“And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.

“I threw the script away. I mean, who is going to believe that crazy idea being forced to do drugs?”

TYRANNY

Of the (probably) tens of thousands of words I have read (and written) on the pandemic tyranny, I am yet to see a crisper summary of the past three years. It was a bulls-eye.

Big Pharma a drug cartel? Yep. Buy up all the media? Too easy. Buy up the politicians? Trembling, useful idiots. Imprison the people of the world in their homes? Yes, that really happened. And the folks took the drugs, and kept taking them? Yep, despite the fact they don’t work and can kill you.

The story too crazy to be bought by a film company? That’s right. You could not have made this up. Former Blackrock Investment manager Ed Dowd called Harrelson’s intervention “devastating”.

And libertarian author Jeffrey Tucker noted something else. The gag fell flat. That tells a story.

Obviously, the no-doubt woke PC audience didn’t get the point of the story? Were they ashamed of their own idiocy? Or, just like the rest of the cult, is it just all too much to admit that they were conned. We have all been conned.

No one likes to have conning episodes revealed. As they say, a conspiracy theory is something that the average punter just cannot conceive to have happened in the way described. Tucker headlined his article “the pain of truth”.

Some years ago, I saw an updated Yes Minister play in which “climate change” became the core joke. Very few in the audience laughed. Some things you just can’t laugh at, like Catholics back in the day confronted by (the hilarious) Dave Allen.

Tucker notes: “There has been a conspiracy of silence and still is. The trauma was so deep and the politicisation of the episode so intense that major voices are still silent about it.

HYPNOTISED

“Harrelson’s comment likely will not change that. The usual people will emerge to condemn him as a conspiracy theorist and probably claim that he has been listening too much to QAnon, whatever that is, or that he has been hypnotised by some red-pilled influencer. He has certainly made himself a target.”

And sure enough…

American social commentator Tom Woods notes that, as if to prove Harrelson’s point, the PGGWC (progressive, green, globalist, woke, COVID) media went into a tizz.

Woods highlights Huff Post, Variety, Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast: “Note the verb choices, too – ‘spews’, ‘rambles’ – intended to denigrate the speaker. And of course ‘conspiracy’, the ultimate dumb-guy putdown.

“To my mind Harrelson is wrong about 90 per cent of the time, but when he’s right, it tends to be – as in this case – about something fairly important.

“But good for him, making the kind of observation that hundreds of people in public life would be making if we lived in a normal society.”

The Australian woke media joined in. For SBS, Harrelson is, you guessed it, a conspiracy theorist, the current, superficial insult of choice.

Similar terms such as “homophobe” and “climate emergency” allow the perpetrator of the insult to assert it as if it is known by the reader or audience to be uncontroversially true.

That is a fine trick if you can pull it off. No need for evidence or argument. And, after a while, those reading or hearing the use of these terms barely question them.

SBS, it should be noted, now uses Aboriginal place names on Australian weather maps. So, no surprises there.

But the vehemence with which the media – bought up and sold out – has responded to Harrelson shows the breadth and depth of the counter-counter-resistance.

A fresh front has surely opened in the culture wars. Who would have thought, though, that Leftist media outlets would be so keen to tell lies in support of their traditional class enemies – billionaires, multinationals and capitalists.

Of course, it shows what $300m of Bill Gates media funding will buy.

LIBERALS

It was a surprise that NBC let him loose. But American comedian Bridget Phetasy noted: “People don’t seem to understand, Woody Harrelson is what liberals used to be.”

The Spectator called Harrelson’s effort “trolling the authoritarian Left”. The reputational transformation of Big Pharma has been nothing short of astonishing. And Domenech used the word “scandalised” to describe the media’s reaction to Harrelson’s truth-telling. This was perceptive.

Woody, the hippie, pothead anarchist, has good form on COVID, as it turns out.