false allegations of child sexual abuse throughout.
I want you to imagine that you have a young child at a local pre-school (or nursery). Out of the blue you receive a letter from the local police force advising you that: [warning, descriptions of child sexual assault]
This Department is conducting a criminal investigation involving child molestation by [a named employee of your child’s nursery].
Possible criminal acts include oral sex; fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area; and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense [sic] of taking the child’s temperature. Also, photos may have been taken of children without their clothing. Any information from your child regarding having ever observed [named employee] to leave a classroom alone with a child during any nap period, or if they have ever observed [named employee] tie up a child, is important.
The letter kindly includes a stamped-addressed-envelope for you to return an attached information form.
I assume, like me, you would panic about the potential impact on your child, remove them immediately, make sure other parents were aware, and demand some answers from the authorities. However, having given you this horrendous news, the letter also asks that you keep this information strictly confidential for now and advises that you must not discuss it outside your immediate family.
This actual warning letter was sent by the police chief of the small suburban Los Angeles town of Manhattan Beach to parents of the McMartin Pre-school, a private nursery for young children, owned and run by Virginia McMartin, her daughter Peggy Buckey, and Peggy’s 26-year-old son Ray Buckey, who worked as a caretaker at his grandmother’s school.
In August 1983 one parent, Judy Johnson, had taken her two-and-a-half-year-old son, Billy – who was a pupil at the school – to the doctor after he complained of having an itchy bum. There was some blood found on his anus and days later, she made a report to the local police, claiming that her estranged husband had been sodomising Billy. In addition, she also named Ray Buckey at the school as raping him, alongside much more lurid accusations.
Police interviewed Buckey, along with other staff, and put forward the accusations levelled by Johnson, even though Billy had shown no actual signs of abuse after further medical examinations. Accusations which were strenuously denied by Buckey and the teachers.
Police arrested Ray Buckey on September 7th of that year, and after searching his home, confiscated what they claimed was evidence – a Playboy magazine, a teddy bear and a rubber duck. Police then sent out the letter naming him to nearly 200 parents.
Over the next few weeks, understandably concerned parents reported various suspicions to the police. At the same time, Judy Johnson continued to make further accusations of severe sexual, emotional, and religiously themed abuse by all the staff at the school, not just Buckey.
In one police report she says that Peggy Buckey decapitated a baby, and that young Billy had been forced to drink its blood. That three women teachers had dressed as witches, and that Billy was buried alive in a satanic funeral (though he clearly got out). Judy Johnson raised more and more ludicrous accusations that could not possibly be true, even with the most cursory of investigations. For instance, Billy said he had had staples forced onto his ears, tongue and genitals and that Babs (another teacher) had put scissors in his eye. She claimed Ray Buckey locked Billy in the boot of his car and took him through a carwash, that rabbits were chopped up in front of the pupils, and that he had been taken on a flight from LAX to Palm Springs where he had taken part in a fantastical religious service involving a goat, a power drill and a dead baby.
But, because some other parents were now coming forward after they had received the letter with fears of their own, it was felt there had to be something here, even if Johnson’s more lurid accusations could be easily dismissed as coming from a troubled woman. Someone who had a history of mental health problems, and within a few years, would sadly be dead from alcohol related disease.
By the end of the year, the school had no option but to close after 28 years of otherwise unblemished education, and in February 1984, the story featured on the local TV news.
The number of potential victims skyrocketed following the TV story as parents of former pupils came forward and they soon overwhelmed the local force. The District Attorney asked Kee MacFarlane, a consultant for the Children’s Institute International to help interview the large number of children coming forward. She hit on the idea of using anatomically correct dolls and puppets so the children could demonstrate and perhaps help explain to the adult investigators what went on behind the gates of the school.
In addition, over 150 current and former pupils had been examined intimately looking for signs of abuse and Dr Heger of the Children’s Institute, reached the wild conclusion that over 80% of the children she had examined exhibited signs of abuse. Not actual physical signs though, she concluded this on medical histories and the children’s interviews alone.
One transcript gives you an indication of that was said to the children:
Interview #1 (an 8-year-old boy) Kathleen MacFarlane: Mr. Monkey [a puppet] is a little bit chicken, and he can’t remember any of the naked games, but we think that you can, ’cause we know a naked game that you were around for, ’cause the other kids told us, and it’s called Naked Movie Star. Do you remember that game, Mr. Alligator [a puppet held by the child], or is your memory too bad? Boy: Um, I don’t remember that game. MacFarlane: Oh, Mr. Alligator. Boy: Umm, well, it’s umm, a little song that me and [a friend] heard of. MacFarlane: Oh. Boy: Well, I heard out loud someone singing, “Naked Movie Star, Naked Movie Star.” MacFarlane: You know that, Mr. Alligator? That means you’re smart, ’cause that’s the same song the other kids knew and that’s how we really know you’re smarter than you look. So you better not play dumb, Mr. Alligator. Boy: Well, I didn’t really hear a whole lot. I just heard someone yell it from out in the _ Someone yelled it. MacFarlane: Maybe. Mr. Alligator, you peeked in the window one day and saw them playing it, and maybe you could remember and help us. Boy: Well, no, I haven’t seen anyone playing Naked Movie Star. I’ve only heard the song. MacFarlane: What good are you? You must be dumb. Boy: Well I don’t know really, umm, remember seeing anyone play that, ’cause I wasn’t there, when – I -when people are playing it.
It goes on in that vein, with interviewer giving the kid the answers she wants, and encouraging a very young child to agree with her.
Subsequent blinded examinations showed no signs of sexual trauma.
By March 1984, MacFarlane and her team had diagnosed 360 students as having been abused. After a Grand Jury hearing, 115 charges of child sex abuse were brought against Ray, his mother Peggy and grandmother Virginia McMartin, as well as his sister Peggy Ann and three other employees: Mary Ann Jackson, Bette Raidor, and Babette Spitler. Just two months later, a further 93 indictments were raised by the District Attorney, who was under severe pressure from parents and the local media.
Ray Buckey was held in jail pending trial.
Certain similar stories seemed to crop up from the children’s interviews. Several said they were trapped in tunnels underneath the school, sometimes for the whole day. Despite this, searches of the school and homes of the accused, failed to discover anything remotely consistent with abuse and paedophilia on such a grand scale. No nude photos of children were found despite the accusations of these being taken and traded by the defendants.
In March 1985, a group of ‘concerned parents’ dug up the vacant lot beside the building to locate the fabled tunnels that had supposedly held their young children whilst their fellow pupils had been abused above them. The DA even hired an archaeological firm to search the school. No tunnels were ever found.
The trial process had begun in early 1984 and during the preliminary proceedings, video of the interviews of the children were shown that clearly demonstrated the therapists asking leading and suggestive questions, affirming answers they wanted to hear and refuting those that leaned the other way.
It was clear that the children’s answers where not just contradictory but increasingly bizarre and riddled with inconsistences – as you might expect from pre-school kids being led by over-zealous questioners.
The preliminary hearing went on for over a year and by the end some members of the prosecution team expressed doubts about the case. At the end of 1985, the prosecutors dropped the charges against all the defendants, except Ray and his mother Peggy. The case had so far cost L.A. County over $4m and had still not yet gone the actual trial. Ray had been held in jail for nearly two years.
But the media and concerned parents demanded that someone should be accountable, so the full trial began in July 1987 and lasted until November 1989, with a further 10 weeks of jury deliberations.
One of the lines the prosecution followed was Buckey’s fascination with, and belief in pyramid power – a pseudoscientific belief that objects placed under a pyramid are subjected to certain life-preserving properties. He had one suspended over his bed, regularly wore a pyramid shaped hat, and had attended pyramid healing conferences. This ‘obsession’, as the prosecutors called it, clearly demonstrated to them that Ray was involved in satanic rituals, therefore confirming the more lurid accusations of witchcraft and blood-sacrifice had a basis in fact.
The court heard from several parents who nearly all told the same story. They had had no suspicion of anything untoward until the police letter landed on their doorstep. After taking their kids to CII and them being interviewed by Kee MacFarlane and her staff, the parents became convinced that the children had suffered horrific, ritualistic abuse.
The children, now aged between eight to fifteen, told their stories to the court, including lurid tales of Ray Buckey scaring them into silence by cutting up cats and rabbits with a knife. Clearly many of them suffered from trauma from their experience, but more likely from the hands of the investigators than from Ray Buckey.
The jury dismissed all the accusations against Peggy and all but 13 of the charges against Ray. They were deadlocked over these.
Following increasing pressure from child-protections groups and parents of the pupils, the DA staged a retrial. This time, after only three months, the new jury still remained deadlocked on the remaining charges. The DA never took it to a third trial.
The trial left scars on the McMartin/Buckeys and the other accused. Ray technically has never been acquitted, and he had spent 5 years in jail before being bailed. The harm done to the children because of invasive examinations and the emotional trauma of being caught up in such a harrowing process is incalculable. Ray himself said “Those children went through hell… but I’m not the cause, and neither is my mother”. Instead, he accused the “…adults who took this case and made it what is was.”
In the longer term, the McMartin Pre-school case as it was known, became part of the wider Satanic Panic that swept the US in the final decades of the 20th century. The idea, promulgated by some psychiatrists and campaigners – often with a highly religious outlook – was that satanists were actively recruiting children and young adults into partaking in ritualistic abuse of other children, or of suffering abuse themselves, and this was responsible for increasing drug use, alienation, self-harm and suicide attempts by young people nationally.
The social worker tasked with the initial investigation, Kee MacFarlane, would later go on to testify before the US Congress that she believed there was a nationwide conspiracy of like-minded individuals who took part in organised satanic ritual abuse of children.
Throughout the 80’s, various pressure groups, many with overtly Christian associations, campaigned, and had some success with the wider public and politicians, against the pursuits of US teenagers and children, which their parents saw as anti-Christian and satanic. Groups like B.A.A.D (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons) highlighted what they saw as the role of such games, alongside heavy-metal music, easy access to pornography and sexualised media, in satanic cult recruitment. Some groups alleged there was a ‘Holocaust’ of teenagers in the US being murdered by satanists.
In the UK several similar unfounded prosecutions were brought, including the Cleveland Abuse scandal, and similar cases in Orkney, Rochdale and Nottingham.
By the Mid-90’s the Satanic Panic (as it had become known) had largely disappeared, and prosecutions involving Satanic Ritualised Abuse (SRA) were no longer being brought to courts. However, since then many of the tropes and fears of SRA are now being spread by QAnon followers, so unfortunately it will likely never go away.
[Content Warning: graphic discussions of ongoing international war crimes]
Context is crucial for critical thinking. Possibly even the most important part of the whole process. It can turn facts upside down by reshaping the very soil they stand on. Putting forward an argument while averting our gaze from the contextual landscape that surrounds us is simply reasoning within a vacuum.
Context can be inconvenient, of course. Many prefer to do without it. And making a perfectly rational, logically sound argument within a total historical vacuum is, in my view, entirely possible. Such an endeavour, though, can hardly be said to assist meaningfully in the pursuit of truth. Or, at least, the whole truth. Without due reference to an ever-relevant political background, and a wider awareness of an increasing scholarly consensus, even our best critical thinking tools can be rendered purposeless – sharper than ever, but slicing through thin air.
In a recent article for this magazine, Sophia Schultz made the case for the importance of critical thinking tools when it comes to ‘emotionally-charged subjects like Gaza’. She writes at great length about the differences between deductive and inductive reasoning, valid and invalid inferences, logical fallacies and cognitive biases. She argues that the scientific virtues of open-mindedness, positive skepticism, curiosity, diligence and humility are made all the more crucial when discussing issues we may have an emotional investment in. Using herself as an example, she writes:
Today, I can acknowledge that as a consequence of my personal experience and family ties in Palestine, I have a bias on the conflict going on today, but just because I have a bias does not mean I should only follow pieces of information that satisfy my sentiment. There are always two sides to a story, whether we like it or not, and it is essential to acknowledge that and act accordingly.
I happen to share Schultz’s stated political ‘bias’, as I too am an activist for Palestinian liberation. I have lost count of the number of actions, protests, vigils and marches I have attended, particularly in recent months. Moreover, it seems to me that the essential allegation of Schultz’s thesis is, in and of itself, hard to find fault with. Critical thinking tools are indeed distinctly warranted when emotional stakes are high. So too, though, is context. So too is starting our stories at the beginning. So too is taking caution not to sequester individual acts of violence from the antecedent conditions that created them.
Regrettably, over the course of her piece, Schultz happens to omit a sizeable amount of vital contextual information that pertains not only to the particular incidents she touches on, but to the broader history of the crisis itself and the material conditions that structure it. Despite claiming to be ‘biased’ in favour of Palestine, her analysis unfortunately falls prey to some of the most common, misleading, and even harmful narratives that Palestinian rights activists spend much of their time correcting.
It is worth bearing in mind, of course, that Schultz is using ‘Gaza’ here merely as one example to illustrate her call for rationality around emotionally-charged subjects. Gaza, in her piece, is simply the analytical backdrop against which she makes her case.
However, I would suggest that if an essay extolling the virtues of critical thinking tools ends up obscuring an issue rather than illuminating it – even if inadvertently – it might be worth revisiting those very tools to see just how watertight they really are. I believe that the absence of an accurate contextual backdrop in Schultz’s piece undermines her use of Gaza as an analytical backdrop. For critical thinking to be fully operational, it must be historically informed. In this way, my thesis affirms hers.
In addition to repeatedly framing the crisis in the very terms that scholars, historians and generations of activists have substantivelydisputed for decades, Schultz’s piece leaves out many of the core geopolitical asymmetries essential to achieving even a basic understanding of the situation. These include the enormous imbalance of power, the vastly different levels of harm being inflicted, and the overwhelming and undeniable media bias shaping the international discourse. Most importantly, core historical facts about the issue are absent entirely from her analysis even though they inform and explain, crucially, the violence occurring at present.
I write under the assumption that Schultz’s omissions were made in good faith, as I have no reason to assume they were not. After all, she writes from personal experience. She has visited Palestine and has family ties to the region – claims I certainly cannot make. However, holding personal connections to a particular issue is no guarantee of immunity against promoting misleading narratives about them, even if accidentally. Each of us is susceptible to misconception and oversight, despite our best efforts. Nevertheless, obscuring reality unintentionally doesn’t make it harmless.
What is happening in Gaza right now represents a fundamental civil rights issue of our time. The scale of the violence that the State of Israel is meting out to Palestinians surpasses every single major conflict in the 21st century.
The task of ensuring that our critical thinking tools are connected to the real world simply could not be more urgent. If we can’t make meaningful use of such skills now, then when?
Starting at the beginning. Beginning at the Nakba.
‘There is no serious dispute among Israeli, Palestinian, or other historians about the central facts of the Nakba.’
Jerome Slater, Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Between 1947–1949, over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their native lands and violently driven from their homes by the new Israeli army in order to facilitate the creation of the State of Israel. This number constituted two-thirds of the Arab population of the country at the time, most of whom had lived there for generations. Roughly 500 villages and towns were completely destroyed or depopulated, 62,000 homes were demolished, and approximately 15,000 Palestinians were killed in close to 100 massacres. Israeli militias took part in widespread looting of property and belongings, and the total losses of destroyed or confiscated Palestinian property is estimated at 209,000,000,000 US Dollars.
Over the years, this act of expropriation and dispossession has been named and theorised by its victims as the ‘Nakba’. Translated as the catastrophe, it pinpoints a time in Palestinian history that has come to represent the cultural and material shattering of the Palestinian society, the erasure of its national identity, and the obliteration of its political aspirations and statehood. It is the primary locus of collective trauma in the Palestinian memory, with many of the 7 million Palestinian refugees that exist today being directly descended from survivors of the Nakba. This includes 80% of the inhabitants of Gaza.
Nakba Day graffiti in Nazareth, by PRA via Wikimedia commons – CC BY-SA
Much to the chagrin of their ideological detractors, pro-Palestine activists today often insist on beginning their analysis here – at the Nakba and the facts of Occupation. There is a reason for this. It is not merely because Israeli Ministers are openly calling for ‘Gaza’s Nakba’. Nor is it due to Israeli soldiers spraying the words ‘Nakba 2023’ onto buildings in Gaza. Nor is it due to Israel’s decades-long record of attempting to bury evidence of the Nakba, or their efforts to remove the word from school textbooks and ban events that commemorate it – an activity echoed by its allies overseas, who are locked in similar battles against their own history.
It is because, in general, we believe it is a good idea to start our stories at the beginning. We believe that rendering geopolitical conflicts accurately, fully and honestly is the only way to understand them. In reality – whether Western journalists want to acknowledge it or not – Palestinians are not one ‘side’ in a ‘conflict’. Rather, they are the largest group of stateless refugees on the planet, over which a powerful, Western-backed country in the Middle East exerts an almost-total control of their lives and their deaths with impunity.
The Nakba itself provides context for why Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Its residents are not from there, but rather are penned in there – having fled other areas in the region due to the repercussions of the Nakba. Having stolen and expelled them from their homes, Israel now interns them in Gaza.
Today, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), Palestinians are deprived of the kinds of rights many readers might consider basic. In the Occupied West Bank, there are certain roads that Palestinians are not permitted to walk on. In some areas, Palestinians have been forbidden from collecting rain water, due to rain being considered “property of the Israeli authorities”. Millions of Palestinians are not permitted to vote in elections that determine their lives, due to a separate and unequal citizenship structure. Indeed, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert once said that State of Israel would be finished if the concept of ‘one-person-one-vote’ ever gained too much popularity:
If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.
Israel technically withdrew from Gaza in 2005, which is why it claims to no longer occupy it. However, Israel soon placed the territory under a land, air and sea blockade, which UN experts call illegal. This is why human rights organisations, aid organisations and think-tanks still refer to Gaza as an ‘occupied territory’, and why scholars on the subject refer to Gaza as the largest ‘open-air prison’ in the world. Two-thirds of the population are food insecure, due to the blockade. A senior Israeli official explained the purpose of this policy as being “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”.
Many readers of this magazine might not be too familiar with what it feels like to have every single aspect of your existence – your water, your food, your future, your history – owned and controlled by a violent occupying power, whose soldiers refer to you as ‘cockroaches’.
I certainly am not. I was born in the US and grew up in Britain – both places that have tended, historically, to be the ones doing the violent colonising. It is for this precise reason I feel that absolutely nobody should be writing or speaking about Israel/Palestine unless they are willing to foreground these foundational facts of disenfranchisement and dispossession. They are central. They must be established before we even begin, because they are where the story begins.
If we care at all about ‘the pursuit of truth’, as Schultz writes, we must constantly stress that one ‘side’ in this crisis is composed nominally of ethnically cleansed refugees dying of starvation, and the other ‘side’ is a highly militarised state that controls their food, stole their homes, and can shut off their water at will.
Aspiring to paint as full a picture as possible ought not to be controversial to anyone who claims to care about reaching evidence-based conclusions. Choosing to begin instead at individual, isolated incidents – shorn entirely of their origins and their contextual significance – is seldom a fruitful endeavour, and will serve only to veil the realities of Occupation.
The bombing of Al-Ahli hospital
On 17 October 2023 at 6:59pm, a large explosion took place in the courtyard of Gaza’s only cancer hospital. Hundreds of displaced Gazans were sheltering there, and hundreds were killed. Schultz writes:
When I woke up one morning, I scrolled through social media as I usually do, and came across a ton of stories on an apparent bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. My first reaction was to be sad, but then I started asking myself questions about the situation. I wanted to know what had happened and who did this. Some sources blamed the Israeli government and their airstrike, and others blamed it on a rocket malfunction from the Hamas terrorist group. More and more questions came to me, and I kept searching for answers, but no source seemed reasonable.
On assessing evidence from both sides, she continues:
I initially believed the Israeli government was responsible for the bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital, but I reflected on the limitations of my knowledge. After extensive research from both points of view, I find myself in a position of uncertainty regarding what really happened to Al-Ahli Hospital. Rather than hastily adopting a definitive stance, I embrace the [sic] humility, and acknowledge that there is much I still do not know and may never know.
I prioritise the pursuit of truth over unwarranted certainty, recognising that the situation’s complexities demand an ongoing commitment to understanding… To this day, I do not know who bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, because there is a lack of evidence on which to make a thorough conclusion. However, I know that I will continue searching for an answer, and we should continue to do so for all that matters, striving for a deeper understanding of our complex world.
Schultz’s principled ambivalence about the origins of the blast was shared by much Western commentary in the days that followed the strike – including by supposed members of the British Left. Unfortunately, in this case, it is an ambivalence that is somewhat undermined by the fact that Israel did strike Al-Ahli hospital. Twice. Mere days beforehand, and then again in December.
On 14 October at 7:30pm, Israeli rocket fire severely damaged the upper two floors of Al-Ahli’s cancer treatment centre and injured several medical staff, according to the Anglican management that oversees the hospital. The Israeli military has been known to call such procedures ‘roof knocking’ – firing smaller, low-yield weapons at structures to indicate that a bigger strike is on the way. This is a technique that has itself resulted in civilian deaths, and that a United Nations fact-finding Mission concluded was “not effective as a warning, and constitutes a form of attack against the civilians inhabiting the building.”
Indeed, warning civilians that you are going to bomb them – by bombing them – isn’t much of a warning at all. Then, on the 18 December, the Israeli military attacked the hospital again. They destroyed part of the building’s grounds, killing at least four people, and arrested doctors, medical staff and patients.
Crucially, this is far from the first time that Israel has targeted health infrastructure. They did so in 2021, 2020, 2014, 2012, 2009, 2006, in 2002. They bombed a children’s hospital in 1982. In the ten days alone that followed October 7th, the WHO reported 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza, which have killed dozens and left more injured. This is to say nothing of the harm caused by bombing major roads nearhospitals, making them much more difficult to reach. Lest we forget, an Occupying Power is actually responsible under international humanitarian law for protecting and providing for the medical needs of the people it is occupying – not bombarding and besieging the very facilities that are there to help them.
Al-Quds hospital, Gaza City, following Israeli shelling (2009). Photo by Eva Bartlett – ISM, via Wikimedia commons
Of course, in and of itself, the fact that Israel has a patent record of attacking healthcare facilities doesn’t tell us definitively whether or not they chose to attack this particular healthcare facility on this particular occasion. However, what we do know is that Israel has targeted hospitals, they have targeted this hospital twice, and they have continued to targethospitals in the months that followed. I believe that a single incident contains much less information than the broader, historical pattern in which it sits, and this is self-evidently crucial to include in our analysis if we care about the ‘prioritising of the pursuit of truth’.
If I were to wake up one morning and discover the story of the apparent bombing of a hospital in Gaza, as Schultz did, I might find it helpful firstly to remind myself exactly what happened, and in what order it happened – so as to establish a preliminary contextual baseline right from the outset:
On the 13 October, Israel ordered 22 hospitals to evacuate prior to commencing their ‘complete siege’ on Gaza. To be clear, this is a warning, from Israel, that Israel might attack those hospitals.
The WHO referred to this order unequivocally as a ‘death sentence’ for patients who were unable to leave due to relying on life support. This includes dialysis patients, babies in incubators, and women with complications in pregnancy – all of whom would have been left to die. The evacuation orders were widely criticised as ‘impossible’ to comply with.
One of the hospitals that Israel told to evacuate was Al-Ahli hospital.
On the 14 October, Al-Ahli hospital was hit with an Israeli rocket, after which the hospital’s director claimed to have received a call from the Israeli army in which he had been told: “We warned you yesterday with two shells”.
On the 17 October, Al-Ahli hospital was bombed.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s social media advisor immediately issued a tweet celebrating the strike, writing that “Israeli Air Force [had] struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” Not long afterwards, he deleted the tweet, reiterating that Israel doesn’t bomb hospitals.
The Israeli military tweeted video evidence purporting to show that the strike came from a Palestinian rocket that had misfired. Journalists and media outlets pointed out that the video showed an explosion that had occurred 40 minutes after the bombing of Al-Ahli. The Israeli military quickly removed the video from their tweet.
Israel claims that the explosion came from a misfired ‘enemy rocket’. Most of the weapons used by Palestinian groups tend to be unsophisticated, homemade rockets incapable of inflicting the vast scale of damage that occurred at Al-Ahli hospital. Typically, that level of damage is far more consonant with the kinds of weapons that the US supplies to Israel, it must be said. Therefore, Israel’s explanation requires us to believe two things. Not only did Hamas acquire an uncharacteristically large hi-tech weapon with phenomenal velocity, but they also managed to sneak this weapon past an Israeli embargo that even blocks food from reaching civilians – an embargo whose primary stated purpose was to prevent the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.
Examining the forensic evidence that Israel is using to buttress their account, as Schultz does, is appropriate and important. However, I believe another, equally important way of treating Israel’s claim with the weight it deserves would be to examine the historical precedent for such a claim in the first place. Has this ever happened before? Has Israel ever made this claim before? What has Israel’s immediate reaction been to similar atrocities in the past?
Is there perhaps a pattern within which a response like this might sit?
In 2022, Israel carried out an airstrike that killed five children in Gaza. Initially, Israel denied responsibility for the strike, claiming that it was the result of a misfired rocket launched by ‘Islamic Jihad militants’. It wasn’t true.
In 2022, the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli sniper, despite wearing a blue ‘press’ vest. Initially, Israeli officials denied responsibility and blamed ‘armed Palestinians’ for the attack. It wasn’t true.
In 2018, a 21-year-old Palestinian medic was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier. In order to combat the ensuing international outcry, Israeli officials circulated a video in which she appeared to proudly declare that she was acting as a ‘human shield’ for Hamas. The video was revealed to have been doctored by the Israeli army in an attempt to smear her.
In 2014, two Palestinian teenagers were murdered by Israeli soldiers during a protest in the Occupied West Bank. Israeli military officials denied using live ammunition. This wasn’t true.
In 2009, Israel denied using white phosphorus munitions – a chemical weapon whose burns can penetrate bone – in its assault on Gaza. It wasn’t true.
In 2006, Israel carried out an airstrike on a three-story building near the village of Qana in Lebanon, killing 28 civilians, 16 of whom were children. Israeli forces initially denied that the explosion was the result of their airstrike, claiming that the explosion could have come from a device planted by Hezbollah. It wasn’t true.
In 1996, Israel shelled a UN compound in South Lebanon, killing 106 civilians. Israeli officials claimed they were unaware that the compound contained refugees. It wasn’t true. Israeli officials denied having operated a remotely piloted drone overhead before and during the massacre, which would have shown the presence of civilian refugees clearly. It wasn’t true.
I argue simply that precedent matters. History matters. Israel’s record of denying responsibility, attempting to blame others, and even fabricating evidence – as has been alleged in the case of Al-Ahli hospital – is essential to bear in mind when assessing incidents like this one.
It is indeed the case, as Schultz writes, that independent investigations have found the cause of the 17 October bombing of Al-Ahli hospital to be officially inconclusive. And while I agree with Schultz that continuing the search for a conclusive answer to that question is undeniably important work, I believe that taking care to observe the contextual landscape underneath, around and behind that question is just as important. Perhaps even more so. Otherwise, overtures of principled impartiality might well serve to obscure the bigger picture, rather than illuminate it.
There is nothing to be gained –and much to lose –by adopting instead a ‘blank slate’ approach, in which our examinations of current atrocities are dislocated entirely from the patterns of the past.
A ‘conflict’ as ‘complex’
Among the many interacting narratives that continue to structure Western discourse around Israel/Palestine, none seem more prevalent than the following:
The situation constitutes a ‘conflict’
The ‘conflict’ is incredibly ‘complicated’.
These refrains are so widespread across Western political life – finding voice through political figures and mediaoutlets for decades – that they can be seen almost as a prerequisite for engaging in public commentary on the issue at all. An ‘occupational hazard’, you might say.
It is unsurprising, then, that they would appear in Schultz’s essay, too, given that this is very much the water we are swimming in. However, it is worth mentioning that these are narratives that Palestinian rights activists resist, scholars dispute, and experts repudiate.
Two ‘sides’
Many have warned how the language of ‘conflict’ conjures a foundationally spurious image of Israelis and Palestinians as ‘equal participants’ engaging in ‘clashes’ – as opposed to a heavily militarised, Western-backed state having complete control over the food, water, fuel, and movement of a large population of refugees whose homes they stole 76 years ago. As the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim writes:
This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population.
Indeed, there is absolutely no symmetry between Israel and Palestine in terms of the scale of the violence being inflicted, their respective military capabilities, or in the media coverage of the crisis – around which an overwhelming bias has been observed. When the balance of power is overwhelmingly in favour of one ‘side’, the language of ‘conflict’ serves only to sustain the illusion of parity in an asymmetric landscape. The suggestion of a level playing field between those living under military Occupation and those doing the occupying is plainly absurd. It is nonsensical to imply equal footing between David and Goliath, when the former is armed nominally with a stone.
Similarly, we should take extreme diligence not to buy into false equivalencies in talking about violence on ‘both sides’ of Israel/Palestine. The Hamas attack on October 7th was an act of armed resistance that claimed the lives of over 1,000 Israelis, hundreds of whom were civilians. Their deaths are devastating and tragic. Loss of life, any life, is never a good thing.
Israel even funded Hamas for years as a way to weaken the secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation – the dominant political force at the time – and undermine the prospect of a united Palestinian front. Unfortunately, if you leave millions of disenfranchised people with no negotiation process and few regional allies – all while funding a fringe militant religious group trying to represent them politically – the risk of violent resistance is likely to rise.
Injunctions to consider the violence of ‘both sides’ fundamentally miss the mark in acknowledging who those sides are in the first place. The violence that results from the armed-resistance struggle of the colonised is both tragic and not ours to condone or condemn so long as we keep funding the bombs that are killing them, and maintaining the cages that hold them. As former Israeli advisor Daniel Levy has said:
I personally believe that Israelis can never have security until Palestinians have security. The [idea] that you can impose a regime of structural violence on another people, you can deny another people their basic rights, and you will live with your own security – that equation never works… Because when you’re oppressing people, you know in the back of your mind that you are generating a desire for retribution. You can’t actually sleep securely at night if you know [that’s] what you’re doing.
In my view, there exists no conceivable universe in which a malnourished collection of dying, confined, displaced human beings could meaningfully constitute a ‘side’ in a war – any more than a prisoner could be said to be at war with their captors.
A ‘complex’ situation
Appeals to a nebulous ‘complexity’ are no less pervasive, and have been condemned time and time and time again. It is a discursive tactic whose logical flimsiness is revealed the second we entertain a thought experiment in which we reverse the roles of the ‘sides’ in question, as the late Michael Brooks famously demonstrated.
In their expansive work on the history and future of the civil rights crisis facing the Palestinian people, the scholar Noam Chomsky and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé write:
The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story – hard to understand and even harder to solve… Israel succeeded, with the help of its allies everywhere, in building a multilayered explanation that is so complex that only Israel can understand it.
Palestinian rights activists do important work in reminding us of how, throughout history, calls to complexity were often made by those who attempted to defend, distract from, and ultimately prolong grave social iniquities. It was a common response made by white South Africans during the height of Apartheid, for example – as it was during slavery in the US. Although Western media often attempts to separate these struggles, their victims are oftenhappy to connectthem, and havedone for manyyears.
Indeed, Israel prevents foreign correspondents from reaching and reporting on Gaza, which ought to ring alarm bells. Due to the retroactive moral clarity that temporal distance from injustice confers, we mustn’t forget that in the late 1960s, people certainly spoke about Martin Luther King Jr in the way that many speak about movements for social justice today. While it is true that the full, detailed, granular history of these freedom struggles might be complicated, the basic moral assertions are not.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates has said of the time he spent in the Occupied West Bank:
It became very, very clear to me what was going on there… I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited. Where your voting rights are inhibited. Where your right to water is inhibited. Where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me… And so the most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is.
Now I’m not saying the details of it aren’t complicated. History is always complicated… but the way that this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights… It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us [who remember] African-American history.
Many in the scientific-skeptic community might be familiar with appeals to greater complexity as little more than bids for nuance in a sorely lacking media ecosystem. It is entirely understandable, given our eponymous opposition to easy answers. However, history bears a terrifying precedent for how such injunctions can, in fact, work to dilute the moral urgency of ongoing geopolitical atrocities, and aim to blunt the momentum of movements that oppose them.
If we are not careful, the blanket labelling of an issue merely as ‘complex’ can have the troubling effect of ex-territorializing it from history – of sequestering it from the material conditions that once caused it, and now sustain it – and of rendering it unfathomable. Truly, it is difficult to overstate just how often, and for how long, Palestinians rights activists have warned against referring merely to this crisis ‘complicated.’
Regrettably, Schultz refers to Israel/Palestine as ‘complex’ a total of 12 times in her piece, yet the word ‘Occupation’ never appears once. This, in a nutshell, is my critique. Again, I have no reason to assume that Schultz’s omissions were not made in good faith, and the purpose of her piece was never to flesh out the entire history of the freedom struggle at hand. However, these narratives are harmful. And claims that there are always ‘two sides to every story’ are always undermined if progenitor facts about that story are not then rendered accurately and fully.
Edward Said reminds us that Zionism must be viewed from the standpoint of its victims. So, then, let us be unequivocal. Israel is, by definition, an ethnostate. It is a state premised on one ethnic group owning and controlling land that it acquired by chasing another ethnic group from it. Relying on bipartisan support from its Western allies, it has spent decades stripping that very ethnic group of their freedom, their dignity, their basic rights, and their ability to grieve their loved ones. It prevents them from voting, from moving, from eating. It is operationally incompatible with democracy, and racist to its core. Its war crimes are visible from space, but invisible to Western leaders.
Contextless critical thinking is neither critical nor thoughtful. The desire to dispense with unhelpful analytical mirages is entirely consonant with the remit of this magazine, and of our movement more broadly.
Starting our stories at the beginning – and telling them accurately – allows us to breathe real, historical meaning into ongoing struggles for civil rights. It might be tempting to characterise Israel/Palestine as an ancient, unsolvable, unfathomable clash between two equally intractable parties, and leave all notions of ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘settler colonialism’, and ‘stolen land’ at the door. Unfortunately, this reading is not grounded in reality, notsupportedbygrowingscholarlyconsensus, and only attainable by averting our gaze from the context that surrounds us.
Western verdicts of complexity are, ironically, grossly oversimplified, and risk rendering us professionally oblivious to structural iniquity.
Such narratives may be simpler to swallow, and may allow us a moment of imagined even-handedness, but they are not true. They are illusions only context can pierce. And skeptics ought to care about illusions.
‘If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them Their oil would become tears’.
“No one is going to come help you. No one’s coming to save you. Stay Hard!” An angry, bald-headed man called David Goggins yelled. That was my first experience with David Goggins, a retired American Navy SEAL who went viral on social media due to his inspirational life story of self-development. His dark and aggressive take on motivational content was weirdly addictive and eventually convinced me to start a self-improvement journey of my own.
During my self-improvement journey, I followed all the latest “life hacks” from self-proclaimed life “gurus”, used an arsenal of data logging tools like Fitbits and calorie trackers, and bought into the idea that the best way to self-improve was to keep myself accountable with evidence and data. Little did I know that what I thought would be a positive lifestyle change would turn into an unhealthy obsession for data.
I was constantly trying to validate my efforts through numbers on a screen, making sure I hit my daily target and kept up to date with the most optimised way of doing things. This led me to thinking, why am I working so hard for data? Shouldn’t it be working hard for me?
While I thought that it was just a “me problem”, a simple google search showed me that I was part of a large community following the same movement – the “quantified self” movement.
What is the “Quantified Self”?
The ‘quantified self’, originally coined by Wolf and Kelly in 2007, is sometimes called ‘self-tracking’ or ‘lifelogging’, and refers to “self-knowledge through numbers”. It relies on using quantitative data as a means to monitor the elements of everyday life (Feng et al., 2021). By proactively collecting this information, people can gather deeper insights to their habits and behaviour which would be used to optimise their performance. This is made easier by the plethora of devices like fitness trackers and sleep monitors that can capture and analyse personal data.
A 2019 study published by Stanford University highlighted how self-tracking promotes self-awareness, a critical factor in making informed decisions about health and wellbeing. Paired with wearable technology, this can provide valuable real-time feedback on a variety of physiological parameters, allowing individuals to tailor their health and fitness strategies for optimal results (Dhingra et al., 2023).
However, in my opinion, the biggest reason this movement gained so much popularity was due to how accessible the idea was to the general public. The concept of the “quantified self” goes beyond demographic boundaries. Whether you are an athlete striving for peak performance, a professional seeking to optimise your work-life balance, or a health-conscious individual aiming for holistic wellbeing, the principles of quantified self can be tailored to suit your unique goals and aspirations (Lark Editor Team, 2023).
Supporters of this movement hail it as a revolutionary approach to self-improvement, empowering us to optimise our health, performance, and overall wellbeing, but is it really as good as it seems?
Iskandar, a local powerlifter, shared his thoughts and experience regarding the implementation of the “quantified self” movement into his lifestyle with me.
“For powerlifting, it helps me quantify my goals. This helps me keep on track with what I have to do and the weight I have to lift to progress well.”
He added that traditional methods, such as pen and paper tracking, were inefficient compared to the tools available today.
I visited the forum pages of the “quantified self” movement website (yes, they have a website) to find out more about why this ethos held such sway. One forum user by the name of “RiAnn-lliforg”, working in the non-profit sector, told how data collected by a patient’s FitBit showed well-researched and documented signs of dire health, which the patient’s physicians ignored. This caused the patient to go undiagnosed with colorectal cancer which may have resulted in her untimely death. The illness could have been caught earlier had the data been taken into account, instead of doctors relying solely on their own expertise.
However, while Iskandar and RiAnn see the positives in health data tracking, there are downsides to the quantified self movement.
The obsession trap: when numbers rule our lives
The initial allure of self-tracking lies in its promise of self-discovery and optimisation. However, when people take it too seriously, numbers that are not consistent with the user’s sense of body image and do not offer any cues for improving self-understanding can lead to a sensation of despair (Pols et al., 2019).
Think about the pressure of a pre-midnight scramble to hit a daily step goal, or the constant worry about achieving an elusive “perfect” sleep score. This obsession can cause us to push ourselves in unhealthy ways in order to meet these arbitrary standards, detracting from the very wellbeing the movement aims to cultivate.
Furthermore, a 2020 report by the Center for Humane Technology (Center for Humane Technology, n.d.) highlights the potential for self-tracking apps to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. By constantly bombarding us with data and notifications, these apps can trigger feelings of inadequacy amid the need for constant improvement. Ultimately, people can feel forced to self-improve rather than to just be, resulting in these devices dictating our every move.
“It definitely does mess with your mental health when you’re not able to hit the goals you should be able to hit according to the data. There are some days where the weight just doesn’t move how you want it.” Iskandar told me.
This leads me to another confounding factor: the human effects that are unexplained by the data collected.
The fallacy of perfection
As humans, we have access to and awareness of our emotions, as well as an understanding of any physical and mental factors we might be experiencing. However, the quantitative numerical presentation from data sources imply a higher level of precision, as if the tracker knows you better than you know yourself – meaning users can become convinced that self-tracking systems offer a more truthful, reliable and objective view of things than their own subjective experience, even when this is not the case (Van Dijk et al., 2015). This can blind us to the qualitative experiences that contribute to our overall health and happiness.
Data collected also does not represent unforeseen injuries or mental blocks that might occur during our self-improvement journey. Consider a runner who tracks their pace and distance. Their data might not reveal a knee pain, or the mental fatigue sustained while running that could have impacted their timing. In these cases, we can only use our own intuition to adjust to these changes.
With data not being able to account for these factors, it is easy to see why it would create unrealistic standards for people to replicate, while triggering feelings of guilt in those who are not ‘up to par’. Everyone has bad days which may affect their performance, but the data doesn’t know that.
Lastly, the “quantified self” movement often misses the intrinsic value associated with certain activities, especially when measuring holistic wellness. Often, the “quantified self” movement can turn tasks into a chore. By focusing on activities that trade optimality for personal enjoyment, one may be more motivated to push themselves long term. Compared to jogging alone, taking a long walk with friends seems – at least on paper – inefficient, but if it leads to a more sustainable habit that prevents burnout, it can be more effective as a long-term strategy.
Striking a balance: beyond the quantified self
Data is most useful when it empowers us to make informed decisions based on our holistic view of our own wellbeing. Intuition, subjective experiences, and the simple joy of movement in nature all play a crucial role in achieving genuine wellbeing.
Personally, I believe that the “quantified self” movement is going to be a feature of the future and will probably be adopted to some degree by everyone. With the constant development of technology and AI, more resources will be available and accessible to the average person. However, this also means that new ways for data to gaslight and demotivate us will be created.
By striking a healthy balance between data-driven and intuition-based approaches, we can maximise personal development while promoting physical and mental health. Self-development is a personal journey meant to be taken at your own pace, not at the instructions of a monotonous voice called Siri.
Regular readers of The Skeptic may already be aware of the Satanic Panic that began in the USA in the 1980s and continues to find new adherents and variations right up to the present day. A new book by Rosie Waterhouse, Satanic Panic – A Modern Myth, shines a particular light on the spreading of the moral panic to the UK and internationally, and the utter lack of evidence that ritual Satanic abuse even exists at all.
Satanic ritual abuse, as Waterhouse succinctly puts it, is:
A belief in extreme sexual and physical abuse of children by organised networks and secret cults of devil worshipping Satanists, as part of their belief system, in bizarre black magic rituals which include the drinking of blood, eating of faeces, animal and human sacrifice and the impregnation of victims or the purpose of breeding babies for sacrifice.
Waterhouse recounts how she first came across the claims while working for the Independent on Sunday. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) announced in March 1990 that that “child protection workers were encountering a new and horrific form of child sexual abuse by cults.” Along with most of the rest of the press, Waterhouse’s initial coverage trusted and repeated the claims, and the supposed “evidence” that had been used in criminal cases and wardship hearings.
After digging further into the subject over the next five months at the behest of an editor – and reading this I wondered how many journalists are still given this kind of time to investigate stories in 2024 – Waterhouse realised how wrong she had been. She was able to reasonably conclude that Satanic abuse simply did not exist as described. Having looked at cases from around the world, no physical evidence for it had ever been provided. The nature of the claims can easily be found online and I won’t recount them in detail here, but this volume of murder, cannibalism, pregnancy, childbirth and other activities would seem highly likely to leave some trace.
Obviously an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but as Waterhouse says:
I encountered sceptics who were adamant that despite dozens of forensic police investigations across the US, in Canada, the Netherlands and the UK, no corroborating evidence had been found… No bodies, no bones, no covens, no underground tunnels, no animal carcasses, no bloodstains. Nothing. Just the occasional court case where the pretence of supernatural powers was used to obtain silence and submission.
Her resulting investigation was published that same year under the title “The Making of a Satanic Myth”, and became a widely recognised and referenced work. This book covers the people and beliefs that led to these extraordinary – and false – claims, which had severe consequences for children and families. Some such claims would be laughable if not for the devastating consequences: in one well-known case in Rochdale, twenty children were removed from their homes after one young child reported dreams of ghosts to teachers.
This book, which is based on Waterhouse’s PhD by prior publication, details the influence of evangelical Christians and credulous therapists in spreading the idea of ritual abuse and “Satanic indicators” of such activity, and the connected and controversial world of recovered and false memory, and multiple personalities. Waterhouse contextualises her work within the academic literature of psychology in these areas, as well academic literature in the fields of anomalistic psychology and moral panics, and the theory and practice of investigative journalism.
While some of the moral panic of the 1980s and 1990s has calmed down, this remains an important area for skeptics, journalists, social workers, and the wider public to understand, and ensure that there is no repeat of these horrendous miscarriages of justice.
Child abuse obviously exists, but belief in fictitious forms of it sadly still persists. Even today some UK police websites continue to list ritual Satanic abuse linked to cults as one of the motivations for the abuse of children.
While Waterhouse notes that few journalists believe in ritual Satanic abuse these days, such claims have grown beyond individually devastating accusations to form wider cultural movements in recent years, with QAnon and Pizzagate both springing from the same well of nonsense. A paper Waterhouse cites from 1989, presented at an FBI conference, has insight that remains relevant to this day:
Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the American people should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, and that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices. Satanic and occult crime has become a growth industry; speaking fees, books, videos, prevention material, television and radio appearances.
As long as there’s money in spreading moral panics, they will continue. We must remain vigilant against such beliefs gaining any (further) traction in the mainstream, and this book is a useful reference for journalists, social workers, and indeed anyone curious about the spread of, and the lack of evidence base for, Satanic ritual abuse.
It’s 2017, the weather is swelteringly hot, secondary school has just started, and two 13-year-old girls are sat side by side in a rowdy classroom discussing a seemingly very serious matter. My best friend and I are exchanging conspiracy theories. Having just made friends not too long ago, we were stoked when we discovered a common interest in conspiracy theories.
I had been fairly new to conspiracy theories, and any and all conspiracy theories caught my attention. Cherryl, my best friend and partner in crime, on the other hand, had been into the conspiracy theory scene for a while now. When she encountered a YouTube video covering a conspiracy theory involving Taylor Swift, she clicked on it, thinking I would love to hear about it.
Who would want to hear a conspiracy theory about a celebrity they love? Well, me. I didn’t (and admittedly still don’t, despite being a huge Swiftie) keep up with Taylor Swift much apart from her music releases. Hearing conspiracy theories about her was intriguing as much as it was amusing. Cherryl, on the other hand, was and remains a non-Swiftie (although I did drag her to the Eras Tour with me). She had clicked on the video out of pure boredom, and because she knew of my love for conspiracy theories and Taylor Swift.
The 2009 MTV Video Music Awards had been going strong until Taylor Swift was awarded the Best Female Video award. Things took an awkward turn when Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech and proclaimed that Beyoncé should’ve won, instead.
According to YouTube, this was no random act – things had been perfectly set up for Kanye West to jump up on stage and steal the show from Taylor Swift. After all, he had been given a front seat with no guards stationed in front of the stage, giving him convenient access as he pleased.
Who could have set this up? Certainly not MTV, as former producer Jim Cantiello explained, because staging the incident even as a skit since could have potentially strained relations between the three biggest artists of 2009 (Kaufman, 2019).
Among the crowd of shocked and aghast faces, one person in particular stands out. Dubbed “Queen Bey” by her fans, According to the YouTuber, Beyoncé is one of the leaders of the Illuminati. Think about it: Beyonce and her husband, Jay Z, seem to be living on a whole different plane of success, opulence, and power. Plus Beyoncé occasionally flashes a hand symbol that makes a triangle, which is often associated with the “Eye of Providence”, in turn often linked to the Illuminati.
Historically, this Eye of Providence originated as a Christian symbol (Wilson, 2022). The three points of the triangle symbolise the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) with the eye representing the Christian God. The Illuminati were inspired by Freemasonry, which had occasionally incorporated the Eye of Providence as a symbol of God – as seen alongside many other churches at the time. As such, the Eye of Providence became a symbol for the Illuminati.
Beyoncé often employs religious symbols and acts in her creative direction. Her 2017 Grammys outfit incorporated intricate gold pieces and a gold halo crown to frame her as a goddess. This gave conspiracy theorists more fuel to stoke the flames, suggesting Beyoncé was one of the supreme leaders of the Illuminati.
Beyoncé’s Grammys 2017 outfit, depicting her as a goddess (Rosa, 2017 – used under fair dealing for analysis)
The conspiracy theory YouTube video also talked about this as an “entrance exam” that people looking to be inducted into the Illuminati had to undergo, involving public humiliation. These humiliation rituals are done (not just by the Illuminati… if they actually existed) to emphasise stark differences between social status (Origgi, 2021). Passing the hazing process entails internalising the shame, feeling humiliated, and accepting the loss of social status.
If this was a hazing process by the Illuminati towards Taylor Swift, who was 19 at that point of time, she took the humiliation like a champ. After Kanye West handed the microphone back to Taylor Swift, she stood in silence holding back tears. Of course, the torrent of tears came gushing out backstage, but in the public moment, Taylor Swift had accepted her humiliation and her loss of public status immediately, as demonstrated by her lack of retaliation to Kanye West’s intervention.
Taylor was scheduled to perform in the following portion of the event. Drying her face and plastering a smile onto her face, she performed her song “You Belong With Me” with no hesitations (although with a shakier few last notes). “Also, she changed into this red dress for her live performance. She wore this same red dress for her next appearance on stage,” Cherryl recounts from the video.
Beyoncé would then go on to win Video of the Year Award for “Single Ladies” where she was invited on stage in a beautiful red number. During her acceptance speech (which, thankfully, no one interrupted), she invited Taylor Swift back onto stage to continue her unfinished acceptance speech from before.
Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, both dressed in red following the VMA humiliation (Cohen, 2020 – used under fair dealing for analysis)
Both celebrities are looking gorgeous in their red dresses. But was it a coincidence that both were wearing red after the incident? As the YouTube conspiracy theorist explained, red is especially significant as it holds a hidden meaning of power and influence (Melling, 2019). Taylor Swift had started in a sparkly silver dress but, after her humiliation, she had made the switch to a red dress – of all colours she could’ve chosen from. This could be to symbolise how she was knighted and accepted into the Illuminati by Queen Bey herself, having passed the initiation process.
Conspiracists have long since rumoured that the Illuminati grants people fame, power, influence, and whatever they wish, as long as they are willing to give up something precious to them in exchange for the wish. It is alleged that Kanye West sacrificed a family member in exchange for fame. There are rumours that Katy Perry and Lady Gaga sold their souls to the devil in exchange for unparalleled fame and fortune. Now, similar rumours trail behind Taylor Swift, that she gained her fame through selling her soul… rather than by her own hard work and talent.
It also does not help that Taylor Swift appears to love the number “13”, and makes an effort to incorporate it into her career. It appears in the number of songs in an album, album release dates, and “easter eggs” in her music videos.
Additionally, conspiracy theorists spread the rumour that Taylor Swift is a clone of former satanic leader Zeena LaVey due to their uncanny resemblance to each other. Zeena LaVey is an American visual artist and musician, and the daughter of the founder of the Church of Satan; she was High Priestess of the church from 1985 to 1990.
Zeena LaVey, right, and her alleged clone Taylor Swift (Ishler, 2016 – used under fair dealing for analysis)
When I asked my best friend what it was about this 2009’s VMA theory that she had been intrigued by, her answer was reassuring. It was the “sheer absurdity of the theory” that “brought her much entertainment and made her laugh”.
Initially, back in 2017, Cherryl and I did not believe a single word of this theory, but over time it began to appeal more to us. Taylor Swift’s boom in success in her career after that incident certainly didn’t seem too much like a coincidence – she released hit after hit album following the 2009 VMAs, escalating her career in the music industry, becoming one of the world’s most spoken-about artists. Thus, our 13-year-old selves concluded that the theory must be true, and Taylor Swift had gained her extraordinary fame as a result of Beyoncé accepting her into the Illuminati.
However, now that we’re both older and have developed some critical thinking abilities, we can both confidently state that we do not believe that Taylor Swift is a member of the Illuminati. “From what I’ve seen about Taylor Swift online”, Cherryl told me recently, “it’s kinda obvious that her fame is well-deserved and all as a result of her own hard work.”
Outside of the conspiracy theory, the real story of the VMAs is far more understandable. According to Billboard, both Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were crying behind the scenes after the incident (Kaufman, 2019). Why would Beyoncé be crying if she were one of the supreme leaders of the Illuminati and had clearly set up the whole incident to test Taylor Swift? Moreover, Beyoncé was actually prompted by producers before her own award was presented to hand the show back to Taylor Swift to continue her interrupted acceptance speech.
And perhaps Kanye West being seated in the front row with no bodyguards stationed nearby was more of an oversight by MTV than the setup of an initiation ritual. Kanye West had been drinking that night, as seen by paparazzi pictures of him holding a Hennessy bottle. Alongside his history of egotistically jumping on stage, it’s really not all that surprising that interrupted Taylor Swift’s moment of glory.
And while there’s not much to be read into Taylor Swift’s costume change, given how frequent costume changes are at awards ceremonies, we can be in little doubt that this conspiracy theory is just a conspiracy theory.
Taylor Swift’s sheer tenacity and creative prowess has got her to where she is now – one of the most successful musical artists of all time. These conspiracy theories often target female celebrities in a bid to rob them of the ownership of their own hard work, resilience, and determination to succeed. Taylor Swift’s success can be fully attributed to her top-tier and unique songwriting skills, her brilliant and borderline terrifying attention to detail, the relatability of her songs, and much more – not to a secret and powerful organisation who has bestowed success upon her.
Alongside this ridiculous theory about Taylor Swift being part of the Illuminati, there are also myriad other conspiracy theories that are equally wide of the mark, the latest being that she is a secret Government Agent to help Biden win the 2024 Presidential Election.
These conspiracy theories are often rooted in underlying misogyny – while similar rumours exist about male celebrities selling their soul in exchange for fame, the issue of whether they deserve their fame is not brought up as often as in relation to female celebrities. For example, Lil Uzi Vert, a rapper who has alluded to having sold his soul to the devil and other outlandish claims, is not subjected to the same scrutiny as to whether his talent is authentic.
Now, Taylor Swift is revelling in her well-earned position as one of the best music artists of all time while Kanye West is… somewhere trying to revive his declining career. Despite the incident (and not to mention multiple other horrific interactions between Kanye West and Taylor Swift), it’s safe to say that Taylor Swift has the last laugh.
