As we approach the end of the year, we are repeating our twenty most-read articles of 2023, in reverse order. This is number 8 and it was first published on June 14.
MARIANNA Spring, the BBC’s ‘Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent’, was aiming for the kill. Announcing BBC Verify a few weeks ago, Spring specified a ‘conspiracy newspaper’ as her prime target. Seeking out undefined ‘harm’ and ‘hate’ and getting politicians to take up her denunciations is specifically how she defines her new ‘reporting’ role. In The Light, the innovative, free sheet, she was sure she had found her catch. It’s been revealing a worrying amount of truth, so it must not prevail. Plummeting television ratings are clearly hurting, but the motive for attacking competitors is not merely about popularity. The new initiative of BBC Verify explicitly reveals our national broadcaster in its Big Brother light, an asset of the surveillance state and Spring as its chief agent.
The Light is a monthly print bulletin launched in October 2020 by Mancunian musician Darren Nesbit as a means of bypassing the unprecedented and draconian censorship on the purported Covid-19 pandemic. Initially distributed at protests against lockdown and a few Stand in the Park groups, it rapidly spread nationwide. Hundreds of volunteers purchase copies in bulk and distribute them, in the interest of awakening more people to the globalist power-grab of our property, privacy, democracy and freedom. In other words, to the Great Reset.
Cleverly, as printed press copy, The Light has averted much of the censorship exerted on independent media, parts of which have been suppressed, demonetised and banned (as experienced by TCW). https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/tcw-was-censored-by-the-uk-government/ The Light is like the Samizdat in the Soviet Union, whereby dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn kept each other informed with covertly typewritten pamphlets passed to trusted acquaintances. In a digital world, paper itself is resistance.
Spring approached Nesbit for an interview based on the idea that each party asked the other a series of questions. He agreed to it.
You can watch the full three-hour unedited conversation, Marianna in Conspiracyland: *FULL UNEDITED INTERVIEW* with Darren Nesbit, Editor of The Light Paper, here.
The exchange is remarkable: a supposedly gifted young reporter is no match for the upstart editor. Whereas Spring uses clichés of the official narrative throughout and avoids substance, Nesbit confronts her with rational argument. The comments beneath the video on Rumble are not kind to Spring.
As expected, however, for her article Spring has cherry-picked the bits of the interview that fit her distorted pre-ordained perspective of dangerous disinformation and hateful extremism. Her account of the paper is inaccurate and unfair if not grossly misrepresentative. Take her claim that it is ‘A UK conspiracy theory newspaper sharing calls for trials and executions of politicians and doctors has links with the British far-right’. Yes, some writers have called for justice for the unethical and brutal Covid-19 regime, akin to the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War, deeming the imposition of these policies tantamount to criminal acts. In Spring’s worldview there should be no freedom for such opinion. She does not produce any evidence either of death threats, or for the incongruent connection she made between the cause for freedom from fascist authoritarianism and fascism itself. Indeed, Nesbit exposed this shortcoming in Spring’s case during the interview.
Spring also inaccurately stated that 100,000 copies of The Light are printed monthly (the number is a quarter of a million). This is similar to her gross underestimates of the size of freedom rallies in central London, showing that she herself is more propagandist than an objective reporter of information.
Blithely unaware of the principles of journalism, Spring justifies her amorphous ‘violence and hate’ inquiries by reference to national security needs. ‘Referring to concerns about the wider conspiracy theory movement more generally’, she cites the UK’s Head of Counter Terrorism Policing, Matt Jukes, who she reports as having ‘told the BBC they are currently “seeing evidence of conspiracy theories being interwoven with extremism” and that this “connection is very much on our radar and in our sights as investigators”.’
What exactly is Spring saying here? That the BBC has been seconded by the State in the person of herself to confirm their suppositions about ‘a wider conspiracy theory movement’ and root it out? Shouldn’t the BBC’s job rather be to critically and objectively examine the UK’s ‘counter terrorism’ policy?
I know Darren Nesbit and have found him to be a man of integrity and insight. He is primarily motivated not by money but by a mission of enlightenment (hence the title of his production). He is not a typical editor – he does not necessarily agree with all of the content published in The Light. His undertaking as a genuine advocate of free speech, a concept that Spring appears to abhor, is to create and provide a free outlet for that. There is none so blind as those who will not see, and Spring refuses to consider any justification for people diverging from the mainstream media consensus on Covid-19 or climate change, or to allow that the lockdown and coerced vaccination programmes are perceived by many principled people to be ‘crimes against humanity’.
In her attempted inquisition of Nesbit, I was surprised to find the only verbatim quote she took from the pages of The Light was my writing, a passage I am proud of for putting the schism between the rulers and the ruled so succinctly:
‘We didn’t vote for authoritarianism in the guise of public health, coercive mass injection of an untested genetic engineering vaccine, road closures for a dubious climate crisis, rising prices and food shortages, unlimited illegal immigration, constant promotion of subversive gender ideology and critical race theory, and destruction of our heritage. And we certainly didn’t vote for war against Russia.’
This was a strange choice by Spring for an example of misinformation, because it was taken from an article inviting readers to submit a series of ten questions to their MPs (published in TCW, with the answers reported here). If asking the wrong questions is prohibited, we really have returned to the Dark Ages.
A repeated point by Spring is that ‘disinformation’, whatever she means by this, endangers society. As an example for her BBC article she found someone who is upset about the popularity of The Light in his town:
‘In the Devon town of Totnes, a motivated minority have been distributing The Light for the past two years. Its former town Mayor Ben Piper says he first became a key target of the conspiracy theory movement there because of his role enforcing coronavirus restrictions. He fears an article about him in The Light exacerbated the harassment he experienced – from abuse in the street, to sinister phone calls, to someone driving a car at him.’
But according to Nesbit, there has been ‘no article about the mayor – there might have been a piece that mentioned him and his support for the tyranny, I suppose’. Totnes is a well-heeled town to which members of the metropolitan elite, including green zealots, have migrated from London. But it also has a large community of critical thinkers who distrust the establishment. Spring produced no evidence in support of the ex-Mayor’s ‘fears’ about The Light. It would be interesting to know how she elicited the comment from him.
This is a thoroughly nasty campaign by Spring, who is protecting the establishment and its cronies from transparency and playing her part by smearing contrary information as disinformation. While The Light speaks truth to power, she is speaking power to truth. Perhaps Spring will go the same way as her US counterpart Nina Jankovic, who resigned from the Homeland Security’s new disinformation governance body after posting an excruciating TikTok video of herself singing her version of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ about fake news. Let us hope that Spring is better at singing than journalism.