We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“Canada’s Newspaper of Record Asks: ‘What If They Ultimately Find Nothing?’”, asks Jonathan Kay at Quillette.
A month ago, I offered some predictions about how Canadian journalists would cover the five-year anniversary of the country’s infamous “unmarked graves” social panic, which began on May 27, 2021. On one hand, this kind of important landmark would be difficult for news outlets to ignore. (After all, this was considered the Canadian “Story of the Year” at the time.) On the other hand, any intellectually honest retrospective that these outlets produced would require at least some passing explanation as to why the entire Canadian media establishment had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a story that turned out to be fake—something that most journalists have so far proven unwilling to do.
On Wednesday, it will have been exactly five years since the Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia claimed it has found 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of the community’s former residential school. In the weeks that followed, gullible reporters transformed the narrative into a kind of horror-movie script, complete with mass murdering priests and midnight burials.
It all turned out to be complete nonsense. In five years, not a single actual grave has been found.
The only evidence that had been offered in support of the original claims consisted of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the former residential school grounds. As reporters (belatedly) learned, GPR technology merely detects sub-surface soil dislocations—not actual graves. These dislocations can be associated with graves, but also with pipes, rocks, tree roots, and a dozen other common subsurface artifacts. To truly identify actual graves, one must dig—something that the Kamloops First Nation leaders who originally advanced these false claims have conspicuously failed to do; despite having received more than $12-million from Canada’s (equally gullible) government for search activities.
The Globe and Mail is often referred to as Canada’s “Newspaper of Record”. True to Mr Kay’s predictions, it did carry a slightly repentant but very evasive retrospective. The Globe and Mail’s own link is here and the article can also be seen here. The article starts with the ringing title “There is no reconciliation without truth”, before immediately rowing back in the first line with “Two things can be true, at the same time.”
There is much else in the same vein, including this darvolicious line:
That there have been no human remains found at Kamloops does not mean children did not die there. It does not mean that crimes were not committed against children, crimes that were inexcusable. A contention otherwise is denialism, and it is morally repugnant.
As Jonathan Kay says,
In paragraph eight, the writers try a second motte-and-bailey gambit. We are informed that “regardless of what they find [in Kamloops], the fact remains that more than 3,500 children are named on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation‘s registry of students who died as a result of the residential school system, which operated in Canada for more than 160 years.” This is absolutely true. But it’s also completely irrelevant. No one disputes the information published by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which, unlike the Kamloops hysteria, was based on careful research. In that case, researchers had names, dates of birth, and other identifying details for the victims. None of that exists in the case of the Kamloops story.
The Globe’s implicit argument here is that it doesn’t really matter all that much if those 215 children actually existed or not, since we have the names of 3,500 other children that can be trotted out for the same purpose—so, at worse, we’re still batting 94% on dead-child statistics.
As my deliberately crude wording here is intended to suggest, the rhetorical trick the Globe is playing here isn’t just misleading, it’s also grotesquely reductionist. The documented deaths at residential schools were largely the result of tuberculosis. While the elevated tuberculosis death rates at residential schools represent a stain on Canada’s national conscience, the issue of substandard public-health amenities is completely distinct from lurid fairy tales in which mass murdering Catholic clerics intentionally dispatch 215 children into shallow graves. Every morally aware adult knows this, notwithstanding the Globe’s effort to blur the two categories.
Ten seconds after I wrote a comment to this Guardian story, “Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’”, it was gone. Oh well. My comment was no great loss to the world (I forget the exact words, but it was something about how the New York Times and the Guardian didn’t report it when Biden fell asleep in meetings either) and, of course, a newspaper has every right to delete whatever it wants from its comment section.
But the sheer speed of its deletion made it obvious that it was done by A.I. That happens a lot these days, and not just at the Guardian. Some people on Twitter write “unalive” when they mean “kill” to avoid having their post automatically censored. Cens*red. Cenrosed. There are so many other instances of workarounds to avoid the robot censor that I begin to think we may be evolving something like the avoidance speech that is a feature of languages that originate as far apart as Australia and China.
The current state of Artificial Intelligence is particularly likely to result in pervasive stupid censorship; censorship that does not even serve the objectives of the censors. Four or five years ago the programs caught single words. “Unalive” dates from this period. Sometimes the algorithm caught utterly harmless instances of a given word, for example when a mention of a blue tit – the bird – would be deleted for obscenity. But one could work round it. In five years’ time, or maybe sooner given the speed at which this technology is developing, the A.I. will no longer mistake a blue tit for a tit. We’ll still have the political censorship, of course, and the system will be cleverer than we are when it comes to spotting evasive wordplay. Pray for Elon Musk’s health.
For several years the Guardian automatically deleted any reference to Hunter Biden’s laptop. As I said in this post, for some reason they briefly lifted the prohibition in January 2025:
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop in a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”
MJuma2018’s comment is still up, but when I have tried mentioning the laptop on a few occasions since then out of a maternal concern for the imprisoned brains of Guardian readers, my comments did not get through.
However in my experiments during those four, now five, years it was always comments relating to Hunter Biden that got the chop. My comment of today only referred to “Biden”, as dozens of other comments in the thread also did. For such a general comment to be deleted is a new development. Before you ask, no, they do not delete all my comments. Nor do they delete all my comments that refer unfavourably to Joe Biden. It looks like the AI is just sophisticated enough to recognise a criticism of the Guardian’s own coverage.
This is the whole text of a BBC report published forty minutes ago:
Taxi driver victim of ‘unprovoked, racist attack’
Police are appealing for information about a racially-motivated attack on a taxi driver in Belfast.
Two men and a woman approached the taxi driver on Talbot Street at about 23:10 BST on Saturday and, after being refused a lift, they became aggressive and used racial slurs.
The taxi driver, who is in his 30s, was spat at and struck by one of the men and he hit the ground and lost consciousness. As he got back up, he was hit by a second man.
The three people then made off on foot in the direction of the city centre.
‘Unprovoked attack’
Inspt Moutray from the Police Service of Northern Ireland ( PSNI) described it as an “unprovoked attack, which is being treated as a racially-motivated hate crime”.
“There is no place for hate, racism or violence in our communities, and everyone has the right to feel safe and treated with dignity and respect,” the officer said.
“The area was fairly busy at the time, as would be expected for a Saturday evening, and we’d ask anyone who witnessed this assault to get in touch.
“The woman is described as wearing a black dress, while both men are described as being of muscular build and were wearing a white shirt and red T-shirt.”
I do not know if the decision to hide the race of the victim and the suspects was taken by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the BBC, or both. Whoever it was, they cannot care very much about actually catching the perpetrators. Do they seriously think that someone reading the above who was in the area at the relevant time would have their memory jogged by mention of the colour of the woman’s dress or the men’s shirts? For any crime at all, giving a description of a suspect that leaves out their skin colour is unlikely to be productive in prompting witnesses to come forward. When the crime is a a racial attack such playacting becomes even more outrageous.
Related post: It’s not like anyone needs to know what a killer still at large looks like
Musa al-Gharbi is an American academic – a sociologist and a professor of journalism – who is an occasional columnist for the Guardian. He describes himself as a Democrat.
If you were asked to guess from the information in the sentence above what he would say in a talk giving an overview of sociological research about American voters in the era of Trump, you’d probably be wrong, just like I was.
I found his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production” informative and entertaining, particularly the section that starts at 28:02 and continues until about 40:00 on what is commonly called “the public loss of trust in science”.
(As Professor al-Gharbi points out, there has scarcely been any public loss of trust in science.)
“The toughest job facing the new head of Ofcom: tackling the blatantly partisan GB News”, writes Polly Toynbee in the Guardian.
She writes,
Labour feels more sure-footed. A stronger sense of its own identity flows from standing up to Donald Trump, his war and his insults. MPs are less often looking over their shoulders at the right and its media.
Here comes one test. Selecting a new chair of the media regulator Ofcom is in its final phase: which of two reported frontrunners is appointed will reveal the government’s frame of mind. Ofcom has been moribund, weak to the point of invisibility. One key area is the regulation of online harms, as the government seeks to toughen up on the safety of children and the sanity of the nation, against a libertarian right that defends aggressive notions of free speech, and permits fact-free dangers, such as vaccine and climate denial. Kemi Badenoch is a free-speecher who argued for the weakening of the Online Safety Act in 2022 by removing the ban on “legal but harmful” material for adults, claiming it was “legislating for hurt feelings”. Keir Starmer is strengthening the law by banning addictive algorithms.
and
Try to imagine the revolt on the right if Labour sanctioned an upstart broadcaster with, say, George Galloway as its main nightly presenter (he’d be as good at it as Nigel Farage), a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes. Beyond that scenario, it’s hard to devise a leftist channel as aggressively poisonous as GB News, which pours out Farage, Matt Goodwin, Lee Anderson, Darren Grimes, Martin Daubney and Richard Tice, and is frequently accused of breaking rules about accuracy and impartiality.
Toynbee is right to say that George Galloway could find an audience, but wrong to present the scenario of him being employed by a mainstream outlet as unthinkable. Alongside his work for Iran’s Press TV and Russia Today, Galloway hosted shows for talkSPORT and talkRADIO for several years. But we don’t have to imagine “a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes”, we can see it in Ms Toynbee’s own newspaper, which has been financed by the Scott Trust since 1936. That’s fine by me. I don’t object to “a string of leftists and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes” if it is paid for by a benefactor or by other leftists who like their tropes. I start objecting to a string of leftists and a news agenda focused on far left tropes when I am forced to pay for it via my television licence.
“Never mind leading the free world, if Donald Trump were your ageing father, when would you take away his car keys?”, asks Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian.
She writes,
Imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that the 61% of Americans (according to Reuters-Ipsos) who think their president has become more erratic with age and the 56% who don’t think he has the mental sharpness now to deal with challenges (according to recent polling for the Washington Post) were not wrong. Suppose that, much as they did with an octogenarian Joe Biden, millions of Americans had sensed something through their TV screens that genuinely did affect their president’s capacity to send thousands of young soldiers to their potential deaths in the Middle East, whether or not that something amounted to a clinical diagnosis.
Imagine they were right to suspect that the lives of countless people around the world rested in the hands of someone whose judgment might not be entirely up to this – including the 45 million estimated to be at risk of acute hunger if farmers can’t get enough fertiliser, a crucial byproduct of a now badly disrupted Gulf gas industry, to grow food. What would it take, hypothetically, for the system to challenge an elected president’s will?
It’s strange that this has become a subject seemingly too delicate to discuss in public, given what is at stake.
It is not strange at all. I think that Ms Hinsliff knows perfectly well why the delicate “cannot discuss” Trump’s possible senility. Her own delicacy in introducing the elephant to polite company demonstrates that. “Suppose that, much as they did with an octogenarian Joe Biden, millions of Americans had sensed something through their TV screens”. Yeah, suppose the sensing-through-the-TV screens had happened before. Suppose your newspaper – suppose your entire media establishment – had frantically squashed the ballooning obvious until it burst like an exploding colostomy bag. Imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that Americans had concluded that either Vice President Kamala Harris was complicit in covering up her boss’s senility or that she was too stupid to notice it. Imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that them voting for Donald Trump in preference to her was a rational decision.
You can’t imagine it; that’s your problem. The cloud of smoke you made to hide Biden’s senility has blinded you.
Maybe I imagined it.
I thought I saw the first few seconds of a scary video, either put out by the Home Office “Prevent” scheme or by some NGO with a similar remit. The video featured a teenage actor – white and male, obviously – portraying a boy lamenting that he had got a criminal record after impulsively posting hate speech online. I remembered the title as being something like “It just takes a few seconds to get a criminal record” or “It only takes a few words to get a criminal record”. From what little I saw of it, the video seemed more sinister than 99% of the hate speech it aimed to combat – because it was not put out by some Twitter-addled rando with thirteen followers but by His Majesty’s government, or an organisation closely associated with the same.
Ya know how it is. I just saw a second or two and thought, “I might blog about that”, but I was too busy to note it down. And now it’s disappeared. I put a query into CoPilot, which might have been unwise, and got this:
🔗 Official Home Office Video Link
🎥 “It Just Takes a Few Words to Get a Criminal Record” — UK Government (Prevent)
YouTube (Official UK Government Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw (youtube.com in Bing)
This is the authentic version of the video you’re looking for. It’s produced as part of the UK Government’s counter extremism and online safety messaging aimed at young people.
📌 What this video covers
• Warns young people that posting extremist or hateful content online can lead to:
o Arrest
o Prosecution
o A criminal record
• Uses a serious, cautionary tone
• Shows teen actors in realistic online scenarios
• Designed to discourage impulsive posting of harmful content
The link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw says “This video isn’t available anymore”
That “anymore” suggests it did once exist, but I am beginning to wonder if I did not hallucinate the whole thing and spur the A.I. to join in my hallucination by means of my prompts.
Assuming I did not imagine it, can I get this video back from the void? I’ve tried the Wayback Machine without success.
UPDATE: That was quick. My thanks to commenter nbc who said, “This one?”
Yes. This one.
https://xcancel.com/Steve_Laws_/status/2029317472059359438
It took me about a second of scrolling down from that post to find views expressed by Steve Laws that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, he mocks Laurence Fox for saying, in the context of the child-killer Ian Huntley being attacked and killed by another prisoner, that even the most depraved criminals should be protected from vigilante justice in prison. Steve Laws appears to be an actual far-right person. They do exist. But as I have said before, “if there is a truth respectable people shy away from mentioning, do not be surprised when the despicable people who will say it aloud are listened to.”
The video appears to have been put out by the police rather than the Home Office, and shows a boy – not “a boy” in the sense of “a young man”; a child of about thirteen – tearfully saying “I just got all my devices taken away by the police. My mum couldn’t believe it. I might get a criminal record and not be able to go to college. I only shared a link. I just thought it was funny. But it was terrorist content, and that is not a game, it’s real life.”
That is a deeply sinister message for the police to be putting out, particularly in that it is aimed at children.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ted Schuerzinger has provided a direct link to the video: https://www.instagram.com/terrorismpolice/reel/DVd1g1bkg7I/. It came from an Instagram account called “terrorismpolice”. The final frame shows a police logo and the words:
COUNTER TERRORISM POLICING
A.C.T.|ACTION COUNTERS TERRORISM
WHAT YOU SHARE LEAVES A TRACE
CLICK TO FIND OUT MORE
and the caption to the Instagram video says,
Has your child spotted our latest campaign on their feed? 👀
We’ve launched a digital campaign aimed at teenage boys to highlight the real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online.
The content is being promoted on platforms young people already use, to reach them where they are.
Our message is simple: sharing extremist material can lead to serious legal and life-changing consequences.
It’s not just a laugh. What you share leaves a trace.
Learn more about the campaign and the message behind it via the link in our story.
Two questions occur to me:
1) Why was the video removed from YouTube? Hostile comments?
2) Is the video an accurate portrayal of the likely “real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online” when the sharer is a child and the content is something the child shares because they think it is funny? If it is not an accurate portrayal, then the police officers or police employees who made the video are deliberately frightening children with misinformation regarding the law. People have had the police turn up at their doors to issue a “friendly warning” for less. If, however, it is an accurate portrayal of the real world – that is, if children really are being given criminal records for sharing (not creating, sharing) comic memes of whose extremist origin they were unaware, then we are further along than even I thought.
The day before yesterday I wrote, “Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.”
One example is Adam Boulton. He is the former political editor of Sky News, among many other prestigious roles, and currently presents on Times Radio. Regular readers may recall that in 2023 he told BBC Newsnight that GB News should be shut down in order to protect the UK’s “delicate and important broadcast ecology”. Boulton’s response to the crisis at the BBC was this tweet:
Adam Boulton
@adamboultonTABB
For the record No words were put into Trump’s mouth. The quotes were him saying what he said.
9:36 AM · Nov 9, 2025
(Hat tip to the science fiction author Neal Asher.)
People in the replies to Boulton’s tweet have a lot of fun snipping out parts of what he said in order to reverse its meaning. But it is not really that funny. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Adam Boulton is lying to you; assume Adam Boulton would lie about you.
Another journalist whose own words demonstrate that he thinks it is fine to use selective quotation to lie to his readers is Mikey Smith, Deputy Political Editor of the Mirror. Back in the days when he was Michael Smith, Mikey worked for Sky News and the BBC. On November 9th, he tweeted this:
Mikey Smith
@mikeysmith
It’s not an assault on the BBC. It’s an assault on facts.
The edit was only remotely a problem if your position is that Trump played no part whatsoever in encouraging January 6th. Which he plainly and obviously did.
7:37 PM · Nov 9, 2025
Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Mikey Smith is lying to you; assume Mikey Smith would lie about you.
Still, perhaps I was a little harsh about journalists in general in my earlier post. Sure, there are plenty of outright liars in the media, and plenty of people who upvote their lies and beg to be lied to some more. But perhaps a larger group is made up of caring, intelligent people who you’d probably really like if you met socially, in the unlikely event that you were invited to one of their social gatherings.
People like Jane Martinson. She is a Guardian columnist, a professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. On November 9th she wrote this piece for the Guardian: “The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it has given in”
Now the resignations of both Davie and the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have shown that baying for blood gets results.
The biggest shock is that this saga began just a week ago with the leak of a 19-page “devastating memo” from Michael Prescott, a former political journalist who spent three years as an external adviser to the broadcaster, published in the Telegraph. The dossier alleges BBC Panorama doctored a speech by Trump, making him appear to support the January 6 rioters, that its Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views, and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender.
I admire in a technical sense the way that Professor Martinson uses the word “alleges”. The claims that the BBC’s Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender can be fairly called allegations. Even if one thinks these two allegations are probably true, as I do, whether the behaviour of groups of journalists over a period of years was fair or unfair is not a matter that can be assessed quickly at a distance. Two of the three items in Professor Hutchinson’s list of things that she says the dossier “alleges” truly are allegations, i.e. claims that remain to be proved. The first one is the cuckoo in the nest. Professor Martinson also categorises it as an “allegation” that Panorama misleadingly edited Trump’s speech. If she had wanted to, she could have verified the allegation as fact by watching a twenty-three second video. That particular clip was from news.com.au, but it is widely available. (I suppose we could enter a spiral of distrust and say that maybe that video was faked like the Panorama one, but that would involve admitting the Panorama one was faked, so this option is not available to Professor Martinson.)
Now, Prof. Martinson might complain that it is unfair to focus on that little evasion when later in the article she did go on to say,
None of this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection.
But if she did so complain about relevant material being downplayed, I wouldn’t have to go to ChatGPT to find a smoothly written defence of the practice. Notice how even in the act of admitting that the Panorama edit was “bad and misleading”, she still puts in a little doubt that it actually happened. She writes, “the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit“. “Appears to” – can we get BBC Verify onto that? It might be that Jane Hutchinson wrote “appears to” here and “alleges” earlier as part of a subtle attempt to cast doubt on politically inconvenient facts that she knew were true but would prefer her readers to doubt. However I think it more likely that it was a mere reflex; an involuntary flinching of the eyes and mind away from the thought that a situation could exist where Trump – Trump! – was the one being lied about and people like her were the liars, and, more embarrassing yet, that she and people like her might be the ones being lied to. And that this might have been going on for years, and she, a Professor of Financial Journalism, had not noticed.
Let us finish this discussion with a short prayer for Guardian journalists and those who love them:
“Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.”
– Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
“BBC director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit”, reports the BBC about itself:
BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit
It comes after the Telegraph published details of a leaked internal BBC memo suggesting Panorama edited two parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021
In a statement, Davie says “there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility”
I used the tag “Deleted by the Woke Media” because fifty-four minutes of Trump’s speech on January 6th 2021 were deleted by the Woke BBC, and the trailing ends of the tape spliced together to make it appear as if he had said an inflammatory sentence he never said.
Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.
The Telegraph has a story – with accompanying videos – that ought to finish several careers at the BBC: “Exclusive: BBC ‘doctored’ Trump speech, internal report reveals”.
What Trump actually said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And 54 minutes later:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
What the spliced-together BBC version made it look like Trump said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And immediately afterwards:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
In case your screen is not showing all the lines through most of the second version, the falsely edited BBC version made it look like Trump said,
“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
It seems like only yesterday that I posted this in 2021 :“The background and motive of yesterday’s attacks were unclear”.
And here we are again. It has been hours since the mass stabbing on a train travelling from Doncaster to Kings Cross. There were many witnesses. Two men have been arrested. No other suspects are sought. I find it hard to believe that the background and motive of yesterday’s attacks really do remain unclear to the police, the government, or the press. But they certainly have not been made clear to the public.
The Home Secretary has urged the public to “avoid comment and speculation at this early stage”. There are times when this is good advice. This is not one of them. “Nature abhors a vacuum” is never more true when the vacuum is one of information about a crime that makes millions think, “That could be me”. Did you learn nothing from Southport? The only thing that will dissipate the hurricane of speculation is to replace it with facts. It is not as if your strategy of politically correct evasiveness is working. It hasn’t worked for years.
Update: one of the arrested men was innocent and has been released. The only suspect for this crime has now been named as Anthony Williams, aged 32. This development makes the slowness of the police to release any details worse, not better. Williams is black. Those who were inclined to believe that the authorities were trying to avoid saying that the two suspects were Muslim are not going to say, “Oh, how foolish I was” when it turns out the only suspect is black. Furthermore official tardiness meant that an innocent man was under a cloud for long after it should have been clear that he was innocent. What were they playing at?
“Why is it so hard for the authorities to win public trust? Maybe because they keep lying to us”, Gaby Hinsliff writes in the Guardian:
If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat.
A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It’s a rightwing agitator’s dream. “The real disinformation,” wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, “is the regime media.” Yes, that Dominic Cummings.
She’s not wrong about dishonesty and censorship from the authorities causing people to rightly distrust them, but she cannot see the elephant in the room because she is looking at the room from inside the elephant.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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