Waiting on a friend at an outside café I shared a table with a stranger and we engaged in conversation. It started with the devastation in the high street. Most shops were closed or boarded up save for the odd phone repair centre, nail bar, vape shop and this café. Without asking, the reason he gave was Lockdown. So quickly we were on to Covid and all the theories of how we got to where we are.  “How can you tell” I asked, “what is a conspiracy theory and what is knowing the truth? What is the difference?”. “The difference” he said “was about 9 months” I guess it may take longer but the switching has already begun. In fact, it began some time ago, when people who saw that the truth would out, slipped over to the other side. Rishi Sunak’s confession, now forgotten, being a very public example of this. The truth is out there and it is not hard to find, provided you see past the first tranche of links which the search engines offers you and you recognise the not-too-subtle messages in the main stream media.

Now, there are a number of writers, thinkers, commentators, theologians and even journalists who have helped me make sense of our current situation, helped me sift through the competing stories and the especially the past two extraordinary years. I am thinking of a disparate gang of personalities: Peter Hitchins, John Waters, Luara Perrins, Cathy Gyngell, Dave Rubin, Mark Steyn, William Phillip, James Delingpole, Neil Oliver, Paul Joseph Watson, Konstantin Kissin and others, most of whom seldom appear in the main stream media, or if they do, only to have their work deposited in the conspiracy theory, covid denier, anti-vaxxer bin.  It goes without saying that I do not agree with all or even most of what these individuals say, their style of presenting them or the principles they live by, but all have touched on something that has been hard for me to ignore and has given clarity to my own understanding and made me believe that I was maybe not totally mad after all.

Others have had the time and presence of mind to write books:  Peter and Ginger Breggan with their carefully and dogged research in “Covid-19 and the global predators”, Mark Woolhouse “The year the world went mad”  with his assertion in that “lockdown was a monumental mistake on a truly global scale…..with its unintended but predictable consequences of trying to control a novel coronavirus by shutting down society” Ian Miller in his meticulously investigation into the use of face coverings “Unmasked” and Laura Dodsworth in her shocking revelation of how the government weaponised fear “A state of fear”. More recently Naomi Wolf has published her own response in “The bodies of others”.

If you are a someone who fully respects and believes the prevailing narrative in relation to Covid-19, posited by most governments of the world and relayed effectively through the main media platforms, if you see those who make the decisions as basically honourable and trustworthy, who have our best interests at heart and who are not corrupted by the influence of Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Data or Big Business and who listen to all the arguments carefully before making a judgement, then this book is not for you. You would only find it unsettling, annoying, even make you angry and I would want to spare you that.

Now, Naoim Wolf is not someone who I would be naturally drawn to or would have taken any great interest in the subjects she has chosen to focus on, but like so many others, prophets come from strange camps. And the truth is buried in surprising places. For me it was an easy read, comprehensive but concise, universal yet personal, simply compiled yet fully and carefully referenced.  Above all it was a personal story and remarkably similar to others who have come from a solid background in the classical liberal post-war world to a sense that things are not what they appear to be and that the ideology which gave us succour for so long was fundamentally flawed. Most importantly, for me, is her admission, which comes late in the book, that she had come to recognise, perhaps for the first time, the true reality and horror of evil and that there was a spiritual being behind the forces of darkness. This drew her finally and logically to an acceptance of the reality of God. 

“I asked a renowned medical-freedom activist how he stayed strong in his mission as his name was besmirched and he faced career attacks and social ostracism. He replied with Ephesians 6:12 “ For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the world, against spiritual wickedness in high places”

After many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, I started to pray again.. I was now willing to speak about God publicly. Why? Because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training yet found that it was so elaborate in its construction and so cruel, with an almost super human, flamboyant, baroque imagination made from the essence of cruelty itself, that I could not conceive that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.”

“In the magnitude of evil around us; in its awe-inspiring level of darkness and inhumanity; in the policies aimed at killing children’s joy, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the president’s own bully pulpit, demanding people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbours and loved ones and friends all of this the presence of such rampant, elemental evil, I felt a darkness beyond anything human. I don’t think humans are smart or powerful enough to have come up with this horror alone.”

“Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk of believe in spiritual matters…we are to be shy about referencing God himself… we Jews, though, do have a history and literature that lets us talk about spiritual battle between the forces of God and negative forces that debase, that profane, that seek to ensnare our soul. We have seen this drama before, and not that long ago.”

So, I am left with the conundrum which I face almost every day, with friends and family who find it unbelievable that I should be so contrary and perverse to swallow the “conspiracy theory” narrative. We seem to be miles apart. It is a great divide and a hard one to get across. I know that the gracious and loving thing to do would be to tell the truth as I firmly believe it to be so, but the fear of causing upset, trouble, or even anger, trumps it, and to my shame I keep quiet most of the time.

But the in the end, as one of the thinkers above suggested, we shouldn’t get tied up in knots over conspiracy theories. The reality is there is a genuine conspiracy, the one Naomi Wolfe’s friend alluded to and the one that the writer exposes in the second Psalm. It is the ridiculous and even comical picture of the great kings of earth plotting against God the creator who simply laughs at them. He holds them in derision and the writer warns the rulers of the earth to serve the Lord with fear, to celebrate his rule with trembling and to kiss the Son, or they will be destroyed. For this conspiracy will fail, of that there can be no doubt. It is something that the rulers of the nations and the supranational bodies, the UN, EU, WEF, WWF, WHO, WFP, IMF and the World Bank should pay careful attention to.

This is not, however, a charter for laziness, for lying back or coping out, we have to be vigilant, as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. We have to be salt and light and when we can, we have to speak out, stand up and resist evil wherever it comes from.