It often elicits a wry chuckle when I divulge to others - somewhat reluctantly, admittedly - that I took Media Studies A-level. And yes, I get it - a qualification in watching TV and reading magazines, very academically rigorous, I'm sure!

The thing is, though - it was! Seriously. It was by far the most challenging of the four A-levels* I did (the others being English, Psychology and Philosophy - so, yes, admittedly there was no quantum mechanics in there, although the statistics in Psychology were quite tough - but a module I did pass, thus paving the way for such future crazy quackloonery as recognising that a cold virus with a 99.98% survival rate is not a mortal threat to the very fabric of existence itself). 

The reason my Media Studies A-level was both the most challenging, as well the most instrumentally useful for the rest of my life (unlike the endlessly amusingly named 'Life Skills' class I also took at school, where we spent several lessons learning how to glue crisp packets to bits of paper), is because it taught me one of the most vital and sustaining life skills one needs in order to survive the modern age: how to read the media.

And if you think you do that merely by being literate - by taking at face value the words thrown at you by media vehicles - then you're going to have a really bad time. Indeed, you will currently be suffocating underneath a grubby face rag having injected vials of unregulated poison into yourself every time the government tells you to, as well as promptly putting yourself under house-arrest upon the command of your mobile phone. 

Whereas, if you've been tutored in how to accurately read and decode the media, you have done none of this dangerous and absurdist nonsense and have, in addition, spent zero seconds of your life worrying about a coronavirus that can be killed by Dettol.

Indeed, the only reason anyone, anywhere, has spent any time worrying about the fake plague at all, is because of the media. Therefore, it's critically important we all learn how to read media vehicles properly, so we are not living the rest of our lives in a state of highly suggestible, highly controllable, irrational terror, regarding the latest media-manifested bogeyman (which appears to be literally all men at the current time). 

The key most important factor in accurately decoding the media is identifying what it is actually for, since, as an old Russian proverb has it, regarding their two main newspapers, 'Pravda' (truth) and 'Novosti' (news), "there's no news in the truth, and no truth in the news". This ably illustrates the reality that the very last thing the media exists to do is to impartially inform you about what's going on in the world. If you want to know what's going on in the world, switch off your TV, go for a walk and talk to your neighbours. The media, on the other hand, has nothing whatsoever to do with keeping you informed - after all, there are millions of newsworthy events happening all over the world every day, so why does the media obsessively focus on a small minority whilst completely ignoring all the others?

It's because the exclusive purpose of the media is to control your thoughts and subsequent behaviour in order that you conduct yourself in the way that is most desirable to the ruling elite. That's it. Teams of top psychologists (including expert behaviorists, who, rather and instead of epidemiologists and immunologists, primarily populate SAGE, the Government's emergency pandemic response team) are the driving force of the modern media, and they know exactly what linguistic tricks and emotive appeals to use to mould your thoughts and modify your behaviour to their desired ends.

Using a variety of time-honoured tactics and techniques (endless fear mongering, constant divide and conquer, tribalising and otherising etc.), the media burrows itself deeply into the human psyche where it then behaves as a sort of demonic puppet-master, bombarding you with expert emotional appeals and consummately crafted propaganda, and using these to jerk you around like a psychological marionette. This means that, ultimately, most people don't have their own thoughts and feelings - they simply have programming deftly installed into them by the media. I mean, just look at that most powerful puppet master of all, the TV - they even CALL it programming!

This full spectrum state dominance and control of your thoughts and behaviour is a process started by government-controlled schools and their founding principles of - don't think for yourself, don't question or challenge, just memorise and mindlessly repeat what 'authority' tells you - and is maintained for the rest of one's life by the media.  After all, how often have we been hectored by every arm of the media to "trust the experts" and "follow the science", meaning we ought simply reflexively obey perceived authority with no pesky intrusion of our own thoughts. The New York Times even had an article literally entitled, "the solution isn't to try to think more carefully. It's to trust the experts."

So, in many ways, reading the media has become a lot more straightforward lately, as they seem to have done away with much of the pretence of "impartially informing you of the facts so you can come to your own view", and are now straight-up demanding - "don't you dare think for yourself, you do what we tell you". Iron fist discards velvet glove, as happens with weary inevitability in all ultra-oppressive tyrannies - which often tend to initially present themselves as "liberal democratic" trojan horses.

 So, this is the key takeaway point: the entire purpose of the mainstream media, whether "left-wing" or "right-wing", broadsheet or tabloid, TV or print, is to install thoughts into your mind that are useful to the ruling elite. If you start reading the media on that level, and stop relating to it in any way as a vehicle of accurate information about how the world works, you will begin to break the phenomenal spell it has cast over you and start to gradually re-attach to reality. 

The tricks the media uses to hypnotise you are profoundly sophisticated, and this most certainly includes "low-brow" vehicles such as soap operas - see how much of the dominant media narrative regarding the plague is also reflected in shows like Coronation Street and Eastenders. The media uses all of its vehicles (newspapers, film, TV) indiscriminately to manicure your mind and perceptions of reality in order to elicit the desired behaviour from you. In essence, the media has used its ability to psychologically manipulate humanity, to create a false, illusory reality, and then used the behaviour it has induced in people on the basis of these tricks, to "prove" that the illusion is real. A pitch-perfect example of this was a pub I visited shortly after the first lockdown was lifted, where a barmaid was having an animated discussion with a table of young men, who were telling her the pandemic wasn't real.

"Of course it's real!" She decried, gesturing wildly to all the screens, sanitisers, dots and circles festooning the pub, "Otherwise why would we have all this?!"

Equally, if you convince people that the symptoms of the common cold are actually the world's deadliest plague in disguise (which the media is currently doing), they will become petrified and, upon developing such symptoms, check themselves into hospital - where the hospital staff will follow the "coronavirus protocols" of incredibly powerful drug cocktails and intensely invasive and traumatic ventilation, the combination of which is highly likely to kill them, thus "proving" the common cold is indeed the deadly plague and we must all panic accordingly. 

See how that works? Neat (if murderously psychopathically evil) little trick, huh? As an illustrative aside, a few years ago, I read the autobiography of a former staff writer for Cosmopolitan magazine, in which she revealed how Cosmo and its ilk created the sexual revolution, by inventing and publishing case studies about emancipated, liberated young women all bed-hopping around the city and sleeping their way to the top of their professions, etc. These accounts were completely made up and had no basis in reality (as is almost always the case with illustrative case studies in the media, and any seasoned journalist can confirm this). 

When average young women read these stories, they started copying them, believing this is what everyone else was already doing and that this was the hip, cool way to behave.

The media has continued to use make-believe to cast powerful behaviour-modifying spells over people ever since. 

The encouraging thing at the moment is that I get the distinct impression that, slowly, bits and pieces of the above are starting to percolate into the average, normie mind, because - as I've mentioned before - they've all gone very quiet on the subject of Covid, and attendant insanities of poisoning children and introducing medical apartheid. 

The reason for this is that our normie friends do still have a functioning moral compass somewhere - these are intrinsic to human beings and very difficult for the overlords to annihilate entirely, much as they tirelessly try - and so they do know these things are wrong. However, because none of their favoured media vehicles have said so, they have no idea how to further develop and articulate these thoughts. I have observed on many occasions that most normies have no real values or convictions of their own, they just parrot whatever the fashionable press tells them is the 'good person thing' to think.

So, what is very revealing right now is that they've all gone absolutely silent on the issue of Covid, and have instead scuttled back to safe 'good person' topics, such as Brexit (bad!) and benefits (good!). [I can't help but marvel, yet again, about the absolute and utter absurdist lunacy of these hardcore leftists who believe the Tories are simultaneously trying to kill them by slashing money from their benefits, but also benevolently trying to save them with endless free vaccines.]

The reason for this is that these individuals have desperately scoured the trendy press in order to program themselves with some shareable thoughts about jabbing children and introducing vaccine passports, but, having found nothing, are left floundering helplessly, completely unable to formulate a position of their own. They have a sense that these things are wrong, but... but... surely if they were, the Guardian and Keir Starmer would have said so?! 

This crisis of cognitive dissonance illustrates everything I've been saying above. The media has installed itself into the collective national psyche as an all-powerful substitute for independent thought. No "normie" has ever had to put the work into formulating a position of their own as the media has always preemptively done it for them - not just by telling them what to think about an issue, but by telling them what issues to think about at all - and so all they've ever needed to do is is parrot these positions back to their identically media-manicured friends for a rousing concerto of applause about what a brilliant, sensitive, insightful genius they are (of course, there are people who disagree with them, but they are different, deviant, bad people; people who read the bad newspapers and have the bad thoughts - boo hiss to them!).

You can see this happening in real time right now, and it presents a rare window of opportunity for millions of people to see what has been done to them, to break the programming, and to fight back - which you do by starting to think for yourself. This is no trite or pat conclusion, it's one of the hardest things in the world to learn to do, given that multiple ultra-wealthy institutions that saturate our lives from birth exist for the sole purpose of stopping us doing this. Infant children are typically sent into government-controlled institutions to manicure their minds from the age of four - roughly twenty years before their brains have reached full development. You can do a lot to a mind if you have it at such a plastic stage and for such a long time.

Believing that schools exist to benevolently teach children to read and write is roughly on par with believing McDonald's exists to nourish and nurture them. Reading and writing takes about 100 hours to transmit, so what exactly is school doing with children for the next 11+ years it has them?

It's doing the same thing the media does with adults - disabling their ability to think critically and behave independently, and, instead, making them into uncritical, dependent order-followers. School is basically obedience training for kids, that's why rebellious ones, no matter how bright, don't do well at them.  For more on this subject. please read the brilliant and incisive thoughts of John Taylor Gatto, a 25-year veteran of high-school teaching and multiple recipient of New York State Teacher of the Year awards, who said of schools, "Slowly I began to realise that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behaviour."

That's exactly what school does, or at least it starts the job, which the media seamlessly perfects and maintains. It shouldn't be a great leap of logic for people to understand that, when ultra-wealthy sociopathic billionaires, such as the types who compose our ruling classes, make things available very cheaply or freely - as is the case with schools, vaccines, and various media offerings - these things are not in the national interest. The ruling classes only ever subsidise things that are in their own interests, in terms of remaining ultra-wealthy and all-powerful. Without the gargantuan power they have harnessed over the national psyche via the media, they would never have been able to get away with all the various psychopathic, genocidal evils they have perpetrated across the world in recent history.

They only keep getting away with this because the media has not been widely exposed for what it really is - a devious dark magician conjuring up endless pseudo-realities in order to drive self-destructive behaviour in the masses that serves the psychopathic ruling elite. The fact that the "liberal" press has not commented in any meaningful way on the advent of non-consensually administering dangerous injections to children, nor on brutally segregating society via medical apartheid (inevitably down race lines as ethnic minorities are disproportionately vaccine sceptic), is irrefutably revealing this.

The question now is, will the remaining morally functioning amongst the populace, who are starting to see what is happening, be courageous enough to take up the challenge this presents, and realise the media can no longer speak for them and they must find their own voice? Or will they continue to keep quiet and stick with the 'safe' topics - sticking the proverbial crisp packets on the bits of paper?

I should mention that a few weeks after our class had completed this exercise, the glue dried out and all the crisp packets fell off.