Taking a look at the Andrew Bridgen controversy and how the British establishment reacted to a wildcard

In September last year, I wrote an article speculating on the ways in which the establishment, both in Britain and elsewhere, was going to handle public discourse around excess deaths and alleged links to the vaccine roll-out. To be clear, my interest here is not to speculate on the cause of the excess deaths, but to focus on how Power deals with the situation and widespread public distrust. As a subject of discussion, vaccines and their supposed efficacy divide opinion in all circles interested in the zeitgeist and its trends and general direction. The partisan nature of the discourse has meant that few people view the situation through a value-free analysis of Power and how Power deals with problems.

Such problems can be rooted in facts, or they may well be simple fictions of the public imagination, a baseless ‘‘conspiracy’’ but in each case, Power has to offer some degree of response or strategize to absorb the blows.

In my September article, I posited 6 courses of action that the system of power could utilize in the face of growing distrust and outright hostility to everything that Power was telling them, or not telling them, in relation to excess deaths and vaccine safety. The scenario which prevailed was number 6 which amounted to doubling down and doing nothing:

The most likely scenario in the short term is that nothing at all happens. The narrative grip is tightened and the reasons for the excess deaths are not fully investigated or honestly addressed. While this certainly seems to be the logical short-term play from the establishment, it does carry a number of ‘‘side effects’’ over the long-term.

Public distrust and a feeling of having been lied to is already spreading like wildfire among the populace. This is then compounded by the fact the public is expected to go along with a multitude of other dubious schemes and capers such as the climate change agenda, inflation, potential food shortages and soaring energy bills.

The situation as it stands now has public bodies hemorrhaging all of the social capital gained through their propaganda campaigns and applied psychology techniques. Ironically, public distrust is spreading like a virus and the system is still trying to find ways to ‘‘stop the spread’’.

Perhaps lacking in my original analysis was that the ‘‘Spread’’ of discontent was also manifesting in pressure being placed on individual politicians by the restless public. This, combined with the online and offline ecosystems of scepticism around vaccines and excess deaths, meant that the stage was being set for a politician to bring the issue into the center of power itself.

Enter Andrew Bridgen.

On 13th December 2022 Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire Andrew Bridgen gave a speech in an almost empty House of Commons detailing the corruption, medical malpractice and wilful blindness of the political and media establishment to the massive harms being inflicted upon the population by the vaccine campaign.

According to Bridgen:

Before I state the key evidence-based facts that make a clear case for complete suspension of these emergency use authorisation vaccines, it is important to appreciate the key psychological barrier that has prevented these facts from being acknowledged by policymakers and taken up by the UK mainstream media. That psychological phenomenon is wilful blindness. It is when human beings—including, in this case, institutions—turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, reduce anxiety, avoid conflict and protect their prestige and reputations. There are numerous examples of that in recent history, such as the BBC and Jimmy Savile, the Department of Health and Mid Staffs, Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, and the medical establishment and the OxyContin scandal, which was portrayed in the mini-series “Dopesick”. It is crucial to understand that the longer wilful blindness to the truth continues, the more unnecessary harm it creates.

He continued:

In the past, vaccines have been completely withdrawn from use for a much lower incidence of serious harm. For example, the swine flu vaccine was withdrawn in 1976 for causing Guillain-Barré syndrome in only one in 100,000 adults, and in 1999 the rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn for causing a form of bowel obstruction in children affecting one in 10,000. With the covid mRNA vaccine, we are talking of a serious adverse event rate of at least one in 800, because that was the rate determined in the two months when Pfizer actually followed the patients following their vaccination. Unfortunately, some of those serious events, such as heart attack, stroke and pulmonary embolism will result in death, which is devastating for individuals and the families they leave behind. Many of these events may take longer than eight weeks post vaccination to show themselves.

A week later, Bridgen appeared on James Delingpole’s podcast. In a wide-ranging discussion, the two discussed what was happening within the political establishment with regard to adverse reactions, excess deaths and the conspiracy of silence regarding the vaccines. According to Bridgen there are MPs who are aware of the carnage being meted out by the vaccines, but they’re fearful of sticking their heads above the parapet. In yet more ‘‘insider baseball’’ revelations, Bridgen explained that the mask-wearing by politicians in public during the pandemic was pure theatre and that if the audience could see the whole studio, they’d have realized the only people wearing masks were those speaking into the cameras.

By sheer coincidence, the Tory Party decided that the time was right to breathe new life into an investigation of Bridgen’s lobbying and financial interests, with the Daily Mail reporting:

MPs have agreed to suspend a Tory MP after he was found to have displayed a ‘very cavalier’ attitude to the rules in a series of lobbying breaches.

Andrew Bridgen will be suspended from the Commons for five sitting days from Tuesday.

The Standards Committee recommended the suspension for failing to declare a financial interest in a company he was lobbying on behalf of.

The MP for North West Leicestershire’s actions were described as ‘careless and cavalier’ and led him to breach the MPs’ code of conduct.

It is of course rather fortunate for the Tory Party that they decided to find a conscience at this particular moment and investigate this particular side hustle. Rishi Sunak’s relationship with Moderna will have to wait for another day. For now, we’ll simply have to be content that Andrew Bridgen’s Ghanaian woodland project has been thoroughly investigated.

However, Bridgen might have been suspended from parliament, but he at least still had a Twitter account. What’s more, Muskian Twitter meant that government agencies had lost the ability to outsource their censorship needs to this particular Big Tech outlet. If Bridgen wandered off the plantation on Twitter, the government would have to deal with it themselves.

On January 11th Andrew Bridgen tweeted this:

The condemnation was instantaneous and across the political spectrum. He’d finally gone too far. The tweet resulted in Bridgen losing the whip and being booted from the Tory Party – not because he’d accused the British Government of crimes against humanity and mass death, but because his invocation of the Holocaust was deemed offensive and anti-Semitic(!)

Many Tory grandees took to Twitter themselves to do everything possible to tarnish Bridgen’s name, slander his opinions and disavow him without hesitation. Curiously, nobody took issue with Bridgen’s supposed anti-Semitism more than the people responsible for the implementation of the pandemic policies (not in the designing) and the vaccine roll-out.

Thus, within a month of raising questions about vaccine safety, institutional corruption and excess deaths in the UK, Andrew Bridgen had been investigated and suspended for corruption, and labelled an anti-science, anti-vaxer kook, an anti-Semite and offensive to the Jewish people and wider society generally.

The British political establishment, then, had found within their ranks a heretic and suitably purged him, cast him out into the wilderness to stalk GB News and the podcast scene like a leper.

However, Britain’s containment grid is more sophisticated than just that.

Because the British political establishment is widely detested by the public, there’s always a danger of political renegades and outcasts being welcomed by John Bull. It is for this purpose that a secondary wall of containment and narrative control exists. The wall of containment I’m alluding to here is the radio talk show, primarily LBC and TalkRadio. The format is one in which intellectually incurious blow-hards bully and ‘‘own’’ hapless members of the public, while at the same time posing as renegades and ‘‘say it as is’’ free-thinkers themselves.

White van man little Englander goes about his daily grind listening to what presents itself as ‘‘common sense’’ and ‘‘no holds barred debate’’ when in actuality it’s simply sanding the rough edges of the issue of the day and sending the masses into a cul-de-sac of safe opinion. Here dwells the discourse of Bulldog Nationalism.

The issue facing people like Julia Hartley-Brewer and Nick Ferrari is that their audience is becoming increasingly worried about the excess deaths and secrecy around vaccine side-effects. Their job is to repackage that dissent into a more rubbery and less sharp or pointed criticism of the power structure, just as they do with race and immigration-related issues. The politicians themselves had set the tone for what was to ensue with regard to Bridgen — is it ever appropriate to compare something to the Holocaust?

The fact that Bridgen said explicitly ‘‘since the Holocaust’’ hardly mattered. The framing was set. The issue of whether the public was suffering severe health problems because of a substance the government had insisted they have injected into them was now cast into the shadow of the ‘‘Big H’’.

This was not accidental. It was simply the secondary line of defence serving its purpose. This, essentially, is why the talk radio networks always have the whiff of non-alcoholic beer about them: it’s a promise of catharsis which never materializes.

In the print media, The Guardian and The Times have taken the opportunity to force the ratchet of online censorship forward a few notches with these articles:

This, then, is what the public sees when an elected politician tries to begin a debate, that the public has been placed in danger by what many people regard as life-threateningly reckless policies imposed by an inherently corrupt and self-serving political and media network.

The indifference to the well-being of the British people is so obvious and met with such contempt by every institution of power that enormous degrees of distrust and hatred for the establishment become inevitable. Matt Hancock’s tweet attacking Bridgen had, last I checked, 7000 replies with the overwhelming majority hissing hatred and accusing Hancock, and the political class to which he belongs, of crimes against humanity.

We’ve reached a point where politicians can routinely expect to open emails or replies on social media and read things such as:

‘‘I lost my 32-year-old son to the AstraZeneca vaccine because of you, I hope to see you hang!’’

Blood In The Water

I began this article with the caveat that I would not be getting into the weeds on the cause of the excess deaths or speculating on the vaccines themselves. What interests me is the manner in which Power deals with counter-narratives and rogue individuals. Essentially, this whole article is a list of tactics by which the establishment can use spin and applied psychology to squirt squid ink into the eyes of the public. Traditionally, spin was used to offset the damage done to Power by a leak or failed policy. In other words, spin and narrative planting was done after the fact of a scandal or inconvenience as a self-defence mechanism.

It is merely an opinion, but it seems to me the British political establishment became so reliant on their mind-bending nudge units and applied psychology divisions that a change occurred. Instead of these tactics being used in a reactive sense, they have increasingly factored into policy-making preemptively. A dangerous or ill-intentioned or destructive policy could therefore be implemented on the assurance that no matter how catastrophic the consequences, the mind-benders would swoop in to dig Power out of the hole. The arrogance and hubris fostered were thus absolute, the indifference to pain, death and injury assured.

The Government decided that it could ‘‘double down’’ rather than issue a partial concession or, hey, prove the anti-vaxers wrong, because they thought their ability to mould public perception could trump fearful tremors rippling through the population that something was deeply, horribly wrong.

Source – https://morgoth.substack.com/p/a-bridgen-too-far-how-the-british