Credibility is the foundation of justice, not truth. It may not be strictly fair, but when it comes down to one person’s word against another, credibility carries weight. Politics relies on this when it uses ‘convincing’ Ministers to tell lies about policy in the hope the public won’t feel the need to ask follow-up questions.
The purpose of rising censorship is to preserve this arrangement.
That is why you hear e-safety framed under the banner of ‘public trust’ and community safety. It has never been about your safety online, it is about theirs.
While Silicon Valley acted in unity, dutifully curating the public conversation in favour of its political and corporate mates, governments shrugged their shoulders and ignored the abuse of the public forum at the hands of blue-haired baby communists.
Remember when Prime Minister Scott Morrison complained that Australian victims of the Covid vaccine were being silenced to protect pharmaceutical companies? No. Neither do I.
For two years, the Big Tech oligarchy protected Covid policy, health bureaucrats, politicians, and Big Pharma while taking millions in advertising dollars, both public and private. Then came Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter – the loudest of all social media platforms – and within two months the Covid narrative collapsed. Victims were speaking and being heard. Hard evidence of harm was being published. TV presenters were able to report on documented cases. Experts were going on the record. It was a disaster for ‘public trust’ in government advice.
To put it bluntly, the government had been caught in a lie.
‘Safe and effective’ turned out to be a made-up slogan used to justify all manner of inexcusable behaviour including the expansion of emergency powers. That’s why our Premiers are quietly returning tens of millions in Covid fines that were used to threaten and coerce while praying mounting class action suits fail otherwise the Treasury could become fodder for furious Australians.
While predatory ‘regulators’ in other countries, such as the UK’s Ofcom, attempt to return order and lock-down speech, Twitter continues to invalidate and expose the professional liars in Parliament. This is not only a problem for the political future of parties, it might jeopardise trillions in the Net Zero era.
The backroom handshakers are frightened by public free speech, which is why they label it ‘mis and disinformation’ while exempting themselves from the same rules. Imagine if we held Members of Parliament to the standard of absolute truth…?
Censorship is the cheapest and weakest path to ‘public trust’ because it is enforced rather than earned. That doesn’t make it any less powerful, as Mao and Stalin will attest.
If we do not clean up the abuses of power created by Covid, civilisation faces the next round of assault at the hands of ‘climate change’. It is a political narrative that promises taxation, regulation, infringements on liberty, and the reimagining of our society as something a little more fascist-y.
This is the real reason we should not ‘move on from Covid’. Citizens have unfinished business with the political class which amounts to a lot more than an apology.
Citizens were abused, lied to, punished, incarcerated, killed, injured, dehumanised, banished, and deprived of their livelihoods. What kind of civilisation dobs on kids playing in their backyard and handcuffs grandparents at the park?
To achieve justice, a small percentage of the population will have to mount a case to convince the as-yet undecided or openly hostile masses who do not want to entertain the thought that they were deceived.
We have to win this argument, not only for Covid but for the green nightmare that’s rising in front of us.
This is not the first time in history such a thing has been attempted, but what we know from historical precedent is that the speakers searching for justice must conduct themselves as credible, sensible, calm, and rational if their claims are to be believed. Where liars favour silence, we must create noise, like Huxley loose in the Oxford University Museum in 1860.
Which brings me to a point I have been trying to raise for some time.
The concept of ‘conspiracy’ has been weaponised against conservatives. While it was fun for a while to laugh and joke that ‘today’s conspiracy is tomorrow’s truth’, what embracing conspiracy has done in the long run is to devalue the power of conservative speech.
It would have been a lot smarter for us to reject the label of conspiracy at the beginning and say, ‘Vaccine injuries are not conspiracy, they are a real and serious side effect of rushed public policy. We’d also like to know the state of collusion between gain of function research and foreign labs.’
‘Conspiracy’ allowed these questions to be shunted out of the public sphere where they largely remain, attempting to claw themselves back into the news cycle. It brings me no pleasure to watch duplicitous click-hungry traitors in the press changing their stripes and latching onto these stories as if the last two years never happened, but the few brave and honourable members of the press who asked the right questions at the start, such as our Editor-in-Chief Rowan Dean, are going to need help if they are to rise above censorship and champion Covid justice.
Additionally, swathes of the libertarian and conservative voter base – feeling rightly betrayed by the media class – have decided that because the press lied about Covid, they are lying about everything. The ‘nothing is true’ ideology is dangerous because it allows those who embrace it to detach from reality and lose all hope of convincing their peers in the centre. It creates a divide that cannot be crossed.
If conversations about Covid vaccine injuries rub shoulders with ‘the moon landing is fake’, ‘the Earth is flat’, and ‘we’re ruled by shape-shifting lizard people’ then what happened during Covid will not be taken seriously.
Those who misbehaved during Covid would love nothing more than for it to become synonymous with conspiracy. They want conservatives to lose themselves in a world where ‘nothing is true’ and ‘everything is a lie’ because in that world, there is no solid ground from which to mount a legal case against abusive governments.
For those who are tasked with leading the public conversation, my advice would be to shed the language of conspiracy and go hard in the tangible world – there is nothing the political class fears more than an empowered, credible independent press.
As for conservatives at large, start with basic, provable truths and ask questions from there. Trap politicians and the press in obvious lies. Gain a footing in the mainstream narrative until the tug of curiosity brings the bulk of the population across. Credibility is power and once it is acquired, no amount of censorship can protect the government from the truth.
Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
