Where are all the critical thinkers?

Review of 'Getting Healthy in Toxic Times' by Jenny Goodman (Chelsea Green, £16.99)

https://chelseagreen.co.uk/book/getting-healthy-in-toxic-times/

As is the case for many of us in the freedom movement, the friends I have now are not the same as the ones I had a few years ago.

The events of 2020 were a shock on many levels (as no doubt they were designed to be). Fortunately my wife Johanna and I saw things in much the same way as each other from the beginning, but that was not true for our families; and we could not believe that people we had thought were our friends and saw the world in a similar light to us actually insisted on wearing face masks and on inserting probes up their noses to find out if they were suffering from a disease for which they showed no symptoms – yet still refused to meet up indoors.

And that was before the introduction of the COVID ‘vaccines’ at the end of 2020. I had originally thought the COVID scare was a combination of massive overreaction by government and mass panic among the public, each feeding off the other. Naïvely I’d hoped that the COVID vaccines would provide a route out of this collective delusion.

I did not realise at the time that COVID had been brought in for the vaccines rather than the other way round, and that governments had imposed lockdowns to blackmail their citizens into taking the COVID vaccines, by refusing to release them until they had submitted to vaccination. This was made explicit here in the UK when the government told the public that it was extending lockdown for an extra four weeks beyond the promised ‘Freedom Day’ (21^st June 2021) because not enough people had come forward to be vaccinated.

Nor did I anticipate that millions of people would be so thoroughly consumed by an irrational fear of COVID that they would continue to wear masks and to submit to COVID ‘tests’ even after taking the vaccines they had been assured would protect them from the disease. And Johanna and I hadn’t expected that our so-called friends would now refuse to see us because we hadn’t been vaccinated, or because we wouldn’t tell them if we’d been vaccinated, even though they were supposedly now immune to COVID themselves.

But then the COVID narrative never really had anything to do with health or disease. It was a test of the public’s willingness to submit to authority, whatever that authority told them to do. And of their willingness to turn against their fellow citizens, if that was also what the authority told them to do.

The questions are often posed within the freedom movement, What makes us different? What special insight has enabled us to see through the fraud? Why have we stood up against the power of the state, often at great personal cost? Why have we not submitted to pressure from our fellow citizens? Is there a common factor that unites us?

In one sense, these questions are easy to answer. We all refuse to be told what we should think. We insist on conducting our own lives as we think fit.

On the other hand, we have all arrived from different places. Here lies the great strategic error made by governments in 2020. Before then, diverse groups of people had been aware of and had spoken out against state overreach and the corruption of government and media, for different reasons. One of the principal consequences of lockdown was to bring together disparate groups of dissidents who had never previously had any reason to coalesce, or even communicate.

I remember, at the age of fifty-nine, participating in a public demonstration for the very first time, in August 2020 in Trafalgar Square in the centre of London, a protest of several thousand people against lockdown. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people attending who did not appear to have come from the ‘professional protesting class’ and who (like me) appeared to have been provoked by the COVID measures to take a stand for the first time, but I was also critical of the numerous banners warning about the dangers of 5G radiation when I thought the protest should have focussed specifically on the issue of lockdown.

I was right – but so too were they. Leaving aside the possibility (of which I was then unaware) that the COVID story might have been invented to hide the introduction of 5G in London and other cities, and that some of the symptoms ascribed to COVID (and especially to so-called ‘long COVID’) might actually have been caused by exposure to 5G radiation, the participation of anti-5G campaigners in the protest should have alerted me the role of lockdown in bringing together disparate groups who had previously been concerned about apparently unconnected issues. The greatest achievement of lockdown was to inspire an awakening among hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. The law of unintended consequences.

The idea of lockdown waking up disparate groups of people is not a new one, but what I think is insufficiently appreciated is the amount of cross-fertilisation that has taken place. I remember meeting an original ‘9/11 truther’ at a local Sunday morning ‘Stand in the Park.’ (Stands in the Park were started during lockdown on the premise that the government had banned people from meeting outdoors in large groups but there was nothing to stop them from happening to stand in the park near where others happened also to be standing in the park.) He told me how pleased he was that the COVID fraud had inspired a whole new wave of sceptics to come out to join existing groups like the 9/11 truthers, who had hitherto felt marginalised and ignored. Thanks to COVID, opposition to fraudulent state narratives went mainstream.

All of which is ironical given that I’m convinced one of the main purposes of lockdown was to prevent people from meeting each other and discussing what was really going on: pubs and cafés were closed, and the government tried to prevent people from meeting in groups, even outdoors (the spring of 2020 in the UK was warm and sunny, ideal for meeting outside). Lockdown was intended to atomise people and prevent them from connecting with each other. It worked up to a point – but it also achieved the opposite, by making people more open to engaging with strangers. In a world of masked people, it was easy to identify a fellow dissident, as someone not in a mask. It was a peculiar phenomenon of the freedom movement that the British, so well known for our reserve, would hug people we didn’t know and willingly socialise with strangers, neither of which had previously been regarded as British characteristics.

I was radicalised by the experience. Before COVID, I would have liked to have considered myself an independent thinker, but I certainly wouldn’t have regarded myself as a revolutionary. I’d never attended a public protest. It was the government (and media) response to COVID that radicalised me.

I’d never really looked into 9/11 before COVID. I knew it had been used as a pretext for the ‘war on terror’ – which had clearly been constructed upon a mountain of lies – but I’d never contemplated the theory that the US government had itself created this pretext by murdering (or being complicit in the murder of) thousands of its own citizens. I think it’s still very important to try to get to the bottom of what happened on 9/11 because if the US government was indeed prepared to sacrifice American citizens for its geopolitical ends, then clearly there is no limit to the crimes it might be prepared to commit.

I had not investigated the climate fraud before COVID, either. I have written about my previous career as a wine writer and a historian of vine-growing and wine-making in my first Substack article, ‘Authors Who Haven’t Read Their Own Books.’ I published ‘Wine Snobbery’ in 1988 and ‘Drink: a Social History’ in a British edition in 1995 and in an American one in 1999. I also spent many years after that working as a gardener. So I was well aware of both historical and recent changes in the climate. I knew that the weather was getting warmer in parts of England, making it possible to grow vines on a scale that had not been seen since the early Middle Ages. But I’d had no occasion to question the official narrative that the cause of the climatic warming was the increased production of man-made greenhouse gases. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was a subject about which scientists might have had reason to lie.

In another book I wrote about wine in the 1990s – a guide to wines made from the grape variety Pinot Noir – I suggested that the best hope for the future of English Pinots Noirs lay in the prospect that the greenhouse effect would cause the climate to warm sufficiently to ripen the grapes better than hitherto. Mea culpa.

Although I did become increasingly sceptical of the official climate narrative, it was only as a result of the recent cross-fertilisation between climate scepticism and the freedom movement that I realised the claim that the climate had got warmer because of the greenhouse effect was not merely erroneous, but a deliberate lie.

It has got warmer, though. In 2022, in my first article for the Daily Sceptic news website, on English wine and climate change, I argued that English wine has improved in recent decades at least partly because of climatic warming. I based my argument on the historical evidence rather than scientific data, on which I stated I was not qualified to comment. I did point out, however, that the last period when England had produced wine of good quality was the early Middle Ages, when the climate was comparably warm to today, and that politically motivated interest groups have gone to considerable efforts to hide the history of this medieval warm period, because it undermines their claim that global warming has been caused by industrial gases (which obviously weren’t around 800 years ago):

https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/10/englands-booming-wine-industry-is-because-the-climate-is-getting-warmer-but-it-also-boomed-in-the-early-medieval-warm-period/

I might not have realised thirty and more years ago that we were being misled about the effect on wine of the changing climate, but I did know that we were being misled about wine. When I made public in ‘Wine Snobbery’ the methods by which the image of the supposed superiority of well-known wines had been created and marketed, it caused quite a scandal. The book reached the best-seller lists, and I even had to fight off a libel action, from a wine importer whom I’d criticised for writing articles in a consumer wine magazine recommending wines for which she was the agent, without declaring her commercial interest. It was a time when libel actions against journalists and authors were all the rage here in England, but my publishers (Faber & Faber) stood by me, and the litigant dropped the action before it came to court.

As I explained in the introduction to the book, the idea of writing ‘Wine Snobbery’ germinated from the (now forgotten) Austrian ‘anti-freeze’ scandal of 1985, which involved the addition of the toxic chemical di-ethylene glycol – a constituent of anti-freeze – to some Austrian wines to make dry ones taste sweeter and thin ones taste fuller-bodied.

The anti-freeze scandal revealed other frauds in its wake, such as the contamination of German wines, only at much lower concentrations than Austrian ones – because some German wine-makers were in the practice of illegally adding 10-15% of Austrian wine to their own produce and passing it off as 100% German wine.

I had first responded to the anti-freeze scandal by writing an article for ‘Vogue’ magazine about legal wine additives of which the public were also unaware, and suggesting that the scandal might encourage consumers to look for organic wines, which at the time were hardly heard of. I wrote to the importer of one of these organic wines, asking him for some details of its production. I recorded his reply in ‘Wine Snobbery.’ He wrote that by the time my article appeared he hoped that ‘the whole glycol saga will be forgotten. The very mention of additives always raises question marks in the consumer’s mind and it seems to me that any reference to additives seems to add another black mark to the image of wine.’ The attitude of the wine trade to the anti-freeze scandal was to try to make it go away. As I pointed out, ‘wine scandals briefly expose what is rotten, but generally hidden, in the wine trade. It is the purpose of this book to expose those dubious practices which are normally exposed only by occasional wine scandals.’

I discussed in ‘Wine Snobbery’ the use of insecticides and pesticides in the cultivation of vineyards and debunked the implausible claim of wine-makers that these chemicals disappeared during the wine-making process and there was no danger of their getting into the finished wine. I also described the preservatives they added to the wine at bottling. Sulphur-free ‘natural’ wines had not yet arrived on the market. Some large commercial wine producers were converting to organic production but only because they feared litigation from vineyard workers who had been poisoned by the chemical sprays they had been instructed to use on the vines.

While I was exposing wine scandals, Jenny Goodman was abandoning conventional medicine. Having qualified as a doctor, she became disillusioned with the lack of interest shown by other doctors in investigating the causes of illness or in actually healing sick people (as opposed to prescribing them drugs) or in engaging in preventive healthcare. Jenny ended up practising ‘ecological medicine’, which sought to identify the nutritional and environmental causes of ill health.

Had it not been for the meeting of dissidents from different backgrounds as a result of opposition to lockdown, Jenny and I might never have met. Since writing ‘Wine Snobbery’ I had spent a good deal of time investigating the various ways in which we were being poisoned by our environment – pesticides in our food, plastics in our water, chemicals in the air, electromagnetic emissions from mobile ‘phones and wi-fi, etc. – but I was completely unaware of the danger to health of flying in jet aircraft before I read Jenny’s first book, ‘Staying Alive in Toxic Times,’ which came out in 2020. This introduced me to aerotoxic syndrome – the largely unreported scandal of long-term neurological damage to pilots, cabin crew and regular travellers caused by the ‘fresh air’ in aeroplanes being drawn off the jet engines – together with carbon monoxide and toxic organophosphate chemicals from the engine oil. According to the Aerotoxic Association, about 30% of all those who fly in jet aircraft suffer from either acute symptoms or long-term ill-health (or both) in consequence. This is (of course) a story the airline industry does its best to suppress.

For me, the most shocking revelation in Jenny’s new book ‘Getting Healthy in Toxic Times’ concerns the dangers of low-dose nuclear radiation (pp. 118-134). We’re all aware of the risks of nuclear accidents, but we’re never informed about the danger to our health from exposure to relatively low doses of nuclear radiation from the normal functioning of power stations. As Jenny points out, some scientists have indeed warned about the dangers of low-level nuclear radiation, but they have been silenced, sacked and ridiculed by an industry that has all the money it needs to pay its own scientists to denigrate research results it doesn’t like. And now nuclear energy is being sold as ‘green,’ which Jenny told me is ‘very sinister: it’s infinitely more dangerous than burning coal.’

The same applies to the harms caused at the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum – long-wave, low-frequency radiation from mobile ‘phones, wi-fi and the like. In order to downplay the illnesses caused by its products, Jenny explains, the tech industry devotes a great deal of money to funding dodgy research designed to ‘prove’ that the symptoms caused by electromagnetic devices are psychosomatic rather than physical. And there is no effective health regulation of the industry, because of ‘regulatory capture’ in which the organisations which are supposed to regulate the industry are controlled by the industry itself. Mobile phones and other electromagnetic devices could be made much safer, using less damaging frequencies, but that would cost producers a lot of money, so they aren’t (pp. 150-1, 157-60).

I became aware of the health issues associated with electromagnetic devices about fifteen years ago when I was suffering from insomnia and dizziness and brain fog, and wondered whether these devices might be a factor. We had replaced our land-line with a DECT (walk-around) ‘phone, but then I read that a DECT ‘phone was like having a mobile phone mast in one’s living room. I bought a hand-held electromagnetic monitor, which recorded very high readings in the area of our DECT unit. I got rid of our DECT ‘phone and went back to a traditional fixed land-line. My sleep and other symptoms improved dramatically.

Land-lines of all kinds are now increasingly being phased out, and I do now carry a mobile ‘phone but I keep it in a protective pouch (from ShieldYourBody.com) which seems to be sufficient protection for me. We do also have wi-fi, rather than the ethernet that Jenny recommends (p. 161), because I was outvoted on this at home, but I insist that it’s turned off at night. I think it’s necessary to expose oneself to a certain level of electromagnetic radiation, in order to build up tolerance, because otherwise how is one going to cope with going into shops or public buildings or with taking public transport where it’s impossible to avoid radiation from wi-fi and other people’s mobile ‘phones?

Members of the freedom movement make a lot of noise (quite rightly) about the dangers of mobile ‘phone masts and 5G – and I’ve got a friend who’s just moved out of London because a mobile ‘phone mast was erected close to her home – but I’m not sure how many are aware of the dangers of carrying a mobile ‘phone. Or maybe they are aware, but just don’t do anything about it. I was shocked at an early resistance meeting where we’d been all asked to deposit our mobile phones at the entrance – for fear of state agents listening remotely to our conversation – to see that nobody else attending the meeting had taken the trouble to mitigate the harmful effects of keeping a mobile ‘phone in his pocket by storing it in a protective pouch or attaching one of the many available gizmos. Yet they were paranoid about being overheard via their ‘phones – which I doubt is possible if they’re not being used. (It’s certainly possible for the state to identify your location via your mobile ‘phone, which is why some people store their ‘phones in a Faraday bag which blocks the signal.)

I suspect many in the movement are perfectly well aware of the dangers of electromagnetic devices but have chosen to remain in a state of denial because they’re so dependent on them. As Jenny points out in her book, it’s hard to wake up members of the freedom movement to this issue because we’re just as addicted to our smartphones as everyone else. We’ve had a lot of discussion in our various strategy groups about smartphones and about whether they should be regarded as a neutral instrument that can be used for both good and evil or whether they should be seen as the principal weapon of the New World Order. Because I’ve been convinced one of the purposes of lockdown was to prevent people from meeting and to keep them on their ‘phones and computers, I’ve tried to make it a rule in the groups in which I’ve been involved that we should always meet in person and that virtual groups on Telegram (or elsewhere) should only ever serve as support to real-life meetings. In the early stages of the movement people were much more inclined to consider abandoning their smartphones than they are now. The addiction of members of the so-called ‘freedom movement’ to smartphones has become a serious problem, and I try to encourage a ‘switch-off Sabbath’ on which people forswear all electronic devices for one day a week. You don’t have to be Jewish to do it, or choose Saturday as the day on which to switch off.

One cause of ill health which Jenny conspicuously fails to address in ‘Getting Healthy in Toxic Times’ is the COVID ‘vaccines.’ It’s a subject about which she knows a good deal. When I asked her why she hadn’t said anything about it, she explained that other medical and scientific experts have already published books on the topic – she cited Clare Craig’s ‘Expired’ – and that she wanted to focus on issues of which she had direct professional experience and which have not yet been covered by other authors. Also, the intended audience for her book is ordinary members of the public rather than ‘the awake,’ and it’s much easier for the former to understand that our environment has been contaminated by industry in the name of profit than to accept that their doctors have poisoned them for no obvious reason. Environmental toxins provide the background to the COVID vaccine issue and a stepping stone to being able to take it on board.

I did also wonder whether Jenny had originally intended to write about the COVID vaccines but had been censored by her publishers. Quite the contrary. Not only did her publishers Chelsea Green not censor her book at all, just edit it for relevance (and length), but they have already published several books about the COVID scandal.

Perhaps the best known of the authors published by Chelsea Green is Naomi Wolf, whose targeting by the ‘other Naomi’ – Naomi Klein – for her uncompromising views on the COVID fraud and the COVID vaccines I covered in my first Substack essay, ‘Authors Who Haven’t Read Their Own Books.’ I thought I’d been fiercely critical of Klein’s book ‘Doppelganger,’ which she had dedicated to undermining Wolf and everything she stood for, but then I hadn’t read the review by Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the libertarian Brownstone Institute. Under the title ‘Malicious Stalking as a Literary Device,’ Tucker described ‘Doppelganger’ as ‘one of the strangest, creepiest and most morally rotten literary products I’ve ever encountered. … I simply cannot believe it was ever published:’

https://fcpp.org/2023/12/08/malicious-stalking-as-a-literary-device/

Yet earlier this summer ‘Doppelganger’ was awarded the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction here in the UK. To have presented an award to such a shameful book discredits the entire publishing industry and demonstrates how far it has fallen from the principles of intellectual rigour and open and honest debate to which it once appeared to have been committed. What purpose can there be in publishing 399 pages of an unsubstantiated personal attack, other than the pursuit of a politically motivated campaign to discredit a prominent critic of the globalist regime?

Last autumn, a few months after Klein’s book appeared, Chelsea Green published Wolf’s (indirect) response, a book of essays entitled ‘Facing the Beast: courage, faith and resistance in a new dark age,’ which rises above personal name-calling in order to focus on the dangers of the mindset which ‘Doppelganger’ represents: an assault on humanity itself, disguised as a defence of humanity, and on another, higher level a spiritual battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

One of the essays in ‘Facing the Beast,’ called ‘How Lies Killed Books,’ tells of Wolf’s visit in 2022 to the Brooklyn, New York branch of McNally Jackson Books, which she described as ‘an independent bookstore that had for years been a stalwart outpost of free-thinking publishing.’ Wolf found that the staff were all still wearing face masks, and that there were no books at all on the shelves dealing with the defining episode of our lifetimes. This was, said Wolf, symptomatic of a world in which public intellectuals now led lives of ‘lies and denial.’ Among publishers, and most conspicuously among Left-leaning publishers, Chelsea Green has stood alone against the tide – and virtually all its sales are online. In the Acknowledgements section of her book, Wolf salutes Margo Baldwin, the founder of Chelsea Green, as an ‘intrepid publisher’ who has ‘championed free speech in a censorious time’ (p. 213).

Books published by Chelsea Green challenging mainstream narratives include J. B. Handley’s ‘How To End the Autism Epidemic,’ on the link between vaccines and autism; Arthur Firstenberg, ‘The Invisible Rainbow,’ on the dangers of electricity; Stephanie Seneff’s ‘Toxic Legacy,’ on the health crisis caused by the pesticide glyphosate (‘Roundup’); a reissue of Celia Farber’s ‘Serious Adverse Events,’ about the AIDS fraud as a dry-run for COVID; Mattias Desmet’s ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ (with his ‘The Art of Truth Speech’ on the way); and several debunking the official line on COVID including the English-language edition of ‘Corona False Alarm?’ by Sucharit Bhakdi and Karina Reiss, and ‘The Truth About COVID-19’ by Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins.

I spoke to Margo Baldwin about the controversial books her company has published, and she expressed a perspective that wouldn’t have seemed at all unusual a few years ago. ‘I feel the same about the world as I always did,’ she told me. ‘It’s the so-called “progressives” who have changed.

‘We exist to promote important ideas. Our view of publishing is about changing the world. Otherwise you’re just in a manufacturing business.’

Chelsea Green initially established a reputation publishing books about the environment and sustainable agriculture. Margo suggested that Chelsea Green’s response to COVID should be seen in that context. She told me that Mercola’s and Cummins’ ‘The Truth About COVID-19’ was ‘really a critique of industrial agriculture and chemical approaches to soil and food’ and therefore sat in line with the company tradition of publishing books on ecological and environmental issues. It’s clear that the worldview that promoted the COVID vaccines runs counter to a perspective that emphasises the importance of natural good health based on nutritious food raised on healthy soils with minimum chemical input. At one point in her book Jenny Goodman praises a mother who after a bad experience with her first child decided against allowing doctors to give any vaccines at all to her two younger children, who ‘are well protected from infectious childhood diseases by having been breastfed, by eating well and by getting plenty of sunshine, fresh air and exercise’ (pp. 46-52).

Chelsea Green brought out ‘The Truth About COVID-19’ in April 2021. It provoked more controversy than anything else they had published. By September 2021 it was selling so well online that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to Amazon demanding that it change the algorithms on its site to limit the visibility of a book that she claimed made false and misleading claims about the COVID pandemic and COVID vaccines. In response, Chelsea Green sued Warren. Its action was led by Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, who had written the foreword to Mercola’s and Cummins’ book and who’s an environmental lawyer. When Kennedy announced he was running for President, the lawsuit had to be abandoned.

The ‘Washington Post’ book critic Ron Charles asked Margo if she felt any responsibility for adding to a culture of fear and misrepresentation by publishing ‘The Truth About COVID-19.’ She replied that ‘Our public responsibility is to the truth, as far as we can determine it. Creating a climate of fear and misrepresentation is what mainstream media seems to excel at, not independent publishers like Chelsea Green.’

If only more publishers still thought like Margo Baldwin. The industry has been completely ‘captured’ and is no longer interested in promoting free speech and open dialogue. This is not the place to discuss the prevalence of ‘cancel culture’ in the publishing industry, which reached its zenith (or nadir) in 2020 when a book on cancel culture by the British commentator Julie Burchill was cancelled by her publishers. It’s ironic in the circumstances that the history of publishing is synonymous with the history of free speech. The Reformation would never have happened without Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the fifteenth century. At a time in history when religion was central to life in Europe, it was the introduction and spread of printed books that broke the rigid control of the Catholic Church over the popular understanding of the world, and enabled the public to read the Bible for themselves.

So it’s concerning that earlier this year Chelsea Green was sold to Rizzoli International Publications, a subsidiary of the Mondadori Group, the biggest publishing company in Italy. Who knows whether it will be able to remain independent-minded now that it’s no longer independently owned? I’m sure it will keep on publishing books on ecology and regenerative agriculture, but on subjects like autism and electromagnetic fields and pesticides and AIDS and COVID? If Rizzoli have good commercial sense, they’ll realise that there’s money to be made from retaining Chelsea Green’s unique selling point, as more and more people wake up to what’s happening worldwide.

I don’t agree with Jenny Goodman about everything. I disagree with her views on private car ownership and on the effect of the restrictions that have been placed on car use in London and other British cities (the so-called ULEZ and LTN zones, pp. 107-14). I also disagree with her about the connection between man-made greenhouse gases and climate change, which in any case she mentions only peripherally, because her book isn’t about climate change: it’s about environmental toxins. As Jenny points out, carbon dioxide is one of the few products of fossil fuel combustion that isn’t poisoning us (p. 102). She’s interested in the ones that are. I think that one of the purposes of the official promotion of the false narrative about man-made greenhouse gases causing global warming – supposedly threatening our survival as a species – is to deflect attention from the environmental toxins that really are damaging us, so it’s important that Jenny should have focussed on these. My main criticism of Jenny here is that I think she has taken official explanations at face value – that measures to restrict car use and to counteract so-called ‘anthropogenic climate change’ are being imposed by officials who genuinely believe in the policy they are pursuing. No, they don’t. They know these measures are merely a smokescreen to hide the real purpose of Agenda 2030, which is the reduction of individual freedoms and the imposition on the public of technocratic controls.

As part of her discussion about the harms caused by plastics getting into the water system, Jenny retells the well-known story of mother albatrosses feeding their offspring plastic instead of squid, which it superficially resembles. This tale (she says) was featured by David Attenborough on his ‘Blue Planet’ series for the BBC, inspiring a consumer-led movement against the use of plastic here in the UK, which led to the introduction of a tax on plastic bags (p. 83). I entirely agree with the point Jenny makes here about wasteful plastic packaging in supermarkets. I’m unconvinced by the albatross story, however. I would be very surprised if mother albatrosses were unable to distinguish between plastic and squid. It’s more likely that that they picked up the plastic as a convenient hard object to help break down food in their gizzards. According to Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, who discusses this story in his book ‘Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom’ (2021), ‘Sir David Attenborough [and] the BBC are knowingly lying through their teeth in hopes no-one will call them out. Very few people know the truth about seabirds, gizzards and the hard objects used for digestive aids. … Activists, the media and some scientists are happy to play along with the “birds mistaking plastic for food” narrative. This is a clear example of an unobservable, remote situation where the general public cannot verify the truth of the matter for themselves’ (pp. 113-122).

I mention this story not because I intend forensically to examine a book from which I have learned a good deal, with which I very largely agree, and which contributes enormously to a public understanding of the individual and cumulative effects of the various elements of the toxic soup in which we are all forced to survive – but to make what I think is an important general point about the freedom movement. We’ve all been saying for the last four years that what most offends us about the current state of mainstream media and the publishing industry is that they suppress all deviation from the official narrative and silence all discussion on unapproved issues, yet are we really so committed to open debate ourselves?

There’s a tendency within the freedom movement to assume that because we know official sources are lying to us, then everything they tell us must be untrue, and the opposite of what they say must be the truth. This is based on a misunderstanding of how propaganda works. The effectiveness of mainstream propaganda depends more on the selective reporting of the truth than on downright falsehoods. The material published by government bodies and by mainstream media certainly does need to be forensically examined to see what narrative they are seeking to promote, and to see when they are telling the truth and when they are lying. But who has the time or energy to analyse every single story? People in the freedom movement are just as guilty of groupthink as those who still cleave to official narratives. We imagine ourselves to be independent critical thinkers, who refuse to be told what to think by government or media or even by our social network, and who go out of our way to make up our own minds on everything. But that isn’t really true.

Jenny Goodman is an original thinker who looks at the evidence and comes to her own conclusions. She’s not part of any tribe. Jenny attributes her independence of thought to a Marxist upbringing which made her aware from childhood that the powers-that-be didn’t have our interests at heart, but their own; and that power corrupts and all institutions become corrupted (including, she adds, socialist ones). So Jenny didn’t need waking up to the perversion of the system, because this was the narrative on which she was raised. As a result, she told me, she’s always been a ‘troublemaker,’ ever since she organised a demonstration at her secondary school in north London against a talk by Martin Webster, leader of the anti-immigrant National Front. No doubt parts of her book will annoy people in the freedom movement, but that comes with the territory.

In one sense, ‘Getting Healthy in Toxic Times’ is not a contribution to the freedom movement because it ignores the principal issues which have brought us together – lockdown and the COVID vaccines (and now the climate con). In another sense, it defines what the freedom movement should represent. We need to be independent thinkers, we have to ask questions of everyone, and if that means offending people who are supposed to be ‘on our side,’ then for the future of us all it is better that we do so.

If we are standing at a turning point in human history, if we are indeed participating in a ‘great awakening,’ then we have to hold ourselves to higher standards than we hold others. We have to be better than our opponents. Something I often say nowadays is that the only thing we know for sure is that we’re being lied to. Everything else is a matter for argument.