Who Gets to Control How the World Thinks?

Carl Benjamin, who began his online life with the gamer name Sargon of Akkad and then got stuck with it, has a YouTube channel called Akkad Daily. He produces daily YouTube videos on a range of topics, which tend to focus on British political and cultural life but have a common theme of being anti-woke, anti-social justice warrior, and anti-feminist. He has been particularly strident in decrying the cover-up of the Muslim grooming gangs scandal, but has also launched into the more aggressive aspects of the transgender lobby, and has a particular dislike of the Communist regime in China.

I have watched quite a number of his videos, and while I don’t agree with everything he says, and sometimes his thoughts about what women think are truly wince-inducing, he is still a welcome and refreshing antidote to major left-wing media outlets such as the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times. A bit of balance, one might say, to the relentless barrage of left-wing reportage and analysis. So of course he has had his channels demonetised by YouTube, with no explanation or justification given.

You might think, “Yeah, so what? I don’t really care about some far-right commentator.” But, for one thing, "far-right" has become a meaningless term of abuse. And for another thing, you should care, because platforms like YouTube are setting out to control how the world thinks.

Dave Cullen has a YouTube channel, Computing Forever. He is Irish, and so sometimes looks at strictly Irish issues, but he also enthusiastically reviews Hollywood movies (like Star Wars) and TV shows (like Dr Who), especially to decry the way in which woke values have spoiled them. But he does discuss serious global topics, and during the corona virus pandemic he has taken a lot of trouble to seek out sources of information other than the mainstream media. And he does this very carefully. For example, when following up claims that the US Centers for Disease Control is encouraging medical practitioners to exaggerate the number of deaths from Covid-19, he provided screen shots of the actual guidelines.

The real fuss happened when he interviewed Professor Dolores Cahill of University College, Dublin. In the interview, “Debunking the Narrative”, Professor Cahill said she believed the lockdowns to be unnecessary, and also expressed support for hydroxychloroquine. The interview was then flagged to YouTube by Business Insider as an example of “conspiracy theories” and YouTube duly deleted it. Now Professor Cahill is no basement crazy person:

Prof. Dr Dolores Cahill is a world-wide renowned expert in high-throughput proteomics technology development and automation, high content protein arrays and their biomedical applications, including in biomarker discovery and diagnostics. Prof. Cahill pioneered this research area at the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany, and holds several international patents in this field with research, biomedicine and diagnostic applications.

If an eminent scientist questions the policy response to a pandemic, this needs to be vigorously discussed, not shut down. And she is not alone. There are many distinguished researchers who have questioned the rationale and efficacy of the lockdowns in terms of the trade-offs between economic meltdown and saving people from the equivalent of a virulent flu. We need to know if excess deaths were actually due to the Covid-19 disease, or were at least partly due to misclassifications and mortality caused by diverted hospital resources and people avoiding medical care.These are crucial questions.

But then one gets the idea that it was probably the hydroxychloroquine part of the interview that was the nail in the coffin. If President Trump promotes something, it is immediately virulently rejected by left-wing media and ceaselessly ridiculed, with little or no discussion allowed. However, as Trump said, it would be good to know if this drug, which has been around for decades, can help prophylactically or in the early stages of the Covid-19 infection. Who wouldn’t want to know? Certainly the National Health Service in the UK is taking it seriously.

Britain’s National Heallth Service (NHS) has revealed that it is following U.S. President Donald Trump’s lead on experimenting with hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus preventative.

The state-run, socialised healthcare provider will be giving hydroxychloroquine to as many as 10,000 health workers at at least 20 hospitals as part of a clinical trial led by the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (Moru), to confirm anecdotal evidence that it can prevent people from catching the Chinese virus.

What will the left-wing media say now? So who could blame Trump if he went after the censorship practices of patently anti-conservative platforms such as YouTube and Facebook?

Harry Wiren