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Undercover at Britain’s ‘conspiracy school’

Undercover at Britain’s ‘conspiracy school’

Released Thursday, 25th April 2024
 1 person rated this episode
Undercover at Britain’s ‘conspiracy school’

Undercover at Britain’s ‘conspiracy school’

Undercover at Britain’s ‘conspiracy school’

Undercover at Britain’s ‘conspiracy school’

Thursday, 25th April 2024
 1 person rated this episode
Rate Episode

Episode Transcript

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0:00

Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked

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Unlimited slows. Off Air,

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the podcast, with Jane Garvey and Fi

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Glover. I go to the sink and I

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have some cheese. You eat cheese in the sink?

0:38

Doesn't everybody? Every Monday to

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on after their Times Radio show. I

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think if we were to do a Mr and Mrs. Oh

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no. How would that go in the

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booth? Badly. Go very badly.

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Unencumbered and Off Air. Two tiny

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0:55

podcast, now available on the Times

0:58

Radio app. From

1:05

the Times and the Sunday Times,

1:07

this is the story. I'm

1:09

Manveen Rana. In

1:20

a community center in Manchester, a

1:23

group of children are sitting around a

1:25

table, their eyes tightly shut, small

1:28

hands folded over little crystal

1:30

pyramids. Close your eyes,

1:32

ask. Take the energy,

1:34

see what energy is coming off there. One

1:39

little girl has slightly opened her eyes to

1:41

sneak a peek at Phil, the

1:44

self-styled shaman who's explaining that

1:46

crystals can transmit energy. I

1:50

see you get some energy off her. Hello.

1:56

You want a little bit? I'm just doing this

1:58

right now. It's

2:01

2.30pm on a Tuesday in

2:03

January and these children should

2:06

be in school. The

2:08

problem is, they are. For

2:21

one whole month, The Times

2:23

reporter Tom Ball went undercover

2:25

at an unofficial school in

2:28

Manchester where on four days a week,

2:30

students who are no longer

2:32

registered in mainstream education are

2:34

being taught a very different

2:36

sort of curriculum. A

2:41

lot of the people who

2:43

worked there were adherent to

2:45

the conspiracy known as the

2:48

Great Reset Theory. The

2:50

purpose of the school is that

2:53

they are prepared for when

2:55

this, I suppose, apocalypse occurs

2:59

and that they will be equipped to

3:01

deal with whatever the World

3:03

Economic Forum and Bill Gates has to threaten.

3:07

At the end of the day, we're

3:10

bringing up a generation

3:12

of children that do

3:14

know the truth. They won't have

3:16

to be woken up because

3:19

they've never been asleep. My

3:44

name's Tom Ball and I'm a reporter

3:46

for The Times. heard

4:00

about it. Up

4:02

until very recently I lived

4:04

in Manchester and every

4:06

Friday on the corner

4:09

of my street a bunch

4:11

of middle-aged guys with yellow

4:13

placards would gather and they

4:15

would tell anybody that would listen that

4:17

COVID was a scam, that

4:20

vaccines killed people, that 5G killed people and all

4:22

the rest of it. And normally

4:24

I'd walk past ignore them but

4:26

every now and then I would

4:28

pick up a copy of The

4:30

Light which is a newspaper which

4:33

peddles conspiracies and which

4:35

they would give out for free and

4:37

I'd read it just as a curiosity

4:39

more than anything else. But one

4:41

day towards the end of last

4:44

year I picked up a copy

4:46

and I saw that they were advertising in the

4:48

ads at the back for a qualified

4:50

teacher. The

4:58

ad didn't go into any detail about

5:00

what the institution that was

5:02

looking for a teacher was other than to

5:04

say rather critically

5:06

that it was a self governing

5:09

small community learning provision. But

5:12

on the basis of that that no

5:15

credible educator could be looking for a number of

5:17

staff from the British for The Light I thought

5:20

it was worth an application. Yeah

5:28

I mean that really is intriguing but

5:30

also the idea of a self governing

5:32

small community learning provision. I mean

5:35

that's a mouthful. So it's not actually a

5:37

school or it's not calling itself a school.

5:41

Is it technically one? The

5:43

definition of a school is a slippery

5:45

thing. So Universal Kids which

5:47

is the name of this place outwardly

5:50

does not describe itself as a school

5:52

but to its parents

5:55

to send their kids there to prospective parents

5:57

to teachers it does describe itself as a

5:59

school. school and it

6:02

would like to think of itself as a

6:04

school I would say. However, the fact that

6:06

it's unregistered with Ofsted, with

6:08

the local authorities, with the DFE,

6:11

means that it would get into a lot

6:13

of trouble were it to be ostensibly operating

6:15

the school but not registered for those bodies.

6:17

Ah, so it's unregistered, it's not obviously

6:21

billing itself as a school, although it does

6:23

privately. We're going to call

6:25

it a school, because if we start calling

6:27

it a self-governing, it will

6:29

be here all night. But you started

6:31

looking into this, having seen the ad, you start

6:35

looking into this institution. What

6:37

can you learn about it? I mean, what's

6:39

out there publicly? Not a

6:41

great deal. It's got an Instagram page

6:45

and it also has a website, but the

6:47

website also doesn't tell you a great deal.

6:49

But it does detail the sorts of things

6:51

that are taught there. I think if you

6:53

were to at first glance look at its

6:55

website, you'd think, okay, this is a slightly

6:58

left field education facility of some

7:00

sort. And you can see that

7:02

there's quite a heavy emphasis on

7:04

new age type things. So for

7:06

example, they say that

7:09

they teach kids about homeopathy, about

7:12

moon cycles, about

7:14

foraging, sacred dreaming. But then

7:16

you also see that they teach

7:18

things like survival skills as well.

7:20

So it's a strange

7:22

and slightly baffling mixture

7:25

of things that they are on

7:27

offer. Definitely a long

7:29

way away from the national curriculum here. Yeah. I

7:31

mean, they do also say that

7:33

they teach certain curriculum subjects, but yeah, for the

7:35

most part, it seems to have this sort of

7:37

new age emphasis on it. You

7:40

applied. How soon did you hear back? I

7:42

think it was about a week, a week

7:45

or two weeks later that I heard

7:47

back from them. They sent me an

7:49

email, invited me to have sort of

7:51

an initial Zoom meeting. And

7:53

that was sent by the school's

7:55

founder and head teacher, a woman

7:57

called Le Dan Ratcliffe. So,

8:00

Le Dan had been a

8:03

teacher in the mainstream state

8:05

education system in and around

8:08

Greater Manchester for about 20 years. I

8:10

think in around 2016, she then went

8:12

to China with her husband and ran

8:15

an independent school out there and came

8:17

back about three years later. In

8:20

the following year, in the midst of COVID, Universal

8:22

Kids was born. She told me during

8:25

one of our early meetings that she

8:27

had the idea to set the school

8:29

up while on an

8:31

empty lockdown march. And

8:34

why did she need to feel the need to set

8:36

it up? What was she hoping Universal Kids would achieve?

8:38

What's its sort of big belief

8:41

system at ethos? What's it trying

8:43

to do that other schools don't? She

8:45

spoke a lot about the fact that she

8:47

felt mainstream education

8:49

sat the life out of children.

8:52

She wanted to make a school which was

8:54

primarily focused around the kids and the word

8:56

that she used a lot was autonomous. Autonomous

8:59

in the sense that these kids had some say in

9:01

what they were learning, if they didn't like something, then

9:03

they wouldn't have to do it. But

9:06

I think she also, from a sort

9:09

of more conspiracy point of view, felt

9:11

that the state was actively harming

9:13

children through the education and

9:16

that creating somewhere like Universal

9:18

Kids was providing a kind

9:20

of parallel society

9:23

in which to

9:25

raise kids. A

9:30

lot of the

9:33

people who worked there

9:35

were adherents to a

9:38

conspiracy known as the Great Reset

9:40

Theory, which essentially posits

9:43

that a group of politicians,

9:47

bureaucrats, financiers like Bill Gates,

9:49

but primarily the World Economic

9:52

Forum, are

9:54

plotting against humanity. And

9:56

the reset element comes into it because

9:58

they believe that that this

10:01

cabal of people are

10:03

trying to depopulate

10:06

the Earth through manufactured catastrophes like

10:08

the Covid pandemic for example or

10:10

the war on Ukraine as

10:13

a means by which to then set

10:16

up this kind of authoritarian regime in

10:18

which they can public planet. Wow.

10:26

So this is the

10:28

institution you're going into. What

10:31

role had you actually applied for? You know when you

10:33

arrived what are you meant to be? I

10:36

was a teacher teaching yoga

10:38

in the mornings and then

10:40

I was also teaching a

10:42

lot of Chinese medicine and

10:45

ancient Chinese philosophy all stuff

10:47

that I wasn't particularly I

10:49

would begin with. I was going

10:51

to say are you an expert secretly in Chinese

10:54

medicine? I know more about it

10:56

now than I did before but that's not

10:58

saying much. I mean as a testament to

11:00

how poorly these kids are being taught I

11:03

was looking up most of stuff on my phone beforehand.

11:07

Googling it. Yeah, yeah especially. So

11:09

you land up here at this would-be

11:12

school. Just give us

11:14

a sense of how it works. I mean is

11:16

this a full-time school? How many pupils do they

11:18

have? When I

11:20

was there there were 13 children aged

11:22

between 8 and 14. The school operates for four

11:27

days a week. One was

11:29

online, one was in a

11:31

community centre in Stockport and two were in

11:34

a private property that up until

11:36

recently had been a nightclub. It's this

11:39

very dilapidated old

11:41

Victorian pile. There was rain water

11:44

dripping through the ceilings. There

11:46

was graffiti everywhere. I was reading a review

11:48

of the nightclub from a couple of years

11:50

ago which described it as proper manky. The

11:53

kids were during their break times they had

11:55

to run the place. They were running around

11:57

the stage area playing on various

12:00

fixtures. Not the ideal

12:02

location for children to

12:04

be taught I would say. No, no, that's

12:06

not the sort of place you'd want to leave kids to have the

12:09

run of the place.

12:11

Tell me about your first day

12:13

going into this environment. What was that like?

12:18

So my first day was at the community

12:20

centre in Stockport. Working your way

12:22

up to the nightclub. Yeah, yeah,

12:24

that came a bit later. I parked

12:26

my car around the corner, walked

12:28

up to the entrance and knocked

12:31

on the door. Hello,

12:38

I'm Tom. Hi. I'm here to meet Le

12:40

Dan. Oh, come on in. Hi. Time

12:43

to just see. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. You

12:46

just say to yourself, how are you? OK.

12:49

Oh, are you OK? Yes. Hi,

12:51

Le Dan. Hi. I see you. Lovely to

12:53

meet you. Yeah. Hi. Hello.

12:57

We got a new student. A

13:00

little bit older than you, I'm afraid. And

13:03

there was Le Dan speaking with some of

13:05

the other parents. There was

13:07

a yoga class to begin with that the

13:09

future was taking us on. OK.

13:17

So, it's

13:19

very good. Just

13:23

the best schedule. That's like

13:26

a moment. OK. OK. And

13:31

while I was going on, Le Dan and I had

13:34

a chat and she spoke to me about

13:36

the sort of things she wanted me to

13:39

teach. And she emphasized

13:41

that this is not going to be like the

13:43

sort of teaching that you might be

13:46

used to. We have a very different way of

13:48

doing things here. But

13:51

I just kept reassuring me saying you'll get the

13:53

hang of it eventually. Coming

14:04

up, Tom gets a

14:06

lesson in alternative science from one

14:09

of the teachers. That's

14:13

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plushcare.com/weight loss. That's plushcare.com/weight loss. Tom,

15:12

you were describing going undercover in

15:14

this sort of school called

15:17

Universal Kids in Manchester. Tell

15:20

us a bit about your fellow teachers. There

15:23

are quite a range of people. The

15:25

business studies teacher runs

15:28

a cryptocurrency business for

15:30

conspiracy theorists. The

15:34

philosophy teacher is a squash

15:36

coach at the National Squash

15:38

Center. He told

15:40

me whilst I was there that he secured cancer

15:42

by eating apricot kernels.

15:45

Then there are people who have previously

15:48

taught in mainstream schooling. For example,

15:50

the art teacher who I only

15:52

knew is red, had been

15:54

a teacher at a school. What did all

15:56

the pupils call this teacher to? Red. Yeah,

15:59

she had red hair. I guess. She taught

16:01

at a girls school in Stockport for many

16:03

years. And to be honest, I quite like

16:05

to go on with her. She had a

16:07

good sense of humor. She's very dry. And

16:11

we were standing outside one

16:14

day having a chat and I was beginning

16:16

to wonder if perhaps she'd managed to end

16:18

up here by accident because she seemed quite

16:20

sane. And then she looked up to the

16:22

sky and saw the vapors

16:24

that aeroplanes leave and she said,

16:27

oh, God, they're thoracic

16:29

again. I thought, what do you mean? She

16:31

said, it's the chemtrails

16:33

that they're trying

16:35

to give us all Alzheimer's with. You

16:40

say chemtrails are bad for Alzheimer's?

16:43

Yeah. Really? Yeah.

16:46

The number one cause of dementia is aluminium. And

16:49

that's an aluminium in the

16:51

chemtrails? Yeah. Really? Yeah.

16:55

So hang on. These are the lines that Chris crossed

16:57

this guy when planes have gone over. What

17:00

did she think they were? She told

17:02

me that it was the

17:04

MOD and that these planes

17:06

are releasing a vapour made

17:08

from aluminium for which

17:10

this video is on dementia. Yeah. Look

17:13

at AARP. Okay. It

17:16

used to be a consponsal service. Yeah.

17:19

What was that? What was that? I

17:22

don't know. I don't know. It

17:24

was easy. See that one? He tried to

17:26

show my neighbour. There were two chemtrails and then

17:28

an ordinary commercial plane going in between them. His

17:31

tail was only that big. So see,

17:33

that's chemtrails. That's chemtrails. Is

17:42

this the sort of stuff that the

17:44

kids are being taught? I mean, are they saying

17:46

it in class? What do they think

17:49

they want to be educating these kids to do?

17:51

And what's their purpose? As

17:53

the same teacher read,

17:55

said to me, the purpose of the school

17:58

is a... as she

18:00

said, to make sure they're awake, awake

18:03

and alert to this evil cabal that's

18:05

trying to subjugate the planet.

18:08

So the rest of societies is

18:10

asleep, they haven't seen the light

18:12

yet? Exactly, yeah. And the

18:15

second purpose is that they

18:17

are prepared for when this

18:19

supposed apocalypse occurs, that they

18:21

will be able to find their

18:24

own food, hence why there

18:26

are foraging lessons, that they'll

18:28

be able to make their own

18:30

medicine, hence why there's immunopathy

18:32

lessons, and that

18:34

they will be equipped to deal with

18:37

whatever the World Economic Forum

18:39

and Bill Gates has to threaten. Do

18:41

they talk about this stuff, the World Economic

18:43

Forum and Bill Gates, with the kids? There

18:46

were no sort of specific lessons

18:48

whereby the kids were taught

18:51

this kind of stuff, but naturally it

18:53

did come out. So for example, there

18:55

was a cookery lesson

18:57

and the kids were making biscuits

19:00

made out of carrots. Unusual?

19:02

Yeah, they were as disgusting as

19:04

they sounded. And

19:08

one of the kids asked, would you ever

19:10

eat cockroach? You

19:23

might have to. If Bill and

19:25

Klaus get their way, then... Bill

19:32

Gates and Klaus Schwab, who set

19:35

up the World Economic Forum at

19:37

Davos. Precisely, yeah. Two major bogeymen

19:39

of the conspiracy movement. They

19:42

said if Bill and Klaus have their way,

19:44

then you may all be seeing cockroaches in

19:46

the future. Don't you want to say that's

19:48

why they're showing us? Because

20:02

they're trying to normalise the eating of insects.

20:05

Oh my God. And

20:07

that wasn't one that I'd heard at the time. When I

20:09

looked it up afterwards, it was quite a well-known conspiracy

20:12

theory that the WAF, the World

20:14

Economic Forum, is trying to force

20:16

people to eat insects.

20:19

And this is something that the pupils are

20:21

hearing very regularly. What's

20:24

their version of history? So

20:26

in a history class, they were being

20:29

taught about the Second World War. And

20:31

in fact, this cookery class that I

20:33

mentioned was a sort

20:36

of war-themed cookery class whereby the kids

20:38

were making the sort of recipes that

20:40

people did during the blitz. But the

20:42

kids were also being taught about Anne

20:44

Frank's diaries as well. And

20:47

I wasn't in the class for that, but I

20:49

had heard two of the teachers discussing

20:51

the lesson. And one of the teachers said to

20:53

the other, oh, have you

20:55

heard the one about how Anne Frank

20:58

didn't actually write those diaries

21:00

herself? And the other teacher

21:02

said, oh well, that's one

21:04

that's knocking around. And that

21:08

is a long-standing and quite

21:10

well-known conspiracy theory, particularly amongst

21:13

anti-synthetic circles. What's this?

21:15

This is basically Holocaust now? Yeah,

21:17

the teacher that was talking about that, I think,

21:19

had probably heard it from somewhere. I wasn't sure

21:21

if she believed it herself, but it was something

21:23

that she mentioned in passing. And I guess, you

21:25

know, as a token to the fact that if

21:27

you were in these circles, then you'd actually pick

21:29

up on these sources conspiracies and they're often making...

21:32

Their roots can be in very

21:34

dark places such as this one.

21:36

What did the

21:39

pupils make of

21:42

the curriculum and

21:45

the classes? From

21:53

what you saw, what did the pupils

21:55

make of the curriculum and the

21:57

classes? I mean, did they buy into all of it?

22:00

of this? I felt that

22:02

the great irony of this place

22:04

was that Adan spoke a

22:07

lot about how stifled

22:09

kids were in the mainstream system

22:13

and how universal kids

22:16

by contrast was a place for

22:18

them to express themselves and

22:21

learn what they wanted to learn etc

22:24

but from what I saw

22:27

the kids were mostly pretty

22:29

disengaged or perplexed by the

22:31

stuff that they were being taught and I

22:34

quite often heard the kids say I just

22:36

don't understand why we're learning this and there

22:38

was one occasion when a guy

22:41

called Phil came in with his

22:43

box of crystals, the sort of

22:45

crystal therapy, crystal healing lesson and

22:48

so these kids were given the crystals to

22:50

hold and he said just put it

22:52

over your third eye and

22:54

your forehead What can you see?

22:57

What can you

22:59

feel? And one little curl piped up I can

23:02

just feel the

23:08

crystal on my forehead And

23:14

he responded don't

23:18

be clever which I thought was

23:20

a kind of perfect encapsulation of their philosophy

23:23

of learning really. Don't be clever. Is

23:26

Ofsted aware of this school? No

23:29

they're not it's been around for three years

23:32

but despite that it's gone

23:34

completely under the radar of both Ofsted

23:37

and the local authorities and

23:39

that's very much how the school

23:41

wanted to remain. I was interested

23:45

to ask Le Dan about that

23:47

about her interactions with the local authorities

23:50

and she told me that

23:52

when parents were contacted by the local

23:54

authorities as they often are if they're

23:56

homeschooling Le Dan

23:58

told the parents not to specifically mention

24:00

universal kids, but just to say that, you know,

24:02

they're occasionally going to sports clubs or to

24:05

socialize with their friends and, you know,

24:07

it wasn't anything kind of formalized and

24:09

that was the way that she said

24:11

that they worked at the side of

24:13

local authorities in her words. I've

24:24

contacted Offstead and shared

24:26

with them our findings and they've told us that they

24:28

are going to urgently open

24:31

an investigation into the school. They

24:33

described the findings as shocking,

24:36

though not totally surprising. Offstead

24:39

are fully aware of the fact that

24:41

there are hundreds of suspected unregistered schools

24:43

operating in England, but they

24:45

say that current laws aren't strong enough

24:47

to be able to clamp down on

24:49

the problem. The

24:55

majority of those that they

24:57

prosecuted have been faith schools,

25:00

so schools operating in ultra-infant

25:02

Jewish Muslim communities. But

25:06

increasingly inspectors are

25:08

starting to see these sorts of non-religious

25:11

schools which have this kind

25:13

of anti-state ideology and sometimes

25:15

conspiratorial ideology to them. So

25:18

about a year ago, I did

25:21

another investigation into another suspected legal

25:23

school called Hopes and Fix, which

25:25

is run by former

25:27

members of the far right who also have

25:30

a kind of conspiratorial ideology

25:32

to them as well. Again, founded

25:34

this school in the midst of

25:37

anti-lockdown rallies during the pandemic. And

25:39

again, really alarming. Why

25:41

are there so many of these schools

25:44

now? What's going wrong? Is this the

25:46

law that's to

25:48

blame? What needs to change? The

25:51

wording of the law is quite

25:53

general. So the wording

25:56

of what constitutes an illegal school is

25:59

quite and precise, I would say,

26:01

it has to be somewhere which

26:03

is not registered for the authorities

26:05

and which is providing full-time education

26:07

to five or more children. But

26:10

the problem is that there is no specificity

26:12

with what full-time education means, so a lot

26:14

of places can operate on the cusp of

26:17

the law. So this is four days a

26:19

week that might not qualify, and they don't

26:21

have to register. They don't have to tell

26:23

the authorities what they're doing.

26:25

Yeah, it's a very grey area,

26:27

and officers have repeatedly called for

26:29

the government to implement a definition

26:31

of much more specific than that

26:33

which already exists. And also, the

26:35

other thing is the fact that

26:37

there is no register for homeschooled

26:39

kids, which Labour has said at

26:42

the start of this year it would bring in

26:44

where it would be in government. And

26:46

that would be a great help because it

26:48

would mean that officer and local authorities could

26:50

keep much closer around what kids who are

26:53

being educated at home are doing every

26:55

day. And Tom, when you

26:57

went to Universal Kids and told them

26:59

that actually you'd been a journalist

27:01

undercover the whole time and told

27:05

them about the piece you were writing, what was

27:07

their response? They denied

27:09

that it was a school. They

27:11

said that it was a parent-child

27:13

community initiative and only

27:15

operates for about 11 hours a

27:18

week. Wreckler said that she strongly objected

27:20

to the view that Universal

27:22

Kids has trained in future conspiracy theorists.

27:25

She said that the learning experiences we

27:28

provide are based on natural law of

27:30

the universe and ancient knowledge that's been

27:32

omitted from mainstream education. You

27:35

were at Universal Kids. There's the

27:37

place you mentioned in Sussex. This

27:40

is not a one-off problem. Why

27:43

do you think these institutions

27:45

are gaining ground? Why is there suddenly a

27:47

growing demand for them? I

27:49

think a lot of it stems from

27:51

the pandemic, a, because people

27:54

were spending huge amounts of

27:56

time on their computers falling

27:58

down these rabbit holes. But because

28:02

some people felt that their liberties were being

28:04

taken away from them when they were forced

28:06

to live at home, and that

28:09

was only reinforced when later the

28:11

population was mandated to have vaccines.

28:14

So if you're of a kind

28:16

of conspiratorial, already of a kind

28:19

of conspiratorial anti-state fence, then that

28:21

can be quite a potent combination.

28:23

And it's no coincidence that both

28:26

universal kids and hope suffix were

28:29

reforged in the midst of that

28:31

pandemic year. But also,

28:33

I mean, it's more broadly, it's a

28:35

symptom of the information age that

28:37

we live in. The propagation

28:40

of untruth has been one

28:43

of the major problems of

28:46

the way that unfiltered information spreads on

28:48

the internet, so that now

28:51

you can have some

28:54

crazy theory that was posted

28:57

on an obscure Reddit forum, be picked

28:59

up and amplified on other

29:01

social media channels, and then

29:03

even ending up in somebody's mouth. And what's

29:06

often been kind of subterranean and

29:09

only really existing on the internet now,

29:11

more and more is happening in real life. So

29:13

you see people with yellow

29:15

billboards on roundabouts telling

29:18

you that the pandemic was a hoax.

29:20

And then there was an astonishing study published

29:22

last year by King's College London, which found

29:25

that a quarter of people in Britain believed

29:27

that the pandemic was probably or definitely

29:29

a hoax. So more and

29:31

more, you're seeing these conspiracies come to

29:33

fruition in real life. I mean,

29:35

that's astonishing. We

29:38

spent a month at this school

29:41

and watched how it was working. You

29:43

know, there are a group of adults running

29:46

the school. There are adults sending their children

29:48

to this school, knowing what it's

29:50

going to be teaching them. What

29:53

were your reflections after

29:55

the experience of what's

29:57

going on there? adults

30:00

doing this? I initially

30:03

felt that in

30:05

their own way through their own contorted

30:07

logic, they were doing what they thought was

30:10

best for their children. If you genuinely believe

30:12

that there was a great

30:15

plus against humanity, then following that

30:17

logic, you could conceivably say that

30:19

they were doing what they thought was best.

30:22

But then I think as time wore on

30:24

and as therefore longer and longer, I changed

30:26

my mind because actually,

30:29

even if you do take

30:31

that conspiracy as your starting

30:33

point, these kids weren't

30:35

learning anything. They spent much

30:37

of the time being quite

30:39

sort of non-plus and perplexed by

30:42

what they were being taught. And

30:44

actually, I just came to see it as

30:46

less of an act of altruism on behalf

30:48

of their parents and more of

30:51

their parents and these teachers just

30:53

wanting to live out their convictions

30:55

and imposing that upon these kids.

31:02

Universal Kids would claim that

31:04

they're raising these autonomous, young,

31:07

independent people, but

31:10

in fact, they are just raising kids

31:12

who will lack life's

31:14

most fundamental resource, and that's the

31:16

truth. Thanks

31:46

for listening. Have A lovely weekend. Want

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