There were some star performers speaking this time. The latest webinar deliberately avoided the usual social media platforms so that it wouldn’t be trolled and forced to use that favoured tactic of COVID and other dissidents, the blotting out of trigger words (like vaccine) that bring the algorithmic censors into play.

One of the star speakers, the equally redoubtable (and very busy) Craig Kelly was talking, ironically, about freedom of speech.

ARGUED

He argued with passion that freedom of speech is at the pinnacle of all the freedoms, and is under threat. John Anderson, another warrior for the light, has suggested that freedom of conscience precedes and so out-ranks freedom of speech. Perhaps he is right. Yet …

COVID has proven that the 18C problem pursued so vigorously by liberals in 2015 was merely a sideshow. Important, but not game-changing.

Yes, allowing the perpetually offended to get people sacked and their lives destroyed is a travesty. But its capacity to damage the broad citizenry was, and is, very limited.

With COVID and the cleverly grasped (engineered?) opportunity for the ruling elites to bury us all in rapidly hardening concrete through turbo-charged censorship, reclaiming freedom of speech has suddenly become far more urgent.

As Craig Kelly said, in as many words, COVID rulers lied, dissidents were shut down, and people died. Suicides from lockdown? Cancelled cancer treatments? Patients denied effective pandemic treatments? The vaccine injured? Doctors silenced upon threat of deregistration?

Kelly and fellow freedom-fighters were cancelled by the COVID class. Pilloried. Sidelined. He was speaking the truth. Yes, free speech matters.

UNMASKING

What the recent Twitter files taught us was that prophetic scholars of the administrative State like John Marini in Unmasking the Administrative State (2019) were not idly speculating.

Marini’s book tells: “… the critical missed story of the last century of political history [is] the ascendance of the theory behind and resultant growth of an administrative State that has supplanted limited constitutional government with the tyranny of unbounded anti-constitutional bureaucracy.”

COVID has proven the theory.

Ed Dowd has shone a light on the close ties between Big Tech and US State agencies in the era of pandemia. But there is more.

As Dowd has pointed out, the US Government’s whole pandemic response (and especially the vaccine play) was run by the US security state, to Donald Trump’s eternal shame.

Trump still seems to think that Operation Warp Speed was a good idea. Since then, there has been ongoing “deep collaboration” between the State and Big Tech.

The threats to our freedom, then, are now stark, and clear. The unlamented Jacinda Adern said that the State’s version of events is the only “truth”.

This has been one of the core strategies of the censoring class. Simply to boldly assert that government has, and should have, the power to define what is the truth.

A second strategy is cultural shaping, undertaken to nudge the population towards compliance, non-interest and ultimately, silence. Make people stupid, or at least, uninformed.

Create a climate of fear and then the people will be supine. They will not care remotely that their rights, including freedom of speech, have been taken away. Clever. Some have called it all a psyop.

A third strategy lies in the words used by the elites to describe opinions deemed to be beyond the pale. Cleverly, terms such as “misinformation” and “disinformation” place those so deemed at a disadvantage, as one victim explains.

The appropriation of hoorah-words is a favourite trick of the censor class. Think “love”, “rainbow” and “pride”. “Fact” is an absolute beauty.

NARRATIVE

Just Google anyone who has questioned the COVID narrative, or the Ukraine narrative, or the woke narrative, or the climate emergency narrative.

You won’t find what these brave souls actually say. Instead, you will find what the ubiquitous fact checker class has to say (of which, more below). It is mighty helpful to have Big Tech on side.

A fourth strategy is to silence opposition, especially on the internet, where it really counts now.

A fifth is to ridicule dissidents, when silencing hasn’t worked. This has been a favourite, for VicPol cops, useful idiot politicians like Brad Hazzard and paid-up collaborators in the legacy media alike.

Anyone remember the slightly deranged musings of Jack the Insider? The lies that were told mattered. When you control the narrative, it is easy to identify enemies of the State.

But, just as effective, the silencing of debate has been the COVID State equivalent of playing the Joker in five hundred. When people are starved of good information, they are far more easily manipulated and controlled. Safe and effective? Stay safe? It was a master class in Goebbels-level propaganda.

A sixth strategy, again aimed at silencing opposition, is regulator bullying.

Mark Steyn’s departure from GB News as a result of Ofcom threats is a case study. Make the dissident (or at least his employer) fear that you may act. You don’t even have to do anything. Just put the fear of God into anyone thinking of having a crack.

A preemptive strike that induces what Steyn calls “self-censorship”. Think also of doctors during COVID and the efficient and brutal neo-fascism of the Australian Health Professionals Regulatory Authority.

A seventh strategy is to starve dissidents of the normal channels they have to readers. Disappear them from internet search engines, so no one even knows what they are saying. No need to argue back. No need for ridicule.

This is the online equivalent of denying venues to speakers or publishing houses to writers, or threatening venues and publishers who don’t themselves deny the platform.

Finally, we come to the eighth strategy, the “fact checkers”. A recent addition to the cancel culture repertoire. The fact checking class is clearly a global growth industry.

PROSTITUTES

Their numbers are growing faster than jet refuellers and prostitutes in Davos. Between them, Google and Facebook employ 40,000 “verifiers”. It has been a truly astonishing development.

And they have captured the commanding heights of the aforementioned search engine optimisation. The new apex of absolute power.

This has been a brilliant manoeuvre. The takeover of the world by the fact checker class has occurred in the blink of an eye. We do it because we can!

It is a neat reversal of the old fact-value philosophical dilemma. The enlightenment philosopher David Hume suggested we could not derive a value from a fact.

But these folks have pulled off a philosophical trick of equally epic proportions. You can derive a fact from a value! Brilliant, really. But all based on a lie.

The Brownstone Institute has published an article titled “Censors use AI to target podcasts” that explores the very latest development in this deep collaboration.

It quotes a Brookings Institution report on podcasts: “… conservative podcasters were 11 times more likely than liberal podcasters to share claims fact-checked as false or unsubstantiated.”

Which of course gives the game away. They are not checking facts. They are “checking” a particular kind of broadcaster. It is a virtuous circle, as well.

We fact check those we wish to discredit. We then “find” that these same people are the most fact-checked (horror).

This, then, gives us permission to eliminate them. A great business model.

This is the perfect convergence between technology and tyranny. Hence the new war on podcasts (like that of Pat Mesito), is the latest front in the war to track down the dissidents and silence them. The PGGWC (progressive, green, globalist, woke, Covid-mad) class never sleeps.

DEPLORABLES

There is another advantage. The beauty of the term “fact checker” is that it apparently endows the user with ownership of “truth”. A position that is not remotely deserved. And not available to the deplorables. This is very clever.

This is ironic for progressivist post-modernists who profess not to believe in absolute “truth”. Shouldn’t the victims of the fact checkers’ forensic attention – all, curiously, purveyors of values alien to those of the fact checker class – be accorded the courtesy of having “their truth”? Apparently not.