Remember when Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader and the mainstream media had an absolute fit over it? Remember when the hundreds of thousands of new Labour Party members he attracted were continually smeared by the press as "infiltrators" and "entryists"?
Then there was the way that any talk of democratising the Labour Party from within was described as if democratic re-selection of MPs was some kind of terrifying ideological "purge", rather than a means of actually holding them to account for their actions.
And the way that everyone involved from Corbyn all the way down to the hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters who voted for him were repeatedly smeared as "extremists".
Despite all of this rhetoric Corbyn's election and re-election as Labour leader were actually fantastic demonstrations of grass roots democracy in action.
An out-of-touch clique of right-wing Labour MPs plotted to get rid of him in the summer of 2016, but ordinary Labour voters unified behind Corbyn because they want a proper party of democratic socialism, not another feeble austerity-lite imitation of the Tory party.
However the mainstream press didn't present it that way at all. Instead they created the narrative that Corbyn represented some kind of terrifying extremist take-over of the Labour Party by a disgusting horde of dangerously left-wing extremists, then they pushed this warped version of events as hard as they damned well could (from the rabid right Daily Mail all the way through to the faux-left Guardian).
The truly incredible thing is that the United Kingdom is now witnessing a very real extremist takeover of a major political party, yet the mainstream press absolutely refuse to portray it in the same terms as their fantastical narratives about "entryism", "extremism", "infiltrators" and "purges" they concocted over the Labour revival under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
Theresa May has taken an extreme and belligerent approach to Brexit from the beginning. She's repeatedly shown contempt for parliamentary sovereignty, and the rule of law. Again and again she's tried to bypass parliament and to conduct the Brexit process in the most secretive and unaccountable manner possible.
She's also tried to appeal to the basest instincts of the hard-right Blue-kip demographic who abandoned the absolute wreckage of UKIP in order to mindlessly follow her because she's waving the Brexit flag she so opportunistically nicked off actual Brexiteers when it suited her career interests to do so.
Ever since her vanity election backfired Theresa May has demonstrably been a hostage of the most fanatical elements of the Tory-DUP coalition she's cobbled together.
The faction of her own party that has the most sway over her has clearly been the hard-right Europhobes who see Brexit as a brilliant opportunity to trash workers' rights, consumer protections, food standards, environmental regulations, parliamentary sovereignty and literally anything else that might get in the way of their dream of a terrifyingly hard-right Tory hegemony.
Then there's the DUP bigots who took their £1 billion bribe, and have then proceeded to demonstrate that they're in absolute control, and that May can't do anything on Brexit without their approval first.
And then there was the Amendment 7 rebellion. 11 Tory MPs defied Theresa May and voted with the opposition parties in order to ensure that the final Brexit deal is subject to parliamentary approval before it becomes law.
The howls of outrage over this rebellion in defence of parliamentary sovereignty were extraordinary. The one "mutineer" who held an official position in the party (Stephen Hammond) was revenge sacked immediately, and there were soon calls for all of the "rebel" MPs to be thrown out of the party and banned from ever standing as Tory MPs again.
Contrast this extreme Tory intolerance of dissent with the Labour left's calls for democratic re-selection of Labour MPs and it's extraordinary to see the latter situation was greeted with screams of "purge, purge, purge" while this brazen Tory display of intolerance towards dissent barely elicits a murmur of mainstream media commentary!
Then there's the fact that this abusive and intimidatory atmosphere towards pro-democracy Tory MPs has been nurtured by the outside group Leave.EU, which is the propaganda outlet of the extreme Brexiteer and UKIP donor Arron Banks.
Just consider the concerted mainstream media campaign of demonisation against the internal ans accredited Labour campaign group Momentum, and contrast it with the absolute silence on the powerful grip Arron Bank's dodgy extreme-right propaganda outfit is exerting over the Tory party.
It's obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention that the Tory party is being usurped by an extreme-right anti-democratic faction right in front of our eyes, yet the mainstream press won't even describe it for what it is, let alone launch into the kind of hyperbolic language that is very much more appropriate now than when they used it to fearmonger about the rejuvenation of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
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