Let's remember where all this came from.
The media built Boris Johnson: he is its Frankenstien's monster, sewn together from laughter and lies.
It built Nigel Farage.
It built Jacob Rees-Mogg.
And the other killer clowns tearing this country apart.
Then it gave these clowns a massive platform, the platform it reserves for the most odious, entitled and feckless people to be found in this nation.
Make us laugh, make us cry, but above all make a noise.
Because that's ratings. And ratings is power.
To hell with the consequences
You think I'm talking about the billionaire press?
Yes I am.
But I'm also talking about the BBC, whose role is more insidious and more powerful, because, for some reason, people still trust it.
Impartiality? Balance?
Forget it. Give us outrage. Give us shock. Give us eyeballs.
The bigger the idiot, the greater the airtime.
And by this means, pursuing its own interests, the media changes the country. The intense focus on cacophonous buffoons gives them power they could only have dreamt of. Power no nation in its right mind would ever grant such people.
And now the same media are saying "Oh my God, look at that idiot! Can you believe what a jerk he is? Of course, we saw it all along."
It's all part of the same circus. They can't lose, as long as there's noise. The noise that drowns all thought.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

12 Jan
What’s unfolding here and now in the UK is almost unbelievable. But it's real. And it includes an attempt to criminalise an entire ethnic group. It's as if the 20th Century never happened. We urgently need to wake up to this.
My column.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
There’s an arrogant, unfounded belief that it couldn’t happen here: after all, we’re British. Tory MPs and Lords chunter about the “British sense of fair play”. OK, so where is it? When do they propose to exercise it?
The thing is, this swift and horrifying shift towards authoritarianism will continue even if Johnson is toppled this week. In fact, it might even accelerate, as the ascendant force in the parliamentary Conservative Party is the ERG/CRG extremists.
Read 6 tweets
8 Jan
The Cold War was a clash between two extreme ideologies: the extreme collectivism of the USSR and the extreme individualism of the USA and its satellites. Both belief systems were pointed towards collapse.
Thread/
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Western powers believed their system had been vindicated. It hadn’t. It’s just that the other one fell first.
The gathering chaos in the US, which some people believe is leading towards fascism, civil war or both, is driven by the impossible expectations raised by extreme individualism: everyone can have everything, regardless of the interests of anyone else.
Read 8 tweets
7 Jan
Johnson obtains £58k of favours while offering govt support for the donor's project. Then lies about it.
The regulator, Lord Geidt, decides that this blatant corruption did not break the ministerial code.
Lord Geidt was appointed by Boris Johnson.
We need a formal constitution.
I've long seen the government appointment system as fundamentally corrupt. It's as if a defendant in a criminal trial were allowed to choose the judge and jury from among his mates, decide which charges he should be tried on, and choose how the trial should be conducted.
It's the same with public inquiries: the govt decides who will preside over investigations into its own malfeasance, and what the scope should be.
Lord Geidt and other such figures are "independent" of the government in the sense that my right hand is independent of my left hand.
Read 5 tweets
4 Jan
To allow gamekeepers to kill crows and jackdaws to "protect" pheasants and partridges, the pheasants and partridges are classed as livestock. But you aren't allowed to shoot livestock for sport, so when pheasants and partridges are being shot, they're classed as wildlife.
Thread/
But you aren't allowed to round up wild animals at the end of the shooting season, and trap them in enclosures, so when the survivors are being rounded up, they become livestock again.
But if a pheasant flies into a car during the roundup, and causes a crash, you're not legally liable, because, for this purpose, it becomes wildlife again.
Read 11 tweets
3 Jan
Because this article came out on Christmas Eve, and seems unbelievable, the outrageous things it reveals have been a bit buried. So I’m giving it a new push. With the government’s help, key sectors of the economy are being handed over to organised crime. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
My guess is that there are now upwards of a million people in the UK working in organised criminal networks, with almost no fear of prosecution, facilitated by successive governments' wildly irresponsible deregulation. This is a fantastically hazardous situation.
As crime networks embed themselves in the economy and gain political power, we could slide towards the kind of Mafia state seen in the US during Prohibition, and in Russia, Italy, Mexico and Lebanon today. I can’t see any effective measures being deployed to stop this happening.
Read 7 tweets
2 Jan
This is a hazardous topic to discuss, as you immediately get accused of all sorts of things, but here goes.
I think the boundaries of free speech in this country are in the wrong place.
Thread/
Civil law in the UK goes to great lengths to protect people’s *reputations* against free speech, often with oppressive consequences, as the outcome of some recent defamation suits show. But the law does little to protect people’s *lives* against free speech.
There are exceptions: namely hate speech and the Cancer Act. But, to give one example, the outrageous lies told by certain influencers about vaccines kill people: those who believe them and therefore avoid vaccination have been more likely to die of Covid-19.
Read 7 tweets

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