It's come to my attention recently that, due to the apparently over-the-proverbial-puncturing-board nature of some of my articles (Charlie Kirk in particular), some individuals have taken to circulating some rather - shall we say - creative commentary relating to my supposed personal history, all with the aim of "proving" that I am some sort of subversive plant.

I am not a subversive plant, or a plant of any description (or a spy or an agent or a government employee, for those who may leap on 'plant', with "ha! But she's just saying she's not a flower! It's a trick!").

However, it is true that I have an unusual personal biography, as is the case for many people who later find themselves in this most unusual of worlds. I've written about that before, the strong correlation between unorthodox backgrounds and later "conspiracy theorising".

I haven't gone into the specific personal details of my own history before now, because it's a bit, well, personal, and, more specifically, because it doesn't just involve me, but multiple other living people who may very well not wish to be publicly dragged into my "conspiracising" - but we are where we are. Others have made the choice to drag them into it (a perennial risk in the internet age), so all I can do is correct the distortions and untruths and tell the true story. I apologise to anyone mentioned in this account if they find what I say upsetting or unfair, it's not my intention to cause any distress. My intention is simply to tell the (my) story as truthfully and accurately as I can, and inevitably, the truth is sometimes upsetting.

I would not ordinarily randomly compose an autobiography, which seems a little navel-gazing, to say nothing of a tad premature, but I am now in the position where it's incumbent on me to set the record straight. If I don't write the real story, other people will simply disseminate lies. If you're not interested in my personal history - about which I wouldn't blame you at all - then feel free to skip over this piece, and normal conspiracy content will be resumed forthwith.

For those of you who are interested, however, please do keep reading...

My family history has its contemporary roots in a small village in North Staffordshire, called Keele ("where? You mean the service station?").

In 1949, a new university was founded in this little village (and indeed, there's not much else there other than a service station), and, two years later, my maternal grandmother, Enid (still going strong at age 92!), moved from her home in Wales to attend the university. She studied Geography.

While undertaking her studies, she met postgraduate Classics student, Gerry, one day in the queue for the canteen, and they began to "court".

Upon graduation, Gerry got a job as a Classics lecturer at the university, and the couple married. They went on to have five children, three boys and two girls. They lived on the university campus, as staff families were encouraged to do, and the children grew up there, all - unsurprisingly - encouraged to be very academic and focused on career success.

When their eldest daughter, Judith, finished her A-levels, she did a gap year teaching in Europe, and when she returned to Keele, began dating a newly arrived young lecturer, John Sloboda, who had arrived at the university aged 24 to take up his first teaching job, after having completed a PhD in London.

Judith went on to study at the University of Sheffield, and when she had completed her degree, the couple married in Keele's university chapel. Soon after, your author here (an only child) was born.

After a year living in nearby Newcastle-under-Lyme, the three of us moved back to the Keele campus, into a house just a few doors away from my young grandparents (my grandmother being just 49 when I was born), and their three youngest children, who were still school-aged. I attended the local nursery, located just opposite our house - where my cat, Huckleberry Finn, would follow me, and sit outside meowing plaintively until I came outside - and then the local primary school, St. John's.

Keele, being a lush woodland oasis sort of a place, provided a rather idyllic backdrop for being a child, and I had a very happy first seven years, surrounded by family and friends (and cats).

However, my mother - who, unlike her parents and siblings, had failed to be inspired by the idea of academic and career achievement, and had not pursued further study or work after becoming a mother - began to have something of a spiritual crisis, and reject the Christianity she'd been brought up with (she was raised Church of England, my dad a Catholic, and they'd married in and had me baptised into the Catholic church). She felt there was more to life than Christianity and career, so she began searching for what it was, as a lot of young people (she was just 21 when I was born) were at the time doing.

When I was two, a young man came to the university to give a talk on Buddhism, which she decided to attend. She was very taken by what he said, and began to attend the nearest "Buddhist centre", which was about an hour's drive away in Manchester.

Over the subsequent years, she became more and more involved in this movement, until, when I was seven, she decided to leave my father (who had taken no interest in Buddhism), move to Manchester, and be involved with it full-time. She also decided to take me with her, an idea towards which I was strenuously opposed, and made my feelings very clear at the time.

However, it was considered that "children were better off with their mother", so off we went to Manchester.

The subsequent nine years were very unhappy and unstable from my perspective, as we moved around a lot (I'd lived in 7 houses by the age of 13) and at one point, spent four years in a Buddhist women's "commune" (located in Whalley Range, not perhaps the most obvious epicentre for a pioneering spiritual movement), consisting of five adult women, a dog and cat - the cat was named 'Headcase '- and me.

The other women were okay, they weren't cruel to me or anything, but they were young (my mother was the oldest at 30) and involved with their own lives, not in the position to be "surrogate mothers" to a young child. I didn't want them to be, either: I just simply didn't want to be there, and implored all the time to go back and live with my dad in Keele, but was told this would not be permitted until I was 16.

The Buddhist movement with which my mother was involved did not represent mainstream Buddhism, but rather, was a sort of separatist sect that had been invented by a deserter from the army in the 1960s, and combined some traditional Buddhist beliefs, with some rather odd interpretations of philosophy, and 1960s "free love" ideas. The organisation at that time was very anti-family, believing that family units were toxic pressure cookers that resulted in abuse and dysfunction, and that adults should instead live in single-sex communes. Heterosexuality was seen as inferior to homosexuality, as heterosexuality - including and especially having children - the senior disciples stated, "tied you to the lower evolution".

Thanks very much, I thought huffily.

I emphatically disagreed with all of these philosophies, even at my young age (especially the veganism...), and, rather unsurprisingly, they informed my becoming rather more conservative in my own beliefs, and especially believing in the importance of the family unit - because it's clear that is and always has been the number one target of subversive forces everywhere.

A lot of people, primarily disaffected ex-members of the organisation, have described it - certainly as it was at that time - as "a cult", and in 1997, The Guardian (back when it was still actually a newspaper) did an expose on the organisation and some of its more abusive practises.

The organisation has gone through an intense "rebrand" since that time, and the man initially responsible for coordinating it all, Dennis Lingwood (who went by his "Buddhist name" of Sangarakshita) died in 2018. Under its new leadership, the organisation admits it made a lot of mistakes, especially at the time I was growing up, and is now more supportive of conventional relationships and families.

However, when I was growing up, there was a lot of silence and denial regarding what I was being exposed to - maybe even the sense that I was "lucky" to be liberated from the supposed evils of family life - so none of this was really discussed by my wider family or with me. It was known that I was unhappy, but nobody felt it was their place to intervene. I went to visit my dad every other weekend. as was the supposed "norm" for children of divorce at the time, as well as spending school holidays with him, and then, when I was 16, I finally went back to live with him full time.

I went to the local FE college to do my A-levels (English Literature, Philosophy, Psychology and Media Studies - yes, Media Studies - it was hard, ok!). I did well, but didn't feel like going straight to university, having been resident on one all my life. I'd been friends with students since I was 15, and was used to going out to the student bars (I was quite tall and ID requirements were rather lax back then), so the prospect of "going to uni" didn't hold the same enticing appeal for me as for many.

Instead, I got an admin job in the university's admissions office (following summers working on the 'Clearing' hotline, a rite of passage for all the offspring of Keele staff), and moved into a little flat in nearby Newcastle (-under-Lyme, not "the other one", as it was scornfully known).

I enjoyed this quieter pace of life for a while, after a decidedly hectic childhood, but when I was 23, decided to spread my wings a little further, and moved to Liverpool, to start a degree in Politics. By that point, a lot of my childhood friends had moved to London for further study and work, and I was spending a lot of time visiting, so decided after a year at Liverpool to transfer to a London university (Queen Mary's).

However, as I got a rather well paid summer job after moving to London, I decided I quite liked having money as opposed to being an impoverished student, so I didn't return to university, and worked instead, ultimately training as a copywriter with a West London agency (very successful at the time, it recently collapsed due to AI taking all the copywriting jobs).

I lived in various houseshares with friends, moving around London as jobs dictated, until 2012, when a company I was working for went into liquidation, and I suddenly found it - in the post-2008 crash climate - much more difficult than I ever had before to get a new job.

Employers could afford to be picky, and the one reason that kept coming back to me for repeat rejection was "hasn't got a degree".

I pondered this, and decided now might be quite a good time to complete one, as not only would having a degree enhance my employment prospects, but being able to "sit out" the unstable climate in a university for a while would give the climate a bit of time to stabilise and improve (ha, yes, I chuckle at such woeful naivete too...).

However, things had changed a lot since I'd last been at university, when fees were just £1,000 a year, and now they stood at a whopping £9,000. So I did some research, and discovered that, when cost of living was taken into account as well, it was actually cheaper to study at a state university in America (it would have been even cheaper to go to somewhere like Germany, but I didn't fancy living in a country where English wasn't the first language).

Given I was reasonably young and unencumbered by such things as mortgages, children, or pets, I thought this sounded like quite the adventure, and so I decided this is what I would do. So, in 2013, I flew over to the State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam to study Professional Writing (and a variety of other subjects, courtesy of the USA's 'Gen Ed' requirements).

I decided on SUNY as it's regarded as one of the two really good state systems in the States (the other being California, and I certainly did not want to go to uber-liberal California), and Potsdam particularly, because it typified the kind of quintessential small-town, semi-rural America that I, like many, rather idolised. I imagined such a location to be markedly less infested by some of the more insidious extremes of liberal modernity, which I had come to rather dislike, as such themes accelerated through the 2010s.

Potsdam did not disappoint (there were even Amish people there!), and I had a great time, but it was also around this time that I was "waking up, that the university I attended tried to force-vaccinate me rather expedited that journey... My successfully challenging this attempt, and confronting the very aggressive and underhand tactics they'd used to try and manipulate compliance (threatening to expel and deport me) was what catapulted me well and truly down the rabbit hole.

As such, by the time I returned to the UK, I had developed a deep interest in vaccinations, and in particular, the way they are foisted on students in a very aggressive way, completely bypassing medical standards of ethics and informed consent. I could see there were lots of resources aimed at parents of young children regarding the risks of vaccination, but very little designed for young adults, for when they started making their own vaccine decisions for the first time. I had felt confident to stand my ground because I was older, but what hope would the average 18-year-old have?

So I wanted to put some sort of resource together to help students make informed choices, but didn't really know where to start, and so started researching people and organisations involved in UK vaccine safety activism.

To my intense surprise, I found one such person based just a stone's throw away from my childhood home in Keele. This was Professor Chris Exley - otherwise known as 'Mr Aluminium' - and I've written about our acquaintance - and his own shocking story - here.

Chris inspired me to start my first vaccine website, the resource STRIVE - the Student and Teacher Research Initiative for Vaccine Education (which unfortunately is now offline as the provider, Webs, I used to host the site collapsed).

Chris had been at Keele since 1992, and knew of my family, but we'd never personally interacted before. However, with my newfound interest in vaccinations (and the aluminium adjuvant addition, in which he was an expert) we got to know each other quite well, and I was very interested in his work regarding silica, the only known substance that can remove aluminium from the body. The most bioavailable form of silica Chris had discovered, that could effectively remove aluminium from the whole of the body, including the brain, was that which naturally occurred in certain mineral waters - a type of silica known as orthosilicic acid, or OSA.

Chris had used a specific OSA-rich mineral water from Malaysia in his studies to remove aluminium from the body, and he was always getting emails from people asking where they could purchase this particular product, which wasn't available in the UK at the time.

This was all happening around 2017, and at the end of that year, my elderly paternal grandmother died aged 90, leaving family members some money. My dad had by this point become very interested in vaccines, aluminium and silica himself, especially because of the Keele connection through Chris Exley, so in 2018, me, my dad, and a friend from the vaccine safety world, Mike Daly, decided to use the inheritance from my grandmother to open our own business importing the silica-rich water Chris used in his studies, with a view to promoting its powerful aluminium detoxing effects.

Although other silica-rich waters existed (like Volvic) none of them promoted themselves as being able to detox aluminium (probably due to intense pressure from the aluminium industry not to) and so we thought this would be a way of making a real, practical difference to people - retailing and promoting this water based on what it could actually do.

Running a business was a most instructive learning curve, and we did make some good progress, with many people trialling the water and noticing significant benefits (especially for HPV vaccine injured teenagers), but ultimately, the operation, with all its foreign import and storage costs, just became too complex and expensive, and, running out of money, we eventually made the decision to close the business, after about two years (but Volvic and Fiji waters are still widely available which have the same effects).

By this time, I had become very active online in various "conspiracy" communities, including forums and Facebook, and although my primary focus was still vaccinations, I was becoming more interested in the wider "conspiraverse", and in April 2019 ,made what turned out to be a rather accurate prediction about an upcoming fake pandemic...

By this point, I had got married to a fellow conspiracist that I had initially met on Facebook in 2016 (during the first Donald Trump fiasco), and we were living together in Oldham, where he was from. After living there for about a year, we moved to Huddersfield, so he could be closer to work, and I got a job there in market research, whilst continuing my conspiracising on the side.

After the "pandemic" made its debut in 2020, the company I was at the time working for decided to transfer all its operations to WFH, and, in order to be able to continue my duties, I needed to have a router, which we didn't have, just using mobile phone hotspots for the internet.

So I purchased a router from Sky, but it didn't work. When I tried to resolve this issue with Sky, they were impossible to get hold of and I was informed they were only dealing with "key workers".

When I was not able to resolve this issue after a couple of weeks, I lost my job. (I refused to pay Sky on this basis, and those b*stards are still chasing the debt five years later!)

Fortunately, my husband Mark at the time had a good job and was able to sustain both of us, so while I looked for new opportunities, I was also able to put a lot more time into developing my writing, and began my 'Miri AF' website, where I started to add the letter templates I'd been writing for others to challenge the Covid restrictions, and my articles on a variety of subjects.

Gradually, I began to develop an income through this output, and, as my reach widened over time, it started to become more plausible that I could actually do this for a living.

So, I've basically been doing that ever since, although, since that time, Mark has been made redundant, and has been obliged to go back to college to retrain (he's just starting his second year of a three year course), as the employment climate is even more brutal now than it was when I had to do similarly a decade ago. So it's fair to say that, as a full-time student and freelance conspiracist, we are not exactly flush, and I certainly am not in receipt of any great stipend (or any stipend) from the establishment, nor any member of the Delingpole family (one of the more bizarre accusations made against me is that I'm in the employ of one of James Delingpole's brothers, an individual I have never met or had any kind of interaction with).

I've developed a modest degree of visibility in "the truth movement" over the past few years, and inevitably, the more visible you become, the more criticisms you attract, including and especially is a movement that is riddled with "agents" and "plants" (a subject I have written about myself on several occasions).

So of course, I have been accused of being a plant and an infiltrator myself - which I am not - and the main "evidence" presented for this seems to be centred around my parents and their backgrounds, rather than anything in particular I myself have done.

It is the case, as I detailed earlier, that my mother was a member of a dubious Buddhist sect, but I personally was not - I lived with her whilst she was in it (against my wishes), but I was never involved in any of its rites or rituals, certainly never described myself as any sort of Buddhist, and left the minute I could.

My dad, meanwhile - who didn't remarry or have more children and became very focused on his career - went on to become very professionally successful, and ultimately, in 2018, was awarded an OBE for services to psychology and music (the psychology of music being his specialist subject).

Unsurprisingly, much has been made of this by my critics and how my father receiving this award allegedly "proves" I am some sort of asset of the crown.

Well, I am not an asset of the crown - or an asset of anyone or thing - and although I completely understand why a sceptical eye is cast on this particular biographical detail of my father's, it is actually his biography and not mine. Like the overwhelming majority of people, I have had no input into or control over my father's career trajectory, and didn't get a say in whether or not he accepted this award.

His award is also not in an area that I have any experience in or that I've pursued myself. I did do an A-level in Psychology, but got my worst result in it ("so what went wrong with the B?" one of my uncles thoughtfully rang me up to enquire, my having got As in the other three subjects...). I am also completely and utterly non-musical, having failed to even get to grade one on the piano. So, it's not the case that my father - or either parent, in fact - excelled in fields that somehow opened doors for me. All my jobs have been non-academic and totally outside of "the establishment" - copywriting, admin, telesales (I have actually retailed double glazing, oh yes - and apologies).

It's also of note that my father didn't get his "gong" until I was well into adulthood, and had long since left home - he was nowhere near as professionally accomplished when I was growing up, we lived in a very modest council-style house, and I went to state schools (I did go to a grammar school - the type you get into by passing the 11+, not the fee-paying type - but it was officially the worst grammar school in the world: the only one in history to get put on Ofsted Special Measures).

So yes, there are some details in my parents' biographies which may look questionable without wider context, and I appreciate that, so I hope the above has clarified things and that, although my childhood was unusual, I was not born into an "asset" family, nor inducted into any kind of state role on that, or any other, basis.

I came to "conspiracising" completely independently, and - other than briefly working with my father on the water import business - no member of my family is, or ever has been, involved in any way with what I do. In fact, most of them don't even know what I do. I describe it vaguely at family gatherings as "social commentary", and I have no idea whether any of them have actually Googled me to find out more.

Because of the kind of academic background my family members are from, a lot of them are very professionally successful, and some may very well be involved in things I personally wouldn't be, but I don't really know, as - as is common for most middle-class families who are scattered across the country - I have very little to do with my extended family.

It's also the case that I haven't seen, or meaningfully communicated with, several of my aunts and uncles for years, and I have some young cousins I've never even met. I mention this because I saw one particularly ludicrous allegation that I'm in some sort of Tavistock-based programming cult with one of my aunts, because she did some training with the organisation, an allegation which is really rather comically far from the truth. I barely know this woman, I've only seen her about twice in the last five years, and I don't even possess her phone number. We literally don't even exchange birthday texts, never mind operate a mind-control cult together.

I mean, I wish my extended family WAS close enough to operate successful businesses together (albeit not mind-control cults), but, alas, we are not. Although I was close to my maternal aunts and uncles when I was very young, after they all left home to go to university in far-flung places, our relationships largely petered out. This is a common phenomenon for people from my sort of background, and I've written about it before.

So, no, I'm not in any sort of subversive mind-control organisation with any of my family members (or with anyone else).

Having cleared that up, the other "evidence" presented by my critics for my alleged infiltrator status is that I have "changed my name", and, when arguing with me on Twitter, they have taken to referring to me as Miri Sloboda (or even Agent Sloboda) because that is my dad's surname.

Well, I've been married for nearly seven years, and I believe it's actually quite normal for women to change their names upon making this commitment, and therefore, quite weird to insist on referring to them by their father's name, but also, let's be honest - if you had grown up spending hours of your life spelling and pronouncing a Polish surname (my paternal grandfather being Polish), and were later given the opportunity to change it to 'Finch', I think you'd take it, too...

Plus, how would I otherwise have developed my splendid pen name?! Miri AS doesn't quite have the same ring to it, somehow...

So, there you have it. I did have a rather unusual childhood, and yes, that certainly has informed how I see the world now, but not because I was inducted into any sort of establishment training programme to become "an asset" (I wasn't), simply because it is known that difficult childhoods correlate with an increased ability to confront what others may prefer not to look at. That's why people who go on to become "conspiracy theorists" so often report difficult or unusual childhoods.

If I'd had the normal, unremarkable childhood of a lot of my peers, I probably wouldn't be a conspiracist, I'd probably have followed a more conventional career path, and I'd probably currently be the recipient of seven Covid vaccines and have an array of colourful face masks and Ukraine flags dotted around my home.

That wasn't what fate had planned for me, though, and according to my friend Tamsyn, we all pick the experiences we know we need to have before we incarnate here, to teach us what we need to know.

I don't know if I agree with Tamsyn, but I do think I'm probably where I'm supposed to be in life, and am very grateful to all my readers and supporters who think that, too.

I can absolutely assure you that I am completely independent, that nobody tells me what to (or what not to) write about, and I have never intentionally included false or misleading information in any of my articles (inevitably as a fallible human being, I sometimes get things wrong, but it's never on purpose).

I do write about lots of controversial topics, airing opinions with which many people vehemently disagree, and that vehemence seems to have inspired some of them to start circulating "conspiracy theories" about me. So, here I have set the record straight, and while people are still entirely at liberty to make false accusations about me (that's free speech) and misrepresent aspects of my past to serve their own ends, what you've just read is the truth, from the person who actually lived it and has all the "receipts", rather than "creative" accounts from random strangers on the internet.

I may elaborate on it all one day, as people are often rather interested in the "four years in a Buddhist commune" part in particular, but for the time being, I think there are more urgent and pressing things going on in the world than my childhood, and therefore, that my time and energies are better spent focusing upon them.

As there is one thing that the Buddhists - and fellow denizens of Manchester, Oasis - do say that I agree with:

Be here now.

So, despite the efforts of a few bad actors to drag me back into the dim and distant past, having now accounted for it, that is where I from now on intend to remain.

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