OFF TOPIC POST: Get ready to protect yourself from the Brexit Disinformation Wave

I believe we are about to be hit by a Brexit Disinformation Wave of tsunami proportions. It's designed not to persuade but to divide, demoralise and paralyse.

In the UK we're thirty-three days away from sliding into leaving the EU with no plan except how to control our own population once the job losses, shortages of food and medicine and increases in prices start to hit.

This is not an accident or a sign of incompetence, it's what Brexit was designed to do. The foreign billionaires who funded Brexit and the Russian troll factories who weaponised social media in support of it did so in order to create disruption and chaos.

The billionaires get a double benefit of destablising the EU at exactly the point where it was getting organised stopping tax evasion by the wealthiest individual and companies and by acting as Disaster Capitalist who make more profits from unstable and unregulated markets than they do from stable, mature markets.

The Russians benefit by using "soft power" to weaken the EU and undermine NATO as part of their Hybrid War with the west.

I know that may sound like the rantings of the kind of tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist that we're all supposed to laugh at. Yet everything I've said can be checked by information available in the public domain. The challenge is, we've had our faith in publicly available information destroyed because all sources of news have been flooded with fact-free emotion-heavy messages targetted to appeal to our beliefs and pre-conceptions and push us to outcomes like sheep being herded by a sheepdog.

I believe we are about to be hit by a Brexit Disinformation Wave of tsunami proportions. It's designed not to persuade but to divide, demoralise and paralyse.

I think we will see the following beliefs supported.

"No Deal means we stay in the EU because we couldn't agree on leaving terms"

"No Deal means we'll revert to WTO terms and will be able to trade globally without tariffs."

"No Deal saves us money because we don't have to pay the EU a penny."

"No Deal is bad but it's been forced on us the EU. We've withstood aggression from Europe before and we're not afraid to stand alone now."

Test for yourself how many of these statements are believed by the people around you.

None of these statements is true. Most can be easily disproved with a few minutes of research.

No Deal means that we will have left the EU by 29th March but with no agreement on terms of trade or the settling of debt. No Deal is like slipping out of a hotel without paying.

We can't "revert to WTO terms" as we've never been in the WTO. It was invented after we joined the EU to provide a framework for countries to trade on who did not have the support of a large trading block. WTO rules REQUIRE us to set tariffs on all trade. So food imports would have to have a 10% tariff on them, making everything more expensive.

No Deal won't save us money. We may refuse to pay our debts to projects that we already promised to take part in but the price is having no agreement on how trade with the EU, our major trading partner, will work and creating an impression with future trading partners that we don't pay our debts.

The EU does not want No Deal. It will create huge amounts of disruption and uncertainty for the twenty-seven member states. They have consistently offered a wide variety of deals, some of which we have even committed to, but we keep changing our mind. It's as if our government doesn't want to come to a deal.

If these things are untrue, why are they so widely believed?

Because they are being marketed with great skill and strong funding across social media and news outlets and because each message provides some comfort for us which inclines us to want to believe it.

There will be many more message in the next few months. When you receive them, ask three questions: