Mel Ve: Jumping off the Hoaxtead train?

A couple of weeks ago we received an unprecedented email from Mel Ve, in which she informed us that Angela Power-Disney was parting ways with Mel’s CCN channel over irreconcilable differences. This touched off a bit of a firestorm, as Angela (who never…well, rarely….all right, sometimes, and that’s our final offer) reads this blog, but was all over our coverage of Mel’s letter like flies on shit.

At the time, we wondered why Mel had chosen to write to us to make this announcement. Surely she could have simply done one of her ‘Wax Lyrical’ segments and done the deed there?

Our friends at MKD, though, seem to have nailed it:

They point out that Mel and her husband Biggi have a habit of promoting hoaxes first, and asking questions later: Kevin Annett springs to mind, but Mel and Biggi have also thrown their support behind the Hollie Greig hoax, alleged SRA “survivor” Toos Neijenhuis, and the Swiss Indo monetary scam (which Neelu still clings to, by the way). In each case, their initial enthusiasm is followed by equally enthusiastic disavowal.

Most recently, Mel seems to have dropped off the QEG scam promoted by HoaxGirl…er, HopeGirl…though she has not yet explicitly stated that this is the case. Perhaps she just hasn’t reached the Loud Disavowal stage yet.

On the plus side, Mel isn’t shy about coming clean when she decides to drop her support for her hoax du jour. So at least she admits some of her mistakes, and takes her lumps. But one is tempted to ask: why jump on so many dodgy bandwagons in the first place?

Of course, it’s hard to claim to be an “alt news” type if you don’t latch onto every conspiracy theory or deluded nutter who comes along, and CCN seems to be predicated on the idea that conspiracies are real and what the rest of us sheeple believe is “real” is actually just a constructed reality created to dupe us into complacency. Or something.

So in a way it would make sense to jump aboard without asking too many awkward questions, as Mel did initially with the Hampstead SRA hoax (and Angie, come to that). In the world of conspiritainment, if you don’t come up with new “shows” to feed your followers’ collectively gaping maw, you’re dead in the water.

And for a while, two years ago, Hoaxtead was the latest and greatest on the conspiritainment line-up: it had it all. Pretty children, sexual perversions, good-looking and/or privileged “élites” supposedly getting up to some very nasty business; it was the perfect bit of entertainment for anyone who fancied him or herself an armchair detective.

These days, though, Hoaxtead is box office poison. Those behind it have been exposed for the frauds and charlatans they are. The police have finally begun to take the massive amount of harassment and online abuse seriously; people have been arrested, and others have begun to realise that discretion might very well be the better part of valour. Those who continue to publicly flog this very dead horse are clearly either criminals, mad, or both.

So really, it’s not terribly surprising that Mel would want off the Hoaxtead train.

And really, can you think of a better excuse than Angie? She’s really a most unattractive character, as anyone who must deal with her for longer than five minutes at a time has found out. It makes perfect sense that in ditching Angie, Mel would kill two birds with a single very well-aimed stone.

uh-oh…