The HART Leeks (sic)

A Selection of Tasty and Nutritious Morsels

Read All About It! Exclusive Leeks!

Many years ago I started writing for HART, the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (you can also find us on substack). This wonderful group of people came together during the latter part of 2020 and announced themselves in early 2021. I joined as a pool writer for their bulletin team after they had become established, but before a very shady outfit hacked them and spewed all of HART’s internal chat logs onto the internet. These ‘HART Leaks’ were a smear, pure and simple: quotes were taken out of context and stitched together in an attempt to besmirch the individuals involved.

In actual fact, anyone of a neutral mind who took the time to look at the chat logs in more detail would have realised that as per good scientific practice, hypotheses were being tested by internal debate, which – naturally – include people engaging in robust argument and taking positions counter to what they might actually think or believe.

However, the process is the punishment, and much was made of this hacking incident by those peddling the ‘mainstream’ lies about the virtues of lockdowns, masks and injections. Various organisations and nefarious characters went to great lengths to squirt selected snippets of HART’s internal chats all over the internet in an attempt to shut down our views and portray us as somehow toxic. The incident was very traumatic for some of HART’s frontline team.

We publicly reiterated our raison d’être and reported the incident to the police, but how much further was that going to go when it turned out that Logically.ai, the entity that was involved in publishing the HART leaks, was funded by none other than HM Government to the tune of £1,000,000?

It was only a few years later that we were able to write about this in more detail when civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – which revealed highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government departments.

A HART writer (me, in fact) takes up the story:

In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.

It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.

It will not surprise the reader to learn that HART was mostly right, and it was Logically.ai itself – and the very government agencies it was working for – pushing the misinformation. Here are the receipts. Black is white. War is peace. I’ve read this script before somewhere.

Unfortunately, dirty tricks like this are commonplace – the fact that they are often funded by taxpayer funds just makes it all the more shocking. Only a year later, a Channel 4 ‘investigation’ just prior to the General Election turned out to be an entirely staged attempt to discredit (not protect) ‘legitimate public figures’ (c.f. quote above) standing as candidates. The mainstream media gleefully misrepresented the claimed happenings as fact, presumably safe in the knowledge that they could recant at a later date, after the event and after the reputational damage had been done.

What was that about seeing “more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”?

Only this week I found a mole within the membership group of my local political group. A senior writer on UK politics at Reuters had registered as a junior member with a fake name. When politely confronted about this, I asked him if it was acceptable for a paid journalist such as him – presumably with comfortable tenure, salary and pension – to waste my unremunerated time with this kind of behaviour? He defended his actions as a ‘wider test’ (i.e. organised by his employer) and as legitimate line of investigation. It is no wonder that the public are developing a disdain for organisations such as these with their misguided ‘Fact Checking’ services and membership of the laughable ‘Trusted News Initiative’. Somehow, I can’t think why (he who pays the piper plays the tune?) these established organisations fail to realise that – all too often – they are the ones promoting the misinformation.

As mentioned atop this post, I have written various articles for HART. Most of these were credited to the HART bulletin/editorial team to reflect the collaborative internal review process. Where articles were re-published by other outlets, the primary author would be credited, c.f. my articles in The Daily Sceptic and The Conservative Woman.

The HART team has recently made the decision to credit its primary authors, and my first such article under this new regimen – the latest in an ad hoc series of book reviews – was published this week. And this little milestone brings us full circle to the uproariously pun-ny (not necessarily funny) title of this post. Partly for my own purposes – and hopefully for the benefit of others – I intend to catalogue my previously unassigned HART articles for ease of reference and for hindcasting/backtesting purposes.

For my own amusement, this catalogue will be referred to as the ‘HART Leeks’ – a wholesome and nutritious alternative to the poisonous misinformation and dirty tricks that the establishment insist on hosing us down with.