The People’s Poet has prepared for this moment for twenty years. On television, he’s watched a mass depopulation programme by the NHS unfold, while on the internet, rumours warn that the New World Order is finally being implemented. Poet is protesting around Westminster, getting ready to fight back. “This is…war on a biblical level,” he told me. “…it’s time for action now.”
It was a Wednesday afternoon in August. We met in the protest pen opposite Downing Street, and later walked to St. James’s Park to discuss his opposition to the pandemic (or “scamdemic” as he described it).
Poet, in his early forties, is a towering figure. He stands at six foot four, has a somewhat stocky build, and styles himself with a mohawk and a goatee. In his left ear is a silver earring, and he often carries with him a self-certified coronavirus exemption card. On the back it reads: If you feel distressed by wearing a face mask, for any reason, you are exempt. Smiling is good for you and for others. This is a valid mask exemption card. If lost, download one from Unmask.org.uk.
The People’s Poet poster showing Chris Witty, England’s Chief Medical Officer with devil horns / Photograph by Zeyd Anwar; New Politic
Poet has travelled to Westminster to bring the fight against the pandemic to the heart of the British state. He has believed in conspiracy theories for twenty years, and now the pandemic had strengthened his resolve. He sees his role as a defender of the people against a fascist government, one that has commenced a programme of democide. Democide, he explained to me, “is basically the genocide of your own people. It’s a combination of genocide and treason.”
The term was originally coined by political scientist Rudolph Rummel, but it has now found its way into the language of anti-COVID conspiracy theorists. “I think anyone can see now the British government are clearly at war with their own people. If I could sum them up in one word, it’s depopulation. And that can’t be achieved without democide.”
Poet told me that the coronavirus pandemic was a charade created by the elite, who used lockdowns as an opportunity to implement a New World Order. Like many conspiracy theorists, he blamed the media: “The BBC are showing people with hazard suits outside hospitals, and crisis actors, but I know people who have turned up with cameras on their own and have said [hospitals] are empty…the BBC is a Big Six corporation…you know it’s a load of bullshit really.”
In Poet’s world, the NHS are the executors of this master plan. He compared doctors and nurses on the frontline to Harold Shipman, one of Britain’s most prolific medical serial killers. “It’s sad, they’re being used as pawns in this depopulation agenda. This might be hard to handle, but I recently had a GP approach me in the protest pen outside Downing Street who told me…that he quit his job a few weeks ago, as he couldn’t be a part of it.”
Over time, Poet’s protests have only grown louder. He became frustrated with anti-coronavirus marches. “Even the protest marches, it’s a nice day out,” he remarked, “you shout about freedom and raise your vibrations and meet loads of great people, but it’s time for action now.” Poet explained how, on numerous occasions, he phoned Britain’s anti-terrorist hotline to report Matt Hancock (then health secretary) for terrorism. Poet’s Instagram account, meanwhile, shows videos of him walking into a police station and reporting the British government for democide. He even told me with glee that he had travelled to MI5 offices in Millbank, London to persuade British authorities to extradite Bill Gates. Bill Gates, in his view, is the mastermind behind the pandemic, who bribed Public Health England with £900,000 to say the vaccines were safe.
Poet holds a bleak view of Britain’s future. When I asked him what he thought the next stages of the pandemic would be, he said that the government would announce another lockdown and that there would almost certainly be another civil war, with troops on the streets going door to door forcibly vaccinating people. “I ain’t going out like that…” he said, “revolution is the only solution.”
The People’s Poet / Westminster, London / Photographs by Zeyd Anwar; New Politic
Poet is a man with different identities. He goes by various names: The People’s Poet, The Truth Seeker, The Real Truth Warrior, BigSy, BigSy Blue — but his real name is Simon. He is a former accountant, an activist, a conspiracy theorist, a revolutionary, a mental health survivor, a website developer and a musician. The life he has lived is a varied one, and the alternate versions of Poet do not seem to cohere into a single person.
Poet was born in Stretford in the heart of Manchester. When I asked him about his origins, he said, “My name is Simon. I’m a [Manchester] City fan from Stretford. I used to see Manchester United stadium from my back door, so I think it was born into me to be a rebel. I didn’t have much of a choice in that one.”
Poet played football for Stretford Youth Club throughout his youth. He summed up his childhood in three words: “Football, football, football.” American football was his second love. Poet’s father was a Las Vegas Raiders fan, and this rubbed off on him. He played friendlies for the Trafford Bulldogs and explained that his stature made him ideally suited for sports. His height and stocky build gave him an advantage at a young age, but, alongside his support for Manchester City, these attributes also made him susceptible to bullying from others.
“When you’re at the park…and there’s twenty lads charging at you, going ‘I’ll get the big one, I’ll get the big one,’ I’m thinking, ‘Shit. I’m the big one…’ I always used to stand out with my City scarf and kit in Stretford Grammar [School]…but I suppose [being bullied] made me the person I am today. I feel unbreakable now.”
Football enabled him to cope. “[American] Football was a way of releasing my anger, I suppose, to just go [and] hurt people for a few hours a week. It was tactical—a good way of releasing the pent-up frustration…from being a victim of bullying, which is what it was really.”
[Read: How to End Britain’s Pandemic]
Things worsened when Poet began secondary school. His parents divorced and he moved to a rougher part of town, closer to the Manchester United stadium. He described how he went from playing football and riding his bike for hours each day to sitting on the sofa and playing computer games. He ballooned in weight, and eventually lost his passion for football. “I’d been invited to the England versus Cameroon game…but I simply sat at the match with a can of Coke and a Mars Bar, depressed…I’d lost my heart for it.”
Poet’s difficult childhood impacted his mental health. “When a psychiatrist got hold of me, they said I was ‘hyper-manic’ until the age of eleven, then ‘manic-depressed’ [sic] from the age of eleven.” Poet’s face was animated when discussing conspiracy theories, but now he appeared much more sombre. “…obviously I was the eldest of three, so I didn’t have any big brothers to look after me.”
From the age of 23, Poet found himself in various mental health institutions. He said one of the first questions the assessors asked him during his diagnosis was whether he believed phone calls were monitored by the secret services. “I said of course they are, and then they started writing: Paranoid and delusional. I knew I’d hit the trigger words, but I wish I’d played dumb…hindsight is a great thing. They identified me as an enemy of theirs from the beginning, so they…made an example of me. I walked in 14 stone and ended up 28 stone, suicidal, and unable to function in a way a man would be able to function if he wanted children.”
“There used to be a football group in the ward, which people used to be excited about,” Poet said. “It also used to bring outpatients who had previously been in the system. It was good social interaction. But they decided they couldn’t afford it. It cost £30 to hire a football pitch for a week, yet some of the injections they were putting in people were £1,500. It was all just insane, upside down and back to front. I used to think, ‘just skip the injections for today and let us have a football pitch for a year.’” The staff, according to Poet, often threatened his liberty, arguing he would be sent deeper into the system if he misbehaved.
Now, Poet’s relationship with football, like pretty much everything else in his life, has become consumed by conspiracy. “Football isn’t what it used to be…[but] I’m bringing football to the table in this revolution and freedom movement.” He explained that that the earth was flat, and that the World Cup trophy—represented by a golden globe—had been hijacked by the elites who used the game to disseminate lies. “I’d like to do to Bill Gates what he wants to do to every single one of us: that’s bend him over, pull his pants down and jam something up his rear end, because the World Cup makes me feel sick now, seeing a globe on it.” It wasn’t always easy to anticipate the direction of Poet’s conversation: it took surprising turns, with even the most banal topics overshadowed by conspiracy.
It was during his early twenties that Poet began his descent into the world of conspiracy thinking. He found it difficult to pinpoint the exact moment, but he did mention 9/11 as a key milestone. “9/11 was an eye opener for me. The BBC were reporting that three towers had been hit by two planes, and the third tower was still in the background. It’s like, huh…how does that happen?!”
Poet mentioned his friend gave him a copy of Stupid White Men, a book by Michael Moore, which persuaded him that the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was due to the oil industry. “Afghanistan was more to do with oil and opium than a man in a cave,” he said.
He consumed various elaborate conspiracy theories over the years, but one of the most seminal was the video documentary by Janet Ossebaard, Fall of the House of the Cabal, and its sequel, named The Sequel to the Fall of the House of the Cabal. As our conversation progressed, it became clear Poet’s conspiracy theories stretched far beyond the coronavirus pandemic. He spoke about his belief in the fake moon landing, 5G Towers, flat earthism, chemtrails, geo-engineering, and that Bill Gates was trying to block out the sun. It occurred to me that it would have been easier to ask Poet what conspiracy theories he didn’t believe in, rather than the ones he did.
“You learn, when you wise up, that history is a lie. If people knew the truth about Bill Gates, he’d be getting publicly hanged, next to Tony Blair.”
The People’s Poet’s letter to Boris Johnson / Westminster, London / Photographs by Zeyd Anwar; New Politic
Poet was aware that many of the things he believed in were controversial, and in fact even disgusted many others. “It’s a bit surreal. Some people think I’m a crazy, mentally-ill conspiracy theorist. [But] I see the bigger picture, and I’ve seen what’s coming: a New World Order take over.”
“The world is ran [sic] by a controlling elite: Satanists who harvest adrenochrome and take pride in serving us our own dead children in McDonald’s burgers.” This is the story that Poet believes: that children are being sodomised, tortured and sexually abused in secret locations; that their blood is harvested in Satanic ritual sacrifices; that they are slaughtered on a regular basis; and their captors are blood-harvesting Luciferians, and some of the most powerful, wealthy and well-connected people in the world.
Of all Poet’s beliefs, this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is one of the most disturbing. He explains that an elite group, controlled by Jews, are injecting themselves with the adrenochrome of abused children to keep themselves young. Adrenochrome, according to Poet, is a by-product of adrenaline, and extracted from the pituitary glands of frightened children.
Poet learned about the theory from YouTube. One video, titled Blood Sacrifice for McDonalds claimed a Jewish man, Rabbi Abe Finkelstein, had admitted that child meat had been discovered in a McDonald’s factory in Oklahoma, and that hundreds of thousands of children were being sexually abused in the process. It also made claims about a Zionist agenda to take over the world.
“…Rabbi Abe Finkelstein explains it all…it’s about an hour-long interview…he mentions that [the elite paedophiles and Jews] see around three hundred … children on Passover and… drain them of their blood and everything. I wish it wasn’t true, but they [elite paedophiles and Jews] don’t value human life.”
On the day of our interview, Poet was wearing a purple shirt, with a message that read LEAVE OUR KIDS ALONE. This was a reference to Pizzagate (the debunked conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians were involved in a child sex trafficking ring which met in the basement of a pizzeria), and he often stretched out his crumpled shirt to show the words and shouted the message out loud to the camera recording our interaction.
Poet’s belief in these extreme stories of child abuse explains why, despite wanting children, he has not had any. “I want kids. I’d be a good dad. But when you scratch beneath the surface of this world, it’s fucking sickening mate. …There are, literally, a group of satanic paedophiles that kill our children. I mean, how many times did Bill Gates go to Jeffrey Epstein’s paedo island?”
Poet claimed that St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall is Britain’s equivalent to Little Saint James (the infamous island where children were allegedly sexually abused by financier Jeffrey Epstein). He said there are several warehouses around Britain where the sexual abuse has taken place, and the ship that blocked the Suez Canal in March 2021 was full of children and 5G weapons.
Conspiracy theorists have long held an obsession with child abuse, both as a narrative to justify their existence and to help recruit others to their cause. “Hurting children is one of the worst things you can say someone else is doing,” says Kathryn Olmstead, Professor of Cultural and Political History at the University of California, Davis, “It’s an easy way to demonise your enemy.” These narratives also resonate across the political spectrum. By drawing attention to the idea of innocent children they evoke a universal feeling of human disgust. But most importantly, they establish credibility because they are exaggerated versions of evil deeds we know to be real.
When I asked Poet how satanic sexual abuse and depopulation were related, he said they were both central aspects of an evil cabal beyond redemption. “They all go hand in hand really.” He told me that people had had enough of the pandemic, and that individuals like him were being proved right. “[People] have started to realise the conspiracy theorists are right, that [the police] are protecting paedophiles and…are complicit in the crime of genocide. The Nuremberg trials are commencing. Yeah, [conspiracy theorist] Kate Shemerani gets a bit of stick because she compared [the pandemic] to the Holocaust and to Nazi Germany, [but] that’s how it is in the bigger picture.”
Poet was building on centuries of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, this time in the context of the pandemic. “Let’s get the Holocaust out of the way,” he said. “There weren’t even six million Jews in Europe at the time, so I don’t know where that figure is from. I think the British Red Cross said 900,000, but some even say that was an overestimation. I’ve got to be careful I don’t get called an anti-Semite and all that nonsense, but everything is a lie. The amount [sic] of casualties that will be a result of [vaccine jabs] will put the figures from the Holocaust to insignificance.”
Poet’s beliefs are difficult to distil into one overarching idea. On one level, they possess a Marxist undertone: one of a down-trodden underclass fighting against an all-powerful elite. On another, they lack an economic focus. Rather than stories of the poor against the rich, his worldview is one of simple divisions: good against evil, child-protectors against child-abusers, and the god-fearing against Satanists.
The time I spent with Poet did allow me to understand why he holds such a deep-rooted scepticism of authority. There was a feeling of injustice, that his time in mental health institutions had exposed him to the misdeeds and wrongdoings of authority that others were largely unaware of. “I used to be naïve and believe people went into mental health [institutions] to get help,” he said, “but if you look at the bigger picture, that’s not what happens at all.”
There was a distrust of the institutions, policies and systems responsible for his negative experiences of medical care. From the beginning of the interview, it was clear Poet is overly cautious about public health information, less willing to follow safety advice and more susceptible to being persuaded by misinformation. In this way, Poet is the perfect target for conspiracy theorists: a vulnerable man, with a difficult past, and enough cause to rail against the medical and political establishment.
It is this that explains his feeling of powerlessness, and his desire for agency, attention and self-control. His belief in anti-COVID conspiracy theories give him psychological comfort, the feeling that he isn’t at the mercy of events outside his control, as he has been for much of his past. Poet is a man on the fringes of society, marginalised, excluded and insignificant. Conspiracy theories allow him to make sense of his life in a complex world, giving him the feeling that only he really knows what was going on, and that he is one of the few who truly sees things for what they are. This has restored significance, meaning and value to his life. He is no longer a hapless victim against the elite. He is standing his ground, asserting his worth, and someone who has attracted the interest of others.
Poet is not alone in resisting the mainstream view of the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, while I have spoken to others who fight for a similar cause, it is clear Poet is the most devoted one in Westminster. He holds an unshakeable belief in his cause. He analyses the world not only as it is, but also how it should be.
The revolution that Poet so badly wants circles back to the central pillar of his childhood: football.
“The big thing for me is football. If you can revolutionise football, you can revolutionise everything. If we stop the hotshot depopulation jab, shutdown Operation Lockstep and give football back to the fans…that’s a big part of the solution.”
The People’s Poet’s “Pandemic Fraud”, hanging on the walls of the protest pen opposite Downing Street / Photograph by Zeyd Anwar; New Politic
“It’s time for the good guys to have a go.”
