The “shill card” is a tactic used by the promoters of disinformation to discredit people who point out their errors. Instead of answering the objections being raised, they simply claim that the source is a “government shill.” It’s an old tactic, more generally described as “poisoning the well.” It is applied to fact checking sites like Snopes or FactCheck.org, it’s applied to the media by politicians, and it’s applied to debunkers by conspiracy theorists.
Once a label has been applied it often sticks. Posting an explanation for something like contrails with a reference to Wikipedia might be met with a response like “Wikipedia, LOL,” or even “Wikipedia has been debunked.” A very useful source of largely neutral information has been suddenly deemed entirely unreliable. Not only that, but the fact that Wikipedia (or Snopes, or Metabunk) says something is often interpreted (by conspiracy theorists and people on the political fringes) as evidence that the opposite is true.
If you encounter this accusation after referencing a site like Wikipedia, then the best thing to do is simply bypass that “tainted” site and use the direct references instead (Wikipedia in particular almost always has the information available in several referenced articles). But what do you do when the shill card is played against you yourself?
This is a position I have found myself in many times, and I have also seen it when other people reference articles I’ve written. Like the “Wikipedia, LOL” comeback, I get similar responses, like this one from a believer in the “Flat Earth” theory:
Anyone who buys Metabunk bullshit deserves not the truth. Mick West, lol, what a joke. He is utterly ignorant of pretty much everything involving basic physics.1
Or from a believer in Chemtrails:
When a liar is caught in a lie, the only way to cover up the previous lie is to make up another lie. That is why Mick West, the most notorious internet troll in existence, will never tell the truth.2
Or from a believer in the 9/11 Controlled Demolition theory:
Mick West is a shill for the Government and believes there is no such thing as “Conspiracy Theories” or “Government Corruption.” … When it comes down to the science and physics of 9/11, he suffers from cognitive dissonance.3
I’ve even seen it in strange indirect manners when people on social media raise issues that sound like claims I’ve made (like, “contrails have always persisted”), then they get accused of being Mick West in disguise, and their evidence is discarded.
I have tried to counter this by being open, honest, and respectful. I tell people who I am. I explain to them what I think. I explain that I think there are many real conspiracies, an abundance of government corruption, and that nobody should blindly trust people in power. I discuss why I debunk false conspiracy theories, and why I think that is important. I discuss my past, explaining how I got here, what my credentials are (more often how I don’t have any), how I came to know so much about contrails, and how I can afford to run Metabunk by myself.
The short version I give is that I’m a retired video game programmer and nobody pays me. I debunk as a hobby and it’s something I’ve always been interested in. Metabunk is just an off-the-shelf forum that costs very little to run except for time, of which I have plenty.
The longer version follows. I include my story here because the more someone knows about you and the more they can relate to you, the more effective your communication will be. That does not necessarily mean they are more likely to believe in what you say, but it will at least help get past the “shill card.” If I can get across to people the fact that I don’t need anyone to pay me, and that I genuinely think that debunking false conspiracies is a valuable thing, then they will (hopefully) move away from the position that I am being paid to lie, and towards the belief that I am simply mistaken, that my disagreement with them is honest. And from that position we can have a much more productive discussion.
I was born in the 1960s in Bingley, a small town in the north of England. My parents, two sisters, one brother and I were all packed into an old stone terrace house originally built to house workers from the nearby wool mill. We were a poor family and did not have a phone or a television for many years. I learned to read with my father’s collection of Marvel comics, and later his large collection of science fiction. I was an average student who read a lot, but I excelled in mathematics. I really enjoyed solving math problems, particularly those to do with physics—calculating things like velocity, acceleration, energy, and momentum.
My grandfather encouraged my interest in mathematics; he bought me a programmable Casio calculator and asked me to try to program it. I discovered that not only was I merely capable, in fact I also really enjoyed doing it. I spent a cold winter delivering newspapers to raise enough money to buy my first computer and began to learn how to program. I became obsessed with programming and playing computer games (which were very simple things back then).
Another obsession of mine was reading. I read a lot of science fiction, but I also read a magazine called The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time, a periodical published in the early 1980s that told (supposedly true) tales of UFOs, ghosts, magic, and other strange beasts that people were unable to explain.
For many years these things were causes of great fear to me. In my early teens I used to lie awake at night, literally trembling with the thought that some alien could enter my room and spirit me away to perform experiments on me, or that ghosts might actually be hovering around me, ready to shriek into existence, or softly stroke my face with disembodied hands reaching out of the darkness.
In particular one small book, written for children, really scared me. It contained an account of the Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter, a “true story” of a farmhouse under attack by little green men. At one point they describe turning around to see a clawed hand reaching down towards them.
But as I grew up and learned more of science, and the way the world actually worked, these fears dropped away. I found that the Kelly–Hopkinsville “aliens” were almost certainly owls, and my fears felt silly in hindsight. I did not lose my fascination with these fringe topics, but instead became even more interested in them, particularly in seeking out the most reasonable explanations of strange phenomena. I never fully rid myself of the fear—I’m still not entirely comfortable in the dark. I can rationalize it away, I know the fear is an illusion, but it’s still there.
A small part of the reason why I debunk now (and still occasionally address ghost stories) is anger at the fear this nonsense instilled in me as a young child. Perhaps you can’t do much to stop children being afraid of the dark, but I can still call out the bunk in the tales, and perhaps that will help someone be less afraid. Perhaps it will stop people from passing off these stories as true. Every little bit helps.
Progressing through school I continued to do well in math and physics. I also studied advanced level draftsmanship, following the profession of my grandfather. I went on to university in nearby Manchester to study computer science. I spent far too much time playing with my computer and reading science fiction, but I managed to scrape by with a degree.
In my last year at university I entered a national contest to describe the future of information technology. Skipping classes for a week, I created a futuristic newspaper describing something called “The Stream,” which quite closely resembled the present internet. I won the contest4 and a cash prize which allowed me to pay a few months’ rent on an apartment, and to get a modem.
There was no internet at the time, but there were a few very small BBSs (bulletin board systems) which typically only one person could use at a time. Connection speeds were measured in bits per second, literally a million times slower than today’s fastest connections. The closest thing to a public internet was FidoNet, a collection of modem-based bulletin boards that called each other up at night to swap information. Interactions were necessarily slow, so two people would often exchange only one message a day, or less.
But it was with this limited online presence that first I took up debunking as a hobby. I continued to read the Unexplained magazines, but now the greatest source of fascination to me was the explanations. Spontaneous Human Combustion became less a source of fear that I might suddenly burst into flames, and more a macabre wonderment that a human corpse could burn, the flames fed by body fat, a good source of air, and the wicking action of clothes. I liked to share this information with my friends, or with anyone who thought Spontaneous Human Combustion might be supernatural.
My competition winnings ran out in a few months and I was forced to get a job. Luckily my skill at math, my love of computers, and my ability to solve problems made me an ideal candidate to work in video games. I was in precisely the right place at the right time with the right set of skills. Back then games were much easier to create, and often the programmers had no formal training, having entered the industry in their teens. I got a job writing a snooker (billiards/pool) game and began my career as a video game programmer.
I moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1993, where I worked for a year at Malibu Interactive, writing a robot war game. Once more I found myself in the right place at the right time, during a period of rapid expansion of the industry, especially in Los Angeles. I left Malibu with Joel Jewett and Chris Ward to start our own company, which (somewhat on a dare) we called Neversoft. It was touch-and-go for a few years, but we eventually hit our groove with the wildly successful Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series.
I was mostly busy with work for the next decade, consequently much of my debunking was at work—as emails would get passed around (after we actually got email, around 1996), I was always quick to point out the errors, and direct the writer to something like Snopes (which was founded in 1995). I remember one particular story around the time of the Mad Cow scare (around 1995), where a brain disease infecting cows was occasionally being transmitted to humans as Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD). It was claimed that 50 percent of Britons (including myself) would die of CJD disease within ten years. That was over twenty years ago and 99.9999 percent of Britons are entirely unaffected, but the effects of that media scare live on, in that I still can’t donate blood in the US.5 This always stayed with me as a prime example of the negative effects of junk science—the predictions of a CJD epidemic in the UK were vastly overblown, and in the twenty years since the fears were raised there has never been a proven case for CJD from blood transfusion.
I took up my hobby of debunking more seriously again after I cashed in my stock options and left Neversoft in 2003. The Tony Hawk money meant I could pretty much retire, giving me a lot of freedom to do whatever I liked with my time. I started part-time work as a writer for Game Developer magazine, where I just wrote about whatever interested me in game development technology. Around 2005 I joined Wikipedia as an editor (that does not mean I worked there; anyone can join). Initially I did lots of minor little editing on dubious topics like homeopathy and audiophiles. I found a big source of bunk in the form of Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge (now called “Scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts”), which is rather a fringe subject that suggests that there is scientific truth in the Bible that was not available to humanity at the time it was written, the claim being that this was proof that the Bible was written by God. I delved into such arcane subjects as Ancient Egyptian Medicine, biblical exegesis, phytopharmacology, and vegetarian lions.
At some point on Wikipedia I found an article on a proposed medical condition called “Morgellons.” It looked a bit dubious to me. People were claiming that fibers were coming out of their skin, and I thought that looked like they might just be mistaking random bits of clothing fibers. I made some edits to the page in March and April 2006. After a few weeks, I found the subject so interesting that I started my first single-subject skeptical blog (using the blogger.com platform at the time, later switching to WordPress, both of which were free).
MorgellonsWatch.com was my part-time hobby for nearly three years. I wrote over a hundred articles, and got over 12,000 comments. During the first year or so there were several media stories regarding Morgellons, and I received a few requests for interviews. I declined them because I wanted to remain anonymous. I was actually a little embarrassed by the amount of work I put into my odd hobby, and preferred to not discuss it with anyone.
I learned many lessons while running Morgellons Watch. The most important one was to be polite and respectful to people that you disagree with. Nothing good comes of insulting someone, even unintentionally.
Interest in Morgellons died down around 2008 and more or less went away after the CDC did a study on the topic in 2012 and found nothing unusual. So I stopped posting and moved on to other topics.
After I left Neversoft one of the first things I did was take flying lessons at Santa Monica airport. It turned out flying was a bit more stressful than I’d imagined. Santa Monica airport is right next to the very busy Class-B airspace of Los Angeles International Airport, and to go anywhere requires careful planning and often complex navigation. I got my solo certification, I did a few long distance solo flights, then decided flying was really not for me.
But along the way I had to learn a lot about planes, air traffic, and the atmosphere. I also found a new topic that intersected with my new knowledge and my interest in debunking. The topic was Chemtrails—the unfounded belief that the long white trails left by high flying airplanes were not just condensation clouds, but were artificial trails deliberately sprayed for some illegal or nefarious purpose.
I came across the topic of Chemtrails somewhat randomly on Wikipedia, and I immediately found it fascinating—particularly the false idea people had that “normal” contrails could not persist. At that point (in 2007) I’d grown a little disillusioned with Wikipedia. Rather than spend much time editing the Wiki article (which would often be re-edited by a believer in Chemtrails shortly thereafter), I simply started a new blog: Contrailscience.com.
Chemtrails seemed like safer ground than Morgellons, as it seemed to mostly be a misunderstanding of the physics of the atmosphere with none of the implications of mental illness that Morgellons had. But there was still this constant problem that people got so upset by rigorous criticism of their ideas that productive conversation became impossible. So to try to address this I instituted a politeness policy on the site which grew more and more strict as time went by.
I was still settling into semi-retirement. After Neversoft I’d done some consulting work. I wrote the artificial intelligence for the computer players in a poker game. I wrote articles on topics like simulating fluid mechanics or analyzing video game lag. I was contracted by a large corporation to build a robot to test the effects of various factors on the response times of video game controllers. I wrote an iPhone app (one of the first available at the launch of the app store) to help Scrabble players. I traveled the world with my wife. I spent a lot of time on the internet—anonymously posting explanations of “Chemtrails” on Contrail Science. But I was getting a little bored of the whole thing, and I considered closing it down and spending more time programming.
Then in December 2009 I had a story hit the big time with the case of the “Mystery Missile”—where a plane flying from Hawaii to the mainland left a contrail on the horizon that looked a bit like a missile trail. A Los Angeles news chopper spotted it, put it on the evening news, and the story went viral. I wrote a few articles debunking this (explaining how it was just a contrail from an odd angle) and ended up being contacted by the media with interview requests. At the time I was still anonymous, but I decided then that my debunking would be taken more seriously if I was honest about who I was. This was a pivotal moment. I could either maintain my anonymity and just slip away, or take advantage of this publicity to get my message, one of truth and science, out there. I “broke cover,” and went on CNN and CBS Evening News to explain what the trail actually was.
I got a lot of traffic from that, nearly a million visitors to Contrail Science over the course of a week. This felt like a good time to branch out a bit. There was a lot of discussion in the comments section on Contrail Science, but the blog format was cumbersome, and the topics quite often strayed from the topic of contrails and onto broader conspiracies or other strange phenomena. I decided to set up a forum to foster more of that wider conversation.
Metabunk.org was born in December 2010. The name Metabunk is meant to convey the idea of thinking about debunking, and not simply doing it. Thinking about what bunk is, how to debunk better, and thinking about why we debunk and what it is we are really trying to do. I write longer articles that get published to the front page, but Metabunk is really arranged as a multi-user forum with various sub-forums. Some sub-forums are on the more “meta” topics, like “Practical Debunking,” and “Escaping the Rabbit Hole,” but there’s more activity in the topic-specific forums, like “Contrails and Chemtrails” (where all the Contrail Science discussion now lives), “9/11,” and “Flat Earth.” There’s also a thriving micro-community of people in the “Skydentify” forum who enjoy tracking down odd things in the sky (usually aircraft with contrails).
The Chemtrail theory remains the most popular subject, but I cover a wide range of topics. There’s quite a bit of photo analysis, including photos of “ghosts,” UFOs, lake monsters, and other things straight out of the pages of Unexplained magazine. The 9/11 forum gets a reasonable amount of traffic, but curiously the most popular posts are esoteric things like fireproof snow or Flat Earth.
Since there are not many people writing about Chemtrails in depth, I tend to get calls from the media when they are doing stories about it. One of these calls was for a show called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, hosted by Joe Rogan himself, who I only knew as the former host of the Fear Factor game show. Joe was someone who used to be more into strange beliefs, like UFOs and conspiracy theories, but was gradually becoming more thoughtful about them after he met a wider variety of both believers and skeptics.
After the episode aired Joe invited me on his very popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, to discuss the Chemtrails theory. This was good publicity for Metabunk, but also seemed to convince some people that both Joe and I were government shills. But it also had a positive effect for many people, as I was told via email recently:
I think what was so helpful about your appearances on Mr. Rogan’s podcast was that it helped break a common line of thinking I think many conspiracy theorists, and certainly those I knew, suffer from. They have a tendency to think any person who attempts to disprove or debunk their theories must have some ulterior motive (commonly manifested in the tendency to call debunkers shills or suggest that they are “bought and paid for”).
My friends were already fans of Mr. Rogan, and therefore believed he was a man of integrity. Because of this, they could let go of the belief that you were only debunking their theories due to being an apparatchik of the global cabal as they often imply, because they trusted Mr. Rogan would not do such a thing. Therefore, it allowed them to simply listen to your ideas objectively, rather than using some concept of you being a shill as an excuse to instantly discount and ignore your arguments. Being as they were genuinely intelligent people, once they began to listen to your ideas honestly, they were perhaps unsurprisingly convinced by your logical and fact-based approach.
Over the next couple of years, I continued to do minor “talking head” appearances for TV shows, and a variety of podcast interviews. Then in 2016 the Flat Earth theory became quite popular. Joe had a friend who had got sucked into that particular rabbit hole, and he invited me back on his podcast to talk about that. This prompted a temporary shift in focus on Metabunk as I wrote a bunch of articles on Flat Earth to make sure I was prepared. Metabunk briefly turned into the hub of Flat Earth debunking.
The Flat Earth show was shorter than normal as Joe was sick, but the episode still got quite a bit of reaction. I was a called a “globetard shill.” Joe did not help here, actually having T-shirts with “Globe Earth Shill” printed on them, which I declined to wear. But there was also some positive feedback, which brings us to where I am now, typing this book. The publisher saw me on the podcast and thought it would make a good book, so they approached me, and here it is.
After all this talk of me being a shill, when this book hits the shelves it will be the first money I have ever made from debunking. I’ve never (other than very brief one-day experiments) had ads on Contrail Science or Metabunk. Nobody has ever paid me. I operate my sites out of my own pocket, and it only costs around fifty bucks a month.
I’m not a shill. I’m just someone who thinks the truth is important, and someone who enjoys finding it and helping other people find it too.
That’s my story, told as honestly as I can in the space available. It is laid out here as an answer to the shill card. People will continue to claim that I am a shill, because the primary evidence that they use for that claim is simply that I disagree with them. But by laying out my past, my source of income, my personal history with the topic, and by explaining why I do what I do, I hope to at the very least get some people to consider the possibility that I am not a shill. I’m simply someone who believes in a different version of reality to them. Hopefully they will then ask why I have opted for this version of reality where the Earth is round, planes leave harmless clouds, the Twin Towers fell due to fires and gravity, and there is not a cabal of evil bankers controlling every aspect of the world. If they can see that I am an honest man with honest beliefs, then I can finally get to explain to them the reasons for my beliefs.
How does all this apply to you and your friend? In two ways. Firstly, my life story as a debunker is laid out in this chapter so you can avoid being tarred with the same brush. Some of the new information you are going to be presenting to your friend (especially regarding Chemtrails) might come from one of my websites. You might even, in the spirit of openness, tell your friend you have read this book, or even try to get them to read it. If you can show them evidence that I’m not actually a paid shill, then it might make it easier for you.
Secondly, I encourage you to try to be equally open with your friend. You don’t need to detail your childhood nightmares, but you can still explain why you personally think it’s important that we try to debunk claims that are false. It really hinders communication when people even slightly suspect you might be a shill, so make an honest effort to explain why you are disagreeing with them.