The highly credible team of investigative Journalists at Byline Times have been hot on Dominic Cummings’s trail since long before many of us fully realized how powerful insidious his malevolent manipulation and control of UK politics was to become. In a recent Byline Times Article Peter Jukes attempts to answer that question posed by Simon McCoy, “What has he got over you all?” Jukes lays out five potential reasons why Boris Johnson could be pressured into retaining his out-of-control Chief Advisor, threatened with exposure of shady deals and serious past wrongdoing. This murky list of deviant conduct is in addition to the five possible reasons that I posed in an earlier post. Jukes does not include what, in my estimation, is the most incendiary threat of all: blowing the whistle on the industrial scale fraud that leveraged Johnson into office after the Covert 2019 Rigged Election.
The Prime Minister’s vulnerability to blackmail could involve all or at least a combination of several of the issues raised by Jukes; so what does make the cut among Jukes’s “five quick examples, mainly from Byline Times’ extensive coverage of Cummings, of why Boris Johnson might be loathe to let his lieutenant go.” First up is the Vote Leave Campaign’s significant breaches of Electoral Commission regulations on spending; one of the very few powers the toothless watchdog has left and why we need to “Rescue our Watchdog” because “A Watchdog that cannot watch is just a dog!” For Boris Johnson and Michael Gove “Leave” means Leave well alone and let’s Move On; their wretched campaign manage to con vast swaths of the British public to vote against their own best interests and no one should look into how they managed it.
In the Byline Times Article: “Boris Johnson and Michael Gove Must Have Known About Illegality: Why the Two Vote Leave Leaders are a Threat to Democracy,” Whistleblower Shahmir Sanni spilled the beans on what went down. According to Sanni, who was one of BeLeave’s founders, “this unlawful spending was signed off at the highest levels.” Byline report that, “Cummings was held in contempt of Parliament for failing to answer questions about the Vote Leave campaign before a Commons select committee.” They ask? “Does Cummings have evidence that Johnson signed off on the illegal activity? Or even encouraged the overspend?” This could damage the bluster of Boris’s Brexit triumph without invalidating the vote or dislodging the PM; so does it outweigh the reputational damage Johnson and the Tories are suffering right now? A full confession could incriminate Dominic Cummings himself so he would need to tread carefully.
The next point raised by Jukes also relates to Brexit and the festering sore of data harvesting via Cambridge Analytica. Jukes joins the dots between the various companies involved in the illegal harvesting and the transfer of data that was then used to brainwash the public through targeted, grossly misleading, PsyOps Online propaganda bankrolled by that overspend. In the Byline Article: “Did the Leave Campaigns Share Our Data? Key Questions Over Brexit Referendum Remain Unanswered,” Ian Lucas MP who was on the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Select Committee examined these data transfer innsue. He wrote, “The Electoral Commission found that Vote Leave and BeLeave coordinated their campaigns and fined Vote Leave for breaking electoral law. Was there similar coordination on data sharing?”
Just as in was implausible for Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to claim that despite their high profile leadership of the campaign they were blissfully unaware of massive financial transfers to another Leave organization it was equally unlikely they were ignorant of the data musical chairs. Byline reports that, “AIQ used Project Ripon as its database – a psychometric targeting tool drawn from up to 75 million hacked Facebook accounts. When challenged by the Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr as to how Vote Leave found the small Canadian firm in 2017, Cummings replied ‘on the internet’. But AIQ had no internet presence in early 2016.” This was flatly refuted by others who testified to DCMS. Byline asks, “Does Cummings have dirt on Johnson’s knowledge of this illicitly gained database? Is there more to come out about this great hack?”
The Daily GasLamp has provided a vast trove of information with regard to Cambridge Analytica, PsyOps, the harvesting and manipulation of Data as well as Dominic Cummings’s dubious involvement in these dark arts. They state that their site was set up “in the wake of the strange Tory victory in the 2019 General Election. Strange because it was won by the Tories by the precise margin predicted by Dominic Cummings – 80 seats – and confounding all other polls.” They link to their post entitled “Election Fraud 2019” which covers what I now refer to as the Covert 2019 Rigged Election.
They point to Links for other GasLamp Articles, “What magic was Dominic Cummings using? IT magic! Used in conjunction with standard methods of commercial marketing and Pyschological Operations;” with a Link to their post on “Propaganda and Gaslighting GE2019.” The novel use of technology to influence elections was invented by Cambridge Analytic and has been proven worldwide…”
• Read How Cambridge Analytica was set up, at this Link: “What is all the fuss about Cambridge Analytica; Part 1.”
• And the Impact it made and how it was “uncovered,” at this Link: “What is all the fuss about Cambridge Analytica; Part 2.”
• How did they do it, “What is all the fuss about Cambridge Analytica; Part 3.”
• Technology background can also found here in a post on, “Search engine manipulation effect” at this Link.
• And here in a post entitled “Control the message,” at this Link.
“The impact on Democracy of the use of Big Data” is outlined in the post, “Democracy and big data,” at this Link. While “the combination of demographic data, pychographic data and social media – is described in the Daily Gaslamp’s first Animated Movie” at this Link. I realize that all of these GasLamp Links and write ups on the posts linked to here have been analysed in my previous outpourings on this thread, but I wanted to collect them together here as background support information on Dominic Cummings.
Still deeply involved with Cambridge Analytica and Brexit the next possibility raised by Byline Times is the influence of the toxic American Steve Bannon who they describe as, “Breitbart supremo, Trump campaign manager and Cambridge Analytica founder Steve Bannon was an advisor to Boris Johnson for some years.” Bannon has been trying to stir up far-right hate groups all over Europe and is proactively angling for the demise of the EU. Byline document known meetings between Bannon and Johnson as they “were reported to have become close from late 2016, and Bannon himself claimed to have advised the Foreign Secretary about how to topple May.”
Jukes then directs us to another Byline Times Article entitled, “Russian Interference Part II; Brexit and the Great Cambridge Analytica Hack.” In this lengthy piece Jukes attempts to track down all of the numerous connections between the principal disruptive individuals driving manevolent foreign interference in Referendums, including Brexit, presidential and UK elections. Of Cambridge Analytica he says it, “was co-founded in the autumn of 2013 by future Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon and Alexander Nix of SCL – a British company specialising in military-grade psy-ops, cyber warfare and civil society programmes.” He quotes Christopher Wylie saying, “Bannon was enamoured by the cultural caché of Britain’s ancient university town – one which also conveniently had a psychology department using online data analytics for psychometric profiling of millions of people.”
In Part II Jukes reveals,“…SCL’s head of research worked with a Cambridge University professor called Aleksander Kogan to harvest the profiles of millions of Facebook users to analyse their psychological predilections and weaknesses and see how online campaigns could change their behaviour. Kogan’s special psychometric app allowed Cambridge Analytica to download all the interests, connections, photos, likes, movements and the direct messages of all who used it, and could also access most of this information from all of their friends.” Jukes asks? “Does Cummings know something about plots and schemes during May’s premiership which could ruin Johnson’s credibility and reputation, especially among Conservative supporters and MPs?” However, this harvesting and manipulation of data cannot possibly be construed as legal, but although the full extent of exactly what was applied and where is still slow to fully emerge, Dominic Cummings holds the key to how it was used and who authorized its use.
In a brief return to my own personal suppositions, I would think that once Dominic Cummings had secured access to that massive cache of stolen data, that swung the Brexit Referendum vote, he would have hung onto it for future use. Facebook was heavily fined in the US for stealing that data, thus establishing a clear precedent that the data was in effect “stolen goods,” Therefore, if that very same access to personal data was used in the Brexit Vote or the Covert 2019 Rigged Election surely it would represent illegal use of stolen goods? This was precisely the information that was required for Dominic Cummings VICS Program to create the Situation Awareness necessary to target the postal votes required to take exactly 80 seats. Could this information essentially criminalize the Covert 2019 Rigged Election and the major beneficiary of its fraudulent result who must have fully authorized the deception?
The next vulnerability highlighted by Jukes is “The Suppressed Russia Report.” Whatever the Tories were so eager to keep hidden until after the Cover 2019 Rigged Election, and then kicked into the long grass ever since, contains information that I too have no doubt that Dominic Cummings has the full details of. Johnson had a number of nefarious connections with wealthy Russian Oligarchs who generously contributed to his campaign coffers and supported the Tory Party bid for electoral success. Who wants to dredge up the national embarrassment of Johnson’s time as Foreign Secretary, but it is widely recognized that during that time he hobnobbed with Russian émigré and key Conservative donor, Alexander Temerko, to plot the downfall of Theresa May over a glass or two of wine. In the Byline Times Article; “Spooking the Spooks: Media Complicity and Security Concerns over Lebedev and Johnson” Otto English drills down these Russian connections, a long read, but well worth it.
We all know that Boris is ruthlessly conniving in his narcissistic, ego driven pursuit of power nothing new here. Jukes asks, “Does Cummings know something about Johnson’s Russian connections which could be especially embarrassing given the extraordinary suppression of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report?” If this is not new to me I doubt the public would be shocked enough to oust Johnson from office over it. But what of the next target Dominic Cummings’s obsession with Health Data and Herd immunity? Byline Times claim, “Cummings is an enthusiast for big tech, artificial intelligence, so-called ‘evolutionary economists’ and some of the more extreme genetic determinists associated with the ‘Bay Area Rationalists’ – a group of right-wing ‘techno libertarian’ thinkers associated with Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley.”
Jukes reminds us that, “While Johnson took extended leave earlier this year, Cummings was sitting in on key COBR and SAGE meetings, planning for the Coronavirus threat. According to the Sunday Times, he was the main proponent of ‘herd immunity’.” Sure he vehemently denies this now, but all of the evidence points to the fact that this strategy has not been abandoned, but rather rebranded by the Tories under a more covert plan to continue a massive cull of the population targeting the “economically inactive,” the elderly pensioners and disabled population. We need to be seriously concerned about the Government’s new track and trace App and what data we may be handing over to an untrustworthy Government.
This leads to the last of Byline Times’s assumptions regarding Dominic Cummings. As they describe it, “in his crusade to shake-up Whitehall and government, Cummings has managed to amass an investment fund of close to a billion pounds for his ARPA brainchild, based on the US DARPA model. His Vote Leave data scientists, Faculty AI, have accumulated seven Government contracts since Johnson came to power. Other tech companies are also moving in, including the controversial data and security firm Palantir, owned by Trump backer Peter Thiel. As a former recruitment advisor to the digital healthcare group Babylon, Cummings would have a great understanding of the lucrative new frontier around private medical data.” They ask, “Is this post-Brexit data gold rush just too good for any Conservative Prime Minister to miss? Or does Cummings have information that could damage Johnson around the dangerous policy of herd immunity that has left the UK with the highest number of excess deaths from the Coronavirus in the world?”
Do any of these vulnerabilities pose a significant risk that would prevent Johnson fro jettisoning Dominic Cummings? Potentially all of them could be contributing factors. Cummings will have carefully evaluated all of this and already worked out how to minimize any personal risk to himself in revealing the truth; I seriously doubt he will have trusted Johnson to remain loyal and retain him out of an obligation as a friend. Cummings unique position as a Whistleblower could cause catastrophic harm to the Tories with full exposure of the evidence revealing exactly how the Covert 2019 Rigged Election was orchestrated; they would be driven from office even before an investigation fully confirmed all the details of this industrial scale fraud. We must continue to pressure the Government for prompt and permanent removal of Dominic Cummings as tis might just be the final tipping point with the potential to bring down this Government.