If you get your news from the likes of the BBC and the Guardian, billing themselves as bastions of liberal progressivism, you might be forgiven for knowing little about the biggest anti-establishment protest in London since the massive February 2003 demonstration against the invasion of Iraq. No doubt, if such a large anti-government protest had taken place in Minsk or Moscow, this would have been headline news. You may have just heard that a few thousand demented antivaxxers staged a super-spreader event, undermining our collective struggle against the virus, and attacked brave police officers whose sole mission was to protect public safety.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of thousands of people travelled from all over the UK to stand up for basic civil liberties, scientific truth and humanity as we have known it for countless generations. I feel guilty only because I could not take time off to join the crowds. Many ethical issues may divide us, but the prospect of a permanent bio-security state should horrify anyone concerned about society’s steady drift towards a technocratic dystopia.
Luckily, the event was livestreamed on alternative media. Unlike other large gatherings in the English capital over the years, the mainstream media did not publicise it at all, in stark contrast with the mass-marketed pro-EU and anti-Trump demos. Despite coronavirus restrictions last year, the venerable BBC gave favourable live coverage of the much smaller Black Lives Matter protests. They downplayed the scale of violence against police who had earlier taken the knee, while completely ignoring regular episodes of police violence against peaceful anti-lockdown protesters. The only minor skirmishes at yesterday’s demonstration occurred after the police attempted to break up crowds of youngsters playing live music in Hyde Park. The police were massively outnumbered and unwisely attempted a baton charge against hundreds of fit young men and women, who did little more than hurl food scraps at retreating officers. I feel sorry for the police forced to wear face nappies on a sunny day and enforce scientifically flawed public safety measures detrimental to people’s emotional and physical health.
Ministries of Truth
As my week-long Twitter suspension neared its end, I checked reactions to yesterday’s events. Two stood out. One from BBC’s notorious Marianna Spring would not look out of place in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, effectively denouncing hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people as dangerous conspiracy theorists intent on undermining the UK’s glorious mass vaccination campaign.
We may note Ms Spring’s obsession with the QAnon phenomenon and her constant reference to false claims. The adjective false is meaningless unless you can refute an assertion you claim is false. Just because the government and the BBC’s corporate partners such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation claim that an assertion is false does not make it true. Tony Blair dismissed any suggestion that his government supported the occupation of Iraq to retain control of the oil supply as wild conjecture you may read on the Internet, which was still in its infancy back in 2003. Subsequent events proved the so-called conspiracy theorists right, although keeping the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency also played a role. Caitlin Johnstone and Wikileaks have exposed how the QAnon movement was most likely a CIA-driven pied piper operation, focusing on claims that Trump had someone code-named Q embedded in the Deep State to expose the cabal’s widespread ritual satanic sexual abuse. Back in the real world, Trump not only appointed war hawks to the highest levels of his administration, but he also collaborated with the biotech industrial complex in the roll-out of experimental mRNA injections going so far as to claim credit for Operation Warp Speed. However, most disturbingly Marianna Spring has lent her rhetorical weight to calls for the censorship of any means of communication that big corporations cannot control. She disparagingly refers to Telegram as an encrypted channel that facilitates conspiracy theories. Both Labour and Tory politicians have already called on the government to take tougher action against vaccine misinformation. Yet even the government’s own Yellow Card reporting system has detailed over 160,000 serious adverse reactions as of 14th April 2021 and admits elsewhere this accounts for fewer than 10% of actual adverse events. We do not know how many of the excess deaths of frail nursing home residents in January and February this year, assigned to covid-19 were expedited by adverse reactions to the Astra Zeneca or Pfizer injections. However, testimonials by nurses and carers would suggest much higher numbers than those revealed in the Yellow Card reporting system.
Another message retweeted by the NHA Party (who amazingly still follows me) accuses protesters of antisemitism because they likened the prospect of medical apartheid via vaccine passports with the plight of Jews forced to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany. If Christine Williams had done her homework, she would know mainly Jewish protesters in Tel Aviv made the same comparison. Are they antisemitic too? More important many prominent scientists, such as Dr Mike Yeadon and Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, have warned us of the prospect of death on an unprecedented scale as corporate forces take full control of every aspect of our private lives and are busy building a new urban landscape clearly designed for fewer people. All the warning signs are there, discrimination, dehumanisation and polarisation.
Manufacturing Reality
Well-funded fact-checkers, as promoted by the mainstream media, academia and establishment politicians, employ a simple modus operandi. They focus on a few obvious falsehoods, which may have enjoyed some limited currency in the alternative media space, while either dismissing or ignoring the big questions. Once they have impressed the gullible with their cogent debunking of a claim of little consequence (e.g. do facemasks contain worms?), they proceed to cite peer-reviewed research favourable to the interests of their corporate funders. Very occasionally, fact-checkers will try to win public trust by highlighting a few cases of genuine corporate malfeasance or political corruption, but usually only to distract us from larger crimes or to discredit outmoded practices or expendable politicians.
Free speech, as in intellectual freedom, logically lets anyone make any claims about current and historical events. Many conscientious political activists may make claims based on limited knowledge or second-hand sources. Few of us can employ researchers to verify each claim we make. However, we can report what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears. Once we go down the road of subjecting all pronouncements to moderation by official experts or artificial intelligence, we will have no way to verify if the official experts are lying.