Category Archives: Media

Lockdown and the price of suppressing dissent

In times of crisis, we need more debate – not less

Article by Fraser Myers

Excerpts:

This week, we learned that this shushing of debate and silencing of questions went right to the top of government. Speaking to the Spectator, former chancellor Rishi Sunak claims that even he was unable to get a hearing for his concerns about lockdown.

An omerta on lockdown harms was quickly established in the spring of 2020. Ministers were told not to talk publicly about potential trade-offs. According to Sunak: ‘The script was, oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.’

[…]

Although there was an apparent consensus in SAGE in favour of lockdown, Sunak says this isn’t the whole truth. When difficult questions or disagreements were raised in the scientists’ meetings, these were simply edited out of the minutes before they reached ministers. Dissent was excised. It is only because Sunak had a Treasury official listen in to the SAGE calls that he knew there was often a great deal of disagreement and uncertainty among the scientists.

[…]

Many opponents of lockdown suspected that SAGE was being overly alarmist throughout the pandemic, and this was confirmed beyond any doubt in December 2021, when the government defied SAGE’s recommendations and refused to implement new restrictions. A predicted bloodbath of 6,000 deaths per day simply did not materialise.

Throughout the pandemic, the government and the scientists tried to hide their uncertainty. The media demonised dissenters and Big Tech cracked down on them. All of this was apparently to the end of showing a unified front, preserving the integrity of science and pushing a singular, easy-to-follow public-health message. We were essentially told that in times of crisis it is better to put up and shut up than to undermine the authorities.

But look where that has got us. An economic crisis, a health-service crisis and an education crisis are now engulfing the nation – all of which were, at least in part, fuelled by lockdown. We are standing in the smouldering wreckage of our elites’ terrible decisions. We have paid a heavy price indeed for suppressing debate and dissent.

Why eco-alarmists are wrong about almost everything

The Great Barrier Reef is not dying, and the world is not coming to an end.

Article by Brendan O’Neill.

Excerpts:

The ‘somewhat surprising’ news about the reef’s good health – as one newspaper diplomatically describes it – is a very serious blow to the apocalyptic scaremongering of the eco-elites. 

[…]

Eco-alarmists aren’t only wrong about the death of Earth – they’re wrong about life on Earth right now. The message they constantly send is that everything is dire. The big, disgusting ‘human footprint’ on poor Mother Earth is causing heatwaves and storms and death on an unprecedented scale, they say. It is all so overblown. We are actually safer from nature’s violent whims than we have ever been. The number of people dying in natural calamities fell from around 500,000 a year in the 1920s to 14,000 in 2020. That’s a 96 per cent drop. The percentage of human beings living in poverty fell from more than 80 per cent at the start of the 19th century to less than 20 per cent in the 2010s. Deaths from disease and war have also declined dramatically in the modern era. Child labour, too. Life expectancy, meanwhile, has shot up. In Europe, it went from 34 years to 79 years between 1770 and 2019. That is, at the exact time that mankind was having industrial revolutions and allegedly being a plague on the planet, the health and prospects of humanity improved in a way our ancestors could only have dreamed of. It’s almost as if modernity is good for us.

We must never let the anti-industrial rage of the elites blind us to how brilliant our impact on the planet has been. We haven’t destroyed Earth – we have tamed it and civilised it; we have unlocked its secrets; we have transformed this wild and unpredictable ball in space into a planet that can happily host eight billion people, and more besides. Occasionally bleached coral is a very small price to pay for the liberation of humanity from death and drudgery, wouldn’t you say?

Of course things are far from perfect. We’re heading into a serious economic and energy crisis. It will hit the working classes in the West and the people of the South hardest of all. But this crisis is not an indictment of modern human society. On the contrary, it’s an indictment of the elites’ turn against modern human society. Decades of eco-doom-mongering, of fury against fossil fuels, of constant demands for a slowing down of economic growth and for a violent shrinking of the ‘human footprint’, have unquestionably helped to drag us into this worrying new reality of energy crisis and shortages. It isn’t the ‘human impact’ on the planet we should be worried about – it’s the establishment’s hostility to the ‘human impact’ on the planet. Mastery of nature is essential if we are to continue improving human life. It will also help us to look after nature itself, including its greatest wonders like the Great Barrier Reef.

Meghan Markle and the aristocracy of victimhood

How Meghan became the Princess of Postmodernism.

Article by Brendan O’Neill, in which he reviews Tom Bower’s new book, Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors.

Excerpts:

Isn’t it striking that the Trump administration was continually slammed by liberals for its promotion of ‘alternative facts’, whereas Meghan is loved by liberals despite also seeming to deal in ‘alternative facts’? The Trumpite Orwellian category of ‘alternative facts’ really means pushing ‘claims that do not conform to objective reality’, raged USA Today. ‘Traditionally known as false or misleading claims; also, lies’, it continued. Does that apply to the Duchess of Sussex, too? Are her claims about being an only child and getting married three days before she actually got married also ‘alternative facts’, false claims, misinformation?

[…]

This is not to say Meghan Markle is a liar. It is more complicated than that, and in a sense more sinister. She appears to be a product of the end of truth. She seems symbolic of a postmodern culture in which self-definition now takes precedence over objective reality. In which our narcissistic description of ourselves carries more weight than any anchored, measurable facts about ourselves. In which one can ‘identify’ as anything one chooses, however estranged your identification might be from material reality. A man can be a woman, despite having a penis, and Meghan Markle can be an only child, despite having siblings. That’s their truth, man.

[…]

Together Meghan and Harry have become globe-trotting moral reprimanders, with often unwittingly hilarious results. Meghan guest-edited Vogue, using it as a pulpit to preach about the evils of climate change. Yet she takes private jets the way the rest of us order Ubers, says Bower. Harry flew in a private jet to a Google camp in Sicily to speak about climate change. ‘His plane was just one of the 114 private jets, as well as a fleet of super yachts, that had ferried billionaires and celebrities to the festival.’ Later, at a press conference in Amsterdam to promote an eco-travel campaign (!), Harry is outraged when a journalist asks him about his private jet-setting. Ninety-nine per cent of my flights are commercial, he says. Actually, at least 60 per cent of your flights are private, he is informed. ‘No one is perfect’, he replies. A few days later the pair flew by private jet to attend the wedding of a close friend who was getting hitched to the son of an oil billionaire.

[…]

We may never know all the facts about some of these stories. But we should bear in mind a point Bower makes well – that in the woke ‘religion’ of Hollywood celebrities, ‘the concept of “universal truth” [is] false’. Indeed, Meghan herself has said that ‘life is about storytelling, about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we’re told, what we buy into’. We all have the right to ‘create our own truth about the world’, she says. Behold the Princess of Postmodernism, for whom truth is whatever she says it is. I am the Truth – the final rallying cry of the narcissistic new aristocracy.

Why the BBC’s new “anti-vaxxer documentary” is a complete farce

The leading British propaganda organisation for elitist autocracy in full swing

Article by Iain Davis.

Excerpts:

Despite there being no reason to trust anything the BBC ever says, the broadcaster implores its viewers to “trust” it simply by pronouncing its own trustworthiness. For the BBC, your “trust” demonstrates your “faith,” allowing it to tell you stories without the need for investigative journalism or even supporting evidence. By contrast, the evidence invariably reveals that the BBC is completely untrustworthy.

According to BBC, its so-called “documentary” is going to be based on bombarding seven hapless unvaccinated lay people with a barrage of pro-vaccine “experts.” Once browbeaten into submission by these authoritative opinions, the victims will then be subject to the BBC’s logical fallacy tactic of appeal to authority. In other words, these high priests of “the science” will explain how the BBC’s seven victims have been misled by “anti-vaxxer” propaganda.

It is highly likely that even if the seven subjects cogently explain why they have decided not to be injected with experimental concoctions, the BBC will edit out any and all valid points they make—and/or deny whatever evidence they cite. We can make these predictions with relative ease, simply by noting the extraordinary level of deceit already present in the BBC’s press release announcing its “programme.”

We can make still further forecasts about the BBC’s alleged “investigation.” For one thing, it won’t honestly report on the current status of the vaccine trials.

Namely, it will neglect to inform its audience that the NCT04368728 trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab isn’t finished. And it will not reveal that neither the NCT04470427 trial of Moderna’s mRNA jab nor Johnson & Johnson’s NCT04614948 Jansen trials have posted any results, because these trials, too, are incomplete.

Moreover, the BBC will strenuously avoid pointing out the implication of these facts—probably by not reporting them.
Unless the recipients of these drugs were told that the jabs they were about to receive were experimental, they couldn’t possibly have given their informed consent.

Consequently, whenever they weren’t informed, administration of the jab contravened nearly every known medical ethic, including those outlined in the Nuremberg Code. But the BBC won’t mention this, either.

It is also safe to say that the BBC will not tell its audience that AstraZeneca concluded the NCT04516746 trial of its AZD1222 adenovirus jab more than a year before schedule by not bothering to conduct a quality control review, rendering its so-called vaccine trial results practically meaningless.

The BBC will not tell anyone that the British Medical Journal (BMJ) disclosed that both Moderna and Jansen (J&J) confirmed that they had given the jabs to their placebo control groups, ending any prospect of their trials ever meeting the basic standards for randomised controlled studies. When the BMJ asked Pfizer if it had done the same, Pfizer declined comment.

Instead, the BBC will almost certainly claim that the jabs have been through extensive clinical trials. It will just omit the part about them having failed to properly complete any.

The BBC will not acknowledge the freedom of information requests and subsequent court ruling in the US that overturned the Federal Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to delay release of Pfizer’s primary safety monitoring data for 75 years.

The Federal Court forced the FDA to release the damning results of Pfizer’s own early monitoring of adverse reactions following the jab rollout in the US and Europe.

In the space of just a couple of months, there were approximately 42,000 adverse reactions to the Pfizer mRNA jab alone, with just over 25,000 of those confirmed by medical exam and the other 16,000+ unconfirmed. Of these, more than 1,200 injuries resulted in death. More than 11,000 of the injured had not recovered from their serious adverse event at the time of reporting.

The BBC certainly won’t report the Israeli study, the results of which indicate that the Pfizer jab prompts a marked decline in male fertility.

Nor will the BBC mention that Pfizer’s own research shows that, contrary to all of Pfizer’s marketing claims, the corporation knew during the trial phase that the lipid nanoparticles used in its jabs found their way into the liver, adrenal glands and spleen and, in particular, accumulated in female recipients’ ovaries.

The BBC may well have to acknowledge the more-than-38,000 possible vaccine deaths reported to the US VAERS system, the 2,200 deaths reported in the UK and the 46,000 deaths recorded by the European Medicines Agency.

Its “experts” will point out that there is no evidence that these deaths are caused by the vaccines and will say that the risk of the disease COVID-19 is far higher than any known risks from the COVID-19 jabs.

The BBC will almost certainly make extraordinary and extremely silly claims about how many lives the jabs have allegedly saved. Again these claims will be based upon nothing but baseless assumptions about what could have happened according to some spurious “predictive model.” Rather like claiming your anti-unicorn spray has stopped a million unicorns from grazing your lawn because you don’t have any unicorns in your garden.

As we have just discussed, the risks of harm from COVID-19 claimed by the government and its propaganda outlets—the BBC foremost—are so implausible they verge on absurd. Yet the BBC will not inform its audience that, to date, not one of the regulators has produced a comprehensive risk-benefit analysis for any of the jabs. So the inevitable BBC claims that the jab benefits outweigh the risks will literally be based upon nothing at all.

Something else that the BBC won’t mention is that none of the respective regulatory agencies have done anything to investigate any reported vaccine deaths.

The BBC will not go anywhere near reporting the findings of a team of eminent German pathologists who performed autopsies on 40 corpses of people who died within two weeks of vaccination—and who identified the vaccine as the likely cause of death in one-third of the cases.

Nor will the BBC report statements like those from the UK regulator, the MHRA, that adverse reactions, including deaths, are significantly undereported, with just ten percent of serious reactions and between two percent and four percent of non-serious reactions recorded.

Still, we might get to watch “Unvaccinated, with Professor Hannah Fry” when it finds its way on to Odysee, BitChute, Rumble or some other worthy video-sharing platform. If so, it will perhaps be interesting for some to see how accurate or inaccurate this article is.

In the meantime, let’s give the Beeb the benefit of the doubt and hope this post is way off the mark. Instead of the awful propagandist drivel we might expect, let’s hope the BBC proves that these suspicions are born of nothing but unfounded, anti-BBC bias.

Bet they aren’t.

SADS — Missing From My Dictionary

Pfizer’s New Approach

Article by Alan Stevo. (See also here.)

Excerpt:

Curiously, doctors are now reporting that people dying with the exact symptoms of what death from a Covid-19 vaccine would look like, are actually being called death by “SADS” or Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.

It is a very widely known, age-old problem, we are assured.

My 8.6 pound Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language from 1992, has quite a bit to say about sudden death, but it does not have anything to say about SADS.

Perhaps it is not the age-old problem we are being told it is.

Indications Covid virus came from a US laboratory

America seems to have used biological warfare before

Article by Ron Unz.

Excerpts:

[S]everal months ago I had carefully investigated the history of American biological warfare and discovered that the story I had casually absorbed from our media [about “false” Chinese claims that the US had used bio-warfare in the Korean War] was the exact opposite of the historical truth. Based upon declassified government documents and other fully mainstream sources, there was actually overwhelming evidence that the Chinese had been telling the truth during the Korean War while our own denials had been false. America had indeed used illegal biological warfare during that conflict.

I have no doubt that Becker was being entirely sincere, and his statements on that specialized historical question were simply due to his acceptance of the conventional media narrative rather than any deliberate deception. But suppose we now apply his own standard. Once we recognize that China had been truthful in the past, while America had both employed illegal bioweapons and then lied about their use, these disturbing facts must inform our own analysis of the Covid outbreak.

Perhaps Covid was a natural virus and perhaps it accidentally leaked out of a Wuhan lab. But there is also a third logical possibility, that it was deliberately released in one of China’s largest cities as a planned biowarfare attack. The Covid outbreak occurred at the height of China’s ongoing international conflict with America, so elements of our own hostile government would be the obvious suspects. None of the three books seemed to recognize the existence of this hypothetical possibility even merely to dismiss it, an enormous blind spot that may or may not be due to the constraints of the American publishing industry.

At the time these books and the review appeared, the possibility that the Covid virus had an American origin had remained totally unmentionable in the Western media, but in the last few weeks this situation has suddenly changed.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University ranks as a pillar of the mainstream establishment and served as chairman of the influential Covid commission established by the Lancet, a leading medical journal. In May, he broke his silence and co-authored an article in the prestigious Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences making the case that the virus was clearly artificial and calling for an independent investigation into its possible American origin.

So courtesy of Sachs, a public debate has now begun on whether Covid came from an American lab. But the two earliest major outbreaks occurred in China and Iran, striking the two countries in the world most subject to American hostility, surely a rather implausible result from an accidental release.

BBC accused of institutional alarmism

A new report reveals long list of climate misinformation

Writes Net Zero Watch:

London, 9 June – The BBC has been accused of institutional alarmism as a new report reveals the BBC’s persistent exaggeration and false information when it comes to climate and weather-related news.

The report, compiled by climate researcher Paul Homewood, reveals that the BBC has been forced to correct a dozen false claims and other items of fake news in climate-related coverage after receiving public complaints in recent years.


The report, which has been submitted to the Government’s upcoming Mid-Term Review of the BBC, shows that it has become common practice for BBC reporters to publicise exaggerated and often misleading weather-and climate-related stories in order to hype up the potential risks from global warming.

Net Zero director Benny Peiser said:

Persistent misrepresentation by BBC journalists in climate news coverage is fuelling the corporation’s institutional alarmism.

Institutional alarmism is a form of hyped and exaggerated news reporting that is deeply embedded in the BBC. It manifests itself as unbalanced, one-sided coverage of climate risks that are habitually exaggerated and that go uncorrected by the BBC’s in-house fact checkers.”

In 2020, the BBC’s director general warned that the problem posed by disinformation online was increasingly serious and that the BBC would need to work harder than ever to expose fake news and separate fact from fiction.

Since then the corporation has set up a team of fact checkers, a BBC-wide ‘Anti-Disinformation Unit’ and a ‘Climate Misinformation’ team. Yet none of these teams of fact checkers noticed or addressed the long list of false news stories that were only corrected by the BBC after lengthy and protracted complaint procedures.


Paul Homewood said:

There can be little doubt that the cases documented in this report are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other such inaccurate news or false information are broadcast by the BBC without being noticed or complained about.

It is also true that the BBC regularly try to fob off complainants with spurious replies, leading many to give in. This is even the case when their inaccurate claims are obvious, easily proven and manifest.”

Here’s the full report. (PDF)