In Conversation with Luke Eastwood

'Con Houlihan was a big mountainy man from Kerry. He was brilliant, a genius. But he wasn’t "educated" (as a journalist) in the formal sense; he was just a brilliant writer and a brilliant thinker.'

No More Legendary Mountainy Men

‘[Covid] was for me an abomination beyond imagination. I can’t to this day believe it happened. Sometimes I think it’s a nightmare and I’m gonna wake up and think, Ah! Of course it didn’t happen!’

What has happened to our world is in some contexts clear (a bioterrorism attack by elected governments in 2020) and in other respects not. There are remaining mysteries, such as why the defenders of civl liberties remained almost unanimously silent, and why the most fundamental principles and duties of journalism were stood down. Even if we are unable to resolve such issues, we need to continue raising and repeating them, for otherwise the tyrants’ desire for the normalisation of post-democracy will be satisfied. This is the sole purpose of speaking about these matters, of repeating the unresolved questions and looking to fill in the blank spaces in our understandings.

What happened to journalism to make it so bad and so corrupt?

How much of the shifting culture of media was engineered to prepare for the moment when the power-grab would be launched?

Might it still be possible to establish a genuine functional alternative to corrupt mainstream journalism?

What happened to liberalism?

How were the internet and artificial intelligence revolutions hijacked by Big Tech?

How did we miss the totalitarian nature of the European Union?

‘If you go back forty years, there were all kinds of different journalists, all kinds of strange people. I remember in Ireland we had Con Houlihan, who wrote about sport and literature in the Evening Press. He was a big mountainy man from Kerry. He was brilliant, a genius. But he wasn’t educated (as a journalist) in the formal sense; he was just a brilliant writer and a brilliant thinker. It would be impossible for somebody like him to break into journalism as it is now — and indeed he wouldn’t want to!’

‘This has only occurred to me recently in this form. There were other dimensions, but one of them, I think, was this: that there was some kind of, as it were, secret communication that went down certain channels, to be picked up by certain people, particularly journalists, maybe lawyers, which conveyed something like, “Lookit, don’t think this is a normal event. Don’t just look at this at face value. This is really serious. We are doing this and we’re not gonna stop! We don’t mean ‘serious’ in [terms of] the gravity of the virus, but we mean that we are going through with this. So don’t get in our way if you want to be part of our system in the future.” I believe that something like that was communicated in some kind of abstruse or arcane way that we wouldn’t necessarily know about, not being in those channels. Because that would help to explain the unanimity of those sectors, which you wouldn’t have expected.’

‘Lets’ just take a paragon of exemplary liberal views, who has been highly respected, perhaps the kind of stature — morally, and so on — as an archbishop in the olden days. That kind of level. Maybe a journalist with a leading newspaper, say, and he’s on board with this, and he’s attacking people who, say, refuse to take an untested injection. And he’s sneering at and attacking and demonising anyone who dissents from this. And, whether he’s aware of it or not, every time he opens his mouth or turns on his computer, he contradicts everything he has stood for over the previous thirty years. And he doesn’t seem to notice. Or care.’

‘Journalists are effectively political prosecutors That’s their job. I remember when I was a journalist, we had great editors like Vincent Browne, who took great glee out of the idea of bringing down the government.’

'We’re dealing with a situation here where, virtually on a monolithic basis, the establishments of the West are all on the same side. And that includes political establishments, judicial establishments, media establishments, scientific, medical, and so on. So, you know, where are the arrests going to come from? Who’s going to do the collar-feeling? The police are of course in on it as well.’

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