A year or two ago I noticed that some sort of newspaper had been lying on the vestibule floor for a couple of days with all the flyers for kebab shops, suppliers of fitted bedrooms, loft-converters, funeral planners, dog groomers, roofers and providers of niche sexual services.
At first, I thought it was some Christian screed. I saw the title, The Light – with the picture of the lighthouse on the masthead – and quite naturally assumed some religious source. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have gone in for a rebranding, I thought, or the local Catholics, ranks depleted by the War on Nonces, have launched a recruitment drive.
Nothing of the sort, it turns out. Or almost nothing of the sort.
Every few months or so, a new issue drops. Sometimes I have a flip through it. The Light is subtitled “The Uncensored Truth” and describes itself as a “people-funded paper”. I assumed – I was once a Wigan Reporter paper boy – that everyone got a copy. How wrong I was.
You need to live near someone dedicated, or deluded, enough to buy up a sack-load of the things and shove one through your letter box, presumably under cover of darkness. After a very strange conversation at the start of the first lockdown, I suspect Barry from three doors down.
‘The Red Pill Revolution’
The Light is a strange read. Its major thrust has been the Covid ‘conspiracy’ or, as the paper’s writers tend to put it, the Covid conspiracy. They are convinced that the pandemic was a created event designed to reduce populations into the sort of supine, malleable idiocy necessary for the success of The Great Reset.
The ‘Covid scam’, they argue, gave global capitalists, authoritarian governments and their mainstream media puppets the long-awaited excuse to condition us into accepting increasingly draconian levels of social control.
Along with the ‘climate change hoax’, the pandemic was intended to soften us up for population control and resource management by the uber-wealthy and their myrmidons. Issue after issue publishes articles about the ‘Covid scam’, the ‘unholy alliance between governments and Big Tech’, and the authoritarian conspiracy by world governments to make sure we all keep taking the blue pill.
In his article End the era of fear, Ben Hunt delivers a clarion call to the latent “warrior” within every reader of The Light. “Awaken the race of peaceful warriors at your peril,” he warns the establishment, the mainstream media, governments everywhere. They have all, apparently, colluded in the deliberate “fear programme” that has attempted to reduce us all to snivelling dogs, desperate for commands from our masters. “You know who you are, scum. This time there will be no forgiveness, no amnesty, because you have offended the divine spirit tat dwells in God’s people.”
In hysterical tones reminiscent of Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher at his inflammatory best, Hunt employs the good old disease metaphor: “[T]he fear programme that the scum are peddling is … chronic, like a cancer, eating away at all that is good and wholesome. It is all around us, spewing out of every radio and television, twenty-four hours a day … dragging us down into the dark and cold regions of our minds and seeking to paralyse us into quiet submission.”
A smorgasbord of alternative facts
The paper offers a range of articles guaranteed to stimulate your sceptical glands. Issue 29 carries: an interview with Matt LeTissier, a report which alleges 2,300 UK vaccine injection deaths, a story on ‘fraudulent’ voting machines, several reports on the drive to eliminate cash, an article about a woman arrested for “silent prayer” outside an abortion clinic, an exposé of the vested Microsoft and Big Pharma interests nesting at the heart of the MHRA, and an explanation of the “betrayal of the working man” by vested interests done via the prism of Ray Davies songs.
The writers are at pains to smear a patina of credibility over such stories and features. They like to quote, or at least reference, apparently top-flight academics to substantiate the way they’ve joined the dots.
In the article Are elections being stolen worldwide?, writer Emos Truth (I kid you not) quotes professors from Harvard and MIT, though their favourite tactics are the passive voice, the rhetorical question and the easy leap over degrees of separation: “Suspicions grew further…”, “Fingers were pointed…”, “Now it gets weirder…”, “There are also question marks over…” and (my own favourite) “Is this absolute proof of election fraud? No. But an incontrovertible pattern is emerging…”.
If you enjoyed Leslie Watkins’ 70s conspiracy classic Alternative 3 (“the super-powers are co-operating in space on a plan to preserve a tiny nucleus of human survivors”, etc), then The Light is very much up your street.
Now listen to these messages
Christians, coin-sellers, naturopaths, ‘privacy phone’ traders and other woo-merchants dominate the adverts on the publication’s back pages.
There’s a Tachyon Chamber “located in the heart of Lancashire”, I’m pleased to find, which will provide me with “a unique and non-invasive healing phenomena” [sic]. A nutritionist promises me I can achieve a whole Winter’s immunity (doesn’t say from what) simply through diet.
Your life After Death is a paperback book. “Knowing what’s ahead following physical death eliminates fear and uncertainty,” it claims. Reader William Crighton raves: “Answered all my questions – it was as though the book was talking to me! It tells me the choices I have and what exciting journeys await me on the other side.”
I’m not pregnant, sadly, though if I were I would definitely be subscribing to whenpushcomestoshove.co.uk, a provider of “Holistic Maternity Care and Childbirth Courses” with a “NON-medical approach” that, refreshingly, dispenses with the bogus services of so-called experts like doctors, midwives, nurses, etc and puts YOU in charge of YOUR birthing experience. Quite right, too. What the hell do medics know anyway? They’re just the shills of Big Pharma, softening up the marks. That’s us, by the way. Obviously.
There are ads for “Action Against 5G”, loads of “Naturopathic” medicine clinics, CBD oils, Colloidal Silver health supplements, healing “sanctuaries” offering Reiki massage etc, and a book which sounds amazing. It’s called Many Voices, One Mission and, for only £18.95, it promises that “twenty highly evolved spirit guides deliver wisdom, detailed insights and practical advice in contemporary, no-nonsense language”. (Presumably this is much, much more scientific than Big Tech and Big Pharma, all of whom are so obviously keeping you in the dark.)
You can get 15% off admission to a “Comedy Podcast Weekend” featuring Katie Hopkins, Matt Hoy, James Melville, Gareth Icke (son of David), and Right Said Fred. My favourite, though, has to be this from an edition a year or so back: “Cosmic Silver Linings… EMF Protection Clothing… lovingly handmade in England.” There’s a picture of a happy couple wearing his ‘n’ hers EMF suits and a hippy chick with a tin-foil hat.
Preparation for an uprising
The advertisements offer a sort of amusement, I think, but closely reading the articles can be both a baffling and disturbing experience.
As I suggested earlier, some of them have a Der Stürmer-ish quality of rabid hysteria (Ben Hunt’s ‘scum’ and ‘cancer’). There’s the pseudo-respectability I mentioned earlier; the constant references to ‘alternative research’, faux academic tone and dodgy citations are designed to appeal to all those semi-educated, unhinged armchair outsiders who say they like to ‘do my own research’ whenever confronted by a basic fact. They’re encouraged to distrust everything they’re told by the corrupt “mainstream media” yet invited to buy books containing ‘facts’ about the afterlife. More worryingly, they’re being seduced by narratives about their own marginalisation and exhorted to find the “warrior within”.
The Light is not merely a handy place for Reiki healers and coin fanatics to peddle their wares; its writers seem to expect a real uprising.
