Why are UK’s Conservatives embracing European conspiracy theories?

At its last party conference before an election it’s expected to lose, Britain’s ruling party is bringing fringe ideas into the mainstream.

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With an election due to be held within the next year, the British government is struggling desperately to win over public support – and with perhaps only months to go till it faces the electorate, its rhetoric is morphing into what looks like full-on populism.

Among the latest ideas the ruling Conservative Party’s MPs have floated are preventing a “tax on meat” (which the opposition has never proposed), and banning “15-minute neighbourhoods” which would supposedly allow local government to restrict people’s movements.

These are false claims that have been widely debunked, but they have lately gathered traction among fringe right-wing groups active on social media. And by European standards, the Conservative government is in fact a relative latecomer to these particular theories.

The concept of a 15-minute neighbourhood was first formulated in France in the mid-2010s, and adopted by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo as her city began to re-emerge from the COVID pandemic.

As the idea spread to other world cities, it became the target of conspiracy theorists radicalised during the pandemic, who see it as the next wave of an insidious plot to make lockdowns permanent on the pretext of combating climate change.

This idea dovetails with other fringe theories about creeping totalitarianism in everyday life among them a wariness of the “cashless economy” and claims that a “globalist” elite is conspiring to ban meat consumption and force citizens to subsist on insects instead.

The insect theory has enjoyed a surge of interest in Lithuania, where public authorities have had to push back hard against it. It’s also caught on in Bulgaria, including with the help of a loudmouthed fringe politician – and a prominent Russian state TV host.

But these outlandish theories are not just the province of Russia-amenable far-right media and fringe grassroots protest movements: they also have their advocates in certain European governments.

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is fighting to secure another term in a 15 October election, has actively propagated the insect-consumption story.

Earlier this year, several PiS politicians accused opposition leader Donald Tusk and his party of planning to deny Poles access to meat. One PiS lawmaker, Bartosz Kownacki,​​ declared that “Instead of chicken, eat a worm” because “this is their real election programme”. Tusk derided the claim as embarrassingly desperate.

Also subscribing to the insect theory is far-right Italian politician Matteo Salvini, whose party supports the current government in Rome.

While the Conservatives have not mentioned insects specifically, that they are raising the twin spectres of government control of meat consumption and limits on personal movement indicates that they have identified an audience potentially receptive to this sort of rhetoric.

So why now? According to Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, the dire state of the party’s polling and its exhaustion after 13 years in power are both weighing heavy.

“The Conservatives know fully well that the fundamentals – the economy, the NHS, and even asylum and immigration – are running against them so they are basically throwing a whole bunch of ‘war-on-woke’ and ‘green crap’ stuff against the wall in the hope that some of it will stick. I’m not sure it’s that coordinated or coherent, more clutching at straws.”

Bale, whose book The Conservative Party After Brexit charts what has happened to the party in the last five years – which have seen it led by four different prime ministers – is unconvinced that the government’s sudden investment in outré paranoid ideas has much of an audience among the electorate.

“The Tories target voters are middle-aged to elderly, mainly white, mainly home-owning, car-driving, non-university graduates with culturally conservative views,” he explains. 

“They’re hoping that the ‘war-on-woke’ and ‘green crap’ stuff will mobilise them to turn out and vote and, even better, stem any losses to Labour which might result from the loss of their reputation for economic competence and the dire state of public services.

“It may also bring a few supporters of the radical right-wing populist party Reform UK back into the Tory fold. And who’s to say it might not work. The question is will it be enough – to which the answer is probably not, but what else have they got?”

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The Reform UK party that Bale mentions is the rebranded version of the Brexit Party, formerly led by Nigel Farage. The party has not won any electoral representation since the UK left the EU except for a tiny handful of local government seats. That in turn raises the question of how much the Conservatives have to gain from competing with it.

Yet when Farage, who has traded on the insect theory himself, arrived at this week’s Conservative conference in Manchester, he was all but mobbed by enthusiastic supporters. And The Spectator, the British press’s top establishment right-wing political magazine, recently named him the most powerful figure on the British right, ranking him above the sitting Tory prime minister.

Having stepped back from running for office himself, Farage’s main mouthpiece is his show on GB News, a right-wing news channel whose anchors include full-on conspiracy theorists and notorious provocateurs attacking “wokeness” in all its forms.

Meanwhile, as the Conservatives use their conference to vent more bizarre ideas than ever, Bale is not optimistic about the state of the party – or of British politics in general.

“It’s pretty depressing, really,” he says. “when you’ve got a government that’s reduced to telling people that, among other things, it’s going to make it easier for people to appeal against parking tickets, we’re not exactly in visionary territory, are we?”

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Watch out for these images fuelling a conspiracy theory about the Hawaii wildfires

In the wake of the fires that tore across the Hawaiian island of Maui on August 8, a number of images have been circulating on social media. The unrelated videos have been fuelling a conspiracy theory, born in the 2000s, that says wildfires are caused by laser weapons known as “directed energy weapons”.

Issued on: Modified:

5 min

If you only have a minute

  • On August 8, devastating fires broke out on the Hawaiian island of Maui, ravaging the major city of Lahaina. 
  • Since then, several videos purporting to show the island before, during and after the fires have been posted on Facebook and elsewhere. They are all unrelated to this tragedy. 
  • What all these images have in common is that they fuel a conspiracy theory that the Maui fires were caused by “directed energy weapons”.

The fact-check, in detail

A video with more than 100,000 combined views on X (formerly Twitter) shows a huge blast of light that seems to travel some distance, resulting in smoke and fire.

It was first posted on August 13, with the caption, “Maui was attacked by directed energy weapons (dews)”. The video was reposted the next day by an account that claimed, “What happened in Maui was more than just wildfires … It appears directed energy weapons may have been used and possibly why there was such a sudden and tragic loss of life!!”

A video showing a blast of light was shared on Twitter on August 13, 2023. © Twitter

According to these users, the tragic fires that ravaged Maui were in fact set intentionally, by a laserbeam weapon. Directed energy weapons are a very real type of weapon, using a laser beam or microwaves. They can perforate, damage or disrupt an object’s electronic systems from a distance. But these systems are mainly designed for defence against drones and high-speed missiles. There is no evidence that such weapons have ever been used to cause fires.

The cause of the Maui fires, which have claimed more than 100 lives since August 8, remains unknown for the time being.

The viral video is blurry, making it hard to see exactly what is happening, or where it might have occurred.

In fact, a higher-definition version of this video exists. It was posted on YouTube in December 2018 by local television channel WWL-TV, which serves New Orleans, Louisiana. The caption on the video says it was a cellphone video taken by a viewer “down Williams Boulevard” in Kenner, Louisiana.

The blast of light is in fact an electrical explosion that traveled through power lines and caused sparks to fly. “Thousands” of Kenner residents lost power as a result, according to WWL-TV.

The explosions were caused by severe weather and high winds, according to this post from December 2018.

A blast of light appearing … in Chile

Another video shared on Facebook on August 14 shows a large beam that seems to hit a building in an urban area, clear characteristics of a supposed “directed energy weapon”.

A number of accounts shared the video, including this French-speaking user, who wrote, “What’s happening in Maui, Hawaii?” 

On August 14, this account, which usually focuses on African news, published a montage of images of the Maui disaster. In the middle is this excerpt showing a beam hitting a building.
On August 14, this account, which usually focuses on African news, published a montage of images of the Maui disaster. In the middle is this excerpt showing a beam hitting a building. © Facebook

But this video has nothing to do with the fires in Maui, as confirmed by AP in this article. The video actually comes from a TikTok post dated May 26, 2023. The person who posted it said that it was taken in the Macul district of Santiago, Chile. When it was reposted to support the “directed energy weapons” conspiracy, the video was enlarged and flipped, making it harder to see what was really going on.

A capture of the original TikTok, published on May 26.
A capture of the original TikTok, published on May 26. © TikTok

But what could have caused the beam seen in the original video? According to a report on Chilean television, the explosion was caused by a branch hitting an electrical transformer.

The beam itself is simply a refraction from the camera lens. In fact, if you play the video frame-by-frame, it’s possible to see that the explosion occurs before the beam appears, rather than the other way around.

In the video posted on TikTok, we first see the explosion (left, 0:00), then the beam appear (0:01).
In the video posted on TikTok, we first see the explosion (left, 0:00), then the beam appear (0:01). © TikTok

An industrial incident at a refinery

On X (formerly Twitter), another account claims to have proof that directed energy weapons were the cause of the Maui fires. “They’re using Direct Energy Weapon (sic) to try and advance their climate agenda”, this post, in French, explains.

The post contains a low-quality image that appears to show a beam causing an explosion. Another post with the same photo and a caption in English claims: “I can confirm this, this was #DEW (Direct Energy Weapon) They have been using these is (sic) Canada Australia and other places.”

This Twitter account, which regularly publishes conspiracy content about the fires in Hawaii, believes that this image, posted on August 11, is proof of the use of directed energy weapons.
This Twitter account, which regularly publishes conspiracy content about the fires in Hawaii, believes that this image, posted on August 11, is proof of the use of directed energy weapons. © Twitter

Once again, the image has been debunked. Snopes, an American verification media, was able to find the original context of this scene. It is in fact an incident that took place in January 2018 at a refinery in the city of Canton, in the US state of Ohio. It was reported in the local press. An Internet user also shared this photo of the event in the comments of a Facebook post by The Canton Repository.

A screenshot of the first occurrence of this image, posted on Facebook in 2018.
A screenshot of the first occurrence of this image, posted on Facebook in 2018. © Facebook

Again, no connection with the Maui fires. Similar claims like these, attributing wildfires to a government conspiracy or high-tech weapons have proliferated in recent months. Last June, we debunked a claim that called into question the cause of fires in Canada.

Read moreNo, these satellite images aren’t proof that the Canadian wildfires are a conspiracy

The idea that forest fires are caused by laser weapons, known as the “DEW theory” for “Directed Energy Weapon”, is not new.

According to Mick West, an American journalist specialising in fact-checking, it “emerged in the early 2000s, particularly after the attacks of September 11, 2001”.

At the time, certain conspiracy theories claimed – wrongly – that the collapse of the Twin Towers had been caused by laser weapons. The same theory was later applied to forest fires.



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Self-anointed ‘Vaccine Scientist-Author-Combat Antiscience’ still fighting lab-leak ‘misinformation’

A whole lot of so-called “experts” still have a whole lot of egg on their faces today after the lab-leak conspiracy theory for the origins of the COVID pandemic turned out to not be a conspiracy theory after all. If only someone had tried to convince them that it was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad idea to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis as unscientific, racist, conspiratorial garbage.

Someone did try to convince of that, in fact. Many people did. GOP Sen. Tom Cotton was one of them, and he was slimed and raked over the coals for it by the FoLLoW tHe SciEnCe™ community.

Sen. Cotton called for transparency. The “experts” fought tooth-and-nail against it. It didn’t work out well for the latter group. And now we’re seeing how they behave when confronted with extremely compelling evidence that they put all their eggs in the wrong basket.

Let’s take a look at “Vaccine Scientist-Author-Combat Antiscience” Peter Hotez MD PhD BBQ PDQ (OK, we added the last two), for example, who, like so many others, isn’t handling the news very well:

Here’s our post about the New York Times piece that Hotez is referring to. It really screwed with the narrative Hotez wanted to perpetuate.

It’s important to note, since Peter did not, that COVID having natural origins does not actually disprove the lab-leak hypothesis. Virology labs often conduct research on viruses that originated in nature. The problem is when one of those viruses that originated in nature somehow gets out of the lab and spreads to places where it wasn’t naturally found, like, say, outside of caves inhabited by infected bats.

Now, now, Peter … just because you got caught trying to whitewash your own COVID misdeeds doesn’t mean that’s what people giving credence to the lab-leak hypothesis are doing. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You just know where your bread was buttered and don’t want to go hungry.

We can actually picture Hotez sneering as he typed that.

Admitting they may have been wrong would be the first step toward redemption in the eyes of a willfully misled public. It would also just be the right thing to do.

And that is why — perhaps with a handful (see what we did there?) of exceptions — they’ll never, ever do it.

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Related:

Your crow is served: The COVID lab leak theory was dismissed by many – Twitter reminded them today

Jill Filipovic knows who’s to blame for libs/media calling misinfo on any theory blaming China lab for Covid

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#Selfanointed #Vaccine #ScientistAuthorCombat #Antiscience #fighting #lableak #misinformation