“After the Nazis were defeated, almost everyone in France became a member of the Resistance.”
So tweeted The Guardian’s George Monbiot on January 7th, the day after shocking footage of the US Capitol building being stormed by a pro-Trump mob made worldwide headlines.
We all know that January can be a tough month: post-Christmas blues, dark nights, depleted bank balances.
Spare a thought, then, for Toby Young and the group of right-wing, pseudo-intellectual shills he identifies as his “fellow lockdown sceptics…Allison Pearson, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Peter Hitchens and Lawrence Fox.”
Young and co. entered this challenging period trying to digest three almighty receipts: years of “libertarian” support for Donald Trump culminating in a deadly, anti-democratic assault on the US Capitol Building, Brexit posturing resulting in a trade deal as sweet as a lorryful of dead fish, and months of Covid-related scepticism coming back to bite them via 60,000 cases a day, a new variant and record UK death tallies.
We have previously documented the extraordinary campaign by Blairite elements of the Labour party and the corporate media to tar Jeremy Corbyn with the stigma of anti-Semitism (in spite of his lengthy record as an anti-racist campaigner including 50 occasions where he has stood with the Jewish community).
The double-standards employed to do so have been so shameless and Orwellian we feel compelled to document them.
In 2011 Julian Assange was presented with the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, awarded to figures “whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda.”