Anecdotes of the harms of the last two years are palpable but ignored. Patients complain of symptoms their doctors won’t acknowledge. Citizens tell stories the media ignores. Family members try to open dialogue only to be shut down. The stories are told but, for the most part, they aren’t being heard.
Newspapers, television, internet sites and social media have become merely instruments of manipulation at the service of elite interests. We have seen Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and other commercial information companies which started out a mere decade or two ago with promises of independence and open media, end up as our censors in the past two years, enthusiastically adding their contributions to the long and bleak history of totalitarian deletions.
Branding a video description or a tweet as “misinformation” because contains condensed and generalised information, with a more detailed discussion in what follows, has nothing to do with checking facts. It’s just about creating strawmen, especially when the “fact-checker” even distorts the quoted headline to make it fit her narrative.
The harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported at the time they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of mass deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty, hunger, and starvation.
I am truly grateful for all that John Pilger and his companions in the leftist propaganda dissection cadres have taught me over the years. But as Ortega y Gasset said, a public intellectual is only as good as his ability to remain at the “height of his times.” Sadly, this group of otherwise talented individuals has failed this test, badly, over the last two-plus years.
Or I could ask, for example, how it is that the number of deaths per million in that terrible and irresponsible country called Sweden, where there were no generalized lockdowns and no mandatory masking, are less than in Spain with its rather strict confinement regime? Or about the fact that in the US many states without lockdowns and without the mandatory public masking (e.g. Florida, Georgia and now Texas) have the same or better results in cases and deaths than several states (California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts) with much stricter “mitigation” regimes?
By simultaneously threatening both the federal bureaucracy and social media companies, a handful of high-level officials could effectively transform the federal government into a sprawling censorship army reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards, silencing any opposition to tin-pot public health policies with increasing detachment and certitude as this systematic silencing falsely convinced them that the regime’s policies were just and good.
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