In a hard-hitting interview with Holding the Line, a United Kingdom Member of Parliament is calling out tech giants and mainstream news for failing to provide balanced debate on Covid and lockdowns.
Conservative MP Chris Green, speaking to HTL spokesperson Roger Guttridge, says: “When we think of a media challenging the establishment, they have failed.”
During the wide-ranging interview he also raises concerns about restrictions on free speech that could be brought in via the proposed Online Safety Bill.
The Bolton West and Atherton MP also discusses the social and economic costs of lockdowns and why he resigned as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in October 2020 because of the coronavirus restrictions, which he believes caused more harm than good.
Fear-based policies around Covid-19, Mr Green claims, resulted in people being too frightened to visit their doctors and hospitals for serious conditions including heart disease and cancer.
The MP says that in the Bolton borough alone there were 20,000 fewer referrals from doctors to hospitals over the period of just a few months.
He also discusses vaccine mandates for health staff, and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Sajid Javid’s U-turn on those mandates for NHS staff.
Mr Green was speaking to HTL spokesperson Roger Guttridge on February 22, 2022.
The Convoy22 protesters camping in front of Parliament since Tuesday face a complete unwillingness by the media, political and pundit classes to take them at their word.
Present are people who have lost their jobs due to mandates, people whose lives have been forever changed due to ‘vaccine’ injury, people separated from loved ones through travel restrictions and those who oppose the suspension of civil liberties due to the Covid ‘emergency’ and myriad other reasons connected to the loss of freedom and state coercion.
Despite being clear they are there in the name of freedom, to end medical mandates, to halt the roll out of the Pfizer injection to children and to end Covid restrictions, their critics insist they are not what they say they are.
Instead, they are conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, crazies, QAnon devotees, right-wingers, violent extremists, neo nazis, delusional freaks.
This playbook is so played out it’s entirely predictable at this point. Anything but reality. Anything but real people suffering under Covid policy. Anything but a grassroots surge for freedom from tyrants.
I’ve been shocked by just how far the dehumanisation and mischaracterisation has gone. It’s almost pathological. I take it as a given that people are 100 per cent nicer in real life than they are on Twitter, but what people have been willing to publicly post shows how emboldened that hatred has become with little concern for how it will look when the mood changes.
We have the receipts, as they say. So let’s review.
Commentators on social media are happy, proud even, that not a single politician has addressed the crowd:
How do you reconcile public sentiment through political leaders? Have you measured it or is it a reckon? How do you know the ruling elite's lack of comms are not driving resentment among a sig proportion of the population?
They have defended police brutality (see full video of police kneeling on this woman’s head below):
'I'm just so surprised that my public indecency, violation of a trespass notice, and resisting arrest resulted in the cops grabbing me' she said https://t.co/I5P17Gr4en
It was claimed that the protester’s grievances are a ‘political dysfunction’:
I think the protesters are brought together by a sense of unreality. Rangi Kemara has documented this well. I'd hate to reach for a regressive, psychological explanation for their political dysfunction, but it's hard not to when you see things like this https://t.co/5dYXpImeeb
And generally showed indifference to their plight:
Terribly sad that people in need through their own personal choices are taking food and weather protection that could be given to people in genuine need.
They could and should have brought all of their own provisions.
Barely any commenters have shown any willingness to hear what the protesters have to say, understand their experiences or what has brought them to Wellington. But still, we are authoritatively infomed that “there is no rhyme or reason to their call to action. They want freedom, but don’t respect others’ right to choose to be protected by the mRNA jab, or the Government’s democratic mandate.”
The delusion goes further. Despite the Government’s Covid policies having wiped a minimum of 27,000 businesses off Companies Office records, and tens of thousands of professionals losing their jobs, and the vaccine injured going unacknowledged, reporters are more concerned about the impact of the protests on local businesses, disabled road crossings, and local residents.
new cars being added right now. this one now blocking anyone in a wheelchair crossing the road. pic.twitter.com/zLndxi6ava
The anti-mandate/anti-vax protests have caused Wgtn retail sales to drop by about 70 percent, according to Retail NZ – pretty rough in what is already an inhospitable climate given Omicron: pic.twitter.com/YEyeRLTS8C
The media seem confused about why protesters are not welcoming them, despite having spent two years vilifying and gaslighting anyone who disagrees with the Government.
They have mercilessly smeared dissenting experts and other critics, have used the bogus concept of ‘false balance’ to justify biased reporting, and egged on the Government in its authoritarian policy making – ‘Why are you not locking down sooner, longer, forever? Why aren’t you punishing refuseniks harder?’
After such a dereliction of duty, do the press really think they have a right to walk among these protesters heckle-free?
I can’t support jibes by protesters, or signs referring to the hangings at Nuremberg. While historically accurate, it is distasteful. I’ve always read them as a reminder that the abuse of power is eventually held to account but others have interpreted them as death threats.
Given the media’s willingness to misrepresent the protesters words and actions, it’s important that they attempt to be beyond repute. Protests are heady affairs and tensions run high, so this is a difficult ask. But they have the moral high ground here and need to stand on it. They need to be the adults, while the press and pundits throw their tantrums.
One News reporter Kristin Hall did go among them, but sadly with pre-set ideas of collective delusion, and could not resist a low blow in her final analysis.
Despite the threats and aggro, I genuinely feel sorry for a lot of them. People have "done their own research" about the vaccine with catastrophic results. Some have been shaking with tears while discussing the idea of getting vaxxed/the booster. Fear is a powerful drug.
Kids having a feed at the Freedom Convoy22 protest at Parliament. Sourced from the Voices For Freedom Telegram channel.
‘The kids are in danger’
A noticeable criticism from the haters has been the fact that many people brought their kids. I’m not really sure why they think this is so bad, every protest I have ever been to has had kids present. It’s completely normal. Clearly, protesting parents had no intentions or expectations of violence.
Yup taking kids to a protest when they have not organised anything to cover their children's welfare is a pretty low standard of parenting. pic.twitter.com/aRqFfAvbsh
— 💉💉Lulu Lamarmiteontoast & Fairy-light Friday (@oh4forksakeNZ) February 9, 2022
Except the moment they started harassing people on the streets, threatening members of Parliament and attempting to break police lines. They stopped being a protest and became just an angry mob… Which by the way uses kids as human shields.
This picture made a bit of a wave but the kid was later reported to be happy as Larry and well cared for:
Having worked with @JLSousaSantos in internal displacement camps with populations who have fled actual violence, this photo makes me furious for a whole bunch of reasons. There’s a hell of a lot of privilege on display at the so called protests at Parliament. And kids? C’mon. https://t.co/AGyOKRWw8l
But when I saw the same criticism was being thrown at the Canadian Truckers, who inspired the New Zealand convoy, it made a lot more sense.
This morning it was announced police would stop carrying batons at the protest over concern for children present. This is obviously a good move, but in my view this should have been their plan from the start precisely because there were children present. The fact they have decided this only now implies it’s more about making the protesters look bad.
Anti-government protesters are increasingly being labelled security threats by intelligence services. Sourced from the Voices For Freedom Telegram channel.#
The new information war on freedom fighters
Along with freedom and bodily autonomy, thinking for yourself is now deeply frowned upon. ‘Doing your own research’ is an invitation for mockery.
It is considered so dangerous that it can lead to radicalisation, some researchers say.
Thursday’s One News report on the protests compared the protesters to the January 6th ‘insurrectionists’ in Washington last year. Despite this narrative emerging from the security services in the US, without evidence, the media has embraced it.
The Department for Homeland Security in the US has been signalling for the last year a major pivot from focusing on foreign terrorists to domestic ones. So have local agencies.
In a new briefing from DHS, factors contributing to a “heightened threat environment” included “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions”.
Why is the fouth estate not challenging what is being implied: That anyone who disagrees with the government or shares counter-narrative material – as I do here – is a potential violent extremist?
“Covid-19 mitigation measures—particularly Covid-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures.“
Newsroom political editor Marc Daalder published a piece on Saturday called Splintered Realities’: How NZ convoy lost its way, which claims the protest has been high-jacked by the ‘far-right fringe’. It’s an interesting case in point of how the mainstream are following the new narrative to turn the freedom movement into something sinister. There will be many more articles like this so keep an eye out.
Counterspin Media, the focus of this article, is not my cup of tea at all for a number of reasons. But they have covered important court cases that the mainstream media has not touched in any meaningful way.
Daalder correctly identifies that like any social movement there are splits between different groups and what they are trying to achieve. Most people protesting that I’ve spoken to take the view that the challenges faced are beyond left and right politics, and require uniting on the issue of freedom to push back against government over-reach.
The media’s use of terms like ‘white supremacist’ and ‘anti-vax’ is liberal and often dishonest, which is one of the reasons they are losing their audiences.
The article contains an interesting fact. What Daalder and the mainstream designated as ‘misinformation’ pages on Facebook, have had more views than mainstream media pages during the protest.
“The leading misinformation page, run by anti-vaxxer Chantelle Baker, garnered more video views with five posts than the leading media page, the NZ Herald, got with 73 …
“Chantelle Baker is, with five videos, generating more video views than 73 videos put out by NZ Herald in the same 24-hour period. There are dynamics here that are unprecedented. You are talking about a small misinfo/disinfo community who are pushing out real-time footage and coverage and framing about something that is happening that is fundamentally different to what the mainstream media is putting out.“ (emphasis mine)
Ah. Yep.
Daalder and commentator Sanjana Hattotuwa from the Disinformation Project express alarm and imply this is a result of a kind of radicalisation process. But this is delusion. Just as Joe Rogan has more listeners than CNN, the reasons for this are not difficult to understand. Audiences want more than what they’re given.
There will always be people attracted to more extreme ideas and interpretations, but most people can intuitively tell when they are and are not being manipulated and bullshitted. When they hear chat they have been missing and needing, they know it and tune in. Authenticity shines through.
Chantelle Baker comes across as open, interested, kind, and eager to hear about how Covid policies have hurt people. She is explaining and showing her audience the reality of who the protesters are and why they are there – something the mainstreams media can’t execute because no-one involved wants to talk to them.
They are losing their readers and viewers to new independent sites. In their self-reinforcing bubble, they believe their own bullshit and then buy into dark fairy tales about why people don’t want to hear it anymore.
This is a must read by @marcdaalder on what’s going on with the COVID related protest in New Zealand right now. Listen to @sanjanah. White supremacists are using the pandemic as a recruitment tool. This is serious and disturbing and can’t be ignored. https://t.co/bGs6CPPsvd
Despite the spin and internal disputes, protesters report swelling numbers, a great deal of community spirit, much hugging, children and the elderly being cared for collectively, love being shown to the police, the distribution of free hot food and drinks and even hot showers. They are a from a wide cross section of New Zealand society. They know what they are about.
This is very cute. Some of the cops were lovely on Thursday. One came forward and we chatted about dogs lol #Convoy2022NZhttps://t.co/w031ONktvg
Despite the predictably negative media campaign and the intolerance from the laptop class, the response from the Government has been telling.
I asked propaganda and crisis communications expert Greg Simons at Uppsala University what he made of the fact that politicians are refusing to meet with protesters, but at the same time have now publicly said there will be an end to mandates (at some point) – the first time they have said this.
“This is an act of desperation to keep their totalitarianism on track. They engage in character assassination as they try to kill or at least compromise the messenger, and will not go after the message itself for the risk of people seeing how illogical the official narrative is.”
“I also note how the same narrative is being used everywhere to discredit those protestors in both Canada and New Zealand. They are the same essentially, and bring in some recycled stuff from the ‘populism’ and Trump narratives.
“To me, this signals coordination, but it also signals desperation. The old tactics used to intimidate, scare or shame people into submission are not working. In fact, in Canada and parts of Europe, it is having the opposite effect and instead of dividing the public it is uniting them through a common sense of outrage at these ‘lovely’ would-be dictators. It is a watershed moment.”
Simons says the hardliner ‘Covidians’ are being forced to double down on their authoritarianism, like in a game of poker.
“If protests continue the Government will be forced to fold on their totalitarian paradise, and this scares them. Accountability comes after that.”
Not everyone is happy about the roll-out of covid jabs to kids.
Today is my child’s first day of school, and it’s been bittersweet.
I can keep my child from being injected with the Pfizer product (in principle, anyway) but short of removing him from school there is little I can do about his first year being marred by the blight of face masks.
He will be young enough not to have to wear one, but will be surrounded by older children who will. The joy of interacting with other kids and teachers, seeing their facial expressions and other important facial cues, will be violated by a useless, unhygienic, dehumanising muzzle.
Children need to breathe
A 9-year-old girl from my neighbourhood just told me, with eyes popping out of head, that she had to wear a mask at school today. She said it made her head hurt, and feel “kind of dizzy”. But they were allowed out of the classroom for up to a minute to take some deep breaths before putting it back on and resuming class.
If children need to leave the classroom to get sufficient fresh air, then they clearly shouldn’t be wearing a mask in the first place. I find it incredulous that our public health officials have decided this is a price worth paying for a virus with such a low mortality rate.
The damage being done to unvaccinated kids through the social alienation of being barred from school camps and sports activities and the inevitable bullying and stigmatisation that has occurred, is already unconscionable.
But injecting young children with this crap, masking them. It’s unspeakable what is taking place.
In a recent conversation with Guy Hatchard who writes the fierce Hatchard Report, he commented, “do these people even understand prana?”. Clearly not.
In Indian philosophy, ‘prana’ is the body’s vital energies. It is the “wind-like vital forces that assist breathing, distribution of food in the body, and digestion,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Note the word ‘vital’.
I’ve done enough yoga in my time to appreciate this wisdom, but if you prefer to look at it from the point of view of scientific materialism, then we can probably just leave it at the obvious – that our children require plenty of fresh air to function properly, on every level.
As well, humans were not designed to inhale their own carbon dioxide waste, or foster a warm moist environment for the growth of bacteria over an important orifice. Surely this is just common sense?
Please. Watch. This. British news program. A commentator who is student reacts to the announcement that Britain is removing masks. Watch at 1:40 seconds. Her breakdown is what almost ALL students feel about masks.pic.twitter.com/BfL5RJ67BS
Visiting my child’s classroom today, I’m told they will have all the windows open at all times for good ventilation – great when it’s warm, but what if it’s cold and draughty? They will also eat outside. OK, that’s cool, but what happens when it rains or it’s cold?
The idea that the teachers can’t make these basic, practical decisions based on real-time considerations, and instead must defer to arbitrary rules seems beyond ridiculous.
I must trust that the teacher’s sense of practicality and instinct for what serves the children best will prevail, but I’m already hearing anecdotes about children at other schools being forced to wear masks despite having exemptions. One girl became short of breath and fainted as a result.
My own child’s teacher wisely pointed out the importance of facial cues for children’s learning and said he will not be wearing a mask. But other kids in masks and teachers will still be a visual signal everywhere else in the school for my child to absorb. What message does it send, what will it do to his sense of the world?
'There are three reasons why I believe masks are the most insidious of all the restrictions that have been involved.'
Former NHS consultant clinical psychologist Gary Sidley gives his view on coronavirus restrictions.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired clinical psychologist. He argued against the use of face masks during a recent debate on GB News. Credit: Coronavirus Plushie
But I have no desire for my child to be concerned about any such threat. I just want them to be left alone to be a child and do the busy work of self-development, unburdened by the world’s problems. That’s our job as adults, to let them just be, unencumbered by our fears.
Before the insanity of 2020, there was a significant consensus among medical professionals that masks did nothing to stop respiratory viruses from spreading.
Epidemiologist Michael Baker even said so back in February 2020.
“The virus can also infect you via your eyes. It basically likes to land on mucus membranes, and then, from your eyes, go down to your nose anyway. So I think people should not bother with the face masks.”
And studies done in the last two years have found little to no evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in the general population, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control, according to Swiss Policy Research, an organisation that has impeccably recorded data from all over the world during the Covid situation.
The largest of these studied 6,000 subjects. The Danish study found no statistically significant effect of high-quality medical face masks against SARS-CoV-2 infection in a community setting.
“We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected.
“Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and Covid-19 illness, the environmental changes associated Covid-19 pandemic are significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”
The report’s authors go on to say:
“Masks worn in public settings and in school or day care settings may impact a range of early developing skills, such as attachment, facial processing, and socioemotional processing.”
So it was painful to hear Baker glibly call for two-year-olds to be masked.
“Our biggest gap in immunity, in many ways, is younger children. It’s been partially filled by lowering the vaccine age to five. But, we’ve still got the younger age groups, many of whom are going to early childhood centres, and they won’t be protected by the vaccine. So, we need another barrier in the way of them getting infected.”
Credit: Bob Moran
Hatchard calls this the “shield mentality”. We must use our children as a protective fence for our elders, by masking and jabbing them. When did our ethics get so topsy-turvey?
A recent freedom of information request in the UK shows that in the last two years, there were no deaths in children between the age of 1 and 9, where Covid-19 was the only cause listed on the death certificate. There was one death under 1 year, one in the 10-to-14 age group, and one in the 15-to-19 age group, and 5 in the 20-to-24 age group.
Screenshot
So why are we rolling out these experimental jabs to our kids?
Risk of Covid versus risk from the injection in children
Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility spokeswoman Jodie Bruning said after two years, the truth concerning the lack of risk to children and the ethical considerations of injecting children with the gene therapy technology remains obfuscated by the Government.
“The Government makes no claims other than that the vaccinations will protect tamariki and continues to urge medical treatment of 5-to-11-year-olds to protect vulnerable family members.
“There has been no public discussion of how children may be at risk, and the implications of this risk. No discussion on the necessity of taking a new drug that has not stood the test of time. No analytics have been provided of the infection fatality rate of 5-to-11-year-olds throughout the pandemic.”
Bruning said the efficacy of the jab against the omicron variant now circulating was dubious (see here and here) and may even have negative efficacy, meaning that if someone is exposed to the infection after vaccination, the outcome is more likely to be worse.
She points out the Government’s Unite Against Covid-19 website categories groups at severe risk from covid, and children are not listed.
“It has been clear from very early on, that healthy children and young people, including those with a single health condition are not at risk. In the UK, with a similar obesity rate as New Zealand, 99.995 per cent of children and young people with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test survived. This equates to an infection fatality rate in the UK of 0.0005 per cent (from a study of over 12 million).”
And yet the risk from vaccine injury in children and young people, is heightened and throws a spanner in the works of the presumed safety of the roll-outs, Bruning said.
“Studies from the USA, Hong Kong, Denmark show high levels of myocarditis in young people, particularly males. Scientists have drawn attention to the fact that these rates are above background rates.”
One study that found there were major risks for children, was pulled by the publisher Elsevier without explanation, after passing peer review. Elsevier is now facing legal action from the authors because of the unusual circumstances.
The British HART group (a group of doctors, scientists, economists, psychologists and other experts concerned about policy and guidance relating to the Covid-19 pandemic), sent an urgent letter to UK drugs regulator the MHRA on 20 January, urging an investigation to find out if the Covid jabs are causing a “significant numbers of deaths seen recently in male children and young adults.”
The groups is also asking that anonymised data showing how many kids have died following the jab, and within how many days, be published for the sake of transparency and the public interest. And here is what HART has to say about masks.
The letter to MHRA came on the heels of evidence presented to the High Court in London on 13 January showing a significant increase in the number of young male deaths following the roll-out of the covid-19 vaccinations compared with the prior five-year average between 2015 and 2019.
Pfizer’s own safety monitoring recorded more than 150,000 adverse reactions, within three months of the global roll out.
In its appendix list of adverse reactions, Pfizer lists nine pages of ‘adverse events of special interest’, with barely a space between each one named. Many of these are very serious and include cardiac events, kidney problems, blood clots and Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children.
Pfizer’s own post-authorisation monitoring lists nine pages of adverse reactions. The Government continues to tell the public Comirnaty is safe.
The US vaccine pharmacovigilance system VAERS now records just shy of 2 million adverse reactions from the Covid jab and nearly 35,000 adverse reactions in children between the ages of 5 and 17. This is the US Centre for Disease Control’s own data, with a calculated under-reporting factor of over 40 (Steve Kirsch and Jessica Rose have both run the numbers).
In the report covering 14 December to 21 January for 5-to-11 year-olds, there were 7,052 adverse events. This included three reported deaths, including a 7-year-old girl from Minnesota who died 11 days after receiving her first dose of the Pfizer product. There were 14 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, and 24 reports of blood clotting disorders.
New Zealand’s adverse event reporting system CARM, managed by drugs regulator Medsafe, shows there are now 45,984 events recorded and a total of 133 deaths, of which it only recognises two as resulting from the injection. There are citizens databases with many more injuries and deaths recorded, however.
Medsafe says an independent safety monitoring board has reviewed adverse reactions in children and found children are not disproportionately affected by the vaccine.
There just doesn’t seem to be a point at which they would ever pull the plug. It feels like deaths and injuries will go on unabated by regulators and ethicists and medical publishers.
A spokesperson for the group, working together collectively as The Hood, said they were disappointed but not surprised by the decision.
“While we are concerned the Judge did not act in a precautionary way, by temporarily halting this roll out until the matter could be heard in full, our case remains compelling.”
The group was committed to continuing the fight, they said.
In other news, Pfizer is now asking for permission to jab babies as young as six months old. The insanity never ends.
Holding The Line 