Podcast: Informed Dissent
‘If we just refuse to do the things that, by our doing of them, would enable the tyrants to continue, then we shall succeed in restoring our freedoms and our children’s hopes.’
When the Sentries Switch Sides . . .
As we await the verdict of the Supreme Court in our appeal again the denial of our challenge to the lockdown — due this coming week or next — here is a recent interview (late February) I did with Dr. Jeff Barke and Dr. Mark McDonald on the Californian platform Informed Dissent about the context of out action and the peculiarities of Ireland’s grappling with the continuing crisis of freedom.
We speak about how, in initiating our legal challenge to the lockdown two years ago, Gemma O’Doherty and I feared we might be trampled in the rush of legal, liberal and civil liberties luminaries seeking to do the same thing, but instead found ourselves isolated and demonised.
We explore the emerging tendency of actors who do not hesitate to use their power fascistically, yet feel free to daub their critics as ‘fascists.’ From where did democratic governments acquire the entitlement to become rulers?
We speak about the shameful degradation of journalism, which has continued to claim to be the guardian of our freedoms while transforming into the complete opposite.
We go into the waning of people’s knowledge and interest in the instruments in place to protect their freedoms, and the consequent taking of basic liberty for granted. Is the result that freedom is henceforth to be regarded as a bad thing? People don’ even know there are such questions. In the absence of adults and adult thinking, the entire floor has fallen out of our civilisation.
We delve into the use by rogue politicians of spell words and hypnoidal smears — ‘cattle prods’ to keep dissenters from alerting the herd to the shepherd’s malign intentions.
We touch on the grief that surges up from the fear of being unable to hand on to our children the free countries we inherited from our parents.
An essential solution is to hand, which it is open to everyone to utilise: To not underestimate the importance of our own courage — the power of the powerless. If we just refuse to do the things that, by our doing of them, would enable the tyrants to continue, then we shall succeed in restoring our freedoms and our children’s hopes.