When I was at school, my French teacher, Mrs. Mealor, had a bit of a problem with controlling the class, as seems to be an occupational hazard for the tutelage of the Gallic dialect (maybe it's the melodic, lyrical nature of the language, as it seems German teachers have no such problems...). When various threats of detention and extra homework failed to bring the recalcitrant class under control, Mrs. Mealor announced ominously that she was making a list.
Within a few weeks, virtually the whole class was on this list, for various scurrilous misdemeanours (talking, eating, dancing etc), and yet, it had still failed to make any difference to anyone's scholarly focus.
So, one day, Mrs Mealor strode into class to announce to us all that she had now turned her list into a song.
She then, quite seriously, proceeded to sing it.
"I've got a little list, I've got a little list
There's David who likes dancing
And there's Laura likes to laugh
There's Sam who's always speaking
And Matthew late and in the bath..."
And so on and so forth. I can't remember what my own personal misdemeanour was (probably being late, which I was 87 times in my final year, a school record, the administration dryly informed me), but we were all so pleased with the song that we decided to reward Mrs. Mealor by actually doing some work. To this day, I can still recall how to accurately ask where the local discotheque is in French.
I was just musing on this situation recently, as for some reason - despite the prospect representing no threat whatsoever to a class of surly teenagers in 1998 - the concept of "the list" seems to send shivers of convulsing terror down the spines of sophisticated free thinking adults in 2025.
I learned this recently courtesy of The Twitter Wars, where - for those of you thoroughly sensible enough to stay out of them (most of my readers, it would seem, which further underlines their commendable discernment!) - there is an ongoing spat occurring between certain "factions" regarding who is, and is not, a so-called "shill". That is to say, a bad actor and an infiltrator inserted into the truth movement to variously mislead, exhaust, and control it.
Social media generally, and Twitter in particular, are extremely powerful social influence vehicles (Twitter has 'changed the world', according to the WEF). In the digital age where everyone is constantly glued to their phones, social media wields as much power as, if not more than, the mainstream media. So, of course, the establishment spends a lot of time and money infiltrating and controlling the social media space.
I learned this with particularly sharp clarity during the Lucy Connolly episode, when it became abundantly clear just how many Twitter accounts were involved in pushing this fabricated psychological operation, and that "Lucy" herself was wholly a fabricated creation that built its brand and power entirely through the Twitter medium.
"She" (meaning the social media management company behind the account, probably Hello Social Club, via its directorial connection to Democracy 3, the deeply dodgy fundraising platform used by the Connolly clan) meticulously crafted a brand to appeal to the "right-wing gammon / conspiracy fringe" market, engaging and interacting with as many of them as possible, whilst posting sweary Tweets and mildly pornographic content that would keep interest and engagement high.
Hence, "I know she's real because I talked to her on Twitter" (which I've heard more times than I can count) was the entire foundation of validating this op, which turns out to be one of the most impactful and influential since Covid, already being taken to the White House to powerfully direct the political fortunes of both this country and the USA (the Lucy character herself will also be speaking at the Reform conference).
So that's how powerful Twitter is. We may mock and roll our eyes at "Twitter spats", but such spats may well be influencing the future of the Western world and shaking the very foundations of civilisation itself... (seriously!). More and more, the establishment relies on social media to seed and validate its psyops, and therefore, people who credibly challenge and expose these ops are a huge threat to establishment interests and must be neutralised at all costs.
So, even if you very wisely stay away from Twitter and its ubiquitous battles, I hope you will nevertheless indulge my analysis of exactly why these conflicts erupt in what are usually highly coordinated ways, and what they are being used to do...
A seasoned warrior in the Twitter wars, Mr. General Ripper (ripping things, generally), has been very good at engaging with some of the more suspect Twitter accounts, and, essentially, successfully goading them into outing themselves as highly likely establishment assets, planted to control the narrative and smear and discredit those who challenge it. If you care to do so, please do peruse Mr. Ripper's account - looking at the 'replies' as well as his main feed - where he has provided a detailed historical record of the behavioural tactics used by compromised accounts.
Overall, there are some obvious tells of these type of accounts, such as suspiciously large follower numbers, when they aren't celebrities or prominent content creators, and amplified Tweets, which get many times more views and interaction than legitimate accounts do (this was seen repeatedly with Lucy Connolly). It is, in effect, obvious which accounts the establishment wishes you to be aware of, and which it does not.
But far more than that, is their behaviour, and the pack-like coordination with which they will ruthlessly go after anyone who crosses a certain line, and then they will display typical DARVO tactics - Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. This is a well known psychological technique used by military intelligence to try and break people and it tends to work quite well.
So, what they did to Lucy Connolly sceptics, for example, was subject them to extraordinary targeted abuse (I detailed some of the tactics they used on me here), and then, when the subject stands up for themselves, the abusers immediately affect victim mode, claim the subject is the aggressor, and start smearing them as mentally ill, aggressive, a cult leader, and a c**t worse than the enemy (all direct quotes from these accounts).
It's quite clear that these are not normal reactions from ordinary members of the general public who simply "disagree about Lucy Connolly" (or whatever issue, they now seem to be behaving very similarly over Graham Linehan), but trained assets inserted to control the opposition and discredit and smear those who step out of line.
However, when these observations about their behaviour are shared with these accounts, they again instantly go into victim mode and pearl-clutch in outrage that "oh my GOD, I'm so deeply harmed and wounded and offended! How DARE you accuse little old DARVO-ing me of being an infiltrator! You c**tish cult leader!"
Yet five minutes later, they're all changing their account names to "Secret Agent", "Deep State Detective", and such like, and having an ongoing jolly hilarious joke (which has been going on for months now) whereby they all call each other "agent". My sides are splitting just thinking about it.
So, which is it guys? Are you mortally wounded and offended that someone would dare suspect you work for the people you admit you work for, or is it a really hilarious haha funny joke?
If someone suspects me of being an asset, I neither find it deeply offensive nor wildly hilarious. It's a standard suspicion in a movement riddled with infiltrators (as all anti-establishment movements are and always have been) of anyone with any sort of a platform, and therefore, if you're prepared to put yourself out there, you have to accept that, at some point, accusations will be made of you.
If you're authentic, these suspicions shouldn't concern you at all, since the truth, rather famously, does not fear investigation.
Hence, when I get these accusations levelled at me, I deal with them by assuring people that I am not an asset or an agent, have never worked for the government, military, or intelligence in any capacity (an assurance compromised accounts are bizarrely reluctant to give), and have a wholly verifiable backstory as to how I eventually came to have a modest degree of visibility in the movement.
Firstly, I did not just come out of nowhere in 2020. I had been involved in the truth movement since around 2013, when I was a regular on various "conspiracy" forums where I made my first conspiracist friends. In 2015, I launched my first website, STRIVE (unfortunately now offline as the 'Webs' hosting platform I used for it went out of business), a vaccine information resource for students.
I was very active on Facebook in anti-vaccine groups, particularly the natural health group, Arnica, and made many connections over Facebook, who went on to become real-world friends. I was involved in initiatives such as sending information to schools to warn of the dangers of the HPV vaccine, working alongside groups like AHVID and Sanevax, and helping to promote the work of people like Chris Exley (who was the person who inspired me to begin my own vaccine website).
Yet I had not really branched out of vaccine activism until 2020, when "Covid" made its debut (and I had noted on Facebook in early 2019 that I thought something like that was coming), when I started writing letters, first just on my own behalf, but then increasingly for other people, to challenge various aspects of the restrictions. I ended up writing about fifty letters on behalf of others to challenge mask, test, and vaccine mandates, and turned them into templates, making them freely available so anybody could use them. I'm told they were used hundreds of times, very often successfully.
It was needing a better platform than Facebook for my letter templates that led to the birth of my 'Miri AF' website in 2020 (which was initially run on the Webs platform, until that provider collapsed and I moved to my current location), which then went on to diversify into articles as well as letters, and here we are today. I also now publish my articles at Substack.
So it's taken me well over a decade to build up what is still a fairly modest following (less than 10k followers on Twitter and Substack). To be clear, I don't aspire to a huge following or 'fame' - I'm very happy with, and grateful for, the modest following I have - but the reason I outline my own trajectory (which other "small fish" content creators will relate to) is to underline how utterly juxtaposed it is to certain other people's.
I harbour healthy scepticism (and anyone who's interested in the truth must always harbour healthy scepticism) about anyone who suddenly appeared on the scene in 2020 with no previous history in this movement, immediately amassed large numbers of followers for no apparent reason, and somehow became viewed as some sort of "leader", despite not having put in any of the work that might legitimately accrue someone that kind of status.
Moving into a leadership position is generally a slow and gradual process that takes place over many years, as a person builds their knowledge, experience, and - crucially - credibility, so the phenomenon of unknowns suddenly shooting to high prominence more or less overnight is a big red flag their ascension is not organic.
In harbouring these suspicions, I'm not including the many people who legitimately "awoke" in 2020, of whom there were of course a lot, some of whom already had a profile courtesy of their work in the media or politics, so their high follower numbers are not automatically suspicious.
The point is that the establishment knew full well the events of 2020 would wake a lot of people up - how could they not? - and therefore, that they had to manage what could otherwise have been a very threatening level of awareness amongst the population, by flooding this new "awake" community with infiltrators employed to manage and contain the new awake class.
Hence, in 2020, along suddenly came a significant number of quote unquote "nobodies" who styled themselves as "just ordinary members of the general public" who nevertheless somehow amassed incongruously large follower numbers, and started behaving as if they possessed significant authority and clout, rising very quickly to high levels of visibility and influence in this movement.
They built credibility by saying "all the right things" during Covid, enabling them to subsequently portray themselves as trustworthy authorities when they started defending later state psyops (e.g., "Lucy Connolly is real, trust me bro, because I told the truth during Covid"). Classic bait and switch.
It is my contention, therefore, that such people have been inserted into this movement to manage and control it, including trying to remove the influence of anyone who challenges sacred cows and important ops (as comedian Alistair Williams wittily and very accurately summarised in this video). Therefore, it's vital to identify the characteristics of these people and how they operate, specifically on social media which is inevitably where most "activism" takes place, to ensure we can successfully resist their malign influence.
The key tells for me include (the more of these criteria that apply to an individual, the more suspect they are):
*Incongruously large follower numbers built very quickly circa 2020/1
*Adopting an air of authority or influence not congruent with the contribution they've actually made
*Attempting to impose limits on what it is "acceptable" to discuss or believe ("here and no further" gatekeeping) - accusing others of mental illness (paranoia, delusion) if they challenge these limits
*Attempting to smear and shut down those who challenge certain narratives with very aggressive, abusive language, in particular overuse of the c-word
*Savaging people with a consistent track record of producing original work, whilst they themselves produce little or nothing (mainly Tweets and the odd bit of AI slop)
*Deliberately misrepresent, misquote, and flat out lie about those they're tasked with discrediting
*Operate in packs, always backing each other up and reinforcing each other, yet attempt to isolate targets by blocking their supporters, and/or pathologising them (calling them 'lapdogs' and other such dehumanising epithets)
*Go lockstep on pushing state agendas (Lucy Connolly is real! Graham Linehan is real! Oh look, the Fabians!), as well as coordinated demonisation strategies of those who challenge them (their latest is pushing 'humility' and how people need to admit they don't really know anything about anything and if you don't admit this, you're an arrogant cult leader)
*Ally themselves with state narratives supported by the likes of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Lord Toby Young, and then gang up and berate anybody who challenges such narratives with "not everything's a conspiracy you know" (although usually expressed in rather more aggressive language than that)
*Play the victim when called out and declare they are blameless targets of evil people - probably cult leaders - who question their spotless integrity for absolutely no reason
*Affect 'domestic abuser' mode by telling you you should be really, really grateful for all the amazing "support" they've given you, whilst they relentlessly abuse and malign you
*Get really very offended indeed if they are added to a list
This last one is particularly revealing, because the aforementioned General Ripper compiled a list of those whom he believed were compromised, controlled accounts based on all the above behaviousr, and published it on Twitter.
Despite the fact General Ripper has less than 1k followers and this list will hardly have made the headlines, several of the named accounts went absolutely mental and accused him of being a Maoist dictator who was going to round them all up against a wall and have them shot.
(Perhaps I should have suggested to Mrs. Mealor that would have been a more effective tactic for class control than bursting into song.)
Wow, I thought, that's quite a reaction to being put on a list. I'm sure I'm on lots of lists (not least Mrs. Mealor's), and it has never occurred to me to be remotely concerned by this fact. Who cares if some random from Twitter puts you on a list?
Or perhaps it's more accurate to say, who cares if you're not guilty of what they accuse you of.
It doesn't bother me in the slightest if some random "outs" me as "controlled opposition" because I know it's not true. I'm not going to rant and rave and clutch my pearls (but then two seconds later decide it's a really funny joke). I'll either answer their questions if they're genuine and asked in good faith, or ignore them if it's just a sh*t-flinging troll (as it generally is).
The way these suspect accounts have reacted, though, is most revealing - and indicting.
What we have to remember is that the establishment lives and dies by the maxim "the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves" and so they relentlessly infiltrate all anti-establishment movements, and they do it to what may initially seem an implausibly excessive degree.
I mean, is it really plausible that that random (albeit inflated and amplified) account arguing with you on Twitter, with a lovely dog profile picture, and that posts pictures of their dinner, is literally a trained, paid state agent deployed to neutralise you? Doesn't the state have rather better things to do?
Yes, it is in fact eminently plausible, and we know this from, for instance, the extraordinary infiltration of the animal rights' movement. This movement basically consisted of a handful of students and single mums handing out leaflets outside McDonald's, but the establishment was nevertheless so threatened by this - and so determined to control this group - that they sent in undercover police who posed as activists for years, to the extent they even had long-term romantic relationships and children with some of these women.
If the state will do that to a relatively benign group just campaigning for better treatment for animals, what do you think they would do to a group who's stated explicit intentions are to challenge, expose, and topple every aspect of the malign establishment?
That's what the truth movement aims to do, so of course the degree of establishment infiltration into this movement is going to be off the charts. And since the truth movement primarily exists online, that's where most of the infiltration is going to be.
We knew all about "77th" through Covid, and these guys didn't just retire when that particular pantomime came to an end. They just changed their focus. It's also on public record that undercover police widely infiltrate Twitter.
So, you are most certainly not crazy, irrational, paranoid, a cult leader, or that wearisome other c-word (can you people not diversify your degrading dialogue a bit?) if you come to the conclusion that an overly aggressive Twitter account relentlessly targeting you is likely an undercover police officer or intelligence asset. We know that Twitter is full of them, that's a well-documented fact, so it's simply about using deductive logic and reasoning based on behaviour - especially coordinated patterns of behaviour - to work out who these people likely are.
Inevitably, given human fallibility, there's the risk of getting it wrong on occasion and suspecting innocent people, but that's just how it goes: that's an occupational hazard of being a "truther", just like having an out of control class is an occupational hazard of being a French teacher.
That we may occasionally get it wrong is absolutely no reason not to be consistently highly vigilant, and to realise that identifying authentic people from devious bad actors is utterly essential to making any real progress. These characters are far more dangerous than Matt Hancock or whoever, as Matt Hancock makes it explicit what he is and doesn't pretend to be on our side. The devious bad actors do, which makes them a far more dangerous breed.
People who tediously decry criticism of controlled opposition as "dividing the movement" need to be explicitly clear that controlled opposition are not in the movement. They're pretending to be in it in order to ultimately destroy it. That's how establishment infiltration works, and to repeat, the establishment infiltrates every single anti-establishment movement in the world and has done so all throughout history.
Infiltrators don't make themselves obvious at first, of course (they would be completely useless infiltrators if they did), and will often be very nice to you (too nice, you may realise in retrospect). But when the pressure is on, as per the Lucy Connolly operation they were obviously under strict orders to promote and protect at all costs, the mask starts to slip.
It's particularly revealing how contemptuous and snarling they all become, and how easy it therefore is to ascertain they were never actually your "friends", they never "respected your work", they were just managing and profiling you.
And if you have done any kind of significant activism at all, there will be assets assigned to manage and profile you. Either online, in the real world, or both. So it's crucial to learn how to recognise them. And if you're wrong, and someone's just being a shit to you, not because they're an agent of the state but because they're simply a shit person, then all the better to have them out of your life too.
One must choose one's allies extremely carefully - in all aspects of life, but in any kind of political activism especially, because politicised movements are always such infested viper's nests. We cannot "unite the movement", nor is it desirable to try, because it is so heavily infiltrated. Instead, we must be highly discerning and keep our circles of confidence small. That doesn't mean we can't collaborate with other groups when it makes sense to do so, but that, as General Ripper put it:
"This Lucy Connolly episode has made me realize you can't have a coherent movement of anything. You can have loose, changing affiliations of individuals, but ultimately, you have to pursue your own course, and if others agree with that, if only for a short time, so be it."
That's the mature, realistic conclusion that I believe we must all accept to make genuine progress, and to see this as as a liberating realisation: that we don't require the validation of any self-appointed "leader" or "influencer" to pursue our own path. We don't need to be in the self-styled "in-group" (or cult), nor seek the approval of anyone, regardless of whether we might have agreed on things in the past.
Natural allies will emerge at times, and at times we'll feel more alone, but that's okay. It's certainly infinitely preferable to some sort of collectivist communitarianism where individuals are side-lined and subsumed by what some dubious "leader" has decided is "for the greater good".
One of the compromised accounts on Twitter even explicitly stated we need to have a truther list of commandments where there are subjects we all solemnly swear to eternally agree upon and never challenge or discuss. Obviously, such a thing is the complete antithesis of truth and freedom, and hence, any legitimate member of a movement based on these principles would resist such restrictions at all costs.
The truth is the truth, even if you're in a minority of one, and sometimes it is necessary to be in such a minority. Yet if you stand firm and refuse to compromise on your principles, despite every type of pressure imaginable being exerted upon you, you will find real support - from people who neither require nor desire you to agree with them on everything. I'm lucky enough to have some such people in my life now (I certainly haven't always), and I hope you are too, or that you find them soon.
In closing, I have not compiled my own "list" to identify the individuals I've just been describing here, as it seems more expedient to simply outline their behaviour.
However, what we can conclude is that, if ever you're targeted by one of these people, we now know the kryptonite with which to defeat them.
Tell them you're making a list.
Tell them they're on it.
And that, if they don't behave, you'll turn it into a song...
I actually had a go at rewriting some songs for the Covid era, so maybe I could have a bash at this too.... 'Imagine all the shilling / it isn't hard to do / just tell the truth on Twitter / and they will come for you'...
I admit it lacks the continental flair of Mrs. Mealor's efforts, but it'll just have to do for these compromised, controlled, cunning and various other c-word accounts. If you'll pardon my French...
Thanks for reading! This article was originally published at miriaf.co.uk, which is entirely reader-supported, with no paywalls, adverts, or wealthy corporate backers, meaning your support is what powers this site to keep going. If you enjoyed this article, and would like to read more in the future, please consider…
1. Subscribing monthly at Substack or Patreon (where paid subscribers can comment on posts)
2. Making a one-off contribution via BuyMeACoffee
3. Contributing in either way via bank transfer to Nat West, account number 30835984, sort code 54-10-27, account name FINCH MA (please use your email address as a reference if you’d like me to acknowledge receipt).
Your support is what allows these articles to keep being created and is enormously appreciated. Thank you.