This media fiasco of the past two years amounted to full-blown support for the overreaching State.

So much just went through to the keeper. Like closed external and internal borders, crushing police brutality, economic destruction and rampant discrimination against those who refused the jab. Not to mention sinister and overblown contact-trace technology, shuttered schools and universities and obsessive attention to the virus.

CHICANERY

Yet when it is discovered that our very peculiar COVID PM Scott Morrison engaged in some machinery-of-government chicanery, all hell breaks loose.

Suddenly every pet shop constitutional law professor is getting serious air-time.

“We need a royal commission into COVID policy!”, they scream. Shock and horror. Plumbing what passes for the mind of the former PM is difficult at the best of times.

What persuaded him to trash political protocol in his ministerial self-appointments is one for the ages.

Wise heads not merely interested in inside-the-beltway obsessions and Party-political shenanigans have made the obvious point. Really?

Why are we obsessing over what Scotty did next when we have ongoing (often covert, as in the case of NSW Health) vaccine mandates, proven, widespread vaccine harms, ineffective boosters, continuing State Government emergency powers, the use of nudging and fear to shift popular behaviour and a global, lock-down induced recession and cost-of-living crisis?

ScoMo’s play at in-house COVID totalitarianism has made it respectable for COVID State fence-sitters to call for a royal commission, something that, up until now, only the political outsiders have done.

So, by all means, main stream media, join the One Nation-led push for an inquiry into COVID State bullying and transgressions. But do include your own behaviour and reportage as a key term of reference.

Then we can put you on the stand and explore in some detail your pro-vaxx propaganda, your own gaslighting of what you all chose to label as anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.

Oh yes, in relation to the impacts of lockdown, there were (a very few) honourable exceptions. But it was all qualified.

Protesting vaccine mandates was far beyond the pale and far beyond the willingness of working hacks to buck middle and senior management’s iron grip on the COVID-vaccine narrative. A step way too far.

A conspiracy researcher or royal commissioner might want to take a look at the tentacles of Bill Gates, the extant quasi-eugenics sentiment still loitering among mainstream journalists, the dependency on Big Pharma for advertising revenue across the media, and the linkages, driven either by funding dependency or mere ideology, among journalists, tame academics and politicians.

DISSIDENTS

In effect, the corporatist media have precisely replicated the COVID behaviour of the Lib-Lab Party-political duopoly – some dissidents, views and groups are simply too out-there to report, some topics were just too anti-the-narrative.

Like unexplained excess deaths and the potential connection between these and the vaccine rollout.

There were those who chose to “freelance” rather than stick to the day’s talking points, as the former Prime Minister’s Office insisted each morning in an email to all MPs.

In politics, we had the ousting of Kelly and Christensen, in the media we had the removal of Alan Jones.

Reflecting the “respectable” anti-Trumpism that still abounds, the cabal of journalists, columnists and assorted pundits of all ideological hues took COVID refuge in bagging the deplorables.

We have witnessed two echo chambers, Left and Right, where different chapters of the political and media class simply talk to one another.

The deliberate silencing of any dissenting voices by so-called free press advocates in the media should not be lost on anyone.

Three aspects of the “look-the-other-way” journalism and punditry spring to mind.

First, there has been a widely-shared, yet unwritten, rule that it is okay to criticise lockdowns but not vaccine mandates.

Second, there is the tendency to regard COVID totalitarianism as just another assault upon us, on a par with woke ideology and net-zero vandalism, and no worse than these.

This has been a fundamental, perhaps wilful, misreading of the freedom-crushing elements of the COVID policy era.

EMBEDDED

The methods embedded in the so-called push to “save lives” are here with us for keeps.

Think, cashless financial surveillance, QR code tracing, digital ID and the use of facial recognition technology in routine transactions, the still unchallenged legitimacy of the 2015 Biosecurity Act – passed (by the way) on the watch of Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and Barnaby Joyce and with Labor’s full support.

Then there’s baked-in maskism, the continued use of emergency powers by States and territories, almost at will, and the blind acquiescence to policies thought up in Davos, Ottawa, Paris, Berlin, Washington and Wellington.

No, the threats we face from executive overreach touch us far more deeply and broadly, and so are worse by orders of magnitude than the admittedly awful ideologies of wokedom and climate emergency.

Third, the employees of the COVID media have, without acknowledging it, perhaps even without realising it, embraced Rousseau’s “general will” and the utilitarians’ crushing of individual freedom for the good of society.

They have abandoned Burke and, yes, even the normally favoured John Stuart Mill.

Health has ceased to become a matter of private prudence, and is now a plaything of loud-voiced majorities who appeal reflexively to the “safety” of “the community”.

This amounts to a fundamental shift in core Australian values, and those who should be calling this out either agree with it, or have not understood it, or are too spineless to speak up.

As well, those on the Right-of-centre have formed a unity ticket with their colleagues across the journalistic aisle in embracing scientism, rejecting sober reasoning and ignoring Blind-Freddy level evidence that even erstwhile uber-Covidistas like the US Centers for Disease Control have officially now accepted.

The COVID State simply relies on faith. Specifically, on faith in vaccines-as-the-silver-bullet to achieve freedom from lockdowns and the willing acceptance of other onerous and cruel torture-tools used by the likes of Daniel Andrews, what’s-his-name from the Northern Territory and Mark McGowan.

FAILED

The journalists who, during the endless press conferences devised in order to announce fresh, unvaccinated deaths, failed to ask now apparently obvious, if inconvenient, questions and so failed to nail the likes of successive “Liberal” premiers in NSW and their outrageously canonised Chief Health Officers.

These same journalists should be on notice to have their answers prepared when called before the Royal Commission they now champion.

That it has taken a serious, apparently inexplicable breach of the basic principles of cabinet government by a Chauncey Gardner prime minister to rouse our pundits from their COVID insouciance should be one of the first issues raised.

Why didn’t they get onto the scam earlier? Who will admit to any of the following?

“I was simply wrong about the vaccines and associated mandates and the medical quackery that gave rise to them.”

“I didn’t do my job as a journalist or commentator. I ignored the mounting evidence of policy incompetence and malfeasance and a dereliction of duty by the entire political class.”