Does it matter? The truth, I mean; does it matter?
Eric Olson spent his adult life trying to learn the truth about his father’s death because he believed the truth matters, not just because it was his father who died, but because shadowy figures in the national security state had him murdered. Did the truth about the CIA’s murder of a loyal American matter? Does it?
In Canada in 2021, journalist Terry Glavin reported truths he believed mattered. The New York Times and many Canadian news outlets had just reported the discovery of mass graves on the premises of former state schools for indigenous children, presumably those of children who died while in residence there. At first, 215 such graves were reported, but soon the number ballooned to over 1,000. Those shocking reports were followed by a nationwide orgy of recriminations against the white Europeans who’d established the indigenous schools.
But that narrative, so beloved of the news media, the Trudeau government and academia was simply untrue. There were no mass graves. None. Every fact of importance about those schools had been known at least since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on same had delivered its report in 2015.
But the narrative preferred by the Trudeau administration and the MSM was entirely averse to relevant facts. That narrative demanded mass graves and therefore, mass graves were reported. Terry Glavin reported the truth, that there were no mass graves; so did reporter Tristin Hopper; so did journalists from First Nations communities and so did tribal leaders. All to no avail. As with Frank Olson’s murder, the facts didn’t matter.
Months later Glavin told Bari Weiss, “It’s not just that the truth doesn’t matter, but that it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter.” That is, according to power elites in government and the news media, factual truth only matters insofar as it supports their preferred narrative. If there had been mass graves, they’d have mattered because the facts would have conformed to the narrative of white guilt; the fact that there were no mass graves doesn’t matter because it undermines the narrative. Therefore, the truth, in the purest Orwellian sense, is what the powerful desire it to be. They use their power to make the factual truth appear and vanish as they choose. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
In the grand scheme of things, Frank Olson’s murder and the Canadian Mass Graves Hoax are relatively small potatoes. But the same can’t be said of the cascade of information pouring out Elon Musk’s Twitter to such journalists as Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, Lee Fang and others. I won’t attempt to detail their findings and import. For that, go to their various Substack pages and to Glenn Greenwald on Rumble, Substack and now Locals. There you’ll see the astonishing depth and breadth of the moral and legal wrongdoing by governmental officials, social media platforms and the MSM.
Arms of government like the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DHS and the Department of State daily pressured and browbeat Twitter and other social media providers to privilege certain points of view, restrict access to others, outright censor still others and entirely shut down accounts, including those of the President of the United States and major news organizations. Officials at Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. sometimes pushed back on the demands for censorship, but ultimately acquiesced, abandoning their own guidelines in favor of the preferences of governmental actors.
Those preferences had a distinctly partisan tone – pro-Biden/anti-Trump, pro-Democrat/anti-Republican, pro-Progressive/anti-Conservative. The most obvious example is the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco in which the nation’s leading law enforcement agency decided who it wanted to be president and became the one thing it must never be – a political actor. That much of that was a direct assault on the electoral process is, by itself, a huge scandal, one that demands the most thoroughgoing investigation and reform. Agencies of government, working in tandem with social media companies and the MSM to oust a disfavored president from office is the stuff of banana republics.
Outrageous as that is, it may not be the most important story of the Twitter files. Those same agencies and social media companies plus the White House actively suppressed vital information on COVID and promoted policies that proved massively destructive in ways that are not yet fully understood. The full details of the COVID debacle will continue to emerge for a long time, but what we know now is that state and federal officials adopted policies that severely damaged physical and mental health, the education of the young, the economy, the economies of many poorer nations that depend on trade with the U.S., increased mortality rates for those aged 18 – 44, increased the suicide rate and contributed to the 94% spike (since 2019) in opioid-related deaths.
To be altogether clear, that was U.S. policy. And anyone, regardless of how qualified, who questioned it found him/herself shut down across multiple platforms. The Great Barrington Declaration, written by three public health experts of impeccable credentials was shut down as disinformation solely because it raised science-based issues about then-existing policies. That the GBD was right, that it now has widespread support in the medical and public health fields should be a humiliation to those who had it sidelined. At the very least, they should lose their jobs.
But regardless of how much information comes out about the incompetence, arrogance and mendacity of those making policy and their handmaidens in social media, it seems not to matter. Scan the MSM for demands for real accountability for COVID policies and you’ll find a wasteland.
Nor is it only the Twitter files to which we owe this information. Discovery coming out of the lawsuit Missouri vs. Biden has proved a treasure trove of revelations too. And House Republicans have announced their intention to appoint a select committee to look into the Biden White House, various social media platforms and what appear to be their overt intention to sideline ideas, facts and opinions, regardless of how sensible and fact-based, that questioned administration policies, regardless of how flawed.
Which brings us back to Terry Glavin’s remark – that the truth no longer matters and it no longer matters that it doesn’t matter.
That, amazingly, is the party line taken by the Biden Administration and large swaths of the corporate media. That those forces happily peddled misinformation and disinformation to the American public in order first to ensure that Donald Trump wouldn’t get a second term and later to establish policies that made the COVID pandemic incalculably worse than it needed to be, are, according to countless commentators, a “nothing burger.” To them, it simply doesn’t matter and no one should think it does.
If the whole thing weren’t so dangerous, so horrifying, its best analogy would be that of Monty Python’s Dead Parrot skit. There, a pet shop owner has plainly sold a customer a dead parrot. When the customer confronts him, he simply stonewalls claiming, against everything obvious and factual, that the parrot is very much alive and “only restin’.”
Defenders of the Biden and Trudeau administrations, federal power generally, social media platforms and the MSM, do much the same – pretend the truth is a lie and a lie the truth. Government agencies using tax money to go to bat on behalf of one candidate and against another? No problem. Take our word for it, the parrot is alive and well. The Biden Administration and sundry government agencies sidelining factual information on COVID that could have been used to develop sensible policies and save countless lives? Never mind, the parrot’s fine.
But the truth is that the parrot is dead. And many, many people think the truth matters.
I’ll have more to say about that next time.
