OPINION
Is anyone really gullible enough to believe them when they blatherskite about “misinformation”?
Because, for all the pontificating of the government, its bureaucratic masters, and its legacy media lickspittles, it’s beyond obvious that the worst purveyors of actual misinformation is them.
This isn’t just conspiracy theory gibbering. We know it’s true. We know they’re liars — because they’ve admitted it.
And not just any old governments and bureaucrats, either — the very people supposedly “combatting misinformation” are lying through their teeth.
Their misinformation runs the gamut from lying about their CVs to spreading damaging lies about people who dared get in their way.
People like journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer.
A rarity in the mainstream media, Hartley-Brewer has long dared challenge the establishment narratives on everything from “hate speech” to vaccine mandates. It was the latter, in particular, that drew the ire of the Ministry of Truth.
The saddest – or the most alarming part of this story is that Hartley-Brewer could hardly be considered any kind of skeptic to begin with. And yet – she made it to “the list.”
The reporter has apparently had the Covid jab and even promoted it on her show. But it was a post on X – then Twitter – that got her in hot “secretive list” water (Stalin, truly, would never even bother.).
“No. No. No. NO!!!!,” was the post – in reaction to “a Telegraph article published in October 2021 about the Health Secretary and Education Secretary’s joint letter to parents encouraging them to vaccinate their children against Covid, headlined, ‘Pupils could lose out on face-to-face lessons if they don’t get vaccinated, warn ministers.’”
Enter, the Inquisitors. In the form of the UK government’s “Rapid Response Unit”, an Orwellian “counter-disinformation unit” which has no hesitation in spreading very real misinformation to smear anti-regime thought criminals.
Hartley-Brewer was slapped with the modern-day totalitarian state’s equivalent of an old-school communist “counter-revolutionary subversive” label: “vaccine sceptic”.
That label was slapped on the journalist as she was included in what Big Brother Watch rights group says was “a secret report on vaccine hesitancy sent across UK government recipients – and even to the US government.”
Caught bare-faced lying, the government has, kinda-sorta, apologised.
If talkTV host Julia Hartley-Brewer wanted a “formal apology” from the UK government, she has it. You see – the said government is either “sorry” for inflicting pain on Hartley-Brewer, or just upset because their “counter-disinformation unit” (formally – “Rapid Response Unit“) got caught, pants down, spreading actual disinformation […]
In the meanwhile, Julia Hartley-Brewer, as far as the UK government, is no longer a “vaccine skeptic.”
Aw, isn’t that nice of them?
The real issue for British citizens, though, is, first, that a government department deliberately lied and smeared a journalist for rightfully doing the job that so many other journalists failed or refused to do.
Second, the liars are almost certainly still at it.
That unit apparently no longer formally exists. Acquired knowledge assumes there may or may not be something worse in its place.
But Big Brother Watch has now “crowdfunded legal action against the UK government to ‘stop the Counter ‘Disinformation’ Unit targeting political dissent’, arguing that the unit is threatening freedom of expression in the UK.
Reclaim the Net
Meanwhile, the socialist Albanese government in Australia thinks Britain’s MiniTrue was Just The Thing. So much so, that they’re trying to create their own.
Especially after a potentially fatal referendum loss that, they think, was entirely due to their inability to control the public narrative, or, as they lie about it, “misinformation from the No campaign”. The political elite aren’t about to make the mistake of allowing robust, free public debate again.
The referendum result is likely to be used by the federal government to push on with its online censorship laws via the proposed Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill. Because the verdict that mainstream Australians delivered on the Voice proposal clearly defied the wishes of the political class, that class is now set to debate laws to impose the most draconian peacetime censorship Australia has ever experienced.
The government’s legislation follows teal MP Zali Steggall’s private members’ bill introduced last year with the deceptive title Stop The Lies. Following the vote Ms Steggall asserted, without evidence, that “it’s clear that the information people had access to through the course of the debate was often heavy with misleading and deceptive facts”.
It seems lost on Ms Steggall that something which is a “fact” cannot be “misleading”.
Spectator Australia
It’s a mistake, though, to argue as the Institute of Public Affairs does, that, “the problem with laws aimed at combating ‘misinformation’ is that, ultimately, someone must be in charge of deciding what is true or false”. From the establishment’s point of view, that’s not a problem at all.
The only problem is making sure that it’s them controlling what’s allowed to be “true” and “false”.
They will be our sole sources of truth — just ask them.