Free speech and a free press are key to a free – and therefore prosperous – society. But we don’t have them now. The result is mutual misunderstanding and popular mistrust.
A big problem is the gulf that separates increasingly polarized groups in society. The establishment is increasingly Marxist, woke and globalist. It pushes propaganda in the Mainstream (MSM) or ‘Legacy’ media. By manipulating public opinion, a handful of global media companies have demonised political dissent. The dissidents targeted include conservatives and republicans in the US, and populists and sovereigntists abroad. The focus of the establishment effort centres on the Triad of Trump, Brexit/Farage and Putin.
This is because, behind the apparently ‘caring’ Woke agenda, there is a coterie of wealthy old white men in large corporations, banks and permanent bureaucracies who are afraid that the ‘deplorables’, in Hillary Clinton’s words, are slipping out of their control. Perhaps they are not ‘on the right side of history’ anymore? Hence, the WEF’s Great Reset. Trump’s victory and the Brexit referendum, both in 2016, and Putin’s defiance of Western meddling in Syria and Ukraine created the current hysterical globalist reaction.
‘Covid’ and ‘Climate’ narratives have been introduced or ramped up to terrify people, or as Matt Hancock said in his WhatsApp texts ‘scare the pants off them’. And fear justifies a police state. Since such narratives are substantially devoid of a basis in truth, a hugely expensive, relentless effort of propaganda is required to keep them from crashing to earth.
Which has led to today’s extraordinary situation. It has become practically impossible to have a reasoned conversation on any of these topics with the other half, at least, of the population. Those clinging to their faith in ‘the system’ will be simply unaware of key facts and events. They cannot learn about them from their trusted sources. Instead, one meets a strange hysteria, as though Putin, Farage or Trump were the Devil incarnate.
Enter Dr Naomi Wolf. She is a well-known commentator who has done excellent work on the pandemic. Visitors to her site can read, for example, about the unprecedented fall in birth rates in most European countries last year – down 8% in Germany and 12% in Britain. Presumably it is largely due to the jabs. The MSM has generally not reported this, naturally. Officialdom is still hoping to avoid public discussion of the whole ghastly mess.
Nevertheless, Dr Wolf is no libertarian but rather, it seems from what follows, generally a believer in the truth and trustworthiness of the MSM and established political parties.
What finally changed this was Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s stripping away the establishment narrative about the 6th January 2021 ‘insurrection’ when members of the public entered the Capitol. The Democrats running the federal government imprisoned many of the demonstrators, often in isolation and without charge. It has been done in the service of a narrative that the demon Donald Trump promoted an insurrection which resulted in the death of five police officers.
Now we have thousands of hours of surveillance camera tapes. These show one of the officers allegedly killed that day calmly escorting and guiding the visitors. Indeed, he led a strangely garbed shaman to pride of place for getting photographed. The Democrats are unable to name any dead officers. It is perfectly clear that they withheld the tapes to enable an anti-Trump supporters witch hunt. The only person definitely killed on 6th January was an apparently innocent demonstrator shot by a Capitol policeman (he was promoted).
Dr Wolf discusses January 6th in useful detail and then lists other lies foisted on her by people she trusted, including the Russia Gate hoax that Trump was a Russian agent. Then she eloquently, and winningly, apologises to Conservatives and Republicans for being misled into wrongly believing them to be bad people.
I would like to think that small-state and no-state libertarians, voluntarists etc. like me are also covered by the apology, as we have done a disproportionate share of the work of providing alternative sources of information and ideas. This is the link:
The question arises; what is going on inside MSM newspaper and broadcasting offices to enable such a rigid adherence to what is clearly little more than a paid propagandist role? Well, a big incentive is not to irritate advertisers, including Big Pharma and government agencies in cahoots with these or other commercial interests. In a concentrated MSM industry in long-term decline, it is clear that dissent is likely to lead to unemployment.
If you have a car journey in prospect, I attach below a link to a Tom Woods interview episode about the press and the pressure to comply and lower journalistic standards:
The pre-planned censorship regime in place at the beginning of the pandemic gave free reign to a global attempt to rein in and suppress independent voices, and indeed thought. Particularly hard hit were people whose businesses or practices were threatened.
People who proffer the establishment line genuinely have no inkling that their point of view has been promoted at the cost of censorship and many ruined careers, businesses and lives.
To give well-meaning supporters of the establishment some inkling of what has been done to deter free speech and therefore thought, I attach a link to an article by Dr Mercola about his treatment when he had the temerity to suggest an alternative view of the pandemic:
Lastly there is a post from the redoutable Martin Armstrong discussing the globalist ‘Trusted News Initiative’ intended to make sure only the establishment version of events is heard: