You wouldn’t have thought a talk about the welfare of our children was controversial. But it has turned out to be.
“There is a dangerous intolerant totalitarianism, aided by timidity, strangling debate in this country,” writes Professor Richard Ennos as he describes the disturbing cancellation of my proposed talk to parents.
The cancer of slowly killing free speech in Edinburgh and beyond continues, aggressively. Our event with Hugh McCarthy, a respected retired headteacher, and a former Director of Education of three Northern Ireland Learning Areas, someone who has presented directly to ministers, political party leaders and elected members, was refused several possible venues for the talk ‘What Are We Doing To Our Children?’ on grounds that were both spurious and unsettling.
“Anyone speaking out can be suppressed,” Prof. Ennos told Jeffrey Peel, adding that his group, Common Knowledge, has been denied venue after venue.
Censorship is, of course, rife. My cancellation demonstrates how far the tentacles of totalitarianism reach. And for me, it wasn’t the first time.
If you are proposing to vaccinate my child or grandchild, surely I am entitled to ask why, but doing so resulted in a ban from LinkedIn. And my attempts to obtain answers from the medical authorities fared no better, simply being ignored.
Similarly, if you are insisting that my child or grandchild wears a mask at school and on the bus for eight hours a day, I must be entitled to ask if you have carried out a risk-benefit assessment. But pointing this out and drawing attention to the potential damage to children resulted in me being silenced by the BBC, when the host closed the call despite me being an invited guest on his popular phone-in radio programme.
I further thought in a liberal democracy that I was allowed to ask questions such as, “What are we doing to our children?” Yet a talk on this topic in which I largely used Government data to highlight the adverse effects of Covid restrictions on children had to be given only to invitees and was subject to stringent security measures – and was then banned from YouTube for good measure.
The focus of my cancelled talk in Edinburgh was to be to present the evidence of the harms to children from restrictions while examining whether those harmful policies – masks, testing, isolation, school closures – actually worked. I was also to look at whether children were ever in danger from the virus or a danger to others, and therefore whether restrictions on them were necessary at all.
Arguably this is what any responsible society should be asking. And if the answers are ‘no’, somebody should be held responsible.
Apparently though, the Times, Telegraph, Express and others can say it, but I can’t.
Lockdown “damaged a generation“, the Telegraph reports former Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies saying. She told the Covid Inquiry of the “damage” lockdowns had done to children and that it was “awful” to see “these young people struggle”, according to the Express.
The Times reported similar comments from former Chancellor George Osborne, saying lockdown “harmed a generation of children”.
The Telegraph ran a further feature under the headline, ‘How lockdown broke a generation and no one seems to care’. It states: “New research has shown that lockdowns fuelled a staggering rise in teenage eating disorders – and this was not the only damage done.”
This is basically what I was going to say in Edinburgh. Why may they say it but I may not?
Should I be surprised, though, when world-leading scientists have suffered the same fate. Professor Norman Fenton explains how his status as a world expert “counted for nothing” and he became an “academic pariah” after his public criticism of Covid countermeasures such as lockdowns and vaccines. “Now no one is even prepared to review our papers let alone accept them,” he said. He is now “shunned by my academic colleagues”. ”Just having my name on a paper was enough to get it rejected.” His academic papers are now routinely being rejected, even by pre-print servers. Having been invited to speak at a major NHS event, the invitation was summarily withdrawn of the basis that he had questioned the efficacy of the vaccine.
The censorship has sometimes taken on an intimidatory tone as world-renowned scientists have been denigrated and subjected to threats. For example, the authors of the widely-endorsed Great Barrington Declaration were derided as “fringe scientists” by U.S. Government officials. Professor Sunetra Gupta in particular was subjected to intimidation and cancellation. I had offered her my support and complimented her on the roundtable discussion hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in which she participated. She replied: “The round table has been taken down by YouTube – very depressing.”
The Great Barrington Declaration itself and its three authors were subject to a Government-sponsored attack, as reported in STAT:
Emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed worrisome communication between Director Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that COVID-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others.
Collins’s response to the memo signed by thousands of scientists demonstrates a clear intention to silence. Collins wrote:
This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize-winner Mike Levitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.
The Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART) – a group of scientific and medical experts formed to present evidence around Covid policies – is similarly concerned about the suppression of freedom of speech and academic inquiry among scientists and other researchers. They write:
Once you are persona non grata for one of your beliefs, you become an ‘untouchable’. This culture of instant dismissal for an unpopular belief (regardless of whether it is accurate or not) has been exponentially rising in prominence in the last decade. It has led to a culture of self-censorship amplified by social media algorithms which merrily curate your timeline into a homogenous soup of unilateral agreement, obscuring anyone who may challenge your worldview.
Perhaps the biggest danger is indeed that we engage in self-censorship. The HART authors continue:
At heart is the realisation that it is not just a question of eradicating the physical act of censorship, as bad as it is. A much more insidious and evil practice seems to be rife, that of silencing a few outspoken people such that a larger minority choose to self-censor for reasons of self-preservation. The ‘official’ narrative… therefore prevails, unchecked.
Or as Professor Ennos puts it in his conversation with Jeffrey Peel: “There is incredible social stigma about being different – it takes a lot of courage, so we self-censor.”
Worryingly, some countries are taking censorship a stage further, starting to legislate directly against free speech. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, for example, currently being debated in the Irish Senate (having been passed by the lower house) has been described by the Free Speech Union’s Toby Young as a “draconian anti-free speech law”.
Finally, there is the growing absence of democratic accountability. I have written of the order of 200 emails to individual politicians in our political parties and to Government medical officials asking why we are vaccinating children, why children are masked and why schools were closed. Most recently I asked if medical facilities had displayed information explaining to patients the meaning of, and their rights under, informed consent rules.
Most do not even afford me the courtesy of an acknowledgement, let alone answers to my questions.
In a second article, the HART authors write:
So what is the truth, and who can speak it? While the answer to this question may not be clear-cut, one thing is absolutely crystal clear: if we are not allowed to talk about it, then it seems very unlikely that the mainstream narrative will resemble anything that is even remotely close to the truth. HART has more to say on this matter, and we intend to say it.
Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker is even more forthright:
There will be no restoration of liberty, rights and truth until we come to terms with what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future. Playing along with this conspiracy of silence surrounding a policy that effectively blotted out every advance in human rights since the Magna Carta is a disastrous error that could lead to the entrenchment of a new dark age.
Strong words indeed, but I fear he may not be wrong.
Hugh McCarthy is a retired headteacher in Northern Ireland who until recently served as a director on two of the province’s main education councils and who remains a ministerial appointment on one.
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We face a soft version of the dictatorship of the USSR. There is no Gulag for us, but the people who enjoin us to ‘be kind’ are filled with a religious zeal that calls for the silencing of all heretics.
Like Solzhenitsyn, I choose not to live by lies.
KBO.
I found it grimly amusing that teachers encouraged their 2020 students to protest their spuriously awarded exam results, but never encouraged them to protest for the right to sit those exams properly in the first place.
Censorship has widespread support, even if most of the time it’s tacit support, particularly on those topics in which the population has been coerced and intimidated into submission. So basically, anything covid related and anything climate related.
The reason is simple. Cognitive dissonance. Imagine you’re someone who has complied with everything. You’ve probably done it because you’ve been forced to, you’ve been intimidated and out of cowardice you’ve complied., knowing to do otherwise would just mean trouble If someone then comes along and shows defiance by, god forbid, asking a few questions, it reminds you of what a coward you”ve been. And nobody likes to be reminded of their cowardice. So you welcome the other person being shut up.
You probably won’t call for the person to be shut up, because you’re also too cowardly for that, but you’ll quietly be glad they’ve been silenced.
And that is how a relatively small group of aggressive petty totalitarians capture an entire society.
The main “topics” you refer to are RACE GENDER EQUALITY DIVERSITY and CLIMATE. On these topics and more, people often willingly surrender their freedom of expression, by self censoring themselves. On these five ideologies people will censor themselves because the appeal of ideologies is that they “absolve us of the obligation to think for ourselves” (Andrew Doyle, Free Speech and Why it matters)
It is looking increasingly hazardous to put ones head above the parapet on any contentious topic. The government is permanently cloth-eared and the forces of social media, especially those who profess to oppose hate speech are shown to be the biggest and most frequent practitioners.
And now that they have enroled corporate business, we risk our lifestyle as well as our freedom to do what we have traditionally done.
For most people it isn’t hazardous. It’s futile. You just won’t get anywhere. You’ll find all the doors closed.
But you are right that if, for whatever reason, you manage to get yourself heard, start building support and begin to have some sort of influence, then i does start to become hazardous.
It certainly does become hazardous, that’s why very very few commentators actually call it out.
As mentioned in the first post in this thread, I quote “There is no Gulag for us”………….Not yet there isn’t..
Its the very same peoples who were sending us Gentiles to the Gulags, this race of people is extremely hazardous..
There, I’ve called it out…past caring…. I’m sure the 77th have my IP address by now.
Gulagesque “containment camps”, policed by immigrants..
Best keep your head down…
The left doesn’t want us to protect children
Jeffrey Tucker is absolutely right. We’re in deep trouble.
Over two years ago, I wrote to my friends and family exactly what Jeffrey Tucker says – we have entered the New Dark Age.
But I guess the Old Dark Age wasn’t all bad.
The NHS is a totalitarian socialist organisation enabled by a socialist fascist state; ‘Blair’s Britain’.
‘The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.’
‘The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only.’
‘Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State’
“The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932), Benito Mussolini
Like Norman Fenton and the others, Hugh McCarthy is a hero.
Censorship is only ever practised by cowards.
Cowards who have something to hide.
The WEF is headed up by a German. The EU is a French-German racket intended to unite the two major powers in Europe who weren’t strong enough to conquer Europe on their own, but united may well be.
They have learned a great deal from Nazi propaganda and the East German Stasi ….. and it is now being applied across Europe and Western nations.
It is totalitarianism – and in order for their lies to be accepted by the majority, the dissenters must be silenced. Instead of actual Gulags, they are building virtual ones.
We must all speak out and refuse to “go quietly.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffAMFiV514I
Are we caught up somewhere between what the German philosopher Herman Lubbe(1) called “communicative silencing” in which an individual’s perception of the distribution of public opinion influences that individual’s willingness to express their own opinions
and as postulated by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman -all that has to be done then is to “control” public opinion-
and this means the perpetrators avoid the need to acknowledge, and be held accountable for, what they have done, through the imposition of rules around what is allowed to be said-”sayability rules”(1)
and in which some people are allowed to acknowledge “mistakes” because they control the content and tenor of what is said?
So some are censored, some are silenced, some lose their jobs, some become criminals through new laws and some silence themselves….and some aren’t and some don’t. How come?