Hello, I am Brent Lee and I am an Ex Conspiracist. From 2003 to 2018 I was completely consumed by the world of conspiracism. I was a full on conspiracy theorist.. or as we called ourselves in the noughties, a Truther. This was my identity and my belief in these conspiracies became my ideology. In 2021 I decided to speak out about my past and started documenting this journey on YouTube and Twitter. I now have a podcast called Some Dare Call It Conspiracy where me and my brilliant co-host Neil Sanders explore and examine conspiracy theories case by case and try to discover where the truth lies. 

 

What exactly did I believe?

 

I believed in what can be called “The Grand Conspiracy”. This is the New World Order, Illuminati, Freemason, Deep State Cabal style global conspiracy. I believed that secret societies were running the upper echelons of politics, banks, corporations, religious institutions, universities, the entertainment industry, even organised crime. I believed they were involved in nearly every facet of our life, pretty much but they hadn’t quite achieved global domination… yet…

 

I call it the grand conspiracy because I also believed that most other conspiracy theories played some part in propping up the grand conspiracy. The assassination of JFK, the Oklahoma bombing, 9/11, 7/7, UFO’s, MKUltra, and anything else that sort of comes under the umbrella term of a traditional conspiracy theory.. all of it.. was them.

 

Lastly, I believed that these secret societies were mystery schools or cults which practised black magic and ritual sacrifice. I believed that terror attacks, mass shootings and assassinations were occult rituals, mostly orchestrated through the intelligence services and committed by mind controlled patsies. They did this in order to birth their new world order through black magic.

 

So the question here would be.. How and why did I believe this?

 

But I think it would be useful to tell you a bit about my background before we get into my journey down the rabbit hole. I haven't spoken about my childhood or family in interviews but I’m certain my development and the things that shaped me would be an important part of my story for more people to hear.

 

So here is my story…

 

I was born in Swindon, England. When I was 18 months old my parents divorced and my mum moved us to California where she married my stepfather Ramon. A Tech Sergeant in the US Air Force. He was a Puerto Rican American from the Bronx NY and was a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam war. As a child, I didn’t understand the horrors he went through in the war, but I saw the scars it left on him. He often had night terrors, he drank a lot and would get angry and violent with my mum. I would later come to understand why he turned to alcohol to numb the trauma but not till I was a bit older.

 

Anyway, In the military you get stationed at different bases every few years and when I was four we moved to Frankfurt, Germany. Over the next few years the abuse towards my mother escalated and all ended one night. After a violent attack, he was arrested and discharged from the Military and sent back to America. We were left stranded. In Germany. My parents divorced and mum found a job on the Base as a Civilian Contractor, but as our Military Dependent status was now removed, I was enrolled into a German School. I didn’t know the language but found new friends to help me learn German and I immersed myself in their culture.

 

After four years I was then enrolled back into American School as my mum had married James, my new Stepfather. He was also in the Air Force but the complete opposite to Ramon. A kind and patient man. He was an incredibly stable father figure for me. I remember being frightened during the first Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait. And being a little bit older, I had seen the films about the Vietnam war and my Mum had told me the stories of what Ramon had gone through. I was terrified of James being sent to Iraq. Not only was I worried if he would die there but also.. if he did come home would he come back and be scarred like Ramon? Thankfully neither happened as he was never sent to Iraq. And soon the war was over.

 

I then started High School on the base. That American OTT Spirit was a little bit of a culture shock after being in German School but I integrated where I could. As you've probably seen on tv.. Popularity in high school pretty much revolves around sports, the football team, the Basketball team.. Yada yada yada.. But I wasn’t that sporty and tbf just disliked the whole quarterback/cheerleader scene so I gravitated more to the drama and music crowd.. I wasn’t very good at school. My grades were pretty terrible but just good enough to not be held back. Not that I wasn’t intelligent enough or anything, I just wasn’t interested. School was ridiculously boring to me. What do I need to know this for? Why should I care?? I just wanted to make music. That’s pretty much all I wanted to do since I was a kid.

 

Then halfway through High school, my Stepfather was given orders to be stationed in England. So we packed up and moved to England and I started again. In another High School. And another group of friends. I started a punk band with two other friends. We were terrible. But it was fun while it lasted. We started smoking weed and that eventually got me expelled from High School and barred from the Base. I didn’t finish my education and got myself a job. Isolated again from my friends I met some other musicians in the village and in 1997 we started a band. This one was actually good. We were very popular in Peterborough, the city closest to our village and we toured various venues throughout the country on and off for the next decade.

 

I wanted to tell you all this so you hopefully have a better idea of who I was when I first encountered the rabbit hole.

 

Down, down, down…

 

In 2003.. I was surfing a file sharing application called DC++. One day I was browsing for some documentaries and I found a user with a large folder of videos that had some interesting titles. There were a few 9/11 documentaries in there and I was like yeah, I’ll download this folder.

 

The very first video I watched was called “Millennium 2000”. It was presented by Anthony J. Hilder and Jordan maxwell. This Millenium 2000 video was mainly about how the illuminati and freemasons were the hidden hand in history and had now infiltrated the governments of the world. They showed this through their symbology. I was pretty blown away with what I had heard. I wasn’t completely sold but I hadn’t watched the 9/11 videos yet. Once those were downloaded everything changed. I watched every video in that folder and scribbled away in my notebook every reference that I thought would help expand my understanding of this information. I sent a message to the owner of the folder asking where I could find more and he invited me to a private hub on DC++ where everyone else had similar material. It was a treasure trove of pdf’s and word files of books, mp3s and video of lectures, interviews and audiobooks. In those first few years there were four people specifically whose media I consumed a lot of as they seemed to cover a lot of ground between them.

 

These four were Jordan Maxwell, William Cooper, David Icke and Alex Jones.

 

I read every book, watched every video and listened to every radio appearance I could get a hold of from these guys. It was a literal obsession. 24 hrs a day, 365 days a year.

 

In 2005, I joined the David Icke forum and started to engage with other conspiracy theorists. I was on the forum on the 7th Of July when 52 people were killed by 4 bombs in London. We instantly started from the position of thinking this was a false flag terror attack. A False Flag is when a country attacks itself, while wearing the flag of their enemy so they are seen to be at fault. That morning there was a group of us compiling all the tidbits of information and noting down anything we deemed suspicious and finding inconsistencies in various news outlets. We were doing this because we believed that among the chaos and confusion of an event like this.. The truth leaks out. After the dust settles the Government does a little damage control tells the MSM “The Official Narrative” and then they spin it out to us. Everything that we gathered which didn’t fit that mainstream narrative was then used to poke holes in it and structure an alternative narrative.. The 7/7 Conspiracy theory.

 

That was the first, but not the last time I would contribute more lore to the Conspiracy culture. Around 2008 I left my band to concentrate on going solo. My debut album had 20,000 downloads in the first year and I created a promotional site for other conspiracy theorist musicians. Myself and my ex-partner ran a blog where we were decoding and exposing the secret symbols and hidden rituals of these elite cults. We covered Will & Kate’s Wedding, The Beatification of Pope John Paul II, Osama bin Laden’s Death, The opening and closing ceremonies of The 2012 Olympics and Paralympics and How Glastonbury Festival was an occult ritual including the headline acts. These websites had over 2 million hits. So it would be fair to assume our “research” helped confirm our readers' beliefs.

 

What made you start to question your belief system?

 

Well, at different stages of those 15 years there were always certain things I didn't agree with and thought were distasteful or just plain bigoted but I brushed that off thinking that was just a couple of fringe groups out there latching on to this loose knit community. But these disagreements didn’t make me question my belief in the grand conspiracy. What really got the ball rolling was Sandy Hook. Truthers were spinning this new narrative that the massacre was really a hoax played out by crisis actors and nobody died. And the big influencers like Alex Jones were pushing this narrative. This theory then was recycled for lots of tragic events after that from the Boston marathon bombing to the Pulse nightclub shooting.. that was the first time I really felt a disconnect with the truth movement.

 

From that point, 2012 till around 2015 there was so much wild stuff going up on youtube and being shared on social media that I just found myself disagreeing with so much because it just got.. Ridiculous. You had this crisis actor, hoax narrative then things like Justin Bieber and Eminem are illuminati clones, Mandela effect. Pizzagate and eventually Qanon. Even flat earth started to gain some traction with some of my friends. And one of the weirdest.. Elite Gender Inversion (the theory that almost every famous person is “secretly” the opposite sex and that somehow is a Satanic Cult). Yeah, don’t ask.

 

So if that didn’t pull you out… What did?

 

So now we’re talking between 2015-2018.. from me distancing myself from the online communities till i was completely done.. During those years my interests in politics, religion, society and culture continued to blossom and honestly, the more I learned, the more I found the things I knew were wrong. I started seeing how intricate and chaotic the world was. I started to see how the logistics of this grand conspiracy were just impossible. I just couldn’t make anything fit anymore.

 

Then on the world stage there was quite a lot happening that really didn’t fit with that new world order agenda.. These were the final nails in the coffin. The rise of Qanon and the election of Trump, the United Kingdom voting for Brexit and the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in the labour party.. the Illuminati would never have allowed these things to happen.. ever. My belief was all elections were predetermined and would suit the NWO. A common trope among conspiracists was that "Leaders are selected, not elected".

 

So that was me pretty much done.. And the first thing I did was completely withdraw from these online communities.. I logged off facebook and barely logged back on for 3 years. I just silently walked away from all my friends online and every one I had met through the truth music directory. I didn't talk to anyone about my doubts.. I didn't discuss it with anyone.. I just logged off.

 

But I was still completely fascinated with the world of conspiracies. I wanted to know why I believed them. I wanted to know if any of it was true. So I continued learning about the subjects I enjoyed and started to do research about “conspiracy theories” which has been enlightening. I have discovered a lot about myself from it. And I am happy to say I do not believe in this grand conspiracy myth. I do not believe it exists. I believe I have more than enough evidence to prove to myself.. this myth is itself a hoax.. it is a big lie.

 

Thank you for reading.