The fact that a UK diplomat tried to recruit me – a freelance journalist far from the center of power – as an informant hints at how common it is for mainstream journalists to be approached by the intelligence agencies.

The left has sunk a long way since the Iraq war. The renowned public intellectual Slavoj Zizek is the latest recruit to the war hawk camp over Ukraine.

The cases of Paul Mason and Carole Cadwalladr reveal how readily celebrated media figures are recruited to the intelligence services’ covert information war against other journalists.

Because we in the West are the strongest tribe on the planet, we are also the most deluded, the most propagandized, and the most dangerous.

Billionaires buy up media outlets precisely because a lie is more likely to fly than the truth – including the lie that they are invaluable.

Liberals are increasingly adopting an old Soviet tactic: of painting those who disagree with them as suffering from mental illness. As the west lurches from crisis to crisis, this trend is only going to intensify.

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.