I REALLY began to wonder this week whether Britain had lost the will to live. Where’s the fight gone from this once feisty country? The silent majority seem to lie down and meekly accept everything, even if it means national suicide. I put it down mainly to the legacy media. Run by the children of the 60's and 70's cultural revolution, themselves educated in a new illiberal era of post-feminism, diversity and 'woke', they seem incapable of independent critical thought, or judgment. Yet, these outlets are still treated as the bastion of truth. It's their headlines that dominate the broadcast news.
Yes, I am feeling a bit jaundiced. It’s been another week of ‘battling’ at TCW; a new front opening up each day for me to confront. Hardly knowing where to direct TCW's limited resources but thinking, 'I can't let this slip or ignore this.’ My son told suffer from a from of ADHD which means I work compulsively at the things that obsess me. I can't let them pass. Without the clutch of faithful and wonderful readers who keep me informed with links to news and commentary elsewhere, I wouldn’t have a chance of keeping my head above the surtface. Thank you for the research, I acknowledge it when I can and use what I can. I do rely on you, my unpaid team.
My mood I admit wasn’t helped by coming down with a wretched cold on Monday, which turned into laryngitis on Friday. Fortunately not before then or I might have found myself unable to talk (as I did in the chemists on Friday) on Dan Wootton’s OUTSPOKEN show on Tuesday. Dan had invited me on to respond to that morning's verdict on Lucy Connolly’s appeal against her prison sentence that I’d written about and was in process of writing about further, as well as to the news that Tommy Robinson was to be set free having purged his contempt of court. Only to be charged again on a trumped up charge.
It was upsetting, as were the censorious tweets I got in reply to my Lucy Connolly articles. She is not a good woman, they declared. So she deserves it. Are not they themselves infallible? This came on top of battling against two more examples of modern British brutality, the Assisted Dying Bill and the Schools Bill - two terrifying threats to our liberty and two huge oppressive state power grabs I couldn't and can’t ignore. Then was Labour’s big defence sellout to warn of - thr reason for Starmer’s disastrous EU ‘reset’ (see Ewen Stewart’s excision of this regressive deal in these pages today) that the great and the not so good former ‘Brexit’ politicians hadn’t had a grip on at all. Only after the event did some of them start saying ‘oh dear, look what he's done’. Like Michael Gove. Yes, he was there afterwards to pontificate from his Spectator desk:
‘This week Keir Starmer fell into the embrace of Ursula von der Leyen […] The whole point of Labour, the whole purpose of its creation, was to allow democratic control over capital. But now, Starmer has returned to the EU’s empire of complex and opaque rule making in which legal directives and financial instruments can be constructed without the public having to know what’s being done or who’s paying the price. The government’s ‘reset’ with Brussels makes its metropolitan priorities clear. Starmer has negotiated shorter airport queues for business travellers and Erasmus scholarships for top graduates – and he has let down our already declining coastal towns.’
Yes, he has, Michael. I agree, but so did the Conservatives with their disastrous fishing deal. And why didn’t you apply your lucidity in the weeks before? Forgive my cynicism, but you knew this was on his agenda and that Starmer had no voter mandate for what he was planning - taking us back into impotent alignment with EU rules as a precursor for his ‘rejoining'. Social media, by contrast, was alive with the fact that Starmer has no mandate for this.
Social media is where the war is waged, and where Starmer is most challenged. Virtually. For all the noise and activity it still seems impotent. This week demonstrated once again how, even with Elon Musk at X, weak social media's disparate and disaggregated firepower is against the establishment and its mainstream mouth pieces. Today’s MSM may be the grave in which decent journalism died. In time it may itself die. But it still has a monopoly on communication; it still controls the narrative. However false or disingenuous.
Contrast their reporting of Tommy Robinson purging his contempt of court to end his solitary confinement prison sentence with TCW's. What chance has Ezra Levant of being heard on the BBC or ITV? I know some readers think I go on about Robinson too much, but his case epitomises all that is wrong with mainstream discourse. His is more than a ‘cause celebre’ case of the collapse of freedom of speech and weaponisation of the law to silence it. It’s the clearest example of the still huge power of the MSM over public perception. For the uncritical silent or compliant majority, what they hear on the radio or TV is still the source of truth.
I discussed this with Dan Wootton and Ezra Levant (publisher of Rebel News) in one of the segments on Outspoken on Tuesday. Dan was more confident about the beginning of the end of MSM and of the ‘alt media’ breakthrough than I was. Trump’s White House ambush of the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa a day later (see here) was more proof of my case. Legacy media headlines all reported Trump's false claims and the ‘white conspiracy theory’ that drove them. ‘Full fact’ checked responses rolled out of the MSM - I read one after another all on these Guardian lines – a narrative that Daniel Jupp took apart. But who will read or listen to him?
It prompted me to contact Professor Norman Fenton and ask him to do what the MSM's fact checkers had patently failed to do. I sent him the Reuters and the CNN articles to examine for their specious statistics-based claim that, because white farm killings are a minuscule proportion of South Africa's horrific overall murder rate, they cannot equate to genocide. That I said to him seemed to be what their case boiled down to. Norman replied to me that yes, I was right in principle. 'Key missing figures here' he said 'are the number of white farmers and also the number of black farmers'. The fact checkers should have known that. Norman promises us his data analysis next week, so look out for it! Whatever he finds, he will report it fully and truthfully.
That is what we are about. Decent independent journalism. In one area last week, thanks to Sally Beck’s brilliant investigative journalism, we were on the front foot with our own truth bomb on MAID, Canada’s (kill not care) assisted suicide programme that she came to me with. On Friday, we published the result of her enquiry – a piecing-together of hard data and cases I have not seen elsewhere. It is factual and objective, with all the hallmarks of quality reporting now so lacking in the MSM. I was proud to publish it. The non-TCW reading British public may be cowed and compliant, but we are not and we need to get to them with the truths they are not hearing. So please share our articles and help us wake up the woke!
Once again a big thank you to all those who already do donate regularly and a reminder to other readers that we rely on your donations to keep publishing our 'free to read' daily TCW as we are still cancelled by Google. Please, if you can, consider supporting us with a one off or monthly donation.
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Best wishes,
Kathy Gyngell
Editor, TCW Defending Freedom