Hi folks, I am belatedly posting a recent podcast I did with Melissa from her ‘Real History’ podcast. She has started doing ‘shorts’ which are 15 minute discussions on a variety of topics in between her longer form interviews. As an aside, I highly recommend her recent podcast with David Hughes, a fellow dissident academic. Melissa asked me to reflect on the Brownstone Institute’s ‘New Resistance’ conference. She was interested in what the conference was about and my personal expeience.

You can listen to the shorts here and here.

Meanwhile, I went to the ASF second ‘Progress through Science and Freedom’ conference at RMIT, Melbourne over the weekend.

I was feeling off colour and so left earlier than I’d planned, missing the dinner. (I have since come down with a lurgy, alas). Nonetheless, I attended all the Saturday sessions, which were on ‘restoring trust and integrity’ in the key institutions of education, health, law and media after the pandemic. Mostly the conclusion was that such trust is categorically broken, and the hope lies in creating new institutions and structures. I am for the most part in agreement, having felt monumentally betrayed by the government and all the aforementioned institutions during the Covid era. I also feel betrayed regarding erosions to the category of woman in law and policy and by the ubiquitous tentacles of the censorship industrial complex as devastatingly revealed by the Twitter files; however, I would add the caveat that it is a lot easier to tear something down than it is to (re)build it.

I particularly ‘enjoyed’, in that informative but deeply depressing way,

Dr. Fidge filed a complaint with the Chief Justice of the Federal Court, Debra Mortimer alleging that Justice Rofe had failed to disclose her connections to Pfizer before dismissing the case, and ruling in Pfizer’s favour. The complaint alleged serious misconduct, but this too was dismissed on a technicality regarding ‘legal bias’. In a nutshell, this drastically limited the terms of reference effectively ignoring what was really at stake here: the impartiality of the judge and, by association, the public’s trust in the Court.

As Gillespie stressed in a Substack article,

Mortimer’s decision relies heavily on technical arguments about bias law, such as the “passage of time” argument, without addressing the ethical obligation of judges to disclose past associations with parties involved in their current cases. For instance, she argues that a historical relationship with Pfizer does not automatically imply bias, failing to acknowledge that disclosure is essential in preserving public trust in judicial impartiality. This legalistic reliance on established standards without adapting them to the case’s unique public scrutiny disregards the broader ethical obligations that the Complaint argues should apply here.

It strikes me as more of the same. Here and elsewhere, cases against employers, the government, the regulators and/or Pharma are dismissed on spurious grounds before they are even heard. Heaven forbid a precedent is set and the whole house of cards come falling down! The failures are systemic and implicate so many people in power that it is hardly surprising they are hobbled before they begin. On the other hand, cases against dissidents are virulent and doubling down. Gillespie was articulate but also palpably cynical and exasperated.

Augusto Zimmerman’s lecture on the long-term erosion of core components of the Australian constitution vis-à-vis ‘fundamental rights’ was informative and again interesting in that depressing way. He highlighted the erosion of the separation of powers with courts insufficiently independent of governments. Interestingly, he mapped this erosion over a century. As he explains in the scholarly article on which his talk was based,

The convergence of executive-legislative powers has a number of deleterious consequences for the realisation of the rule of law, each of which may be regarded as being key flaws in our constitutional framework… Australia has effectively become an ‘elective dictatorship’.

Last but not least, Professor Gigi Foster who burst onto the scene with her brilliant and acerbic anti-mandate missives on Q&A founded ASF with a view to bringing hitherto isolated dissidents within Australia’s health, legal, media, education and culture industries together. As she wrote on the Brownstone Institute blog.

A problem many freethinkers experienced early in the Covid era was the difficulty of finding other similarly-minded people. Afraid to be caught out and punished, many people sharing our horror at the transpiring events did not publicly identify themselves. With internet censorship and movement restrictions, not to mention mandates to hide our faces from one another and social encouragement to point the bone at refuseniks, organising an effective resistance was extremely tough going.

Many people thought they were literally all alone, going crazy in their minds, for years. Only a few of us were lucky enough to find ourselves from the get-go in networks with others who saw the madness for what it was.

Indeed.

I am pleased to have found and joined ASF. I will be speaking at their online members forum next week. Come along!