I tuned in the other day to an excellent webinar titled “Prayer and Pushback” organised by the redoubtable Pat Mesiti. It was a forum for Covid, woke and climate deplorables. A similar event of Pat’s a year ago earned some scrutiny from The Guardian – funded by Bill Gates – and the descriptor, “a beauty parade of anti-vaxxers”. There were some star performers speaking this time. The latest webinar deliberately avoided the usual social media platforms so that it wouldn’t be trolled and forced to use that favoured tactic of Covid and other dissidents, the blotting out of trigger words (like vaccine) that bring the algorithmic censors into play.
Funny old world, now.
One of the star speakers, the equally redoubtable (and very busy) Craig Kelly was talking, ironically, about freedom of speech. He argued with passion that freedom of speech is at the pinnacle of all the freedoms, and is under threat. John Anderson, another warrior for the light, has suggested that freedom of conscience precedes and so out-ranks freedom of speech. Perhaps he is right. Yet …
Covid has proven that the 18C problem pursued so vigorously by liberals in 2015 was merely a sideshow. Important, but not game-changing. Yes, allowing the perpetually offended to get people sacked and their lives destroyed is a travesty. But its capacity to damage the broad citizenry was, and is, very limited. With Covid and the cleverly grasped (engineered?) opportunity for the ruling elites to bury us all in rapidly hardening concrete through turbo-charged censorship, reclaiming freedom of speech has suddenly become far more urgent. As Craig Kelly said, in as many words, Covid rulers lied, dissidents were shut down, and people died. Suicides from lockdown? Cancelled cancer treatments? Patients denied effective Covid treatments? The vaccine injured? Doctors silenced upon threat of deregistration? Kelly and fellow freedom-fighters were cancelled by the Covid class. Pilloried. Sidelined. He was speaking the truth. Yes, free speech matters.
What the recent Twitter files taught us was that prophetic scholars of the administrative state like John Marini in Unmasking the Administrative State (2019) were not speculating idly. Marini’s book tells:
… the critical missed story of the last century of political history: The ascendance of the theory behind and resultant growth of an administrative state that has supplanted limited constitutional government with the tyranny of unbounded anticonstitutional bureaucracy.
Covid has proven the theory.
Ed Dowd has shone a light on the close ties between Big Tech and US State agencies in the era of pandemia. But there is more. As Dowd has pointed out, the US Government’s whole Covid response (and especially the vaccine play) was run by the US security state, to Donald Trump’s eternal shame. Trump still seems to think that Operation Warp Speed was a good idea. Since then, there has been ongoing “deep collaboration” between the State and Big Tech.
The threats to our freedom, then, are now stark, and clear. The unlamented Jacinda Adern said that the State’s version of events is the only “truth”. This has been one of the core strategies of the censoring class. Simply to boldly assert that government has, and should have, the power to define what is the truth.
A second strategy is cultural shaping, undertaken to nudge the population towards compliance, non-interest and ultimately, silence. Make people stupid, or at least, uninformed. Create a climate of fear and then the people will be supine. They will not care remotely that their rights, including freedom of speech, have been taken away. Clever. Some have called it all a psyop.
A third strategy lies in the words used by the elites to describe opinions deemed to be beyond the pale. Cleverly, terms such as “misinformation” and “disinformation” place those so deemed at a disadvantage, as one victim explains.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-not-very-hidden-agenda-of-the-fact-checkers/
The appropriation of hoorah-words is a favourite trick of the censor class. Think “love”, “rainbow” and “pride”. “Fact” is an absolute beauty. Just google anyone who has questioned the Covid narrative, or the Ukraine narrative, or the woke narrative, or the climate emergency narrative. You won’t find what these brave souls actually say. Instead, you will find what the ubiquitous fact checker class has to say (of which, more below). It is mighty helpful to have Big Tech on side.
A fourth strategy is to silence opposition, especially on the internet, where it really counts now.
A fifth is to ridicule dissidents, when silencing hasn’t worked. This has been a favourite, for VicPol cops, useful idiot politicians like Brad Hazzard and paid-up collaborators in the legacy media alike. Anyone remember the slightly deranged musings of Jack the Insider? The lies that were told mattered. When you control the narrative, it is easy to identify enemies of the State. But, just as effective, the silencing of debate has been the Covid State equivalent of playing the Joker in five hundred. When people are starved of good information, they are far more easily manipulated and controlled. Safe and effective? Stay safe? It was a master class in Goebbels level propaganda.
A sixth strategy, again aimed at silencing opposition, is regulator bullying. Mark Steyn’s departure from GB News as a result of Ofcom threats is a case study. Make the dissident (or at least his employer) fear that you may act. You don’t even have to do anything. Just put the fear of God into anyone thinking of having a crack. A preemptive strike that induces what Steyn calls “self-censorship”. Think also of doctors during Covid and the efficient and brutal neo-fascism of the Australian Health Professionals Regulatory Authority.
A seventh strategy is to starve dissidents of the normal channels they have to readers. Disappear them from internet search engines, so no one even knows what they are saying. No need to argue back. No need for ridicule. This is the online equivalent of denying venues to speakers or publishing houses to writers, or threatening venues and publishers who don’t themselves deny the platform.
Finally, we come to the eighth strategy, the “fact checkers”. A recent addition to the cancel culture repertoire. The fact checking class is clearly a global growth industry. Their numbers are growing faster than jet refuellers and prostitutes in Davos. Between them, Google and Facebook employ 40,000 “verifiers”. It has been a truly astonishing development.
And they have captured the commanding heights of the aforementioned search engine optimisation. The new apex of absolute power. This has been a brilliant manoeuvre. The takeover of the world by the fact checker class has occurred in the blink of an eye. We do it because we can! It is a neat reversal of the old fact-value philosophical dilemma. The enlightenment philosopher David Hume suggested we could not derive a value from a fact. But these folks have pulled off a philosophical trick of equally epic proportions. You can derive a fact from a value! Brilliant, really. But all based on a lie.
The Brownstone Institute has published an article titled “Censors use AI to target podcasts” that explores the very latest development in this deep collaboration. It quotes a Brookings Institution report on podcasts:
… conservative podcasters were 11 times more likely than liberal podcasters to share claims fact-checked as false or unsubstantiated.
https://brownstone.org/articles/censors-use-ai-to-target-podcasts/
Which of course gives the game away. They are not checking facts. They are “checking” a particular kind of broadcaster. It is a virtuous circle, as well. We fact check those we wish to discredit. We then “find” that these same people are the most fact-checked (horror). This, then, gives us permission to eliminate them. A great business model. This is the perfect convergence between technology and tyranny. Hence the new war on podcasts (like that of Pat Mesiti), the latest front in the war to track down the dissidents and silence them. The PGGWC (progressive, green, globalist, woke, Covid-mad) class never sleeps.
There is another advantage. The beauty of the term “fact checker” is that it apparently endows the user with ownership of “truth”. A position that is not remotely deserved. And not available to the deplorables. This is very clever. This is ironic for progressivist post-modernists who profess not to believe in “truth”. Shouldn’t the victims of the fact checkers’ forensic attention – all, curiously, purveyors of values alien to those of the fact checker class – be accorded the courtesy of having “their truth”? Apparently not.
It is a little insidious when an alliance between the taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the taxpayer-funded RMIT University team up to hunt down dissidents, then seek to expose them as spreaders of “misinformation”, now considered by the beautiful people to be a crime up there with (gasp) racism.
The fightback against censorship will not be easy. One of the characteristics of the cancelling class, and greatly to its advantage, is the interconnectedness between government, legacy media, academia and Big Tech, their shared ideology and the ability of each to use the resources of the others to stifle debate and maintain an agreed narrative. It is a cancelling cartel, in effect. An integrated, honed operation. There is an impenetrable wall of censorship. This may well mean that dissidents, those who ever dare to challenge the power structures and vested interests of the day, are herded into a ghetto, an echo chamber where we simply talk to each, and no one else. That is a hell of a way to preserve a ruling narrative.
We shouldn’t understate the importance of this takeover by what David Souto Alcalde and Thomas Harrington term the “digital brownshirts”:
We are under siege. A nihilistic fanaticism is running free among us thanks to the emergence of a journalistic “ethos” that establishes an almost complete equivalence between the “truth” and those utterances that support the strategic goals of the great economic and digital powers of our time.
But this isn’t just about two sides having a go at one another in some sort of culture war. Alcalde and Harrington again:
The authoritarianism of the fact-checkers not only cripples science but effectively annuls the very idea of the public sphere by naturalizing the idea that the robust, and at times, conflictual exchange of ideas is in some way perverse.
https://brownstone.org/articles/digital-brownshirts-and-their-masters/
What this amounts to is far more than simply chasing a few renegades from the public square. It is getting rid of the public square itself. Nothing should alarm us more.
Dwight Eisenhower was right about the military industrial complex. Craig Kelly is right now. Freedom of speech is now the front of battle that matters. The people who run the show now have all absorbed Orwell. They have seen that silencing the perceived racist and homophobe offenders with 18C protection is a model with far wider application, one which is now further empowered, with the lethal, silencing capabilities of online censorship. They can come for the refusenik who pushes back against the State and GloboCap. In other words, for you and me.
Paul Collits
25 February 2023
Brilliant and very scary Paul.
I hope that the fact that I tell my neighbour will lead to it's defeat.
On Saturday we marched the City of Adelaide carrying the crosses of the fallen and the stories and names of the vaccine injured which we showed the people in their cars and streets. We called out the fallen's and injured's names and described their stories.
There are other ways to tell neighbours which I do not wish to signal here for reasons that Sun Tzu alludes to in his The Art of War.
The facts are speaking for themselves people are telling me they are no longer being jabbed as they have seen the injuries and death occurring in their near and dear. Also there are just too many jabs to be credible.
People are telling me they are "awake" to Self Monitoring Analytical Reporting Technology so called SMART Cities ideas.
Paul I am hoping and working for the truth of the saying "Nothing can stop the idea whose time has come" and I am reading you and so many others. We are like mushrooms popping up all over the place. We are networking and know others just around the corner like us and we are all used to a level of freedom never achieved before by humans.
Provided I do not just talk to you and there are some that do then I hope and believe they the evil empire will not win.
You do a brilliant job but the information here good as it is does not help my neighbour to wake up as well as relentless focussing on information that will waken them to the reality that they are being, attacked, killed and enslaved.
Fortunately there is much information of this sort around and I will continue to gather it and share it with my neighbour AND pray as never before.
Craig Kelly does not fit the mould of today's society of shiny shoes and suits. He is a true Aussie not a wannabe !
He has more integrity and truth in his little finger than all the suits combined.
If he was an Instagram influencer the country would be falling at his feet. It takes character to stand up like he has.
And talk about brad hazzard........ yes lower case........being a West Aussie I did not know who he was but after my first viewing of him I wanted to put my fist through the screen.
I have said before I am an old lady getting tougher and madder by the day. I am even shocking myself!
When I go to a site and a big notice comes up on my screen from the AFP to say the site I am looking at is not correct, I want to cry.
Having had the privilege of having hindsight by way of age, I see this beautiful country of ours going down the drain. Those without hindsight having nothing to fall back on and so the status quo is their acceptance of whatever they are told. Well you cannot say some of us did not go down fighting. And what a bitter fight it is!