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It’s quite something that the clown world in which we now live has evolved to such a terrifying degree that Piers Morgan — of all people — somehow believes he is best placed to arbitrate an entire planet’s sense of morality, but sadly, that is where we now find ourselves.
Off the back of a recent Connecticut court’s ruling that Infowars founder, Alex Jones, must now find an additional one-billion dollars to pay the victims families of the decade-old Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, without fail, but with much vigour, many of Britain’s so-called ‘pro-free speech’ commentariat found broad cause for celebration.
First, there was TalkTV’s breakfast show host, Julia Hartley-Brewer, who, despite being an apparently rational ally when it comes to the topic of justly-crucifying Boris Johnson’s former cabal of ‘Covid response’ cronies, rather oddly appeared to high-five the gravely dangerous precedent being set in regard to the upsetting and harmful words of a rotund Texan bogeyman, tweeting as she did on the day of the verdict,
This is the same pro-Brexit, anti-eco-extremist purveyor Julia Hartley-Brewer, who has herself been consistently inundated with mobs of pitchforks by her political opponents to be de-platformed, uninvited, or boycotted from certain forums altogether, so much so, that an actual free speech absolutist over at sp!ked-online, Brendan O’Neill, wrote a stark defence of her perceived-to-be upsetting and harmful words and viewpoints back in 2019.
Perhaps in a parallel universe somewhere, the ever-self-righteous James O’Brien of LBC radio fame, who once proclaimed that Donald Trump’s ‘sit down’ chat with Jones was his ‘point of no return’, maybe he too is being sued into oblivion for the anguish he helped cause to the falsely accused when deciding to become a global megaphone for Carl Beech, the now-jailed fantasist who was handed extensive airtime by O’Brien on his own show to promote carte blanche incriminations of a Westminster-wide political paedophile-ring that didn’t even exist.
Whilst it goes without saying that how Alex Jones initially conducted himself in the aftermath of such a tragedy was undeniably ugly, as a society we really should begin to ask ourselves: Where should punishment, if any, for ‘anguish’ or ‘trauma’ suffered by victims, not only of high-crime, but anything, begin and end?
Moreover, isn’t ‘anguish’ and ‘trauma’ by definition subjective? A victim of a fake paedophilia charge has no less had a life and reputation destroyed than a parent suffering fake charges about an already destroyed life, no?
Or should we, as suggested by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian of late, place our full trust in government to regulate specific online speech so much that ‘alternative media’ actors such as Jones are simply memory-holed in perpetuity for the sake of, as he puts it, ‘preventing lies’ and ‘protecting freedom’? Because as we all know, the government, and gatekeepers of news like The Guardian, are the very first places one would look for unadulterated ‘truth’.
In the wake of Hartley-Brewer and O’Brien, came a fellow broadcasting nuisance, Piers Morgan, a been around the block antagoniser whose as-marketed, no-holds-barred primetime ‘Uncensored’ talkshow, now regularly loses viewership to rival station, GB News, pointing, perhaps, to a distinct lack of enthusiasm for his always-pious pontification.
Never one to let a good human disaster go to waste, taking to his channel’s Twitter feed, Morgan said,
“Opinions belong in the daylight, where they can be challenged, debated and exposed for what they are. That is free speech. But there is a line”.
This, an interesting tidbit considering Morgan’s own past, and his own metamorphosis since such a past into the country’s loudest Simon Cowell impersonator during his time as a talentless ‘talent judge’ on such entertainment shows as Britain’s Got Talent.
But let us not forget who and what this man really is.
A career journalist and newspaper editor whose relationship with Australian media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, began, and continues — via TalkTV — to this very day.
In the past, however, Murdoch owned the now-abolished weekly-Sunday tabloid, the News of the World (NOTW), of which Morgan edited in 1994 before moving onto become the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mirror in 1995.
But by May 2004, at the height of the Iraq War, Morgan had been sacked, and by 2011, the News of the World was no more.
A self-made moral arbiter though he may think, shameless enough to now pass judgement and chastise those who put fantasy over fact, once again, let us not forget Morgan’s personal participation in the realm of ‘hoax’ himself — pre-Sandy Hook — when, as editor of the Daily Mirror, before finding any legitimate corroboration, he green-lit the front-page publishing of multiple fake ‘torture’ photos which purported to show British Army officers defiling ‘Iraqi prisoners’ whilst in captivity abroad.
Placing thousands of soldiers’ lives at risk by running such a lie in a time of war, one would think may have offered up ample excuse for self-reflection, yet just six years later after his dismissal, Morgan was relatively blasé, opining that he felt ‘vindicated’ for printing the issue and that it was his ‘moral duty’, weirdly, to publish imagery of staged theatre to the unaware masses.
A year later, in 2011, Morgan had become the blowhard replacement for Larry King Live, which was, at the time, CNN’s most-watched and longest-running programme.
But just a few months into his tenure, scandal broke that a UK-wide newspaper campaign involving ‘phone-hacking’ had been going on for years under the banner of News International, the media empire owned by his friend Rupert Murdoch, including the NOTW.
While not implicating Morgan directly, it soon transpired that scores of NOTW journalists, in conjunction with bribing police officers, had in fact been hacking the phones of various celebrities, politicians, and Royal Family members simply to garner gossip before their competitors, but most scandalously of all, they had also hacked the phone of the murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, which, because of her post-death mobile activity, led her family to believe she was actually still alive.
Although Morgan incessantly denied he was aware of any phone-hacking practices under his editorship at the Daily Mirror when answering questions at the then-government-sanctioned Leveson Inquiry into media-wide conduct, allegations from former colleagues of his were nevertheless forthcoming, including from one reporter who claimed phone-hacking under Morgan was ‘endemic’.
Later exposed by BBC stalwart, Jeremy Paxman, and then again by a Channel 4 TV show that dug up video footage of Morgan from 2003 explaining how to hack a phone, one may well be justified in having reservations about his outspoken denial of the charge. This, especially so, when one considers that in Lord Justice Leveson’s conclusive inquiry report by the end of 2012, he deemed Morgan’s self-exoneration as ‘utterly unpersuasive’.
Furthermore, by the latter part of 2014, Trinity Mirror Plc, the umbrella group that included the Daily Mirror and its affiliate newspapers, for the very first time admitted liability that journalists involved within their newsroom had indulged themselves in widespread phone-hacking, with legal papers stating that the bulk of the alleged wrongdoing took place in the early 2000s when Piers Morgan was Daily Mirror editor.
More recently, as of just last week, Morgan took social-media sensation Andrew Tate to task for many of his ‘controversial’ opinions during his ‘Uncensored’ evening talkshow.
Providing endless evidence of his aversion to nuanced debate and proclivity to scaffold ‘gotcha’ interjections and questioning, instead, Morgan later treads the line of the absurd, flailing whilst doing so, as he attempted to trap Tate into mere ‘guilt by association’ by suggesting that for the former world champion kickboxer to appear on a past Alex Jones podcast, he is surely culpable of some kind of irredeemable crime, using Jones’ latest Sandy Hook defamation fine as the battering ram for blood-on-the-hands complicity, and the barometer of Tate’s ‘moral line’.
As Morgan went onto preach to a much more stoic Tate,
“When people invent vile things to make themselves rich off the back of families of little kids who’ve been blown to pieces with a machine gun, or a semi-automatic version of a machine gun, I think that is actually a line I wouldn’t cross. I wouldn’t be happy to go on someone’s podcast when they’d been responsible for doing that…”
No, indeed, except when it comes to the likes of Tony Blair, a very rich friend who sent thousands of youngsters into machine gun fire, the rules around ‘moral outrage’ change entirely.
The country’s former war criminal prime minister who misled the totality of the western world for the auspices of an eight-year-long conflict in the Middle East, killing 179 British armed service personnel in the process, is, however, so worthy of Morgan’s ongoing respect, that he suggested as recently as last year that the ex-Labour Party leader should be entrusted with leading the country once more as it grappled with the consequences of the Covid pandemic.
How corruptible a world it must truly be when a lead instigator of a war based on lies, killing hundreds and thousands of men, women and children, is forgiven far more casually than a man who got it wrong about the deaths of 26 small souls and staff.
How corruptible a world it must truly be when a smug-faced fat man of celebrity tittle-tattle steps atop his high horse once more to object to the lives and actions of others, when his very own resume and photo anthologies include various interviews and pictures with three convicted child sex abusers, a well-known Hollywood producer rapist, and one Ghislaine Maxwell, former long-term socialite girlfriend and convicted co-conspirator to the procurement of teenage girls, for now-deceased Kingpin paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.
How corruptible a world it must truly be when one effortlessly decides to become chief establishment shill for a ‘public health’ monster by cheerleading the ideas of legislated ‘vax-pass’ segregation, forced loss of livelihood, and state-ratified medical negligence against millions of people throughout the country — his fellow citizens — simply because they refused to take a vaccine that never came close to preventing exponential transmission, and then dares question the moral integrity of his adversaries for their ‘heinous’ toxicity?
So, no, Piers Morgan, though you may desperately seek to absolve yourself of your own sins by diverting the world’s gaze to far easier targets, the internet never forgets. Bluster, bollock, and babble all you like. To our country’s great misfortune, you were, and always will be, at the very top of Britain’s list of most morally-bankrupt bottom-feeders.
