White Roses For Me:Inside the Covid conspiracy theory ecosystem.

Yesterday my mum rang me to tell me she'd got Covid. She's 77 and she's not had it before. She had been very sensible at the height of the pandemic and since then she's been fortunate. She'd not been feeling well for a few days but she didn't think it was Covid until somebody suggested she take a test and she found out otherwise.

Apart from feeling tired and having a nasty cough, roughly the same symptoms I had with both my bouts of Covid - one during Xmas 2021, one on my birthday last year, she's bearing up and I'll give her a ring later to see how she is today. The timing, when it comes to Covid, is never good but this news was apposite because yesterday evening I was attending a Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk at Davy's Wine Vaults with the title 'Inside the White Rose: an anti-vaxx, Covid conspiracy theory ecosystem'!

Over three and a half years since the start of the pandemic and Covid is still hitting us in ways we're only just beginning to understand. I was fairly confident it'd be a good talk because the speaker, Michael 'Marsh' Marshall, is reliably excellent. He's engaging, well informed, reasonable, and funny. He explains things for members of the audience who may not be au fait with the subject in hand (and not in a patronising way), and he's also responsible for my most viewed EIAPOE blog in the whole seven and half years I've been doing this.

'Evans is not a place on Flat Earth:An Infinite Ice Shelf That Bisects Reality' has notched up 32,384 views since I wrote it in August 2019 (most of them bots probably) and it was with these Flat Earthers that Marsh began his talk. In that August talk he spoke of how many in the Flat Earth community had been opened up to other, far more worrying and dangerous, conspiracy theories and that this, unsurprisingly, came to pass with Covid too.

Marsh mentioned that all but two of the many Flat Earthers he'd met (and he's met a lot of them) believed that Covid was either a conspiracy or a hoax or at least that some elements of it were being intentionally overplayed by every government and mainstream media outlet in the world. They cited the fact that there weren't piles of dead bodies lying in the street (conveniently ignoring the fact that most people were dying on ventilators in intensive care units in hospitals where we couldn't see them) and they shared memes and stickered lamp-posts.

Marsh saw a lot of this in his home city of Liverpool so he e-mailed the address at the bottom and they sent him (for free) some of the stickers so he could go out and spread the word. He'd made contact with a decentralised group called the White Rose movement who had named themselves after a non-violent, and hugely admirable and brave, resistance movement in Nazi Germany.

That White Rose group didn't last long (about eight months) before they were arrested, imprisoned, and, in many cases, executed by the Nazis. The new White Rose movement genuinely believe what they're doing is as important as trying to stop the Nazis. They see, as does Andrew Bridgen - the former Tory MP and Brexit blowhard, elements of the pandemic (not least the vaccination programme) as being the modern day equivalent of the Holocaust.

White Rose don't rely on you subjecting their ideas to scrutiny, they rely on an emotional gut punch - something that came quite easy during the first pandemic any of us had ever lived through, and they certainly don't concern themselves with consistency in their beliefs. Beliefs that begin with insisting Covid is a hoax then moving on to saying vaccines don't work (long before any vaccine had even appeared) and, eventually, that vaccines are being used to implant us with microchips so we can be controlled by the likes of Bill Gates and some shadowy New World Order/Illuminati organisation.

Having been barred (eventually) from sharing their misinformation on YouTube and Facebook (as well as Twitter though Elon Musk let them back on before banning them again and then letting them back on again - Elon Musk is basically a troll) they found the medium that worked best for them was Telegram.

Telegram is owned by Pavel Durov. A Russian born entrepreneur who looks like your standard tech bro and is based in the United Arab Emirates. Many believe Durov is merely the public face of Telegram and there are more shadowy figures in control behind him. Now, that sounds like Marsh is proposing his own conspiracy theory but it was Durov himself who had claimed that Putin's allies had been infringing on his business interests.

If that is the case, and bearing in mind Russia has been fighting a misinformation war with far more success than it has been fighting the war in Ukraine, then why would Telegram stop people filling their service with lies and hate? They've no incentive to. In fact, it would be tacitly encouraged.

Further proof of this came on the day Russia invaded Ukraine when virtually everyone on the White Rose Telegram groups (of which there are a huge number, some large, some smaller local groups) announced that they were pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine, and that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a Nazi just as Putin said.

They'd happily, if unknowingly, swallowed Putin's propaganda on Covid and they were now happily swallowing his propaganda regarding Ukraine. It didn't stop there. Other right wing, conspiracy, groups found their way on to the White Rose groups and soon Covid (and the idea that it was a hoax) was just one of the subjects being discussed.

The great replacement theory, QAnon, even as far back as the moon landings. All of these were not individual, discrete, conspiracies but were all linked to one, huge, overarching conspiracy theory which, if you trace it back far enough, always ends up in antisemitism. The Jews, of course, are always at the root of everything that's wrong with the world. Them and the Clintons it seems.

The fascist marchers in Charlottesville in 2018 chanted "the Jews will not replace us". They didn't mean they feared being replaced by Jewish people. They feared the Jews would replace them with people of colour as a final revenge on their ultimate enemy, white people. As for the Clintons, QAnon orthodoxy has it that they are in charge of a huge operation which has taken thousands, if not millions, of children away from their parents, put them in huge underground prisons (often said to be in Alaska - where nobody can bother to go and check), and then intentionally terrified them so they can harvest their adrenochrome and live forever.

QAnon has it that Donald Trump (and a few select others, rarely named) secretly know about this and are working to stop it. It's absolute horseshit but it's surprisingly popular in the US and it's growing in the UK. During lockdown, Marsh saw people marching through Liverpool - possibly Britain's most left wing city, carrying QAnon slogans and banners.

The White Rose movement itself, as far as anyone can see, wasn't (and isn't) in it for the money but such was the popularity of their Telegram groups that it wasn't long before some of the most vile grifters (including former grand wizards of the KKK, David Icke, and Piers Corbyn) you could imagine moved in. It's unlikely that StephenYaxley-Lennon (who uses the stage name Tommy Robinson) has particularly strong feelings regarding Covid or Covid vaccinations but he showed up on these groups to say he did and then to direct people to his other websites where he spread race hate.

It's always worth taking time out to remember that Yaxley-Lennon intentionally interfered with a trial of a grooming gang so that it would have to be thrown out of court and he could then air his (completely untrue) grievances that courts weren't taking grooming seriously if it was done by groups consisting primarily of Muslim men.

Another tosser who turned up was the preposterous raw food advocate David 'Avocado' Wolfe. Avocado believes gravity is a toxin (he doesn't explain what this even means or what can be done about it but Marsh, quite rightly, pointed out that he doesn't float), that solar panels drain the sun of its energy, and he's an anti-mask activist who believes chemtrails exist and that the Earth is flat.

He turns up on White Rose Telegram groups where he directs people to his own website where they can buy unsafe products and deer antler spray which he claims will help you levitate. He's a charlatan of the highest order. His Facebook page has over eleven million followers. Among them four people who are my Facebook friends (including a certain pub owner on the southern coast of England who won't be reading this because he can barely read).

Conspiracy theorist Mark Steele's big beef is with 5G. In 2021, Mark Steele predicted that 5G and the vaccination programme combined would kill at least 70% of everybody in the UK by the end of that year. Clearly, that didn't happen but Steele still rocks up on Telegram groups advising worried parents to take positive action to eliminate those who want to vaccinate (and, in his warped mind, kill) their children by getting their revenge in first. He shares memes of people in military fatigues breaking into the houses of doctors and nurses and gunning them down with the implicit suggestion that this is what you must do if you really love your kids.

Then there's Kate Shemirani. A former nurse who was struck off for misconduct in 2020, Shemirani describes the pandemic as a "plandemic" or a "shamdemic" and espouses the idea that it is all a political plan to alter people's DNA. Her answer to this is to suggest we hold a Nuremberg style trial for everyone behind what she believes is the Covid hoax. Like the Nuremberg trials of Nazi Germany, many should pay with their lives. The doctors and nurses, of course, should be first up against the wall.

It'd depressing, but fascinating, stuff but at least Marsh left us with some positives. He met, in person, with one of the guys who ran the Liverpool White Rose movement. They chatted and chatted and eventually this guy started to realise, slowly but gradually, he was being used by bad actors to promote hatred, misogyny, and dangerous messaging regarding serious health issues. Marsh and the guy became, and remain, friends.

If only it was always that easy. A lengthy, yet compelling, Q&A followed that took in freedom of speech, free men of the land (a bonkers belief system that suggests we all live under maritime law - because we come into the world via birth canals and we're tried in docks, and therefore - as long as we don't admit to our name being our name - we are not bound by land laws and can therefore do whatever we want such as drive 90mph past a junior school), and Marsh's own safety concerns (he admitted being a straight white male gave him an advantage in that he's not received as much hate as a woman, a homosexual, or a person of colour - let alone any combination of the above - would have done if they'd been saying the same things), and David Irving's holocaust denial.

Thanks to Jade for joining me (it was good to see David & Paula too), thanks to Chris French for hosting (as ever), thanks to Goddards Pie & Mash for tasty food beforehand, and thanks most of all to Marsh for another truly interesting and entertaining talk. It may well be that nothing Marsh said was a huge surprise or something most of us didn't already know but the way he put it together, the research he does, and the way he tells his story make him a really fantastic speaker. It was no coincidence the room was as full as I've seen since Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub moved to Davy's Wine Vaults. Right, better call mum.