The Information Wars, Covid and the Media’s Useful Idiots
Daniel Andrews declared from on high that, without further ado and with neither explanation nor apology, that “Covid exceptionalism” was over. Scotty from AstraZeneca said that “we have moved on”. But, apparently, the Covid info-wars are not over. Just as those who were personally injured by Covid policies, or simply found them to be abominable, still seek some form of justice, or even a modicum of accountability, there are others, up to their ears in defence of the Covid State at the time, who are still at it. Like the remote, escaped Japanese war prisoners on lonely Pacific Islands who didn’t realise the war was over, and that they had lost, there are those stalwart scribblers in the legacy press who are still fighting yesterday’s war. They don’t realise that the Covid vaccines never worked, and that everyone bar them now knows this. With some of the narrative-clingers, it is still unacknowledged publicly but it is known deep down. They know they were conned.
The Covid stalwarts don’t realise that the science is in on masks. That the jurisdictions that locked everyone down fared no better than those that did not. That, despite all the cover-ups, the truth tellers outside the Big Pharma-funded for whom these scribblers work have clearly established that the vaccines were never safe nor effective, nor necessary. That exposure to vaccine harm increases with every extra booster. That the global economic collapse is the direct and inevitable outcome of the policies they cheered on. That the hastily built Covid quarantine camps were billion dollar wastes of money. That the release of the State Premier inner-fascists was built on nothing. That the harms to our social fabric are lasting. That they themselves are active participants in the ongoing cover-ups. That they own employers were bought up by global drug cartels, as the actor Woody Harrelson so accurately described them.
There is, now, a co-opted journalist class. James Delingpole recently lamented, with Mark Steyn, that a whole generation of former colleagues, simply ran from the building. There has been the normalisation of vaccine deaths, the ignoring of sudden death syndrome among the young, among the sportsmen, among pilots, among doctors, an ignoring of the plight of the vaccine-injured, and an ignoring of the fact that governments everywhere are ignoring the plight of the vaccine injured. A French doctor explained to Steyn why so many younger people were dying of heart attacks following the jab. The doctor thought that Pfizer shots acted as a myocarditis “accelerant”.
For Steyn, media management has simply been bought, through advertising (the only place now where they make money), by Big Government and Big Pharma. Simple as. For working journalists, it is more a case of cowardice. Or, perhaps, in some cases, simple ignorance.
Then there is Ramesh Thakur, writing for The Brownstone Institute:
They will have to build a new circle of hell to accommodate all the perpetrators of evil let loose upon the world since 2020.
A mistake is when you spill coffee or take the wrong exit ramp off the highway. Lockdown was a policy pushed hard by politicians and health chiefs even against scientific dissent and substantial public opposition, using tools from every tyrants’ playbook of disinformation and lies whilst attacking and censoring truth. The depth of public opposition went unrecognized because the fear-peddling media colluded in not reporting on protests.
Genuine mistakes were few and are forgivable. Most were deliberate distortions of reality, outright falsehoods, and a systematic campaign to terrorize people into compliance with arbitrary diktats interspersed with efforts to vilify, silence, and cancel all critics by using the full powers of the state to co-opt, bribe, and bully. All in pursuit of the most maddening public policy insanity of modern times because it ignored existing canons of pandemic planning in blind panic just when calm was most needed. To call lockdown a mistake is to trivialize the shock to society (my emphasis).
https://dailyclout.io/conspiracy-theories-become-conspiracy-facts/
“The fear peddling middling colluded”. The paid-up, bought-off media didn’t even admit that mistakes were made, let alone crimes committed.
Which brings us (neatly) to The Australian’s columnist, Angela Shanahan. Her latest effort, about the Victorian Government’s Covid policies, was headlined:
Hold a Covid pandemic inquiry, but leave politics out of it.
Sub-headed:
If the public had really opposed Dan Andrews’ response to Covid, his government would have been thrown out.
Jeffrey Tucker writes of lockdown defenders:
… it is hard to find public intellectuals or health officials today who defend it at all, especially in light of the catastrophic consequences and no obvious advantage. For sure, there are those who still have every intention to do it all over again, such as the WHO. The absence of apologies is conspicuous. Still, it’s hard to find a fan of lockdowns these days willing to stick their necks out (my emphasis).
https://brownstone.org/articles/was-trump-tricked-into-lockdown-or-not/
Well, Angela Shanahan is willing to stick her neck right out. And she doesn’t even concede “mistakes”, let alone crimes.
The context of Shanahan’s almost literally unbelievable intervention is the revelation that Daniel Andrews hired mate-consultants (Qdos) to focus-group his Covid thuggery, just as, in Britain, all the WhatsApp messages of the then Health Secretary and other senior Government officials were revealed in their hideousness.
And also, there was The Australian’s own editorial:
“Were millions of Victorians subjected to one of the world’s most extreme Covid-19 lockdowns for health reasons or for the political expediency of Premier Daniel Andrews?”
The convenience of the Victorian election result for Shanahan is that, in the midst of the lockdowns, she was one of Andrews’ staunchest defenders. She wasn’t alone in the media, of course. At one point in 2020, The Sydney Morning Herald published a series of encomia under the heading:
Cometh the hour, cometh the Dan - our lockdown hero.
There was quite a bit of it about. A recent British YouGov poll showed that a sizable chunk of the population STILL thinks the lockdowns weren’t tough enough. Add to these, those who STILL think the lockdowns were “just about right” and you have a sizable majority. No, Shanahan was not alone. Never mind the lockdown science – they are useless for stopping the spread, and massively harmful to society – and never mind the data that have emerged since the Covid fear campaign was (very quietly) declared to be over, that jurisdictions that were totalitarian in their approach to Covid had as little impact on outcomes as the jurisdictions that were relatively free. Many are sticking to their guns, and still fighting the last war.
Shanahan seems to be saying, so, I was right, then! The election result proves it. To which there are two responses. The first is that the election was about many things, including the useless Liberal Opposition, the absence of a real choice, the massively PGGWC electorate (progressive, green, globalist, woke, Covid), and not just the plandemic.
The second is that it is clear, Shanahan clearly doesn’t recall, or never knew, that Hitler’s (public approval) numbers were still in the nineties at the end of the 1930s. The Third Reich was massively popular. Fascism sells. People wish to be told what to do.
The Americans just couldn’t get over how supine Australia was. For them, it was head-scratching territory. Arthur Chrenkoff was onto this welcoming of Covid totalitarianism back in 2021, at The City Journal.
No Liberty? No Problem
Australians shrug at their government’s draconian pandemic response.
He wrote:
To those half-jokingly tweeting about invading and liberating Australia, I have some bad news: Australia does not want to be liberated. Strong majorities support the harsh measures. Several state elections over this time have seen incumbents comfortably reelected on platforms of acting tough against Covid, amid messaging that those advocating a lighter touch want to kill your grandma. In Victoria, where the left-wing Labor government has been by far the harshest and most trigger-happy—Melbourne has been under “hard” lockdown for more than 200 days so far—polling suggests only a small dip in support, not nearly enough to unseat the administration. The consensus can be distilled into the following: Look at the rest of the world! Our government has kept us safe so far. We can’t allow what has happened in the United States or Europe to happen here.
A powerful coalition of those with the most to lose and those who have not lost anything is driving the official “zero Covid” fantasy. The media has piled on, helping the government to terrify the population. The Fauci Syndrome is strong in Australia, too: health experts and bureaucrats have tasted unprecedented fame, power, and influence, and continue to be among the main drivers of the most ridiculous restrictions. The ever-growing section of society directly or indirectly dependent on taxpayers for its livelihood has been well care for during Covid-related upheavals. Those most at risk of death or serious complications remain strongly supportive of government “protecting” them from the virus. And the so-called laptop class also hasn’t had a bad pandemic, with many enjoying being able to work from home.
https://www.city-journal.org/australias-crazy-covid-response
Indeed. We were that ill-informed then, and, apparently from the evidence of Shanahan, still are. Mass surveillance? Not a problem. Queues around the block for useless Covid PCR tests? Where do I sign? Curfews? Yep. Closed off children’s playgrounds? You bet. We had the curtain twitcher class of whom East Germany’s Erich Honecher and the Stasi would have been proud. (As Anna Funder’s 2002 award winning book, Stasiland, would attest).
As Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World:
… most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
Of course, the willingness of Victorians (especially, but not only them) to bow to Covid fascism was precisely because they were nudged into fear by political and pharmaceutical lies. By propaganda on a scale that would have done justice to Goebbels’ efforts. By every tactic in the book. By the very actions that were, no doubt, recommended by Qdos and all the nudge units now employed by most governments. The humble Victorians were victims of “mass formation”, of hypnotism. Of a giant psyop. All of this has passed Shanahan by. She hasn’t scratched the surface of Covid manipulation. Or if she has thought about it, she doesn’t care that it happened and that it had consequences. Someone should send Shanahan a copy of Laura Dodsworth’s 2021 book, A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The conclusion that Daniel Andrews won the Victorian election – as just about everyone knew he would – because his approach to Covid was correct is facile and entirely beside the point. The bigger question is (of course), was Andrews right to do what he did? And were all the others who followed him to a greater or lesser extent also right? Labor also won resounding victories in Western Australia and Queensland, after all. Morrison, also a Covid fascist, lost.
Shanahan inevitably wheels in an expert.
According to respected epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws of the University of NSW, “Victoria was way beyond the numbers where they could safely ease restrictions.”
The media trotted out many tame academics during the time of Covid, academics who went along with the Big Pharma narrative that, in effect, was overturning half a century of World Health Organisation supported “settled science” on the utility of lockdowns in fighting respiratory infections. All these academics contributed to a false sense of consensus and thereby cause public policy harm. Two points about McLaws. Respected by whom? And her claim here is rubbish. We have proof positive that the “experts”, whether academic or bureaucratic, are very often wrong (at best), and evil at worst. Just look at Anthony Fauci. As Seth Smith notes:
The most egregious recent example of this worship and the power of the 21st century technocrat is embodied by the former Director of NIAID, Anthony Fauci, who was the public face of the disastrous Covid response for nearly three full years. The myopic reverence for this man is dangerous on many levels, but it also showcases a grave weakness of modern humanity; many of us will give up even the most basic freedoms because we blindly trust a technocratic “savior” who just may have all the wrong data or simply be a mendacious, cunning bureaucrat.
https://brownstone.org/articles/five-lessons-from-three-years-of-authoritarianism/
Wheeling in an expert in a debate over Covid proves nothing. One thinks of Dracula and blood banks.
The legendary Mike Yeadon has opined on the work of supine journalists and their incentives:
I’ve been sceptical all my life about a category of people dubbed conspiracy theorists. It’s literally never made any sense to me. The motives ascribed to such people simply aren’t realistic. You don’t make much money from being a conspiracy theorist. The costs on such a person are large, no question (don’t ask me how I know).
In contrast, you can make pots of money being an official liar or a helpful “journalist”. I can see their motives from space.
I am not sure how much money Angela Shanahan makes. I suspect it is not all that much. Unlike Sir Richard Rich, who sold his soul for Wales, or Dominic Perrottet, who sold his soul for the New South version, I don’t believe Shanahan has sold her soul to Bill Gates or to Alex Bourla. I think she simply doesn’t understand the world, or how it works. That means we are in the territory of the useful idiot. She seems simply to be wallowing around, cluelessly, in the shallows. And, of course, Shanahan does work for the Murdoch press. For The Daily Vaccinator. She is not an outlier.
Obviously, there should be an inquiry into Covid policy. The heroic British MP Andrew Bridgen has stated:
By the end of the month I expect to see the start of criminal proceedings against the many politicians and officials who are responsible around the world.
We can live in hope. Shanahan limply concludes her whitewash of Andrews as follows:
The connection between politics, public opinion and health management in a pandemic is a given. There is no way in a well-run democracy that they can’t intersect. There will be more pandemics, so an inquiry would be welcome. Bennett [Professor Catherine, another academic “expert”] suggests we need a nationwide assessment of the actions of each health department and nation-level data sharing for future broadbased decision-making. She is right.
Broadbased decision-making? Really, Shanahan isn’t remotely on the page of where we need to be with Covid inquiries. Try a royal commission with sweeping powers. A Nuremberg Two. Governments thought that the actions of a few dozen paedophile priests decades ago were a sufficient problem to warrant a half billion-dollar RC. Try the destruction of a nation, of people’s lives, of the social fabric of communities, of the careers of the non-jabbed, of the health (and, in some cases, the lives) of the forcibly jabbed and vaccine injured. Then there are the lockdown suicides, the deaths of those not permitted by the authorities to access proven-to-be-effective Covid treatments, the record numbers of unexplained excess deaths, the collapse in teenage mental health, the lost years of our children’s education, all the cancer diagnoses missed, the lonely deaths of those not permitted end-of-life company of family, the faith and the souls lost because churches blissfully complied and shut themselves down.
I think we need a little more than national-level data sharing, Ms Shanahan and Professor Bennett. With great respect.
Meanwhile, the Covid information wars grind on, perpetrated and prosecuted by those who will never admit they were hopelessly wrong, by those with a stake in planning the next “pandemic”, by the embarrassed-and-vaccinated, by the still-cringing medical profession, by the Pharma class that now must be dreading law suits from the injured, by the decision-makers equally fearful of justice, and by the vaccinator-media. The useful idiots play their part.
But we shouldn’t just be blaming the Shanahans of the bought-up corporate media. There are many who are still sitting out the greatest policy scandal in our history. Staying totally schtum. Here is James Alexander, who writes (borrowing the title from Bill Rice of The Brownstone Institute):
Where Are the Woodward and Bernsteins of the Pandemic?
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/03/12/where-are-the-woodward-and-bernsteins-of-the-pandemic/
Certainly not at The Australian. The fact that few, if any, journalists even use the word Covidgate is telling. We are now in the era of privately owned media being state propagandists, and the era of media organisations joining in the war of the state against the people. As active participants. Mark Steyn – who should know, having been cancelled himself – calls it the “death of media”. An astonishing development and one of the defining events of our age. Second-rate journalists and columnists who defend state narratives are mere foot soldiers in the war to control what people are allowed to read and, therefore, to think.
Paul Collits
15 March 2023
They’ll all defend it to their death. Too much sunk cost. People like McLaws are the worst sort of self-interested charlatan, but have been a protected species for 3 years. I am a highly experienced, senior medical practitioner, a pathologist with a deep understanding of disease and disease process. Science and medicine are dead until there is a reckoning and renaissance, they have been perverted beyond recognition. I still have concussion from banging my head against walls by writing to newspapers (of all leanings), federal and state politicians, professional bodies and public servants. No reply, not one. Nothing sent to a newspaper was published apart from the odd ‘comment’, usually toned down. No challenge of any approved narrative was tolerated. But ‘The Experts’ like McLaws, we’re wheeled out repeatedly to deliver their ghoulish reading of the tea leaves, over and over. It’s all an unmitigated disgrace. I agree with Ramesh Thakur, who has been one of a few shining lights in this fog of authoritarian, unscientific nonsense; genuine mistakes are forgivable, but the vast majority of this was driven, ruthless and lethal. The only way they were able to perpetrate it was with the cooperation of the useful idiots in the media. People should serve time for this.
So true. I gave up on the Oz. They were hopeless mostly and still are on the covid nonsense. Steve Waterston was an exception. The journalist you mention-I just stopped reading her.