Remember We Used to Have No Rules?

The lickspittle propaganda press makes me sick. When they aren’t creating stories from Jacinda Ardern’s social media posts or spreading the lies from the Podium of Odium, they are cheerleading the drastic abatement of civil liberties and the imposition of a draconian police state.

Take this headline from Stuff yesterday:

Deep inside the propaganda unit of Stuff‘s Parliamentary Press Gallery team, the haughty lickspittle and all-around know-it-all Luke Malpass sets about praising the regime for giving us back some of our rights that they stole from us in the first place.

Vaccine certificates are no longer required, scanning in has gone, some mandates have been lifted and today the country woke up in the orange traffic light setting. Cases and hospitalisations are coming down.

Life is now basically a version of normal plus masks. Air New Zealand is ditching its no-jab no-fly policy and Australians can now arrive. It will take some time for flight prices to come down.

The disruptions of Covid are definitely still upon us, with many people home sick or isolating because another member of their family is sick.

But the world is now getting so much more open again that what rules there are in place, seem to make less sense. That’s because the main trade-off between freedom, openness and health has been made. The primary restrictions now revolve around reducing the spread in certain crowded conditions through mask-wearing and through staying at home if you or someone in the household catches Covid-19.

There are deaths reported every day, but for the most part, life seems to be returning to normal.

Stuff

It seems to have escaped him that we used to have no restrictions before the tyrant decided that for the first time in the history of the world it was perfectly acceptable to lock up healthy people, then force them to abandon their livelihoods and business, wear masks and then in the ultimate abrogation of those rights, forcibly medicate them, and then create a two-tier society and ‘other’ those who believed in free will and resisted the state imposing forced medications on us all, and they did this all against our Bill of Rights.

Where was Luke Malpass when those freedoms and rights were curtailed with the haughty stare and brisk wave from the tyrant?

Yes, that’s right, he was parroting the lies from the regime and still is to this day. The free press became the bought, paid for and subsidised propaganda press. Little wonder their readership is plummeting at the same pace that trust in media is plummeting.

The headline Malpass used is, unsurprisingly, a lie. We are not experiencing Easter with fewer rules than ever. We are experiencing Easter with fewer rules than the last two years, but most certainly not forever. We used to have NO rules.

Because the propaganda press failed to hold the politicians to account, failed to speak truth to power, and failed to fiercely guard their independence, they instead became propagandists and lickspittles to the regime as they trampled our rights.

The propaganda press is not a friend of freedom, it is an enemy of freedom. They are complicit in the degradation of our egalitarian society into an us and them society with them playing on the regime’s team.

They are no longer the independent referee, they have pulled on the stripe of the oppressors.

Wonky headlines and shill pieces touting regime lines are not the hallmarks of a free press in a democratic nation. They are the hallmarks of hopelessly corrupted media masquerading as truth-tellers when to all intents and purposes they are grifters, liars and shills.

Tyrants will always be tyrants, especially when given the unfettered powers of majority rule. But the media are supposed to be the fourth estate, with an explicit capacity for advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues. They should have stood, not with the regime, but against it, as the regime tore our rights and freedoms from our lives. They are worse than the politicians because they had a choice to make, and they failed.

Oscar Wilde once wrote in his 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.

Here we are 131 years later with the exact same problems that Oscar Wilde lamented.

We’ve been badly let down by the propaganda press, more so than by the politicians, who by and large are rent-seeking sociopaths intent on control over everything. The propaganda press abrogated their huge responsibility and so they deserve to wither and die, or preferably, burn quickly on the revolutionary bonfire that technology is bringing to us.

They are beneath contempt, they are no longer journalists practising journalism. They are hand in glove with the parliamentary complex.

But while people continue to advertise with them, or buy their newspapers, or subscribe to their sites, they exist, when really they should be drowned like an unwanted kitten. A more apt demise would be to leave them in a pot outside the gates to die from neglect like in Ancient Greece.

They abandoned their lofty principles, they prostituted themselves then prostrated themselves before the politicians. Now they must pay.

Forgive them? Not likely. Forget them, no way. We remember what they did and we remember what they said.

Now we are coming for them.

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