The Church Of Covid Sets Up An Inquisition

Honestly, if there anything more tragic than wimpy snoots trying to sound all butch? 

'Information Warriors'

Seriously?

It doesn't get better:

Sometimes, Stuart Ritchie feels like he’s being pursued by an army of smiley faces. The lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, is not delusional: instead, and somewhat to his surprise, he is on the frontline of a coronavirus information war.

That's it, that's liberal heroism: a wacademic with a lectureship in buzzword studies spending his time cyberstalking critics of the government.

Totes normal, you guys!

Sign of a healthy democracy!

Has there been a better example of the fraudypants nature of the modern left than the Guardian trying to convince us that a publicly-funded purveyor of approved truthiness is some kind of rebel? 

Nothing says 'speaking truth to power' like shouting down anyone who disagrees with the Prime Minister!

But, as Bachman Turner Overdrive told us, bbbbbbbaby, you ain't seen nothing yet!

We don't just have phony rebels, we have the phony right too!

I think you can see that the government is indirectly influenced by [lockdown sceptics],” said Sam Bowman, director of competition policy at the International Center for Law and Economics and another of those behind the site...

With most of the group on the right – two thirds, Bowman estimates - there is a sense of reputation management, too. “We were both, independently, really aggravated,” said Bowman. “Maybe it’s the narcissism of small differences – seeing people who are also theoretically on the right making such dangerous claims, it’s exasperating.”

Yep, 'reputation management', that's it. That's why the grifters in 'right wing' think tanks have all embraced Lockdown4Eva. Nothing to do with protecting the interest of their corporate donors by driving smaller competitors out of business. 

It's just a coincidence. 

Of course, if you want the best of both worlds, namely bleeding the taxpayer dry and grovelling to big corporations, nothing beats the average Tory MP: Hence we have this load of old pony from - guess who - Neil O'Brien aka the member for Amazon Prime:

“This idea it’s none of an MP’s business – trying to get to the facts of a deadly pandemic is absolutely an MP’s business,” O’Brien said. “You’ve got to look at people’s testable propositions and see how they’ve panned out. That’s how science works.”

Well, OK, then: how have Neil Ferguson's predictions held up? Or the claims that the 'high cycle' PCR test was totes reliable?  Or claims that Vitamin D had no protective benefit? Or......

Nope, he doesn't like those kind of facts. He's here to hold the public to account on behalf of the government, not the other way round. Hence why he never, ever, brings any of this rage to bear on the people responsible for the biggest single source of infection in Britain. 

Yep, he's a sleazy fraud, but what of the Guardian and the wider left? They're been pushing NHS atrocity stories for years (well, since 2010 anyway) and now they've finally got the Tories standing over a line of corpses, smoking gun in hand, they've suddenly decided that the real issue is the uppity peasantry. Sure, they may differ with weasels like Bowman and O'Brien on issues like Corporation Tax but when it all comes down to it, they really are all in this together. 

It's the ultimate irony of the Church of Covid: they've put on their Boris Burkas and taken off their masks.

A Cuck Cucksplodes On The Launch Pad

True to it's mission statement aiming to 'push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking' UnHerd comes out with a post attacking... Donald Trump. 

Yeah, baby, they went there. Daring!

I know what you're thinking:

Hey, DJ, does the post by any chance include painfully pretentious pseudo-intellectualism and shoehorned in references to ancient history while never actually laying out any actual, specific charges against Donald Trump? 

You know it does!

Actually, it is groundbreaking in one respect: most TDS posts at least get through the first 100 words before going off the rails. Here are the opening words of this one:

It was one of the weirdest moments of the last four years: President Trump stood before a church, holding a Bible like he'd never seen one before.

Presumably, the point of the stunt last summer was to reassure godly Republicans that he was on their side, during the depths of the BLM protests and riots.

Just a random church? Or St John's Church in Washington DC, the one every US President had worshiped in, right up until Antifa savages tried to torch it the night before? 

That was why he was there - he was visiting the scene of the attempted arson of a historic building by fanatics. But never mind that, the key thing is he looked kind of weird - that's some top drawer intellectual analysis right there!

Meanwhile, what were the respectable conservatives doing? 

Hiding, mostly. That's what counts as morally upstanding in Cucklandia: being neutral on the whole 'desecrating churches' thing. The Republican establishment spent the whole summer AWOL while America's cities burned but now they're ready to take on the real enemy: their own voters. 

And it's not even as if the cucks can claim to be any good at winning elections. Weren't Mitt Romney and John McCain the poster boys for respectable conservatism? How did they do again? 

At least DJT won in the first place. These guys got wiped out at the ballot box but apparently, in the US just as in Britain, no matter how many times the cucks stand on the rake, the conservative movement will never need to move on from cuckservatism.  

The Guardian Doesn't Do Self-Awareness....

Well, that goes without saying, but this one is just special. 

(And not just because an academic at the LSE is calling other people privileged).

Yes, in a society that celebrates victimhood there's always a temptation to spin a grim oop North back story. But there's more to it than that:

Our findings indicate that such misidentifications are built on particular origin stories that people reach for when asked about their backgrounds. These accounts tend to downplay people’s own, fairly privileged upbringings and instead reach back into working-class extended family histories that incorporate grandparents and even great-grandparents. Here people find stories of the past – of working-class struggle, of upward social mobility, of meritocratic striving – that provide powerful frames for understanding their own experiences and identity.

Seriously? Was there no one in the office who suddenly found themselves thinking 'hmmmm...that sounds familiar'

Say, I wonder if there have been any other examples of people using supposed atrocity stories from the past to downplay their privilege and justify bad behavior? 

In our report, we argue that these intergenerational understandings of class origin should be read as having a performative dimension; they deflect attention away from the structural privileges these individuals enjoy, both in their own eyes but also among those they communicate their origin stories to in everyday life. At the same time, by framing their lives as an upward struggle against the odds, these interviewees misrepresent their subsequent life outcomes as more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious.

Oh really? People living absurdly privileged lives inventing bogus oppression to justify them acting like pigs? 

No, doesn't ring any bells at all. 

Like I said over at Julie's place re: Sharon the Starving Sumo Wrestler, this is the result of the left allowing thuggish enforcers to impose a cultish group think. There's no one left around to point out that half the Guardian's output is from race-hustling bums using exactly this kind of argumentation to explain why they earn six figures but they're the real victims and so it's oppressive to expect them to pay parking tickets.

Meanwhile, whatever the downside of pushing supposed meritocracy, it can't be nearly as damaging as having filthy rich celebs leaving their huge mansions just long enough to claim the system's rigged and there's no point even trying. 

This Is Perfectly Normal....

'Secret payments to public figures to push government policy'? 

You say that like it's a bad thing!

Government ministers paid £63,000 to 42 social media 'influencers' to promote the NHS Test and Trace service, it has been revealed.

The ad campaign, launched last year, saw celebrities including Love Island stars Shaughna Phillips and Josh Denzel share messages of support for the health service and its coronavirus testing system on platforms such as Instagram.

If the Government isn't up to something dodgy, it's sure in first place for the 'Best Impression of People Up To No Good' Award. 

Don't expect the MSM to object though - or if they do, it'll be just because they thought they had the monopoly on fanboying over authoritarian creeps.

And, yes, this guy is just one more of them telling us to barricade ourselves in the house to stop the vampires getting in, then going for a moonlight stroll. 

They Took A Knee...Right In The Nuts

Who says Sir Keir lacks the common touch? 

Labour today piled more pressure on Boris Johnson to shut down professional football after players flouted Covid-19 rules again and were accused of losing the 'moral case' to continue as infections rise and the NHS struggles to cope.

Yep, that will certainly win back those lost voters: demanding Lockdown Xtreme while making sure there's nothing to watch on the TV too. 

At risk of stating the obvious, given the insane amounts of money clubs pay to secure their player's services, the average Premiership training ground may be the safest place in the country. No one's going to pay forty million for a young starlet then not do everything they can to reduce the risk of losing him for six months to Chinese Lung AIDS. 

Hey, at least the training grounds are a lot safer than certain places I could mention. Someone should ask Sir Snooty about that.

I guess the player's union needs to start making those big donations to Labour. Kickback enough cash to Labour and not even killing people is enough to derail the gravy train (if only there was a well known former prosecutor the media could ask about that case). 

Of course that does raise the other point. Professional football has spent months literally bending the knee to the left. They fed the crocodile on filet mignon and now they're under the team bus. 

Shockingly, it turns out liberals are prepared to fill acres of newsprint hailing the courage of millionaires who denounce guys working the evening shift in Krap-e-mart for their white privilege but when push comes to shove, the essential rule of dealing with liberals is the same as it ever was: you can get in bed with the left but they won't respect you in the morning. 

Today's 'Conspiracy Theory' Come True...

Hey, remember how people used to say that the liberals would hijack the 'Prevent' program to harass conservatives and the left said they were crazy? 

This:

Eton College reported its dismissed Master to the anti-terrorism Prevent programme for allegedly advocating male supremacy and the glorification of violence.

The elite £42,500-a-year public school reported their concerns to their local authority over teacher Will Knowland's lecture.

School chiefs dismissed Mr Knowland after he refused to take down an online lecture tackling radical feminism and the concept of 'toxic masculinity' from his personal YouTube channel. 

Who knows? Maybe they were genuinely worried that he might be plotting to....what exactly? 

Make a really sarcastic video? Include a sock puppet called 'Ms Feminazi'? Or even escalate to doing a livestream?

The contrast with the treatment of the Manchester Arena bomber is striking.

As with much else in modern life, we're being asked to accept that there are two classes of people in the world. Our speech is violence but their actual violence is treated as all but a particularly colorful rhetorical flourish. 

A system that explicitly designates a large chunk of the population as an underclass deserves no respect. Hence why I refuse to be outrageously outraged by events in Washington right now.