Posted originally on the conservative tree house on March 19, 2022 | Sundance

Forty years ago, a rock band named Pink Floyd had a hit song, The Wall, describing the institutions of education as indoctrination machines generating thought controls.   In the era of the internet, the thought control mechanisms metastasized, but the intents of the gatekeepers remain the same.

In his weekly monologue, Neil Oliver frames new internet safety legislation in the U.K. around the issues of government-controlled speech, free thought and the recent examples of weaponized outcomes in the example of our COVID era.  [The transcript is HERE, and the internal citation he mentions from Alana Newhouse is HERE].  Oliver’s perspective is thoughtful.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – […] “Moving faster and faster, from the 1970s onwards, the online culture enabled the tiny, ideologically driven elite that created it to win and take all. The online safety bill now making its way through parliament feels a whole lot like yet another move from a playbook that is well worn by now – make us, the little folk, feel we’re in danger from something we cannot see, and promise to make us feel safe by assuming yet more control over our lives.

The technocrats moved fast and they broke stuff. They broke the national boundaries that stopped them making more money in every part of the world. All the same stuff – made for the lowest price at the expense of human beings – is, increasingly, available everywhere, so that it is harder and harder even to know where you are. Rather than setting us free, the online world is, more and more, about uniformity and conformity. Much more of this and it won’t matter where you are anyway.

This is not just about the online safety bill – obviously it’s not. That piece of legislation is just another brick in the wall. During the past two years, we have been swiftly and efficiently herded to the opening of a whole new era. Most people did what they were told, in hopes of feeling safe.

And yet let’s stop for a minute and look at where we are, right now, on account of what we were told to do for the best: a cost of living crisis of the sort few alive today have ever seen and no credible ideas about how most might cope with the hits that are coming; spiking inflation; energy prices rising in a way that is out of control; restated commitment to carbon Net-Zero and, now, a land war in Europe that could go in any direction at the drop of a hat. This is where and what we’ve been brought to by those that insisted, with the full weight and force of the law behind them, they would keep us safe, safe from ourselves. In fact, while a handful of billionaires doubled their wealth, the world is apparently more dangerous than ever before.

In recent years, faster and faster every day, the technocrats, corporations and the governments with whom they enjoyed a relationship you might describe as friends with benefits, saw to the breaking or the setting aside of the institutions, long in the building, that really had kept us safe and allowed us freedom to transact with one another, in all manner of fruitful ways: education, bodily autonomy, parliament, employment rights, journalism, even the privately owned businesses on the High Street.

The authorities told the churches to close their doors on their congregations during Covid and most, shamefully, complied. Even the past itself was vilified and dismissed as corrupt, malign, only to be ashamed of. So much of what had grown over centuries, even millennia, to give us real shelter and protection, meaning in our lives, has been methodically steamrollered flat and replaced with the thinking and morals of so-called and self-proclaimed progressives who looked around at all that had been and merely sneered. Most recently, even the biological difference between men and women has been discarded – so that much of the foundation of medical science and also feminism, has been dismissed as mere bigotry. To declare that there are two sexes, and that those sexes matter, is hate-speak.

Across the board we have replaced discussion and debate with a new game where the only acceptable move is to take turns repeating and so validating the narrow world view of those progressives who have so efficiently exploited the technological revolution to create a world shaped in their own image and designed to benefit them and them only.

But of course, every one of you still awake already knows all of what I have just said, anyway. We have this understanding in common and, if nothing else, it has kept us connected and sane in an increasingly insane world that has been deliberately manipulated to make every last one of us feel alone. They shut the pubs, the schools, the churches and made us stay in our homes so that our only means of communication was via the online world they controlled.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know about you, but I have had about as much doom and gloom as I can take, these two years past, and I am a naturally miserable person, I will be the first to admit it! From now on, and as much as possible, I propose to look for the light and the fresh air of promise and potential.

What I feel, more strongly every day, is that there is a way to fix this. Or if not to fix it exactly – because some things are beyond fixing – at least to resist its effects and to offer other ways. Ways for those of like mind to turn away from what is being broadcast at us every moment of every day by every means available – and to try something different. (read more)