The story of Palestine is a loud echo from our past. Maybe the loudest. If we cannot hear it, then we cannot learn – and we cannot take the first steps on the path towards real change.

Western media and politicians want us focusing exclusively on Russia’s role in Ukraine so we overlook our own responsibility for making sacrificial victims of the Ukrainian people.

Have our elites been carrying out similar “gain of function” research on us, treating us as the equivalent of a virus that may over time become more lethal to their narrow interests of maintaining wealth and power for themselves in a system facing imminent collapse?

The media outrage at Boris Johnson linking the Labour leader to Jimmy Savile is because his comments inadvertently exposed the dark underbelly of the British establishment.

So long as we collude in allowing Israel’s apologists to make a Whoopi mountain out of a Whoopi molehill, we play our small part in deflecting attention from a modern crime against humanity – and perpetuate Palestinian suffering.

You need to search out and maintain those connections before they are gone entirely. Because those alternative voices you prize now will wither and decay like autumn leaves if they have no audience.

In the Julian Assange and Craig Murray cases – and now Rachel Riley’s defamation win – the British judiciary is accumulating more weapons to crush political speech that challenges establishment narratives.

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.