Suspicious Minds

Suspicious Minds by Chris Green

The underlying premise behind conspiracy theories is that they are hiding the truth for dark, nefarious purposes. They might refer to the government, mainstream media, Russia, China, aliens, the CIA, the FBI, the BBC, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Tech, and/or more often than not, the Jews. But because you are so sagacious and resourceful, you have access to privileged information and can see things as they really are. Much ridiculed such conspiracy theories might be amongst the population at large, but what if some or all of them are true?

Lev Jacobi belongs to the Golders Green Flat Earth Society, which, if they all turn up for a meeting, has just enough members to make it quorate. The small team dedicate themselves to the task of spreading the word that the Earth is flat. This is being kept under wraps by all major governments for fear that it would cause panic if the secret were to get out. It would decimate the travel industry overnight if people became worried they might fall off the edge. As it is, they are covering up thousands of deaths every day to stop word of this from spreading. Why can’t people see they are being taken for fools? Maps in atlases are not curved, are they? They are flat and they are flat for a reason, Lev argues. The Earth is flat, and it clearly isn’t spinning. How did they ever manage to sell that one? Surely, it’s easy enough to see that those photos taken from space are fake. For one thing, space does not exist. This is why it is called space, because there is nothing there, duh!

Out of the blue, Lev is invited onto Just The Way It Is on Channel 5 to examine conspiracy theories. The host, Wayne Sunshine, dismisses all of Lev’s explanations and comes out with all the familiar arguments to support Earth being a sphere spinning in space and orbiting the Sun. He shows the faked footage of the Earth from the space station and from outer space and invites the audience to laugh mockingly at Lev’s objections to its veracity. The space station does not exist, Lev tells them. It’s all done with CGI. And all those rocket launches from Cape Canaveral are just for show. They don’t really go anywhere, and it’s a well-known fact the Moon landings were faked. For a start, the moon is nothing more than a projection, so there’s nothing to land on anyway. Wayne tells him that’s all they have time for. Just The Way It Is is looking at a number of conspiracy theories on the show this week. The editorial, it seems, requires only a summary of each, before moving on to the next one.

The programme covers 9/11, Chemtrails, Area 51, 5G, and a conspiracy theory claiming that birds are drones, this much to the amusement of the audience. Finally, they get around to their main item, Covid 19 being a hoax and the vaccination programme an attempt to turn the hosts into compliant zombies. To tell Wayne all about this and the deaths attributable to the vaccine, they have Tara Vain. Lev listens in Channel 5’s hospitality suite and is taken by how articulate Tara is. It should be obvious to anyone from her account that there needs to be a thorough independent investigation. Even though she is possibly not Jewish, Lev feels he could get along with someone like Tara. He decides he will stay in contact with her after the show.

In a letter to The Independent the next day, eminent astrophysicist Edison Bolt drops the bombshell that he is open to the possibility that the earth is flat and that his entire career has been based on an illusion. He goes on to say that he was impressed by Lev Jacobi’s account and was horrified by the way the host of Just the Way it Is ridiculed him. He says there’s a strong case for Flat Earth and you can read all about this and other myth-busting revelations in his new book, Flat as a Pancake. Lev feels encouraged by the acknowledgement.

He meets up with Tara Vain at Zest on Finchley Road and they get along like a house on fire. Over Matso Brei and Chocolate Babka, they chat about conspiracies and cover-ups. Tara confides that although she is a seasoned conspiracy theorist who questions everything about everything as a matter of course, she had never before doubted the Earth’s spherical or orbital properties. The narrative behind Earth spinning and making its way around the sun every 365 days is so well entrenched into our thinking that we take it for granted. But, she says, Lev has convinced her that, while it will probably never be conclusively proven to satisfy everyone, it appears the earth may indeed be flat and not orbit the sun, and even that space may be a projection. Lev tells her he too must get to grips with some of the other lies we are fed. Broaden his field as it were. It is important to understand what is going on and why.

‘I used to think that birds were real living things,’ he says. ‘Imagine that, Tara! Birds, real! Now I realise they are no more alive than the fish in the sea, I feel I have more of a grip on things.’

‘It took me a long time to catch on that fish were put there to spy on us,’ Tara says. ‘These myths are so powerfully proclaimed and even more fiercely protected.’

‘Basically, everyone is spying on everyone else, Tara. Information is power.’

‘Sometimes you cannot see the wood for the trees, though, Lev. Speaking of which, I only found out recently that Amazon was a front for the New World Order.’

‘I became aware of conspiracies early on,’ Lev says. ‘We Jews have been blamed for most things over the years. We’re an easy target.’

‘History has been rewritten over and over for profit or gain. Each time there’s someone new on the scene. But things have speeded up so much, there are now convenient misunderstandings and double-dealing everywhere you turn. Lies are the norm. Follow the money.’

‘You’re right, Tara. Gaslighting and false flags everywhere you look these days.’

Now recognised as a pop-scientist not afraid of a challenge, Edison Bolt is offered a weekly programme on Trust TV for the winter schedules called Suspicious Minds. Edison contacts Lev to do a guest spot which fittingly will focus on how science has got it wrong over the years, the prime example of this being the shape of the Earth. In preparation for this before filming starts, Lev suggests he needs to travel to collect evidence, and maybe root out some new conspiracies. Bolt manages to negotiate a budget for this with Trust. Lev invites Tara to accompany him on his adventure.

The Somalian taxi driver taking them to the airport is anything but chatty. Lev and Tara put this down to his difficulty with the language, or possibly that he finds doing this run regularly, unstimulating. Heathrow turns out to not be the bustling metropolis they have been led to believe. There are few people in the concourse and these look bored. They find there is little information about flights, but they are eventually able to find a desk where a clerk checks their information and points them in the direction to their terminal. There appears to be no viewing platform where you can look out onto the runways, but they are entertained by a film of planes taking off and landing playing on a large TV screen. Gradually it occurs to them that the footage consists of the same few planes over and over in a loop. A trickle of bored-looking people, possibly zombies, come and go and there are intermittent announcements of flight cancellations, before finally, the news comes over that their flight has also been cancelled. They find there is now nobody manning the desks to take this up with, so are unable to get further information.

Slowly it dawns on them that jet airliners might be nothing more than a CGI creation and airports are just there for show. There are no passenger flights to faraway places. The aircraft to fly them there do not even exist. Could this be tied in, they wonder, with Flat Earth? The apparent limitations to travel certainly add weight to their argument. Perhaps the edge of the world is closer than they previously thought. Perhaps not only do the planes not exist to take them there, but the faraway places don’t exist either. The places with strange-sounding names that you see on TV travelogues are nothing more than sets in film studios. Disappointing, but of course, perfect material for Lev’s spot on Suspicious Minds.

‘The obvious question here,’ he says, ‘is if a biggie like air travel is a sham, what else that we take for granted might be fictional? One shudders to think what other biggies there are. But here and now, I’d put money on shipping being similarly spurious. Those colossal cruise ships and supertankers are clearly fake. Nothing that big floats.’

‘There’s probably no end to the list of things that are fake, Lev,’ Tara says. ‘It might be easier to use this as a starting point and try to come up with a list of things that might actually be true.’

‘It’s not enough to see something, is it?’ Lev says. ‘The eyes can easily be fooled. Added to which there’s CGI. Advertising relies on CGI. And pretty much all images are adverts for something or other, so CGI is everywhere. And anything distant is likely to be a projection. To verify something, you have to be able to touch and feel it.’

‘I don’t quite know how to say this, Lev,’ Tara says. ‘But sometimes I feel ethereal, insubstantial. It’s like I only exist as part of someone’s imagination.’

‘I think I know what you mean, Tara. Once or twice lately I’ve wondered if perhaps I’m nothing more than words on a page.’

‘Now you come to mention it, Lev, I believe I may have read about you. In a story by that author who wrote Waiting For Doggo, I think it was. Do you know, I had a feeling you seemed familiar when we first met.’

‘But hang on, there, Tara. If I’m fictional, and you’re fictional too, doesn’t that mean ……….?’

Copyright © Chris Green, 2023: All rights reserved