Maroc - EURASIAREVIEW.COM - A la une - Aujourd'hui 01:23

Trump Calls Time On Self-Flagellation – OpEd

For nigh on two decades, Western democracies have been busy pouring highly inflammable fuels on the bonfire of progressive vanities that has been consuming them. Acts of willful self-flagellation include affirmative action policies that have morphed into DEI mandates, net-zero death wishes, political correctness, gender self-ID, and other proliferating examples of wokery-pokery. State control of information has been central to this effort in which ‘correctspeak’ guidance is issued from authorised agencies, adopted and parroted by the media, and ruthlessly enforced by the administrative state and a compliant judiciary. The Spectrum from False News to Gaslighting Is calling the gatekeepers of permitted opinions ‘fact-checkers’ an example of misinformation, disinformation, or gaslighting? Censorship exists to protect bad ideas from public scrutiny. Because censorship is effectively a toxic four-letter notion, governments in thrall to the control of information that members of the public can freely access have taken to an entirely new typology. ‘Fake news’ is the easiest to describe. It’s the transmission and dissemination of ‘news’ that is entirely made up as an act of mischief. Examples can include reports of deaths, divorces, arrests, a birth certificate proving someone is or isn’t a citizen, and what have you. On 2 December 2023 (sic), the Economic Times of India published a report on a lecture by the British-Indian cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, the promoter-turned Covid vaccine sceptic, recommending that India should withdraw from the World Health Organisation (WHO). This was headlined as ‘WHO has lost its independence, Indian govt should exit global health body’ After Trump’s rewithdrawal from the WHO, this headline was picked up by someone and put back into circulation on social media last month, but without the quotes of the original headline, and spread rapidly around the world, including to my Signal account. On this occasion the fact-checkers, who went quickly into action, were right – both factually and ethically – to highlight the error and grade it ‘false.’ ‘Misinformation’ is false, inaccurate, or incomplete information that is created or spread inadvertently, without the intent to deceive. By contrast ‘disinformation’ refers to the deliberate spread of knowingly false information which is curated and spread in order to hide the truth or influence public opinion. ‘Malinformation’ is when the spread of false information is both deliberate and intended to cause harm. For example, using AI to generate an image and voice of someone to create and distribute an embarrassing or otherwise damaging video. In sum, fake news is false, misinformation misleads, disinformation deceives, and malinformation harms. The ‘liar’s dividend’ pays off when those who sow mistrust successfully then use the ensuing confusion and loss of trust to their own financial, political, or professional advantage. Distinct from all these, ‘gaslighting’ is when actors themselves spread, or else attach the labels mis-, dis-, and mal-information to true information and real facts in order to delegitimise them and promote their own narrative with the view to manipulate people’s opinions and behaviour. Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year originates from the 1938 play Gas Lightwhich was popularised with the 1944 Hollywood film Gaslight starring Ingrid Berman as an heiress falsely convinced by her husband that she’s going insane so that he can steal her wealth. It thus describes a form of deliberate psychological manipulation that causes victims to doubt their memories, experiences, perceptions of reality, and beliefs. It became popular as a political metaphor over the ‘post-truth’ decade to describe government attempts to control people’s beliefs and behaviour. The 51 former US intelligence officials who denounced the New York Post’s scoop on the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation is a perfect example of gaslighting. How can we spot climate change gaslighting? Look for the jet-flying alarmists (who prove by their actions they don’t believe their own heated rhetoric on global boiling) and the subsidy-seeking grifters. Australia’s Prime Minister (PM) Anthony Albanese and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen flew separate Air Force jets to the same event in the Hunter Valley, a short distance from Canberra, in March 2024. Presumably they are so disconnected from reality that they failed to see how their actions undermined their narrative. Covid The Covid suite of misinformation-cum-gaslighting began with the insistence on the zoonotic and dismissal of the lab-leak origins of the virus, and proceeded to claims of the efficacy of lockdowns and masks, the denial of harms from school closures, and the ever-shifting narrative on vaccine efficacy and safety. In a statement released on 25 January, the CIA said, albeit with low confidence, that ‘a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting.’ It thus joins the FBI and the Department of Energy among the significant US agencies to believe that a Wuhan lab leak is the most likely origin of Covid. Yet anyone who said this back in 2020 faced vilification as a fringe conspiracy theorist by national authorities and the WHO and deplatforming from social media for peddling racist disinformation. Curiously, even though the public admission is new, the conclusion had been reached by the CIA during the Biden years but kept hidden from the public. China engaged in disinformation on the coronavirus origins and absence of human-human transmission. Those who took China’s word on good faith, including the WHO, then engaged in misinformation in endorsing that. But Anthony Fauci, the public face of America’s Covid policy, and Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, colluded backstage to organise the publication in a leading medical science journal of an article ruling out the possibility of a lab leak rather than a zoonotic origin. In public, they then used that paper as proof of zoonotic origin and denounced anyone still suggesting even the possibility of a lab leak from Wuhan as a fringe conspiracist. That is gaslighting. Biden’s preemptive pardon of Fauci really is a criminal outrage. The guy deserves to be in the dock. The early alarmist infection fatality rates, the claimed benefits of shutdowns and facemasks in slowing the spread of the virus, and the initial statements of vaccine efficacy and safety in checking infections, hospitalisations, and Covid-related deaths were examples of misinformation. Persisting with the narrative of the pandemic of the unvaccinated after it became known that vaccines do not stop transmission; claims by NSW Health for several weeks that the unvaccinated were disproportionately represented in the Covid-hospitalised and ICU admissions, when the raw numbers for each category showed zero cases in both metrics, making it mathematically impossible for the unvaccinated to be ‘overrepresented;’ and denials of serious and fatal vaccine injuries were examples of disinformation. Politicians and health chiefs who insisted that people of all ages were equally at risk from Covid and that the vaccine’s overwhelming benefits-negligible harms equation applied just as much to healthy children and adolescents as to elderly people with comorbidities, when the data on age and risk profile clearly contradicted such assertions, were guilty of gaslighting. The resort to propaganda using actors from all ages to promote these messages and shame people into ‘doing the right thing’ and guilting people into believing they posed a grave risk of death to their grannies if they broke lockdown restrictions or refused the vaccine, were further examples of official gaslighting. Possibly the worst example of vaccine-related gaslighting was the manipulation of definitions, starting with denials of links to gene therapy and extending to coding the one-dose vaccinated and everyone within two-three weeks of second and booster doses as ‘unvaccinated.’ This may have made sense with regard to the debate on vaccine efficacy on the reasoning that efficacy kicked in only after that period. It made no sense with regard to vaccine injury. I don’t know the practice in the US and elsewhere. But in Australia, whenever I have been vaccinated, I was told to wait for ten minutes to see if there were any adverse side effects before exiting the clinic. The net result of the classification parameters means that all official data are suspect in assessing the benefits-harms impacts of the Covid vaccines. Climate Change The Covid years were an eye-opener for many who previously had taken scientific opinions and policy recommendations from domain experts on trust at face value. The new burst of scepticism towards experts, authorities, institutions, and the media has led to fresh scrutiny of the claims of climate change and the prescriptions to slow, halt, and reverse carbon emissions. Techniques of information control and public messaging during Covid can now be seen for what they are with respect also to climate policies: the manufacturing of a scientific and policy consensus that censors, silences, and marginalises sceptics and contrarians; the conflation of empirical science with assumptions-driven modelling; the politicisation and corruption of scientific research and publishing; the long list of catastrophist predictions that never materialise; the role of profit maximising commercial interests in driving the narrative; the adoption of luxury beliefs by the global elite that profits off catastrophism while shifting the cost burden to the working classes; etc. Climate change policies have mostly impoverished and inflicted hardships on Western populations without solving the climate crisis if there is one. Decarbonisation in practice has equated to increased green subsidies, higher energy costs and more frequent supply interruptions, deindustrialisation and degrowth, offshoring manufacturing and carbon emissions to China, higher imports that add to emissions from seaborne freight, and almost net-zero contribution to global emission reduction targets. Consider the demonisation of coal which powered the high standards of living of Westerners. For the likes of power-hungry China and India, coal is the affordable energy source to power their economic growth and assure energy security, accounting for well over half their electricity generation. Their argument that they came to the industrialisation party late compared to the already industrialised countries and their per capita emissions remain significantly lower is of course correct. But this doesn’t negate the reality that the substantial growth in their emissions thwarts the drive to global decarbonisation. In the Economic Survey 2024–2025 tabled in Parliament on 31 January, India committed to coal, its only reliable energy source, and other fossil fuels to drive its economic development for the foreseeable future, even while expanding its clean energy networks. The UK Telegraph reported on 1 February that China’s coal consumption increased by around 6 percent to 4.9 billion tonnes last year, accounting for 56 percent of the total global increase. The additional 300 million tonnes of coal that was burnt produced an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon. In 2023, China commissioned new coal power stations to generate an additional 114GW of electricity, compared to the UK’s total power generation, at full capacity, of 75GW. China’s coal-fired power generation increased by 1.8 percent last year, from 6,232 billion in 2023 to 6,344bn kWh. It plans to increase annual coal consumption by 75 million tonnes. Already the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases – about 15 billion tonnes of carbon last year, almost a quarter of the world’s total – China will be responsible for a still higher share of global emissions. By contrast, the UK emits a modest 400 million tonnes of carbon annually, down from 817 million in 1990 and equivalent to only half of China’s 2024 increase. Australia’s annual emissions are comparable to the UK and both account for about one percent each of total global emissions. The four emission giants (China, the US, India, and Russia) account for 58 percent. It’s beyond perverse for the likes of Australia and the UK to impoverish and immiserate their own people to help China and Russia grow richer and more powerful. While most of China’s coal consumption comes from domestic supplies, its insatiable energy needs still make it the biggest importer of seaborne coal, meaning that emissions caused by transportation must also be added to the calculations. And of course, in effect, the West is shipping its carbon production to China’s factories that produce the steel and other manufactured products (aluminum, EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, etc) that must then be imported to support Western industry and lifestyle. Thus the West’s combined efforts to cut global emissions are dwarfed by the rise in China and India’s emissions to support their industrialisation story. What exactly is the point then of the West’s mad pursuit of deindustrialisation, degrowth, and immiseration that also translates into national security harm as the equation enables China’s gain in relative power and its military modernisation at pace? This is all aside from the far-from-settled science of climate change; the decades-long history of failed predictions of catastrophic collapse owing to rising seas, galloping desertification, and the like; and the lived reality of escalating energy bills, grid instability, and power outages against persistent claims of lower power bills and stable supplies by switching to the unreliables (aka as renewables) of intermittent wind and solar. The most egregious example of climate change gaslighting is to exploit all extreme weather occurrences to manipulate public sentiment to double down on the blind rush to the promised nirvana of net zero. After all, storms, floods, droughts, famines, and fires have always been part of the natural cycle of changing seasons and climate variability. Even as many such outbreaks have declined in frequency, intensity, and damage owing to better fossil-fuel-enabled physical and knowledge infrastructure, unfortunately, our massively increased capacity to detect, film, and broadcast them to a global audience in real-time, has helped to create the illusion of a multifront permacrisis and the narrative of a climate emergency. There is zero science behind the implication that local weather conditions in my hometown or country are the result of emissions-related sins of commission and omission by my local council or national government. No reputable scientist would make such a claim. Only climate activists and gullible politicians do so. Climate crisis distraction was a major contributor to California’s neglect of fire prevention practices and firefighting capacities that made the recent Los Angeles wildfires worse than they should have been. The Southport, UK Killings In the UK, the Cass Review’s Report exposed the fear-mongering lie of gender-confused children at high risk of committing suicide without gender affirmation policies. The single most abhorrent example of gaslighting already from the early days of the Starmer government concerns the case of Axel Rudakubana who pleaded guilty and was convicted of killing three young schoolgirls in a frenzied knife attack in Southport during a Taylor Swift-themed dance party on 29 July 2024. He is an African whose parents fled Rwanda for the UK. He was initially described as a Cardiff-born UK citizen. There is starkly graphic evidence of the gaslighting in the Welsh choirboy photo released after the attacks and the mug shot from the trial months later. It’s worth looking at the two images side-by-side. Even after his conviction, despite multiple threads of evidence suggesting a violent predisposition towards whites, possession of an Al Qaeda training manual, and the biological agent ricin, authorities have downplayed the terrorism element. Starmer described it as a new form of terror threat from loners and misfits who are radicalised online in their bedrooms. He explained away his earlier failure to mention terrorism in connection with Rudakubana by the need not to prejudice the trial – a consideration that was glaringly absent when he fiercely criticised the Southport rioters and the Home Secretary called them criminals before any trials. Still more attempts to gaslight the public come from the deflection to the irrelevant issue of Amazon not doing due diligence before shipping the knife to him, dutifully parroted by some media, when in fact it was an everyday kitchen knife present in most households. Rudakubana was reported to the anti-terror group Prevent three separate times between 2019 and 2021, yet roamed free to commit his heinous crimes on Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice da Silva Aguiar. Nigel Farage is right to call out Starmer’s cover-up of Rudakubana’s terror links, which might plausibly have contributed to the enraged public’s riots through the resulting information vacuum in which all sorts of combustible conspiracy theories swirled. Farage was even prevented from asking questions in Parliament on this issue. Rudakubana’s guilty plea will conveniently prevent the full facts from ever becoming public. It’s hard to disagree with Mark Steyn’s damning judgment that Starmer ‘and every outpost of the corrupt British state have lied to the public about every aspect of the Southport mass murder since the very first statements by the Liverpool chief constable passing off the killer as a “Cardiff man”.’ Trump’s Impact on the Overton Window on Social and Climate Justice ‘Permission structures’ were manipulated using digital communications to nudge people into progressive beliefs by the promise of moral standing among peers if they adopted the approved viewpoint. The phrase ‘DEI’ was deployed to mean the exact opposite of the three constituent words: uniformity of thought and behaviour; unequal treatment of individuals to support group-defined equitable outcomes regardless of merit, qualifications, and performance; and exclusion and ex-communication of heretics and apostates. The Covid deep state was an architecture of political coordination by the administrative state with other institutional actors, the legacy and social media, academia, NGOs, and foundations. The puppeteers in the Biden administration anointed themselves the font of all wisdom and, emulating New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, the guardians of truth. When confronted with contradictory evidence, the keepers of reality chose to sanctify error. Consistent with this and betraying a lack of self-awareness to the very end, President Joe Biden complained in his farewell address of ‘an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation’ from ‘a tech-industrial complex’ that was ‘enabling the abuse of power.’ You cannot make America great again by constantly talking it down, condemning it as irremediably racist, destroying social cohesion, growing the administrative state that feeds parasitically on the productive sectors while suffocating it under mountains of red and green tape, sabotaging energy security, deindustrialising the country and impoverishing citizens, and exporting industrial capacity to geopolitical rivals. In his inaugural address and teleconference address to Davos on 20 and 23 January, President Donald Trump promised to launch ‘a revolution of common sense’ in order ‘to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom.’ In pledging to return government to the people, Trump promised to restore the political compact between citizens and the government. He has so far exceeded expectations with a raft of measures aimed at dismantling the deep state, not in the fabled first one hundred days, but in his first one hundred hours and ten days. On his very first day back in office, Trump insisted that ‘Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society’ and ‘Our liberties will no longer be denied.’ His suite of executive orders ended the Green New Deal, withdrew America from the Paris climate pact, and revoked the EV mandate so ‘you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice;’ terminated DEI policies that had shoehorned ‘race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,’ returning instead to ‘a colour-blind and merit-based society.’ Official US policy reverted also with immediate effect to the insistence that ‘there are only two genders: male and female.’ He has also pulled out the US, again, from the WHO. As the progressive Utopia is suddenly seen as the ugly face of Dystopia, Out with the progressive new, in with the conservative old. Starting with a bang is proving popular – who’d have guessed? According to a Quinnipiac University poll published on 29 January, Trump begins his second term with a ten-point higher approval rating (46-36) than his first term, the Democratic Party has recorded the highest unfavourability rating ever in Quinnipiac poll history (57) and the Republicans their highest favourability rating ever (43) which also gives them their highest 12-point favourability advantage over the Democrats (43-31). An I&I/TIPP poll released on 3 February showed that on 12 key issues covered by Trump’s executive orders, four were backed by a majority of voters, five by a plurality, and only three were opposed by a plurality or majority. The shockwaves from Trump’s clarion call are also already having a global impact. All seven candidates vying to become the next president of the International Olympic Committee have suddenly rediscovered their spines and promise to restrict women’s sports to biological females across the board. For some like Sebastian Coe this is sweet vindication. For some others it is a Damascene conversion. Similarly, London’s virtue-signalling ultra-woke mayor Sir (for a Knight of the Realm he is) Sadiq Khan has quietly dropped his personal pronouns (he/him, not that anyone was in doubt) from his X account. Let’s be clear and blunt. Everyone who supported the gender self-ID idiocy enabled the bullying, elevated safety risk, and marginalisation of women. As with Covid crimes, it is not acceptable to put it all aside as history and move on. No, not now, not ever, leastways not until heads have rolled and, metaphorically speaking, adorn the business end of pitchforks. The Seminal Importance of Free Speech Which is the bigger denial of science: that the earth is flat or any man can be a woman just because? Yet, without free speech, we cannot criticise and oppose any wrong propagated by the ruling authorities. Nor defend any other human right, civil liberty, or economic freedom. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s admission of the reality of the government-ordered Big Tech censorship complex should forever stain the legacy of all the Supreme Court justices who last year voted to overturn the lower court’s injunction in Murthy v Missouri. Facebook and Instagram have joined Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) to reject censorship at the behest/order of government and ditched fact-checking, thus terminating yet another tool that was widely deployed to gaslight the public. The number of times fact-checkers got their facts wrong and young left-aligned nerds inserted themselves into complex scientific debates among serious scientists was frankly embarrassing and served more to discredit the media than the dissidents. There are examples galore from Covid, net zero, and gender-ID policies of governments trying to play God and claiming the ability to control virus, climate, and biology. They clearly demonstrate that governments are among the biggest and most consequential purveyors of malevolent forms of public communications and messaging. The most perverse act of gaslighting is exploiting the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation as the justification to crush civil liberties and political freedoms, grow the bureaucracy, expand state power, and subjugate citizens. This is what Australia’s social media regulations for the young, and the office and head of the eSafety Commission, are all about. How about, instead of scolding us that our analysis is the result of toxic misinformation that should be banned, the response is: ‘What you just said is wrong. Let me explain why.’ The office was established and its head appointed by the last, supposedly centre-right Coalition government. Clearly, free speech matters to them not as the foundation of human liberty and freedom, but as a vote-swinging transactional issue. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s professional instincts as a former police officer seem stronger than his commitment to liberal principles. Douglas Murray in his regular weekly podcast for The Free Press recalls Vaclav Havel’s inaugural speech where he spoke of living in ‘a contaminated moral environment’ during communism. That had been made possible, maintained, and could have continued only with the passive complicity of the people. By throwing off the yoke of oppression, by taking back power, the citizens took responsibility for the past and therefore for the future. Similarly, by pledging to return government to the people, Trump promises to restore the political compact between citizens and the government by cleansing the moral environment. Martin Gurri wrote in the New York Post: ‘The open society was closed for repairs until further notice.’ This is why Trump’s restoration of free speech rights is of first-order greater importance than his energy, gender, and immigration policies, consequential as the latter are. The US weight in world affairs gives it an unmatched gravitational pull on world attention. Trump’s words and actions are being noticed everywhere. Maybe, just maybe, he can help lead the world to transition back from energy fanaticism and gender extremism to realism. His immediate bold decisiveness in translating people’s priorities and preferences into executive actions serve only to show up the timidity and weakness of other so-called leaders on things that matter to citizens. Farage, known to be close to the US president, is Britain’s answer to Trump minus the crude vulgarity. With the discredited Tories on death watch and Labour’s hold on the electorate on life support, Farage leads Reform UK as an insurgent party. On 1 February Reform polled ahead of the Tories in all seven major opinion polls for the first time. On 3 February Reform topped the YouGov UK poll for the first time with 25 percent support to 24 for Labour and 21 for the Conservatives. Will the ripples spreading out from Anglo-US shores turn into tidal waves by the time they reach Australia’s shores? We can but hope. This article was published at Brownstone Institute