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The writing’s been on the wall for decades, but still the graphology persists

Mark Horne
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The writing’s been on the wall for decades, but still the graphology persists

What can our handwriting tell us about our personality? Graphologists assert that our rarely-used scrawl can improve mutual understanding in a marriage, help a recruiter to identify us as the right person for a job, or even reveal us to be a serial killer… 

The trial in August 2023 of the serial killer Lucy Letby involved a number of handwritten notes that had been penned by the accused – and subsequently convicted – former neonatal nurse. Most UK readers will be aware of the post-it note Letby had written, which included the words “I AM EVIL” and “I DID THIS”, from the extensive media coverage of the trial proceedings.

Readers of the Mail Online, the Mirror and the Daily Star may also have read additional commentary on the handwritten notes found by police in Letby’s house, from leading British graphologist Tracey Trussell. After examination of Letby’s handwriting through these notes, Trussell spoke extensively to the Mail about Letby’s personality. Among other observations, she said that “Letby should never have been put in a position of care and responsibility” and noted that “Letby was likely to act impulsively and wilfully, without thought, and powerless to control strong subconscious urges. Plus, she lacked principles.” 

I’m not trained in handwriting analysis, nor am I a member of the British Institute of Graphologists, but I think even I could tell you that a woman just convicted of seven baby murders and the attempted murder of seven more infants lacks principles, and should not have been in a position of care and responsibility. 

Graphology is “the analysis of handwriting… to determine someone’s personality traits,” and it will not surprise the reader to learn that the British Psychological Society says that it has “zero validity”. It should be noted that graphology is distinct from forensic document examination, which seeks to use science to establish the authenticity or other questionable aspects of a document, including relating to the authorship and handwriting.

Graphology uses features like the size and spacing of letters, the angle of letters, the use of space and margins, the pressure applied with the writing instrument, the types of connections used in cursive, the downstrokes, and even how you cross your “t” to extrapolate personal traits from the handwriting sample alone. 

There are claims that graphology has its origins back as far as ancient China, but the term itself was coined by a French priest and architect, Jean-Hippolyte Michon, in 1871. Michon believed that when people write spontaneously and without thinking that they bare their soul on the page, but later graphologists preferred Jungian and Freudian explanations and interpretations. 

Even casting aside the existence – or otherwise – of the soul, there are some obvious reasons to be suspicious about the plausibility of graphology. Does one’s personality change when using a different writing implement? I can’t be the only person whose handwriting noticeable changes when using a nice ink pen rather than a biro. What about your education? Being born at a time and place where cursive (“joined-up”) writing was emphasised or ignored, or where left-handers were routinely forced to learn with their right hand will both clearly affect one’s handwriting, as will the age at which one leaves school. 

It therefore comes as no surprise that when independently researched, graphology does not tend to hold up well. Graphology and personality: Another failure to validate graphological analysis (Furnham and Gunter, 1987) had 64 participants complete the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and copy out a set text in their own handwriting. Using graphology texts, the handwriting was analysed and compared against the EPQ results, and “the results quite clearly demonstrated fewer significant effects than may be expected by chance.” This, the authors reported, concurred with many other studies into graphology – they quote four, from 1976 to 1986 – and they conclude with the following: 

Perhaps one should be forced to conclude rather uncharacteristically for researchers that ‘no further work needs to be done in the field’?

Of course, graphology persisted and so inevitably further research has been done in the field, but subsequent studies have generally found very similar results. For example, Graphology and personality: an empirical study on validity of handwriting analysis (Dazzi and Pedrabissi, 2009) tested 101 students on the Big Five measures of personality and asked graphologists for their analysis of the same based on handwriting, with the following result: 

Correlations between the Big Five Questionnaire and graphological evaluations did not confirm the capability of handwriting analysis to measure Big Five personality traits.

Despite the continued lack of good evidence for graphology, mainstream belief in this practice remains. As recently as 1991 it was used by 91% of French public bodies and private companies to assess prospective employees, and although its use in France is reported to be declining, there are reports of its use by recruiters in both the US and UK. It is hard to imagine astrology, which the British Psychological Society ranks alongside graphology, being used by any respectable employer to screen recruits. Why do professional, intelligent people believe in – and continue to use – such a method?

The most comprehensive discussion of this can be found in the study Illusory Correlations in Graphological Inference (King and Koehler, 2001). 

They highlight a 1992 meta-analysis of 200 graphology studies, which included some with methodological shortcomings, that found only a small effect size (r = .12) in inferring personality from handwriting. This effect size is: 

not nearly large enough to be of any practical value and would certainly be too small to be perceptible to the human judge… even a small, real effect – for which the evidence is mixed at best – cannot account for the magnitude of handwriting-feature personality-trait relationships reported by graphologists or their clients.

King and Koehler also note that in studies, graphological prediction of job performance was “modest” when using autobiographical text which could give the graphologist contextual information, but that when the text used was identical for all the analysed writing, graphologists were unable “to draw valid inferences about job performance”. Essentially, without additional information, the measurable effect in these studies disappeared. Whether used consciously or not, information gleaned from a CV or a covering letter – or the knowledge that something was written by serial killers – seems likely to influence a graphologist’s analysis of a handwriting sample. 

In any case, with an effect size ranging from modest with contextual information, to imperceptibly weak or non-existent without contextual information, it seems unlikely that actual effectiveness could be the most parsimonious explanation for some people’s persistent belief in graphology. 

As I suggested earlier, it seems logical that many factors could influence handwriting, and King and Koehler highlight studies showing that one’s literacy, socioeconomic status and even gender can be predicted to some degree by handwriting, which they say “may in turn predict some personality traits. Thus, any weak ability of graphology to predict personality may be merely based on gender or socioeconomic status information assessed from handwriting.”

This may be one of the reasons that graphology can sometimes appear to have a weak or superficial predictive quality, but it is quite alarming that such a method is used for recruitment, as it would seem very likely to feed into discriminatory hiring practices. Indeed, when graphology first came to prominence phrenology and eugenics were used to justify legal and social discrimination, and around that same time graphology itself was suggested as a method to identify criminality and mental illness. 

King and Koehler also note that the mean agreement of graphologists in handwriting interpretation is r = .42, which is not that much higher than non-graphologists’ interpretations, at r = .30. Their suggestion is that graphological interpretation of personality from handwriting is derived not from empirical evidence, but the same semantic inferences that anyone might make from handwriting – i.e. that small handwriting suggests modesty, that large suggests egotism, and that someone who precisely dots their i’s and crosses their t’s may be the kind of person who pays attention to every small detail in a task, because that’s literally what the phrase means in English. 

…we found that naive judges “discovered” relationships in the data consistent with those claimed to exist by experts. The obvious implication is that semantic association, which appears to drive illusory correlation in both domains, is the origin of experts’ theories.

This illusory correlation potentially contributes to the continued use of graphology, as the graphological interpretation feels right and matches our own intuition as lay recipients of such analysis. All the more so if we, too, have read the analysed person’s job application – or indeed know that the person analysed is a convicted criminal. 

The authors also note other explanations for continued use of graphology, such as Barnum statements, which could describe almost anyone. These also appear in the Mail Online article’s analysis of Letby: “Letby’s often reclining style of handwriting shows how she was withdrawn particularly when stressed, generally on the defensive and potentially capable of irreverent actions.” While not everyone is defensive, an awful lot of people become withdrawn when stressed, and literally everyone is potentially capable of irreverent actions. 

As graphological interpretation isn’t generally legally acceptable, thankfully such analysis is restricted to post-hoc discussions rather than law courts. However, the continued use of graphology in recruitment is potentially far more worrying, not least due to the potential discrimination it introduces into such an important part of our lives. 

The power of placebo-controls has little to do with the placebo-effect

David Weinberg
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The power of placebo-controls has little to do with the placebo-effect

“I’m addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn’t matter.” – Steven Wright

Placebo controls are a mainstay of clinical research in medicine. They are one of the gold standard features of the iconic “double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled clinical trial.” This is surely an affirmation of the potency of the mighty placebo effect, right? Not really!

Even if placebo effects are a myth, placebo controls would remain a powerful tool to improve the quality of clinical trials.

The Rise and Fall of the Placebo Effect

A placebo is an intervention intentionally devised to be devoid of a relevant physiologic effect. The apparent over-achievement of placebo groups in some studies has created the impression of a potent therapeutic response to these intentionally impotent interventions. This has been given the moniker “placebo effect.” This enigmatic effect has garnered a mythology as a powerful inert intervention; a mysterious “black box” with unexpected power.

More careful studies and more critical analysis of prior data has taken much of the mystery and potency out of the placebo effect. These investigations have opened the black box and identified more mundane influences, biases, and statistical artifacts masquerading as the placebo effect. After proper attribution of these factors, the placebo effect mostly vanishes. To the extent that the placebo effect exists at all, its power has been greatly diminished.

Self-reported outcomes like pain and anxiety are vulnerable to influences that are difficult to measure, and these subjective responses remain the last hiding place for the placebo effect. Mike Hall and Dave Hahn have discussed the rise and fall of the powerful placebo narrative in previous Skeptic articles.

If the placebo effect is mostly imaginary, why are clinical investigators obsessed with using placebo controls? And if future research continues to neuter the placebo effect, will placebo controls be abandoned?

Placebos and clinical trials

The value of placebo-controls in clinical trials has little to do with the placebo effect.

Not every research question in medicine is appropriate for a placebo-controlled trial, but for investigating the safety and efficacy of an experimental medication, it remains a favoured study design

The value of a control group

Say, for example, we want to test the effectiveness of our new drug, humbly called “Panacea” for condition X. We find 1000 patients with condition X and treat them with Panacea. At the end of the study our measurements of condition X are unchanged. Can we conclude that Panacea is ineffective for condition X? Maybe, maybe not. What if condition X is a relentlessly progressive condition, something like Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). No change might be a therapeutic victory. On the other hand, what if condition X is self-limited and usually resolves spontaneously, something like singultus (hiccups!). In this case, no change in the condition might be an indication that panacea is actually making the condition worse.

In order to figure out if a treatment is having a positive or negative effect, we need some reference for comparison, a so-called “control group.” There are many possible comparison groups we could imagine. The ideal control group would be identical to the treatment group. There is no perfect control group, but when possible and practical, using a random process to sort the experimental and control group is the best that can be achieved. This process maximises the likelihood that the groups will be matched in important factors such as: age, gender, severity of disease, co-morbidities, etc.

Here is how a randomised trial works. Each potential subject is assessed for eligibility according to a set of pre-defined criteria. After a process of informed consent, each eligible subject is then enrolled into the study. They agree to be in the study without knowledge of their treatment group. Only then is the subject randomly assigned to be in the treatment or control group.

The value of a placebo control

Now that we have sorted subjects into treatment and control groups, what does a placebo control add? It is desirable that the only difference between the treatment group and the control groups is the experimental treatment itself.

Randomisation ensures that the treatment and control groups are as similar as possible when they begin the study. Placebo controls ensure that the treatment and control groups are as similar as possible during the conduct of the study.

Implicit in placebo control is the assumption that the subjects do not know if they are receiving the experimental treatment or the placebo…they are blinded to their group assignment. To the extent possible the investigator(s) are usually blinded to the subject treatment assignment, as well. Placebo controls are a necessary feature for the blinding of subjects and investigators.

The argument for “blinding”

Imagine that you are the subject in a clinical trial of an experimental drug. As part of the informed consent process, you have been educated about the potential benefits and the potential risks of the study drug. Now imagine that you know you are in the treatment group. You might be more optimistic about your prognosis. You might be more enthusiastic about participating in the study. You might be more likely to comply with study activities. You also might be more vigilant about potential side effects.

Imagine that you know that you are in the control group. You might be more concerned that your condition is worsening. You may be more likely to seek treatments outside the study protocol. You might be more likely to drop out of the study. You might be less likely to report mundane life events as side effects.

Investigators are not immune to these types of biases. If an investigator is aware of who is in the experimental group and the control group, it could influence the way they interact with subject, the way they collect data, and in decisions they make in the conduct of the study. It also increases the possibility that they could accidently “unblind” the patient.

These potential asymmetries between the experimental and control groups are known as “bias,” and can confound the results of the research. Placebo controls and blinding are attempts to minimise bias in the design, conduct, and analysis of clinical trials. Minimising bias is one of the key features of the scientific method.

Conclusion

The value of placebo controls in clinical trials is not an affirmation of the power of the placebo effect. Even if the placebo effect is eventually proven irrelevant, placebo controls will remain a mighty tool to minimise bias in clinical trials.

Not right about nitrites? Mouse study provokes media scaremongering over cured meat

Michael Marshall
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Not right about nitrites? Mouse study provokes media scaremongering over cured meat

As anyone who has been watching the news will have realised, for a lot of pupils, it hasn’t been the smoothest start to the new school year. Yet, crumbling classrooms and failing concrete aren’t the only health risks that our children are exposed to at their primaries and comprehensives, if a recent headline in the Guardian is anything to go by:

Thousands of schools serving meals that could contain cancer-causing chemicals

Education authorities across England and Wales shown to use meat that has been treated with either nitrites or nitrates

As the Guardian explains, Local Education Authorities have stated that “some or all of the schools in their area are using meat that has been treated with either nitrites or nitrates”. Typically, that’s likely to be bacon or ham, as nitrates and nitrites help give those meats their flavour and pink colouring. They also act as preservatives, slowing down the bacteria that cause food spoilage. Nitrates and nitrites are naturally occurring chemicals, and when it comes to pork products they’re often part of the curing process.

As the Guardian article continues, schools are using these treated meat products as part of school lunches, even though there is “evidence that both chemicals … can be carcinogenic”. The Guardian also mentions that some scientists and politicians are calling for nitrites and nitrates to be banned from use in meat production. It’s clear that we are meant to be very concerned about the thousands of schools serving up cancer-causing chemicals to our children, or at least to the children not actively dodging falling concrete.

But how worried should we be about all of this? To answer that question, the Guardian cite an earlier article in the paper, from December 2022, to back up their fears over these cancer-causing chemicals.

‘Too much’ nitrite-cured meat brings clear risk of cancer, say scientists

A leading scientist has urged ministers to ban the use of nitrites in food after research highlighted the “clear” risk of developing cancer from eating processed meat such as bacon and ham too often.

The study by scientists from Queen’s University Belfast found that mice fed a diet of processed meat containing the chemicals developed 75% more cancerous tumours in the duodenum than mice fed nitrite-free pork.

It also found that mice fed nitrite-cured pork developed 82% more tumours in the colon than the control group.

This story made a lot of headlines and a lot of splash at the time, with some even linking it to the WHO’s decision in 2018 to label processed meats a Group 1 carcinogen. Putting the WHO aside for a moment, it’s worth looking at the new study that was the inspiration for these stories: a 2022 study in The Nature Partner Journals Science of Food, titled “Dietary inclusion of nitrite-containing frankfurter exacerbates colorectal cancer pathology and alters metabolism in APCm in mice”.

This is an animal model, in which researchers took 40 Adenomatous Polyposis Coli (APC) Multiple Intestinal Neoplasia (min) mice – these are mice that are highly prone to developing tumours, making them handy to research what causes tumours to develop or not.

The researchers split the 40 mice into four groups, each of which got unrestricted access to foods, aligning to one of four different diets: nine mice were given a diet containing unprocessed nitrite-free pork, ten were given a diet of nitrite-free sausage, ten were given a diet of nitrite-containing frankfurter, and the remaining nine were given a control diet of AIN76 – a special kind of rodent chow that is used in research. The paper doesn’t explain what happened to the two missing mice, but we can assume that isn’t important.

In each of the meaty diets, the mice had unrestricted access to food pellets consisting of 15% of their specific meat, and 85% of the basic chow. So, in summary, 28 of the mice received various nitrite-free diets, and 10 got the nitrite-containing Frankenfurter.

After 8 weeks, the researchers culled and dissected the mice, to see how many tumours each had developed, in either the duodenum, jejunum, ileum or colon. What they found was, on average, the nitrite free pork and nitrite free sausage mice developed around 8 tumours each, while the nitrite-rich frankfurter mice developed around 11 tumours each. The control mice had an average of 7 tumours each – because, after all, these were mice selected especially for their propensity to develop tumours. In fact, in the Jenunum, the control mice developed more tumours than any of the other mice, and in the colon, it was the nitrite-free pork that correlated with the most tumours – neither of which were statistically significant findings.

Graph from the paper showing that pork, sausage and frankfurter fed mic have more tumours than control but this is only statistically significant in the frankfurter mice

Of all the various analyses that were undertaken, the only significant finding here was that, compared to control, the nitrite-processed frankfurter mice developed a statistically significant number of additional tumours. The pork and sausage mice did not develop a statistically significant number of additional tumours above control.

In the discussion, the authors conclude:

This study found that a modest inclusion of a sodium-nitrite-containing pork frankfurter in the diet of APCmin mice significantly increased the number of intestinal tumours present. A similar inclusion of either nitrite-free pork sausage or minced pork did not increase tumour numbers.

It was this finding in particular that inspired the headlines in the Guardian and elsewhere, about the cancer-causing chemicals in your children’s foods. To reiterate, that scary headline is based on a study in which ten nitrite-fed mice who were prone to developing intestinal tumours developed more intestinal tumours than tumour-prone mice fed on a non-nitrite diet.

This might be a robust study, with a reliable finding, even despite the multiple analyses conducted. However, this finding is based on 10 mice, out of a total of 38 mice, all of which were already prone to developing tumours. It might prove to be a useful starting point, but it’s not sufficient yet to justify alarmism over diets in schools.

What’s more, that discussion might be making a claim that is not entirely supported, in that it described the Frankenfurter diet as “modest inclusion” of sodium-nitrite-containing pork frankfurter. The “modest inclusion” amounted to 15% of the mice’s diet, supplemented with 85% of other feed. Would we otherwise consider 15% of dietary intake a “modest” amount of processed meat? Would we expect cured sausages and bacon to make up 15% of food intake per day, every day? That seems like an unusual amount of processed meat.

On that subject, it is worth revisiting the WHO labelling issue, where the WHO moved processed meat into the Group 1 carcinogen category. Group 1 are the things that are known carcinogens to humans, and there are 127 things in that list, compared to 95 things that are Group 2A “probably carcinogenic”, and 323 in Group 2B “possibly carcinogenic”. In 2018, processed meats were moved into group 1. But just because something is a cancer risk, that doesn’t mean it’s something we should be scared about, depending on the risk level.

Helpfully, the WHO do actually quantify that risk for us:

The consumption of processed meat was associated with small increases in the risk of cancer in the studies reviewed. In those studies, the risk generally increased with the amount of meat consumed. An analysis of data from 10 studies estimated that every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%.

Coincidentally, 50 grams is about the size of a Vienna Frankfurter, at least according to the Sausage Sizes Guide on the website sausageman.co.uk. So, if we are to listen to the WHO’s own data, and if we are to take the sausage man at his word, then someone would have to eat an additional Vienna Frankfurter every day in order to raise their risk of colorectal cancer by just less than a fifth.

The current lifetime risk for colorectal cancer in the UK is about 5%, according to cancer.net – therefore, if you eat a regular diet, with a regular amount of processed meat, and then you add a daily additional smoked sausage to your diet, your lifetime risk would rise from 5% to 6%.

The question we should be asking, then, is how many sausages are schools giving our children, and at what frequency. And, more generally, what percentage of our kids’ daily diet is made up of nitrite-processed meat. We also should not panic just yet, because so far the claims around the harm of nitrite-processed meats are only in mice – but we should avoid excess until there’s better data out there.

On the subject of data, there’s one final coda to this story. There’s a reason that this story came out at the start of September, with the scary headline about “Thousands of schools serving meals that could contain cancer-causing chemicals”. The schools did not announce this as part of a statement about new school menus for the year ahead – the story came from LEAs responding to freedom of information requests about the nitrite content of their school meals. The source of that FOI is named in the Guardian’s coverage:

The FoI exercise was undertaken by Finnebrogue, a Northern Irish food firm that launched the UK’s first brand of nitrite-free bacon – Better Naked – in 2018.

Jago Pearson, the company’s chief strategy officer, said it welcomed other food producers, including Waitrose, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer, introducing similar products “because this can only help improve the health of the nation”.

This, therefore, is a story about how your child’s school meals contain carcinogenic chemicals that you should be scared of… yet, it is arguably a tool for a nitrite-free meat manufacturer to get some eye-catching headlines to endorse the primary selling point of their product. Meanwhile the story may scare readers over what amounts to indicative early research in a small number of tumour prone mice who were fed an unusual amount of nitrite-heavy food.

It may well turn out, in time, that nitrite in processed meats are bad for us, and raise our cancer risk from 5% to 6%. Or it might turn out to be one of those “in mice” findings that don’t pan out when it comes to data in humans.

In either case, school dinners are not currently the biggest threat to the health and wellbeing of children at school in the UK, and parents have enough to worry about without also panicking about the contents of that relatively rare smoked sausage.  

Knowledge Fight podcast wins Skeptical Activism Ockham award

Michael Marshall
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Knowledge Fight podcast wins Skeptical Activism Ockham award

Knowledge Fight – a podcast which catalogues the lies, conspiracy theory and misinformation of Alex Jones and Infowars, has today been named the 2023 recipient of the Ockham Award for Skeptical Activism.

The Knowledge Fight podcast art

Knowledge Fight is the long-running podcast that dissects right-wing propagandist Alex Jones, and through that lens attempts to shine light on the larger community of extremists he exists within. Created in January 2017 by Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes, it has amassed a huge and dedicated fanbase, and has become an essential repository for understanding the conspiracy theory ecosystem of Alex Jones and Infowars.

In 2018, when parents of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting sued Jones for defamation over his claims that the incident was “staged”, Knowledge Fight’s Dan Friesen was invited to give expert testimony as part of the case, which eventually resulted in Jones losing the case.

Michael Marshall said: “Knowledge Fight is a superb example of the importance of tracking and documenting misinformation. Many people have dismissed Alex Jones over the years as a bizarre and kooky character. In doing so, they have allowed his more ridiculous and outlandish statements to distract them from the real harm and impact of his decades of conspiracy theory extremism. By listening to what Alex Jones actually says, and keeping track of the figures in his orbit, Knowledge Fight have shown that he is far from harmless.

“The value of developing such a detailed understanding and encyclopaedic knowledge of people like Alex Jones was shown not just in the Sandy Hook case – where for the first time Jones has faced some genuine accountability – but also in demonstrating his links to the extremists who stormed the Capitol and attempted to overthrow the US government.

“For putting together so comprehensive a picture of Alex Jones’ world, and for delivering that deep insight in a format that keeps the audience entertained as well as informed, we’re delighted to award the 2023 Ockham Award for skeptical activism to the Knowledge Fight podcast.”

The ‘Skeptical Activism’ award was announced as part of The Skeptic’s annual Ockham Awards at a ceremony that took place during Saturday’s QED conference on science and skepticism, in Manchester. Also awarded during the event was the 2023 Rusty Razor award for pseudoscience, which went to cardiologist and anti-vaccine influencer Dr Aseem Malhotra.

Cardiologist and Covid vaccine critic Dr Aseem Malhotra wins 2023 Rusty Razor award

Michael Marshall
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Cardiologist and Covid vaccine critic Dr Aseem Malhotra wins 2023 Rusty Razor award

A registered cardiologist who has become one of the country’s most influential critics of the COVID-19 vaccine, Dr Aseem Malhotra, has today been named the 2023 recipient of the “Rusty Razor” award, the prize given by The Skeptic to the year’s worst promoters of pseudoscience.

Dr Aseem Malhotra (Credit: Rathfelder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Dr Malhotra has made a name for himself over the last decade as a cardiologist who advocates strongly against the broad use of statins. He has described the drugs as a multi-billion dollar “con” by the pharmaceutical industry, saying that his critics have “received millions in research funding from the pharmaceutical industry”. He has described the link between heart disease and saturated fat as a “myth”, drawing criticism from the British Heart Foundation.

In 2017, his book The Pioppi Diet put forward a diet that he claimed could prevent 20 million deaths per year from cardiovascular disease. The book was named by the British Dietetic Association as one of the celebrity diets to most avoid – with the BDA highlighting his apparently Mediterranean diet excluded pasta and bread, but included coconuts.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Malhotra has been a prolific and powerful voice spreading narratives that run contrary to the best available evidence. In 2021, his book The 21-Day Immunity Plan included a diet claimed to improve the immune system and help fight off infections – claims that drew criticism from medical professionals.

In 2022, Dr Malhotra released a paper claiming that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines posed a serious risk to cardiovascular health and that the vaccines were “at best a reckless gamble”. The paper was published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance – where Dr Malhotra sits on the editorial board.

Dr Malhotra and his campaign against the COVID-19 vaccine was subsequently praised in Parliament by Andrew Bridgen MP as part of the reasoning behind his ongoing anti-vaccine crusade. In January of this year, Dr Malhotra used a BBC interview about statins to claim that deaths from coronary artery disease were actually complications from the vaccine, prompting a slew of complaints, and an apology from the broadcaster.

The Skeptic Editor Michael Marshall said: “In our opinion, Dr Malhotra has been an incredibly prolific promoter of pseudoscience throughout the pandemic, including spreading the false notion that vaccines are responsible for thousands of excess deaths.

“Dr Malhotra’s media career has given him a very large platform, from which he spreads misinformation that undermines confidence in a health intervention that has saved the lives of countless people across the world. In doing so, he stokes the flames of conspiracy, paranoia and mistrust of medical consensus.

“For anyone with so large a platform to do this would be concerning enough, but Dr Malhotra shares these pseudoscientific messages as a registered medical professional whose opinions have influenced at least one current member of parliament.

“All of this, we feel, makes Dr Aseem Malhotra a highly deserving winner of the 2023 Rusty Razor award”

The ‘Rusty Razor’ award was announced as part of The Skeptic’s annual Ockham Awards at a ceremony that took place during Saturday’s QED conference on science and skepticism, in Manchester. Also recognised during the event was the Knowledge Fight podcast, who won the 2023 award for Skeptical Activism.

Why inaccuracies in Bill Cooper’s influential conspiracy theory book serve as its strength

Thiago Vahia Malliagros
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Why inaccuracies in Bill Cooper’s influential conspiracy theory book serve as its strength

When it comes to writing about the conspiracy theory landscape in the 1990s, the obvious place to start is with Milton William “Bill” Cooper, and his book Behold a Pale Horse. My used copy of the book consists of 500 pages, with 17 chapters and 7 appendices; to begin with, sources for various claims appear at the end of each chapter, but as the work progresses, the citations cease.

The book is usually credited to Cooper, even though large parts of it were not written by him – in fact, chapters 1, 3, 4, 10, 14, 15, and 17, plus all of the appendices, were written by other people, and at other points Cooper introduces material published elsewhere, to which he merely adds some commentary or conclusion.

The book is thus a mishmash of chapters that do not connect; each of them can be read independently of the other. The objective of some of those chapters is that they would be documents that reinforce the author’s central idea that there is a secret cabal dedicated to the destruction of the United States. In fact, the book contains two of the most notorious pieces of conspiratorial writing – one reproduced in its entirety, the other just in selected pieces: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.

The protocols were published in 1903 in Russia, purporting to recount a plan by the Jews to control the world. The fact that the book was a hoax, and a plagiarism of several works, did not stop it spreading throughout the world over the decades following its publication.

The most interesting part of Cooper’s republishing of the text is in the author’s note he includes by way of introduction:

Author’s Note: This is an exact reprint of the original text. This has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word “Zion” should be “Sion”; any reference to “Jews” should be replaced with the word “Illuminati”; and the word “goyim” should be replaced with the word “cattle.”

Cooper clearly understands that the Protocols are an antisemitic work, yet he is happy to use them because the message they contain supports his narrative. So how does he solve this problem? By claiming that the Illuminati manipulated the work, and by asking the reader to replace any terms that have a Jewish connection with conspiratorial “neutral” terms. Other conspiracy authors, such as Stan Deyo in The Cosmic Conspiracy follow the same approach:

The protocols are real; they do exist; and they have been exercised with alarming precision by some group for more than 100 years. They were truly written by the Illuminati… that same Illuminati whose Hermetic code insists on secrecy… and a ‘low profile’. The Jews and Masons have been made the scapegoat for something they have not done… even though some of both groups have at times aided the cause by their own ignorance.

Deyo, The Cosmic Conspiracy, page 66

What is the advantage of having the Protocols as a work that is part of your canon, given all the baggage the original text carries? Given that text is a fraudulent and a clearly antisemitic document, you’d think that using or referencing this work would be automatically disqualifying, or at the very least, highly problematic. However, this is precisely one of the chief reasons for including such texts, because of a concept outlined by political scientist Professor Michael Barkun, called “Stigmatized Knowledge”:

In the first place, stigmatization itself is taken to be evidence of truth – for why else would a belief be stigmatized if not to suppress the truth? Hence stigmatization, instead of making a truth claim appear problematic, is seen to give it credibility, by implying that some malign forces conspired to prevent its becoming known.

Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, page 28

So, according to this principle, the problematic aspects of a theory become its strength; society rejects the Protocols not because it is antisemitic or even a proven fraud, but because it is actually telling the truth – the truth that They don’t want you to know. And why does the rest of society scorn and criticise the text? Not because it is an incendiary and deceptive piece of propaganda whose aim when it was written was to stoke racist fears and attack minority groups, but because it is a true account of the mendacious plans of an evil group.

There is also another reason to graft texts like the Protocols into books like Behold a Pale Horse: the construction of a canon. As Jovan Byford points out:

To address the tricky issue of evidence, conspiracy writers tend to interpret the world around them through the work of other conspiracy theorists, past and present, and invoke their authority as a substitute for direct proof.

Byford 2011, page 110

Conspiracy theories are narratives claiming that truth has been hidden and suppressed by society. Authors like Cooper will use whatever material they can to prove themselves correct; the more they use, the better, as it creates the notion of a gigantic canon of material that all confirms what he claims.

The second work grafted into Cooper’s book alongisde the Protocols is Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, which shares a very similar structure to the former work, in that the material purported to be extracts of an evil cabal’s plan to dominate the world. The document demonstrates how to carry out an invisible war against North American society, in order to take control of it. Those responsible would be the Elite (Illuminati), the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group and (of course) the Rothschilds. In addition to telling the reader why this war is being carried out, it out lines the reasons, methods and theoretical aspects of the war – as if the text had been for internal use by the evil cabal, but had been leaked to the general public.

Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars sometimes stumbles and goes beyond what could plausily be accepted to be an “official” document. However, the important thing is the language, and what the text says: that the American government is slowly attacking its population with various techniques in order to pressure and weaken them. In a book like Behold a Pale Horse, this is enough for both the reader and the author to accept, as it confirms what they want to be true, regardless of the structure or logical errors in the texts. Any issues that are too obvious to ignore are easy to deal with: as Cooper stated earlier, they’re just evidence that the text has been tampered with to hide the truth, so the apparent mistakes actually merely prove the text to be true.

This is merely a brief introduction to Bill Cooper’s material in his book; I intend to go into more depth on on the book and its author in future articles.

The Rothschild family, and the modern conspiracy theory industry

Mike Rothschild
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The Rothschild family, and the modern conspiracy theory industry

In my new book, Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, I make a simple hypothesis to do what all conspiracy theories do: apply an easy explanation to a complicated issue. And that simple hypothesis is that almost all conspiracy theories are rooted in antisemitism, and almost all antisemitism is rooted in conspiracy theories.

Essentially, whenever you have a cabal of global puppet-masters sitting in a dark room smoking cigars around an oak table deciding who lives and who dies, someone must foot the bill. And that someone, more often than not, is labeled as Jewish. Yes, the conspiracy theorists making the claims often couch their abhorrent ideas in euphemisms and front groups, some of which are actually real and not all that interesting: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of the Isles, “foreign bankers,” “European financiers,” and so forth.

But an examination of the corpus of conspiracy theory works almost comes back to the idea that whoever those groups are and whatever their individual focus, many of their members are wealthy Jews who have worked tirelessly for generations to keep their money, make more money, and use that money to leverage unlimited power. And if these powerful Jews themselves have a leader, a “king of kings,” if you will, chances are they’re going to be the Rothschilds, the German-Jewish banking family (to whom I’m not related) that started in the walled Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt only to send its tentacles first into the financial capitols of Europe, then the world.

Antisemitism is an ideology that’s easy to exploit and lucrative to monetise any time there’s a major political upheaval, health crisis, economic disaster, military setback, or degradation of “traditional” social mores – which is to say, all the time. Some of this stereotyping is benign enough: jokes about how cheap Jews are, books extolling “Jewish business wisdom,” and the like. But Rothschild conspiracy theories have been used as fodder for pogroms, riots, blood libel panics, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and played a critical role in ginning up the hate and bloodlust that made the Holocaust possible.

And they still are. The antisemitism powered by Rothschild conspiracy theories has seen a considerable upswing during and after the years of Trump and Brexit and Orban, with neo-Nazis and antisemites emboldened enough to pass out antisemitic fliers at Broadway shows, harass people on the street, hang anti-Jewish signs on overpasses, vandalise Jewish property, and in some cases, commit overt acts of violence. Celebrities and conservative influencers now openly speak to huge online audiences of how much they love Hitler, and of Jews being a lesser race, disloyal, and controlling banking and entertainment – all accusations consistently levelled at the Rothschild family, but often couched in the past in equivocations like “we don’t hate all Jews, just these Jews.”

The impact of these theories is hard to quantify for the Rothschilds themselves and will remain so – none responded on the record to my requests for an interview for the book. But for the Jewish people, the harm is obvious. Modern Jews are still battling the myths that started in a game of telephone almost 200 years ago. With western antisemitism and acts of violence against Jews and Jewish centres of worship and commerce at a high not seen in decades, it’s vitally important to understand how these theories feed into each other and build upon themselves.

To understand Kanye West ranting on Alex Jones’ show about how great Hitler was requires understanding how Jones himself has spoken many times of the influence that John Birch Society speechwriter Gary Allen’s 1971 book None Dare Call It Conspiracy had on him. Allen’s book, which sold millions of copies by attacking Jewish “insiders” like the Rothschilds, was inspired in part by Secrets of the Federal Reserve, a best-selling conspiracy book funded by the antisemitic and openly pro-fascist poet Ezra Pound. And Pound was inspired by that deathless work of anti-Jewish paranoia, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which took root in the anti-Jewish scapegoating of the post-World War I era.

All these, and so many more, lead us to the place where we are now. And Jewish Space Lasers is a study of that dark and winding path. It is not a biography of the Rothschilds, but of an idea: that Jews control everything, and the Rothschilds are the “Kings of the Jews.” Behind this notion lies a tangled web of absurdities that are equal parts bizarre and deeply sad. And it’s not all conspiracy theories, either. When popular culture has needed a rich family, particularly a Jewish one, to satirise or caricature, writers and artists pick the Rothschilds as a stand in simply because they’re the best known of the bunch.

And yet there are truths found in even the most pernicious myths, some bit of historically accurate arcana that prevents it from being dismissed altogether. The Rothschilds were immensely powerful, with an almost superhuman ability to use that wealth to keep the peace between empires. They certainly didn’t “fund both sides of every war” as alleged by countless internet memes. But houses often found themselves on opposite sides of conflict, such as when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, and while the Rothschilds weren’t selling rifles to both countries, they did have investments and holdings in both countries, forcing hard decisions to be made. Of course, the Rothschilds in no way “funded the Nazi war machine,” as conspiracy cranks like David Icke have claimed for decades. But the Rothschilds did see their Vienna and Paris branches looted by the Nazis, with the head of the Austrian branch held hostage by the Gestapo, only being rescued through the payment of what is likely the largest ransom ever paid out.

All of these facts are easy enough to manipulate into myths, and equally easy to monetise as conspiracy theories. Jewish Space Lasers is my attempt to determine why the false and debunked myths about this family continue to spread, even long after their power and wealth have been eclipsed by others. Why does anyone actually believe any of this, particularly given how thin its supporting evidence is? And what, if anything, can be done to put them to bed for good? After all, isn’t 200 years enough?

Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories by Mike Rothschild is out now, published by Melville House

The strange tale of Bridey Murphy and Virginia Tighe

Sean Slater
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The strange tale of Bridey Murphy and Virginia Tighe

On December 20th, 1798 in a small cottage called The Meadows, near the city of Cork in Ireland, Bridget Kathleen Murphy came into the world. The daughter of Duncan and Kathleen Murphy and younger sister of Blaine Duncan Murphy, she was raised to appreciate the culture of 19th Century Ireland. She was sent to a day school to learn to be a ‘lady’. Her barrister father taught her about the poetry of Keats and the tales of Irish mythology. The family spoke English rather than Gaelic, but used various dialect words, and as she grew up, her mother told her of the local custom of kissing the Blarney Stone at the nearby Blarney Castle.

In 1818 at St Theresa’s Catholic church, Belfast, she married Sean Brian MacCarthy, who, like her father, was a barrister. At their wedding, guests followed the tradition of putting coins into her dress pockets as she danced. Brian (he was known by his middle name) studied, and later took up a role teaching, at Queen’s University in Belfast. Alongside that he wrote articles for the Belfast News-Letter.

The couple remained childless and lived an unassuming, but happy, life in 19th century Belfast. She shopped in various stores, such as Carrigan’s grocery, and bought her clothing at Cadenns House drapers. She saw the advent of gas-lighting to the city, describing the long thin lampposts, topped with beautiful bright lights, dispelling the city’s dark corners.

Sadly, Bridey broke her hip falling downstairs, and she died at the age of 66. Her gravestone was marked ‘Bridget Kathleen M MacCarthy, 1798-1864’ (the ‘M’ standing for Murphy).

Her’s was an ordinary life that would otherwise have remained anonymous, but she remarkably become famous in 1950’s America. Her story was the subject of countless articles, books, hit records and even a major motion picture. Cocktails were created in her name, and revellers would host “Bridey Murphy” themed parties.

In addition, her story would popularise a whole new pseudoscience.

All this despite no real evidence she ever existed.

Virginia Tighe, who was given the pseudonym "Ruth Simmons" (image in public domain)
Virginia Tighe, who was given the pseudonym “Ruth Simmons”

In order to tell the whole story, we need to meet Colorado businessman, Morey Bernstein. As well as running several businesses, he was a keen amateur hypnotist who would use his skills at social gatherings as a party trick, and to help friends overcome some minor ailments. In 1952, at a dinner party at the home of Virginia Tighe in Pueblo, Colorado, Bernstein offered to hypnotise Virginia to discover the cause of her allergies. He regressed her back to her childhood, hoping to determine if there was a long-hidden trigger to her issues, but at some point – to the astonishment of Bernstein and the other party guests – Virginia started speaking in a distinct ‘Irish’ accent, and instead of being an 8-year-old American, claimed to be 8-year-old Bridey, living in Cork in the early 1800’s.

Over the next few weeks and over several sessions, Bernstein tape-recorded his subject’s responses as he pushed her for more information about what he assumed was a past-life. When he had originally studied hypnosis, Bernstein was excited by the work of The Sleeping Prophet, Edgar Cayce. Cayce was the progenitor of so much new-age quackery that he deserves an article here all to himself. He was a fantasist who claimed to have access to angels, dream worlds, and past-lives; he claimed to be able to project his spirit across the universe, that he could see both the past and future, and that he could heal anyone via his powers even if not in the same room. All by putting himself, or his subjects, into a trance-like state.

By Morey Bernstein - Pictures from the LP The Search for Bridey Murphy. Experiment No. 1 Research Recordings No. 101. Released with the book The Search for Bridey Murphy. Doubleday, 1956., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57719095 Photo shows a woman laying on a sofa surrounded by people watching on.
Hypnotist Morey Bernstein with Virginia Tighe

Bernstein assumed that Tighe was able to access this world – and from there, to her previous life – because she was clearly in a trance-like state, and was revealing details that only someone who had lived that life could possibly know.

Virginia Tighe – at the time 29 years old – was born Virginia Mae Reese in Chicago and had never visited Ireland, nor had her family any connections to the country. Her parents were 2nd generation Scandinavian immigrants. For Bernstein, her ability to speak in an authentic Irish accent, and recount facts only someone native to Ireland would know, plus her uncanny ability to recall such intimate and precise details of a life once lived, was proof that she wasn’t lying. 

The story subsequently appeared in the Denver Post in 1954, and Bernstein soon released a book: The Search for Bridey Murphy, in 1956. Tighe had asked to remain anonymous, so he changed her name to Ruth Mills Simmons to protect her identity.

An excerpt from the recordings,
in which Bernstein talks to Bridey
Murphy, via Virginia Tighe

The book caused a nationwide sensation, and the recordings made between them were released on LP records. Soon songs on reincarnation topped the charts, countless comedy routines, magazine articles and similar claims of past lives filled the US media.

As the New York Times put it:

Within months of the book’s publication in January 1956, it created a cultural brush fire, elevating hypnotism into something of a national mania and laying the groundwork for a later surge in interest in reincarnation and channeling.

The rights to the book had already been sold to Hollywood, so the film was released the same year.

Unfortunately, in his rush to release the book, Bernstein had failed to do much fact-checking of Virginia/Bridey’s claims. He had verified that the Belfast News-letter existed, as did Queen’s University. There was a St Teresa’s church in the Belfast phone book, and an English author had confirmed some of the dialect words used by Tighe were indeed Irish idioms, but because prior to 1864, no good records existed, an Irish law firm tasked with searching for any official birth, death or marriage records had stated they were unable to verify any of these details. Despite this the book was published.

Only then were others able to investigate properly, and it became clear that many of the facts did not add up. St Teresa’s didn’t exist until 1911. Catholics in Ireland would not have been allowed to become barristers until Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Her claim to learning about the luck brought by kissing the Blarney Stone as a child was strange, because it only became a popular myth after appearing in a poem in the 1840’s. Strangely, Tighe never mentioned the Great Famine, an event that would have dominated the life of anyone living in Ireland in the 1840’s.

It was soon discovered that Tighe was adopted and her birth parents – with whom she had lived until the age of 3 – were part Irish. A neighbour of her childhood home in Chicago was one Bridey Murphy Corkell, born in Ireland in 1892. In the 1930 census, Corkell’s sister Margaret Murphy was actually living with the Tighes, when Virginia would have been in her teens.

Most scholars now put Virginia Tighe’s story down to Cryptomnesia. This is where a subject may relay, what they believe to be something new, but is in reality a forgotten or long-dormant memory. There’s no accusation that Tighe was lying or making up stories to deceive, and it is not doubted she was in a trance-like state, but Bernstein’s rush to publish without any due diligence led to fleeting fame and a prominence for a pseudoscience that was taken all too seriously, when in reality it was nothing more than an interesting parlour game.

Listening to the recordings it is clear that much of the information is drawn from Tighe at Bernstein’s promptings. In her hypnotic state, she no doubt used faint memories passed onto her from the Irish immigrants she had known in her childhood, weaved with common tropes well known about Irish culture – such as the Blarney stone – to build an imagined life. There is no real evidence that past-life regression under hypnosis has any basis in fact. Despite this it is still offered as a ‘treatment’ by some maybe less than impeccably reputable therapists.

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