TRUTH DENIALISM IN THE THESIS OF AN AUT GRADUATE

Counterspin Media: Far-Right Extremism and the Undermining of Public Sphere and Public Health Principles

There is not much money to be made in showing the public the truth concerning things some would rather not know about. However, the money sloshes round on the other side. Cindy has been mobilized by the United Nations to take down all voices that do not agree with the UN and World Economic Forum narrative. The Disinformation Project is chewing through vast piles of tax-payer money. And the universities have been infiltrated – in some fields exclusively – by greens and communists. That is where the money is today, and there are many young hopefuls preparing themselves to get a piece of the pie.

One such hopeful may fancy herself to be a future member of the Disinformation Project. Late last year Claire Patolo submitted her thesis to AUT – preparation, she hopes, for bigger things to come – for the degree of Master of Communication Studies. The thesis is titled Counterspin Media and COVID-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand: Far-Right Extremism and the Undermining of Public Sphere and Public Health Principles. True to its title, it is largely about Counterspin Media and, in particular, Kelvyn Alp and Hannah Spierer.

It is a long time since I was associated with Academia, but when a Masters thesis is largely about one’s own organization, someone from that organization has to volunteer to read it. I volunteered and have spent a couple of days with this thesis.

What did I learn? Oh dear– one hopes that universities and technical colleges are places for genuine enquiry. In this case, anything further from an authentic striving for truth cannot be imagined! Reading all 102 pages of this thesis was to experience no free interchange in a search for true ideas but to be thrown into a sclerotic headlock of cast-iron opinions masquerading as intellectual endeavour.

It is a disturbing trend in Academia today that, scared of the future, students tend to become straight-jacketed into a very narrow sphere of orthodoxy. In this thesis, no venture beyond the orthodox can be tolerated, and no open-minded enquiry is attempted. Armed with her copy of Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa by Cunningham, La Rooij and Spoonley (published by Otago University Press) and clutching it to her torso with all the fervour of a Christian fundamentalist walking through the red-light district in Babylon, our heroine-author has written a study that will surely earn her high accolades of praise among those she wishes to impress. A high future must be ahead of her. Perhaps Cindy will make her her personal secretary.

It is tempting only to mock, as the work is such a delicious example of projecting onto others all the hidden faults within oneself. But I must look further than this and consider what kind of thought is at work here. If we can understand it, we – or our descendents to come – can take steps to transcend it. New Zealand, in my humble opinion, would be destined for a very terrible future if the kind of total agreement with government dogmas expressed in this thesis remains typical of what goes on in our places of higher learning.

Patolo’s paper gives us the orthodox view of everything connected with covid-19, mandates, lockdowns, government propaganda and the fake vaxxine. It is New Zealand history fully scripted according to the country’s “single source of truth”. In its initial portrayal of Counterspin as a “far-right, extremist organization” peddling conspiracy theories, no attempt is made to define the terms “far-right” or “extremist” or to look into the facts and evidence around what Counterspin is saying.

This is a little like Shakespeare’s character Polonius, who says in the second act of Hamlet, “To define true madness, what is it but to be nothing else but mad?” Perhaps because she knows that she can’t, Patolo makes no attempt to critically establish the facts revealed by the New Zealand covid experience that go against the government narrative. She simply calls Counterspin Media, in the first time that it is mentioned, “one of the largest platforms for conspiracy theories and far-right ideology in Aotearoa New Zealand”.

What is “far right”? What is a “conspiracy theory”? No definition is attempted, and these terms remain labels used as cudgels to beat the author’s opinions into the heads of her readers. The word “fascist” is defined but only according to a recent definition that fits the author’s need to say that this is what Counterspin is, simply because she says so. There is no attempt at a more complex definition that goes into the unity of corporation and state. If there was, she would have to acknowledge that, in focusing on the overreach of state power, Counterspin is anything but fascist. One hears in the background the cheers of her mentors from the Disinformation Project, but they are desperate cheers from desperate people, trying desperately to defend the indefensible.

Did the government narrative turn out to be totally truthful? Hell no! – armed with a multitude of scientific studies on topics such as the safety and efficacy of the vaxxines, the value of mask-wearing and lockdowns, the reliability of PCR tests and the truth about alternative cures such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, few people would be able to look you in the eye and say our single source of truth was indeed dedicated to nothing but selflessly telling the truth in order to keep the people of New Zealand safe. Having a lot more proof than we had a few years ago, it is pretty easy to state categorically that the greatest purveyor of untruth and disinformation in the time of covid was the New Zealand government. Those you called then “conspiracy theorists” were actually telling the truth while the Disinformation Project, the New Zealand government, the UN and WHO and experts of all kinds were lying to us.

Let us call people like Claire Patolo and the army of tutors and mentors who gave her inspiration and helped her write her thesis, “truth denialists.” It’s time to make that label as common as “conspiracy theorist” is about us. To have been called a “conspiracy theorist” in the early 2020’s is a badge of honour – it means someone who had a greater faculty for perceiving truth than those who, at the time, simply consumed others’ propaganda and opinions. To maintain false truths that do not stand up at all to recent research is to be a truth denialist or an anti-truther. It would be good if these two terms could become a new label that hangs around such people like a bad smell until they go away.

For Patolo’s thesis pays no attention at all to the most important striving of those at Counterspin Media, which is their attempt to blaze a path through the multitude of lies and half-truths and uncover what is true. We are not always right, but we know that in most cases the government is wrong, and we are going to find out what is right. Patolo and the truth denialists have no ability to perceive this striving. They can only see everything in terms of a wish to deceive others, as if Alp and Spierer and their cronies malevolently craft the most wicked theories they can, like witches stirring up a magic potion, with the aim of it all being to draw others astray. She writes of them that during covid they were “manipulating people’s uncertainty and fear about the virus as a recruitment tool.” You can sense Cindy, Kate Hannah and the rest of the truth denialists nodding their heads appreciatively, but this has nothing to do with what actually motivates Counterspin researchers to get out of bed every morning and get to work. We follow the example of Q to cure the brainwashing in people from years of propaganda and thought-manipulation so that they find, more and more, their own true selves and ideas that they can hold authentically amidst the confusing realm of lies and misinformation.

The academic style that Patolo uses means that she never has to say anything out of her own authentic individuality. Everything comes from hearsay. Was she at the Wellington Occupation herself? She does not say. Does she have anyone in her whanau or circle of friends who suffered from covid or from the effects of the jab? If she does, that is not relevant. Would she do any actual interview with Hannah Spierer or Kelvyn Alp to augment what she has read? No, that would be humanising them and she wants to keep to what she has read in academic papers and on the media. Rather than using first-hand experience, she prefers to regurgitate facts established by other academics who think like her and have gone before her. Every paragraph or so, and often more frequently than that, some expert is mentioned (Alp, 2021) as if the mention of a name makes all proof unnecessary (Thomas S., 2023). This style allows the writer to take no real position herself – she does not have to justify her assertions through her own experiences so that the thesis reads as if it could have been written by A.I. (Costello, 2023). That’s a sample of the academic style – Patolo hides behind her experts and is merely a humble follower of those who have laid down the rules before her (Spierer, 2020) – a person to be praised by fellow academics who have the same truth-denialist biases as her but whom truthers might call a “useful idiot.” (Mike Bee, 2024).

There are good points in her work and things we can learn from. When she looks at the language used and zeroes in on key-words, this gives some insights. Every person and every spiritual or political movement has a doppelgänger, and those of us connected with Counterspin do easily fall into the habit of using our own jargon and perhaps generating resistance from people who are not yet ready for the full truth – those whom the VFF contingent would call the “wobbly middle”.

However Patolo is never rigorous in her own assertions. She says of the “Great Reset initiative” that it is “an effort to reduce global inequality and advance environmental initiatives in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic,” which we mistakenly call “a tool being used by the elites to reorganise society and institute a global, totalitarian regime,” whereas even a tiny bit of research into Klaus Schwab’s own speeches could show her that the Great Reset was very consciously employed by the World Economic Foundation to turn society in a new direction with the abolition of personal property and the surrender of individual sovereignty – goals that have been crucial to the goals of the New World Order for decades. Schwab makes no secret of this. Truth denialists must either be stupid or in league with the people who are trying to turn the world upside down in this way. (I think it could be a mixture of both.)

Patolo also links Counterspin with Q (who, of course, as is the habit of those who don’t know him, she calls QAnon) but does no research into what Q ever said that could have given truthers inspiration. We learn nothing more about him (or them) than that he is bad and should be shunned by respectable people. This we could have learned from the first ten minutes of the Kim Hill interview that first told Kiwis to the false facts that the government wanted them to obey. The Great Awakening as a worldwide phenomenon is never mentioned.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture. The obvious motivation for such work is that the writer wants to ingratiate herself into the anti-truth community and perhaps pick up employment there. However there is also a current of fear running through Patolo’s writing. JFK welcomed diversity when he spoke the famous words:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

However, Patolo and the truth denialists are scared of views other than their own and want them suppressed. Spierer and Alp are guilty of “undermining the public sphere” and going against proper health principles. Truth denialists want everyone to be controlled – the same medications, the same ideas, the same need to submit to anything that comes from on high. That many people could make decisions about their own health for themselves frightens them. They fear it will lead to anarchy, and anarchy is dangerous – much better to have strong leaders telling everyone what they ought to do.

The thesis finishes in a most naively simple way. Patolo asks what is the remedy for the misinformation and disinformation maliciously forced upon a gullible population and declares that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” This is pure Q – “dark to light” – the exposure of the misdeeds of the satanic élite so that their crimes can no longer remain concealed by darkness. Q gave this as a goal of truthers before the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and others had come to light, but in a few short years, knowledge of what Q said needed to be exposed has become the common knowledge of many, and countless Americans, for example, know for a fact that Bill Clinton made 26 trips to Epstein’s “Pedo Island”. Patolo only meant that more such opinions such as hers should be read – Counterspin itself should be suppressed and no one should know of it. Counterspin, on the other hand, welcomes all discussion and debate. We don’t want to suppress the truth deniers but let them be part of the great information commons and to shine our light on their claims so that people can make up their own minds about what is true and what is not.

I’m sorry, but I give Claire Patolo an ‘F’ for her thesis. It is all about conspiracy theory and what she believes is best for our society, but it does not stand up to the truths of experience. Truth denialists and anti-truthers will love it, but it is nothing but a desperate attempt to remain relevant against the moving currents of history. It is full of lies.

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