Guest Post by Colin Todhunter from Global Research. Reposted with permission.

Five years is a long time in the world of ‘independent’ media. Looking back from 2026, the issue of 2020–2022 wasn’t about a deadly virus. It was an economic lockdown and a pay-day bonanza for Epstein’s pal Bill Gates and his cronies in Big Pharma. But the period was also a stress test for the soul of the ‘alternative’ media.  

Some like Off-Guardian and Global Research called the ‘pandemic’ out for what it was and paid the price:

Global Research is now the most censored news website in Canada (click the link for an excellent piece by Elizabeth Woodworth); from arguably being the top alt media site on the net (in terms of readership) pre-2017, it has lost most of its audience in the last six years. Of course, many failed the test, trading their so-called radicalism for the safety of the official narrative.

For many years, I was a consistent contributor to a couple of publications that branded themselves as sanctuaries for the counter-narrative. But as the 2020s took hold, the editorial stance shifted from critiquing state-corporate power to policing their own writers.

The transition was subtle. Work on ‘safe’ radical topics often in faraway lands was still welcomed. But anything that questioned the C-19 consensus was quietly shelved with no debate or engagement.

The breaking point for me came from a single quote. In one of my submissions, I had quoted Robert F Kennedy Jr, a prominent voice critical of Big Pharma and public health policies. At the time, he was the ultimate ‘heretic’. I received a vitriolic, unprofessional outburst from an editor who had quietly shelved all of my submitted pieces that had challenged the official narrative on the COVID event. The kind of tantrum one expects from a disgruntled teenager, not a supposed defender of free inquiry.

This is the tell-tale trait of gatekeeper hucksters. They trade on their apparent credibility, but the moment you quote the ‘wrong’ person or question the ‘correct’ narrative on public health, the mask slips. They refused to give space to challengers, aggressively policing the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

The upshot was that during that period, it became clear who was controlled opposition. Aside from the aforementioned outburst, others simply refused to respond to emails that asked why they would not publish anything by anyone that countered the official narrative. Some of the publications maintained the aesthetic of radicalism while enforcing establishment limits on the issues that mattered most.

We also saw it with celebrated ‘anti-empire’ bloggers—those who claim to dismantle the ‘narrative matrix’ every morning yet found themselves curiously silent or compliant when that same matrix deployed the most sweeping authoritarian measures in modern history.

These figures who rail against foreign wars but stayed quiet on quietly accepted domestic medical mandates, seemed more concerned about being censored, de-platformed and losing their income stream. They thundered about the empire abroad but accepted the bio-security empire at home.

The ‘alternative’ media didn’t just move; it split. One side chose the difficult path of consistent scepticism. The other chose to protect their brand.

Many of us remember those who held the line; from the editors of certain sites to the dozens of writers who accepted the cost of principled dissent. And we remember those who did not.

This critique isn’t a blanket attack on everyone who supported the narrative but a specific indictment of those who became aggressive enforcers of orthodoxy or who decided it was easier to just keep their heads down. ‘Radicalism’ is easy when it’s relatively safe or profitable, but true dissent carries a cost.

An ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ media that collapses under pressure is not an alternative at all; it is merely a softer interface for the same system, translating authority into more palatable language while calling it resistance. In such cases, editors end up enforcing orthodoxy as zealously as any mainstream institution.

Another crisis will come. When it does, the same people will once again demand to be seen as dissidents. But the record already exists. They were tested and they failed.

Colin Todhunter’s new book India’s Farmers Against the Global Agri-Cartel: Chronicling Resistance to Corporate Enclosures can be downloaded for free at Zenodo.