A LOT of mud has been slung at lockdown and vaccine sceptics this week. On the basis of the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity I wasn’t altogether put out by Melanie Phillips’s decision to attack The Conservative Woman in her Times column this week.
It turns out that as well as being conspiracy theorists we are also ‘freedom fetishists’, whatever they might be. There are plenty of counter-accusations we could make, but as we all know mutual name-calling gets no one anywhere. What does is questioning everything, interrogating the evidence and investigating the facts. All of which we do our best to do. Melanie might consider how many of her former ideological allies are on this same quest, and as a result have reached some pretty disturbing conclusions about the politics as well as the science of Covid.
One such is the American writer, conservative commentator, classicist and military historian, Victor Davis Hanson. In an extraordinarily comprehensive interview with American Thought Leaders he discusses the politicisation of the virus and the assault on democracy. He starts by recounting the deliberately false Covid narrative we were sold – by Chinese and Western scientists and policymakers. This terrible story of deceit is but an illustration, albeit truly appalling and extreme, of the way modern elites have come to justify their control or manipulation of information as ‘for the good of the people’. Hanson describes this as ‘the noble lie – I’m smarter than you. I’m your platonic guardian. I can lie for your own good . . . Just don’t dare suggest I’m lying.’
You can view the interview via this link – the transcript is also available here.
