The Fourth Estate’s Contempt for Free Speech

In a perfect display of the fourth estate’s (or should I say the left estate’s) contempt for debate and the free exchange of considered opinions, Stuff on Saturday editorialised in prose and cartoon, box-holing all criticism of Dear Leader’s handling of our COVID response as conspiracy theories and some individuals, laughably, as deniers. Deniers of what?

The BFD. Cartoon credit: Stuff

The woeful editorial accompanying the stupid sketch fails even in the relatively simple task of straw-man building by reverting to ridiculous fact-free hyperbole:

“The impression of lax border testing obviously helps rumours and conspiracies to flourish, but so does the image of a government forcing tests on people who may not want them. That feeds into the growing networks of those who believe that Covid-19 is a hoax and that the pandemic is really a front for governments to expand control of populations and erode human rights.”

I haven’t heard a single individual voicing the pandemic as a ‘hoax’ let alone a ‘growing network’ of such people; what utter nonsense.

The editorial continues:

“Such thinking has grown increasingly mainstream. A National Party official in Taranaki has attacked alert level restrictions as breaches of “the basic human rights and civil liberties of everyday Kiwis”

Yes, really. A ‘National Party official’ has stated a very elementary, indisputable, fact, obvious to everybody except the mentally unwell, and for his trouble is corralled with hoaxers and deniers that exist only in the editorial writer’s sub-standard imagination.

The BFD Screenshot from Stuff

Meantime, says Stuff, can you spare us a donation?

The BFD. Photoshopped image credit Boondecker

How about no: but perhaps when you grow up, and please, keep the monkeys away from the typewriters.

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