‘When vigorous prose could sweep away the intellectual wreckage of antiquity and simple experiments could reveal beautiful new truths about nature…’

I came across this gorgeous line while reading Armand Marie Leroni’s Mutants. They are speaking of the period in English history when Western Enlightenment began to peak and the era of scientific discovery entered its stride.

Science had wriggled free from its religious shackles and slithered away from the old political guard. In this Age, curiosity was power and those who could collect and decode emerging worlds attained respect and fame.

Explorers risked their lives on the African continent where the average European was lucky to survive a few months.

These explorers achieved a kind of Hollywood blockbuster status with each published journal. Many of these books sit on my shelf, untouched by so-called sensitivity editors who re-draft history so that events which never happened can be used as an excuse to cancel an entire generation.

Listen to how Alan Moorehead in The White Nile recalls David Livingstone’s quest for the source of the Nile:

Never can there have been a journey which was founded upon so many misassumptions as this one. It was a search for the source of a river in a region where it did not exist; it was an anti-slavery expedition that had no power whatever to put down slavery; it was the march of a man who believed that he alone, unarmed and unsupported, could pass through Africa, and that was almost impossible. But none of this made any difference. Through a series of paradoxes all comes right in the end; the march goes on – but only because the Arab slavers take care of the sick and lonely man in the wilderness. Slavery is dealt a blow from which it never recovers – not because Livingstone was able to raise a hand against it, but because he was the helpless witness of a massacre. Even the mystery of the Nile is resolved – not by Livingstone himself but because he inspired another man to go off in another direction.

It is a novel I recommend for its raw telling of history. When judging the past, it is important to read the words of those who lived it. As for our modern educators, I am sure they know they are lying to the next generation. One day, they will find these books, if they have not all been burned.

Who, I wonder, shall read the raw truth of our history if we are not permitted to speak?

During the enlightened period, there was no credentialed gatekeeping. A layman could wander the cliffs and collect fossils, building knowledge the same as a scientist. No one sat around tut-tutting about how many letters were dragged behind a person’s name as an unwanted chain rattling against progress.

Much of what was thought, said, written, and displayed in museums turned out to be incorrect or an exaggeration. And yet the sheer weight of Enlightened thought tore the secrets of the world apart and eventually found the many truths that built modernity.

Mistake, misinformation, and fantasy proved to be fertile ground for the trees of knowledge while the voices of the crowd acted as scythes, cutting away the weeds of policy and propaganda.

Today, we drag the statues down built in honour of this time. The politically correct erase the names of the world’s explorers and belittle their immense achievements. The museums have been emptied. The history books … rewritten.

Our culture of suffocating ‘fact-checking’ has robbed ideas of the time needed to expand, explore, and refine.

Were our ancestors to impose misinformation and disinformation laws onto the world of science, nothing would be discovered for every wrong step would be punished. No one can climb if they are killed for stumbling.

This is what awaits us if we allow politicians, Labor and the Coalition, to continue down this freeway of puritanical political protection.

I will not tolerate one more lie brandished in defence of social media censorship claiming that these laws are somehow about protecting children.

To those who try I say, look to the UK where the protection of children narrative has mutated into stopping illegal migrants from working. It is moved from one public fear to the next as a hermit crab crawls into a new shell. Anything to frighten an all-too trusting public into locking themselves into a cage for protection. You cannot wield a pitchfork through the bars, peasants…

It is evident, from what is included and excluded, that neither ‘safety’ nor ‘children’ are a genuine consideration. There are too many pieces of legislation that came before that wasted hundreds of pages lamenting the irritating freedoms that allowed Australians to question the government line on Covid, Climate Change, and the Voice. These documents, many of which were attached to Digital ID and previous online censorship bills (which passed into law), were quite happy to equate the questioning of Covid policy with domestic terrorism.

These censorial powers have always been about protecting weak, lazy, predatory, and flat-out inaccurate government policy from the rigour of debate.

Covid mandates, maintained for years, barely lasted two weeks after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, fired its Woke staff, and allowed the victims of government policy to tell their stories. Social media did what well-meaning media hosts could not.

Government had to let Covid go (although I note that there has been no attempt, by either major party, to withdraw excessive powers, apologise for the harms caused, or punish public servants and politicians who over-reached their station).

What government cannot let go of is Climate Change.

There are trillions of dollars, every year, being put at risk by social media’s open dissent against climate policy and Net Zero technology.

Taxpayers are picking up those pitchforks, and politicians across the Western world are urgently herding them into cages.

As the explorers went out into the wilderness, so too are millions of people who cannot be controlled by any of the institutions government enjoys holding power over. It is impossible for a politician to spin the lie that farmers love wind and solar when those farmers are posting pictures of their ruined properties and destroyed communities. While a newspaper can be leaned on to hold back photos of demolished rainforests, the average blogger with an iPhone cannot.

Eventually, the dark side of Net Zero will reach a saturation point where even the ‘greenest’ inner-city activist will see and read something that makes them doubt the narrative.

That is what online censorship is about. That is why it targets the platforms which embrace free speech, rather than platforms where children congregate.

Misinformation and disinformation laws have all the subtlety of the Spanish Inquisition.

Digital censorship is an attack on the collective intellectual mind.

It is an act designed to protect money at the expense of truth.

And to ensure that those politicians who helped construct a false narrative will never face difficult questions from a truly independent press.

We are not fooled, and neither are you.

Stop giving politicians the benefit of the doubt. They certainly haven’t earned it.

Finally, when we speak of sweeping aside the intellectual wreckage of antiquity, imagine the repair work required to rebuild a world of truth after this political flood has receded.

Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.