Quite recently, I covered at this site the insidious anti-human cult that is “socialism”, and how it operates: in short, socialists believe nobody has achieved anything in life on merit, but purely because they have had unfair advantages, such as rich parents or a private education.

As such, socialists believe others are not entitled to enjoy the fruits of their own successes, or to share them with their own families, but instead, are of the opinion that successful people should give a hefty share of their money and resources to the hard-done-by socialist.

We saw this illustrated with excruciating clarity during the farmers’ inheritance row, and I related a personal story of how I’ve been on the receiving end of it myself, and how my inverse snob socialist teachers put my success at A-level down to a “privileged background” rather than to my own hard work.

We all know this particular brand of socialist, but I’ve come to realise there’s another, equally insidious, subsection to the socialist breed: the conspirasocialist.

The conspirasocialist is a fairly self-explanatory creature: someone with conspiratorial leanings, but nevertheless, a strongly embedded, and the characteristically embittered, socialist mentality…

The conspirasocialist has been targeting me for as long as I’ve had a platform where I’ve dared to monetise my own work (they’re not fans of people earning money through work, as we know), but their attacks ramped up considerably when I decided to put my comments on “paid subscribers only”.

I haven’t always done this, as long-term readers can attest, and before I started publishing at Substack, used to run an open comments’ section at my website, www.miriaf.co.uk.

This was quite manageable when I only had a few hundred regular readers, of whom about 5% would regularly comment, but as my audience grew, it became increasingly impossible to keep on top of - not least because, as you might imagine, not all of the comments were exactly friendly…

Lots of thuggish keyboard warrior types wanted to get into “debates” (i.e., online insult trading) with me, which was a tedious, demoralising, time-suck, and not in any way augmenting what I actually do, which is write articles, not run free internet brawling rooms.

So, when I moved over to Substack about 18 months ago, I made the decision to put comments on “paid subscribers only”, and it’s hands down one of the best decisions I’ve made where it comes to managing my platforms.

First of all, the hostile aggression so common to internet “debates” has completely evaporated. Sure, sometimes my paid subscribers disagree with me - and with each other - but it’s always done respectfully and appropriately.

Secondly, as my paid subscribers are only a small proportion of my total subscribers, it keeps my comments’ section manageable, and means I am generally able to read each one, and frequently engage with commentators. (Though, please note, Substack has been a bit glitchy recently, making it difficult to reply to people directly. I think they’ve ironed it out now, though.)

As my Substack articles on average have between 5,000 and 10,000 views - and sometimes up to 30k+ (Michael Mosley article), to have the comments section open to everyone would make this level of engagement impossible. Even if just 5% of people who viewed an average article commented, that would still equate to hundreds of comments. I generally write multiple articles a week (I published 14 times in November, roughly every other day), so to deal with potentially several hundred comments on each piece would be totally overwhelming and unmanageable.

There’s also the centrally important fact that I value my paid subscribers immensely, as they are the only ones who make it possible for me to keep producing articles. So it’s only right that they should have some “perks” that aren’t available to free subscribers.

However, ever since I put comments on paid subscribers only, I have heard some variation of the following many, many times:

“WAAAH! Why are you stopping me commenting on your articles?! Shill! Controlled opp! Grifter! If you were really interested in the truth, I’D BE ABLE TO COMMENT!!”

Well, you can comment: you can comment on me all you like on your own platforms. Set up a free Substack, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and talk about me and my articles all you like (many people do). I’m all for free speech, after all.

“BUT I WANT YOUR PLATFORM! GIMME GIMME!”

Okay, how about you just click the “restack” button at the bottom of my articles and add a note? Then you’ve commented on my article right here on Substack!

“NO! YOUR COMMENTS! LEMME AT THEM!”

So, you see, what they reveal about themselves here is what they really want is not “the ability to comment on my articles” (they already have that), but free access to my audience.

That’s because the people who do this never have significant followings of their own, and feel that the fact that I do (although 6.5k is honestly a pretty modest audience compared to the size of the really popular Substacks) means I must have acquired them by some unfair advantage, such as “being controlled opposition”.

It was observed by one of my conspirasocialist antagonists recently that I must be an agent because “she has over six thousand Substack subscribers… how?!”.

Clearly, the answer must be “because I’m controlled”, it couldn’t possibly be “because I worked really hard and (whisper it, because this is total kryptonite to socialists) I’m good at what I do”.

So, this is why I call them conspirasocialists. It’s exactly the same mentality as exhibited by the mainstream socialist: that nobody who’s achieved anything could possibly have done so purely on their own merits, they must have enjoyed some unfair advantage, and therefore I deserve a share in their spoils which I don’t have to pay for.

Because the funny thing is, these types of people could have all the access to my comments they liked: all they have to do is pay the price of a pint, for unfettered access to all the comments sections of all my articles dating back years.

They never do, though, and in my recent interview with James Delingpole, he made a similar point, observing that when people throw a load of abuse at you because you’ve said something they disagree with, and tell you, “I refuse to support you any more, because you’re obviously a shill / liar / fraud etc”, in 99% of cases, it’s not a paid subscriber. It’s virtually always, as James says, a non-paying “floating voter”.

You would think that threats to withdraw support would be far more common from paid subscribers, as they’re the ones who are actually financing the work, and therefore, might expect to have some influence over the content.

But it’s vanishingly rare that a paid subscriber does this. It’s virtually always the unpaid ones. Which gives us a very interesting insight into the psychology of the conspirasocialist:

They’re so entitled. They not only expect to consume your content for free, they not only expect to have free and unfettered access to your time, attention, and audience, but they actually also expect to exert control over your content, all whilst giving absolutely nothing of any value in return.

(“Their opinion”, they’ll say, lol.)

What’s also fascinating about them is their remarkable ability to put 2 and 2 together and come up with orange Toblerone elephant.

I’ve observed this because my disinclination to give these people free and unlimited access to my time and my comments’ section has led them to conclude that I am hiding a dark secret… A smorgasbord of them, in fact, and several budding Inspector Clouseaus have put together “cases” to expose me, including the “facts” that:

“She’s suddenly come out of nowhere” (I launched my first vaccine information resource nearly ten years ago)

“She’s lived in more than one location” (er, yes… so?)

“She’s claimed to follow two different religions” (I haven’t even claimed to follow one)

And various other attempts at “gotchas!” which either aren’t true (such as the religion one), or are true - that I’ve moved around quite a bit - but obviously don’t prove anything sinister.

I’ve always told people to dig around in my background as much as they like and present their findings to the world, especially if they think those findings somehow prove there is something untoward or “controlled” about me. Well, they’ve had ten years and nobody’s managed it yet.

I wonder if that might possibly be because there is no sinister, shady backstory and I’m just a writer who worked really hard over many years and found a modest degree of success as a result?

Could that possibly be it?

(It certainly wasn’t overnight success, either, and I’ve done my fair share of demoralising day jobs over the years, including long stints in call centres, which I’ve written about before.)

Not if you’re a conspirasocialist, just as if you’re a mainstream socialist, it couldn’t possibly be the case that anybody succeeded at anything in life because of their own hard work: it must be because of rich parents or posh schools or whatever (I still marvel over Terry Christian’s declaration that farmers were opposed to inheritance tax - not because they desperately wanted to maintain the family business they depended on to stay alive - but because they wanted to “dodge tax on the fat wads they pass on to their dopey kids”. Mr. Christian also expanded on this description to allege children of farmers are “slack-jawed”).

Now, of course, the conspirasocialist will foment with fury about what I’ve just said, because…

“But YOU call people controlled opposition! YOU complain when they don’t respond to you!”

Yes, but this is the key distinction I’m attempting to illustrate: when I call people controlled opposition, I make a robust case with logic and evidence, such as demonstrating who’s funding them - Jeremy Hosking, in the case of Andrew Bridgen, for instance - and pointing out other meaningful anomalies in their stories (like an establishment background or intelligence ties), not such things as “their parents are from two different places”.

The other “gotcha” these types like to use is the fact that, as a fallible human being, I don’t have perfect recall of everything I’ve ever said or done, so, for instance, if in one article I mentioned moving to London is March 2006, and then in subsequent one said May 2006, I’ll get: “Ha! Shill! Gotcha! You said you moved to London in March and now you’re saying it’s May! Revealed yourself now, haven’t you?!”

I hesitate to use the admittedly cliched, “it’s people like this who give conspiracists a bad name”, but really that’s what it is, because they’ve descended into irrational paranoia and are seeing ghosts (or rather, “spooks”!) everywhere, rather than being discerning and only alleging an individual is controlled / an asset etc when they actually have a robust, plausible case to support their theory.

For instance, if an individual has been instrumental in passing through the UK’s first anti-conspiracy theory law (as Richard D Hall has), there’s plausible grounds to strongly suspect they’re an asset.

If someone is bankrolled by Jeremy Hosking (like Andrew Bridgen and Laurence Fox are), there’s a very high chance they’re compromised.

And so on and so forth.

But there’s no such “dirt” on me because I’m not an asset. To the people who throw that at me, the fact is that I’m simply someone you don’t agree with and/or don’t like, and - I regret to inform you - you will encounter many such people in your lifetime, the overwhelming majority of whom will not be controlled opposition intelligence assets.

You can believe what you want about me, of course, but the truth does actually matter, and if you can’t discern it - if you can’t discern the difference between someone who you simply disagree with (me), and someone who’s explicitly trying to manipulate you for nefarious reasons (various controlled op) - then you’re going to be in for a bad time.

Anyway, to return to the much-maligned Mr. Bridgen, who is often invoked as an example of someone who I have complained hasn’t responded to me…

I have indeed objected to this, because at the time I sent Bridgen my open letter, he was a public servant bankrolled by we tax-payers to deal with public concerns.

It was his job.

He was paid the best part of £100k a year, plus generous expenses, to do it, and as a tax-payer, I contributed to that.

In other words, it was reasonable for me to expect a salaried MP to respond to me.

It’s not reasonable for every whinging whiner on the internet to expect me to respond to them, much less for me to give them a free platform to express their whingerous whines upon…

The bottom line is, as with all socialism, it comes down to entitlement: conspirasocialists believe they’re entitled to others’ time, attention, and resources, whilst giving absolutely nothing of any value in return.

If they don’t get what they want, they lash out.

Of course, giving them what they want doesn’t change this behaviour, and actually makes it worse, because as I - and most people - have learned very well: the more you give to people for free, the less they appreciate it, and the more they expect (I mean, imagine if, rather than farmers passing on their farms to their children, they gave them to Terry Christian instead - would he be appreciative and grateful?!).

Anyway, I hope many of the conspirasocialists we’ve talked about today will share this piece widely with their own thoughts, and, hopefully, follow it up with a lengthy “expose” on me.

First of all, because they make for quite entertaining reading, because they’re always so ludicrously wrong, and I’ve just today been accused of lying about successfully refusing vaccines at university (as I spoke about in a recent interview) because “no teenager from Grimthorpe would have the knowledge to do that”… yet where did I say I was a teenager when I went to university?! I actually explicitly said I was a mature student, as around 30% of all students are, and when I went to university, I attended classes with people through from 18 right into their forties.

(And accusing me of being from Grimthorpe is highly condescending and offensive. It’s actually Stoke.)

But mainly, I encourage exposes of myself because of what I always say: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. There’s a reason the word “expose” is so close to “exposure” - they’re the same thing.

Exposes draw attention to people. That’s why I want the mainstream media to do one on me.

Granted, being “exposed” by Dave883 with 74 followers isn’t quite the same as a front-page splash in the Daily Mail, but nevertheless, all exposure is helpful, and whenever people do produce “exposes” on me, my subscriber count always reliably rises as a result.

This is why - as you may have noticed - I don’t use the real names of any conspirasocialist antagonist in my musings: because I’m not using my platform to give them free publicity.

But I’m very happy if they want to (and they do seem to want to!) give free publicity to me.

And I’ll tell you what, my conspirasocialist critics: the author of the best and most imaginative “expose” of me, that results in the most new subscribers to my blog, will be rewarded with a free subscription to my comments…

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