Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Nick Pope - Useful Idiot of the Far Right


It’s a very, very, very, very small thing on one of the most significant days in modern American political history, but hours after we watched a very courageous young woman sit before a Congressional committee to detail Donald Trump’s attempt to replay Mussolini’s “March on Rome”, Nick Pope (who still bills himself as the “UK’s Fox Mulder” long after that claim has been revealed to have been a massive exaggeration) wandered on to Fox News this evening to talk about UFOs with the execrable neo-fascist Tucker Carlson. In doing so, he yet again decided that there’s no such thing as bad publicity in his never-ending quest to monetize his three-year stint decades ago shuffling paperwork at the British Ministry of Defence, and there’s no low that he won’t embrace in order to try and sell a few books.

I know it might come as a shock to #UFOTwitter, more than a few of whom travel along the same path as the conspiracists and dead-enders who populate the Big Lie cult of Trump, but there are more important things than UFOs. The very real threat to democracy is one of them. 

As for Pope, his fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame has long ago passed it’s best-before date. By shamelessly trying to hang on to any relevance, even within ufology, which is in and of itself about as irrelevant as it gets in the grand scheme of things, he has become nothing more than a useful idiot for those, like Carlson, who desperately want Americans to ignore both what happened on January 6th, and what continues to be done by the far right to undermine American democracy. 

Shame on him.

Paul Kimball