Readers of the Daily Sceptic will no doubt be familiar with the ongoing debate between ‘Team James’ and ‘Team Toby’ on the London Calling podcast. The former seeing conspiracies everywhere, the latter maintaining most problems are due to sheer incompetence, rather than elaborate malice.
I now believe I have found the resolution to this conflict (you’re welcome, guys).
In the last couple of years my Twitter feed, and what passes for my real life, has become radically divided between naive normies (Team Toby) and ‘awake’, ‘red-pilled’ types (Team James), the latter often spilling over into ‘black-pilled’ doomerism.
If you didn’t understand that sentence, then you are a normie. Congratulations — your life is probably quite pleasant (unlike, say, Andrew Bridgen’s, who is currently suffering the consequences of a hefty overdose of red pills).
For those who have taken the red pill, things do tend to get pretty bleak. These people see through the facade of the normal world, into the apocalyptic reality lurking beneath… well, almost everything.
Politics (all globalist shills), the sky (chemtrails), water (fluoride), Paul McCartney (died in ’66, replaced by a ringer), etc.
This leads to situation whereby one cannot even talk about normal normie things, like, say, party politics, without getting a flurry of comments explaining “they’re all WEF anyway”. But I believe we can still talk about these normie things within that limited framework, identifying the least bad option. Red-pillers may scoff at this stance, but let me explain.
Even though my sympathies lean towards the red-pilled side, I find myself at times equally frustrated by both positions, and thus I have come up with a way to exist that incorporates both, which for now I’m calling ‘conspiracy moderate’.
And, if one returns to the original Matrix movie, which is of course where the red pill metaphor originated, it looks like I am onto something.
In the movie, Neo takes the red pill, and is suddenly ejected from the ‘normal’ world he has always known, and thrust into the “desert of the real”. There, he gets to eat gruel, wear austere clothes, and learns that humans are now just batteries feeding AI bots that have taken over the world. It’s not a lot of fun, but at least he knows the truth.
The normies, meanwhile, stay in the Matrix, content in their appalling ignorance.
But what some of my angrier Twitter followers appear to be missing is that Neo still returns to the Matrix to fly around and shoot guns and generally f*** s*** up.
In other words, I believe it’s okay to engage in the normie world, as long as one does it from a point of awareness.
Of course, the worst thing would be to try to go back to being a blue-pilled normie. This is shown to us in the movie via the character of Cypher. He betrays his fellow red-pilled warriors to the evil agents (the embodiments of the malevolent AI bots). He does this in exchange for being plugged back into the Matrix with total ignorance, as long as he can become “someone important, like an actor”.
He is both Judas and Peter, giving up the saviour while choosing to deny all knowledge of our redemption because it is too hard, too painful to bear. He is simply too weak to sustain a moral conscience.
To deny what we know for an easy life is evil. But that is very different from exploring the Matrix, as Neo does, in order to fight back against the system, and just because it’s fun to do Kung Fu.
Because one problem with the red-pilled world is that it is very boring.
We see this in the recently ‘awake’, especially those who have ‘overdosed on red pills’. Every conversation ends with ‘it’s all planned’; all discussion and playfulness is curtailed; there is no point in anything.
It’s especially frustrating for those of us who have been on a steady diet of red pills for many years. We know about Bohemian Grove and the Bilderbeg Group. We know about the Georgia Guidestones (RIP) and, yes, we know about the gay frogs. (Sorry to the normies for all the Googling you just had to do.)
Meanwhile the red pill neophyte, high on reality, suddenly lectures us with their new-found knowledge, often veering into what is more like an apocalyptic ‘black pilled’ vision of the world, offering no hope.
One such example is my friend who, becoming convinced the Covid vaccine was simply intended to kill us all and reduce the population, decided there was no hope for the future. I asked why, in that case, she was still sending her children to an elite Hampstead prep school. She replied that she was just doing the best she could for them now, even though we would all surely perish in the coming vaccine genocide, either poisoned by taking the deadly vaxx, or offed by the state for refusing.
Dark. But of course, her theory wasn’t totally crazy. For a while there it looked like those who refused this experimental medical treatment of questionable efficacy would indeed be treated like second class citizens, segregated from society via a vaccine passport.
However, the civilised conspiracy moderate, though resolutely unjabbed (an ‘antivaxxer’ or ‘sceptic’ to different shades of normie, a ‘pure blood’ to the red pilled), allows that the jab itself, while it may give you heart trouble or that side-of-face thing Justin Bieber has, *may* not be designed to kill billions of people.
The conspiracy moderate also retains hope, believing it is inherently immoral to discourage one’s fellow soldiers. (Remember, Morpheus in The Matrix lived by his faith in ‘The One’, and his faith was eventually rewarded).
The moderate knows the elites have gathered for decades at Bohemian Grove for a bacchanalian festival in which they worship an owl. The Red Pill OD case says they are sacrificing children to said owl god. The normie says, “What?!?”
The humble conspiracy moderate does not believe the sacrifice part, but politely points out we now have concrete evidence that this event happens, and that while the elites may just be having a high old time together and the owl thing is largely theatre, it is at the very least ‘a bit weird’.
Similarly with the Bilderberg Group. For years they denied that world leaders met in a secret location to discuss their globalist plans. Eventually the deception became impossible to sustain, and we now know that not only is it real, but that even David Lammy gets invited (it seems even the global elite is suffering a decline in the quality of applicants).
Of course, attention has now shifted to the World Economic Forum.
Normies either haven’t heard of it or will claim it’s an overhyped think tank. The extreme red pilled and black pilled will say Klaus Schwab rules the entire world and resistance is futile. The conspiracy moderate will concede Schwab certainly seems to be attempting that, with his boast that his organisation “penetrates the cabinets” of leaders the world over, but that we also need to allow for the possibility he’s just a deluded idiot, as are most of these global leaders, and that their ideas may be more stupid than sinister.
Though I admit on this one I am more red pilled than normie, and I even wonder if Schwab is there to troll us, with his absurd dystopian ruler outfits, and if he is in fact a front for other, less comically Bond villain-esque, but even more sinister forces. However, we don’t have time for that particularly rabbit hole just now.
Anyway, hopefully all this has explained my position so that I won’t have to keep replying to disgruntled doomers on my twitter feed.
Normies undoubtedly live in a cosy but unreal world. Although it must be said even our current illusory Matrix is pretty grim compared to the world of 1999, when the first movie came out (I watched it twice in the cinema). Post-Covid, culture war torn 2023 is itself a bleak “desert of the real” compared to those simpler times.
The red pilled, on the other hand, sometimes fail to apply the same scepticism to their new red-pill findings as they do to the normie world. Thus they essentially enter a new Matrix where everything can be explained only by the most extreme conspiracy. They also tend to tip over into a disempowering, black-pilled nihilism.
The only truly honourable position, therefore, is that of the conspiracy moderate, living uncomfortably between the two worlds, sceptical of both, moving forward with courage and eyes wide open.
And guns. Lots of guns.
And for the normies out there, that was a Matrix metaphor, not a call to arms. You guys really need to wake up.
Nick Dixon is Deputy Editor of the Daily Sceptic. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack.
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For every acronym, there’s another acronym. ESG – Evil, Sociopathic, Grotesque.
That’s what an energy policy driven by the myth of man-made climate change is.
“You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity.”
Michael Crichton (1942 – 2008)
War is a racket, in which the sons of the poor pay with blood and taxes the self-aggrandisement of amoral political elites.
……. and bankers!
So a bomb can be ethical depending on who uses it.
I never thought of the Iraq war as an ethical crusade, but then all crusades were ethical – isn’t religion a wonderful thing.
I wonder how people balance the shelling of the people in the former east of Ukraine by the Kiev regime with their ethics.
So weapons manufacture, and investment in it, becomes ethical. By extension, so does the purchasing of said weapons by the government (funded ‘ethically’ by you and me) to kill people in a war that should never have happened. Furthermore, Baker’s ethical ‘initiative’ will prolong the war indefinitely, a war unsupported, I suggest, by the majority of Brits (that’s unsupported morally, not financially). Meanwhile we can’t drill for gas which would provide cheap, reliable energy to promote the prosperity of individual and industry. There’s something rotten…..
This just illustrates a point made in the article: Ethical means following principles¹. But principles some people follow aren’t necessarily principles other people would follow as well and what some people believe to be a universal good isn’t necessarily universally held to be one.
¹ Somewhat strained here because the principle these people follow is the principle that their own policy choices must always be suffered by everybody else which isn’t principle at all but might makes right badly disguised.
‘Just over half (52%) of those surveyed believe the UK has provided about the right amount of support to Ukraine (+6 pp from November 2024). 14% feel more support is needed and 18% think too much has been given.
All groups are on balance supportive of the UK’s assistance to Ukraine, though 35% of 2024 Reform UK voters think too much support has been given (50% still think it has been the right amount).’
IPSOS Feb 2025
Not surprising when the people of the UK are only given one side of the story.
If sage dissenting voices are given a platform the British people would have a better understanding that Russia were “provoked” and “justified”.
The UK media are fed their stories by the Kiev dictatorship and is on a level with the Hamas-loving BBC pushing the story that Israel attacked a hospital. The latest incident has been the claim Russia attacked a building and killed civilians. Nowhere is there any mention of it being full of mercenaries and foreign military advisors and thus a legitimate target. There have been the sports centre attacks where the truth is that they are arms stores.
Yes indeed.
I have been bombarding the msm facebook pages for the last 3 years correcting their false stories.
While I agree fully with your comment regarding Russia, did BBC mention that Israel attacked a hospital? Did they mention there are no hospitals left to attack? Did they mention all the chief surgeons being beaten and tortured daily in Israeli jails? Did they mention all the health workers that have been targeted in Gaza? Nurses shot by snipers while treating people? Surely you have heard by now the story of Hind Rajab, the small girl killed by a tank which also blew up the ambulance sent to rescue her (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/18/hind-rajab-israeli-state-atrocity)?
Whereas I am convinced (hopefully correctly) that Russia will never intentionally target civilians, there is overwhelming evidence of Israel doing exactly that wherever Arabs walk the earth.
If Britain wants to restrict immigration, it must deregulate international trade.
Returning to the Agency Laws of the 1990s would be a good start. That will give Britain more economic and political clout in areas generating ‘asylum seekers’.
Increased defence spending will permit more military training teams to operate overseas, training local militaries to interdict illegal people smuggling operations currently dominated by Russian paramilitary agencies.
What is the evidence that “Russian paramilitary agencies” are behind it?
‘….the paper concludes that ‘weapons of mass migration’ do exist. As in the case studies, migrants and refugees were created, manipulated, and exploited by these two (Russia, Belarus) regimes’
https://research.library.fordham.edu/international_senior/98/
The paper was written by a student under the guidance of Ukrainian Olena Nikolayenko.
A totally biased narrative with no basis of fact.
Olena Nikolayenko is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Fordham University. She is also an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto and held visiting appointments at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, the Project House Europe at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany), the Center for Belarus and Regional Studies at the European Humanities University (Lithuania), the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland), the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University (Sweden), and the Department of Sociology at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). Her research interests include comparative democratization, contentious politics, civil resistance, and political behavior, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe.
Gosh Munro, you are so clever at cutting and pasting. Do you actually have any views of your own?
PS If I was you I would answer yourself since you don’t seem to have the orbs to do it directly to me or CGW.
‘Last week at the Old Bailey, a jury found three of the group – Katrin Ivanova, Vanya Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev – guilty on espionage-related charges.
Over many weeks of court hearings, the jury heard how the trio were part of a group that travelled to Vienna and other European locations to surveil Grozev.
Plans were developed to kidnap and deliver him to Russian operatives, which ultimately were never implemented.
The plotters’ ideas were sometimes more bluster than substance, and occasionally prompted laughter from the jury……
“They have come across as muppets”….’
He wants to give “every ounce of support that can be mustered” to Ukraine.
I assume he will, if not already,, be on the front line.
It might just be me but I can hardly see Two Tier Never Here – loather of Britain and its people – inspiring the troops as was done in the past by the likes of Henry V, Lord Nelson etc.
Yes, our political system has been invaded by “liberalism”.
ESG is just a symptom of it.
Russia didn’t cause the rise in energy prices.
It was the liberal Wests sanctions against cheap Russia fuel that created the rise.
In the same way that Covid didn’t cause a near collapse of society.
It was the response from liberal governments to a flu like virus that caused the near collapse.
Liberals are the enemy.
Man inflicts misery on man all the time and even violently all the time. War is no special case but just another manifestation of the general hostility of people towards other people. It’s – that’s one of my pet theories – just a case everyday bullies are especially afraid of because their everyday bullying skills would buy them nothing in this situation. They mean to inflict harm and not to suffer it.
And talking of the useless c*nt, Carney has just been elected as leader of Canada’s fascist Liberal Party and is therefore now Prime Minister even though he has not stood for election as an MP. His anti-Trump stance over tariffs has seen the Liberals rise in the polls when a victory for Poilievre looked most likely. If they vote the runt Carney in then you have to conclude that the people are more stupid than you think.