Darkness came at noon, the moment the news media turned the crime of stealing food into a crime against society.

Newspaper tabloids are propaganda artillery for the right wing while the rest of the corporate news media are its shock troops. Tabloids aim to destroy working-class solidarity and create a mindset where readers blame the oppressed rather than the oppressors that have produced economic or social misfortune for them.

Much of the news media now functions to radicalise and convert people to a right-wing economic ideology that derides the Welfare State as the slippery slope towards Leninism.

Tabloids target migrants, refugees, drug addicts, benefits claimants, and the homeless with salacious, unfounded allegations of their criminality or deviance. It makes the man sleeping on the pavement the enemy thwarting your efforts for a better life rather than the wealthy corporation who renovicted him.

The tabloids and much of the corporate news media- beat a drum towards fascism through deliberate untruthfulness.

Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Canada's Pierre Poilievre are not the product of fringe blogs but the nurturing of corporate news media.

The owners of Tabloids know that extreme wealth and a functioning democracy can't exist simultaneously. It's why, their news stories and editorials have turned the shoplifter into society's enemy rather than the motivations that drive people towards a five-finger discount.

The Daily Mail wants its readers to fear the poor as bringers of disease. So they run stories about how violent shoplifters are trying to infect other shoppers or shop employees with dirty syringes that might be from HIV intravenous drug users.

It's all about the news media fixing a narrative that the Ghost of Christmas future has come for us but we can change our fate if we double down with more conservative politics.

The Daily Mirror a left of centre tabloid has even got into the act of blaming the victims of capitalism and this cost of living Crisis. It makes sense that they are doing when you consider Keir Starmer's Labour Party started branding itself as competent Tories. The Mirror obviously sees the glory of profits by hitching itself to a Labour Party that promises to out tory the Tories when it comes to cruelty of austerity.

This week The Mirror chose to use one of its front pages for a call out to readers to send them their mobile phone camera footage of people shoplifting. Turning working-class readers into grasses for grocery corporations is about as low as you can get before someone rightly calls you an enabler of fascism. It’s as if The Mirror believes that the police inspector in Les Misérables is the true hero of Victor Hugo's book rather than the thief who stole from hunger.

The reason why police reported 286k shoplifting cases in England and Wales over the last 12 months or that since 2020, there have been 300 thousand cases of shoplifting in Canada and that there are 27 million people in the US who have shoplifted is not because poor people are criminal by nature but that they must turn to crime to eat.

Shoplifting isn't producing spikes in food prices and consumer goods. The outrageous cost of feeding yourself is from corporate greed and supply chain management. Knowing, however, what causes inflationary food prices, housing insecurity, and the privatisation of public healthcare- isn't the same as being able to stop it.

We live in an epoch where Robber Barons ensure everything, and everyone has its price. Journalism, social media, energy, food production, telecommunication and transportation are owned by the few, yet needed by the many. We pretend to ourselves ordinary people through voting decide how democracy works. It's a fiction that only suits the interests of the entitled classes. So before we win back what is ours, we must begin to establish some truths or else the left is a dog forever chasing its tail.

Wealth and entitlement aren't our allies. Society is broken and incrementalism won't fix it but neither will a 1917 revolution.

We must organise like modern-day Communards from 1842. We must like be Tom Joad and when we see an ordinary worker is being abused by a corporate boss stand with them. We must fight against the status quo with as much vigour as we use against our fight against fascism because it is the conduit to authoritarianism. We must make saving the environment a priority similar to saving a loved one's life. We must fight against those who deny Covid as a serious threat to public health. We can no longer permit people to be entitled to their ignorance because it leads to the deaths of the vulnerable.

We live in an age where darkness comes at noon. It's an extraordinarily uneven, cruel and evil time that we inhabit. None of us asked to be born in what feels like the last days of the Roman Empire. But at least we know a dark age awaits us unless we fight hard to build a sustainable tomorrow through socialist politics. 

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because your help is really NEEDED. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Even sharing my posts helps the cause. Take Care, John