Some of those challenging establishment narratives on such issues as the pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines, Net Zero, the influence of the WEF/UN/WHO/EU, critical race theory, gender ideology, migration and Ukraine challenge only one of those narratives; others challenge a number of them or even all of them. This conveniently allows the liberal media to write us off as 'conspiracy theorists' or 'deplorables' if some hold several varieties of 'wrongthink.'
If you challenge any of these narratives, you will often find yourselves with a wide range of fellow travellers: anarchists, the traditional far left, libertarians both left and right, classical liberals, populists, the hard and far right, and genuine cranks. What you generally won't find are many members of the metropolitan elites, the identitarian left and centrists (left, right or genuinely in the centre). There are a few, and I am pretty sure that many do challenge some of these narratives, but they are not very public about it.
The traditional far left and anarchists tend to keep themselves to themselves mostly, but the much larger broadly 'libertarian' group generally talks amongst themselves online. I am in that grouping, very much at the liberal end of things. I frequently see people airing views, for example, on migration, Islam or pro-Trump, that I do not share. However, I am not inflicted with any of the progressive vices of judging the speaker rather than the speech, engaging in ad hominems or offence archaeology, nor am I particularly concerned about who others associate with, who platforms them, or the medium where the views are expressed. That may involve me holding my nose at times, but I want to hear and engage with their views on the topics I am interested in, not their views on everything else.
Because 'we' are such a broad church, my sense has always been that most people think in much the same way, exercise the same tolerance, attempt to be civil and underlying that, I have always felt, is a commitment to free speech. There has always been far more civility in political discourse on the right than on the left.
Another thing I think has always bonded 'us' in some way is our familiarity with being on the receiving end of insults. Because I have expressed gender-critical views for a few years now, I am used to being called a 'transphobe', a 'Nazi', 'far-right' and a 'fascist'. Because I occasionally criticise the excesses of critical race theory, a 'racist', and for questioning Net Zero, a 'climate denier'. I've collected 'conspiracy theorist' and 'anti-vaxxer' over the pandemic. When one is first on the receiving end of a new insult, the natural temptation is to mount a defence, but after a while, the name-calling becomes water off a duck's back and ceases to grate. When people descend to this level, they are short of arguments to offer in return.
This week, I've added some more insults - 'evil', 'ignorant', 'morally bankrupt', 'Jew-hater' and 'anti-Semite'. The difference this time is that these have not come from progressives but from the right.
I've made my views clear; I'm not on anybody's side. I simply believe that it is possible to utterly condemn Hamas atrocities, which have no justification, whilst still recognising the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinians from 1948 onwards, and be opposed to Israel getting carte blanche from our media and politicians to respond however they see fit (despite their empty words urging Israel to show restraint), and possibly in contravention of international humanitarian law. Politely, this is "both sidesism" or "useful idiocy"; at worst, it is the slurs above.
Another uniting factor has been a distrust of mainstream, especially legacy, media. The decline in trust here has been greatly accelerated by the constant lying and misinformation about every aspect of the pandemic. Suddenly, with this conflict, some of those critical and suspicious of the media seem to accept what the media tells them, with a clear alignment with media biased towards our pre-existing political persuasion. A few weeks ago, these outlets were treated as state-corporate propaganda outlets, but now, for some, they appear to be the source of truth and wisdom. What happened to everybody’s critical faculties? Let’s take a look at some of the key news/propaganda stories.
What happened at the fence on 7th October is too complex a rabbit hole to go down. Some suspect a 9/11-style false flag, an ‘inside job’; most think it is simply a monumental cockup. I will leave that one for this piece and move on to the first big propaganda coup, the '40 decapitated babies' story. This never happened, but as atrocity propaganda, it had a massive effect. It was plastered everywhere, and I don't doubt that some people still believe it. I don't think this was the IDF command's fault; it can be traced back to one soldier with a history of anti-Palestinian propaganda, two credulous journalists who later retracted their claims, and a Netanyahu-friendly TV network.
However, people whom I usually trust to have a critical mind bought this story at the time. Some believers in new and alternative media attempted to weaponise their embarrassment by turning this round rapidly and went on the attack about people quibbling with atrocities. I'm not aware of anybody who denies there were atrocities.
The IDF has returned to the atrocities with the private screening of the 45-minute video for the world's media. The journalists witnessed horrific things, things that I most certainly would not want to see. The descriptions are nauseating enough. However, they are unsurprising because I always thought that things like this happened. This video does not change my view of the events or how I should view any moral considerations related to the attack.
This did not stop IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari from introducing the video and claiming that atrocity deniers were indulging in Holocaust levels of denial. If these atrocity deniers exist, will they be any less inclined to atrocity denial because the media tells them there were atrocities? If they don't exist, this is a classic straw man argument.
Israel knows that the 40 decapitated babies story has lost traction, even if it never intended it in the first place. It also knows that global public support for its bombing of Gaza is wavering, so the 45-minute video came out when it did in an attempt to counter that drift. It was done to try to continue public support for the unsustainable moral equation that the nature of the crimes committed by Hamas justifies any punishment that Israel dishes out. That much can be seen in Israel’s furious denouncement of UN Secretary-General António Guterres when this narrative is questioned.
Atrocity propaganda goes both ways. The decapitated babies story was a disaster for Hamas, but the al-Ahli hospital strike was a victory, whatever the truth of the matter. That Israel did it is the belief on the ground in the Middle East, which almost certainly would have happened anyway, even if Western media hadn't foolishly leapt on it unquestioningly.
Initially, I was unsure, then I went with the IDF account, but now I am unsure again. I have seen credible evidence that casts doubt on every piece of evidence that Hagari showed in the press conference. Exploring all this is outside the scope of this article, but whilst the impression has been created that the IDF account is now the accepted truth, many still aren't buying it, including al-Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Channel 4 and The New York Times. It could well be that this is another episode in the long history of Israeli lies, denials and propaganda.
Will we ever know for sure? I very much doubt it. Deliberate Israeli targeting vs an Islamic Jihad missile fragment does not exhaust the possible explanations anyway. The one thing that probably would decide the matter and, indeed, the truth of what happened on the 7th of October and what happened with the lorry that was blown up, evacuating civilians on a safe route, is satellite data. I'm sure Israel and the US have that data, but they don't want to release it for some reason.
Again, I see former allies on the right vociferously targetting anybody who questions the IDF account. Healthy scepticism gets muddled up with the journalistic errors of the identitarian-infested broadcast media. Yes, liberals and sceptics see it, too; we can see the bias of the BBC and other outlets here. That doesn't mean, however, that there are no questions to be asked about the IDF account.
The Israel-Palestine situation has a long and complex history with attendant moral complexity; the efforts being made to decontextualise the Hamas attack and compress this situation into a simple good vs evil narrative are spectacular. Contextualisation is not justification, even if there are some who twist simplistic intersectional power analyses and postcolonial narratives into supporting the terrorism of Hamas. Not everybody who protests can be tarred with the same brush. We have seen the presence of a couple of members of the far right used to depict Kellie-Jay Keen and the attendees of 'Let Women Speak' events as fascists and Nazis. We have seen anti-lockdown protestors depicted as 'far-right conspiracy theorists' because of the presence of a few people at such events. Let's not fall into the same trap here.
Last weekend, we saw the ante upped by the Hizb ut-Tahrir protest, which seems to have become mixed up in some people's minds with other protests, allowing further confusion about the anti-Semitism vs anti-Zionism issue. Moreover, it has unleashed anti-Muslim sentiment that far exceeds any anti-Semitism that I have seen online.
Has it occurred to you that such protests might be permitted to take place because stoking anger in our societies benefits the maintenance of the narrative? It worked pretty well against the unvaccinated and unmasked, didn't it? Divide and rule. Has it occurred to you that the moralising media are trying to manipulate you? Has it occurred to you that you may be being nudged?
We are becoming divided again into polarised factions, tribes if you like. We are obsessing over each other's language, looking for weaponisable errors, in precisely the same way as the woke are wont to do. Do we want to behave like them? How many column inches and hours of discussion have been spent over the language chosen by the BBC, the reporting errors and biases of the media, the correct understanding of events, and the rooting out of wrongthink?
We are distracted, and we are being played yet again. We need to reset our focus on the bigger geopolitical picture and the larger context that all this sits in. We need to subject all news/propaganda coming from both sides of the conflict to critical analysis and not rush to judgment. We need to follow the money and the activities of the military-industrial complex. The fiat money system is getting ever closer to a sudden catastrophic collapse. Censorship and shadowbanning are back on social media over the conflict; CBDCs, biometric ID, Agendas 21 & 2030, and the Great Reset are still chugging along, looking for the opportunities this conflict presents.
We can still disagree about the conflict, and we will because passions are high, but I hope we can do so with more civility because I cannot recall seeing vitriol and polarisation on the scale I am seeing now. It wasn’t as bad as this over the invasion of Iraq or Ukraine. There was division but not passion on this scale. Both sides get in a muddle about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and both sides get in a muddle about Hamas and the Palestinians, though in different ways. Then there are those, like me, who refuse to take a side and end up condemned by both or seen as advocates of the opposing side in debates.
Please don't drop the ball now. They're so close to enslaving us forever with CBDCs and biometric digital IDs; they know we're on to them now. We can't afford the luxury of falling apart irrevocably over this conflict. Don’t forget the common enemy, that technocratic, technofeudalist, technofascist (take your pick) blob in the middle that is eating us all up whilst we fight among ourselves. Take your pitchforks to the castle gates, and let's line up together again.
Nice one Nik. We must always try to see the Big Picture. Great Reset vs Great FREEset - that's the lens we must use when we find emotion clouding our judgement.