Censored by CFUV Campus Radio

Earlier this month, I recorded an interview on the subject of Mass Formation (mass hypnosis) with Chris Cook, host of Gorilla Radio. Chris’s show is a long-running progressive Left current affairs program airing on the campus/community radio station CFUV, headquartered at University of Victoria in British Columbia. Past guests on his show have included: Maude Barlow, William Blum, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Dahr Jamail, Naomi Klein, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, Vandana Shiva, Howard Zinn and many others.

I was destined to be in some very illustrious company! Or rather, would have been, had the heavy club of censorship not felled us.

I had recently written a Substack essay on this topic (“Mass Formation: How the Left Got Duped”), which proved to be quite popular, racking up more than 18,000 views in its first three weeks. This led to Chris inviting me onto his program for a pre-recorded conversation about the topic.

We talked about Mass Formation, as described by Belgian psychology professor Mattias Desmet, and how the Left got duped with pseudo-empathetic messaging ("my mask protects you, your mask protects me", "my shot protects you, your shot protects me") into forming the vanguard of Covid authoritarianism.

Three days later, when Chris uploaded the recording to the station’s server for broadcast the next day, station management nixed it. CFUV gatekeepers determined our 27-minute conversation could not be aired because we were “scare-mongering”.

Chris bravely kept our interview mounted on his Gorilla Radio website, where you can listen to it here:

http://www.gorilla-radio.com/2022/01/06/gorilla-radio-chris-cook-kim-goldberg-solo-cut-january-2-2022/

But it will never darken the pristinely orthodox airwaves of CFUV, lest it scare people the wrong way instead of the right way. For those of you who don’t wish to be infantilized by the CFUV politburo, you may want to invest 27 minutes of your time to determine for yourself whether this information is indeed too terrifying to brush up against your tender mind.

In fall of 2021, the CRTC (Canada's broadcast & telecom regulator) held Zoom meetings with all campus/community and Indigenous radio stations across Canada and told them what they could and could not say on air about Covid and vaccine. Which is ironic since the origins of community radio in Canada and elsewhere were to provide a grassroots, citizen-controlled, democratically-run component to the broadcasting system that was otherwise dominated by bulky corporate and government-funded media organizations. Community radio is, at its core, supposed to give voice to the voiceless, to the heterodox, to the non-mainstream, to the otherwise suppressed and silenced.

Is this still your Canada?

~

Kim Goldberg is a Vancouver Island writer and the author of eight books. Her latest is Devolution, poems and fables of ecopocalypse (Caitlin Press, 2020). Twitter: @AlsoGoldberg