Someone messaged me the other day to let me know that the now-legendary (once languishing) Lucy Connolly had begun a Substack (thanks J!). Intrigued, I clicked on the link... only to find I had a pre-emptive block!

I've never made any direct attempts at communication with Ms Connolly, so I find the block to be a sort of accolade as to the impact of my investigations into her case (this, by the way, is why you should never block people, as they inevitably take it as a mark of victory - you never see so much excitement on Twitter as when someone gets blocked, and there's even ongoing jostling competition over who the biggest name to block you is... Jordan Peterson, in my case, followed by Zuby, and then last and very much least, Laurence Fox).

Anyway, as regular readers may recall, I wrote a series of articles regarding the Lucy Connolly case, in which I suspected that this story - like most high-profile, sensationalist news stories - was not, in fact, true. We were told that Lucy, a lovely middle-class mummy running a childminding business, posted a mean Tweet in a moment of madness and - despite having no prior criminal convictions of any kind - ended up receiving a 31-month prison sentence for it. I found this very unlikely, and when I started poking around in the story, found it to be predictably full of holes, which I reported in my articles.

The crowning crescendo of incredulity came on the day of Lucy's "release" from prison, where - despite spending the last 12 months constantly eulogising about her on Twitter, soliciting donations and moonpig cards for her, and viciously savaging any sceptics - not one of Lucy's "friends" bothered to turn up at the prison to greet her, and not even her own husband did.

Preferring to potter around the garden in his pyjamas, Ray Connolly was nowhere to be seen when a taxi supposedly containing his wife sidled quietly out of HMP Peterborough. On this most momentous of occasions, that the press and social media alike had been breathlessly building up for months (even generating a hundred-thousand-signature petition to have her released early), no family, friends, or fans bothered to turn up. Instead, celebrity martyr hero Lucy was left to languish (always with the languishing!) completely alone as she finally came to the end of her "terrible ordeal". Even the MSM expressed surprise at the "muted fanfare" surrounding this long awaited event, when every other prisoner released that day was greeted warmly by jubilant family and friends.

So, the overarching conclusion is that Lucy was never actually in prison (it's the obvious explanation as to why nobody bothered to greet her when she was "released"), and the whole operation was just a media crisis production designed to manipulate perception and behaviour. Propaganda, in other words (primarily to promote the political party, Reform, whose conference Connolly was promptly a star guest of).

Further evidence of the fabricated nature of her "incarceration" is the very Substack she has blocked me from. Lucy Connolly's supposed sentence is not yet over, she was released from prison on licence having served 40% of it, as is standard, and is serving the rest of it at home, but could be recalled to prison at any time should it be judged she's breached the terms of her licence.

As the reason she supposedly went to prison was writing a social media post critical of the government, would she then promptly return to social media whilst still on licence to write posts critical of the government? Nobody legitimate in this situation would take the risk, much less conduct high-profile media interviews and make star turns at political conferences, to vociferously criticise the government - the same government who are allegedly holding her on licence and could call her back to prison at any time.

It's just not a credible way someone genuine would behave, so it's yet more evidence this actress never went to prison, however, we are obviously supposed to think she did, and the overarching takeaway from the Lucy Connolly case is meant to be, gosh, I'd better be careful what I say online, or I might go to prison!

In reality, this is not something we are at risk of.

Yet the establishment is very keen to have us all focussing on this "risk", and looking over there, so we remain ignorant of the real risks of social media, and blind to what their other hand is doing...

It was announced a few days ago that Twitter ('X') is now going to display the country of origin on all user profiles. Not the location you yourself claim to be in, but the location their servers will be able to detect you're actually in, i.e., if you're a man from India, you will no longer be able to LARP online as a "tradwife from Idaho". If you're in India, the Twitter servers will automatically label your profile as being located in India.

On the surface, this may seem fairly trivial and inconsequential, maybe even a good thing - that it will stop unnecessary deception online.

Yet if Twitter is prepared to release location data about users without their permission, what else might they decide to reveal?

In short, just how much longer is the age of internet anonymity really going to last?

We can already see an increase in demands to prove our identity online, supposedly to verify age to access "restricted content", but really, it's all just slippery-slope, frog-in-the-pot stuff for accustoming us to eventually being unable to use the internet at all without first verifying who we are - and, if we use social media, posting under our real full names.

Facebook has long since insisted that users must use their real names, and will typically ban any profiles that use monikers that are obviously fake. I doubt it will be long until all social media platforms are making this demand, and there's already a sturdy case being built for it, with many high-profile people calling for an end to anonymous use of the internet, because of the vicious and destructive behaviour such anonymity can enable.

Anonymity, we will be told, is not compatible with free speech, because with free speech comes accountability, and you can't be accountable if you're anonymous. So, sure, say what you like - but bear the consequences, too, by using your real full name.

'Bear the consequences' is the key risk that is being obscured by the ludicrous Lucified LARP of "going to prison for a Tweet", because that's not a real risk of posting mean Tweets.

However, having your life ruined is - if you post "anonymously" things you would never dare say under your real name, as many millions of people do.

When, for example, seemingly ordinary middle-aged mother, Brenda Leyland, was unmasked as the vicious troll behind a campaign of abuse targeted at the McCann family regarding their missing daughter, Madeleine, she was so overwhelmed by shame (and the reciprocal toxic abuse she started to receive from others) that she killed herself.

How many people would respond similarly if their shield of online anonymity was suddenly revoked and their true internet activity was revealed to the world?

The reality is that this could happen to anyone at any time. Nothing on the internet is really anonymous, and every major publishing platform possesses the ability to "dox" (reveal the true identity of) its users, as was incontrovertibly revealed in the recent Tattle Life scandal. A "celebrity gossip site" specialising in savaging the lives of often rather minor "celebrities" (Instagram influencers and the like), the website was at the forefront of a landmark legal challenge when one of the individuals targeted by the site succeeded in unmasking its long-since "anonymous" owner (and a few of the more prominent posters).

As was reported at the time, if he can be unmasked, anybody can.

You only need to spend ten minutes on any major internet platform to familiarise yourself with the insidious level of toxic abuse that relentlessly spews from anonymous accounts, and you rarely see anything as bad from people who are prepared to use their real names. This is obviously because people would be far too ashamed and afraid to say awful things online that might have devastating real-world consequences for them.

But what if they already have?

What if the whole concept of "anonymous internet" has been a long-game con from the start, purposely designed to lull people into a false sense of security? What if it's intentionally been set up to bring out the worst in people, who can then be revealed and indicted by their own words? What if, in other words - and maybe quite literally - "internet anonymity" has only ever really been about giving people enough rope to hang themselves?

If you think about it, there's no particularly logical reason why the internet was ever anonymous in the first place. We're not allowed to do anything else in life anonymously, after all. If you want to work, study, travel, buy an alcoholic drink (up to a certain age), even open a library account, you are required to identify yourself. Even in environments where you don't have to explicitly identify yourself, such as going shopping or out for a meal, you're still constantly on CCTV, so your identity is still easily discernible.

So: why would the internet be the exception? Why would this ubiquitous tool be the only environment in the world where our control-and-surveillance-obsessed overlords genuinely let us have our privacy?

It obviously wouldn't.

The overlords have given us "internet anonymity" as a self-serving exercise, simply designed to give people all the tools they need to completely indict themselves - and in a way that would very readily serve agenda item goals.

Two major agenda items are to destroy people's capacity to be independent through work (we can easily see that with all the measures that have been taken since 2020 to destroy businesses and employment opportunities, with unemployment now at its highest rate for years), and the other is to dramatically cull the population, as we see through overt programmes like 'assisted dying' and covert measures like vaccination.

What, then, could the social controllers do that would make large swathes of people unemployable, whilst pushing more of them towards ending their lives?

How about releasing their real internet histories under their real full names, just like they did to McCann troll, Brenda Leyland, and owner of Tattle Life, Sebastian Bond?

Bond, and Leyland if she had lived, have been rendered unemployable.

They are figures of revulsion and hate.

Their own families and friends have been left reeling in horror and shock about their behaviour.

No need to send them to prison: they've ruined their own lives much more effectively simply by being given the opportunity to do so, baited into a trust trap believing that they could say what they liked with no consequences because they were "anonymous".

This is the real risk of unwise internet activity: not prison sentences.

There were outpourings of sympathy for Lucy Connolly when she "went to prison" because she was punished by an external force, and her Tweet - which was exceptionally mild by 'internet abuse' standards - isn't the kind of statement that would leave anyone recoiling in revulsion if they found a friend or family had said it. They might not agree with it or find it ill-advised, but it's a far cry from the kind of thing one finds lurking in the dark corners of anonymous internet.

It's crucial to note that Lucy never obscured her identity - she was posting under her real name (albeit slightly misspelt) and her real face. It's a distinction that really matters, because I suspect this will be utilised when parties like Reform join the call for an end to anonymous internet usage.

"I am an ardent supporter of free speech, and our rights to speak our mind without state penalties, as I demonstrated with my unwavering support of Lucy Connolly," Nigel Farage might declare.

"But Lucy is a true free speech warrior, prepared to put her own name and face to her words. She's not an anonymous coward, cowering behind an avatar enabling her to abuse others with impunity. With freedom comes responsibility. If we are to have free speech, we must also be held accountable for our words."

As I said, if you want to suppress free speech online, there's no need to send anyone to prison for Tweeting, at huge cost to the state. Instead, you can just unmask abusive anonymous accounts and watch their lives instantly fall apart, as employers terminate them, friends reject them, and an onslaught of outraged internet users subject them to a taste of their own medicine. We've seen it all before with people like Brenda Leyland, and her reaction to being exposed would not, I suggest, be atypical - and I suggest that the state is fully aware of this.

In its bid to cull the population, the state goes for the "low hanging-fruit", hence why it first targeted the elderly and infirm for Covid vaccination. Equally, unmasking trolls would inevitably see a suicide spike, because trolls by their very nature are deeply damaged people with dysfunctional lives. Stable, functional people simply do not spend their time anonymously abusing strangers online: trolls do this as a reflection of their own inner chaos, and existing mental health issues. In short, they're already far more likely than the general population to kill themselves. So being "doxxed" would push many of them over the edge. The ruling classes know this.

Furthermore, and unsurprisingly, trolls are not life's success stories - they tend to be neither personally nor professionally accomplished and from deprived, often abusive, backgrounds (the unusual thing about McCann troll, Brenda Leyland, was that she was middle-class, whereas anonymous internet abusers rarely are). In other words, they are generally poor, and likely to have health problems, both mental and physical: and it's hardly a secret that the ruling classes despise the poor and the sick and want to get rid of them. Obviously, those with money and means are able to deploy more sophisticated techniques to disguise their identity online, and in a stronger position to bounce back if they are exposed, but for your typical anonymous troll, exposure would likely be catastrophic.

Essentially, we are in an elaborate chess game with people who want us dead, but the rules of said game seem to dictate that the predators can't do anything by brute force. Hence, they didn't hold anyone down and force-vaccinate them. Rather, they used lies and manipulation to dupe people into injecting themselves.

Equally, with the internet, they're not going to use state-mandated force such as throwing people in jail for their words - instead, they have simply provided people with the apparatus to destroy their lives themselves.

In reality, a brief prison sentence doesn't actually destroy anyone's life anyway, and if anything - as the case of Lucy Connolly demonstrated - being seen to go to prison for a Tweet turns you into a free speech hero and media celebrity who people throw money at. So, no, that's not how they're going to control speech online.

They don't do it to us: they trick us into doing it to ourselves.

All it took on Tattle Life was a few strategic reveals of the more prominent posters, for scores of users to start panicking en masse, deleting their accounts, and writing long mitigating posts on social media about their "mental health" and how they may accidentally in a moment of madness have composed seventy-eight pages of vicious vitriol regarding random Instagram influencer X who has since had a nervous breakdown and lost their business, but they really didn't mean it and are truly a lovely person!

The problem with this, of course, is that the mass exposure of abusive trolls would get a lot of public support and many would feel these people were simply getting their just desserts... and then that would result in the end of anonymous internet for everyone, including the millions of people who conceal their identity for entirely legitimate reasons...

People who would lose their job if they were associated with certain political opinions, or people who are struggling with mental health issues they'd rather keep private, or those trapped in abusive situations whose lives would be endangered if their attempts to seek help online were discovered.

There are many legitimate reasons why people may choose to remain anonymous online, but the ruling classes know human nature and how to expertly exploit it. They know that many people suppress the darkest and most sadistic aspects of their characters only because of the extremely effective power of social stigma: that few people would begin randomly insulting strangers in a public setting "IRL" because they would instantly be set upon by those around them who would verbally, or even physically, put an end to their behaviour.

But emboldened by the perceived sheen of anonymity the internet provides, a significant subset of people liberate sides of themselves that really should never be seen.

As it's very obvious that providing the option of anonymity online would bring this out in certain people, it does make it all look intentional - a baited trap, entirely based on the ludicrous notion that we can trust some of the world's worst people not to betray our confidences. That the immensely wealthy, intergenerational elite psychopath families behind all the big social media platforms would never breach our privacy! They might routinely deploy plots to try and main, poison, and kill us, but reveal out real names on Twitter?! They'd never do that!!

Take a step back and it seems pretty obvious that we were intentionally given the anonymity option to entice us into indicting ourselves and ruining our own lives, to save the ruling classes the job of doing it for us. As I said, we can't do anything else in the world anonymously, so it doesn't make any sense that the ruling classes allowed us to be truly anonymous online, and for so long... Unless there was something very significant in it for them.

And it's looking clearer and clearer to me that there is.

In short, nobody is going to prison for Tweeting.

Nobody is even being banned from the internet.

Instead, in their bid to finally and fully crush free expression, the ruling classes will simply hold a mirror up to people and show them - and the rest of the world - what they have done to themselves.

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