Jim Breuer, one of the few non-captured comedians of the 20…

for me it was BC. Before Covid.

I guess the very first cracks were RussiaGate... which basically was Before Trump

Yeah RussiaGate was a wake-up call for sure. For me 2008 was the wake-up moment, when I started looking behind the curtain. Sadly, it was after I’d already, reluctantly, vaccinated my children. My own rheumatologist told me back in my teens that the Rubella vaccine was the cause of my rheumatoid arthritis, but it took another 20 or so years before I truly connected the dots. I think the invention of YouTube was a big turning point, when real people started putting their reputation on the line to bring hidden info to light. It was YouTube that brought me videos of bitcoin as early as 2010/11 so, for all its failings, it has been a real catalyst for change in my life, or at the very least has widened the Overton window.

Yea. 2008 I probably still got all my news from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show lol. During RussiaGate I was basically on Twitter full time, and could see the vast gulf between what was actually happening and MSM reporting

Twitter of course is not perfect, but if you are good at curating sources you can find the [[primary sources]] and make up your own mind

Yes, for sure. And then watching everyone who was telling the truth get deplatformed during Covid only lent support to their position in my mind. If you need to shut someone up, it shows you’re afraid of them, which confers some amount of credibility to their position. I think for us in Europe the formation of the EU was a distant alarm bell, the 911 sowed doubt for many, then 2008 was like a ringing alarm, and if you missed all that Covid was full-on sirens wailing! My husband, is somehow, still fully asleep through all this, which I’ll never understand, but have to accept.

Yea, censorship = lying

It’s odd to think that all this time we’ve been fighting different forms of top down control wearing different masks - the most recent one being climate ‘the science’ and ‘social justice’. They just change the names to suit the zeitgeist but keep pushing the same agendas all the way through. So much of it has its origins in the worst aspects of Communism, mindlessly deferring to authority as in the Milgram experiments, snitching on neighbours, family and friends, central planning, ‘just following orders’, ‘for the greater good’, and so-called ‘equality of outcomes’ and ‘learned helplessness’. I just hope they don’t use AI as the new mask to bring in UBI, that’s up next I think. Perhaps it was studying sociology at A-Level and Philosophy at degree level (and the philosophy of politics in particular) that allows me to see it, where my husband does not. It’s hard to know for sure.