Elites at War with the People

By Ramesh Thakur

An important takeaway from the last four years for many governments is the surprising ease of winning public compliance with demands for intrusive behavioural changes that completely reset the balance of rights and responsibilities between citizens, society, markets, and the government. Instead of implementing policies to give effect to voter priorities, the emboldened dominant metropolitan elites are entirely dedicated to the proposition that citizens should be forced to live by their rules on what to say, think, read, watch, do.

A telling indicator is the abandonment in practice of the long-standing principle of informed consent that was codified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last December and came into effect in January.

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Mass Immigration Contradicts Claims of Embedded Structural Racism

The West seems to be in decline economically, militarily, and as a moral inspiration for much of the rest of the world. With self-confidence sapped, its major political parties compete over which of them can be trusted to best manage the decline in order to ensure a soft landing, with slowly depleting wealth, falling standards of living, and global clout and influence shrinking.

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Another indicator is the loss of control over border security. Mass inflow of peoples from diverse cultures with radically differing belief systems, values, and rights is not the best recipe for creating an integrated, harmonious, and cohesive new community – who knew? Instead, other than in countries like Japan that refused to go along with the mantra that uncontrolled ‘immigration and diversity’ are always an unqualified good, existing bonds of cohesion are breaking down with alarming speed and creating fresh security headaches.

Nearly nine million illegal migrants have swarmed across from Mexico into the US during Biden’s presidency. The biggest millstone around the Rishi Sunak government trapped in a political death spiral is the hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal migrants. Some 550,000 migrants came into Australia last year.

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Climate and Trans Extremism

Holly Valance, the Australian-origin former Neighbours soap star, describes Greta Thunberg as a ‘demonic little gremlin high priestess of climatism’ who is treated ‘as a goddess in the classrooms despite contributing to the epidemic of ‘depression and anxiety’ in children.

Trans-activists are erasing the word woman even from motherhood and sexual assaults. Nurses are advised to use words like ‘birthing parents’ and ‘chestfeeding’ as substitutes for mothers and breastfeeding. Harry Potter series author JK Rowling has promised to keep calling transwomen ‘men’ and risk criminal conviction after a new Scottish law, that threatens to severely punish factually correct speech that violates legally correct definitions, came into effect on 1 April, appropriately enough. The linguistic gender madness of the crowds is spreading to esteemed medical journals that are banishing the ‘w’ word and associated language.

In Canada, a Supreme Court justice gratuitously reprimanded a lower court judge for using the word woman, in a sexual assault case no less, instead of a ‘person with vagina.’ That too with the explanation that the single word was confusing in comparison to the clarity of her own preferred phrase. Neither the complainant nor the accused in the case claimed to be transgender and gender identity and language was not an issue before the court. To cap it all, the decision came on International Women’s Day (8 March). I hope someone has forwarded Rowling’s mischievous tweet to the judge: ‘Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilised resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses.’

Recording trans-identifying males as women in violent crime statistics, including rape and murder, will only distort and make a mockery of sex-specific statistics on violent crime. This was highlighted with the murder conviction of ‘Scarlet Blake,’ in February. He was recorded as a woman by the police in their official statistics even though sent to a male prison. The Women’s Rights Network pointedly asked: why accept his claim of being a woman against the clear biological evidence when, because of the evidence against him, you didn’t accept his protestations of innocence?

Such are the contradictions when legal fiction collides with the reality of male-female interactions in prisons. Because ‘deadnaming’ is criminalised, his pre-trans name cannot be published. Because the media lacks the courage to fight this en masse, the insanity is slowly but surely normalised.

New age feminists attack alleged male privileges but support men who claim to be women under the banal slogan ‘transwomen are women and trans rights are human rights.’ The push for more women in boardrooms, meant to redress gender imbalance, is subverted when transwomen are included in the female category in gender-specific lists of CEOs.

Cleanse your memory of the aggressive big trans bullies you see in action on the streets intimidating gender-realist critics. The ultimate emotional blackmail card of trans-terrorists is the threat of self-harm and suicide by vulnerable trans snowflakes. Watch any old Bollywood movie and you will quickly discover that the master of emotional blackmail as the tool of choice for ensuring compliance by adult children with parents’ wishes is the Indian family.

To be clear, I have nothing but sympathy for adults who feel genuinely trapped in the wrong body and are more comfortable with dress, appearance, and lifestyle choices better suited to their felt gender. But I draw the line at using trans identity to violate women’s hard-earned rights to dignity, privacy, and safety, from locker rooms and toilets to rape and domestic violence shelters, hospital wards, and prisons. Inclusion for trans should not become an alibi to enable abuse of women. Any gender equality law based on gender self-ID can be quickly corrupted into a predator’s charter that shreds women’s rights. Telling women to subordinate their safety worries to accommodate the wishes of biological males is old-fashioned misogyny.

Wokery and Net Zero Are Strategic Own Goals by the West

UK Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch is surely right to insist that quota-filling clumsy diversity drives are not a substitute for effective action to redress inequalities. Often, instead of unity and inclusion they produce division and alienation. Do Western elites have any real grasp of the mockery and ridicule in which they are held for their indulgence of race baiters and grifters and obsession with pronouns and rainbow flags? They present easy targets for the world’s autocrats to point to the dangers of activist-captured democracy. In a fiery address to the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi in October 2021, President Vladimir Putin attacked teaching children ‘that a boy can become a girl and vice versa’ as monstrous and ‘on the verge of a crime against humanity.’ He stoutly rejected the demands of transgender rights supporters to end ‘basic things such as mother, father, family or gender differences.’

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The democratic centre has been infiltrated and captured by the elite fringe. Just like those who spoke out against and refused to go along with the Covid narrative, many have been cancelled for calling out the madness of the metastasising wokery. They should take comfort and solace in the truth that by the enemies they make in resisting tyranny, they shall be known for their virtues of courage and integrity.

An even bigger threat to the West’s relative power is the singular determination to destroy its economies and transfer wealth to China through self-harm in the doomed pursuit of Net Zero. The alleged climate emergency has become the de facto battleground for strategic dominance carried out by other means. European manufacturers of solar panels are facing extinction because of the massive influx of Chinese products and the mix of incentives for electric vehicles (EVs). Extra levies on internal combustion engines (ICE) are subsidising China’s already dominant EV industry.

This is over and above the harsh reality that EVs make neither economic, environmental, nor energy security sense when all factors are taken into consideration over the full life cycle of a vehicle. If vehicle emissions were measured in the components and energy requirements in the total production cycle, energy mix in the grid, backup power requirements, impact of tyres and weight, and disposal after end of life, EVs would likely be banned for performing not too well.

The claim of 97 percent scientific consensus behind man-made global warming was always a confected furphy. The new Climate The Movie exposes this big lie with several credible experts questioning the science behind the rush to embrace Net Zero. Countries should look for the energy sweet spot between emissions, reliability, affordability, and collateral costs that lead to ruin. For two-three decades I’ve been hearing that renewables will make emissions-free power supply plentiful, reliable, and progressively cheaper. So far ‘lived’ experience is the exact opposite on all three counts.

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Because of the fixation on CO2 emissions, market forces and consumer choice are not permitted to determine what people buy and what products businesses make and sell. Even conservative governments use state power to dictate production and consumer choices, from nuclear power to EVs. EV sales have been slowing and dealers’ stocks are not budging beyond fleet sales, with the first early signs of pushback even in the latter category. Hertz is cutting its losses and eliminating its EV fleet of hire vehicles. Manufacturers have put production on hold. Sales of hybrids have grown with no range and charging station anxiety.

Emulating the doomed heat pump mandate in the UK, President Joe Biden imposed a government fiat on consumer preference in the US with a sweeping crackdown on petrol cars. Half of all cars sold in the US by 2030 must be electric. Let’s wait and see how this holds up against the bumper sticker opposition ‘Biden is coming for your truck.’ On 21 March Audi issued a second recall of EVs sold in Australia owing to battery fire risk. British citizens have been awakened to the real-world impacts of the rush to embrace heat pumps and EVs. The perennially cash-strapped National Health Service prefers to spend half a billion pounds on switching to electric ambulances instead of hiring more frontline nurses.

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As this shows, people are mobilising to fight back. The ‘Bud Light moment’ has entered marketing folklore as the perfect lesson of go woke, go broke. Hollywood and Disney are relearning that people watch movies and TV shows to be entertained and not to be lectured on moralism. Political activism by the entertainment industry cuts into profits. In the UK, when the BBC reprimanded Justin Webb, a longtime radio presenter, for saying ‘trans women, in other words males’, it caused an internal ‘meltdown’ among female staff who described his statement as fact.

In the US, 16 female athletes have launched a lawsuit against their professional association that allowed Lia Thomas to share a locker room and bathroom facilities with more than 300 women despite ‘full male genitalia.’ This exposed the athletes ‘to shock, humiliation, and embarrassment in violation of their constitutional right to bodily privacy.’ In Alaska, Patricia Silva confronted a man shaving in the women’s locker room, was banned from Planet Fitness gym for violating its policy of inclusive kindness, and posted on X that the gym would rather cancel her membership than protect young women and 12-year-old girls from ‘men with a penis.’

More generally, realisation is dawning across the West, but not yet in Australia, that routine prescription of puberty-blocking drugs to gender-confused young people is child abuse. England banned these for under-18s on 12 March.

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Via https://brownstone.org/articles/elites-at-war-with-the-people/