Woke is not over and the media are the architects of this dystopian horror show

I grew up in a household where my mother, a teacher and my father, a civil servant, read The Irish Times cover to cover every single day except Sunday. When I got engaged, it was announced on the pages. My parents are now in their early seventies and part of the dwindling demographic still imbibing a monoculture of domestic news from the ‘Paper of Record’ and RTÉ. Growing up in Ireland there was a pervading sense of this title being one to be proud of, it was the heavyweight one, the one for serious people. It did not occur to me that a serious broadsheet would ever do anything other than, you know, report the facts.

Fast forward to 2004 and I am on the Postgraduate programme in Journalism at the University of Westminster. I am taught by the late, great Chris Horrie, who is head of faculty and, although I did not realise it then, the last of a dying breed. He was an old-school hack. He had been a feted investigative journalist. He taught us that journalism was the fourth pillar of any liberal democracy. It was as important as the executive branch or judiciary. This was because its role was to hold power to account on behalf of the electorate. To shine a light.

We were ordered to read all the papers from the red tops to the midmarket to the broadsheets and from left to right. We were trained to analyse how the same story was treated across the various titles depending on their agenda.

Hermaldehyde scandal

We studied how the Sunday Times broke the Hermaldehyde scandal. I was to learn that it took another decade before doctors in Ireland caught up and stopped prescribing the drug which causes horrific birth defects.

In 2014 I undertook original research for my MA Thesis on the manufacture of consent by comparing the reporting of the Troubles with the post-conflict era. This was to profoundly change my perception of journalism as a tool that is always positive or even neutral.

I hypothesised and proved that journalists will self-censor whether consciously or unconsciously due to their dependent relationship with Official Sources”

I interviewed 22 people; politicians, ex-combatants like Danny Morrison and the late Martin McGuiness, war reporters and writers including Max Hastings and Peter O Toole. I interviewed Simon Winchester, the only reporter on the ground on Bloody Sunday who wrote what his eyes saw; that the British Troops opened fire on unarmed civil rights marchers first. Every other journalist on the day simply reported the Official narrative which was the British Army spokesperson’s version of events.

I hypothesised and proved that journalists will self-censor whether consciously or unconsciously due to their dependent relationship with Official Sources which outside of war or military events, is always Government.

Non-reflexive

All media is non-reflexive and lacking in institutional memory. Unlike the military for example, there is no reflection and no manuals written up after each conflict. Yet a million lives were lost in an illegal war when they parroted the lie that Sadam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

In modern Ireland, due to our particular postcolonial history there is no left-to-right spectrum in the body politic nor in the media.

Lacking a robust theoretical framework, they are husks that have easily taken on the clothes of radical progressiveness without scrutiny”

The two parties that have run Ireland for a hundred years weren’t born from shades of communism or fascism; they were spawned over the argument on whether we should have accepted the ‘stepping stone’ of partition or kept fighting the Brits. Lacking a robust theoretical framework, they are husks that have easily taken on the clothes of radical progressiveness without scrutiny.

The last two decades have shown how we were particularly vulnerable to what I have termed the ‘Age of PyschOps’; trans, Covid, immigration and climate.

Gaslighting

It is gaslighting in the extreme to now act like The Irish Times weren’t instrumental in this.

Their publication of an op-ed by Michael O’Flaherty led to a handful of deputies switching from the safer medical model to full gender self-ID without a vote.

Catherine Day’s op-ed calling for reception centres for migrants all over Ireland prepared the ground for the EU Migration pact guillotined and passed by a tiny margin.

Day was the architect of the attempted removal of Article 41.2 from the Constitution as Chair of that Citizens Assemby.

Over the past six years, my think tank, the Countess, has sent over a hundred press releases to The Irish Times news desk. We have been covered six times. Coverage of the press conference by my Women’s Coalition on Immigration last November was essentially a hit piece. They omitted to include the research basis of our core demand; that is to make it mandatory to record ethnicity and country of origin on the Garda Pulse system which records every person charged with a criminal offence. In their coverage, they left out our thematic report into six member states who do disaggregate their crime figures. We found that non-national men were 3-4 times overrepresented in sexual offending. An Afghani man in Germany is seven times more often involved in gang rape than a German man. So not all men… Culture counts when it comes to immigration.

McRedmond gave examples of women losing their jobs for being gender critical or people voicing concerns about immigration being labelled racist”

Last week we learned via a column by Finn McRedmond who lives in London that Woke 1.0 was finally over. Not for the first time the gap between a description of reality and the experience of reality brought on a sort of cognitive dissonance migraine that anyone who is aware and awake will recognise.

McRedmond gave examples of women losing their jobs for being gender critical or people voicing concerns about immigration being labelled racist. But only five months ago my Women’s Coalition on Immigration was smeared as ‘fringe’ and my motivation as a weird pivot from anti-trans to anti-immigration. They were careful not to use any defamatory language like far-right or racist, naturally.

But viewing both trans and immigration through the lens of women’s rights and child protection is vital.

Pillars

When we lose these fundamental pillars and boundaries, mass psychosis can easily slip into the culture.

When the media do not fulfil their proper role, and instead drip feed the population pro-immigration or pro-trans propaganda served up with a heavy side helping of shame; the smearing of anyone who dissents as racist or transphobic, then they fail in their fundamental duty to the electorate. They are not doing journalism they are merely amplifying and preparing the ground for Government policy. It is not the fourth estate. It is paid-for Government PR.

Normalising the exploitation of the innate suckle reflex of a newborn to place that baby on a male nipple is the stuff of nightmares”

Institutions fall in line whether they are fully on board with the ideology or simply aware that they will no longer receive funding if they resist.

That is why a man who promotes ‘lactation for kinsters’ was booked as the keynote speaker at the annual conference of Lactation Consultants of Ireland. Normalising the exploitation of the innate suckle reflex of a newborn to place that baby on a male nipple is the stuff of nightmares and yet this is happening in Ireland today. Biological males who pretend to be women are using babies for their own sexual pleasure and this is promoted by the official body that governs the profession.

Breastfeeding

We have the lowest rates of breastfeeding in the world. Rates are stagnating. We provide little or no specialist support and as a result only 62% of babies receive breastmilk. And as ever in Ireland the hard work and the budget this entails is not given towards investigating and overcoming the structural constraints. Instead, vapid and dangerous virtue signalling drives policy.

If they had covered Surrogacy properly, we would not have a new statutory provision that allows any man of 21 and above to commission a baby from abroad, lawfully”

If the paper of record had done its job and allowed for an honest appraisal of the gender critical argument against trans then we would arguably not be in this dystopian horror show. If they had interrogated the fact that transvestites are straight males who get aroused by thinking of themselves as women then the safeguarding risk would have been obvious. Instead they have spent a decade pushing the line that gender identity is innate and somehow sacred rather than the truth that autogynaephilia is a paraphilia, a fetish.

Similarly, if they had covered Surrogacy properly, we would not have a new statutory provision that allows any man of 21 and above to commission a baby from abroad, lawfully.

We would not have hundreds of single males from the MENA region and Africa being placed in residential areas in blind disregard for the threat this presents to women and children.

Catastrophic

Woke or radical progressive policymaking has been catastrophic for Ireland. In the clamour to shed its perceived dark Catholic past the Establishment has willingly and cravenly rolled out these laws and norms. When people research the reality of these issues themselves, they are castigated. This keeps them in line. There is a particular heightened need to stick to what the herd is thinking in Ireland which is a hangover from Colonialism. This self-policing is unique to Ireland. When I started to discuss my gender critical views in London back in 2018 people reacted strongly but were curious and wanted to get into it.

In Ireland the reaction is either silence or extreme emotion.

This is not the mark of a fully developed public discourse.

The media have kept the people infantilised by pushing axiomatic slogans instead of real debate or any real exploration of difficult complex issues that are after all existential”

Almost daily I get emails to my law library address or private messages on LinkedIn telling me to keep going, they completely agree with my position but cannot speak openly for fear of the impact on status, friendship or their employment.

Many of us have paid a high price socially and professionally for calling out the harm of these policies. All the while the media have kept the people infantilised by pushing axiomatic slogans instead of real debate or any real exploration of difficult complex issues that are after all existential.

“Surrogacy is just another way to have a family”

“Trans rights are human rights”

“Immigration is good and necessary and sure didn’t the Irish go everywhere…..?”

These are all coated with toxic emotional manipulation. The message is clear; the respectable people have the right opinion. There is no civil respect for opposing views. This impoverishes the public square.

The Irish Times by publishing an op-ed by Finn McRedmond proclaiming that Woke is over was attempting to ride on the coat tails of the more developed media in the UK and the US that has actually done the work, evolved and adjusted the narrative. CNBC recently apologised to viewers for espousing views that did not reflect the majority views of ordinary people when it came to Covid, trans and immigration.

It is dishonest in the extreme to pretend woke is over when in Ireland, it is ramping up at speed. It is facetious to act as if it simply happened when the media, especially The Irish Times, were the chief cheerleaders. They are in fact the architects.