Bonus Content: Diary of a Dissenter
As details of the Covid crime continue to emerge, the ground shifts beneath our feet. Some extracts from last week's Diary concerning the now terminal corruption of the universal Fourth Estate.
Resuscitate the Old Lady, just for one day!
‘The recent obsession with identity has allowed journalists to pretend they are still speaking truth to power, even after they have themselves ascended to the ranks of the powerful.’ — Batya Ungar-Sargon
TUESDAY
The announcement of the imminent departure of Paul O’Neill as Editor of the Irish Crimes — on the day after Dr Fauci indicated that he is to depart as senior adviser to US president Biden — is another telling sign of the growing jumpiness among the perpetrators of the Covid scam.
Fauci, of course, is in a creep-class all of his own, but, as I have consistently been saying, the role of editors and journalists has been critical to the execution of this, the greatest deceit in history, and in a certain light they are among the worst of the malefactors on that account. They it is who have normalised the lie and sought to demonise the truth-tellers. Indeed, none of it would have been possible had not the entire media and journalistic profession gone rogue. This allowed politicians, civil servants, scientists and so-called doctors to lie with total impunity in the knowledge that they would not be called out. The journaliars and editors of the Irish Crimes have been among the most reprehensible among the long list of media defendants that, with God’s help, will one day find themselves lined up for Nuremberg II or an equivalent day of judgement.
On the first day of the present year — to give but one example — the Irish Crimes published a report in which it was alleged that an ‘anti-vaxxer’ had the evening before attempted to start a fire in the Masonic Hall on Molesworth Street in Dublin. To this day, eight months later, no one has been either named or charged in respect of this incident (a spontaneous Christmas tree fire, most likely, or, in the alternative, a fire deliberately started by malevolent state actors with a view to smearing and demonising the unvaccinated). Where is the Irish Crimes’s update on this ‘story’?
O’Neill is a sad case. When I joined the newspaper in 1992, he was a fresh-faced young crime reporter who had lately come back from a stint at the London office. He was ethical, decent and likeable, and actually a good reporter. Still, it was a surprise that he became Deputy Editor in 2002, when Geraldine Kennedy took over as Editor from Conor Brady. O’Neill didn’t have a philosophical or visionary bone in his body: He was chosen for this role on the basis of his administrative ability rather than any great record of truth-seeking or established intellectual capacities. For the next nine years, his effectiveness at people management camouflaged Kennedy’s lack of personality, and it seemed inevitable that he would succeed her. In 2011, however, he was passed over for the editorship when the arch-dullard Kevin O’Sullivan was elevated far above his station, he being at the time regarded as the superior yes-man. In 2014, I had a long conversation with O’Neill in which he expressed his frustration with the direction and moral state of the newspaper and complained that, although he was nominally third in command, he was unable to do anything to correct these dangerous drifts. When they finally got rid of O’Sullivan in 2017, O’Neill stepped up.
He has been a disastrous Editor — supine, unimaginative, craven, disappointing beyond description — and has presided over a degree of decline that, if anything, exceeded the achievements of the imbecilic O’Sullivan. But all this is as nothing compared to his leading of the newspaper into the swamp of Covid corruption, reducing it to a purchased propaganda sheet, erasing its credibility for all time, and with it the hard-won historical reputations of every journalist who ever worked for it, including myself. Had O‘Neill been a man of principle, like several of his predecessors, he could have saved Ireland from the destruction and grief imposed by the Covid subterfuge, but instead he chose to carry out the bidding of the corrupt politicians and others who, yes, conspired to subject Ireland to a terminal shakedown, so that the world’s richest might become even richer. It is a shameful legacy, and one that will occasion O’Neill’s name to go down in journalistic infamy.
I write this with a heavy heart, for I always liked Paul, who was genuinely, at one time, a man of principle. As with the general moral collapse of the former Fourth Estate, I am unable to comprehend what has happened to him. As deputy to the appalling Kennedy, he was a man of principle and honour. He played fair. He managed, with no little dexterity, the hysterical ninnies, male and female, within the Irish Crimes and generally speaking kept a lid on their excesses. He once, while he was still Kennedy’s deputy, explained to me the limits on the Editor’s power. In the Irish Crimes, he said, a series of fiefdoms seriously compromised the Editor’s powers to edit and hold control. Constant negotiation and compromise with a range of ornery interests and power-brokers, was essential. All this by way of explaining why several books of mine had either been ignored by the books editor, or dishonestly dissed by some handpicked assassin.
Something odd and unexpected has been happening within the Irish Crimes of recent times. Having lied remorselessly about the ‘pandemic’ for 30 months, the paper has of late seemed to be seeking to mend its hand — belatedly, of course, the horse having long since bolted. On Friday last, for example, the Crimes carried a report headed, ‘Insufficient vitamin D linked to fourfold increase in risk of death among Covid-19 patients’.
This is one of the things the ‘Covid deniers’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ were trying to get out to the public from virtually the beginning of the Covid scam, but all the time finding themselves frustrated in this objective by the lumpen stupidly and malevolence of the journaliars working for such as the Irish Crimes.
‘Irish researchers find unvaccinated patients with low vitamin D levels are more likely to suffer severe disease and death’, the standfirst to that article elaborated. Precisely so, which means that those who tried to stifle the voices of people who were warning about this in April 2020 bear a significant burden of culpability for the deaths of many people whom knowledge of these facts might have saved. Similarly, ‘newspapers’ like the Irish Crimes did nothing to challenge mendacious contributions from such creeps as Varadkreep, who suggested that the science concerning the efficacy of Vitamin D was not settled, and therefore to be regarded as unreliable. In the old days, the Old Lady of D’Olier Street would have been all over this story from the beginning, informing its readers of the deeper and broader picture and thereby safeguarding their health and general welfare. In the ‘progressive’ Ireland midwifed by its journaliars, the Presstitute of Tara Street seeks to mislead its readers and place them in harm’s way.
Incidentally, the research featured in the report was ‘mysteriously’ confined to unvaccinated patients. ‘Although the research was conducted only on unvaccinated patients,’ the report outlines, ‘they [sic] say vitamin D supplementation may play a vital role in protecting both unvaccinated patients and patients in whom the effect of vaccination wanes.’ That would be roughly five seconds after administration, then, since the only proven ‘effects’ of the Covid ‘vaccines’ thus far have been serious injury and death. Not entirely mending its hand, then.
Today, the Crimes is at it again, seeking to misdirect would-be accusers of its wickedness as the truth begins to break out all over. The Crimes tweeted out: Research finds 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise every week offers the best protection against the virus. This is a rather different tune to the one they played through 2020 and 2021, when, like the rest of the media, they were clamouring for the closure of gyms, parks and beaches.
An example of the depths to which O’Neill — and O’Sullivan before him — took this formerly great newspaper (once arguably one of the best in the world) is provided by an article carried in the Irish Crimes over the weekend: a return of the old ‘far right’ sponsored hit-piece, which seeks to demonise those who have questioned the lockdowns and made suggestions such as those now being made by the Irish Crimes, at a time when — to borrow a phrase from the more illustrious past of the newspaper — this was neither popular nor profitable. This is just one more in a long series of examples of the moral degeneracy of the Irish Crimes under O’Neill, who essentially handed it over to the very powers it was supposed to be holding to account.
This article is an attempt to shame those who have questioned the lockdowns, but in reality it shames O’Neill and all who sail with him in this fatally holed vessel.
There is no ‘far right’ in Ireland. Paul O’Neill knows this as well as I do. If there was, he would have been reporting on its existence before Covid, and he wasn’t. The Irish ‘far right’ is an instrument of constructed Covid groupthink, an attempt to create an ‘out group’ which could be demonised in order to cohere the mass formation.
It is interesting that the ‘basis’ of this story is supplied by an American organisation, the so-called Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE). An initial question arises: Why, if the ‘far right’ problem in Ireland is as acute as the Irish Crimes is now seeking to suggest, does the paper have to wait for a bunch of US-based ideological agitators to investigate and expose it?
The GPAHE, and the principals behind the ‘investigation’ reported here, are derivatives of a group called the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which was at one time a respected lobby group in American life, but nowadays is known as a partisan, mendacious propaganda-tool of the American Deep State. The SPLC is not a ‘human rights group,’ as it might legitimately have claimed at a time when it fought KKK groups across America. It has latterly become a smear organisation that attaches pejorative labels like ‘white nationalist’ and ‘extremist’ to anyone who questions the tenets or actions of Cultural Marxism and its goon squads.
The use of the word ‘hate’ by such bodies is always ideological, which is to say that they employ the word selectively in a manner as to suggest nothing so convincing as the projection of their own disposition on to others. The GPAHE is, in other words, itself a hate group. The recent Irish Crimes article, for example, states:
The report warns of the proliferation of groups that ‘demean, harass, and inspire violence against people based on their identity traits including race, religion, ethnicity, language, national or social origin, caste, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity’.
This is precisely the purpose of organisations like the SPLC and the GPAHE, and — in publishing this fatuously defamatory article — of the Irish Crimes, except that the discrete objective here is to provoke hatred and violence against Irish people who seek to defend their country from attack by external enemies and internal quislings.
The Crimes needs to take greater care, for it is falling back into the kind of habits that can cost media organisations dearly. In 2014, the SPLC daubed as an ‘anti-Muslim extremist’ a man called Maajid Nawaz — a British Muslim activist who, after spending his teens and early twenties professing radical Islamist ideology, cleaned up his act and became a respected voice of moderation in British intellectual circles, founding an advocacy group, the Quilliam Foundation, to highlight extremist excesses by Islamic radicals. On Real Time with Bill Maher at that time, Nawaz instanced the SPLC’s longstanding assaults on conservative Christian groups, placing this alongside the SPLA attack on him: ‘They arrogate to themselves the right to criticise their own Bible Belt. But they don’t want me to criticise my belt, within my own community,’ he said.
In October 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center apologised to and agreed a settlement of $3.375,000 to Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam Foundation, after admitting to falsely labelling him and his advocacy organisation as ‘extremist.’ That same year — 2017 — in testimony before the US Congress, SPLC president Richard Cohen refused to include the far-left Antifa among hate groups. ‘Antifa,’ Cohen declared, ‘is not a group that vilifies people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and the like.’ In other words, you don’t have to actually do anything to earn the ‘hate designation. You just have to believe the wrong things, and if you believe the right things, you are deemed incapable of hate. ‘Hate’ and ‘bigotry’, in other words, are ideological concepts offering opportunities for selective moralities.
Most of the research for the GPAHE report, it appears, was conducted by the Far Right Observatory (FRO), an Irish ‘anti-racist’ group set up in 2018 and financed with public money. To begin, the body received a grant of €250,000 — half of which was drawn from the Dormant Accounts fund, and dispensed by the Rethink Ireland’s Equality Fund, which described FRO as ‘a collective platform founded to monitor, analyse, inform and take action to counter far-right activity and hate in Ireland.’ The group also pledged to challenge ‘rising Islamophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism.’ It is, in other words, a bootboy squad acting to protect Government policies from questioning or criticism. The FRO said that it would use the grant money to ‘produce high-level data and analysis’, but unfortunately this is not borne out by the work it has carried out for the GPAHE. Since I am mentioned in the GPAHE report, I am in a position to state that every ‘fact’ contained in the report concerning me is definitively incorrect, which makes things rather difficult for anyone who has reproduced these details imagining that they derive from a reliable source.
This is how the climate of fear is constructed by which the usurpers of democracy and its freedoms get their dirty-work done. The threat of the digital equivalent of tarring-and-feathering is enough to make most people think twice before thinking anything likely to draw upon themselves the attentions of such louts and liars as the SPLC and the GPAHE.
These are, in other words, themselves ‘hate groups’ that have on multiple occasions sought to defame and frame authentic political organisations with a view to silencing their voices in culture. Apart from anything else, the question must surely be raised as to how former members of such a dubious group as the SPLC came to be regarded as having a legitimate role to play in the political life of Ireland, and cited as authorities in the onetime Irish ‘newspaper of record’. The Irish Crimes, in seeking to add spurious weight to its parochial witchhunting, should beware of courting ideological bedfellows and hug its legal advisers more closely. More immediately, the public is rapidly awakening to the utter preposterousness of this line of argument, and responding accordingly by mentally placing the word ‘not’ before every sentence in the Irish Crimes. Bodies like the SPLC and GPAHE are essentially terrorist organisations, their efforts being directed at using lies to frighten people away from sources of truth. But, then again, much the same can be said of the latter-day Irish Crimes, which is nowadays reduced to spreading fear and ignorance among its readers by carrying out to the letter the instructions of veiled overlords who live by the generation of fear and the infliction of tyranny, cruelty and murder.
I should say, in fairness, that Mick Clifford in the (Irish Crimes’s sister paper) The Irish Exscaminer — whom I have previously had occasion to chastise in these pages on not-unrelated matters — gave a pretty decent account of the true nature and quality of the GPAHE report. Pointing to the ludicrousness of the fact that the Iona Institute is listed among the ‘far right’ organisations, he observed: ‘To describe the Iona Institute as “far right” is akin to suggesting Fine Gael are Nazis or saying that Sinn Féin is full of Stalinists. The Iona Institute espouses conservative Catholic values, which chime with a shrinking minority.’
‘Right-wing extremism certainly exists,’ he says, ‘but it is confined largely to online echo chambers and a limited number of headbangers. One might well ask who benefits by attempting to amplify the issue, particularly through smearing organisations which simply hold different views to self-styled fascist hunters.’
Pausing only briefly to ponder who the ‘headbangers’ might be, and making due allowances for Clifford’s bias and craven establishmentarianism, I should be inclined to broadly agree.
The most disgusting thing about the Irish Crimes article, incidentally, is the accompanying recycled illustration, which, against a backdrop of the Irish tricolour, depicts a number of contrived silhouettes of people with arms raised in the Nazi salute. This is the level to which these slugs have sunk. Being incapable of winning arguments based on facts and reason, they must all the time descend to the lowest level of reductio ad Hitlerum. Such attempted daubings in guilt-by-association are the best they can manage, so in reality the article merely reveals their pathetic incapacity to debate or even advance a coherent case in defence of their indefensible agenda.
Such comparisons, according to Wikipedia, are intended to distract and anger the opponent, but in reality they make their targets laugh out loud — in part arising from the knowledge of the utter inadequacy of their opposition, and in part because their repeated rolling out is a sure signal of the defeat — and defeatism — of their deployers. Anyone in the country who isn’t being called ‘far right’ at this stage, in the teeth of the lies and criminality of these sock-puppet embarrassments to public discourse, needs to give some serious thought to his or her own moral delinquency.
But ultimately the message going out from this article is the same as the message conveyed by Paul O’Neill’s resignation: They’re getting scared.
And with good reason. Trust that fear, Paul, it is real. You and your newspaper have left your fingerprints all over the greatest crime in history. The day of reckoning is approaching. The dam is about to burst and the torrents of truth come cascading out. Running away will not save you from the judgement of posterity.
But, even now, it is not too late. There is a way of redeeming the situation and the newspaper your meekness and agreeableness enabled you to lead.
It is this: Resuscitate the Old Lady, just for one day. If, one Saturday morning in the next month or so (I should not leave it any longer than that, if I were you) the Irish Times were to make a comeback, redemption might just become possible. If the readers of Glasthule and Dun Laoghaire (and Granard and Drogheda at the same moment) were to emerge from John Hyland’s corner shop with a newspaper chockablock with facts and truths about how the scam was pulled off — the facts about the PCR test and the mass murder of the elderly in April 2020; the falsification of mortality figures to create fear-porn in 2020; the suppression of news of vaccine deaths in the past 20 months; an interview, perhaps, with Dr Robert Malone and/or Dr Peter McCullough, and/or Dr Mike Yeadon; an interview with Professor Mattias Desmet about mass formation; a full account of the monies paid to the Irish Crimes by the Irish Government, the HSE and the pharmaceutical industry since the start of 2020; perhaps an easy-to-read table of the deaths and injuries caused worldwide and domestically by the pseudo-vaccine, demonstrating — as it must — that these deaths are already far in excess of anything suggested by even the most corrupted corpse-snatching claims about the mortality arising from Covid, et cetera. That’ s all it would take to rescue the Irish Times’s legacy from historical ignominy. And maybe an essay by such as Lord Jonathan Sumption (I cannot think of a qualified Irish practitioner) on how constitutional integrity might be restored after it has been usurped by a criminal political class, with the assistance of criminal scientific, medical and media sectors. And, at the head of all that, a confession: a full page editorial, perhaps on the front of the newspaper, setting out the full extent of the Irish Crimes’s complicity in this crime of all crimes, including, perhaps, the best explanation its Editor can come up with as to why he abandoned journalism and allowed the newspaper in his charge to become one of the key accomplices of the conspirators. A sincere apology to those bereaved as a direct result of these misdeeds, and another to those seeking to tell the truth whom that once newspaper has so despicably smeared and demonised would be essential. And maybe even Fintan might be persuaded to unearth his conscience and write one of those special Saturday ‘think’-pieces about how it is that conspiracies to cover-up come about even among those whose forte is the calling-out of other people’s cover-ups.
Then, Paul, throw yourself at the mercy of the court. That is the way, the only way, you can save yourself from what is coming. If you need any names or phone numbers, you know where to find me. I’ll even write you a column pro bono, for old times’ sake.
THURSDAY
As luck would have it, I’m reading a book that explains much of this ‘far right’ gibberish, placing the focus of fault plumb in the centre of the American media. It’s called Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, and it’s written by Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek. It is most interesting that an analysis such as hers should emanate from such an impeccably progressive and establishment publication, for I have to report that her book is rather excellent and makes a great deal of sense.
Ungar-Sargon makes no bones about the fact that she is a Marxist, and continues to consider herself a leftie. She has written the book as a warning to America based on her observations of her own profession. Her basic thesis is that all the recent agitation about ‘racism’ — at a time when America and the Western world generally are, by any judicious measure, less racist than ever before — derives from the desire of American journaliars to cover-up the fact that, having been elevated to the ‘elite’, they have abandoned their traditional role as spokepersons for the poor, powerless and downtrodden. Woke, then, is essentially a camouflage, to deflect attention and potential criticism on this score. She has in mind not the workaday reporter whose chief instrument is shoeleather, but the kind of ‘journalist’ we have become accustomed to seeing on CNN or Fox News: overpaid, air-headed, and sporting an indoor hairdo. Creating a moral panic around race, writes Ungar-Sargon, has enabled them ‘to mask this abandonment under the guise of “social justice”’. This, she claims — and plausibly so — is why journalists suddenly came to align themselves with corporate interests, while evincing contempt for the blue-collar workers who used to pay their wages. For the first time since the invention of the printing press, the rich have been able to line their nests in the certainty that they will remain above scrutiny or criticism, no matter how grasping they become. This, in effect, is what has brought us to where we are now. While the gap between rich and poor grew exponentially wider, the casualties of this phenomenon — of all castes and colours — were written out of the narrative except in as far as they could themselves be demonised as ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’ or ‘homophobic’. Identity politics allowed journalists to paint America as irredeemably divided on grounds of race and sexuality, while the true divisions, under the headings of economy and class, were buried under tons of prejudice and lies.
She writes: ‘For hidden behind a story that looks like it's about race is a story about class — even caste. The fact is, journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality.’
And again:
‘The recent obsession with identity has allowed journalists to pretend — indeed to believe — they are still speaking truth to power, still fighting on behalf of the little guy, even after they have themselves ascended to the ranks of the powerful, even when they are speaking down to an audience who, in more cases than not, have less than them on every measurable scale. It has quite simply been a displacement exercise; instead of experiencing economic guilt about rising inequality and their status among America's elite, members of the news media — along with other highly educated liberals — have come to believe that the only inequality that matters is racial inequality; the only guilt that matters is white guilt, the kind you can do absolutely nothing to fix, given that it's based on something as immutable as your skin color.’
This is how the plurality of NGOs and ‘anti-hate’ groups currently polluting every Western country with lies and — yes — hatred, has emerged. Journalism’s need to create alibis for its betrayal of its founding principles and its audiences created a market for ideological hatchet-wielders to hack out the missiles for the Woke journaliars to throw. This is the process we observe in the past weekend’s’s Irish Crimes ‘report’.
Ungar-Sargon freely admits that, to begin with, she suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome, thinking that ‘everybody who voted for him must have been a racist’. What she found was ‘very, very surprising, which is that a lot of the nation had moved past the racial binaries that we lefties, we New Yorkers, we overeducated elites, like to believe still exist across the nation’. She put aside her prejudices and decided to try some journalism. She encountered great difficulty finding a publisher for her media exposé. Editors told her: ‘There’s no market for a book about how Americans are not divided.’ Her book, then, is ‘really an attempt to understand where our false view of America came from and I think that the answer is it came from the media.’
She writes: ‘So type the words “Trump” and “Russia” into the New York Times search bar, and you’ll get over 15,000 results. At the Washington Post, this search will bring up 27,000 entries since 2005. Compare this to the phrase “opioid crisis” over the same period, which would turn just 1,047 results at the Times and 2,639 results at the Washington Post.’ This, she says, demonstrates that whatever is going on in contemporary American journalism, it has precious little to do with journalism. Journalists write about things that let them off the hook, enabling them to ignore the true moral emergencies — i.e. the ones they and their elite paymasters are implicated in.
The Irish situation is somewhat more complex than that pertaining to the US. Only a tiny minority of Irish journalists could ever have been described as well paid. Mostly, journalists earn a lot more prestige than money from reporting or commenting on the news. But the underlying argument of the book is valid here in Ireland almost to the same extent as in the US, by virtue of cultural forces by which the overwhelming influence of American journalism on other English language territories tends to impact on the functioning of the Fourth Estate in infinitely less lucrative markets. The new bonds of dependency and fandom that have arisen between corporate America and media have, virus-like, crossed the Atlantic and infected the behaviours of even modestly-rewarded scribes. The fact that Irish journalism has become more and more beholden to the robber barons, drug peddlers and tech fascists has had much the same effect on the culture of Irish journalism as lucrative contracts for journalists have in the US. The race-not-class dynamic, in other words, is transmitted not so much by direct personal interest and gain as a general sense of which side the media’s bread is buttered on. Corporations take out advertising in media, not so much to promote their products as to place inducements in front of publishers, to keep them mindful of the facts of life. Osmotically or otherwise, the ‘logic’ of this finds its way down to the modern scribe going tippy-tap on his laptop.
Of course, as we know, there is much more to Woke than merely the media, who are, at the end of the day, a vital but relatively ‘junior’ component of what is being imposed. As a Marxist, Ms Ungar-Sargon is not well placed to notice, but the overall business is essentially Marxian, being directed at cutting the wires from the past, from tradition, from the memory banks of culture, so that the coming generations will have no point of comparison by which to judge their (lack of) freedoms or the quality of their lives. The recent abandonment by the media — worldwide — of their long-occupied role as defenders of the powerless and dispossessed was an essential element of the installation of a constructive amnesia at the heart of human culture. Nothing is accidental; everything leads in one direction, tiptoeing towards Totalitaria.