How a Manchester United superfan became a conspiracy theorist
Is the internet really to blame for the rise of conspiracy theories, or are they a symptom of a much wider political malaise?
-Published in 1843 Magazine
-Manchester and London / January 2023
For @RedIssue, a Twitter account with nearly 60,000 followers dedicated to supporters of Manchester United football club, 2020 began like any other year – sardonically.
“So the transfer window is now open everyone!” declared a typical post, alongside a video of Alexis Sanchez, a former player bought in the period in January when trading is allowed, who turned out to be an expensive flop. “Are we all excited?”
Descended from a much-loved fanzine of the same name – once described by the Manchester Evening News as the “most acerbic and caustic” in the country – @RedIssue has served up a diet of insider gossip, banter with rivals and gripes about the club’s billionaire owners for more than a decade. That January, its feed included digs at Ed Woodward, Manchester United’s despised, bean-counting chief executive, and Marcus Rashford, a star attacker who had flown, while injured, to America to watch the Super Bowl.
At the end of the month, in a tweet about the signing of Odion Ighalo, a striker based in Shanghai, a new term cropped up for the first time. “The loan fee will cost up to £4m for a player who has no known uk arrival date due to the coronavirus outbreak,” it read. Ighalo went on to play only a handful of games for the club and was barely mentioned again. Coronavirus, on the other hand, would become @RedIssue’s singular obsession.
As the pandemic engulfed Britain, @RedIssue’s feed initially reflected widespread anger at the government’s dithering. The account criticised the authorities for not cancelling sporting events and for failing to provide nhs staff with protective equipment. Alongside demands for Boris Johnson, the prime minister, to get “mopping hospital floors instead of scratching his balls at Chequers”, @RedIssue mocked “wacko” conspiracy theorists who claimed that covid-19 was a hoax. On April 4th, as the country’s daily coronavirus death toll climbed to almost a thousand people, @RedIssue posted a satirical diagram illustrating links between supposed “New World Order 5G Activated Nano Surveillance Toilet Rolls” and a “Weaponised 5G Bat”.
“@RedIssue posted a satirical diagram illustrating links between ‘New World Order 5G Activated Nano Surveillance Toilet Rolls’ and a ‘Weaponised 5G Bat’”
Come September, when Greater Manchester was a covid hotspot, @RedIssue started to question the particularly harsh restrictions imposed upon the region. It condemned local politicians for not standing up to Westminster’s diktats, and urged students at Manchester University, barred from leaving their halls, to protest. By October, when a second national lockdown was announced, @RedIssue was cheering on business owners defying police orders to close their premises. A month later it was insisting that “None of this is about a virus.” “As kids we learnt ‘1984’ was a dystopian novel,” proclaimed a post in December. “As adults we’ve learned it’s a govt handbook.”
By early 2021 the rhetoric that @RedIssue had ridiculed the year before pervaded its posts. The account urged “pliant little sheep” to wake up and see the truth. The vaccine was condemned as “snake oil”. References to Manchester United were few and far between.
As @RedIssue left football behind and devoted itself to exposing what it now termed the “Global Covid Psyop”, many of its followers fought back. Some tried persuasion. “It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a broken system,” argued one. Others appealed to @RedIssue’s heritage. “Totally embarrassing: a mag a lot of people used to love is getting dragged through the mud,” said another. “What happened?” asked a third. “Has this account been hacked?”
***
Most people like to think that conspiracy theorising is confined to the fringes of society. It might be harmful or just funny – but it seems to lurk on the edge of things, like a crude doodle in the margins. This view is reassuring, because it implies that the rest of society, the non-conspiracists, are on the same page. You might love the Royal Family and I might prefer to see them guillotined. But we can probably both agree that the king is not a blood-drinking, shape-shifting, reptilian humanoid. And in this contentious age, that’s something.
But conspiracy theories have never been merely peripheral; they have always refracted the culture from which they emerged. For centuries, outsiders – from the Irish to the Chinese, communists to capitalists, Christians to Muslims and, almost always, Jews – have faced accusations of conspiracy which revealed much about the anxieties of the communities who feared them. Scholars have tracked the evolution of conspiracy theories through the early modern period, when the invention of the printing press allowed for the rapid transmission of anonymous tracts; and the age of Enlightenment, when the machinations of human beings replaced divine writ as an explanation for the causes of events.
“We like to think that conspiracy theories lurk on the edge of things, like a crude doodle in the margins”
The covid pandemic burst out of a cover-up, and conspiracy theories have swarmed around it ever since. We still don’t know whether sars-cov-2 jumped species in a Wuhan wet market or escaped from a laboratory. But the Chinese authorities did engage in systematic evasion: they censored information about the virus’s spread, punished medics who raised the alarm and delayed notifying the World Health Organisation (who).
Psychologists have shown that conspiracy theorising arises out of a desire to make sense of the world around us, and this desire increases in moments of social crisis. Lockdowns relied upon unprecedented intrusion by the state, and confined millions to long, solitary days sitting in front of a screen. Without the routines that usually anchor us in time and place, many people’s perception of reality was scrambled.
Little wonder that some people sought clearly delineated explanations. In May 2020 a study led by clinical psychologists at Oxford University found that 60% of British adults believed “to some extent” that the government was misleading the public about the cause of the virus; 40% agreed that covid was part of a deliberate attempt by powerful individuals to dominate society; and 20% thought it could be an outright hoax. Polling in October 2020 by Hope Not Hate, an anti-extremism ngo, revealed that nearly one in five Britons were convinced that coronavirus had been intentionally released in order to depopulate the planet. In February 2021 researchers in Paris found that around a third of people in France, Italy, Germany and Britain believed that national health ministries were working with pharmaceutical companies to cover up vaccine risks.
As covid landed in Britain, John-Paul O’Neill was in the same position as most of us: bereft of knowledge, scared about the future, and under orders to retreat, watch and wait. He did what he was told. “You side with the precautionary principle,” he told me. Back then, he had little time for conspiracy theories. “You think it must all be bullshit,” he recalled. “Why would all those scientists be saying the same thing if it wasn’t true? And then you begin to read, and follow the links, and check the sources, and you start to see it. You start to see that something’s wrong.”
O’Neill is a short, slight, intense man in his 40s, who bobs with nervous energy whenever he speaks. He was the editor of Red Issue magazine before he ran the Twitter account that bears its name. My initial efforts to talk to him for this article were met with suspicion. “I’ve seen some of the stuff you’ve done previously,” he wrote to me, after I’d asked for an interview. “However, and meant in the nicest way, not sure I trust your motives given the hysteria and censorship over supposed ‘anti-vaxxers’.” He went on to accuse 1843 magazine and other “mainstream” publications of pushing an agenda. “Why would anyone think you would give an alternative viewpoint a fair hearing?” he asked. I thought it was a reasonable question, and told him so. He replied with his mobile number. This interaction, and the various contradictions underpinning it, set the tone for many months of calls and meetings, during which O’Neill expanded at great length on his views but remained wary of my reasons for seeking them. “It’s not so much that the media are complicit necessarily,” he explained to me during our first telephone conversation, which lasted two and a half hours. “The media are the conspiracy.”
***
O’Neill can trace his Manchester footballing roots back to his grandparents, who lived and met each other in the Old Trafford neighbourhood, where United’s ground is located. His father’s teaching job took the family to the Solomon Islands when he was a child. On his return, the club became an all-consuming passion. In the years that followed, O’Neill funded his match tickets by selling copies of Red Issue outside the ground.
By the turn of the millennium, when O’Neill was in his early 20s, he was serving as a regular Red Issue contributor. Eventually he was offered the editorship. He accepted partly to escape the drudgery of a job testing concrete on building sites, but also because Red Issue’s cynical outlook chimed with his own. And in the early 2000s there was plenty to be cynical about. O’Neill’s book, “Red Rebels”, charts the club’s relentless transformation during this period from a communal institution, rooted in the city, into a globalised business whose most prized “customers” were tv spectators and merchandise buyers in far-flung corners of the world. Traditional fans felt increasingly disconnected and priced out of the game. This trend reached its apogee in 2005 when Malcolm Glazer, an American sports tycoon, bought Manchester United using loans secured against the club’s own assets. Many supporters saw the transaction as a terminal defeat in the battle for football’s soul. O’Neill and Red Issue helped lead an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the takeover, and a subsequent move to form a breakaway club, fc United of Manchester, which promised to prioritise social solidarity over commercialism.
“We can both agree that the king is not a blood-drinking, shape-shifting, reptilian humanoid. And in this contentious age, that’s something”
Over the following decade O’Neill grew disillusioned. He publicly accused some of fc United’s leading lights of selling out its original principles, and in 2015 he was expelled from the club he’d created. It was the second time he’d been severed from the football team he loved, as a result of what he saw as the greed and self-interest of a privileged few.
O’Neill doesn’t like to talk about himself. During our many conversations, he nearly always deflected personal questions, insisting that they weren’t relevant to the matter at hand. “People always want a backstory,” he complained to me. “Ultimately, if I’ve got something to say, it stands and falls on its own merits, not on who I am or what I’ve done.” The closest he came to opening up emotionally was when I asked about fc United. “I was a pariah, my name was mud,” he recalled quietly. “I was a conspiracy theorist, supposedly, driven by jealousy and bitterness. And what transpired? All of that cost me months and months of torment, of acrimony and animosity. But it doesn’t bother me. Because if something’s right, it’s right.”
O’Neill’s journey into covid denialism didn’t occur in a sudden flash of realisation. It was more akin to a stumble through the fog. “Everything breaks down a little bit, because you don’t know the answers,” he said, describing the gap between the government’s narrative and the elements of the coronavirus crisis that didn’t seem to fit. So he cast about for an alternative guide that could help him make sense of this strange terrain. “There was never a single moment where I thought, ‘I really need to start looking into this,’” O’Neill told me. “You’re just immersed in it anyway because that’s life now. Suddenly it’s lockdown, and there’s fuck all else going on.”
This slow-burn inquiry evolved on the @RedIssue Twitter feed over many months before its decisive turn towards conspiracism. During the early weeks of the pandemic, O’Neill cast the Tory government as useless and uncaring, more concerned with saving the economy than saving lives.
For centuries, outsiders – from the Irish to the Chinese, communists to capitalists, Christians to Muslims and, almost always, Jews – have faced accusations of conspiracy
But the hospitalisation of Johnson with covid in April 2020, only a few weeks after the prime minister had cheerfully glad-handed covid patients, puzzled O’Neill, even if he couldn’t quite put his finger on what was happening. Johnson’s initial indifference to the disease, followed by the dramatic revelation that he was one of its most famous sufferers, didn’t feel plausible. Neither did the mounting death toll in America and Britain, two of the richest countries on Earth and supposedly among those best prepared for a pandemic.
As spring gave way to summer, O’Neill’s attitude continued to shift: the government’s floundering pandemic policy increasingly appeared not just hapless, but nefarious. “The corruption under this cabal is as blatant and shameless as in any Banana Republic,” he tweeted in May 2020. When Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, was discovered to have breached lockdown rules by driving his family across country from London to Durham, O’Neill posted a mocked-up nhs public-information advert depicting Cummings loading holiday gear into a car, alongside the line, “Controlling the virus means keeping you in your place while we do whatever the fuck we like.”
A new map was beginning to materialise, patched together from increasingly esoteric sources. O’Neill began spending time on a website called OffGuardian that has published a number of sceptical articles about covid (it is rated as a “strong conspiracy” and “strong pseudoscience” website by one fact-checking outlet). Some of the claims O’Neill encountered there initially struck him as unconvincing. “When I first read it, I thought…” he trailed off, shaking his head doubtfully. “But eventually you get over that, because if you know something’s wrong, you know something’s wrong.” Hyperlinks ferried him into other corners of the internet, from Facebook groups to Telegram channels, where people shared rumours, promoted dissident scientists and charted disturbing links between members of government, the medical establishment and big companies.
Nobody ever presented O’Neill with a perfectly formed conspiracy theory. Nobody suggested that he take conspiratorial claims at face value, without doing his own research. “You’ve got to verify what you’re hearing to the nth degree, because you’re going to be questioned,” he said. His inquiry was frenetic, and the energy with which he pursued it appeared to clear the fog. His work, he insists, requires a competent understanding of economics, marketing, psychology, statistics and constitutional law, as well as epidemiology. He spends inordinate time researching. And it has led him to conclude that the pandemic is part of something much bigger. “Covid is just one branch of the wider agenda,” he explained. “This is just the beginning.”
***
It would take a book to sketch all of O’Neill’s beliefs about the pandemic. At various times he has argued that the effects of the coronavirus have been heavily exaggerated, or that it may be just another strain of flu, or possibly an outright hoax. He believes that covid tests are unsound, that cases and deaths have been overcounted and that asymptomatic transmission is impossible. But the purported motivation behind this grand deception is more significant than any of the details.
O’Neill’s ideas are part of a family of conspiracy theories known as the “Great Reset”. Followers believe that global elites are using coronavirus to engineer a power grab, and that the pandemic is a monstrous charade designed to terrify ordinary people into submission. The World Economic Forum (wef), an ngo best known for its annual shindig of business and political leaders in Davos in Switzerland, is said to be behind the plot. In the summer of 2020 the wef announced it was launching a “Great Reset” to guide the world’s recovery from covid and drawing up a “new social contract” with the help of stakeholders and supporters like Prince (now King) Charles, Al Gore and some of the world’s biggest companies. As far as O’Neill is concerned, the Great Reset is really a plot to deprive people of their basic liberties and enslave them to the titans of big tech.
“Then you begin to read, and follow the links, and check the sources, and you start to see it. You start to see that something’s wrong”
As the Great Reset theory has spread, it has fused with the pre-existing anti-vaccination movement. The common bogeyman in these two subcultures is Bill Gates – founder of Microsoft, global philanthropist, covid-vaccine funder and wef partner. “Gates is at the centre of everything that’s going on,” said O’Neill, who sent me details of the many different spheres in which Gates, often through his charitable foundation, exercises influence, from the pharmaceutical industry to international media. “From the start of the pandemic, he was popping up everywhere. Why? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that you can’t ask that legitimate question without being branded a conspiracy theorist.”
Unsurprisingly, O’Neill does not consider himself to be a conspiracy theorist. Even academics who have devoted their careers to studying conspiracy culture disagree on the definition of the term. By some measures, virtually every adult in America could be classed as a conspiracist, and there is a consensus among scholars that being a conspiracy theorist does not necessarily mean that one’s theories are false. Nonetheless, the term has become so loaded that no one wishes to be associated with it.
Many contemporary conspiracy theories draw on a loose master narrative containing a handful of core ideas and symbols – in this case, the spectre of Gates and the idea that covid serves as cover for an elite takeover. This narrative replicates through countless small mutations, not unlike a virus itself, with variants adapting, surviving and thriving in different cultural environments. Read about the Great Reset theory in America, where medicine is largely privatised, and you’ll find a strong focus on the evils of the drug industry. In sub-Saharan Africa, suspicions are directed towards the charitable foundations that are often involved in delivering health care.
Modern conspiracy theories place an emphasis on bricolage and amateur inquiry, an approach well-suited to our times. Adherents believe the internet is littered with breadcrumbs that will ultimately lead to the truth. This gamification of everyday life is seductive, offering an individual both the thrill of the chase and a noble sense of collective endeavour. The diffuse nature of the new conspiracism also fortifies it against refutation. No single piece of evidence is sacrosanct, allowing believers an easy concession when challenged on any particular point.
“You’ve got to verify what you’re hearing to the nth degree, because you’re going to be questioned”
O’Neill and I have discussed his opinions on covid at length. The process has been fascinating for me and maddening for us both. O’Neill would dismiss any confounding evidence from experts on the ground that he didn’t consider those sources to be trustworthy. Whenever I probed a troubling detail, he would either overwhelm me with further links and articles, or slide seamlessly to another topic. He would sometimes trail off in the middle of responding to my inquiries about how exactly a particular dataset “proved” there had been no excess mortalities during the pandemic, or whether vaccine scientists were linked to eugenicists. I detected in those silences a frustration that I just couldn’t see the bigger picture. “You’re not going to get a single smoking gun,” he insisted, on more than one occasion.
O’Neill WhatsApped me at all hours of the day: transcripts of a German parliamentary inquiry at 5am; news stories at tea time about Belgian face masks containing toxic particles. There were Wikipedia pages on decades-old scientific experiments, cross-referenced LinkedIn accounts, newspaper collages with recurring keywords underlined and memes mocking the medical consensus. One evening, in the hour before midnight, I received more than 30 messages: their subjects included the Fabian Society, Israeli covid-case numbers, the family of Aldous Huxley, the Bilderberg Group and a cold-war-era study into the psychological coercion of prisoners.
I tried to follow up as much of this as possible. Sometimes, the messages led me to information that was indeed disturbing, such as the police’s heavy-handedness towards those breaking lockdown. More often, I found the supposed revelation unconvincing – for example, O’Neill thought that it was highly significant that Stanley Johnson, the former prime minister’s father, had given an interview years ago in which he advocated population control. “Ultimately, if something fundamentally stinks about everything that’s going on, then you know it instinctively – you can feel it,” O’Neill insisted. It struck me that this outlook, more than all the archival references and dense, intricate Twitter threads, animated his theories.
In late March, O’Neill forwarded me a widely circulated video of the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. It had been overlaid with a commentary identifying examples of “predictive programming” that, when decoded, revealed the establishment’s plan to conjure up a fake pandemic almost a decade later. “Even if you ignore all the rest, watch that,” he insisted. I asked if it was a joke. “I guess you can look at it any way you want,” O’Neill responded. It felt like the text equivalent of a shrug.
***
The most commonly identified culprit for the spread of conspiracy theories is social media. By devolving the production of information while centralising its circulation, runs the argument, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have made the spread of disinformation frictionless and cost-free. These tools allow dispersed individuals whose beliefs are likely to put them in a minority to discover one another, coalesce and amplify each other’s voices. The feeds that have become many people’s main window onto the world are curated by unfathomable algorithms. These separate us into streams of media consumption, into each of which is funnelled ever-more extreme content, reinforcing prejudices.
There is a commercial imperative behind algorithms that send users down rabbit holes of increasingly extreme content. Harvesting data to sell targeted advertising requires users of social media to keep clicking, liking and sharing. The best way to keep them engaged is by encouraging them to delve ever deeper into a topic.
To date, two approaches have been adopted to counter online disinformation: calling it out (in other words, adding labels to misleading content or debunking it) and censorship. Both approaches rely on someone, somewhere, deciding what counts as disinformation. A vast number of professional fact-checking outlets have grown prominent during the pandemic; the so-called “truth industry” now encompasses more than 300 organisations, a six-fold rise since 2014. Some are registered charities or research institutes, but a growing number are for-profit companies, most of which are financially dependent on partnerships with large publishers or platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
These relationships throw up new concerns. Third-party fact-checkers can flag specific posts as incorrect or misleading, but they can’t force their clients to do anything about them. The platforms may choose to remove the information in question, add a warning to it, limit its circulation or sit on their hands – but the reasons behind their decisions usually remain shrouded in commercial secrecy. That has led some campaigners to argue that fact-checking will never effectively stem the tide, and that tech companies ought to eject conspiracist voices and increase the number of content moderators.
It is tempting to conclude that the problem of disinformation can be resolved with a few technical tweaks. Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley moguls, whose extraordinary wealth and persistent efforts to evade democratic oversight elicit little sympathy, make for ideal villains. Yet this view rests on the assumption that there is a fixed body of knowledge against which social-media posts can be measured. This may be the case on some topics, but ideas are often partial and contested, forever subject to reinterpretation and change.
“I do know that you can’t ask that legitimate question without being branded a conspiracy theorist”
This is particularly true in the case of hitherto unknown phenomena such as the novel coronavirus, where excessive certainty can lead to embarrassment. For example, in February 2021 Facebook announced that it would remove any posts on its platform suggesting that coronavirus was made in a laboratory, after discussions with the who and the appearance of a letter in the Lancet, a medical journal, signed by 27 scientists who condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. In May 2021 Facebook reversed that decision “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of covid-19”, which included a review by American intelligence services into the lab-leak theory. Around the same time, PolitiFact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-check outfit, quietly archived an article that had rated the claim that the coronavirus was created in a lab as “pants-on-fire!” – the organisation’s most serious category of untruth.
Soon after the about-turn, O’Neill sent me an article from a blog called “In This Together”’, which argued that fact-checkers are “no better informed than anyone else [and] are being used by the internet giants, at the behest of government, to censor what we can say online”. This cuts to the heart of the problem with allowing private companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to serve as the ultimate moderators of public debate. Some think that they give oxygen to conspiracy theories. Conspiracists believe that they are at the heart of the plot.
***
On April 18th 2021, as Manchester United kicked off a Premier League home game against Burnley, news broke that six of the country’s biggest clubs – United among them – were going to form a breakaway competition to replace the Champions League. Along with a handful of other footballing giants on the continent, they intended to form a European “Super League” from which other clubs would be permanently excluded. (Andrea Agnelli, a member of the family which has a major shareholding in The Economist, was one of the prime movers behind the new league.) The plans, hatched in secret, triggered an instant and devastating backlash. Within 48 hours, condemnation from fans, broadcasters, players and government ministers had torn the Super League project to pieces.
In the days that followed, O’Neill used the @RedIssue Twitter account to live-blog a series of demonstrations, one of which succeeded in forcing the abandonment of the weekend’s marquee fixture, a clash between United and Liverpool, another would-be Super League member. “Revolution is impossible until it becomes inevitable,” he posted in the lead-up to the game.
“You’re not going to get a single smoking gun”
The controversy energised O’Neill. After months of online mockery for his covid theories, the international media were now speaking his language, using terms like “betrayal”, “cabal” and even “conspiracy”. He seemed both delighted at the widespread backlash against unaccountable elites, and frustrated that more people weren’t making the leap from the Super League scheme to what he saw as the bigger conspiracy behind the pandemic. He went on to write a thread of almost 100 tweets that delved into the financial connections of individuals associated with the Super League and attempted to link them back to the wef. He implored his readers to see that the “lockdown psyop” was part of the same machinations.
I don’t believe in the existence of a lockdown psyop. Nor do I think that the wef had any hand in the Super League. But in many ways O’Neill was right. This stitch-up was a textbook example of a conspiracy: a small group of powerful people colluding in secret in the hope of private gain at the expense of the public. Significantly, it was only made possible because of a system that incentivised and facilitated this behaviour. Since its creation in 1992, the Premier League has offered reputation-laundering opportunities to global oligarchs and despotic Gulf states, and concentrated the bulk of the sport’s income in the hands of a few leading clubs; match-going fans have become a relative afterthought. In its dizzying inequalities and fealty to market forces, the Premier League’s rise reflected a wider transformation of politics that has enriched many and left others feeling dispossessed. The European Super League proposals turned out to be a step too far, even for elite-level football, but they emerged out of structural conditions that, while perfectly legal, have felt fairly conspiratorial to those not benefiting from the status quo.
Look around and you can see similar conspiracies everywhere: from banks fixing interest rates on a grand scale during the Libor scandal to carmakers tampering with the emissions tests on their vehicles. Every time one of these scandals breaks, ordinary people are reminded that they too are probably being screwed over all the time.
This story is written across Manchester’s skyline, where in recent years a forest of high-end residential towers has soared even as the percentage of homeless people climbed to among the highest in the country. You can read it in the ruins of large housing estates that have been demolished in the name of regeneration, to be replaced predominantly by unaffordable buy-to-let flats. And it’s there too in the outlying towns of Greater Manchester – Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale – where levels of deprivation far exceed the national average, and years of austerity have bitten hard.
During the boom years, politicians of different stripes offered little justification to the people who experienced dispossession rather than progress. “Settled, stable communities are the enemies of innovation, talent, creativity, diversity and experimentation,” declared Charles Leadbeater, a Labour adviser in the early 2000s; in 2005 Boris Johnson insisted that allowing the sale of Manchester United to the Glazers was “basic Conservative philosophy”. The overriding message was that money is rootless and you should be too. When this mystifying system came crashing down in 2008, few political leaders could offer a story that explained what had gone wrong, or why those responsible for the crisis were able to continue enriching themselves while ordinary people were left to pick up the tab.
O’Neill has long attempted to unravel those mysteries. He has focused his attention on the areas where the workings of power are genuinely opaque: influential think-tanks, financial institutions and the revolving door between politics and big business. In these contexts, the language of structural critique can stray perilously close to the conspiratorial. In his book, O’Neill connects the “betrayal” of Manchester’s heritage with the “grubby financial deals” struck between the city council and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, which now owns United’s crosstown rivals Manchester City. At the height of the Super League debacle, he shared a post by Jonathan Silver, a reputable geographer at the University of Sheffield, arguing that “Cities such as Manchester are being asset stripped and hollowed out by financialised capitalism.” Whether you agree with the analysis or not, you can’t dismiss it as conspiratorial. A whole generation of “insurgent” politicians and media outlets, most successfully exemplified by Donald Trump and Fox News in America, has drawn on these feelings of alienation to make money and win elections. The idea that such a message can be successfully counteracted by a handful of Facebook algorithm tweaks is fanciful.
Studies have repeatedly shown a correlation between conspiratorial beliefs, doubts about the functioning of democracy and perceptions of powerlessness. In a large-scale poll carried out in 2018 by the University of Cambridge and YouGov, nearly half of the respondents agreed with the statement, “Even though we live in what’s called a democracy, a few people will always run things in this country anyway.” More recent research from Cambridge has concluded that dissatisfaction with democracy is at the highest level since records began.
O’Neill genuinely believes that he is serving mankind by raising the alarm about the Great Reset, and is pained when the people he strives to enlighten choose to mock him. On the relatively rare occasions that he receives an enthusiastic response to a Twitter post, his delight is palpable. “Bravo,” wrote one respondent in July 2021, commending him on his work. O’Neill replied with an emoji of a smiley face wearing sunglasses. “Knowing that not everyone in the world is a sheep or a shill sometimes makes it all worthwhile,” he wrote.
***
On March 20th 2021, almost a year to the day after Britain’s first covid lockdown came into force, thousands of anti-lockdown protesters mustered in central London. Coronavirus restrictions prohibiting mass gatherings remained in force, so the demonstration was organised on Telegram channels with names like “The Great Reopening”, “Protest Everywhere” and “We Are the Cure”. People approached Hyde Park in small gaggles under the watchful eyes of the police – checking their phones with exaggerated insouciance and exchanging significant glances.
It was one of the most diverse groups of protesters I have ever encountered, from grizzled punks with dyed mohicans to bougie mums and teenage boys on bmxs, who performed wheelies down Park Lane and goaded each other into slaloming through lines of police vehicles. “We will not obey!” yelled a well-dressed woman suddenly, breaking the uneasy silence, and she was met with an eruption of whoops and cheers. Smoke flares billowed into the sky and the crowd coalesced, surging towards Hyde Park Corner and then turning east down Oxford Street. Signs were held aloft depicting Bill Gates with devil horns, condemning the “Flu World Order”, and featuring slogans like “Yes sex is great, but have you been fucked by the government?” Someone shot past me on a Segway, broadcasting the scene and providing a running commentary on Facebook Live.
“Knowing that not everyone in the world is a sheep or a shill sometimes makes it all worthwhile”
By the time I caught up with O’Neill, who had travelled down from Manchester for the occasion, the demonstrators had been marching for two miles. I thought he’d be excited at the considerable turnout, but when I mentioned it he looked downcast. “I marched here against the Iraq war,” he said wistfully. “Where’s that million now?” I felt I was getting a momentary insight into the toll taken by the paradoxical requirements of conspiracy theorising: the zealous persuasion of others, and the simultaneous conviction that those in the know will inevitably be crushed by the gargantuan powers arrayed against them.
O’Neill’s disappointment, I could see in that moment, extended to me. He knew that I had come along to the protest as a reporter rather than as a participant, and he was vexed that, despite our long, convoluted debates, we remained as far apart as ever. He felt that many of his concerns were justified, from his fears that the crisis would be used as an opportunity to clamp down on public protest to his prediction that covid passports would be instituted. In the months that followed, it emerged that those who set the extraordinary lockdown rules were indeed breaking them routinely, and laughing about it along the way.
We agreed on one thing: that the social inequalities which had been aggravated by coronavirus reflected a deeper malaise. But whereas I talked of structural injustices, he referenced smoke-filled rooms in the Swiss Alps. On several occasions, O’Neill had insisted to me that the terminology was irrelevant. “You can call it capitalism, or whatever, and someone else can call it lizard people, but it doesn’t really matter because we’re talking about the same forces,” he said.
But the names we give to problems matter, because they determine how we address them. The malaise behind the new conspiracism is political, and politics is required to overcome it – not more fact-checks, not tweaks to the Facebook algorithm and not a simulacrum of political struggle that leans on the exposure of psyops and welcomes the far-right into its ranks (fascist flags were visible at the rally).
At the end of July 2021, O’Neill unexpectedly announced he was closing down the @RedIssue Twitter feed. “It’s been emotional. Goodnight, and good luck,” he declared, quoting Edward Murrow, the American broadcaster who challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt. Most of the replies were scornful: “About time”; “You won’t be missed”; “Good riddance”. When I asked O’Neill why he was quitting, he sounded spent, as though all the detective work and proselytising, which once enthused him, had finally worn him out. His final tweet simply consisted of a link to “The End”, a song by the Doors, a countercultural Sixties rock band.
“This is the end, my only friend, the end of our elaborate plans, the end of everything that stands,” declares Jim Morrison on the track, his voice both wistful and furious. “It hurts to set you free, but you’ll never follow me.”
