It’s a depressing fact that the freethinkers on the internet whom I most admire for their courage, intelligence, and scepticism about the official line, who are doing for free or peanuts the job that journalists no longer do, nearly always let me down when it comes to climate change hysteria.

Take Craig Murray, the ex-ambassador sacked, insulted and defamed for his opposition to the use of torture by the British government. In a reasonable, well-argued, and compassionate article about the corona virus outbreak, he says in an aside:

As the human species continues to expand massively in numbers, and as it continues casually to make other species extinct, it is inevitable that the excessive and crowded human population will become susceptible to disease. As we see the catastrophic effects of human beings on the environment, including on other species and the climate, I am genuinely perplexed as to what are the underlying assumptions and goals of humankind.

And I am genuinely perplexed as to why someone who has been the victim of government lies which destroyed his career and almost destroyed him, believes anything they say. He knows they lie about Julian Assange, about the Skripals, about Iraq, Yemen and Syria. So why does he believe them about climate change?

Or take Caitlin Johnstone‘s latest: “Dear America, Please Stop This Nonsense Immediately. Love, The Rest Of The World:”in which she pleads with the Democrat Party not to hand the coming election to Trump by putting up a candidate who is in the advanced stages of senile dementia. In another recent article she gives 26 examples from recent public speeches by Joe Biden, including his mention of “Super Thursday” and these gems:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by the, go, you know the, you know the thing.”

“I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Look me over, if you like what you see help out, if not vote for the other Bi- gimme a look though okay?”

It’s not as if Caitlin is doing this as a paid up Bernie Sanders fan. In another article, thoughtfully titled: “Chris Cuomo is a Fucking Shitbag” she says of the CNN anchorman and brother and son of New York mayors:

If it weren’t for power-worshipping shitbags like Chris Cuomo constantly sticking their rapey fingers in people’s minds every day and adjusting their perceptions on what’s going on in the world, Bernie Sanders would be considered too far right for the political left to support and nobody would even know Joe Biden’s name.

But, and here’s the point, her plea to the USA not to commit Hara Kiri is summed up thus:

Please don’t do that to us, America. We just want a world that doesn’t get destroyed by climate chaos or World War 3 or the total collapse of civilisation  We just want to live, dammit! We just want to live.

Two more Bidenisms have just emerged from a campaign speech he gave in Missouri:

“If you want to nominate a Democrat, a lifelong Democrat, a proud Democrat, an Obiden-Bama Democrat, join us.”

“…We cannot get re-elected, we cannot win this re-election, excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump..”

I went to the Guardian, who reported his Missouri speech, but without those two quotes. The New York Times doesn’t seem to have a report on the speech so far. The mainstream media are conspiring to hide the fact that their favoured candidate for the presidential election is suffering from dementia.This is not some vague suspicion, blown up by Trump tweets. It’s obvious to any reasonable human being who knows what’s going on, which means anyone who doesn’t rely on the mainstream media. The Guardian and the NYT are part of a conspiracy to get Biden chosen as Democrat candidate and elected by hiding the obvious fact that his mind has gone. The Guardian and the NYT are as trustworthy as Pravda pre-1989. Are the Daily Telegraph or the Wall Street Journal any better? Someone enlighten me please.

Let’s talk about conspiracy theories. I’ve mentioned in three articles, this one, this one, and this one, three organisations in Britain and Europe currently investigating conspiracy theory belief. All three see it as something bad, associated with populist politics, and all three include climate scepticism among their conspiracy theories. The “Conspiracy and Democracy” group at Cambridge even changed their research programme in mid-course in order to include questions on Trump and Brexit, in order to demonstrate that those on the winning side in the 2016 US Presidential Election and the UK referendum were more likely to believe irrational conspiracy theories. In order to produce a series of questions which could be put in a number of different countries, the Cambridge group left out almost all possible actual conspiracies (the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11) leaving only Holocaust denial, contact with aliens, the truth about immigration, climate change, and suspicion of vaccines as concrete cases. The questions were worded so as to determine assent to vague assertions that “the government is deliberately hiding the truth..,” “the truth is being deliberately hidden from the public..” etc. The Cambridge professors have yet to produce their final report, but all indications are that it will find that the world divides into thick populist chavs who deny the Holocaust and climate change, and decent folk who would never believe that the government might lie to them.

The corona virus has given the debunkers a new subject to expostulate about. I must have seen or read a score of articles or TV programmes countering conspiracy theories on social media. All but one of them failed to mention either of the two interesting theories circulating: one involving the sudden dismissal of Dr Qiu and her husband from a Canadian biological weapons research laboratory, and the other concerning the fact that Wuhan, where the outbreak started, is home to China’s main biological weapons research facility. An item on French TV attempted to refute the possibility of a link between the outbreak and the Wuhan lab by pointing out that the virus definitely came from an animal, probably a bat, and thus must have originated in a place where there were live animals, namely the market, conveniently overlooking the undoubted fact that biological laboratories also contain live animals, plus the world’s top expert on bat-born viruses. Attenborough himself couldn’t have done a better job of alerting the normally sceptic rational human being to the fact that he was being lied to. Other facts I haven’t seen followed up on mainstream media are that the virus seems to attack Asiatics far more readily than Europeans, and that Wuhan recently hosted a kind of Military Olympic Games, meaning that it had as guests a number of members of the armies of the USA and other Western powers.

It would be nice to think that some new Watts or McIntyre with knowledge of medical biology might start a blog to explore some of the questions raised, and might in – say – five years time, (because that’s how long it takes when all you’ve got is a blog with informed readers) begin to produce interesting results. It’s more likely that such a person would die of a sudden shortness of breath in easily explained circumstances before their research bore fruit.

The identification of reasonable climate sceptics with holocaust deniers and all those who dare to suspect that our governments are not always entirely honest with us will have a wholly predictable result. When the lights go out, or flights are taxed out of reach, or electric cars start to accelerate silently into unsuspecting pedestrians before bursting into uncontrollable flames (google Tesla) people will turn to the only politicians who said: we told you so. And they won’t be the nice, reasonable (though rather conservative) Lord Lawson or Viscount Ridley.

No doubt MI6 and the CIA are fully aware of the danger, and are even now working on the problem. If you’re a young member of a rightwing climate sceptic party like the French Rassemblement National, heading for electoral success and eager to shake off the boring old racist policies of your elders, check that the wing nuts in your party aren’t agents provocateurs. And check that the wing nuts on your car wheels haven’t been loosened before you drive.