Cafe charges extra fee to people who wear face mask, are caught ‘bragging’ about being vaccinated
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING FOLKS. THE BEGINNING.
30.May.2021.
The manufacturing of fear
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
That is how the media approached Covid. Be afraid of everything, from ice cream to semen. Be afraid of being tall. Be afraid of being bald. Be afraid of going to the shops and accepting home deliveries. And if you’re a man, it’s not just semen you should worry about, but also your testicles, your erectile function and your fertility. Even your toes are in danger.
The fearmongering is relentless. Be afraid of your pets. Be afraid for your pets. Just be afraid.
The media have served us a cornucopia of frightening articles and news items about Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. While writing my new book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I encountered a panoply of doom-mongering headlines. These were an indication of the significant role the media have played in creating our state of fear.
Of course, news media should not shy away from reporting frightening news during a pandemic. They should make us aware of the numbers of deaths, the policies being implemented to tackle the pandemic and the latest scientific developments. But during Covid, the media went beyond reporting on the pandemic. Instead, they appeared beholden to the old commercial imperatives, ‘If it scares, it airs’, and ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. It seems fear does sell.PODCASTWhy biological sex mattersSPIKED
The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating. Death tolls were constantly brandished without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people.
Given the wall-to-wall doom, it is therefore no surprise that the British were one of the most frightened populations in the world. Various studies showed that we were more concerned than other countries about the spread of Covid and less confident in the ability of our government to deal with it. One survey in July 2020 showed that the British public thought between six and seven per cent of the population had died from Covid – which was around 100 times the actual death rate at the time. Indeed, if six or seven per cent of Brits had died from Covid, that would have amounted to about 4,500,000 bodies – we’d have noticed, don’t you think?
While researching A State of Fear, I interviewed members of the general public about how they were impacted by the ‘campaign of fear’ during the epidemic. Many talked of how the media had elevated their alarm.
‘There wasn’t much to do’, Darren told me, ‘so we’d watch TV and we saw programmes about disinfecting your shopping when it arrives, and having a safezone in the kitchen. The nightly bulletins on the TV about death tolls, the big graphs with huge spikes on them, came at us “boom, boom, boom!”. It was a constant barrage of doom and gloom. My fear of the virus went through the roof.’
Sarah told me she had to stop watching the BBC. As her daughter put it, ‘If you just watched or listened to the BBC every day, what hope would you have had?’. Jane, meanwhile, described the ‘gruesome headlines’ that came at her ‘thick and fast’.
The fearmongering about Covid began even before the pandemic hit the UK. We were primed by videos from Wuhan in China, which were then widely circulated by UK-based media outlets. These painted an apocalyptic picture, featuring collapsed citizens, medics in Hazmat suits, concerned bystanders and a city grinding to a halt. In one memorable video, which went viral, so to speak, a woman fell, stiff as a board, flat on her face, on a pavement. The split second where she falters is a giveaway – this was a set-up. If the rest of the world had Covid, China had ‘Stunt Covid’.
These videos were carried by and reported on by major UK newspapers online without their authenticity being verified. Headlines referred to ‘zombies’, a ‘killer bug’ and the ‘apocalypse’. Over and over again, reports and commentaries described these Chinese Covid videos as ‘disturbing’. The coverage was saturated by horror-film and ‘end of days’ references. A Sun headline ‘Zombieland’ travelled with the speed of a virulent sneeze through the copycat global media.
The media have a responsibility to inform us. But they also have a responsibility to be balanced. That didn’t happen when Covid first emerged in China. And it didn’t happen when it hit the UK. Instead, we were treated to contextless coverage of daily death tolls. Add this to the ghoulish headlines and the scary graphs, and the media had left us adrift in a monoculture of fear. Some of the people I interviewed told me about the considerable negative effect this coverage had on their perception of the world, not to mention their mental wellbeing. The media should serve the public. But over the past year, they have been terrorising us.
Newspapers, news shows and so on owe their readers and viewers the best available version of the truth. Something that can be ascertained by careful questioning. So what has gone wrong?
Journalists are human, of course, and subject to the same worries as the rest of us. We are all made of the same psychological stuff. Perhaps their own fears clouded their judgement and reporting. Maybe they did not have time, in the teeth of the crisis, to investigate every image and video supplied by the picture desk with the requisite thoroughness, or to provide the Covid data with the necessary context.
But alongside journalists’ own fears and their lack of time, there are other factors that might explain the widespread media fearmongering. One of which is the financial incentive to be as sensationalist as possible. As one broadsheet comment writer put it to me, when I asked him why newspapers used so many doom-laden headlines: ‘Narcissism and greed drive this.’ He went on: ‘Pay rises are linked to the top-performing articles. The journalists who get the highest views for articles and the most subscriptions generated for the paper get the biggest pay rises. So you want your stories to get the most views.’ Compensating writers for clicks might not lead to the most balanced news reporting.
A pro-lockdown media
The No10 press briefings were often characterised by bland and unchallenging questions from journalists, such as ‘When will the epidemic be over?’. Little wonder that when the Press Gazette ran a poll asking, ‘Do you think journalists have done a good job of holding the government to account during the daily UK Covid-19 press briefings?’, 70 per cent answered ‘No’.
In general, mainstream journalists approached the epidemic as if the lockdown was the only correct response. They didn’t investigate and interrogate the idea of lockdown in general. When journalists did challenge the government, almost performing the role of the unelected opposition, they didn’t challenge the lockdown orthodoxy, or the safetyism that underpins it. They merely urged the government to go further, and lock down sooner and harder. Close businesses? What about closing schools? Tier Three? Why not Tier Four? It was as if journalists had come to see themselves as political activists whose job it was to hold prime minister Boris Johnson to account for not being sufficiently pro-lockdown. Some have even attempted to turn the pandemic into a simplistic morality play, with Covid deaths held up as proof of the evil Tories’ failure to lock down soon enough.
By and large, journalists have shied away from asking more challenging questions of the response to the pandemic. This may be because of the proximity of mass media to political and economic power, as Noam Chomsky has it in Manufacturing Consent. As well as editor and proprietor bias, journalists might feel pressured to maintain good relationships with press officers who, in return, will release privileged information to them, often late in the day. And then there’s the fact that the government and Public Health England became two of the biggest advertisers in the UK. Did the media dare to bite the hand that fed them?
In addition to proprietor bias, the influence of advertising revenue, the lure of the clickbait headline and the journalist’s own tendency to feel the fear and allow that to influence reporting, another worrying factor affected media coverage of the epidemic — state pressure.
On 23 March 2020, Ofcom, the UK’s communication regulator, issued strict guidance about Covid coverage. It asked broadcasters to be alert to ‘health claims related to the virus which may be harmful; medical advice which may be harmful; accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it’. This will have inhibited any media outlets thinking of pursuing any stories that ran counter to government advice.
It was hardly a surprise to find that a Dutch study on our fear of Covid had concluded that our exposure to media increased our fear. ‘Stronger messages in the media may induce more fear and therefore more compliance with the social distancing and lockdown policies imposed’, it stated. ‘However, we caution against using media messages to induce more fear in the general public… as this may only increase distress. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of respondents in our sample were concerned about the role of (social) media, mass panic and hysteria. Hence, fear-appeals in the media should be used carefully.’
This is not advice the UK government and its advisers have heeded. The media have actively induced fear, and therefore prompted more compliance with lockdown measures. But not only did the Fourth Estate help to shape citizens’ behaviour during lockdown, it is also now impeding our exit from lockdown.
Dangerous times ahead
Even though the vaccine rollout is proving a success, the media are still fearmongering about Covid. The language in headlines and articles continues to play up the risks and threats on the horizon. As Bloomberg had it recently, ‘We must start planning for a permanent pandemic – with coronavirus mutations pitted against vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go back to normal’.
And those who do not conform to the safety-first orthodoxy continue to be demonised. It feels as if dangerous times are ahead.
In Israel, for instance, Haaretz described ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not follow the state’s rules as ‘Covid insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’. In a particularly hyperbolic description, ‘maskless individuals’ were accused of setting off ‘epidemiological time bombs’. Once we feared bombs that might be dropped on us following the pressing of a red button in a faraway country. Then we feared bombs strapped to terrorists. Now human beings are bombs.
Back in the UK, media coverage of Covid has taken a similarly bio-political turn. People are being conjured up as threats, indeed biohazards. A recent Times headline – ‘Hunt for mystery person who tested positive for Brazilian Covid-19 variant, then vanished’ – evoked an image of a hunt for a person carrying a new Covid variant as if it was a weapon. As Nick Cohen wrote in the Guardian, ‘It is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’. History reverberates with examples of deliberate attempts to dehumanise and divide people and it has never ended well. It is a worrying development. Let us observe how we report on events in our time and consciously choose to write a better story.
There is much talk right now of the forthcoming inquiry into the handling of Covid. While there should be a great deal of focus on the government and the state, it might be wise to consider the role of the media, too. Something seems to have gone seriously awry. Bad news has had too many wings. The media have not been dispassionately reporting on the pandemic – they have been making fear fly. Perhaps in the future, the media need new imperatives: if it leads, let it be vigorously fact-checked; and if it airs, let the sources be verified. And please, don’t try to make us afraid.
Share this:
SO I NOW ASK, WHAT HAPPENS TO THE RIGHTS OF CHRISTIANS SINCE EVERYONE ELSE HAS BEEN GIVEN RIGHTS ALL OVER THE PLACE?
28.May.2021.
RIGHTS FOR EVERYONE ELSE IS FINE BUT NOT FOR CHRISTIANS AND CONSERVATIVES? AND PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY FIND NO ISSUE WITH THAT?
Christian teacher suspended after declaring he won’t ‘lie’ to students and ‘affirm that a biological boy can be a girl, and vice versa’
Share this:
NO ONE should be forced, against their will, to be vaccinated. There should be no repercussions from refusing the vaccine for a virus that has a 99% cure rate.
Here is some help. FORMS PROVIDED BELOW!
1) There are NO licensed COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S.
2) Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) only – don’t believe “approval” means “licensed.”
3) Your Option to Refuse is based on Federal law over EUAs.
4) Your Right to Informed Consent based on Federal law over EUAs.
5) There are NO long term studies of side effects.
6) Side effects unknown because there are no PRIOR approved mRNA vaccines in the U.S.
7) Short term evidence of severe side effects and death.
8) If you have had Covid-CCP you have immunity.
9) All vaccine makers have been totally released from ALL liability for any side effects or death.
10) There is liability potential on employers who mandate the vaccine if there are side effects or death.
FORMS PROVIDED BELOW!
Solari.com ; http://www.coreysdigs.com ; support@defendingtherepublic.org ; https://defendingtherepublic.org/covid/
Share this:
THIS RIGHT HERE ARE WHAT IS CALLED MEDIA ‘STEALTH’ EDITS AFTER THE FACT THEY HAVE BEEN PROVEN WRONG.
25.May.2021.
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN YOU ASK? GLAD YOU ASKED. IT MEANS THEY SECRETELY MAKE EDITS TO INCORRECT INFORMATION THEY’VE MADE SO THEY DON’T HAVE TO EAT SHIT. THAT’S WHAT THAT MEANS.
Share this:
SATAN HAS JUST PUT OUT LATEST NEWS RELEASE!
19.May.2021.
Really! That’s News To Me!
17.May.2021.
What critical race theory is really about. Afterall, it is directly derived from Marxism!
7.May.2021.
Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it — and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.
To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism.
Originally, the Marxist left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: The workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class and usher in a new socialist society.
During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered for gulags, show trials, executions and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.
By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream — the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work and good citizenship.
But rather than abandon their political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.
Fortunately, the early proponents of this revolutionary coalition in the US lost out in the 1960s to the civil rights movement, which sought instead the fulfillment of the American promise of freedom and equality under the law. Americans preferred the idea of improving their country to that of overthrowing it. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision, President Lyndon Johnson’s pursuit of the Great Society, and the restoration of law and order promised by President Richard Nixon in his 1968 campaign defined the post-1960s American political consensus.
But the radical left has proved resilient and enduring — which is where critical race theory comes in.
Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s and built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions over the past decade. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks and school curricula.
Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion” and “culturally responsive teaching.”
Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds nonthreatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, critical race theorists explicitly reject equality — the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy and oppression.
In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA law professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines.
Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government and would have the power to nullify, veto or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”
One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since, according to Kendi, “in order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anticapitalist.”
In other words, identity is the means; Marxism is the end.
An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination and omnipotent bureaucratic authority.
Historically, the accusation of “anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation: Critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.
What does critical race theory look like in practice? Last year, I authored a series of reports focused on critical race theory in the federal government. The FBI was holding workshops on intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was telling white employees that they were committing “microinequities” and had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and that they must convert “everyone in the federal government” to the ideology of “antiracism.” And the Sandia National Laboratories, which design America’s nuclear arsenal, sent white male executives to a three-day re-education camp where they were told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white supremacists” and “mass killings.” The executives were then forced to renounce their “white male privilege” and to write letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color.
This year, many reports focused on critical race theory in education. In Cupertino, Calif., an elementary school forced first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” In Springfield, Mo., a middle school forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and “covert white supremacy.”
In Philadelphia, an elementary school forced fifth-graders to celebrate “Black communism” and simulate a Black Power rally to free 1960s radical Angela Davis from prison, where she had once been held on charges of murder. And in Seattle, the school district told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance.”
There exists a database of more than 1,000 of these stories. When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, I am not exaggerating — from the universities to bureaucracies to K-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.
This is a revolutionary change. When originally established, these government institutions were presented as neutral, technocratic and oriented toward broadly held perceptions of the public good. Today, under the increasing sway of critical race theory and related ideologies, they are being turned against the American people. This isn’t limited to the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, DC, but is true as well of institutions in the states — even red states. It is spreading to county public health departments, small Midwestern school districts and more. This ideology will not stop until it has devoured all of our institutions.
So far, attempts to halt the encroachment of critical race theory have been ineffective. There are a number of reasons for this.
First, too many Americans have developed an acute fear of speaking up about social and political issues, especially those involving race. According to a recent Gallup poll, 77 percent of conservatives are afraid to share their political beliefs publicly. Worried about getting mobbed on social media, fired from their jobs or worse, they remain quiet, largely ceding the public debate to those pushing these anti-American ideologies. Consequently, the institutions themselves become monocultures: dogmatic, suspicious, and hostile to a diversity of opinion.
Conservatives in both the federal government and public school systems have told me that their “equity and inclusion” departments serve as political offices, searching for and stamping out any dissent from the official orthodoxy.
Second, critical race theorists have constructed their argument like a mousetrap. Disagreement with their program becomes irrefutable evidence of a dissenter’s “white fragility,” “unconscious bias” or “internalized white supremacy.” I’ve seen this projection of false consciousness on their opponents play out dozens of times in my reporting. Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim — such as “all whites are intrinsically oppressors” or “white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children” — and then, when confronted with disagreement, adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who feel “defensiveness” or “anger” are reacting out of guilt and shame. Dissenters are instructed to remain silent, “lean into the discomfort” and accept their “complicity in white supremacy.”
Third, Americans across the political spectrum have failed to separate the premise of critical race theory from its conclusion. Its premise — that American history includes slavery and other injustices, and that we should examine and learn from that history — is undeniable. But its revolutionary conclusion — that America was founded on and defined by racism and that our founding principles, our Constitution and our way of life should be overthrown — does not rightly, much less necessarily, follow.
Fourth and finally, the writers and activists who have had the courage to speak out against critical race theory have tended to address it on the theoretical level, pointing out the theory’s logical contradictions and dishonest account of history.
These criticisms are worthy and good, but they move the debate into the academic realm — friendly terrain for proponents of critical race theory. They fail to force defenders of this revolutionary ideology to defend the practical consequences of their ideas in the realm of politics.
No longer simply an academic matter, critical race theory has become a tool of political power. To borrow a phrase from the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, it is fast achieving cultural hegemony in America’s public institutions. It is driving the vast machinery of the state and society. If we want to succeed in opposing it, we must address it politically at every level.
Critical race theorists must be confronted with and forced to speak to the facts. Do they support public schools separating first-graders into groups of “oppressors” and “oppressed”? Do they support mandatory curricula teaching that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”? Do they support public schools instructing white parents to become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition”? Do they want those who work in government to be required to undergo this kind of re-education? How about managers and workers in corporate America? How about the men and women in our military?
How about every one of us?
There are three parts to a successful strategy to defeat the forces of critical race theory: governmental action, grass-roots mobilization, and an appeal to principle.
We already see examples of gov-ernmental action. Last year, one of my reports led President Trump to issue an executive order banning critical race theory-based training programs in the federal government. President Biden rescinded this order on his first day in office, but it provides a model for gov-ernors and municipal leaders to follow. This year, several state legislatures have introduced bills to achieve the same goal: preventing public institutions from conducting programs that stereotype, scapegoat, or demean people on the basis of race. Some have organized a coalition of attorneys to file lawsuits against schools and government agencies that impose critical race theory-based programs on grounds of the First Amendment (which protects citizens from compelled speech), the Fourteenth Amendment (which provides equal protection under the law), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibits public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race).
On the grassroots level, a multiracial and bipartisan coalition is emerging to do battle against critical race theory. Parents are mobilizing against racially divisive curricula in public schools and employees are increasingly speaking out against Orwellian reeducation in the workplace. When they see what is happening, Americans are naturally outraged that critical race theory promotes three ideas—race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation—which violate the basic principles of equality and justice. Anecdotally, many Chinese-Americans have told me that having survived the Cultural Revolution in their former country, they refuse to let the same thing happen here.
In terms of principles, we need to employ our own moral language rather than allow ourselves to be confined by the categories of critical race theory. For example, we often find ourselves debating “diversity.” Diversity as most of us understand it is generally good, all things being equal, but it is of secondary value. We should be talking about and aiming at excellence, a common standard that challenges people of all backgrounds to achieve their potential. On the scale of desirable ends, excellence beats diversity every time.
Similarly, in addition to pointing out the dishonesty of the historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated, we must promote the true story of America—a story that is honest about injustices in American history, but that places them in the context of our nation’s high ideals and the progress we have made towards realizing them. Genuine American history is rich with stories of achievements and sacrifices that will move the hearts of Americans—in stark contrast to the grim and pessimistic narrative pressed by critical race theorists.
Above all, we must have courage—the fundamental virtue required in our time. Courage to stand and speak the truth. Courage to withstand epithets. Courage to face the mob. Courage to shrug off the scorn of the elites. When enough of us overcome the fear that currently prevents so many from speaking out, the hold of critical race theory will begin to slip. And courage begets courage. It’s easy to stop a lone dissenter; it’s much harder to stop io, 20, 100, 1,000, L000,000, or more who stand up together for the principles of America.
Truth and justice are on our side but only If we can muster the courage to outright fight for it!. ■
fox files 
Recent Comments