For the benefit of those living outside the UK, or who enviably avoid the news, Lucy Connolly is a British woman serving a 31-month prison sentence on account of a single and fleeting post on X. A mass stabbing incident had been reported earlier in the day at a dance studio for children in the seaside town of Southport, north of Liverpool, resulting in the deaths of three small girls and injuries to several others. Lucy was reacting at the time to what turned out to be a false report that the perpetrator was a Channel-crossing migrant.
Prevailing opinion is something along the lines of “what she tweeted was appalling but the sentence was an outrage”. There is rather more to it than that, though. In three parts, I examine how I believe she fell prey to state manipulation. I then look at the legal defence of which she was deprived as to make her imprisonment little more than a rubber-stamping exercise; and, finally, how your perennial fixation with a variety of culture wars, especially one with Muslims, proved to be Lucy’s undoing whilst paving the way for more of the same. (Hereafter, ‘X’ and ‘Twitter’ are interchangeable, as are ‘(re)post’ and ‘(re)tweet’).
At the outset, a popular misunderstanding needs clearing up, one which Piers Morgan has unhelpfully perpetuated in a recent post. Lucy was not charged with “incitement” - what is now known as “encouraging or assisting a crime” - as many a commenter seem to think, but instead with a Public Order offence of “stirring up racial hatred”. The legal test for the latter offence is completely different as I will come to in Part II.
Lucy would have been one of those accounts in my outer orbit, popping up in my feed more and more in recent years. I can’t claim to have paid close attention to her tweets but my approximation of her was, in the mold of many others well promoted X, banter-loving; bawdy humour aplenty; lots of swearing; generous use of emojis; occasional purveyor of bare legs pics who likes a tipple and staunchly on, what would be termed, the ‘right’, often seen giving Labour a good kicking.
I can only recall one interaction with her. She’d tweeted that she was in favour of indiscriminate stop & search of teenagers which I assume raised my hackles a bit. I replied accordingly. It’s fair to say, we’d have been politically far removed from one another but, such is the anarchist in me, that this is almost always the case. It just so happened that, during that whole surreal episode that was lockdown, we tended to form loose associations with one another in way we might not otherwise have done. Some materialised into enduring friendships. For others, it proved to be but a temporary coalition that has long since dissolved, often not on the best of terms. On one hand, you have your born-again truthers and on the other, those that have largely repatriated to Normieland. I find myself negotiating between the two camps depending on the subject; and so it proves in the case of Lucy where there is a small contingent of observers adamant she’s not really in prison and that it’s all been one big pro-censorship psy-op.
That there has been a psy-op, we can be in no doubt. What matters is whether those featuring therein are accomplices or pawns which is to say, unwitting participants. As for Lucy, I am satisfied it’s the latter, that she is very much real and in prison and not in any sense a crisis actor. Moreover, that she is known personally to several accounts on X, that they have met her and are pictured with her in some cases. What I did find admittedly odd, at the time, was the husband’s brief comments to reporters outside the court building which I can only describe as limp and unconvincing. It was as if he was talking about someone he didn’t really know but it was pointed out to me that this may just be indicative of a disconnected marriage or that he was still in shock, which is reasonable. Much of what we are shown is theatre, no argument there, but within lie strands of truth an fiction that need to be disentangled. The risk of wrongly discarding this woman out of hand, on the strength of nothing but conjecture, is not something I can countenance, personally - and so I proceed on that basis.
Beginning in late 2022, following Musk’s takeover of the platform, I noticed my X feed being populated more and more, indeed flooded at times, with what is popularly known as race-bating content - incendiary, algorithm-driven clips depicting asylum seekers, or just minorities generally, engaged in violence or otherwise offensive behaviour, all unsolicited. RadioGenoa in particular was (and still is) pumping out a slew of videos of this kind: violent assaults, sexual assaults of young women, theft, obscene or lewd acts and so on, invariably undated and seemingly recycled in some cases from years prior. Concerned Citizen was another and various others have since spawned. In the name of cheap clicks, reposting these videos, with provocative captions, were the likes of Ian Miles Cheong, David Vance, David Atherton, Leilani Dowding and a number of smaller accounts. To some of us, it was obvious this was to be a precursor to an eventual “far-right” crackdown, a convenient pretext for ushering in “anti-radicalisation” measures - censorship, in other words; all with the generous assistance of the named accounts, knowingly or otherwise.
Atherton’s timeline caters really only to those with a bona fide fetish for the impending Islamification of the whole world. Leilani’s makes for an eclectic mix. A large amount of culture wars grift i.e. aforesaid repostings, plus poking fun at burqas, rainbow flags, fat people and so on, much of it very ragey too; but interspersed with perfectly inoffensive stuff, be it yoga poses, farming content, mucking out the stables, or reliving her Nuts magazine days. It’s quite the niche she’s carved out for herself. Countryside milf with trans-bashing thrown in, all for the same unbeatable price - a winning formula, from what I’ve seen.
The common thread among all of these accounts, and the majority of their followers, is their apparent fondness for self-styled political activist, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, stage name: “Tommy Robinson”. This is more than a side note. It’s a hallmark of gullibility. By that, I mean a fixation with a manufactured culture war against Muslims that played right into the hands of those who were able to bait Lucy into reacting as she did with consummate ease. I’ll come back to ‘Tommeh’ in Part III though. I can already hear the cacophony of voices rushing to his defence. For now, all I wish to illustrate is, a roughly two-year long trajectory of progressively stoking tensions against asylum seekers, and inter-ethnic tensions generally, building to a crescendo following the Southport stabbings and culminating in a simple, low-budget but very effective false-flag event - a single post which lit the touchpaper for the ensuing riots.
Let me be clear, they knew what Lucy going to post before she’d conceived of it in her own mind; not that it would come from her account specifically but that a post very much like the one she made would come from a subset of X accounts of which she likely would have been one. All you have to do is prod - provide the necessary emotional stimulus and wait - and so they prodded. What chance do you think your average overexcitable mummy with an iPhone, stands against devious state-sanctioned manipulation?
Consider, I’m sitting at 77th Brigade HQ at Dennison Barracks, Thatcham, Berks., working in conjunction with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) a.k.a. The Nudge Unit and either running or directing an account on X called “Europe Invasion”. Using custom-built behavioural modelling software (which are they using), I run a simulation, putting out a post “confirming” that the person responsible for this thoroughly barbaric act of slaying three small girls only hours earlier, is a Muslim boat arrival. Let’s call him Mohammed bin Lyin Al-Fakeeh. Out of 24 million UK users on X, I can predict with impressive accuracy the type of enraged rhetoric that will appear in short order and, with the benefit of prior analytics, that it will originate from a watchlist of, say a few thousand accounts, and how much traction individual posts are likely to get depending on the source account. I’ll then select one from an account with a suitably large following, tag it as “racial hatred” and send it viral with aggressive reposting from an army of sock accounts. All done as part a specific exercise to generate online “hate speech”.
Note how they always use these very sterile names for their various impersonator entities which don’t ring true in the slightest: “Europe Invasion”, “Just Stop Oil”, “Insulate Britain”, “Extinction Rebellion”. Keep in mind, it needs to be unmistakeable what the organisation stands represents because mainstream media consumers are infantilised - spoon-fed “bitesized” chunks of information, more or less on the level of “look, bad person”.
There are other giveaways of 77’s handywork - the way it opens with “…confirmed to be Muslim”, as if this fictional attacker, having been apprehended, whipped out his religious identity card. No legitimate report would read that way. It was worded as such for only one purpose which is to support a charge of Islamophobia (“racial hatred”) against any arrested person cites the post as provocation. It sets a trap for a Public Order offence, and this becomes relevant in Lucy’s case because since she made no reference to race or religion in her deleted post.
Lucy reacted on that Monday evening last July, exactly as she (and tens of thousands of others) had been primed, covertly and over an extended period, to a point of compulsion. Some of you might struggle with this idea, labouring under the illusion that we enjoy free will. After all, being the master of your own destiny and similar platitudes are comforting. The reality is, our behaviour, on social media particularly, is at the behest of dopamine (reward) and cortisol (stress) driven impulses which manifest as chasing likes and validation or, as the case was, reacting with anger, aggression and distress. Anything relating to children being harmed provokes an especially visceral response with women tending to exhibit greater activation in regions of brain associated with empathy and emotional regulation such as the amygdala. All social media, reduced to its essence, is about hijacking cortisol and dopamine production to the nth degree. Part of ancient, primal pathways of the human brain that have been conserved over millions of years of evolution, these neurochemicals are deeply rooted in survival, reward and adaptation.
Without veering off into complex neuroscience, what’s fundamentally relevant here is how a platform like X promotes impulsive rather than considered behaviour through reduced engagement of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) - the most evolved region of the brain associated with planning, higher order reasoning and critical thinking, in favour of the reward centres: the striatum and the nucleus accumbens; and these effects are substantiated by neuroimaging (fMRI) studies. The same pattern is seen in substance abuse and gambling addiction. The result is social media bringing out often the very worst that our temperaments have to offer under conditions of stress. Very quickly you can see how this would be, is being, and has been, used to sinister effect through bot networks, fake accounts, algorithm manipulation, covert state actors, front organisations and cooperation with, or even coercion of, platform operators.
Having elicited precisely the reaction they wanted from their unsuspecting subject, Lucy was arrested and shoved into the next phase, public shaming - parading the poor woman across media outlets, juxtaposing the riots with screenshots of her deleted post (whilst of course omitting to mention she’d subsequently posted that violence is not the answer). The backlash on X was nothing if not predictable. Take David here, he of the FBPE clan, himself ideal fodder for behavioural programming. Do you think he has a considered and impartial perspective on the limits of free speech and, after careful deliberation, concluded that Lucy had strayed across the legal boundary? Not in this lifetime. It’s a tribal reflex. He hates what she represents politically and betrays his spite by wanting her life ruined.
With the baying mob frothing at the mouth, all clamouring for her punishment and branding her a “danger to society”, came the next act in this whole farce, fast-tracking Lucy into prison. Essentially, extracting a guilty plea out of her, complete with a grovelling mea culpa, all whilst she’s shaken, disoriented and, importantly, isolated. So we’re clear, ‘extracting’ does not mean overt duress but rather giving her the impression the alternative of defending the charge was a hopeless prospect, in spite of a coherent legal defence being available to her, the terms of which I will set out in Part II.