As IF Times

After three years of fighting, the spotlight has returned to the ongoing war between Russia and The Ukraine.  With human losses on both sides continuing to mount along with the financial toll, a possible end to fighting is now at least on the horizon.

But even as some kind of détente is being negotiated, an even more serious war has emerged among players who were notionally ancillary to the actual conflict. What is surprising is that the conflict is now among heretofore allies in geopolitics.  Schisms have now appeared within the fraternity of the ‘Western nations’.

There is great umbrage in the West among those with dated notions of the East versus the West carried over from the alliances after the last Second World war, now 80 years past.  For these people, East is still the enemy and the West are the good guys.  They still think, better dead than Red. Any kind of détente between these two ideologies can never be accepted by the black and white mindset of those thus convinced.

If we consider the fundamental reason for the division between the East and the West, it is grounded in the vastly different political ideologies pursued by either side.  The East, principally Russia, are presented as authoritarian states without the benefit of free democratically held elections,  without freedoms of expression and the general constriction of individual freedom of movement.  They are widely perceived as surveillance states in which citizens are under constant watch and forbidden to criticize the government.   They are portrayed as bleak, sad places where people are kept in poverty and oppressed.  Though Putin is still the strongman of Russia, the nation is in fact a Christian one without the rampant religious related crime plaguing the West.  We don’t see the squalor in the large cities as we’ve become accustomed to in the advanced West.

Thus, it was with great furor among the heretofore champions of the Western nations, the UK, France and Germany among others, when they responded to what can only be described as a wake-up speech by Vice President J.D. Vance at a security conference in Munich. Vance boldly pointed out that the principles of civilization that made living in the West preferable over living in communist regimes such as Russia, had been abandoned by the erstwhile champions of freedom.

Ironically the very things for which Russia is criticized were being implemented upon their own domestic citizens.  The City of London has the 3^rd largest number of surveillance cameras in urban centers in the world. This statistic is even worse when you see that virtually all of the other ones in the top ten are in communist nations.  Russia doesn’t even appear on this list.

Why are these cameras necessary? The only reason is to monitor the explosion of crime that has taken place in London and other British cities over the past decade or so.  Who is responsible for all this crime?  What has changed in the past few years?

It’s certainly clear that in most European nations, the populations have changed significantly by the addition of immigrants from non-Western nations.  But to even suggest that there is any link between this and the uptick in crime is to risk being set upon by the national governments since this may be considered hateful speech.  Such was the gist of Vance’s speech: That the influx of so many immigrants that do not share and will never share the values of the West are endangering the very existence of Western culture.  As most are probably aware, even being seen to be practicing a silent Christian religious observation is considered an offense in today’s Britain.

Thus we have the reality of Western nations suppressing the opinions of those that would protest against the dilution and diminishment of their native societies.  They are threatened with censure at the least and imprisonment at the worst. After Vance’s speech, a German official labelled it as being unacceptable. The irony of not supporting freedom of speech, the foundation of Western societies was totally lost on him….as well as most of the EU nations.  We now have governments monitoring individual’s social posts for language deemed offensive. There is even a movement to ban the X platform from the UK if not Europe for its role in spreading hate speech.

Thus we have the many EU nations circling the wagons to defend ‘Western values”, which includes defending the Ukraine, but which they don’t defend in their own nations.  It’s lost on most EU leaders that they have become the totalitarian  society that they have always considered the enemy Russia to be.  To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the US didn’t leave the West; the West left the US.

link:  https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-12-03-european-journalists-leaving-x-despise-free-speech.html

In 2006, a group of young people including Jack Dorsey started a little company named Twitter which was in fact only a side venture of their main project at the time.  Twitter was originally meant as a short messaging application allowing only a few characters to be sent, so the messages had to be brief and to the point.

The idea gained traction amongst early adopters and by 2013, after an IPO raising $1.8 billion, it was valued at $25 billion.  While that was an eye popping number, Elon Musk came along in 2022 and paid $44 billion to buy the entire company.  While numerous other social media messaging platforms have appeared since Twitter, now rebranded as X, this platform remains the most widely used and referred messaging platform in the world….not to mention the most influential. It is so influential that some authoritarian governments, such as Brazil’s, actually banned the use of X by their population.

Nowadays, X is the source for the most up to date information on every event worldwide since everyone who uses it can be a conduit for news. How quaint to think about the environment of a few decades ago when you had to wait for the 6 o’clock news.  Even professional journalists had to have an exposure to the platform to stay current with world affairs.  Of course, the flip side to the flood of current information was the proliferation of opinions on any given topic, many of which are considered controversial.

Until Elon Musk purchased and rebranded the platform, Twitter took it upon itself to censor posts which were not in line with the views of the owners.  Thus, as in most media companies, the views of conservatives were censored or just outright banned. Twitter fell into being an echo chamber for left leaning views as did all other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

As Musk took control of the company, he reinstated the principle of free speech to the platform and thus, X truly regained its reputation as being the forum for the exchange of ideas, opinions and news.  To this day, users from across the ideological spectrum use X for their messages to the public, from celebrities, to the plain folk, from politicians to tyrants (often the same).

An odd thing happened since Musk’s takeover.  Now that X is a conduit for freedom of information and opinion, legions of once active social justice posters have publicly left the platform, including most recently over 300 European journalists.

If you think about it, why do journalists even exist?  Their notional job is to report news and events.  Currently, with eyeballs everywhere and with access to platforms such as X, we don’t need a middleman to tell us that a house is on fire.  We can observe that by ourselves.  Information is available, it’s current and it’s accurate.  Journalism these days consists of reporting on an event and supplementing it with commentaries entirely misleading or inaccurate.  Thus, a burning house will be characterized as a result of policies not friendly to climate change.  A couple of people seen sneezing at a venue constitutes evidence of a massive pandemic. It’s as if you ordered a meal at a restaurant and the waiter regales you with a narrative of how the food was artfully prepared by culturally sensitive craftsmen using only natural ingredients and socially acceptable techniques.  So, basically you get a free side dish of sanctimony that you didn’t ask for.

We don’t need middlemen to report the news. It reminds me of the old cliché about consultants; they look at your watch and tell you what time it is…for a fee.  The 300 ‘journalists’ quitting X are enacting a real life ‘Blazing Saddles’ moment, they are threatening their own livelihoods in protest of not being able to spin the news their way.  They’ve all but admitted that they no longer control the narrative, thus they are superfluous.  The past dozen years or so have exposed the majority of media to be fatally biased at best or are loyal mouthpieces of the governing establishment at worst. How often have we seen numerous media outlets use exactly the same phraseology to characterize an event… as if it were orchestrated?

We can say without exaggeration that Elon Musk has single-handedly restored free speech to the world.  He has allowed people to see that their views, though not blessed by the mainstream, are not unique; that many feel the way that they do.  This is an enormously powerful revelation and will have an enormous negative impact on authoritarian governments everywhere.