For more than three years, there have been burning questions about Trump’s role and precisely why this hell was visited upon us. It will undoubtedly be studied for years. More frustrating still has been the general unwillingness even to ask questions of the great/evil man who Republicans cheer and Democrats loathe.
As a journalist, I cannot say much more than the best available facts suggest, but as has been clear for far too long, the mRNA vaccines were not beneficial and safe on a population-level for young, healthy men — yet the CDC and FDA didn’t care. Hopefully, “pro-vaccine publication[s]” may recognize the harm they helped perpetuate.
The only hope is that this ugly, complicated and regressive piece of legislation ends up before a judge who understands that freedom of expression means nothing if held hostage to the views of the European Commission on pandemic-preparedness, the Russia-Ukraine war, or what counts as “offensive” or “hateful” speech.
For “fact-checking” to have any legitimacy whatsoever, it needs to ditch rating the crazies. It also should start each week with releasing a list of 20 items, check each of those, and then write about all of them, true or false. At the very least, the public would know the fact-checkers aren’t hiding facts they don’t like.
The lesson of the muted response to COVID from the so-called right is that clearly things have not gotten bad enough. The sad and terrifying thing is that whatever they must throw at us to elicit a righteous and unified policy response will now have to be so devastating that we will likely never have the political ability to fight it even if we wanted to. Meanwhile, the vanity and political circus will continue unabated.
It’s a very strange time in American political history, no doubt. We have one line of thinking sweeping through the population – which is based on mass incredulity and fury – and then another which is a veneer of normalcy that is slathered on top of our anger by all official institutions, which work hard to keep all these topics out of respectable conversations. Meanwhile, the whole of academic, mainstream social media, major mainstream media, and all of government seems to agree that all these obvious topics are too incendiary to be raised in polite company.
To compound this any expert or publication that dared raise a challenge would be investigated by fact-checkers and predictably labeled as misinformation and subsequently censored. Everyday citizens, on the receiving end of this distorted information machine, were left without any previously respected outlet for any well-founded skepticism. A few spoke out and were virtually ostracized from mainstream society. Many others saw the writing on the wall and, wishing to maintain their relationships and avoid uncomfortable situations, kept their opinions to themselves.
There are a whole host of questions about those fateful days leading to lockdowns. We are not getting answers because no one is asking the questions. All the people who are in a position to end the silence have a strong interest in perpetuating it for as long as possible, in hopes that mass amnesia takes hold and grants them all amnesty.
History tells us that censorship regimes never end well, though it may take a generation for the deadliest consequences to play out. The draft legislation is now under review following a period of public consultation. Hopefully, the Australian Government will take the historical lesson and steer Australia off this treacherous path.
The entire censorship operation was an effort to protect the organizations that were spreading false and misleading information. The entire operation was/is a massive and coordinated disinformation project conceived and executed by at least 50 organizations that comprise the Censorship Industrial Complex – the most important players in this Complex being the U.S. government and social media companies that have billions of followers.
If there were any remaining doubts about the federal government’s censorship activities, this new evidence should settle every question. During the Covid years, the government effectively nationalized all the main social media portals and converted them to become propaganda vehicles for bureaucrats while demoting or completely blocking contrary views. There is simply no way this practice can survive serious juridical scrutiny.
Do not underestimate Tucker’s influence on all of this. The lockdowns – the wrecking of American liberty – certainly needed bipartisan and broad ideological support. If this became a left-right issue, it simply could not work. Therefore someone or something believed it was extremely important that Tucker needed to be convinced. And it worked.
