The Manufacture of Great Lies

18 October, World Nutrition Summit 2025, Cape Town, South Africa

Propaganda is the systematic dissemination of information designed to shape public perception toward a specific goal or agenda. Such information is typically false or designed to misdirect, and a key sign of it being false is that dissenting narratives are suppressed. Throughout history, governments and industries have used propaganda to create and defend large-scale false narratives. This is an utterly unremarkable thing to say. No historian on the planet would contest it.

The pattern is that of a latent agenda driving the generation of false propaganda, seeking to culminate in the distillation of an ideology. Once the ideology is firmly rooted in the public imagination, the latent agenda can become patent, meaning it can be implemented in the broad light of day without material objection.

This framework has close historical analogues. The Hegelian Dialectic, the favourite of Marxists, talks about thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The so-called PRS model talks about problem-reaction-solution.

Before the distillation of an ideology is achieved, the false narrative must be protected from dissent by way of censorship. Those who try to expose the latent agenda are derided as “conspiracy theorists” or “deniers” of a purported problem. During the covid phenomenon, I framed this as a law dubbed Hudson’s Razor, stating that anything that is (1) presented as a global crisis (2) admitting only global solutions (3) amid suppression of dissent, is definitively a scam.

This is of course not to say that there can never be any such thing as a global crisis. If a volcano bigger than Krakatoa blew its top, we’d all know about it for years. But global solutions would be very unlikely. People in one place might prioritise buying blankets; in another, building greenhouses. And suppression of dissenters would be completely pointless. We wouldn’t need to call a blind man who couldn’t see the ash cloud a volcano-denier, or censor anyone who said the ash actually came from a different source. People would just get on with the job of dealing with less sunlight in multiple different ways.

It is difficult to fake a physical crisis with a tangible, visible threat. Telling people a volcano had gone boom when it hadn’t wouldn’t work if you lacked the capacity to fake an enormous ash cloud. So the default pattern is to pretend there is an invisible threat that is a global crisis. The global solution can then be a form of “safety” whose efficacy exists only in a theory or in a model, and the suppression of dissent can include the customary allegation that all skeptics are “deniers” of the invisible threat. If the fear generation is implemented properly, nothing about the solution needs to make any sense. People will clamour for it.

In this talk I’m going to analyse three examples of current propagandized narratives that follow precisely this pattern. I’ll start with the giant scam at the heart of public health dietary guidelines, then explain the parallels with two others.

I’ll conclude by explaining why I think this problem—the existence of such scams—is the only real problem the world collectively faces and talk about what we can do about it.

In the 1950s an oceanographer and physiologist named Ancel Keys formulated the simple hypothesis that dietary saturated fat caused high blood cholesterol, which caused clogging of the arteries and therefore heart disease. The 1970s saw a proposal to use a class of compounds called statins to reduce cholesterol production by the body, and in the 1990s a study sponsored by the pharmaceutical giant, Merck, purported to show that its brand of statin reduced heart disease. Merck went on to make billions marketing the drug. Other companies followed suit, making statins the first trillion-dollar drug in history.

Though Ancel Keys’ seminal Seven Countries paper was a risible fraud, it was cited hundreds of times, spawning thousands of journal articles, several hundred studies and hundreds of books. Similarly, the 4S statins study spawned tens of thousands of journal articles and thousands of studies. The World Health Organisation adopted the saturated fat hypothesis in its 1989 dietary guidelines. It proceeded to add statins to its Essential Medicines List in 2006, meaning that they became part of the minimum requirements for every country’s healthcare system. Funding for all this work came mainly from the polyunsaturated fat and sugar industries, and of course, from pharmaceutical companies.

Dissenting with this problem-solution set—cholesterol-statins—was a dangerous business. Suppression of dissent started early on. As far back as 1957, Jonathan Yudkin had proposed that sugar was a public health hazard. He was taken seriously at first, but Ancel Keys launched a public program of personal attack against him, and by the time Yudkin retired in 1971, he had been thoroughly marginalized and derided. Subsequent critics, such as our very own Professor Tim Noakes, and Drs Demasi, Kendrick and Harcombe, who will be known to most of you, have sustained high-profile attacks, as have many others.

Let’s turn to how things look through our two lenses.

1. Dietary saturated fat was entrenched as a global problem by the 1989 WHO guidelines

2. Statins entrenched as the global solution by the 2006 WHO Essential Medicines list.

3. There’s a clear pattern of vicious suppression of dissent from the 1950s until the present day.

Our criteria confirm the diagnosis of a scam.

1. The latent agenda was clear--profit from drug, sugar and polyunsaturated fat sales.

2. Propaganda came through funding of studies and institutional capture by these industries in the 1950s to 1980s.

3. Ideology can be seen to have become firmly established with the 1989 WHO dietary guidelines.

4. And then the real agenda became patent as statins were launched in the 1990s on an unsuspecting public, generating a trillion dollars, and dietary guidelines benefited sugar and polyunsaturated fat sales to the tune of many billions.

So both analyses—the agenda-propaganda-ideology lens and the global crisis, global solution, dissent suppression lens—absolutely scream “scam”.

I turn now to the covid phenomenon. In early 2020, noting that media hysteria bore no relationship to facts on the ground, I co-founded PANDA, an organization established to challenge the premises of massively destructive lockdowns. Members of my actuarial professional bodies were quick to accuse me of misinformation, and I was subjected to two four-year investigations by my actuarial professional bodies in South Africa and the UK. After exhaustive scrutiny and expensive legal process, not one claim of misinformation could be found to stick. The South African case disappeared without a whimper, but in the UK I was eventually tried by a kangaroo court of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, which found me guilty, not of misinformation, but of offensive speech, in that I had called South Africa’s version of Dr Anthony Fauci a “bigoted nutjob”. This was despite the fact that he himself had neither complained nor responded to our three-part article series laying out the corruption of his actions over the years.

The failure by both bodies to identify a single act of misinformation was quite a crushing indictment of the covid narrative, because I had spent four years making some pretty big claims. I’ve explained elsewhere in great detail not only that every aspect of the covid phenomenon was a scam, but how those scams were pulled off. Those interested in some of that detail can view my 2023 presentation to the Actuarial Society of South Africa, which has not been refuted. In summary, what I claimed was that there was no risk-additive virus in circulation in 2020. There were no “covid tests” that could be used to diagnose any properly characterized disease, and there were no deaths from covid—only deaths from harmful changes to protocols for treatment of normal respiratory illnesses. I claimed that cloth masks, lockdowns, social distancing and the mRNA “vaccines” were all junk science, and that the entire narrative of a novel deadly virus was complete hogwash. If none of the arguments I made in the process of explaining this could be found to be misinformation during the course of two heavily resourced four-year investigations, then you are obliged to take me seriously on these claims.

Okay. Let’s look at the covid phenomenon through our two lenses:

1. A global problem was asserted as an invisible “novel, deadly virus” by the WHO’s declaration of a global pandemic, necessitating lockdowns and other novel mandates. The legion of critics who predicted that the trajectory was heading straight for a mandate of an untested novel injection were labelled conspiracy theorists.

2. But as soon as the pandemic ideology had a firm grip on the public imagination, new and fraudulently trialled injections were indeed proposed as a global solution.

3. Suppression of dissent came by way of unprecedented, industrial-scale media and social media censorship, and by fabricated media articles written by intelligence community assets from 2020 to the present day.

Turning to the propaganda structure:

1. We have a latent agenda, of profit from “vaccine” sales and government control of human populations.

2. We have the largest propaganda event in history, with billions of dollars channelled into ailing media houses, conditional on promoting the covid narrative, into censorship organisations such as “fact checkers” and the Trusted News Initiative, and into creepy behavioural science nudge units.

3. An ideology formed very rapidly, with the notion of a pandemic of a novel deadly virus firmly entrenched within a year.

4. And then the latent agenda that just a few months before had been called a conspiracy theory became a patent agenda. People all over the world lined up to role up their sleeves for what was essentially toxic snake oil.

So we again have all the elements of a scam.

It’s interesting that nothing about the vaccine mandate as a solution made sense. At the same time that people were being told that the shots were “safe and effective”, so that if they took one they would be safe from dying or ending up in hospital, they were being told that “nobody is safe until everybody is safe”. But the staggering contradiction between those two assertions is the kind of thing that a population bombarded with fear-laden propaganda and hypnotised into believing they faced a deadly threat is completely unable to register. Meanwhile, there was nothing for the vaccines to be effective against, and they weren’t at all safe. They caused and continue to cause prodigious harms.

The climate narrative is equally full of contradictions. Relative to the saturated fat and covid scams, it is quite a complicated one. It embeds several narratives, each one of which must be believed, if one is to swallow the broad narrative:

1. That climate change is a new problem we all face.

2. That its dominant cause is carbon dioxide.

3. That carbon dioxide levels are changing because of human emissions.

4. That the climate change that is occurring presents an existential risk.

5. That there is no less destructive solution than cutting hydrocarbon use at all costs, because it is impossible to learn how to live with the expected climate change.

The reality is that climate change has always been occurring; that man makes minimal global contribution to it; that carbon dioxide levels are a consequence of temperature change, not a cause of it; and that we are actually living in a dangerously cold period when warming would make life and agriculture much easier in most places. So, while all five of these elements need to be true in order for the climate change hypothesis to be valid, not one actually is.

But we are told that climate change is a global crisis and that the global solution is net zero policies, and hundreds of dissenting climate scientists, once regarded as leaders of their fields, have seen their careers destroyed, even as leading climate alarmists are seen to build lavish seaside mansions, demonstrating their lack of any real alarm about those rising sea levels.

If you believe that any one of these three purported crises is a scam, then you should believe that all of them are, because their structures are identical. All three propose an invisible threat. All three come with solutions that have serious downsides for humans. All three involve agendas that serve certain cronies, but not broader humanity. All three are associated with suppression of dissent. There is no threat called saturated fat, there is no threat called covid, and there is no threat called carbon dioxide, and we should all be shouting this from the rooftops, because these scams are part of a machinery of lies that threatens our freedoms and human flourishing altogether.

But let’s bring this back to earth. To focus only on these large-scale fakeries is to miss the crucial point that we wade through a much broader sea of lies. When the lady on the TV says that if you buy this shampoo your hair will look like hers, you know she’s lying. Indeed, in some languages, the word for propaganda is the same as the word for advertising. Brands are generally lies. When the politician says he is going to cut government debt, you know he’s lying. If a politician of any stripe is speaking, even if the truth, it will be in the service of a greater lie. And when control of mainstream media is so tightly held, everything you see, everything you hear and everything you feel is in service of the lie. Any salient narrative should be regarded with suspicion. With the advent of AI, fake videos are trivially created. And they’re often designed to provoke fear or rage, so are the ones more likely to be shared and seen. A small minority of scientific papers turn out to be reproducible, making journals a great lie. Through the citation process, lies build on lies, and entire disciplines end up being built on imaginary foundations. I imagine that most of you are here today because you discovered one of these baseless disciplines, be it diet

So what’s the right response? This is what I advise people to do:

• Abandon mainstream media entirely.

• Limit screen time. My friend Mike Driver, whom I channelled several times in this talk, calls these the glass vampires. They suck out your soul if you’re not careful.

• Think in local terms. Trust your eyes and ears in real life, but not in digital space.

• Don’t take all your meetings on Zoom. Human contact is increasing in value.

• Take AI lightly. The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas, despite the predictability of similar inaccuracies in those. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It averages over human output, so remember when you use it, that the average of human thought can be deeply foolish. Instead of calling it artificial intelligence, we should call it real automation. As a technology it is not special and it is not going to bring forth the productivity enhancements people claim it will. But it has the potential to cause human critical thinking to deteriorate further. Avoid it.

• Above all, live your life in analogue. Attend to your family and to your close friends

In response to the great bankers’ project to draw all of humanity into a highly centralized feudal system serving the interests of a predatory elite, our best response is to withhold our attention. And our two best ways of doing that are by ignoring media, and by spending less on the goods and services of large firms. Just 10 or 20% less will bring them to their knees. Before you reach for that shelf, ask yourself who told you that the thing you are reaching for is a product that you need. I wish you well in your efforts to do so, and I look forward to engaging with you now. Thank you.