Economic Reality Bites at RCR

It's been a little while since I've checked in on the antics of the Voices for Freedom bunch, but, checking my email I have set up to monitor their comms, and from others who do the same, there's been a bit of activity lately.

Recently Voices for Freedom/Reality Check Radio (and they sure are the same people) have launched a subscription package they're calling the Foundation Members Club. Reality Check Radio is an internet based “radio” platform which features a bunch of presenters, which they claim “is an oasis of rational thought in an age of cancel-culture, censorship and false narratives.” Hardly!

We've wondered how they were being funded. Running a radio station, even an internet-based one requires resources, and presumably the presenters aren't doing it in the long term out of the goodness of their hearts or belief in the cause, and will want to be paid on a regular basis. They're a bit like The Platform, run by Sean Plunket, and we know they're being funded generously by the Wright Family Foundation.

So, Voices For Freedom have recently been promoting their subscription package to their email subscribers. For the low low price of $30/month or $330 for an annual subscription you can sign up. For that you'll get a newsletter every weekday called RCR Bites which lets you “stay up to speed with current events, breaking news, and censored stories in a few minutes a day”.

According to RCR:

“This is a great way to stay on the pulse of what's really going on in New Zealand and abroad without wasting hours wading through ad-riddled, government-funded, legacy media, searching for an ounce of truth.”

Translation - let us put our conspiracy-fueled spin on current events and tell you what you should be thinking!

Laughably they asterisk their weekday promise basically saying if the newsletter doesn't arrive, it's because they're having some well deserved R&R!

You'll also get their RCR Backstage Pass where you can join the RCR hosts in a Zoom meeting on a monthly basis to ask your probing questions.

Finally, you get 20% off their merchandise - though I wouldn't be seen dead in any of their gear… but each to their own!

Anyway, according to the latest Voices for Freedom email, they've had 2,446 people sign up to their launch offer, which gave away the subscriptions at a 50% discount.

They've previously claimed to have hundreds of thousands of supporters, so I guess that under 2,500 people signing up is a bit of a poor turnout. Still, it will give them some revenue - though doing the maths, that's about $36K for the first month, and it will likely drop off over time. Is that enough to run the station on a long term basis? I don't know?

They do seem to be trying to gain traction with the general public. Just the other evening, I saw a bunch of people near the motorway entrance at Westgate in Auckland, with the familiar Voices for Freedom signs, promoting RCR.

In researching this item, I came across an interview that Peter Williams did with Dr Sam Bailey recently. Peter Williams is a former TVNZ presenter who will be familiar to a lot of kiwis. He fell down the rabbit hole when he joined the Magic Talk radio station, giving favourable interviews to conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxer types. He left Magic Talk radio in late 2021, but popped up again on RCR this year.

I've written about Bailey in the past. She's a doctor who was a presenter on a TV show - The Check-Up, funded by NZ on Air. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, in 2020, she began making YouTube videos about Covid 19.

She trained conventionally at Otago medical school and graduated in 2005 and eventually became a GP. But in 2020, after posting videos on YouTube that questioned the science and evidence-based approach to the pandemic, she ended up being kicked off the TV show and went down the anti-vax path. She lost her job at her clinic for promoting misinformation and decided not to renew her practising certificate.

It seems that her YouTube channel was quite popular and she was making a good living off payments from YouTube. But then, YouTube started removing her videos that were promoting Covid misinformation. While she still has a YouTube channel, her main content is now on Odyssee.

Back to the interview, listening to it was pretty mind-boggling! It seems that going “off-grid” has led Bailey down the rabbit hole to some pretty extreme positions. Amongst these are that viruses don't exist, and that germ theory “isn't even a theory, it's a refuted hypothesis”. She's also into the far-right conspiracy mindset, claiming nefarious agendas, and narratives, and that those who question the mainstream are ostracised.

She's now against “allopathy” - which is a term that is used in a derogatory manner, usually by CAM practitioners, to describe conventional medicine, saying that it's controlled by “Big Pharma”. She's against chlorination and fluoridation of water, and also blames glyphosate (a herbicide used in RoundUp). She also claims that all vaccines are toxic.

Back in 2020 she was noted as a co-author on the Virus Mania book, which is a book that denies germ theory and the existence of viruses. Crazy stuff.

It would appear that she and her husband Mark, who was also a doctor, but has now also gone down the same path, make their money from book sales, donations, and video channels.

In surfing their website I came across an amusing blog post where they attack Dr Peter McCullough, another darling of the anti-vax movement, for saying that he's seen imaging of the Covid virus (SARS-CoV-2). According to the Baileys, viruses don't exist!

In the interview Peter Williams comes across as a rube, eating up all the misinformation that Bailey is spouting, but he almost gets it right when he sceptically asks how people got sick with Covid if there's no virus. Apparently it's all down to toxic build-up in the body and cold and flu symptoms are the body's way of detoxifying. And that's all down to unhealthy foods and stress in our lives.

Anyway, what prompted the interview was that the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal is meeting on Monday 14th August to consider her case. She claims that she's likely to be struck off the register, so wouldn't be able to practise medicine in NZ again. Though, given her thoughts now on how “evil” medicine is, it seems unlikely that she would want to anyway.

It's kind of sad to me to see the wasted resources of training up doctors who then go awry, having “done their own research” and come to some crazy non-science-based conclusions then going on to grifting from others to fund their lifestyles.

The latest book from Bailey is called Terrain Therapy: How To Achieve Perfect Health Through Diet, Living Habits & Divine Thinking. But, it's not actually a book by Bailey - it was written by a kiwi surgeon, Dr Ulric Williams, from last century who quit medicine to become a naturopath. It's a rather audacious effort, as far as I can see, in that she's basically re-published Williams' book, repackaging it for the modern era, and writing a foreword. If you're interested, you can find it on Amazon, where the reviews are somewhat amusing.

I'm sure there will be a future article about this in our newsletter! Interestingly, I found an item online from our NZ Skeptics Journal from Michael Edmonds, reviewing our 2012 conference. He was mentioned in a talk by David Veart on the history of fad diets in NZ. Michael had this to say:

One part of the talk that was very interesting to me personally was that of Ulric Williams, a medical doctor in my home town of Wanganui, who pushed the eating of non-processed food (generally good) as well as an anti-vaccine agenda (quite bad) which resulted in Wanganui having one of the highest levels of polio in the early 20th century.

Interesting, to say the least!