Hello and welcome to the thirtieth (!) issue of the Bright Morning newsletter. This week, our stories are about the phenomenon on social media whereby minority perspectives are presented as mainstream wisdom. This is something that we touched upon last week when the idea of “canceling” Canada Day was presented as common sense. As we will see here, this phenomenon extends across all subjects. Whether it is COVID or political revolutions, social media companies bait viewers with a trending topic and then switch the narrative to present the opposite of truth.
| COVID-19
Vaccine passports and fascism: two interlocked, minority perspectives
Readers of this newsletter will know how much we oppose the concept of vaccine passports. The idea that an individual should be coerced into displaying his or her medical information in order to access a service is nothing short of authoritarian fascism. It demands compliance and the subjugation of the individual.
As well, the logical end point of vaccine passports is segregation. This is because there will always be a substantial minority of individuals who choose to refuse medical intervention - whether it is for personal, medical, or religious reasons - and if these individuals are barred from participating in basic quality of life activities (such as going to a restaurant, gym, or cinema), it sets the foundation for a two-tiered society. Since we live in what is supposed to be a liberal democracy, this is wrong. End of story.
There are a whole host of other issues with vaccine passports, (many of which we described back in April) but for now, we will just state that vaccine passports are no longer just a slow creep towards totalitarianism - they are an avalanche. This is because the corporate and legacy media outlets have been working overtime to suggest that we would all be “safer” if our lives were reduced to a series of checkpoints in which we submit our private medical information to nameless, faceless bureaucrats whom we do not know or trust.
Take, for example, the manufactured controversy surrounding GoodLife Fitness in Canada. This past week, the fitness chain announced on Twitter that it is “not planning to require associates or members to be vaccinated to enter our locations. For privacy reasons, GoodLife will not disclose information regarding any individual associate’s vaccination status.” This was a good move from GoodLife - one that respects human rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Unfortunately, a very loud minority of activists disagreed with this stance and stated that they would be cancelling their memberships. Let’s be real here - these people probably didn't even have gym memberships. They saw an opportunity to display faux-virtue online and jumped on it. Nevertheless, CBC called the responses an “uproar.” But was it? We know that Twitter skews towards outrage. The platform is designed to spotlight the most deranged perspectives and present them as if they are mainstream. This is why the concept of “canceling” Canada Day was presented as normal, even though it was nothing more than the amplified barks of a few disillusioned journalists. So, is there any reason to believe it would be different here?
Furthermore, why put GoodLife in the spotlight? CBC is acting as if GoodLife is the only business not requiring proof of vaccination to enter its facilities, but its policies are the same as 99.99% of businesses in Ontario. To date, there are only six businesses in Ontario that require proof of vaccination, and since Premier Ford announced that he will not be mandating vaccine passports, we do not expect this number to meaningfully increase. Thus, vaccine passports, like support for fascism itself, is an extreme minority perspective. It is just the latest issue to gain some traction on social media and mislead people into believing it is an acceptable idea.
It isn’t.
| CULTURE
Revolting against communism? Not on Twitter’s watch
Last week, a massive protest in Cuba took place against the country’s communist dictatorship that has been in place for over 60 years. Like all communist societies, Cuba is a poor nation that frequently experiences shortages in food, basic medical necessities, and electricity. So, after having enough of these substandard living conditions, Cubans took to the streets and began demanding their freedom. Protesters could be seen waving American flags (a symbol of the desire for freedom) and chanting “Libertad.”
Again, if someone relied on the Twitter trending page and White House Press Secretary meetings for his information, he would be misled into believing that Cubans were protesting against COVID. One of the most outrageous tweets from the State Department said that “peaceful protests are growing in #Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages.” No mention of the efforts against communism, nor the demand for liberty. The “trending” page on Twitter also echoed this lie, but it was not long until the true nature of the protests were revealed to the rest of the world.
At this point, some of the most unpleasant activist groups took it upon themselves to attempt to mislead the public. The most notable example was the Black Lives Matter organization who, instead of admitting that the protests were against communism, lied and stated that the US was “undermining Cubans’ right to choose their own government.” What BLM forgot to mention was that the real reason Cubans’ cannot choose their own government is because there has not been an election since 1962. In case it was not obvious before that BLM is nothing more than a front for communism, then it certainly is now. This is an organization who claims to be against injustice, but voices their support for murderous dictators and police states. Apparently, black lives do not matter to Black Lives Matter.
If readers want to listen to what black Cubans actually think about communism and the state of their nation, instead of listening to what wealthy race hucksters and charlatans want them to think, then we recommend this article from Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez. We do not agree with everything written in it, but it paints a far more nuanced picture than BLM could ever hope to achieve.
Although Twitter attempted to present the perspectives of far-left ideologues as mainstream, the truth behind the protests at least broke out. In a televised address, Joe Biden called Cuba a “failed state” and condemned communism as an unsustainable ideology. This was against the wishes of the more radical base of the Democratic Party - such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who uttered the same falsehoods as BLM - but it was a move in the right direction. It is encouraging to see that truth can still prevail, even against the most aggressive attempts to suppress it.
Like vaccine passports, the portrayal of the Cuban protests on social media demonstrates that there is a concerted effort from social media companies to alter the truth. This is why online discourse is so deranging and dementing. By presenting the most fringe perspectives as mainstream, reasonable people are being gaslit to believe that they are of a radical minority. This sort of bait and switch is not good because it prevents real conversations from taking place at a time when they are needed most. But so long as Twitter remains the primary platform for public conversation, we are going to continue seeing this distortion of reality. As Douglas Murray recently wrote, “on [Twitter] a very few shrill voices can be so magnified that people mistake that sound for the country as a whole. And so, 15 years after its launch, Twitter has become not just a megaphoning platform, but a distorting one, and the distortion continues to have a toxic impact on real life.”
What is our solution? Log off and do not log back in. You will feel better and start to see the world for what it is, rather than for what activists are misleading us to believe it is.
Bait and Switch