The Sunday Times has published a New Year's Day article about Piers Corbyn!
It comes after an action packed few months of campaigning for Piers and his supporters who are continuing their urgent challenge of the ruinous pandemic narrative.
Note that Piers wasn't contacted for permission or comment. It is interesting reading and contains anecdotes such as these:
Extract:
Last month, Piers Corbyn, the anti-vaccines campaigner and older brother of the former Labour leader, Jeremy, walked into London Bridge Tube station without a face covering and holding a sign that said “masks can’t stop viral transmission”.
For much of the pandemic, Transport for London (TfL) has barred those without masks from travelling. It has also issued fines and prosecuted thousands of people for non-payment. However, the staff did not react negatively to Corbyn’s presence.
One, standing outside his Covid-secure staff cabin, removed his mask and made a joke. Another, maskless and wearing his high-vis orange uniform, chased after Corbyn, 74, and asked for a selfie. “Of course!” said Corbyn, who posed for the photo then got on a packed train carriage to attend a rally in Westminster against plan B restrictions."
Extract:
Corbyn’s stunts and surname have granted him a degree of celebrity at a time when health leaders are desperate to encourage vaccinations. With numerous social media giants declining to close Corbyn’s accounts or remove footage of him, his message — that vaccines are dangerous — is no longer confined to the modest number of activists who attend his rallies in person but is instead broadcast to hundreds of thousands of people.
Extract:
The story starts in Shropshire in March 1947. Corbyn was born to middle-class left-wing parents who had met at an event in support of republicans during the Spanish Civil War. He grew up in Yew Tree Manor, a 17th-century country house in Pave Lane.
As a boy, he attended a small private school before enrolling at the local grammar. Unlike his younger brother, he excelled academically: in 1968, he graduated with a first-class degree in physics from Imperial College London.
He did, though, fit the family mould in entering anti-establishment politics: after completing his studies, the older Corbyn became president of Imperial’s student union. According to a history of the college, he engaged in a bizarre stunt when the Queen opened a new building there in 1969. With long hair, a beard and wearing a cravat, Corbyn asked the monarch, in front of 900 people, to grant students a great say in the college’s governance.
Extract:
Having left Labour over the Iraq War, he was banned from rejoining by the moderates then in control of the party machine and was mostly ignored by mainstream publications.
Social media instead became his home: he used Facebook and Twitter to express increasingly extreme attitudes on the climate, even posting an image of Greta Thunberg next to a Nazi swastika and characterising her as an “ignorant, brainwashed child”.
Extract:
Then the pandemic struck. The lockdown of March 2020 provided a perfect opportunity for Corbyn to reannounce himself to the public. His conspiracy theories rapidly metastasised: global elites were now using a hoax virus, rather than climate change, to control their populations.
For fellow conspiracy theorists, he became an easy figurehead with his instant name recognition and profile on the fringes on social media. His first apparent confrontation with police came in May, less than two months into lockdown, when he attended an illegal mass gathering protest in Hyde Park, central London.
Extract:
So far, the Metropolitan police had not sought to have him prosecuted, possibly because of a desire to avoid granting antivaxers attention or martyr status.
Some politicians have taken a similar approach. Last week, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, implored the public not to give the perpetrators of the raid at the Milton Keynes vaccine centre “the oxygen of publicity they crave by sharing the footage”.
The problem for policymakers is that Corbyn, with his family ties, and social media profile, already has oxygen.
Times subscribers can read the full article here!