Peter York on the New World Order of conspiracy theories and culture wars

Things have been strange recently, haven’t they? Particularly during and just after the Pandemic. It was during the Pandemic that my friend – let’s call her Rachel – noticed her sister-in-law, a notable New Age veteran, soft leftie, keen on crystals, ‘wellness’, therapy of all kinds, with a side-order of anti-business and anti Big Pharma especially – started behaving strangely.

She was marching and shouting. She was visiting curious sites that told her that there was a plot to imprison the nation so that ‘they’ could take over. She believed that it was tied to vaccination and lockdowns and that it had all been planned for ages by a combination of Big Pharma and Big Money people.

She also believed that George Soros and Bill Gates were involved, because she’d read it online somewhere. Bill Gates apparently wanted to put minute chips in the vaccine that would report on people’s thoughts. She’d heard this from the local anti-vax group in a rather New Agey Devon town.

She also knew for sure – quoting a well-placed Australian friend – that they were hushing up the very high death rates from side effects of the Covid vaccination. Anthony Fauci, the American former Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States, somebody she’d only recently heard of, was behind the hushing up of the Pandemic’s Chinese origins. She’d heard from someone in her new marching and shouting milieu that he’d been very close to the Chinese.

She’s convinced that ‘mainstream media’ like the BBC and ITN are lying to her, and they’re all in on this. This makes family lunches very difficult indeed now that this woman is becoming obsessive, provoked by her ‘secret knowledge’. She’s taken against The Guardian, which she’d followed before and she’s started saying that Donald Trump was right after all.

And Rachel’s got trouble even nearer home, at home in fact where her son – who, like a fair few eighteen-year-old boys, has always lived mainly on-line, playing games that his parents don’t get – became even more isolated, practically never going out. The cheerful anarchy of his bedroom, cluttered with every kind of screen and keyboard, became and stayed weirdly tidy about a year ago. To her surprise Rachel decided she’d preferred it as it was.

He became starey-eyed about one theme, namely that girls had it in for teenage boys like him. They had taken over. They took boys up and dropped them and he knew he would never have a girlfriend now. The one hero he’d admit to was a Canadian professor called Jordan Petersen whose book 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos had inspired the tidying.

But there were others he visited on sites – new to her – called 4-Chan, and now 8-Chan, which she found very hard-going and had to talk to her husband about. And there was Andrew Tate who, so her son had told her, when he’d appeared on the old ‘family TV’, was being imprisoned in Romania on a trumped-up charge because he’d spoken up for men. Rachel wonders where she’s gone wrong.

Why write this book now? There are several key reasons. For a start, it’s a riveting subject, how the “Culture Wars” came uninvited to Rachel’s pleasant front door in middle-class West London. But the most important thing is that there’s more where that came from. Culture Warriors never give up. They want to take over the world and the new technologies that enable them to tell more plausible lies. As the New World Order becomes ironically more autocratic as a result of 2024 elections happening on nearly every continent, your family and your friends will be subject to an unprecedented amount of Culture Wars propaganda, as will the rest of the world.

This is an extract from A Dead Cat on your Table (Byline Books, £14.99) by Peter York with Illustrations by Martin Rowson. Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Peter York was our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” on Thursday 6 February at 6pm.

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