The man on the stage

>Yes. I possibly quite agree with you. I’m all those things and have said all those things and I’ve not got things right and I’m wrong and foolish in pretty much everything and you are extremely brilliant and right about everything and very very clever in your analysis.
>I’m simply puerile and simplistic. I’m also apparently the sole reason for all bad reviews of Off-Guardian which I certainly wouldn’t want to be. They are perfectly free not to publish me.
I’ve no doubt that, even after this pitiable tirade of feminine “it’s-all-about-me”-ness, OffGuardian will continue to publish you. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve given up on this site, of which I was an avid reader during the COVID hoax. If it’s any comfort to you, you are by far one of the lesser reasons why I’ve given up on it. The unrepentant militant leftists who are given a platform here to bang on endlessly about “the Zionist entity” and so on are a far bigger one.
But as I’ve indicated, I’ve had enough experience by now in the “dialectical” way of things to understand that a mouth-frothing Trotskyist demanding the armed reconquest of Palestine “from the river to the sea” and a nice old woman “living in the Canadian wilderness” urging that “everyone be kinder to one another” come to pretty much the same thing in the end.
The main point I’m making here, in case you haven’t grasped it, is that the upshot, in the end, of all your talk about “working for the good” and “not letting yourself turn ugly” is the same cold, inhuman indifference to the shattered bloody bodies that not just might have been but actually were left laying on the ground at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania as the “river to the sea” people show to the bodies left shattered and bloody on the Israel-Gaza border.
I had hope for OffGuardian three or four years ago because it was one of the very few sites that took an absolutely hard and uncompromising line on the unprecedented political crime of the COVID hoax, brooking no talk of “the virus”‘s being “an exaggeration”, or “the seizing of an opportunity” by the rich and powerful and insisting on calling it what it was: a complete and utter fabrication, from beginning to end, a pure political power-play that ninety-nine per cent of the world fell for.
Something good could have come of that radical scepticism that OffGuardian pioneered in 2020-22. Sadly, the problem seems to be that you can take the commentator off the Guardian but you can’t take all the Guardian-reader out of people who, for years, were regular comment-writers on that globalist-liberal hate sheet. The group of regular contributors that has formed here at OffGuardian – you included, but as I say you are far from being the worst in this regard – now practice a scepticism which is just a thin veil draped over a great mass of moral and political dogmatism that they would as little think of doubting or examining critically as a Red Guard would have thought of critically examining the Thoughts of Chairman Mao. The power of critical thinking that all of you seemed to be developing in 2020-22 turned out just to be a way of bolstering the progressive-leftist shibboleths that led you to The Guardian in the first place even more strongly than they’d been bolstered in your mind before:
“Whole families gleefully tortured and murdered in their homes on October 7th? No, I’ve always been a “well-meaning person” and a progressive – which means that I know that Palestinian Arabs are good, kind, suffering people demonized by Islamophobia, so this must be some media psy-op. You’re not seriously expecting me to believe something I heard from the BBC?”
“Little babbies crying in the ruins of their homes in Gaza? Why is the world not doing something? How can anyone even question this glaring reality? Didn’t everyone see it all with their own eyes on Al Jazeera?”
I’m afraid the same goes for your stance on “believing things you are told about people getting shot that distract you from thinking about other things”, Ms Shawcross. I’d be much more willing to give this stance of yours a hearing if I saw you – or anyone at OffGuardian – apply it across the board. Can anyone direct me to a single article, or part of an article, in OffGuardian which refers to “photos and videos which might easily have been fabricated” of young black men being shot by police in the US and “emotions being exaggerated” around such an event? Of course not. That blacks live lives today in the US not essentially different from those they lived there in 1900 or 1800, that civil rights were never achieved and that we need a “permanent revolution” to move toward achieving them – these are absurd and obvious “progressive left” lies that the “awoken sceptics” who have gathered in and around OffGuardian will never apply any scepticism or “awoken-ness” to, since “birds of a feather flock together” and the people who gathered here, and who gathered you to them, were people much of a kind.
Donald Trump being shot, on the other hand, is something you are more than welcome, here, to throw the “sceptical” kitchen sink at, just as every hate-oozing, blue-haired, septum-pierced “progressive” on TikTok is throwing the sceptical kitchen sink at it right now.
And sorry, but I am sceptical myself about whether, although you express yourself in a language of love and kindness and the blue-haired progressive expresses themselves in a language of “fuck that racist pussy-grabbing pig! he was never shot at all but I dearly wish he had been and we’d seen his brains splattered all over his racist supporters’ faces”, you really, at bottom, feel any differently about Trump than they do.

Maybe even more to the point, there is much to suggest, as usual, that it was not an authentic event, which, combined with the tsunami of evidence and knowledge about the countless inaccurate or fraudulent narratives about major world events whether recent and distant – is it ALL of them? – should at least make the position of hard skepticism the default one.

There just isn’t any reason, no precedent at all for giving that benefit of the doubt, no basis to adjudge that, this time, the tale is true.