"On the BBC, they have been having reports about how social media should be "regulated" in order for people to receive the truth. It's like Orwell's Big Brother with the "Ministry of Truth" supplying the truth that Clinton is great and Trump is a racist."
Sadly the left is becoming more authoritarian by the day and as their power diminishes I suspect we'll see some truly draconian uses of their remaining power in the coming years.
The massive weighting of left leaning thinkers in the media and academia is purely a result of this authoritarianism. If these institutions were a true meritocracy then we'd see equal numbers from across the spectrum of course. Political correctness and personal vilification however have purged conflicting views in a self defeating coup. The long march through the institutions is well documented though it has merely produced a self reinforcing echo chamber which only true disciples still listen to. Sick of being preached to by correspondents more interested in signalling their own virtue than reporting news or valuing differing opinions the mainstream media is following the dead tree press towards extinction. With more and more of the left leaning press running at a loss it is only a matter of time.
And with it their ideology which espouses open borders, supra national bodies and restrictions upon personal freedoms and speech is also dying. Trump's victory, allied to brexit, proved that the zeitgeist is moving at a rate of knots back to the nation state as it's bedrock. In the same way that communism tried to ferment revolutions worldwide the more modern communists merely became proponents for the institutions such as the EU, action on climate change and the like.
Unfortunately by weakening the sovereign powers of the state they left a vacuum of power which was almost entirely taken up by the corporations. At first this was welcomed as corporations too benefit from open borders however with the bank bailouts we saw the nation state being held to ransom by the corporations, rather than enriching the lives of the average Joe through increased prosperity we saw austerity while those guilty of, at the least mismanagement, got off scot free. All with the collusion of the media and academia of course.
The ultimate example of this power was their negotiating trade deals in secret. Not national elected governments but corporate lawyers designing the TTIP etc behind closed doors purely for the benefit of themselves rather than the people.
Trump's victory signalled an end to the power of the left to discredit and vilify an opponent merely by yelling racist, sexist, bigot or denier at them. It also signalled a willingness to roll back the influence of the corporations and reassert the nation state and national interest. With it will die political correctness and the authoritarian desire to prevent the common man from complaining. This was twofold. First imprint a reluctance to complain about immigration, in particular, for fear of being denounced as a racist and secondly to enable those same denunciations.
So with the left reeling in crisis and rapidly losing their grip where do they head? Well the signs aren't very appealing. After a period of denouncing half a nation as racist they appear to have realised how utterly daft they sound. So now the groupthink settles, in disbelief and denial, upon fake news.
That 98% of the fake news was aired by the mainstream media goes unnoticed. One US network even changed the weather to comply with the democrat line that Hillary had fainted due to abnormal heat at the 911 memorial!
They are not however talking about silly stories on social media which even the most gullible could spot a mile off - frankly any such story is debunked very rapidly in the comments anyway.
No what they are talking about with fake news, the news that probably turned the election, is wikileaks.
They don't explicitly mentioned wikileaks by name or else it's ten year history of never releasing a fake would shame the story, but it's clear where their sights are aimed. Namely at whistleblowers, at freedom of speech and even at the internet itself.
A decade ago if you'd espoused the idea that the banks picked politicians and the media colluded with them you would have been labelled a conspiracy theorist, made fun of and dismissed. You would also have been right.
Hence the EU parliament voted the other day to enact censorship upon social media and Russian outlets such as RT. This again shows the line of thinking across the Atlantic where the democrats blamed Russian hackers for forging the wikileaks emails. That those same emails are authenticated by googles own encryption algorithms, and that google's executives colluded with Hillary's campaign, is therefore deeply amusing.
It's equally amusing to see the line of attack taken up by the establishment here in seeking to portray the brexit campaign as having been won by fake news or lies ( compared to the lies put out by the government itself, the treasury, bank of England, IMF, etc etc) and even seeing the EU parliament complaining at the coverage those in favour of brexit got. The snowflakes really are having a tough time of it.
Their response though is deeply unamusing, in typical authoritarian style they seek to control and prevent free speech by imposing restrictions on social media. If the people no longer listen to the discredited establishment mouthpieces then they have to stop people from talking to each other.
It'll be interesting to see how far they go with this, and indeed whether it is already happening. A like and follow for nopenothope, the blog which exposed the shockingly numerous crimes of the liblabcon paid politicians, seems to have disappeared from my facebook page for instance even though activity stopped on it some time ago.
One wonders whether similar blogs in Europe which, sick of the extent of particularly sexual crimes committed by immigrants going unreported in the national press, document and map them from local newspapers in similar vein will survive with several important elections coming up.
Still with 8 years of Trump, Brexit just around the corner and illiberal cupcakes crying into their cornflakes as they see the news each morning the future does look much brighter. Watching the media presenters squirm as their dictat crumbles is wonderful. Politics has never been so entertaining, even if it is unintentionally so.
Do you still tune in to hear the opinions expressed or merely to see their discomfort?
Question is just how hard will their authoritarian masters crack down on free speech and what will they do once they've realised that screaming bigot or similar in self ironic unanimity no longer passes for debate?
Maybe the 95% of people who merely lurk would be more likely to join in a discussion, one can hope.