Cashing in on conspiracy theories

HOW easy is it to join the world’s expanding army of conspiracy theorists?
Judging from a recent live-streamed YouTube broadcast featuring former footballer David Icke and viewed by over one million people, VERY! For three hours people around the globe hung on every word that came out of this buffoon’s mouth when he was interviewed on London Real, a ‘digital freedom’ channel set up through a crowdfunding campaign to allow conspiracy theorists to air all manner of outlandish ideas.

Gnome. Photo by Craig McLachlan on Unsplash. 

‘Son of God’ Icke, who believes the Royal Family are ’reptilian-human hybrids’ and that Jews bankrolled Hitler, insists the Covid-19 pandemic is a cover for a murderous global cabal bent on establishing a fascist World Order by using 5G transmissions to engineer a mass cull. London Real is the brainchild of ex-merchant banker and crackpot Brian Rose who, at the time of writing, got more than 27,000 people to crowdfund his channel to the tune of $133,000. Hmmm, I thought, if it’s that easy to raise cash off the back of human suffering, perhaps I could start a lucrative conspiracy theory of my own. But where to begin? Then it hit me. Garden gnomes.

There are far more of them in Europe than 5G network masts– and I hate the little buggers with a passion. But how would I link gnomes with COVID-19? Well, that’s easy. Back in the early 20th century Sir Frank Crisp, the owner of the second largest collection of garden gnomes in the UK, opened his Friar Park, Henley-on-Thames estate to the public at least once a week from 1910-1919. And what happened shortly after? In 1912 the Titanic sank and more than 1,500 people perished. Two years later the Canadian ship Empress of Ireland went down and 1,012drowned. Millions died in the 1914-18 First World War, and when that ended millions more were seen off by the Spanish Flu pandemic. The popularity of gnomes, which originated in Germany, declined after WWI but they became favoured again in the 1930s following Disney’s film ‘Snow White and the Severn Dwarfs.’
At the time Tom Major-Bell, proprietor of Major’s Garden Ornaments and father of former British Prime Minister John Major, was the most notable producer of gnomes. Bet you didn’t know that.

One notable disaster of the 1930s was the crash in 1937 of the giant German airship the Hindenburg which killed 36. Garden gnomes saw a resurgence in popularity again in the 1970s. That decade saw adam collapse in China in 1975 which killed tens of thousands of people, and in 1978 the Jim Jones cult massacre in Jonestown, Guyana, left 918 people dead. See how easy it is to create a conspiracy theory? But to get it off the ground I would need mass media to incite people to take baseball bats to every gnome they see, and that, as Brian Rose demonstrated, takes a hell of a lot of moolah. If you passionately believe that we’d all be much safer without garden gnomes please send lots of cash tome via my Paypal account using barry@freethinker.co.uk.
For the record, Icke’s net worth is $10-m

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Barry Duke

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