The MSM Finally Reports The Obvious While Covering Its Tracks

by Iain Davis | Jan 29, 2023

The UK Mail Online claims that, based upon a documents unveiled by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, it has “revealed” the UK government’s information war against its own citizens. In truth the MSM (mainstream media) outlet merely caught up with the investigative journalism of the so-called “alternative media” who have been reporting on exactly this kind of hybrid warfare, waged against the British public by their own government, for years.

While it is tempting to offer “no shit Sherlock” in reply, the Mail’s faux “revelations” and the insidious nature of its limited hangout propaganda demands a more robust response. Once again, the MSM has desperately tried to squeeze the unavoidable truth into the confines of its Overton window. Utterly deceiving its readers along the way, as usual.

The Mail article reads as if the spying activities of the Counter Disinformation Unit, the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit and the information warriors of the British Army’s 77th Brigade is somehow limited to the surveillance and censorship of lockdown critics. While the Mail’s “revelations” are accurate, by omission, they are also a deceit.

The surveillance and censorship operations of the UK State and its agents have been ongoing for years and they target the entire population, not just “politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response” as suggested by the Mail. Anyone who seriously questioned any government policy, not just the policy response to the pseudopandemic, comes under the all seeing eye of 77th Brigade and its information warfare partners.

Exactly the same “counter-disinformation” strategies were deployed against those who criticised Western governments’ involvement in the conflict in Syria and, before them, those who questioned the war on terror or the Iraq war. It has been known for decades that British intelligence monitors everyone’s communications.

A UK dictatorship is nearing completion. The carefully crafted “revelations” of the Mail and halfhearted objections by a couple of MPs won’t make any difference. The UK government has passed and is intent upon passing more legislation to embolden its war against the British people with almost unanimous parliamentary consent.

Citing their own columnist Peter Hitchen, the Mail comically opined:

Now is the time to demand a full and powerful investigation into the dark material Big Brother Watch has bravely uncovered.

Since the enactment of the 2005 Inquiries Act there has been no such thing as an independent public inquiry in the UK. Something which, again, the Mail does not feel its readers need to be reminded of. Instead, it encourages them to have faith in the mechanisms of the state.

The government has complete control over so-called public inquiries and the investigations that allegedly inform them. You may as well ask the former Health Secretary Matt Hancock to chair an inquiry into midazolam deaths or Nadhim Zahawi to investigate corporate tax evasion.

Despite the fact that it is now obvious that the government is an enemy of the people, the Mail attempts to convince the public that they can still rely upon their political leaders to do the right thing. It is all propagandist tripe.

The spin and disinformation in the Mail piece is subtle but remarkable nonetheless. Quoting Hitchens, for example:

The most astonishing thing about the great Covid panic was how many attacks the state managed to make on basic freedoms without anyone much even caring, let alone protesting.

This is a lie, though it isn’t clear who is lying. Dissent was widespread and there were enormous protests in London and elsewhere, as millions marched, over the course of a number of weekends, against the denial of “basic freedoms.” These were the biggest street protests seen in the UK since the anti-war marches in 2003.

Yet the MSM deceived the wider public into imagining that only a few thousand “anti-vaxxers” marched. The Mail said they numbered in the “hundreds.” The MSM propagandists minimised the scale of the protests and, if they reported them at all, lied about the broad range of concerns the protesters were trying to bring to wider public attention.

The MSM covered up the protests because it is the paid propagandist agent of the British State. The MSM’s primary task during the pseudopandemic was to terrify the public with baseless, scientifically illiterate bullshit, not alert them to the fact that they were not alone in their doubts, as they sat isolated in their locked-down homes, watching the tel-lie-vision.

Interestingly, Hitchens’ article reads:

The most astonishing thing about the great Covid panic was how many attacks the state managed to make on basic freedoms without anyone much even caring.

The “let alone protesting” observation is absent from Hitchens’ piece. Is this something edited out of his column or something added into Glen Owen’s main Mail Online article? Who knows, but the purpose of the propaganda is clear in any event.

Disingenuously casting himself as the beleaguered hero, Mail columnist Peter Hitchens piled in with more misinformation and disinformation, as he offered his own as the public face of blatant controlled opposition. His role, to highlight the quality of journalism that supposedly still exists in the UK MSM and to obscure the fact that the entire MSM is tantamount to useless.

Hitchens falsely claimed he “was almost alone in criticising” lockdown policies and the other Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI). He peddled the deception that only the MSM reports “the news,” while completely ignoring that fact that independent media outlets reported Hitchens’ groundbreaking story years earlier.

According to Hitchens, it was the rag that buys his pieces, the Mail, that upheld “the proper tradition of a free press.” He said this was because it values “open debate” and “favours the truth.” Presumably the Mail did so by assiduously ignoring public domain information and hiding enormous public protests from its readers while pretending that it upheld proper journalistic standards.

At one point, Hitchens bemoaned the censorship he thought he was subject to on Twitter and other social media platforms. He asked his readers:

Did someone whose salary was paid by you and me, with the special powers given to government, dislike what I said?

What, like Gordon MacMillan? The 77th Brigade Officer who was Twitter’s Editorial chief for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa while Hitchens “suspected” he was shadow banned. A man “paid” by UK taxpayers and given “special powers” by government to engage in precisely the information warfare which Hitchens, Owen and the Mail claim to have “revealed.”

Perhaps they’ve never heard of him in the course of their fearless pursuit of the truth? Which is all a bit odd because the Mail has reported upon the activities of 77th Brigade many times before.

But, on those occasions, they avidly promoted the activities of 77th Brigade, saying “the 77th Brigade will not be working against the British people” and that 77th Brigade has “some of the best experts” who are working to combat “Kremlin disinformation.”

The Mail gushed in its enthusiastic support for 77th Brigade, heralding what it called “The Army’s latest weapon to defeat jihadis“:

[T]he newest force is aimed at the social media war being waged by Islamic State. [. . .] The brigade is designed to ‘meet the challenges of modern conflict and warfare’ by winning the hearts and minds of those in battle by both monitoring and engaging with digital and social media channels. [. . .] Others will try to gather as much intelligence about what the enemy are doing, including their up to date movements. [. . .] Some will be responsible for putting out false information in a variety of ways to create diversions and throw the enemy off track. [. . .] This includes a ‘psychological’ element – undermining the enemy’s morale by covertly leaking messages to them.

Great propaganda for the British military and the government but, as others exposed the mountain of evidence that proved groups like 77th Brigade were directing their operations against the UK public, the Mail called everyone who pointed this out “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” and whatever other smears it could deploy to deflect the public’s attention away from the evidence.

Now, with a high profile report from an “authoritative” body imminent, the Mail has the stomach-churning gal to claim that it has revealed the truth. It does so while re-framing that truth in order to maintain the fading remnants of the propaganda and censorship that it has continuously inflicted upon the public on behalf of 77th Brigade and other UK government “hybrid warriors.”

What a shambolic disgrace!