Last week from January 15th to 19th, the world’s private-jet-setting elites held their annual champagne and caviar fuelled knees-up in Davos. One of the key speeches at the event was made by the fragrant, always immaculately-coiffed EU supremo Ursula Von Der Leyen. Here’s the opening paragraph of Ursula’s speech:
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Klaus. Your annual Global Risk Report makes for a stunning and sobering read. For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate. It is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarisation within our societies. These risks are serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing: changes in our climate – and our geopolitical climate; shifts in our demography and in our technology; spiralling regional conflicts and intensified geopolitical competition and their impacts on supply chains.
The sobering reality is that we are once again competing more intensely across countries than we have in several decades. And this makes the theme of this year’s Davos meeting even more relevant. ‘Rebuilding trust’ – this is not a time for conflicts or polarisation. This is the time to build trust. This is the time to drive global collaboration more than ever before. This requires immediate and structural responses to match the size of the global challenges. I believe it can be done. And I believe that Europe can and must take the lead in shaping that global response.
So, in spite of the Russia/Ukraine war, the growing conflict in the Middle East and the Chinese military threats to Taiwan, Ursula believes the most important issue facing the world is “disinformation and misinformation” – basically what we plebs are allowed to see and hear. And she believes a key role for the elites is rebuild trust in the plans the elites have for us by protecting us against being fed information which she and other leaders consider to be potentially harmful or polarising.
It seems that the attack on free speech is happening on at least three levels. First there is what we might call hidden censorship, by which a small group of people decide what information we are permitted. That’s why websites such as the Daily Sceptic are so important – they bring us stories and viewpoints which our rulers would rather we didn’t know about. I experienced this hidden censorship with my book There is No Climate Crisis. When I first mentioned writing a book debunking the whole man-made global warming nonsense – before I had a title and before I had written a single word – my literary agent told me I was wasting my time as no U.K. publisher would dare publish the book and no U.K. bookshop would dare stock it for fear of attack by the cyber-pitchfork-wielding social-media mob. So I had to self-publish through Amazon. And even though over 4,000 copies have been sold largely through word of mouth and even though I have presented the book to buyers at the main book chains, not a single copy has ever appeared in a U.K. bookshop.
The second level of the assault on free speech seems to be a coordinated effort by much of the mainstream media and the major technology mega-corporations to allow just one approved narrative on key issues like the origin of COVID-19, the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, the finances of the Biden family and, of course, the global boiling scare. In a previous article for the Daily Sceptic I wrote about the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative. This includes many of the world’s leading news media – the BBC, CBC, ABC (Australia) and the European Broadcasting Union; the main press agencies such as AP and Reuters; and the Big Tech mega-corporations such as Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp), Microsoft and Twitter.
The Trusted News Initiative claims its aims are to “work together to build audience trust and to find solutions to tackle challenges of disinformation. By including media organisations and social media platforms, it is the only forum in the world of its kind designed to take on disinformation in real time.” It would seem that the main media members decide the correct narrative for each story, the press agencies help spread that narrative and the technology giants shutdown, de-platform and ban anyone daring to question the Trusted News Initiative’s version of events.
The third method of expunging freedom of expression from our lives seems to be through legal restrictions. Many countries are busy passing toughened hate crime legislation and ‘online safety’ laws. One of the most draconian may be in the Republic of Ireland. Critics have claimed the new Irish laws will “have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech”, the CEO of X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk has threatened to take the Irish State to court over the legislation and Donald Trump Jr. has described the bill as “insane”. But both the EU and many other countries around the world are also introducing similar laws restricting what we are allowed to say, write, see and hear. The Foreign Policy website reported last month: “The global landscape for freedom of expression has faced severe challenges in 2023. Even open democracies have imposed restrictive measures to combat a range of threats including hate speech, disinformation, extremism and public disturbances.” And one certainty in life is that when politicians start introducing new laws, they always find good reasons to keep giving themselves greater powers by adding to the laws they have made.
At Davos, Ursula made it very clear that our access to reliable news and opinions is to be increasingly restricted to avoid polarisation and rebuild trust in those who govern us. Let’s hope we all are suitably grateful to Klaus, Ursula and the Davos elites for their willingness to protect us from misinformation and disinformation which might confuse and worry us.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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