Those who speak out are shouted down until they are proved right. Again and again, and again we are made to watch, or to endure the crude, bullying tactics of the school playground. Reasoned debate and argument have long since gone over the hill into history. Now it’s just one long slanging match, in which the loudest, angriest and most effectively insulting voices seek to win by volume alone, so often echoed by mainstream media who hold reasoned voices in contempt … apparently preferring to ridicule and diminish rather than provide courteous space for those who merely have questions in need of answers.
Again and again, those shouted down are, however, revealed as having been right all along.
Those who spoke out against lockdowns were shouted down until they were proved right about irreparable harm done, the harms that confront us now in every aspect of our lives.
Those who doubted the efficacy and safety of so-called vaccines were shouted down – until they were proved right, and it became irrefutable and undeniable that those medical procedures did not work as advertised and had resulted in death and permanent injury for uncounted numbers.
Those who spoke out about the existence of rape gangs in British cities were shouted down until they were proved right and some … just some … of the victims finally had their voices heard and our establishment was shamed for having knowingly stood by for decades while uncounted thousands of the most vulnerable souls were treated like meat by men acting with impunity. All of it was excused and covered up on the grounds that to do otherwise would have brought accusations of racism.
Shouting down has become a universal and even when it is proven wrong, never is there any backing down by the loudest, any real admission of error. Instead, those voices just move on to their next target. But by now, the truth is that too much harm has been done and any temptation to shy away from confrontation is long behind us. Now more than ever is the time firmly to say, “enough” – we will not be silenced, however loudly we are condemned. This is precisely the moment when those questioning the dogma must find renewed strength for the fight.
Those who questioned the wisdom of sacrificing fossil fuels and nuclear energy on the altar of the so-called Green agenda, are yet more of those who have been proved right after all. Now millions face a winter of cold and hunger – and futures blighted by the deliberate and whole sale diminishing of opportunities – on account of generations of political policies bordering on the suicidal. In the birthplace of the industrial revolution that illuminated the entire world, the lights are going out because economically illiterate politicians wanted to live out adolescent fantasies of saving the world. I say it’s not the world in need of saving – but us, from them and the compound consequences of their vanity and greed.
Those who questioned and continue to question the so-called settled science of climate crisis are no longer just shouted down but demonised, says Neil Oliver
PA images
Those who questioned and continue to question the so-called settled science of climate crisis are no longer just shouted down but demonised as latter-day heretics apparently fit for little less than burning at the stake.
Those who simply have questions about the war in Ukraine – about committing billions of pounds to war while Britons face the darkest winter of their lifetimes are shouted down as Putin-loving enemies of democracy. The shouting down is the response to every contrary voice, and the shouting down on this matter must stop as well.
Those who have questions about mass immigration – who fear the inevitable erosion and dilution of British culture by beliefs and behaviours of utterly different sorts arriving in their midst at an excessive rate, are still being shouted down now, even as the ancient religious hatreds of the sub-continent emerge, large as life, on English streets. If questions can’t be asked, how can answers be found?
Name-calling is at the heart of it too – the seat of the fire that burns to a crisp any with the temerity to challenge this orthodoxy or that. Those who questioned lock downs were called granny-killers; those who questioned vaccines were called covidiots; those who continue to challenge the Green agenda are climate-change-deniers – how effective, in the art of shutting down, is the dreaded suffix of denier, with all its echoes of 20th century horror?
Those who accused the rape gangs were derided as racists – another slur that is all but unsurvivable for anyone who wants to keep a job, far less a place in polite society. Those who have seen at first hand the worst consequences of too much immigration happening too fast … who have watched self-imposed segregation take shape in one town and city after another, the undeniable establishment of ghettoes, are similarly defamed – shouted down as having nothing more to offer than hate based on skin colour – when what they are actually pointing out is the crystalising and entrenching of the kind of division and imported religious hatred that ends always and only in the ugliness playing out in now in Leicester and Birmingham.
The damage done by the delusion, the myth of multi-culturalism – the band-aid hurriedly applied when concepts like assimilation and integration were seen to have failed – has hardly been limited to these islands.
Not so very long ago, Sweden was regarded as a beacon of caring, sharing, liberal leftism. Not anymore. Since 2018 there have been almost 500 bombings in the towns and cities of a country most people likely still believe, mistakenly, to be a model of safety and stability, the home of Ikea and St Greta of Thunberg. It’s not just bombs - 47 people have been shot dead so far this year. National Police commissioner Anders Thornberg is on record describing, “an entirely different kind of brutality” in ghetto-ised suburbs dominated by immigrants. Since 2000, Sweden’s immigrant population – those born elsewhere but now resident – has doubled to 20 percent. Sweden took in more migrants per capita than any other country during the wave of immigration in 2015. Most of the incomers have been young men. At the recent general election, Sweden’s most outspoken anti-immigration party – the Sweden Democrats – emerged as the second biggest in parliament. Those who have voted for the SDs are shouted down – even as news media carry reports of a new trend in so-called “humiliation robberies” during which victims are not just robbed but also degraded while their attackers film the abuse.
Despite the hitherto unknown levels of violence and crime, still it is hard for Swedes to speak out about the reality of their situation. Those who point to the existence of ghettoes – of no go area’s into which fire and ambulance crews will not venture without police escorts – are shouted down as “safety deniers”. Can you imagine … “safety deniers” … whatever next?
When will the shouting down stop? Time and time again those calling out real problems, real danger, are the targets of tactics shaped always and only to silence dissent, to deride and alienate any who seek to give voice to uncomfortable truth, even just to ask a question.
On the other side of the Atlantic, in the US there is no functioning southern border to speak o-. The number of those heading north is now of the seven-figure variety. That is unsustainable, in every way. Those speaking out are shouted down as racists and xenophobes, as you would surely expect. Florida governor Ron De Santis is among those that have taken to moving migrants on – putting them aboard planes and buses and transporting them to self-proclaimed “sanctuary states” whose politics and politicians declare them as fully supportive of new arrivals. No sooner had 50 of those immigrants touched down in wealthy, liberal enclave Martha’s Vineyard, however, than the allegedly tolerant and welcoming residents had moved heaven and earth to ensure those pilgrims were back on buses and headed out of sight and out of mind before leaving so much as a footprint on the all-white beach.
Now is most definitely not the time for dissenting voices to lose their collective nerve, says Neil Oliver
Image: GB News
It was ever thus – those with enough money and the right friends get to preach about how others must live … while being forever insulated against the consequences. Too many people, made guinea pigs for social engineering by holders of influence, have been handed too much to bear. Those authority figures, who never had any intention of taking part in their own experiment but saw to it instead that the inhabitants of distant corners they neither knew nor cared about would have to sink or swim in an ill-judged and excessive wave of newcomers, will continue to do as they please whilst insisting those beneath them in the food chain should simply shut up.
But now is most definitely not the time for dissenting voices to lose their collective nerve. Now more than ever those with questioning, defiant, contrary voices must find the determination to go on. We face economic challenges of a sort most of us have never before had to contemplate. Furthermore, we have been divided among ourselves as never before.
Old certainties have been torn away with nothing desirable to replace them, but we must remember what has been taken and so resolve to take it all back.
This is no time for silence. After two years like no others – when we’ve been told to be frightened of each other on account of a disease, of our way of life on account of its impact on the world, of the future itself – it might be tempting to submit.
Here’s the thing: the shouting and the name calling are the least of it. After Covid, after Lockdown, after war, after crisis after crisis after crisis. If we don’t make all of our voices heard and right now, ask yourself, what might they try next?
