A dangerous conspiracy theorist
The Herald reports:
The man today sentenced to three years in prison on New Zealand’s first-ever charges of sabotage was motivated by one purpose; causing as much disruption as he could in an effort to draw attention to his cause.
That cause was a catalogue of fanatical conspiracies surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic and the roll-out of vaccines.
His conviction in his beliefs saw him turn into an almost fulltime campaigner. He had hundreds of followers online, with his postings garnering significant traction within Aotearoa’s conspiracy and “doomsday prepper” circles.
We can now reveal, what many knew, that he tried to bring down part of the national electricity grid. Sabotage was the appropriate charge, as is a jail sentence.
If he had succeeded, he may have killed scores of people, and done tens of millions of damage to families and businesses.
According to one of Philip’s many books, his childhood was marred with abuse and fear. His father, a steel-fabricator he described as a “schizophrenic communist”, emotionally manipulated Philip and his brother David, he wrote, referring to them both exclusively as his “little swines”.
Sounds terrible.
In 1988, his brother David was tried after being alleged to have killed Kyung Eup Lee, a South Korean fisherman, at the Melbourne Railway Station. He was sprung after a letter he wrote saying he had “done in a Korean” was intercepted by New Zealand authorities.
Philip, still in London, flew to Melbourne weeks later to visit his brother.
He arrived to discover it had been alleged David also cooked the man’s body parts in a wok and displayed Lee’s severed penis in the station’s female bathrooms.
Not a healthy family.
In late November, he began to undertake his own attacks. While the details of those attacks remain subject to strict suppression orders, today those orders were relaxed slightly, allowing media to report it was Transpower infrastructure that had been targeted.
The only other facts that can now also be reported are that the offending caused $1.25 million in damage and one of the acts led to a fire.
A lot of people don’t like the Government’s response t Covid-19. But most of them don’t take the law into their onw hand, let alone decide to try and bring down the electricity grid.