Dear reader,
As a year has just passed since I started this little adventure of uncensored blogging, I thought I would take this opportunity to thank you for your loyalty and support, and share a few thoughts on my vision for this blog moving forward.
Since I started the Freedom Blog just over a year ago, I have written on lots of issues connected to a free society and a free way of life, including:
the ideal of a vibrant digital town square
the value of informed consent
the abject failures of utilitarian and de-humanising approaches to public health
the idea of a free and open society
the critical role of civil society organisations as bulwarks of freedom
the need for more governmental decentralization, and more…
Just over a year ago, I found myself booted off Twitter for raising doubts about the net benefit of the Covid vaccine for young and healthy people, and for pointing out that Ivermectin was already been used quite widely in places like Mexico and India to treat Covid-19. I then opened a blog on Medium to report my experience of Twitter censorship, only to find my first blog post abruptly removed by Medium’s “Covid safety team” or whatever euphemism they had come up with for their pandemic censorship team!
That is what led me to seek refuge in Substack – a platform that actually allows authors to comment openly and candidly on public affairs, without having a Covid or Woke “safety team” breathing down our necks. You can find Substack’s content guidelines here. It is considerably more friendly to freedom of expression than what you will find on Facebook, LinkedIn, or pre-Musk Twitter (let’s see what Musk does).
I want to say a big thank you to Substack for having the courage and good sense to host authors who dissent from the official status quo.
And above all, a big thank you to you, my readers, for following my work in this small but vibrant corner of freedom, and for recognising, whether through your encouraging messages or your paid subscriptions, the many hours of labour – albeit a ”labour of love” – that go into providing you with perspectives and evidence that mainstream media would prefer to turn a blind eye to.
Looking to the future, my vision for the Freedom Blog is:
grow it from its current modest audience of 2600 to a much larger audience of 20,000 or more. I am cautiously optimistic that I will recover my Twitter account soon, which should help me reach a much wider audience.
bring more discounted courseware online for you like this course, which starts on Monday (you can still sign up here!)
As the worst excesses of pandemic policies appear to recede, the focus of my contributions will gradually shift to other issues affecting the life of a free society, be it Woke censorship, the climate change “emergency,” or Big Brother efforts to impose a State-sponsored ideology on our children.
But I also want to put big ideas on the table to stimulate your constructive reflections about the type of society you want for yourself and for future generations of citizens, such as decentralized governance, an independent and self-governing civil society, and strategies for consolidating grassroots resistance against emergency powers.
I am conscious that quite a few annual subscriptions to the Freedom Blog are due for renewal in the coming months. I hope you will continue to support my work in defence of a free and open society, in whatever way you can.
A big thank you to YOU! You’re very appreciated! Best wishes going into your second year!
Thank YOU 😊🙏