I wrote a post recently detailing the centuries-long elite assault on real human communities, exploring how and why the ruling classes have been so hellbent on bludgeoning the natural, healthy ways human beings tend to organise when left to their own devices. Essentially, those who rule over us have targeted our natural, integrated communities for destruction because they want as many of us as possible atomised and marginalised - cut off from each other, isolated, and alone, so there is no remaining obstacle between them - the tyrannical, control-freak rulers (who, like all psychopaths, must have complete and unfettered control), and the individual - you and me. Families and communities have traditionally provided that obstacle, so they have long-since been earmarked for obliteration.

While that - disempowered isolation - is certainly the main motivation behind the overlords' ruthless ravaging of the human community (one which has left many people more familiar with the exploits of fictional characters in the eponymous Australian soap opera, than with their own actual 'Neighbours'), there have been two particularly harrowing news items recently that have clearly belied there are other, even darker consequences, too.

One of the crucial things about community is that, because people know each other and depend on each other, it's harder for constituent members of that community to get away with bad behaviour. A functional, active community will recognise destructive behaviour, call it out, and try to prevent it happening again. Most people have had the experience, especially as a child, of being warned off a certain neighbour, or being cautioned regarding who the bully is at school. When someone is a "bad apple", then, in a well-functioning community, word generally gets around, and that affords a very significant degree of protection to the other members of that community. Historically, humans have traditionally stayed in more or less the same geographical location for all of their lives, and so, for most of human history, "reinventing yourself" by moving elsewhere and starting again, has been a very challenging prospect - expensive and impractical - therefore meaning people of the past typically had powerful incentives to behave well within the community they lived, knowing there would be repercussions if they didn't, and that these repercussions could be difficult or impossible to escape from. Robust, integrated communities make people accountable, and therefore protect more vulnerable members of that community.

The modern world, however, where people and communities are deeply fragmented, and where it's considered infinitely more socially acceptable to strike up a conversation with a stranger 1,000 miles away on the internet, than to knock on the door of one of your neighbours, can, and increasingly frequently does, put people in acute jeopardy.

It is now absolutely the norm and the rule, rather than the stigmatised exception it once was, to meet new people online. It's almost become an anachronism to meet in a cafe or a shop (as people frequently used to do, believe it or not, under-30s...). If you were to approach a pleasant-looking person in your local coffee shop and attempt to instigate conversation with them, they'd probably recoil in horror at your grotesque social faux pas... And then go back to scrolling through strangers on Tinder.

We've been reprogrammed to fear real human beings as they present in the flesh (and of course the Covid pantomime has intensified that already well-developed trend a hundredfold) and to develop attachments to their online avatars instead.

Rarely has that been more starkly illustrated than in the case of The Tinder Swindler, a conman who used the dating app to scam young women out of staggering amounts of money. He was able to do this by utterly deceiving them as to his true identity, posing as the son of a billionaire diamond titan, and hiring actors and props to fabricate a very elaborate hoax. The internet allowed him to make connections with women who were in no way connected to his real life or his original community - a community that knew all too well what he was like, and his own mother had disowned him at the age of eighteen. As soon as journalists began investigating the story and visited the town he came from, the whole sorry story came tumbling out. The Tinder Swindler would never have been able to so grotesquely deceive and harm scores of individuals, had they encountered him through community networks who knew what he was really like and could have - and clearly would have - warned them.

The internet, and the atomisation of modern life, have created a perfect storm, that allows people to present themselves to each other in ways that can be deeply, and increasingly often dangerously, deceptive. The Tinder Swindler is, obviously, an extreme example - but it illustrates the reality that, when we encounter someone online, we encounter a highly edited version of who they really are. Although they may not overtly be trying to deceive us in terms of outright lying, we only see them as they want us to, and we do not see them through the eyes and experiences of the people around them who really know them.

This was illustrated with profoundly tragic clarity earlier this month, when 19-year-old Ashely Wadsworth, a devout Mormon from small-town Canada, was killed by the "internet boyfriend" she had come to the UK to meet.

Jack Sepple, 23, is currently in custody awaiting trial for her murder.

Ashley and Sepple had been talking online, apparently for years, after meeting on a dating app, and she was on "the trip of a lifetime" to meet him in person for the first time, having arrived in the UK in November 2021 on a six-month tourist visa. These details alone caused me to find this troubling, because, although a 19-year-old is an adult - and UK 19-year-olds jet off all over the world all the time - having myself lived in North America, in a small town just an hour away from the Canadian border, where I was studying at a university with a lot of 19-year olds, I know that teenagers from that part of the world can often be very different to teenagers here.

Because we speak the same language, and exchange many cultural offerings in the shape of TV, film, and food, there is a misconception that American / Canadian and British cultures are more or less the same. But I found that - outside of the major cities - this was not true at all. It was my experience that both small-town America and their resident colleges have a level of something like "innocence" that is rare in the UK, and that the American 19-year-olds I encountered were more like British 14-year-olds, with the university I attended often feeling more like a boarding school than an adult education environment. I remember in one class, being asked to recommend a good British comedy, so I suggested 'The Inbetweeners', a hugely popular UK comedy series at the time, regarding the exploits of a motley crew of sixth-formers (16-17 year olds). Skiving off school to get drunk in the park, getting dubious fake IDs to get served in the local, and that sort of thing - all pretty standard stuff for UK teens, but my fellow students in the US were utterly horrified by it. "British teenagers aren't really like that, are they?!", they gasped.

In effect, in many parts of the USA and Canada, young people are treated, and seen, and often see themselves as "kids", until they are about 25. Certainly, from what I saw, 19-year-olds were not regarded as fully-fledged adults. So, already, when I read a small-town Canadian 19-year-old had gone to visit an Essex-dwelling 23-year-old, I knew this was not an equal match.

While speaking to Sepple, there are things about him that a 19-year-old from small-town Canada would have been far less likely to notice and flag as a possible concern, than a similarly-aged counterpart from an English city - including and especially counterparts who had grown up around him in that city, and so actually knew him - not just as a disembodied head on a video chat, putting across a highly manicured version of himself - but as a real person, and how he really is.

And so it transpired after Ashley's utterly tragic death. Her Facebook profile, which is full of pictures of the two of them together, has attracted multiple comments from Sepple's old schoolfriends and ex-girlfriends, detailing his history of disturbed and violent behaviour, and suggesting that he had a drug problem. Of course, these comments are "hearsay" and we won't have definitive answers until the trial, but the key point remains - the life of an innocent teenager was brutally and tragically cut short, because she encountered someone in a distorted and unnatural way, where there were not the natural checks and balances of a community to warn her of what he was really like. It is certainly a viable possibility that Sepple had to resort to targeting prospective partners thousands of miles away precisely because everybody in his community did know what he was like, which therefore disabled him from developing a relationship in that environment.

As soon as I read the story, I concluded, "she had realised what he was actually like and so wanted to go home early. When she told him she wanted to leave, he exploded into a, probably drug-induced, rage, and killed her". Comments in the media, reportedly from family and friends, suggest that this is true, and that in the days leading up to her death, she had set up a secret Facebook page to communicate with them, telling them she was worried about Sepple's behaviour and wanted to come home early (she had been initially intending to stay for six months). Her family instantly bought her a ticket, and her departure was scheduled for just two days after she was killed.

This dreadful, unthinkable scenario should obviously never have happened, and a primary reason it was innocent Ashley who became fatally ensnared by Sepple, was because she and he were not part of the same community, so she had not seen him in that context - real life, rather than a self-edited internet version - nor had she received the protective warnings others in his community had. And, of course, being so far away from her own community, in a completely foreign environment, she did not have nearby friends and family of her own that she could turn to when she started to realise there was something wrong. Of course, meeting someone in your own community is not always guaranteed to be 100% safe (since nothing in life is), but it's much, much safer, if it's within a genuinely integrated community, where others know and look out for each other, as human beings are designed to do - and did, until ignoble overlord interference took over.

I do think one of the most critically important things we can do in moving forward and re-establishing a saner, stronger world is to re-normalise community - saying 'hello' to the neighbours, chatting to local coffee shop regulars, attending other real-world events - because, not only is that so much psychologically and emotionally healthier than forming attachments to fictional soap opera characters or online avatars, but it really could save lives, in a very direct and literal way. Although The Tinder Swindler stopped short of actually killing anyone, he threw his victims into such psychological disarray (with many of them stuck paying off his debts for the rest of their lives), that at least one seriously contemplated suicide. Reflecting on their relationship and how they encountered one another, this same woman ruefully remarked, "of course you'd prefer to meet someone in a cafe or shop, but no-one does that these days".

If we could resurrect that - if young, and not so young, people with powerful needs for connection and community didn't feel they had to turn to the abyss of the internet to forge distorted connections with deceptive strangers - Ashley Wadsworth would still be alive and The Tinder Swindler's victims lives wouldn't lie in tatters. All these women were looking for was real human connection, but they couldn't find it in their real human communities, when they should have been able to. We all should, just as we all did until the overlords set about ruthlessly dismantling our natural communal lives.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not "anti-internet" or suggesting nobody should meet that way - I met about 90% of the people currently regularly in my life that way. But I set about specifically to meet people in my local area, and to build a real-world community with those that I could quickly get offline and see. I initially met people in group contexts, which enabled communal bonds to form and didn't put too much pressure on any one-to-one relationships, and then friendships naturally evolved from that. There are plenty of ways of using the internet to do that (Stand in the Park groups, various local online meet-up groups on Facebook and Telegram, etc.).

So the problem is not "the internet" as such, but rather, that so many people are so starved of real human connection that they will readily strike up rapports with anyone online they feel any sort of "connection" with, regardless of where this person is in the world or other potentially red flags about them (see the whole 'Catfish' phenomenon for more on this) - and while great real-world connections can certainly begin online, and many do, it is also the case that many people who meet their internet friends "IRL" (in real life) can be in for some unpleasant, and even dangerous, shocks. While The Tinder Swindler and what happened to Ashley Wadsworth are tragically extreme, and relatively rare, cases, they are nevertheless critically important cautionary tales about what is happening to our culture, and to our communities. We must take heed of what they are telling us.

Postscript: I have continued to follow the terribly sad story of Ashley Wadsworth as it unfolds in the media, and further tragic details come to light - such as the fact she was on a gap-year between school and university, and had a place to study law at a Canadian college later this year. The university in question offers a Study Abroad programme, so she could have visited the UK that way, where she would have had a protective personal network via the university, and her own friends to turn to, should a meeting with an internet friend go wrong.

However, I learned these details by doing a news search for her name, not because it's been splashed all over the headlines as, for instance, the Sarah Everard murder was. For the last few days I have been unable to understand why this horrific case hasn't attracted anything like the level of media attention and public opprobrium the Everard case did, but today I realised.

It's because it doesn't fit the agenda. The ruling classes want to totally sever us from the real world by portraying it as "too dangerous", and the Everard case offered a harrowingly clear 'confirmation' of this view - that women literally cannot walk down the street without running the risk of being murdered by a stranger. The media whipped up a state of utterly frenzied terror over this extremely rare and unlikely event, and women up and down the UK were expressing genuine fear about the prospect of going for a walk - e.g. being in the real world. Much safer, was the clear and unequivocal message, to stay at home.

Much safer to talk to people online.

And, of course, the Ashley Wadsworth case doesn't serve that agenda at all, but rather, exposes it as the devious psy-op it is. She "stayed home and stayed safe", talking to someone thousands of miles away online. She wasn't walking the streets when she was murdered. She was at home with her internet friend.

So despite the fact the Ashley Wadsworth case is far more representative of the realities of murder (that they are almost always carried out by someone known to the victim and exceptionally rarely by strangers), it will nevertheless never generate the same kind of national outrage or press-induced panic the Everard case did - because it doesn't serve the agenda for it to do so.