'I am ready to die on this hill'

In September 2020, the great journalist Neil Clark was a guest at a digital forum.

The following is an extract from a forthcoming account of Covid from the point of a view of a teacher working in a Scottish secondary school. At the end of this part of the account, there is the video of the meeting written about. It provides an affecting reminder of where the world was at the time and in what direction it looked like we were imminently heading.

“Being ‘othered’ by those in the real world, social media, at least, was a way of hearing views similar to my own. Thanks to it, I did not quite have to undergo the complete isolation of Winston Smith in 1984. Still, those that echoed my beliefs were an extreme minority; there were far, far more pro-government profiles than dissenting ones. In the early days of Covid, opposition accounts were very sparse. Society will forget, but it was a little more than a handful when the first lockdown happened and numbers grew little in presence as it was then extended into the summer. Hardly anyone of prominence, even the ones who are now near-Deities of the New Alternative Media, broadcasting to huge audiences their scepticism and criticisms of everything global-corporate-government, said nothing for a long, long time. Though many knew. Damn right they knew.

One of the few journalists with a following back then, and who was speaking out fervently, almost exclusively on Twitter, was Neil Clark. A freelance journalist who was a regular in a range of well-known publications. A working-class guy who was not really ‘in’ the elite journalistic circles, but whose ability with words and skill in finding an angle on a topic, from the loss of cassette tapes and their nostalgia value, to anachronistic people and events in history, usually the Second World War, all the way to the larceny in Iraq, made his articles attractive to the up-market tabloids, magazines and broadsheet papers.

Not being part of the journo ‘set’, not born into any sort of privilege that could cushion him from criticism, and, dependent on commissions for employment, Neil’s stance on Covid was admirably brave. He only had about fifty thousand followers when I first started to follow him and his opinions were not adding to that tally (as happened later on in 2022-24 to sceptic accounts). For those first few bleak months of lockdown, Neil’s counter-narrative tweets drew an avalanche of criticism. The scorchingly sensible points he made were ridiculed, endlessly, by the virtue-signalling Cultists.

It is hard to explain fully how the sneering and mocking of a reasonable statement by a small-minded, pontificating, self-righteous person comes across to an observer. The only analogy that seems suitable is of a modern educated mind meeting with the ancient, ordinary mind with its phantasmagorical beliefs about the wind coming from the mouth of an unsettled god. ‘Where else would it come from?’ says the primitive man with a sneering superiority to the hopelessly, ineffective Modern as he tries to explain about temperatures, air pressure and other factors, none of which the ‘backward’ mind has any reference for. (Although, now my faith in the modern, educated mind is somewhat shattered.)

In those fraught days, accounts like Neil’s were either ignored or their claims magnified dependent on which was calculated to be most effective at discrediting them. Slowly, he might be persuading people, painstakingly, growing an audience, and then one slip, the Covid Cultists had an attack line and pummelled you mercilessly, discrediting you to a potentially new audience silently watching all the interactions delaying coming down on one side or the other.

In such a climate, there were plenty of circling social media sharks waiting to attack at the first smell of blood to tear apart an oppositional voice. Neil had no margin for error. Amongst thousands of posts, he made one that could be considered a mistake. He said that the human race had not evolved to wear masks. That was it. Consequently, thousands of tweets were fired at him, deriding him for his ‘stupidity’, for if mankind had not evolved to wear masks then neither had it evolved to wear, or drive cars, or live in houses, or fly in planes, and so on and on. His point could have been expressed more accurately, but that was the razor’s edge Neil was walking on: one slip and his words were quoted to millions with a scoffing, sneering introduction. His credibility - and his ability to make means - intentionally undermined.

I’m sure Neil’s account was being suppressed too. It was difficult to tell: no one from my side of the fence seemed to be making any great impression on the minds of the UK populace, not when compared to the clout of the Pro-Lockdown, Pro-Covid, ‘Approved’ accounts who were reaching millions on Twitter alone and were forcefully cheerleading every measure and demanding more strenuous efforts. ‘We’, in contrast, were scattered across a digital desert and sparse in number. It was an army of Goliaths against a few Davids.

Despite the abuse, Twitter was still the best place to go to debate: there was almost no hope of getting your message out on Facebook, Linkedin or Instagram. At least on Twitter, there was a backward and forward, a semblance of a fight. Facebook was either silence or slaughter by a thousand piercing comments where the ratio was a thousand to one…against…and it was your ‘friends’ that were firing the arrows.

We were few in number and alone. I wondered, how could I reach out to people? Could I bring some more people together to form some sort of dialogue? I thought it might be an idea to try and round-up my own clan of heretics via the internet, an online townhall sort of thing. I contacted Neil, offered an honorarium, and suggested we do an one-hour online interview then take questions from the audience for an hour. It would be on Zoom. I’d paid for an account and could broadcast the interview to five hundred people. To my surprise and pleasure, Neil said he’d do it in early September.

I spent a good few weeks, as often as I could, promoting an online ticket for the event through the summer. I was on Twitter tagging as many people as possible. Originally, I was going to charge, to cover expenses and to start a media company that would become a focal point for the resistance – however, such dreams cracked under the pressure of reality – no one was that interested, and certainly, no one was interested in paying. I tagged hundreds of people with little uptake. I made it free and people began to register.

I had a little experience communicating online, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with the technical issues that might arise, which helped. I’d prepared some questions. My first couple of questions focused on how we had gotten ourselves into this situation, before stepping back and analysing the larger picture of corporate control and influence. From there I would try and move Neil onto the widest picture of all: a global takeover by multi-national bodies, who, at bottom, were controlled by wealthy families and powerful trusts. All of them inclined towards Eugenics. That was my reading of the situation, although I left it open for Neil and others to argue for another alternative. 

It is hard to fully recall never mind convey the situation at the time. We were flailing, the resistance, such as it was. Our rights were being removed, one by one, with a chilling methodicalness by a leviathanic global state, all to the indifference or approval by most of the western world’s inhabitants. I genuinely thought it was a serious possibility that myself and those like me were going to end up in camps, if we were allowed to get that far (they had started utilising them in Australia). At that specific point in the Covid era, we were all waiting for the ‘Second Wave’ to be declared by the WHO - as modelled by the Spanish Flu a hundred years earlier - which would be even more severe and would plunge the population - willingly, desperately - into a harder, more comprehensive lockdown from which our emergence was highly unlikely.

All this horror, despite the truth being so obvious. Covid was a sham. Vaccines were a sham. It was all a distraction for the real plan. Destroy dissent publicly. Physically confine opposition. Exterminate. Then restore feudalism, buttressed by biological and informational technologies. We were too few. Too easily fragmented. Too quickly suppressed. Any assessment of reality had to conclude we were losing: we were going to lose. Was this it? Was the candle of human freedom about to be snuffed out until…God knows when…forever? This was the context of the interview. Confronted with this, an online chat felt like throwing a match into the abyss…might as well though!

The highlight of my 2020 was that night. Hundreds did not turn-up, only about one hundred and fifty in all, but, despite the relatively few numbers, there was an intensity and meaningfulness about the entire evening that, for me, reached deep into the anxiety-shrouded hearts of the listeners and touched on something preciously human.

We were due to start at 7.30pm. I would do the interview from my kitchen where I could perch on a stool with the computer on my breakfast bar. I logged on early, about an hour before, switching off the camera function on my laptop and watched as my single back screen in the digital forum was slowly joined by multiple other black screens. A small handful of people were prepared to have their cameras on.

I was nervous. A  good few minutes till we were due to start Neil appeared. His wife was in the picture, helping him log in. We chatted for a bit. I was able to speak to him directly without others hearing. I hadn’t spoken to him before and I found him very easy to speak with, very engaging and egalitarian in his manner – he did not patronise or pontificate or speak about his concerns and glaze over when you gave your opinion. He listened in an active way. I found Neil to be very grounded.

At the 7.30pm, I started. I’m not a very good presenter. I have a tendency to try to say too much, get nervous about my audience’s boredom threshold, speeding-up in response to the intrusive thoughts telling me that I’m boring them, and thus generating a tone of general unease and hesitancy. Tonight, I wanted to keep it short, clear and controlled. I wanted this evening to have an impact, to assure whoever turned-up they were not alone; they were not mad. I introduced Neil, gave a little biographical information, and then I dove into the questions.

I’d shared the questions with Neil a couple of weeks beforehand giving him time to familiarise himself with them. He was such a good journalist, doing his research thoroughly; all he’d have to do was order his thoughts. The first question concerned the recent history of Covid - how we got here essentially. Neil gave a thorough, blow-by-blow account of the events unfolding intersected by key decisions made and information disseminated by politicians and the scientific community. I had just lived through it and knew it all well; I still found it riveting.

I tried not to interrupt Neil. I didn’t try to look knowledgeable or clever. I just let him unwrap the story of Sars-Cov-2 as he wished. I tried to take that approach throughout. I adapted a psychotherapeutic approach: listen, when a natural pause came, listen, nod, and remain silent and let Neil divulge more. This was my dialogue with Neil. A couple of times I could see him hesitate as he expected me to come in with a question or to move on, but I didn’t, which allowed him to give a fuller answer and progress on to related points in his own time while I only intervened to make sure we covered key topics in the time we had.

Neil was brilliant. He knew the subject along with all the by-lanes and avenues that led to and from it. He conducted his own dialectic, dealing with suppositions, assumptions, possibilities and ultimate ends. He was passionate, emphatic, denunciatory, outraged, wise and inspiring. For my own part, I was a bit hesitant, a bit under-confident and hardly animated, but I was competent enough for this format where only a minimal input of personality was required from the facilitator! My voice always seems a bit light and choked, lacking any commitment, and I gave the impression of thinking of things off the top of my head rather than having them prepared – but it was enough. Neil was centre stage and connecting people through Neil’s talk was the aim.

Once we had covered the eight or so questions I wanted to put to Neil – which took over an hour – we opened it up to the online ‘floor’. This is when the magic happens in my opinion. Neil’s articulate understanding had primed the listening audience to partake, and we proceeded to enjoy a succession of very intelligent, sensitive, well-researched citizens who were completely awake to what the government and Big Pharma were attempting.

People did not ask brief, closed questions, which were an all-too-familiar feature of events like the Edinburgh Book Festival where the paying audience is given fifteen minutes to interrogate their cherished intellectual after a preening, puffed-up, wannabe-celeb interviewer has laconically cross-examined them, both usually sharing a ‘chappish’, knowing, self-congratulation, for the lion’s share of the available time. Instead, they were asking detailed, insightful questions combined with cynical and hard-headed statements about our predicament that were responded to with an earnest and democratically-spirited attitude by Neil.

There were so many facets of the entire Covid-Hoax that were covered. It was a forensic dissection. Participant after participant related their stories of censorship, media deceit, normalised abuse, masks outdoors, all the highlights of the grotesque carnival of Covid. Action and leadership were discussed. What could we do? The Opposition lacked any sort of large platform and what online spaces we had were being quickly closed down by well-funded government tools of censorship.

One lady asked Neil to speak at the next rally to protest Covid lockdowns. Neil’s response was emphatic:

Lady audience member: …People do know that something is wrong. If you could put that into words that would be great, thank you.

Neil: I’m ready to die on this hill. This is the hill I’m prepared to die on. I do think this is the most important battle I’ve ever fought. We’ve ever fought. I was very opposed to the Iraq War. I was very worried about what it would led to and I was right in terms of the deaths in that region. But in many ways, this is even worse. This is an attempt to destroy humanity, to destroy what makes us human…this is it. This is the battle. What lies in front of us? A cold, sterile dystopia.

This is how many of us were thinking at the time. It might still be a serious threat to our future. However, what impresses most is the moral courage of Neil Clark.

Listening to it today, there was a depth of penetration, prescience and a tragic grasp of the devastation being wrought by these lies, what they were doing to us and our society, possessed by that audience which was as inspiring as it was unsettling. As Matt Le Tissier said to a group of us, of which I was a part, a long time later, ‘There are just too many good people for us not to win’. I’m not sure about that. Nonetheless, that audience on that night, those contributions, the quality of the people, gave me a precious, timorous hope.

We passed the allotted time. We spoke for another hour and were nearly at the fourth hour. (Foolishly, I had stopped recording.) I wanted it to continue. I think many did. However, my dementia-afflicted mum was at her flat and I was anxious not to leave her alone for too long. Neil seemed keen to continue, but I had to stop. Reluctantly, I called a halt, thanked Neil, the audience, and logged off, then cycled, with my laptop in my panier, through the cool September night air, above me the night sky had been blown clear of clouds and the stars shone in the blackness.”

Neil Clark: Covid-19, Masks, UK Politics and the Future

Sadly, not all the event was recorded but I hope there is enough of a record here as witness to the truth of those days.

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