The corporate media is not our friend. Its coverage of the pandemic is not there to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more, and monetize that distress.

A Boy Called Christmas left me even more certain I should never have colluded in the deception called Father Christmas. But it also emphasised how difficult it is to avoid capitalism’s sophisticated propaganda machine.

The left’s arrogance and censoriousness during the pandemic sends a message that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.

In a time of tribalism, the left’s duty is to speak out loudly for solidarity. We need to remember that we are no less exposed to propaganda than the other tribe.

Through his clownish incompetence, Boris Johnson is threatening to expose the system’s corruption by making it even more corrupt – so corrupt, in fact, that its corruption can no longer be concealed from the public.

Calling for the unvaccinated to be isolated makes for an easy and emotionally satisfying soundbite. If Tucker Carlson or Trump said it, we’d understand it as unhelpful, divisive rhetoric. It doesn’t stop being that just because Chomsky’s the one saying it.

After Bristol University’s sacking of David Miller, the Israel lobby – led by the Jewish Chronicle – is turning its guns on a far wider circle of academics, reviving the playbook used to undermine former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Frances Haugen is not really a Facebook ‘whistleblower’. Because whistleblowers pay a heavy price for standing up for truth, for humanity, for life. She is simply shoring up one elite path of several to more corruption, more deceit, more suffering, more death.

The reality of Julian Assange’s years of persecution is far worse than even the picture painted by a new investigation of a thuggish, power-mad CIA bent on vengeance for his role in exposing its crimes.

There have been concerns in the medical world about ‘leaky’ vaccines, like the Covid ones, for years. So why are experts who are coming forward to raise concerns either being silenced or suffering character assassination by the media?

Faced with the pandemic, we increasingly turn on each other, we prioritise ourselves over the foreigner, we set parent against child, we pit the vaccinated against the unvaccinated – all in the name of a bogus humanitarianism and solidarity.

A few years hence, the woman whose gown said “Tax the rich” will be all the more credible, and useful to the elite, when she subtly changes tune and demands it is time to “Stop the attacks on the rich”.

In the rancour over child vaccinations, we have been given a fleeting peek behind the curtain of official medical debate to see the uncertainty that has been actively concealed from us. “The science” is not quite as solid as it seems.

The press regulator cannot take meaningful action against the Jewish Chronicle because to do so would pull the rug from under the antisemitism narrative that destroyed Corbyn and is now being used by Starmer to purge Labour of the remnants of the left.

If the super rich are pondering where to build their bunkers or which bits of space to colonise to escape the coming climate collapse, we are being conditioned in a similarly deranged, if cut-price, way. New studies are assessing the countries best placed to ride out the catastrophe.

The supreme court’s refusal to hear Craig Murray’s appeal against his unprecedented conviction for ‘jigsaw identification’ means the British state is now effectively credentialising journalists. Only corporate journalists will be safe from state retribution.