The Digital Brownshirts & Their Masters. By David Souto.
We are under siege. A nihilistic fanaticism is running free among us thanks to the emergence of a journalistic “ethos” that establishes an almost complete equivalence between the “truth” and those utterances that support the strategic goals of the great economic and digital powers of our time.
A few months ago Facebook censored an article in the British Medical Journal that highlighted serious irregularities in Pfizer’s clinical vaccine trials. Then two weeks ago, fact-checkers from the Spanish websites Newtral and Maldita burst into the public square to accuse the professor of Pharmacology, renowned expert in drug safety, and ex-WHO adviser, Joan Ramón Laporte of foisting lies and disinformation onto the Spanish populace. This, in reaction to Laporte’s testimony before a Spanish parliamentary commission investigating the country’s vaccination effort.
Despite his towering credentials, his intervention was quickly tarred as problematic by the media and subsequently banned by YouTube. The crime of this new Galileo Galilei? Alerting the assembled parliamentarians to the existence of grave procedural irregularities in the trials for the vaccines, and questioning the wisdom of a health strategy that aims to inject every Spanish child over the age of six with a new, poorly tested, and largely ineffective medication.
This incident reveals that the fact-checkers will attack anyone who does not accept the truth as dictated by the great economic and government centers of the world. This is not the usual official media obfuscation to which we’ve become accustomed over the years, but rather a brazen McCarthyist intimidation device, designed to frighten citizens into submission by appealing to their lowest and most ignoble instincts, an approach lain bare in Maldita’s smug and Manichaean slogan: “Join and support us in our battle against lies.”
Under this harsh binary logic, an internationally famous scientist like Laporte is not even given the opportunity to be judged wrong or misguided in good faith. Rather, he is immediately accused of being a willful and dangerous liar who must be immediately banished from public view. …
Whereas the original model of fascism sought to enforce social conformity through physical intimidation, the new variant seeks to do so by aggressively enforcing the “acceptable” (to big power, of course) parameters of both scientific discourse and the idea of the public sphere, a direct product, like science, of the Enlightenment. Their objective is to liquidate these flawed but essential spaces of debate in all but name, and thus deprive us of two of the only remaining vehicles we have for defending ourselves against the abuses meted out by the liberal state and its corporate and military allies. …
Human progress is being sabotaged by the political class:
These Digital Brownshirts are just the most visible and forward-leaning elements of a much broader effort to install the logic of the algorithm — a providential and vertically-imposed concept of truth that vitiates traditional fact-finding and admits neither human intelligence nor scientific debate — as a cornerstone of our human interactions and cognitive processes. …
The methods these fact-checkers use to dictate what is to be presented to the public as “true” operate under few, if any known, procedural standards. Rather, in forming their “arguments” it seems they simply cherry-pick the opinions of an expert or two who is known to be on board with the particular “algorithmic” project of social change or social mobilization.
The left’s “fact checking” is yet another tool for suppressing the truth and non-leftists.
hat-tip Stephen Harper
