Avid followers of the World Economic Forum will be familiar with the term “The Great Reset”, the idea that it is time to convince governments and private companies to make a radical change to how they behave. Since COVID-19 began to ravage the planet, causing entire economies to falter and fail, billionaires have accumulated more and more wealth – it’s easy to see why there are such strong beliefs that the current system just isn’t working.
According to the World Economic Forum, this accelerating inequality has created a more unstable and violent world. Arguably, those at the top have recognised that this system is becoming more and more unsustainable, and that they will soon start losing money and power if this instability continues.
The stated aim of the Great Reset is to implement “Stakeholder Capitalism”. Unlike normal capitalism, which could be said to value the maximisation of profits at all costs, Stakeholder Capitalism claims to seek long-term solutions which benefit companies in the long term, but also benefit society, not just the shareholders. Such a global change of direction would have been unimaginably unrealistic a few years ago, but as the authors of the Great Reset point out, the world has rapidly changed to fight against COVID-19, so changing society to institute a better and more sustainable system shouldn’t be so hard.
That is the official version of the Great Reset, but it is not the only definition that can be found online – when a powerful group suggests such radical change, and with so dramatic a name, it is perhaps inevitable that alarm bells ring for conspiracy theorists. Those alarm bells first began to ring in American conspiracist communities, who saw the Great Reset as something much more sinister than the official narrative suggested. For those communities, and the conspiracists they went on to influence, the Great Reset is actually a malevolent plan to institute a New World Order or global Technocracy, with the goal of suppressing all freedom and controlling the world. According to believers, the pandemic was deliberately engineered to make the population afraid, so that state control could be expanded as the first step toward this new reality. So their theory goes, if people obey when told to wear a mask, they will also obey orders to have their hands microchipped in order to control where they go, and they will submit to social scores which determine who is good and who is not.
The fear of the Great Reset seems completely at odds with what it involves in reality – when you read the details of the plan, it is ostensibly an attempt by Davos and the World Economic Forums to create a more stable world for people, and by extension for businesses; one that won’t be destroyed by climate change. It’s a pretty open document to read, and is accompanied by podcasts and interviews showing exactly what they want – and the word “want” is key here; none of this is state policy, it is just a suggestion for the world.
There is a tradition of conspiracist reaction to any proposed project of this scale. Alex Jones has spent almost 30 years scaremongering about Agenda 21, the set of suggestions and decisions for how to help the environment, which was laid out at Eco-92. Any type of large-scale international collaboration of this nature inevitably becomes the subject of conspiracy theories, and they always posit that these global co-ordinations plan to imminently remove all liberty and bring about a dystopian future. So how can we explain this constant fear?
In her book “Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11”, historian Kathryn Olmested argues that since the First World War, the constant growth of the state and it’s increasing intervention in American’s lives has made the population more and more scared of the government, in particular of its secrecy and its reach. This was further exacerbated by lies around the Gulf of Tonkin incident (which was one of the causes of the Vietnam War), Watergate and the Iran-Contra Scandal – all of which were real conspiracies by the US government that had a vast impact on the life of its citizens.
Given this fear and suspicion, it’s easy to see why a plan that argues for change to the entire country – or, indeed, the world – by a government which some would consider to be hostile and secret about it’s intentions would not sit well for some people. Even if the Great Reset really is just a suggestion, the sheer thought of state intervention by the US government is an instinctively bad thing for many people, because, as they might ask, “who knows their true intentions?” In this way, conspiracists capitalise on that fear by alleging that the positive view of the future proposed by projects like the Great Reset is just a Trojan Horse – while fighting climate change may be the stated aim, the real goal, believers argue, is to have you surrender your liberties… and so on.
The suspicion conspiracy theorists have toward the Great Reset could also be rooted in the historical discrediting of government and politics as a force for meaningful social change. Throughout the 1980s, political speeches from Ronald Reagan and his UK counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, laid out a philosophy in which the government is definitionally inefficient, wasteful and against the interests of its people, and that only private business can truly accomplish anything meaningful. As the decades advanced and governments focused more and more on privatization, those beliefs persisted – in the minds of believers, power may change hands between the parties, but the objectives remain the same, so why believe that governments can achieve anything positive? Anything they seek to achieve must therefore be, at best, bad.
For those people, a plan that combines the power of the state with the goals of big business in order to change the way you live in the future is perceived as nothing more than an outright attack. Any criticism could simply be deflected by alluding to the long history of government secrecy – both the real examples, and the countless conspiracy theories that supplement them.
From the outside, it is tempting to think that the fact that the Great Reset plans rely on an alliance between government and private business should in theory allay any fears of totalitarian government intervention. However, with globalisation conspiracy theories, the fear of the government is elevated to a fear of a global “Shadow State”, the organisation behind all of the individual governments – and behind the biggest corporations too. Thus, believers come to see the Great Reset as the creation of a technocracy, where global society will be ruled by big business, helped by companies already understanding the weakness of governments and the ascendancy of mega companies.
There are doubtlessly other factors that play into the growth of the Great Reset conspiracy theory, but it is important to understand that conspiracy theories often exist for a reason, and sometimes that reason is fear. The conspiracy theorists offer many different solutions to stopping the Great Reset, including returning to a white Christian society, ending the state completely, and going back to the supposed “good old times”. For believers, they recognise that something is wrong with the way the world is structured, but any response to those problems that doesn’t align with their specific solution is perceived as an attack on all of humanity. The world can only change the way they want it to.
“If you did the statistics properly, I suspect that medicine – independent of public health – kills more people than it saves. I suspect if you if you factor in phenomena like the development of superbugs in hospitals, for example, that overall the net consequence of hospitals is negative.
“Now, that’s just a guess, and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong, and that is a good example of where my thinking about what we don’t know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do
“You know, medical error is the third leading cause of death, and that doesn’t take into account the generation of superbugs for example”
It might surprise you to hear that these are the words of a man described by the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world” – Canadian Professor and self-help guru Jordan B Peterson. Peterson made these bold assertions in a recent YouTube conversation with Bret Weinstein, the former college professor and member of the Intellectual Dark Web, who responded to Peterson’s medical error claim by explaining that COVID-19 was created in a lab in Wuhan.
Neither of Peterson’s claims – that medicine has killed more people than it has saved, and that medical error is the third leading cause of death – hold up to even the most basic scrutiny. The impact of medicine, for example, has been overwhelmingly positive, even accepting Peterson’s stipulation that we discount public health interventions. Public health would include measures such as hygiene, fluoridation (which, incidentally, Weinstein believes is harmful), and arguably vaccination – the latter could fall into the ‘medicine’ category, but to steelman Peterson’s argument as much as possible we’ll consider them specifically ‘public health’ and leave them out of our reckoning.
Let’s first examine the impact of medical intervention on childbirth. According to the 2006 paper “British maternal mortality in the 19th and early 20th centuries”, for every 1000 births in the UK in 1870, around 50 mothers would be expected to die – giving a maternal mortality rate of 5%. Factoring in the trend at the time for families to have six or seven children – primarily due to high infant mortality – mothers might be rolling that 5% mortality dice more than half a dozen times during their life.
By 1970, in the UK, that number had dropped to below 1 in 1000 – a 0.1% maternal mortality rate, and the last 50 years has seen the trend continue further. According to figures at Our World in Data, the maternal mortality rate in the UK is now around 9 per 100,000. Even if we widen what counts as maternal mortality, according to the BMJ, in the three-year period between 2016 and 2018, 547 women died during or up to a year after pregnancy from causes associated with their pregnancy, among 2.2million women who gave birth in the UK.
The impact of modern healthcare on the natural act of giving birth has been unquestionably transformative. Some of that improvement is in hygiene, simply ensuring doctors wash their hands between handling corpses and birthing babies had a dramatic effect, which we can attribute to the public health column. But how much of the rest of the dramatic transformation is in managing pregnancy complications which would have been deadly before we had ultrasounds, medication, and the ability to safely induce labour if needed? Intensive care units and incubators save the lives of countless premature babies every year, and those babies go on to be kids who typically survive through to adulthood – unlike the high rates of child mortality before medicine. In the 1800s, more than a third of children didn’t make it to their fifth birthday. Medicine has had a huge role in lowering that to a child mortality rate of under 0.5%.
It’s arguable that the impact on maternal and infant mortality alone has been enough to put modern medicine firmly in the plus column, but those numbers are further bolstered by, non-exhaustively: blood transfusions to keep patients alive during operations and after accidents; insulin keeping diabetic people alive; heart medication preventing heart attacks; CPR and defibrillators keeping heart attack patients alive long enough to be cared for; heart surgery preventing people from dying of heart disease; antibiotics and their effects on treating infections; chemotherapy, radiotherapy and the other huge strides we’ve made in cancer care.
That list barely scratches the surface, but for medicine to be a net negative, it would have to cause deaths in the kind of magnitude as to tip the scales on all of that. Peterson stipulated that medicine is negative before you even include the rise of superbugs – even if we steelman his argument further by adding superbug deaths to minus column, according to the CDC, that would account for 35,000 people per year in the US, less than the 36,000 Americans per year whose lives are saved by organ donations.
Hopefully the point is clear: Peterson’s first claim is patently absurd, delivered with intense confidence from someone still viewed by his ardent fans as valuable intellectual. His second claim, that medical error is the third leading cause of death, fares no better.
Medical error
Sticking with the US, according to the CDC during 2019 (the last non-COVID year), heart disease killed 659,041 people, follower by cancer at 599,601 people. ‘Accidents’ came in third, at 173,040 people – that’s all accidents, not just the medical accidents. That’s car accidents, accidental shootings (America), falls, drownings, everything… plus medical error. By the CDC stats, the number of medical accidents would need to be higher than the number of all accidents for Peterson to be right.
these figures are vastly inflated and don’t even make any sense on the surface. For one thing, there are only 2.7 million total deaths per year in the US, which would mean that these estimates, if accurate, would translate into 9% to 15% of all deaths being due to medical errors.
In fact, it’s worse: the study only looked at hospital-based deaths. As there are only around 715,000 hospital-based deaths per year, for the figures to be true medical error must account for between 35% and 56% of all in-hospital deaths. Half of all people who die while in a hospital would need to be victims of medical error. This obviously is not the case.
The study came to this absurd conclusion due to its methodological flaws, which Gorski highlights, including that the authors conflated unavoidable complications with medical errors, failed to take into account whether the deaths were preventable or not, and extrapolated from very small numbers. According to a more recent paper, a number of around 5,200 deaths per year in the US due to medical error is more likely.
Concerning confidence
The confidence with which Peterson states facts which were so demonstrably untrue is staggering and deeply worrying, given that this is not the first time Peterson has been so far wide of the mark – yet his reputation among his fans and followers as a deep thinker remains intact. In my opinion, Peterson’s intense certainty is a significant part of his appeal to his fanbase – in a complicated world, an authority figure who speaks with certitude can be comforting.
Peterson is not the first person to authoritatively state the “third leading cause of death” canard in order to denigrate conventional medicine – I’ve heard it from countless homeopaths, alternative healers, anti-vaxxers, chiropractors, flat earthers and even David Icke. Peterson’s fans may write this off as a guilt by association fallacy: just because you share an attribute with someone or something bad, that doesn’t make you bad (after all, if Hitler was a vegetarian, that doesn’t make all vegetarians Nazis). While it’s obviously true that we can’t write a view off merely by looking at the people who agree with it, it is not the case that such associations tell us nothing at all. It is valid to look at what epistemological or ideological company your beliefs are keeping, and if you find that the vast majority of people who hold your position are conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists, it is a sign that you may need to give your beliefs some examination.
Peterson may well be the epitome of this maxim, and his rise to prominence in parts of the skeptical and atheist worlds is something there needs to be some self-examination over. That isn’t to say his ideas were broadly embraced – the vast majority of skeptics and atheists who came across his work recognised early on that what he was peddling sounded like conservative Christianity coyly masked behind rhetoric and sophistry. Nevertheless, there were parts of our communities that failed to see it, even after he set off a number of red lights.
Some of Peterson’s most famous claims would have been dismissed out of hand were it not for the charismatic pull of his personality. His advice on how to live life and the values to hold seem strikingly similar to the conservative Christian worldview his atheist followers would normally critique, even as he equivocates over his answer as to whether he believes in there being a literal god. The very atheists who parroted his explanation that we can understand human societies by observing the behaviour of lobsters would have greeted a similar claim from Deepak Chopra with ridicule, and would have swiftly pointed out that humans have no more in common socially with lobsters than they have with ants, so why should draw social conclusions from one not the other?
Dietary advice and mental health
Over the last couple of years, Peterson has been increasingly emboldened in sharing his wisdom on health and mental health. His views around dealing with mental health – including “sit up straight and tidy your room” – bordered on the kind of ‘think yourself better’ rhetoric we hear from self-help gurus and The Secret, despite Peterson himself suffering from severe depression. Peterson has attributed his depression to an allergic reaction to a glass of apple cider, which he claims gave him a sense of impending doom and prevented him sleeping for 25 days straight – claims which wouldn’t have seemed out of place in pseudoscientific allergy and food intolerance lectures given at Mind Body Spirit festivals.
Peterson’s solution to his depression was to follow his daughter’s advice to go on “The Lion Diet” – consisting of nothing but beef, salt and water. If this depression cure had been posited by anyone else, those same skeptics who followed him would have torn it to pieces. His daughter was at the time charging people up to $600 per year for membership to her diet and nutrition website which she claimed offered advice on how to follow her revolutionary diet, but mostly seemed to consist of testimonials from users. All of this would normally be extreme red flags to the fans of his who see themselves as followers of logic and reason.
It gets worse. Peterson had become physically addicted to benzodiazepines, but refused conventional medical addiction treatment, because he and his daughter wanted him to have ‘alternative treatments’ that weren’t available in the US. Instead they headed to Russia for an unnamed alternative treatment… which led to him being comatosed.
Soon after his coma, Peterson contracted COVID-19, and was hospitalised again, with a CT scan showing his lungs were heavily affected. Despite this, his daughter maintained her stance underplaying the severity of Covid, claiming at the time:
“the meds dad was put on to treat it seemed to be harsher than the actual virus…
“I’m sorry to anyone who has experienced a worse case of the virus or who has lost anyone to it. That’s miserable. So is suicide from lockdown anxiety and lifelong neuroticism from children growing up in a lockdown though.
“Perhaps if we focused on making people healthier the world wouldn’t be so screwed up by a virus that doesn’t really kill healthy people… yikes, I went there.”
It is hard to see much difference between the claims of the Petersons and those of the various pseudoscience proponents who have told us that the real problem is that our lifestyles and our diets are unhealthy, and if we just eat right our bodies will heal themselves, without the kind of conventional medicine that “kills more people than it saves”.
Undeterred fanbase
Despite this litany of questionable assertions and pseudoscientific health claims, Jordan Peterson continues to enjoy a dedicated fanbase who praise him for his clear thinking, his logic and his reason. The podcast in which Peterson interviewed Bret Weinstein was viewed more than 1.1m times in just over a month, with comments that expressed universal and effusive praise. Commenters highlighted the exemplary humbleness of both men, explaining how much they “respect Jordan’s ability to honestly convey emotion in a honest way yet still stay true to a logic string of thoughts that deliver a profound truth”. This, we must bear in mind, is a conversation in which Peterson casually hypothesised that hospitals kill more people than they save, caveated with an unconvincing “I could be wrong, but I also could be right”, to which Bret Weinstein responded: “the fact that it’s even plausible is stunning”, before confidently explaining that Covid was developed in a lab in Wuhan and leaked.
This, I think, exemplifies the appeal of figures like Peterson and Weinstein – they are praised not for their insight, but for the well-packaged illusion of insight; the confident, self-assured tone in delivering ideas that would be rejected if they weren’t masked by charisma and intellectual theatre. Many of Peterson’s positions – at least the ones that don’t promote outright pseudoscience – essentially act as delivery mechanisms for a conservative Christian worldview to an audience who would normally reject those views.
There will be fans of Peterson who, upon reading this, will say these criticisms are unfair, because the Professor addresses exactly these concerns in a four-hour interview here or an eight-part lecture series there, and if only I would have listened to all of those my criticisms would fall away. Unsurprisingly, such a standard is rarely set for assessing Peterson’s claims – indeed, his initial rise to prominence came on the back of his insistence that he would willingly go to prison rather than abide by a Canadian equality law. As many lawyers pointed out at the time, this was nothing but a strawman: even a cursory glance at the law in question showed Peterson was misrepresenting its implications, and exaggerating its threat. There is a deep irony in the fact that Peterson’s rise to fame was powered by his – and his fans’ – refusal to put an idea they disagreed with into honest context.
Evaluating claims in their proper context is a crucial part of reasonable skepticism, and an integral part of avoiding strawman arguments; however, even this principle has its limits, as demanding an unreasonable level of context can be a tactic to deflect fair criticism. You don’t need to have read every one of David Icke’s books to know the world is not run by lizards, and you don’t have to have read the Koran to know that Muhammad didn’t really ascend into heaven on a winged horse, and you don’t have to have studied with homeopaths before you can say that diluting substances makes them weaker not stronger. The burden of proof lies with those making the claim, and when it’s people other than Jordan Peterson making the claims, his fans are usually able to recognise that.
Many books and websites over the years have given accounts of spontaneous human combustion (SHC). But how many of these reports of people spontaneously bursting into flames and being consumed in such a short time are true?
One often repeated story is of Mary Carpenter, a woman who suddenly burst into flames in the late 1930s in a cabin cruiser on the Norfolk Broads in Eastern England. The story has appeared many times since the 1940s, although the victim was not named until at least the 1970s, and as recently as 2019 an article in the British newspaper The Sun gave a brief account of the case.
I first became aware of the case in the early 1990s in a children’s book about the unexplained whose title I cannot remember. The author or authors referred to “Mrs Carpenter”, who was on a boating holiday with her husband and children in 1938 when blue smoke suddenly emitted from her body and she burst into flames – according to the book she was subsequently reduced to ashes in minutes. Although the book was aimed at children, it had a rather disturbing illustration of a youngish woman lying on the floor engulfed in flames while her husband and two young boys look on in horror.
Mary Carpenter’s inexplicable fiery death in a cabin cruiser wasn’t the only case of spontaneous human combustion reported in 1938 – elsewhere that year, Phyliss Newcombe was said burst into flames for no apparent reason at a dance in Chelmsford in South-Eastern England, as researcher Jan Willem Nienhuys investigated in 2001. By studying newspaper accounts of the event, the research revealed that Phyllis’s dress had almost certainly been accidentally set alight by a discarded match. Although many printed and online accounts variously refer to Phyllis as becoming “a charred corpse” or even “pile of ashes”, Nienhuys concluded that the reports from 1938 revealed she was actually badly burnt on her legs, arms and chest, and died nearly three weeks later of pneumonia caused by burn-related sepsis.
A much-repeated and often altered story
Like the inaccurate story of Phyllis Newcombe’s death, sources give very similar details about Mary Carpenter. The earliest account by Eric Frank Russell in the journal Tomorrow (1942), who states that the Liverpool Echo on 30th July 1938 carried a story referring to a “woman burnt to death on motor cruiser on the Norfolk Broads”, but he does not mention her name. Russell quoted a police officer in the article who stated “’Apparently her clothes caught fire’”, with Russell continuing “but (the officer) couldn’t suggest how”. Russell repeated the same story in the Fate magazine in 1950 and in his book Great World Mysteries in 1957, giving exactly the same details and the identical quote from the police officer. On both other occasions, Russell didn’t provide the name of the victim.
In 1964, American author Allen W. Eckert gave details on the case in True, a men’s magazine. Unlike Russell, who attributed the woman’s death to unexplained burning on a cabin cruiser, Eckert claimed that the victim, who remained unnamed, was “paddling about in a small boat with her husband and children” before adding a horrific reference to her being “engulfed by flame and quickly reduced to a mound of ugly ash. The terrified family was unhurt, and the wooden boat undamaged”. Three years later, Vincent H. Gaddis referred to the case in Mysterious Fires and Lights and gave exactly the same details as Russell, but adding that the still-unnamed victim “was… reduced to a charred corpse” rather than being turned to ash, and as with Russell he quotes the officer investigating the death. Ivan Sanderson, another American author who founded the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, summarised the case in his 1972 book Explaining The Unexplained, simply repeating the same information as Eckert.
It was in 1976 that a British author, Michael Harrison, gave an account in his book Fire From Heaven that specifically dealt with the subject of spontaneous human combustion. It appears to be possibly the first time the victim is named as Mary Carpenter. As with Gaddis, Harrison states that Mary was “reduced to a charred corpse” and makes the point that despite fire-causing substances being present on the boat and this “could have provided the authorities with a ready-made excuse…they admitted the inexplicable nature of the tragedy”. Once again, the quote from the policeman is mentioned about how he had no knowledge of why Mary was consumed by flames.
John Allan (1981) made a typically brief mention of the case in Mysteries: A Book of Beliefs, repeating the same part of the story as Gaddis where Mary was “reduced to ashes in front of her husband and children”, while The Reader’s Digest Mysteries of the Unexplained (1982) repeats Harrison’s description of the case as well as the now so-often quoted words from the police officer, believing Mary’s clothes had somehow caught fire, but he couldn’t explain why.
The same year, a rather sensational American book, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Book of Chance, written by Robert Crew and David Miller, whose cover states “A world of fascinating facts about risks, breaks, quirks, freaks, miracles and coincidence – the winners and losers of the game”, included the story, changing the location to Norfolk, Virginia and once again claiming Mary was “reduced to ashes”. The book mentions that she was aboard a boat, with no details about the type of boat where the mysterious fire occurred.
Jenny Randles and Peter Hough were to give a summary of Mary Carpenter’s death in their 1992 book Spontaneous Human Combustion, and as well as the usual brief details all writers previously covered on the case, they quoted Harrison without examining any reports further. A second book to mention the case in the 1990s was again a rather sensational publication, and was aimed at children: Beyond Belief in 1993, which was based on a television series produced by the American children’s TV channel Nickelodeon. In this version of the story, the writers add that Mary was “sipping a drink in the lounge when suddenly she burst into flames”. While Crew and Miller mistakenly give the location of Mary Carpenter’s mysterious death as Norfolk, Virginia, Nigel Blundell in Fact or Fiction?: Supernatural, which was published in 1996, wrote that “an American, Mrs Mary Carpenter, was holidaying with her family aboard a boat on the English Norfolk Broads when she suddenly burst into flames and was reduced to ashes”.
It is clear from all these sources that writers on the subject of alleged SHC deaths were in a habit of copying quotes and adding or changing information. The Carpenter case is also mentioned quite frequently online, the website steemit.com discusses the incident among other well-documented Spontaneous Human Combustion cases and refers to Mary as “Mary J. Carpenter”, the first time an initial had been added to her name. The website states Ivan Sanderson investigated the case, although it appears from studying Sanderson’s 1972 book, that he simply copied the information Eckert wrote a few years before and like Eckert and Sanderson, the article continues by stating the gruesome claim that Mary was “reduced to ashes”.
With writers either claiming Mary was reduced to ashes or was left a charred corpse, it is important to note that the former would be impossible in a confined space such as the interior of a cabin cruiser. Nienhuys (2001) refers to how “an adult human body can’t burn within five minutes”, as was claimed in the fictional account of “Maybelle Andrews”, the story being based on the numerous writers’ distorted facts on the Phyllis Newcombe case. Notably, the length of time between when Mary was said to have suddenly caught fire and then allegedly reduced to ash was also said to be quick, but no specific duration was ever given. Nienhuys continues by explaining:
because of the short time involved, it would require a very high temperature, but the total heat of the human body is such that the effect would be similar to burning ten litres (or quarts) of gasoline within five minutes… all people present would have died of a combination of lack of oxygen and smoke poisoning.
Certainly, this fact makes the claim Mary Carpenter was turned to ashes by the mysterious fire highly implausible, given the fact her husband and children were said to be unhurt and such an intense fire would also cause damage to the boat, despite the numerous claims that the vessel escaped unharmed.
Mary Carpenter’s real name and the true story revealed
In 1995, SHC researcher Larry Arnold mentioned in his book Ablaze: The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion a fact that every other writer who discussed the case wasn’t aware of. The victim’s name was not Mary Carpenter or anything similar, and he stated:
a look through the Liverpool Echo (July 30, 1938) would have shown…the victim is Maude Comissiong and not a Mrs. Carpenter.
Arnold also makes the point that Maude Comissiong was incorrectly named by a number of sources, including Gaddis, Reader’s Digest Mysteries and Randles and Hough. Arnold’s account of the case gives Maude Comissiong’s age as fifty-four, but he still repeats the story that “unexpectedly, before her family’s eyes, she quickly burned to a charred corpse”, and as with all the authors who mistakenly named the victim, or who didn’t give her name at all, he once again gives the familiar quote from the policeman who suggested the only explanation could be her clothes catching fire, even though he couldn’t suggest any form of ignition.
The truth revealed
It appears Arnold didn’t read the Liverpool Echo article in detail as studying it reveals a very different story.
The newspaper article dated July 30, 1938 shows that Maude Comissiong, who came from Leicester in Central England, was on holiday with her husband Albert – it doesn’t mention any children. Given that Maude’s age was fifty-four, she would have almost definitely had adult children by this time. Reading the article shows that her husband wasn’t even present when the fire started, as it states:
Albert Comissiong said he left his wife resting on the cruiser while he went into Great Yarmouth with friends.
It is clear from this statement that the boat had been moored on the Norfolk Broads at the time the fire happened.
The newspaper mentions the fact that Maude Comissiong had opened an oil stove and had planned to make tea, and that she also opened a can of paraffin. It appears likely that it was late afternoon due to the fact she was going to use the heater for tea. Despite the numerous references to a police officer not understanding how the fire happened, the reference to an officer in the article actually states “a police officer said apparently Mrs. Comissiong’s clothes caught fire as she made tea” and makes no mention whatsoever of the officer being puzzled about how Maude was burnt.
The article also states that Maude Comissiong died in hospital, the coroner’s verdict was accidental death and that “two Sheffield holiday-makers, Ronald Cutting and Bertram Donovan, described how they heard Mrs. Comissiong scream and then saw her in flames on the cruiser”. The conclusion of how her clothes caught fire does seem rather vague, however, with the investigation concluding that “somehow she lit a piece of paper and the paraffin ignited”.
Three almost identical articles in other newspapers provide more information. The Bradford Observer, the Nottingham Journal and the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette all reported the story on July 30 1938 and covered the tragic accident in more detail than the Liverpool Echo. The articles clearly state that Maude “was lighting an oil stove in the yacht when a two-gallon tin of paraffin became ignited”. It appears that as she was lighting the stove, a piece of paper next to it caught fire and ignited the paraffin in the open tin. Fire accidents involving paraffin, or kerosene as it is also known, were all too common in the 1930s. All three articles refer to Maude as being “burned about the neck, face, chest, and arms”. The reports in the Nottingham Journal and the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette also refer to the other people on holiday “who wrapped her in blankets until the arrival of the ambulance”. The newspapers even mention of the name of the boat: Perseus.
These reports also state that Maude had died the day before, 29 July 1938, although they don’t state how long she was in hospital, or the exact cause of death. However, because it was stated that the coroner’s report was given on 29 July, it seems highly unlikely that she had died on the same day. As with Phyllis Newcombe, who died nearly three weeks after the Chelmsford fire from pneumonia brought on by sepsis, it is possible Maude Comissiong could have died as a consequence of her severe burns. In the days before antibiotics, both sepsis and pneumonia often sadly proved fatal.
Examination of the British Newspaper Archive website gives no more reports on the death of Maude Comissiong and a search of the site shows no information on any other fire-related deaths on the Norfolk Broads and certainly no deaths by mysterious or unexplained fires on a motor cruiser or any other boat.
Although the four newspaper articles show the victim’s first name to be spelled Maude, the National Death Index for England and Wales shows her name recorded as Maud Comissiong and the website myheritage.com lists her full name as Maud Elizabeth Comissiong. While there were two spellings of the name Maud/Maude, it seems possible that the writers of the newspaper articles could have misread the name Maud E. Comissiong and took the letter “E” of her middle initial to be part of her first name. Myheritage.com also shows her surname to have been Crossley at birth, she married Albert Comissiong in 1908 and they had two children together. The national indexes show Albert to have remarried in 1942, four years after his wife’s tragic death.
More inaccuracies and complete fiction
When researching the case, I found evidence that other alleged and well-documented cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion turned out to be wildly inaccurate or totally fictitious and Nienhuys (2001) makes a similar statement in his study that revealed the truth in the Phyllis Newcombe case. One particular incident that has been mentioned frequently in books and websites is the death of 11-month-old Peter Seaton, who was said to have suddenly caught fire in his cot in London in January 1939.
The Reader’s Digest Mysteries (1982) refer to the case on the same page as the “Mary Carpenter” myth – their horrifying description mentions that “a visitor, Harold Huxstep heard screams of terror. Rushing upstairs to Peter’s room, Mr Huxstep opened the door to face an inferno of leaping flames that flung him back across the hall”, and tragically Peter’s life couldn’t be saved. It was also mentioned that after thoroughly examining the bedroom, no source of ignition could be found and that, typically with many alleged SHC deaths, most of the furniture had not undergone any burn damage.
The Belfast Telegraph on 5 January 1939 shows a very different picture. The blaze that killed Peter Seaton actually happened on Christmas Day 1938 and far from being unexplained, the fire had started when his foster mother had left an electric fire on in the bedroom throughout the night due to the very cold weather. Peter wasn’t the only victim of the blaze, as the report mentions a 24-year-old woman called Dorothy Lindsell, who was injured while escaping and who died four days later in hospital. The Scotsman reported on 27 December that Dorothy “was seriously injured and also had burns”.
It turned out that the witness named Harold Huxstep did exist as he is quoted in the Nottingham Journal on 4 January 1939. After mentioning how he couldn’t make it into Peter’s bedroom due to the intense blaze, and how his hair also caught fire, Harold stated that after Dorothy jumped from the window, “she hit the edge of the blanket held out for her and fell into the basement”. The information given by The Reader’s Digest referring to Harold Huxstep rushing upstairs to Peter’s bedroom is however false, as the Birmingham Daily Post on the same day gave the location of the room as the “ground floor”.
Another case that was alleged to have occurred by a number of authors, including Randles and Hough, was that of Euphemia Johnson in 1922, who lived in Sydenham, South London. Many websites also refer to this case where sixty-eight-year-old Euphemia, who lived alone, was said to have returned from shopping and after making a cup of tea in her kitchen, when she burst into flames for no reason. What is odd about this incident is that Euphemia’s remains were said to have been found reduced to calcinated bones and her clothes suffered no fire damage whatsoever.
Once again, Randles and Hough quoted Harrison (1976) for the source, although his book reveals he had studied a book titled Lo!,which was written by Paranormal investigator Charles Fort, who gave his name to the Fortean Times. Harrison quoted Fort by commenting that Euphemia was:
consumed so by fire that on the floor of her room there was only a pile of calcinated bones… The fire, if in an ordinary sense it was fire, must have been of the intensity of a furnace…
Harrison discussed the fire in more detail than Randles and Hough, and he included the reference to the unburnt clothes. In alleged SHC cases where the remains of a victim have been found, their clothes have been completely destroyed by burning. Surely, the intense burning would have consumed all of Euphemia Johnson’s clothing. In the case of John Irving Bentley, a retired doctor who was found burnt to ashes with just one leg remaining at his home in Pennsylvania in 1966, no traces of his clothing remained.
The death records for England and Wales contain no listing for a Euphemia Johnson aged in her late sixties who died during the 1920s. Examining British newspapers from the period around 1922 makes no mention of an elderly woman who died in an unexplained fire in Sydenham or any other part of London at any point in the early 1920s, or in the later part of the decade. One young woman with the same name died aged eighteen in Birkenhead in north-western in England in 1922, but the British Newspaper Archive had no mention of her. Another Euphemia Johnson died in Alnwick in north-eastern England in 1916 aged twenty-six, although again she has no mention whatsoever in newspapers. Widening the search of death records into the 1930s, a Euphemia Johnson died in Hampstead in north London in 1935, although she was aged seventy-six or seventy-seven and her death wasn’t even reported in any newspapers.
However, by examining Charles Fort’s book Lo!, published in 1931, it is clear that Fort used a reference from Forensic Medicine and Toxicology by Dr Dixon Mann, which was the sixth edition published in 1922. It appears possible Harrison took the date of 1922 for his description of Euphemia Johnson’s death. Mann’s account of an unexplained fire death, where he doesn’t name the victim, differs considerably to the Euphemia Johnson story. Mann refers to a report from The British Medical Journal in 1905 where a Dr Archer investigated the death of “an elderly woman of very intemperate habits, who was a large consumer of all kinds of spirits”. The article refers to how the fire victim’s remains were:
a small pyramidal heap of ashes, on top of which was a skull… found on the floor in front of the chair. All the bones were completely bleached and brittle, every soft particle of tissue had been consumed.
What was noted was the fact that a tablecloth three feet from where the woman’s remains were found was unburnt, along with all the furniture. Harrison’s account of Euphemia Johnson’s death, however, places the tablecloth only “nine inches” from her remains.
Arnold referred to the unnamed woman’s death in his 1996 book, however he gives the correct date rather than giving the account of Euphemia Johnson. However, Arnold’s account contains an error where he mistakes the word “chintz”, which was the material the chair covering was made from, for “chair”. Importantly, the research by Dr Archer makes no mention of undamaged clothes, and it is uncertain where Harrison got this particular reference from.
One other point made in Archer’s research is the fact that the upper walls and ceiling were burnt, but in a case where the victim is consumed by such localised burning, it is natural for a ceiling and upper walls to become scorched. The undamaged tablecloth in this case is not unusual, for the smouldering effects of a localised fire can leave many nearby objects and even floors unburnt.
A search of the British Newspaper Archive suggests that the victim discussed by Dr Archer was Sarah Morley, an elderly widow from the village of Hockwold cum Wilton in Norfolk in Eastern England. Sarah’s remains were found on 24th May 1902 by a policeman who had noticed the blackened windows and curtains and the front room full of smoke. When entering the house he was unable to find Sarah upstairs, but when he went into the living room, he found her remains in front of a chair. The 72-year-old woman had been reduced to bones, with her skull on top.
A neighbour had last seen Sarah alive the night before, where she was reading by the light of a candle. It appears likely Sarah had suffered a fatal heart attack and her body was set alight by the candle, which led to the destruction of her body by what is known as the wick effect, where a person’s body fat acts like a candle. Harrison created a horror story by changing the victim’s name and the location of her death, and bringing the date forward by twenty years. Crucially, he also added the horrific story that while the victim was reduced to ash, her clothes remained unburnt.
It is clear from research that writers of mysteries and unexplained phenomena have for many decades been in the habit of taking an account of a person who died tragically as a result of a fire and transforming the details of their death into a horror story, where by distorting facts, in some cases altering names and creating horrific images such as a person being reduced to ash, they create an unexplained and terrifying myth that the unfortunate person caught fire for no reason. With the alleged case of Euphemia Johnson, an unnamed woman who died in a mysterious fire, not only was she given a false name and transformed into the subject of a bizarre horror story where she burnt to ash with her clothes unburnt, but the location and date of her death were altered as well.
Maud Comissiong, Peter Seaton and Phyllis Newcombe, who all died of burn-related injuries in incidents that can be rationally explained, have sadly been turned distastefully into victims of spontaneous human combustion in horror story myths created by writers who did not care to check facts in order to create their frightening accounts. In some cases, of course, the victims’ names also proved to be incorrect, Maud Comissiong being a notable example with the writers’ transformation of her into “Mary Carpenter”, while in the case of “Euphemia Johnson”, it has been found that she did not even exist and that there was no report of anyone dying in the horrific way her death by mysterious burning was so graphically described.
It is important to consider the truth in their deaths and not to believe any inaccurate or sensationalised accounts in books or on websites unless these stories are thoroughly checked in sources contemporary to the time the tragedies occurred. Sadly, the horror stories continue to circulate on the Internet in the 21st century, so readers need to be cautious without checking the truth first.
Critically, these people should be remembered as people, and not simply as victims of fire, who over a long period have been either accurately or inaccurately named, and have featured so often in the half-fictional horror stories so many authors have created for many decades.
References
The following newspaper articles were used:
Burnt to Death at Wilton. Norwich Mercury, 31 May 1902
Woman in Flames: Tragic End To Boating Holiday: Liverpool Echo, 30 July 1938
Yachting Tragedy. Bradford Observer, 30 July 1938
On Yachting Holiday: Woman Receives Fatal Burns. Nottingham Journal, 30 July 1938
Yachting Tragedy. Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 30 July 1938
In 1886 a gardener living in Austin Texas was issued a U.S. patent for “a new and Improved Fumigating Composition for Preserving and Purifying Purposes.” The elixir was said to “kill all fungus, germs, parasites, and other matter producing fermentation or decay.”
Despite the fact his patent did not mention human consumption, the gardener, William Radam, was convinced he had invented the remedy to all the ills of mankind.
Image from: Ricks Bottle Room
He was motivated, in part, by desire to cure his own malaria and by the early death of two of his children. He had no particular education in medicine or pharmacology but was inspired by the foundational research of scientists like Pasteur and Koch in formulating germ theory. Radam extrapolated contemporary science to conclude that all disease was due to microbes. Fortunately for mankind, he had created a universal antiseptic; the cure to all disease.
He sold the concoction as “Radam’s Microbe Killer.” If his claim to “cure all diseases” was extravagant, his trademark was equally audacious: An image of a man in a business suit wielding a club, prevailing in mortal combat with death, depicted as a scythe-wielding skeleton.
I first learned of Radam and his microbe killer through my hobby of collecting antique medical artifacts. The highly-prized Radam’s signature bottle is boldly embossed with : “GERMS BACTERIA OR FUNGUS DESTROYER” and the humble slogan “CURES ALL DISEASES” as well as the death-match between our club-wielding hero and the grim reaper.
Image from: Ricks Bottle Room
He made the case for his remedy in his book, Microbes – The Microbe Killer. The book lays out his interpretation of germ theory, complete with numerous photomicrographs of microbes. He explains his rationale and process for concocting the Microbe Killer formula.
He has much to criticise about the contemporary medicine of his day. Chapter 7 is entitled “Failure of Medical Science”. Not surprisingly, he attributes all the failure of the practice of medicine to the fact that they lacked the vision to embrace his singular philosophy of disease and cure:
All medicines that are employed to – day, whether inorganic or organic , should be antiseptics — that is, agents capable of preventing fermentation .
He was not optimistic that mainstream medicine would soon become “woke” to his enlightened view of medicine:
I have no fear that the many able, learned, and progressive men that the medical profession numbers among its members will read these strictures as applying to them.
The book is replete with testimonials of miraculous results, including his personal rejuvenation:
Six months after I had taken the first dose of microbe – killer I felt myself entirely cured of the rheumatism. There were no more pains whatever of any kind. The fever had also entirely gone, and the piles were gradually disappearing and were almost well. I then weighed one hundred and forty – four pounds, and had the appearance presented in the picture from a photo graph. My weight now is two hundred and five pounds.
Mr. Radam’s concoction was an international commercial success. There were 17 factories across the U.S. He became a wealthy man. His success enabled him to move from Austin, Texas to a Fifth Avenue mansion in Manhattan.
William Radam: A man of his time
Although no one scientist can be given sole credit for germ theory, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were heavy hitters. Pasteur’s seminal work on the subject took place mostly in 1860’s. By the time Radam patented his Microbe Killer in 1886, germ theory was becoming established science, and was in the public’s consciousness. Although germ theory had great explanatory power, therapeutic victories were mostly unrealised. Penicillin would not be discovered for another four decades.
Radam was a layperson when it came to advanced biology, but he was able to “talk-the-talk” of the relevant science with sufficient confidence that he could persuade the lay public. Public awareness of germ theory and Radam’s ability to speak and write credibly on the subject likely contributed to the acceptance and success of the Microbe Killer. Whether Radam’s promiscuous interpretation of germ theory was sincere belief or a marketing strategy is a matter for speculation.
The other relevant fact of the era was the lack of regulation for medications. The government’s first earnest attempt to regulate drugs was the The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. This regulated truth in labeling of ingredients, but had no authority over safety, efficacy, or therapeutic claims.
Critics and skeptics
Despite the lack of a legal regulatory framework over quack medicine, Dr Radam did have critics and legal challenges. R. G. Eccles, a physician and pharmacist, analysed the Microbe Killer solution and concluded it was water laced with small amounts of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid. Radam hired the famous Robert Ingersoll as his legal counsel. There were libel suits and countersuits back and forth between Radam and Eccles. Each had successes and failures in the courts, but in the court of public opinion Eccles academic exposure of Radam was no match for Radam’s salesmanship.
Radam died in 1902, but the company continued successfully for many years under the ownership of his widow. His business was one of many hawking worthless remedies during this time.
In1912 legislation was passed as a remedy to the weaknesses of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. Known as the Sherley Amendment, the new regulation prohibited labeling with “false and fraudulent” therapeutic claims. The Microbe Killer was one of the first medicines prosecuted under the new law. In 1913 a jury found that the Microbe Killer violated the Sherley Amendment. The government destroyed a shipment of the remedy confiscated from a rail car, signaling the beginning of the end Mr Radam’s company.
New Science, old story
The story of the rise of Radam’s Microbe killer is not just an interesting story, it is an archetype for a narrative replayed in modern history. A budding new science, a public primed for anticipated “modern miracles”, and a vacuum in regulation creates fertile ground for charlatans to flourish.
Flash forward over 100 years. Stem cell research provides a window to greater understanding of developmental biology. The ability to manipulate and harness stem cells opens the possibility of new therapeutic modalities for a multitude of human maladies. The hype around stem cells has create not just hope, but the expectation of miraculous cures.
Despite steady progress, stem cells have not yet ended human disease or suffering. In fact, rigorously validated stem cell treatments are few. Despite limited evidence, a for-profit stem cell industry has grown and flourished.
A commercial stem cell clinic in Florida garnered unwanted attention due to a 2017 New England Journal of Medicine article entitled “Vision Loss after Intravitreal Injection of Autologous “Stem Cells” for AMD.” The article described tragic complications and loss of vision among 3 women treated for age-related macular degeneration. The specific Florida clinic, U.S. Stem Cell, was not named in the article, but was quickly identified by reporters, as well as lawyers for some of the patients.
Kristen Comella, the chief scientific officer for the clinic at the time was a vocal evangelist for stem cell treatments. In a video interview, she is articulate, passionate, and charismatic. Her interview responses strike many of the same notes as did Mr. Radam in his book. She is conversant in the language of stem cell science and able to communicate credibly on the subject. Like Mr Radam she is expansive in extrapolating the benefits of stem cell therapies far beyond established science.
There are lots of anecdotes, including personal testimonials of her own response to stem cells. There seems to be no condition or route of administration unexplored. She testified to personally receiving stem cells injected intravenously for general health, injected in her joints for athletic performance, injected in her vaginal wall for stress incontinence, and injected in her clitoris for sexual rejuvenation. She has treated multiple family members including her father, her husband, and her teenage son, the latter of whom received intravenous stem cells as a treatment for acne.
There are emotional anecdotes about near miraculous results in patients afflicted with truly tragic diseases. She expresses exuberant confidence in stem cell treatment for an astonishing variety of conditions, including: arthritis, degenerative disc disease, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer, ALS, Parkinson disease, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, COPD, myocardial infarction, and kidney disease.
She has some very strong views on stem cells for traumatic brain injury, and opines that professional (American) football players should receive stem cell infusions as “standard of care”:
Every Monday morning after their game on Sunday they should be getting a stem cell treatment. This should be standard of care…it can prevent the damage and the scar tissue from forming in the brain.
She also believed that, in general:
“Any organ or tissue inside the body that needs healing to have going on can be used with these cells because we are going to promote healing inside that tissue.”
It’s not quite as pithy as Mr. Radam’s “cures all diseases,” but a kindred sentiment.
Comella, like Radam before her, is critical of the medical establishment for its failure to share her expansive embrace of stem cell therapies.
U.S. Stem Cell specialised in use of stem cells derived from the patients’ own liposuction, but there are hundreds of for-profit clinics in the USA peddling all manner of stem cell treatments. A report based on a systematic internet survey published in 2016 discovered 570 direct-to-consumer stem cell clinics in the USA. These clinics offer treatments with so-called stem cells from a variety of sources for a highly diverse spectrum of conditions.
The commercial stem cell industry operates within a gray-area in the US regulatory environment. In general, the commercial stem cell industry claimed that they were exempt from policies of US Food and Drug Association (FDA) used to regulate drugs and biologic agents.
The FDA issued clarifications of its policies and issued blanket warnings about commercial stem cells, but mostly avoided direct action against individual stem cell providers. That pattern was broken in 2017, when they inspected the aforementioned U.S. Stem Cell clinic in Florida. In a subsequent report, the FDA enumerated a number of specific violations of standards. They declared that the treatment the clinic was selling met the regulatory definition of a drug. As such, the clinic was engaged in unauthorised use of an unapproved drug. The clinic protested and defied the FDA. Ultimately the FDA prevailed through the courts. In 2019 a federal judge upheld the FDA ruling that the clinic was in violation of the law.
After the intervention of the federal judiciary, U.S. Stem Cell finally backed away from their liposuction-derived stem cell treatments. Dr. Comella and U.S. Stem Cell subsequently parted ways. Although the assertions of the FDA and rulings of the court were narrow and specific to the practices of this particular clinic in Florida, I believe these decisions did motivate other stem cell clinics to reassess their own practices and claims. There is still a thriving commercial stem cell industry in the U.S., but they have largely backed away from liposuction-derived stem cell treatments that attracted the attention of the FDA and the federal court.
The parallels between Dr. Radam and the modern commercial stem cell industry are striking.
An emerging science captures the attention of the public. Expectations for medical breakthroughs are high.
The slow advance of science cannot keep pace with expectation and hunger for new and better treatments.
A few, representing themselves as the vanguard of science, make seductive claims, far exceeding the bounds of contemporary evidence-based science.
The regulators struggle to keep pace in the new frontier, leaving the public vulnerable.
William Radam’s remedy of yesteryear and today’s commercial stem cell industry are instructive cases, but not the only examples of this paradigm. In the latter half of the 19th century there were numerous devices promising to harness the power of the then “modern miracle” of electricity. Look up Boyd’s Battery and Davis and Kidders Magneto-Electric Machine as fine examples.
In the end, germ theory did greatly diminish human disease and suffering through antisepsis, antibiotics, and vaccines. Despite his lofty claims and bogus remedy, Mr Radam contributed nothing. It remains to be seen if the enthusiasm of stem cell treatment “early adopters” is prescient or premature.
I have written more extensively on U.S. Stem Cell and the tragic results of the patients treated for macular degeneration in a 3 part series at Science Based Medicine: part 1, part 2, and part 3.
Consumer Information on Stem Cells
The International Society for Stem Cell Research has excellent information for consumers on their website.
The Niche is a blog run by stem cell researcher Paul Knoepfler, who is an advocate for ethical stem cell practices.
These days, of course, we have the internet for people to make political and personal accusations at one another, but graffiti, stencils and stickers are a persistent presence on our streets, as a year spent in lockdown almost entirely in the Liverpool City Region has demonstrated to me.
A lot of the graffiti is exactly as you might expect, from declarations of romantic love and support for Black Lives Matter, to accusations of someone or other being a ‘grass’, and exhortations for Boris Johnson to do anatomically improbable things to himself.
But there is a different sort of graffiti that seems particularly prevalent at the moment, and a lot of it comes back to conspiracy theories, magical thinking and pseudoscience. Some of it is straightforward, like the concerns about 5G expressed here:
Conspiracies about 5G are as commonplace as they are ridiculous, but they do have serious negative real-world effects, including many dozens of arson attacks on telecoms infrastructure and masts.
Another common sight in parts of Liverpool is the repeated graffiti encouraging people to be a “lightworker” – which apparently refers to people “who vibrate on a naturally high frequency, are able to read others with ease, and have a life’s purpose that goes beyond mere personal growth.”
Harmless nonsense, perhaps, but searching for the term on the internet quickly brings you to sites relating to the Law of Attraction and The Secret – the idea that you are magically responsible for everything that happens to you, be it good or bad – a pernicious idea that leads to victim blaming and even cancer sufferers thinking themselves responsible for their illness.
Although all of the pictures in this article are from around the Liverpool City Region, the people of Merseyside are not unusually credulous, despite the rise of the Cosmic Scouser and Cosmic Scally stereotype. Given Liverpool’s football fans were a victim of an actual conspiracy involving both the media and the authorities, if any city had a right to be suspicious, it would be Liverpool – but a healthy dose of scepticism in the city remains, and this can also be found in local graffiti:
As it turns out, one home of online scepticism towards the city’s most famous graffiti artist, Sine Missione, can be found on the LFC forum itself.
Sine Missione, for the uninitiated reader, creates stencils or vinyls that can be found on the telephone boxes and fibre green telecoms cabinets across the city.
His work consists of generally uplifting and progressive messages, often quotes from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Che Guevara, Mohammed Ali and Mahatma Gandhi about teaching peace, being the change you want to see in the world, opposing racism, and so forth. His intentions certainly seem to be positive; aside from the graffiti (and associated t-shirts) he is well-known for his community involvement and litter-picking.
The problem, as the forum members at The Kop have identified, is that Sine Missione’s 18k-follower Instagram account has featured a lot of much nastier stuff, from antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros and BLM, to vaccine skepticism, 5G and even QAnon.
While I don’t believe that brightening up Liverpool’s drab communications infrastructure is necessarily a terrible thing to do, it does seem to be the artist’s intention for people to go online and find out more about the ideas he espouses; indeed some of his stencils encourage people to do their own research:
In a city that was ravaged during the Thatcher era, has seen unrivalled levels of cuts to central government funding in the last ten years, and where parts of local City Council functions have now been taken over by central government following an ongoing corruption enquiry, there is a real danger caused by the spread of such conspiracy theories during times as difficult as these for Liverpool. Now is not the time for people to ignore public health messages, or to start believing in conspiracy theories that scapegoat certain groups for the very real and complicated problems that exist today.
Beyond the dangers of spreading anti-science ideas and making people doubt the need to follow government and NHS advice during a global pandemic, there is a real danger that people could be sucked into the far-right politics that are also involved in some of the causes and conspiracy theories that Sine Missione has shared online.
A concerned local resident, who did not wish to be named for this article, said:
“One of my main beefs with [Sine Missione] is that he went to do this litter clear-up thing and he got a mouthpiece from the Liverpool Echo and the Council, giving him a platform. And he’s publicising marches where you have Q[Anon] supporters, actual fascists, Trump fans, homophobes and people claiming Hollywood stars are drinking dead kids’ blood under a false Save The Children banner.
“It’s the crossover with the Plandemic crew, 15 months ago before this all kicked off it was about the 5G and now – there are actual fascists involved in that scene, and people attending – hippies and clean eating people and fascists all on the same marches, it opens up that database of people to them. Fascists use opportunities, and I think he’s being used.
“He has 18,000 followers, I don’t think all of them will take it seriously and act, but 180 of them…?”
Just as this has all come to a head, however, Sine Missione has suggested in a recent interview in The Face that he may be considering toning it down online and even moving – shockingly – to Manchester:
I’m going to try and sort out the way I am online… this is all people know me for now.
Even if he does stop the online conspiracist rantings and moves out of the city, it seems unlikely that Liverpool – or perhaps your own hometown, reader – will see an end to the use of graffiti, stickers and stencils to encourage people to seek out dangerous conspiracy theories online.
To take one example that looks to graffiti found beyond the region: the average person probably hasn’t heard of The Kalergi Plan, but antisemitic graffiti about it in Ireland might encourage someone to seek out this conspiracist fantasy-world on the internet.
This is fast becoming an intentional and planned way to spread these ideas, with the White Rose – an anti-vaccine group who don’t believe in the pandemic, but do believe in the Great Reset conspiracy theory – creating online hubs where you too can download a sticker, print it out and play your own part in spreading dangerous, nasty ideas, thereby continuing the cycle. These are now found all over Liverpool and beyond, from local GP practices to fast food outlets.
Would you want a side-order of dangerous conspiracy theories with your chicken burger box meal?
We all expect dentists and other healthcare professionals to practice in an evidence-based way and their patients’ best interests. Despite a lack of evidence for many interventions and several issues in applying evidence to clinical practice, this is mainly true. However, some dentists, willingly or not, actively promote and sell pseudoscientific and evidence-free treatment to their patients. While some of these interventions are relatively harm-free, others may be actively detrimental to your oral and general health.
Spotting these rogue practitioners and dubious remedies can be difficult for the layperson patient. So here’s a handy walkthrough of some of the more common red flags to look out for.
Holistic Dentistry
Let’s start with the basics. A ‘holistic dentist’ (sometimes also advertised as a ‘biological dentist’) often eschews accepted practice. They’ll almost certainly avoid placing amalgam fillings (which in itself is no bad thing), often advise against fluoride toothpaste, and may even try to steer you away from having root canal treatment. In some cases, they’ll even offer further ‘alternative’ services, such as a detox regime involving intravenous vitamin C.
This definition of holistic is very different to mine. I’d consider holistic healthcare to be bearing in mind our patients’ wants and needs during consultations and treatment – to treat them as a person and not just a set of teeth. This may be as complicated as understanding complex social, psychological or cultural needs that affect dental treatment, or simply remembering that their children have just left for university and asking how they’re getting on. Understanding how disease in the mouth can correlate with general ill-health is also acting holistically. This is to be encouraged. Scaremongering over fluoride, less so.
Ozone Therapy
Ozone is a powerful oxidising agent often used as an antimicrobial. In dentistry, it is either used in gaseous form, through the application of ozonated oils or even as an intravenous infusion. The idea is that ozone’s oxidising power will kill off any remaining bacteria wherever it’s applied (although I’m not quite sure how that’s supposed to work for IV O3). The research behind ozone therapy in dentistry isn’texactlygreat, and NICE (that’s the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the body that recommends what treatment should be available on the NHS, among other things) have decreed that it shouldn’t be used for the treatment of decay. Nevertheless, it’s still commonplace to see practitioners offer some form of ozone therapy to patients, once again often as part of a regime of treatments, each with minimal evidence to back them up.
Mercury Detox
Dental amalgam has been popular for over 200 years. It’s relatively cheap, easy to use and considered safe by the majority of the dental profession. Patients requesting removal of their old amalgam (silver) fillings are becoming more and more commonplace, usually for aesthetic reasons. But there’s a subset of people (dentists and patients) out there who are convinced that their fillings are poisoning them. Dental amalgam is an alloy consisting of around 50% mercury along with other metals, including copper, tin and zinc. Mercury-containing dental materials are slowly being reduced and phased out. Worldwide, the Minimata Treaty aims to reduce environmental pollution from mercury. Dental amalgams have traditionally contributed significantly to this pollution, often during cremation, and it’s this environmental concern that’s pushing the move away from the use of silver fillings.
That’s not to say that the health of patients isn’t a concern. In the UK, we’re already advised against placing silver fillings in under 15s, and pregnant patients. We know that mercury is released into the atmosphere whenever silver fillings are placed and removed, but as a general rule, the people most at risk are your dentist and their nurse. But that risk is generally small and mitigated by several measures, including the high-volume suction and even the use of rubber dam.
Most of us are pretty happy to remove old amalgams without a second thought. But there are some who feel that extra protocols are needed—specifically the SMART protocol for amalgam removal. Here, dentist, nurse and patient covered in enhanced PPE, rubber dam use is mandated, and an industrial extractor is used to remove any mercury vapour produced during the procedure. Patients are often given a cocktail of supplements after the procedure to chelate any mercury that may have entered the system.
Most dentists have traditionally scoffed at the SMART protocol, but in the time of COVID, the enhanced PPE and extraction units are now commonplace in surgery. These dentists certainly had a head start when it came to being pandemic ready. But a stopped clock is right twice a day after all.
Homeopathy
Finally, for now, our old friend homeopathy. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’re already aware of the ins and outs of homeopathic ‘medicine’, but in case you aren’t… Homeopathy is a mainstay of pseudoscientific alternative medical practice that uses ultra-dilute preparations of almostanythingyou can think of to treat many ailments. Often the remedies are so diluted that there isn’t even a single molecule of the final product’s original material.
Homeopathy in dentistry is usually limited to complementary therapy, which is to be used alongside ‘traditional’ dentistry rather than as a replacement for it. Even then, the recommendations are often somewhat questionable. Despite this, the use of homeopathy occasionally pops up in articles for well-respected journals.
The British Homeopathic Dental Association is a charity with the specific aims of promoting homeopathy and other complementary therapies within dentistry. Needless to say, homeopathy has no place in a modern healthcare profession, let alone to have a charitable organisation promoting its use. Here is yet another case of the Charity Commission overlooking pseudoscience, to the detriment of patients.
So there’s a quick run-through of a few of the most common things you’ll see in the world of ‘alternative dentistry.’ Look out for more of the same in the future.
Next week, people around the UK will take to the polls in a series of elections to determine who will be their local councilor, who will be their police and crime commissioner, and in some cases who will be their city’s mayor. London is one of those cities holding a mayoral election, as its people decide whether to stick with Labour’s Sadiq Khan – the candidate who replaced Boris Johnson in 2016 – or whether to choose one of the other available candidates.
Although Khan is the overwhelming favourite, Londoners could instead opt for the unfancied Conservative candidate Shaun Bailey, who is polling at around 29%; or they could put a check in the box of Green Party candidate Siân Berry or Lib Dem candidate Louisa Porritt, both of whom are polling at around 8%.
However, if quantity were the only metric which mattered, Londoners are arguably spoilt for choice, as they could vote for any one of the sixteen other candidates running. Among those are UKIP candidate Peter Gammons, an evangelist and pastor with a doctorate in Pastoral Psychology from Canon Theological Seminary in Florida, which has been described as “an establishment that is not governed by the US Department of Education and gives out ‘PhD’s after a maximum of 126 hours of work”.
On his website, Gammons claims to have spoken to “the largest crowd in history”, which is far from his most notable claim – here he is telling evangelist Sid Roth about the time he used the power of prayer to make a deaf wheelchair user hear and walk:
As recently as November Gammons explained that while he is not anti vaccines, he is “not prepared to be a guinea pig for a new untested vaccine” and “believes the risks of an untested vaccine are far greater than the risk of Covid-19”. Unlike Gammons, Londoners who decide not to get vaccinated can’t rely on a direct line to the Almighty as backup.
If neither the UKIP nor the former-UKIP candidate were sufficiently singular in their stance against political correctness, Londoners could vote for former actor Laurence Fox, whose “Reclaim Party” – funded by former Conservative donor Jeremy Hosking – is running on an anti-woke ‘PC gone mad’ platform. Fox is against COVID-19 restrictions and against the wearing of masks, and as recently as last month was discouraging people from taking the COVID-19 vaccine. Last week Fox explained that “There’s no need to “vaccinate” the healthy”.
However, when it comes to London mayoral candidates who have spread misinformation that undermines COVID-19 public health messaging, one candidate cannot be ignored: Brian Rose. Rose is something of a curiosity in the mayoral race, as polls have him at around 2%, but he has been consistently second favourite with the bookmakers for months.
Rose is the host of the prolific London REAL YouTube channel – since 2011, he’s posted more than 8,500 videos, many of which are snippets taken from longer interviews in which Rose sits down with a guest. Among the former interviewees are names that would be familiar to readers of The Skeptic, including Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Jon Ronson, and David Nutt. Alongside them, Rose interviews figures such as boxers, wrestlers, MMA fighters, athletes, rappers, comedians, cryptocurrency promoters, financial advisers and, occasionally, women. In over 2000 videos released within the last year, Brian interviews only three women: the actor Priyanka Chopra, psychotherapist Esther Perel, and Brian’s grandmother.
“…minimised by Brian Rose’s final comments to David Icke. In particular, after shaking hands Brian Rose said that David Icke had “amazing knowledge and amazing perspectives about what’s going on here”.
Earlier this month, body builder and subject of more than 100 London REAL videos Dorian Yates, explained that he pulled out of a live broadcast with Rose after being told he was not allowed to ask Rose about the funding of Digital Freedom Platform, or the complaints from customers of Rose’s self-improvement courses. According to Yates, Rose made it clear he was not to mention those topics during their interview, and could only talk about Rose’s mayoral campaign and policies. Rather than agree to be censored by Rose, Yates refused to take part.
These various candidates truly demonstrate a breadth of options for voters looking to elect a man who will stand alone (on a ballot with half a dozen similar candidates) against the forces of political correctness, censorship, vaccinations, and public health. Thankfully, there is a vanishingly small chance any of these candidates will enjoy more than a moment in the electoral spotlight, as voting intentions have consistently seen a substantial lead for Sadiq Khan, with a poll from earlier in the month showing that only UKIP’s Gammons registers as highly as 1%, while the remainder of the candidates make up 2% collectively.
Ready for another rabbit hole into conspiracy theory land? In my previous article about antisemitic conspiracy tropes, I referenced ‘Hoteps’ and their tumultuous relationship with the American right wing. Several readers mentioned this was their first time ever hearing about Hoteps, so I thought they deserved their own deep dive.
There are severalgoodexplainers available online, generally written from critical perspectives, so I decided to go directly to the source and analyze a four-hour conversation between the two Hotep individuals I mentioned in my previous article, Young Pharaoh and Hotep Jesus, and try to convey how they see themselves. Young Pharaoh made news in the US recently by getting disinvited from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) when it was revealed that he has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories, which appear to be a common part of Hotep narratives.
My initial goal was just to avoid treating Hoteps as a punchline, while also avoiding credulity towards their conspiracy-riddled narratives. Hoteps vividly illustrate how individuals who feel a lack of power and respect are more susceptible to conspiracy theories, whether that felt lack of power comes from the encroachment of social justice or an absence of social justice. As I listened though, a more concrete question drew my attention: why do these guys sound like Alex Jones?! That’s where the rabbit hole started.
First, some brief background. Hotep is an Egyptian word meaning “to be satisfied” or “at peace”. Davis interprets the concept as “the result of action in accord with maat [the proper order of the universe]”. While there is some debate over the origin of the modern usage of ‘Hotep’, it likely arises as a derogatory term for a sort of regressive, pan-African worldview that blends pseudohistory, afrofuturism, conspiracy theories, and heteronormative gender roles into a path to liberation. Though it is generally used as a derogatory term, there are individuals who self-identify as Hotep. During the chat, Hotep Jesus mention both the website Hotep Nation and a Hotep convention in Vegas.
Most write-ups of Hoteps focus on their fixation on Egypt and their regressive views on gender norms as an easy way to identify Hotep related materials, but neither of these is dispositive in isolation. Of course, you can understand why critics focuses on the Egypt stuff, since it gets you pictures like this one of Young Pharaoh:
While amusing, it’s worth noting that the use of ancient Egyptian iconography as a way of reclaiming a sense of lost black history has been a part of afrofuturism from its conception. Here’s a picture of Sun Ra, a jazz musician and one of the originators of afrofuturism.
Sun Ra, like Young pharaoh, believed himself to be an alien who was here to awaken black minds. So, when it comes to the ancient Egyptian iconography, Hoteps are drawing on a rich and respectable tradition. Unfortunately, the pseudo-historic claims that Hoteps add to the mix undercut that respectability, and their views about gender and sexuality make them regressive compared to the ideals of liberation presented in afrofuturism.
Similarly, regressive gender norms are insufficient, by themselves, to distinguish Hoteps from groups like the Black Israelites, who also advocate for conservative family values, but focus their pseudo-historical claims around the idea that black people are the true Israelites, rather than the true pharaohs. All that being said, if you get a meme that blends ancient Egyptian iconography with gendered conservatism, like the following image, it’s a decent bet you’re looking at something Hotep.
As I said though, what really got me going, listening to these guys talk, was how frequently they sounded indistinguishable from the anti-globalist, Qanon-esque conspiracy theorising of Alex Jones and other conservative militia types who frequently trade in white anxiety towards people of color. It felt like there had to be some sort of connection, and it turns out they do in fact share a common ancestor, and not in the evolutionary sense that they both reject. A common conspiracy theory ancestor. Before I reveal the missing link, here is a list of claims made by Young Pharaoh during this four-hour interview, divided into three categories:
Noteworthy empirical claims
Claims Alex Jones would likely also endorse
Antisemitism (that Alex Jones would likely also endorse)
Noteworthy empirical claims:
Buddha was a black Egyptian.
Muhamad was white.
White people murdered the indigenous black Irish.
Lay lines, astrology, angels, souls, past lives, Gnosis, and ancestral spirits are all real.
Everything is conscious, as seen in experiments done on water showing it has memory.
The Adam’s Apple restructures atoms through audible friction
Talking lowers your vibratory frequency and English has the lowest vibratory frequency of any language. That’s why it’s better to use telepathy, which is as real as electronics.
Trump was right to suggest that we beam sunlight into people to cure Covid.
Fossil fuels aren’t made of fossils because bones don’t become liquid.
Evolution is false and human races are actually different species.
Black people have reptilian DNA and white people have a Chimpanzee DNA. As a result, black people can be dropped off anywhere in the world and survive peacefully, while white people always turn into conquerers, because of their violent chimp DNA.
Aliens genetically engineered white people from Dravidian albinos when they came to earth 6000 years ago, which is why there is no history of white people older than 6000 years. The aliens couldn’t genetically engineer black people because melanin in their DNA makes them immune to genetic manipulation.
Black people are descendants of aliens.
Races shouldn’t go to the same colleges and generally should be segregated because they’re different species.
Claims Alex Jones would likely also endorse:
Meritocracy is good and competitive victimhood is bad.
The government pays their bills with cocaine.
We have to liberate people from globalism.
MK ultra, chemtrails, YouTube technocrats, the military industrial complex, and elite pedophiles are all serious problems
COVID-19 is a bioweapon that’s part of a plan to upload all of human consciousness into digital prisons.
If it wasn’t for trump, we’d all be in a FEMA camp.
Black people are controlled by the entertainment industry and don’t want to read.
Black Lives Matter is Marxist trash meant to infiltrate and destroy American capitalism.
The Nation of Islam is a tool of oppression.
Biden and Hillary are KKK members.
Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was a KKK member, a Satanist and a eugenicist (that last one is true).
Obama is not a US citizen, he is an Islamic terrorist.
America was under Martial law and we know that because the seal was off the podium.
The Covid vaccine is designed to kill you, and they’re going to make it mandatory.
Delicately couched claims of needing to fight back against existential threats, for example: “You are physically going to have to resist. I’m not advocating violence but there are people trying to kill you. Bill Gates is one of them. He’s in the top five.” Young Pharaoh also says if he ever sees Bill Gates, he’s “popping that bottle”, though he refuses to say explicitly what that means.
Antisemitism (that Alex Jones would likely also endorse):
BLM was secretly founded by Jews and funded by George Soros as an LGBTQ marxist psi-ops, just like how Jews hijacked the civil rights movement. The ultimate goal of these Jewish puppet masters is to collapse America so we become a communist Chinese colony controlled by computers. (timestamp 1:27)
Louis Farrakhan prevented Khalid Muhammad from stepping up after Malcolm X was killed, because Muhammad made an antisemitic speech where he called Jews “bloodsuckers of the black community”. Young Pharaoh says, rhetorically, “you know what happens when you say something about the Jews”. (timestamp 3:32) NOTE: This all took place prior to CPAC disinviting Young Pharaoh because of other antisemitic remarks he has made. Farrakhan has also been accused of antisemitism.
This list might look like a chaotic mess, but the conspiracy Rosetta stone is the very last bullet point. While listing the shunned books that were crucial to his awakening, Young Pharaoh refers to Behold a Pale Horse as a “top level book”. You can also hear that Hotep Jesus is keenly aware of Cooper’s work. So, why is this book the key?
Bill Cooper
Bill Cooper was an American conspiracy theorist and radio broadcaster who popularised the term “sheeple” and gained notoriety in the early 90’s for his book Behold a Pale Horse, which is essentially a compilation of prevalent anti-government and anti-globalist conspiracy theories. The book includes claims about aliens, Illuminati, and mass depopulation through engineered bioweapons like HIV/AIDS, which Cooper claimed was created to destroy blacks and other marginalised communities while the government withheld a cure. Cooper is likely the source for a majority of the claims I listed above.
Cooper’s work provides a touchstone for an absurd number of communities: sovereign citizens, militias, 9/11 truthers, Qanon, the Intellectual Dark Web, lizard people, and, of course, 90/00’s hip hop. Fans of the Wu-Tang clan likely saw that punchline coming, as the clan makes multiple reference to Cooper’s work. The debate album of the Wu-Tang affiliated group Killarmy, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, is named after the first chapter of Behold a Pale Horse!
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars refers to a hoax document that purported to be a plan to use economic and social engineering to turn everyone into slaves without needing to use overt force. It was itself based on another hoax document, as the guys over on Knowledge Fight explained (while I’m recommending further listening on this subject, the Behind the Bastards episodes on Cooper are also excellent). To quote Wu-Tang member Old Dirty Bastard “everybody gets fucked. William Cooper tells you who’s fucking you… when you’re someone like me, that’s valuable information”.
If you’re now thinking “this sure sounds a lot like The Protocols of Zion, the famous hoax conspiracy document purporting to lay out a secret Jewish plan for global domination” well guess what? Cooper reprinted The Protocols of Zion as another chapter of Behold a Pale Horse. Cooper claimed that the protocols were about the Illuminati, not the Jews, but his reprinting of the protocols single handedly brought them back from cultural obscurity, and put them in the hands of individuals who very much believed that they were actually about Jews. Comments made by Cooper on his radio show suggest he did take seriously the idea that Jews had bought and control “the media”.
In this way, Cooper represents a key nexus for explaining the reverse Godwin problem I’ve mentioned before: that conspiracy theorising consistently trends towards antisemitism. Even today, despite heavy debunking, Behold a Pale Horse remains highly pirated and frequently read, both in conspiracy communities and in prisons, where Young Pharaoh first discovered it. You can also find prominent anti-globalist conspiracy theorists still promoting versions of Cooper’s depopulation theories, often using similar methods of misreading or misrepresenting government documents. Here’s one such conspiracy theorist, who freely attended CPAC:
So, now we have a clear explanation for why Alex Jones and the Hoteps sound so similar, and why they also have remarkable overlaps with a range of other conspiracy touched communities. Interestingly, Cooper hated Alex Jones, who he described as a “bold-faced, stinking, rotten, little coward liar” that pulled his conspiracies out of thin air rather than dedicated research. Cooper saw Jones as a performance artist, turning Cooper’s life’s work into a media game to sell products. Cooper took his views seriously enough to die in a gunfight with authorities when they inevitably served him with an arrest warrant, while Alex Jones continues to predict the end is nigh and that’s why you need to stock up on supplements.
I will admit that the oppression narratives of the Hoteps strike me differently than those of Alex Jones, because communities of color are more likely to face genuine marginalisation and hardship, compared to their white conspiracist counterparts. According to Young Pharaoh, he has been shot, appears to have been involved in gang violence and possibly dealing drugs, and spent over three years in jail. He and Hotep Jesus discuss the “joke” that Hoteps are born in prison cells, and Young Pharaoh claims that’s the first time in a black person’s life when they can actually sit and think because they’re not worried about the government trying to kill them. If you’re at all sympathetic to problems around systemic racism, prison pipelines and the social death of marginalised groups, these claims of neoliberal oppression can sound fairly plausible.
The problem is drawing the line when those concerns cross over into conspiracy theories. We’re in the middle of trying to convince the world to accept Covid vaccines, and Cooper-style conspiracy theories present a real risk for vaccine hesitancy within black communities, especially when backed up by historic events of medical malfeasance like the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments.
Given the connections I’ve presented, I think it’s plausible that Cooper’s theories are also playing a role in high vaccine hesitancy amongst Republican men. It’s good that Hoteps, as an explicitly antisemitic ideology are having trouble getting platformed, but if the American right is serious about addressing the problem of antisemitism, it needs to recognise how much of the party identity remains steeped in Cooperism.
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