In helping to create the extraordinary growth of the American economy, Donald Trump himself is the subject of an extraordinary growth industry.Every time I turn on CNN (for scientific purposes only) I’m confronted by a new exploding beetrooted face telling me how many lies The Donald has told during his Presidency. The numbers are off the radar: 14,436, 15,325, 16,210… ever higher, ever more incredible.

Somewhere in the bowels of CNN there must be a unit of indentured labour, fabricating these statistics and passing them on. By engaging in fake news they hope to create more anti-Trump news. If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a whopper.

This is the state of today’s mainstream media. The Left is in such a state of delusion it thinks it can turn the obviously fictional into the factual, simply by assertion. The CNN unit must also be moonlighting here, feeding their manufactured baloney into the ABC, SBS, Channel Nine newspapers, The Project, the Guardian and The Conversation.

Three examples: The first concerns a bad case of ‘If I want it to be true, it must be true’ syndrome. For 200 years Australian historians recorded the facts of pre-1788 Aboriginal society: a nomadic, hunter/gatherer people who had to scrap hard for survival. Domestic violence, infanticide and cross-tribal conflict were common. By the turn of the 18th century, Aborigines had a quality of life comparable to European peasants but then, due to the tyranny of distance, the technological gains of Britain’s Industrial Revolution left them behind. When the First Fleet arrived, there was no evidence of permanent housing, villages or advanced agriculture. There were no written languages, books or even the invention of the wheel.

Unless the early settlers were hallucinating. In one of the great acts of ideologically-inspired fiction, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu depicts Indigenous Australia as the new Babylon: large tracts of land being cultivated feeding a network of villages via a single system of government. Undeterred by the way in which nobody ever saw this, the ABC is turning Pascoe’s book into a doco, while the NSW Department of Education has introduced it into school libraries and history classes. Fake history has become fake education.

In a second burst of fake news, how many times have we read that Margaret Court regards ‘transgender children as the work of the Devil’? Hundreds? Thousands? And that’s just in Peter FitzSimons columns. In fact, she has never said that. In a 2017 interview, the 75-year-old tennis great spoke of how programs like Safe Schools, in encouraging schoolchildren to change their gender, are the work of the Devil. I’m happy to agree. If there is a Devil, he probably has Roz Ward sitting next to him clutching a flaming pitchfork. Mrs Court has been fitted up big-time. Last week on The Conversation website, two ‘academics’ from the University of Western Sydney repeated the canard. Not only had they failed to do their research (by checking the interview transcript) but they passed on this misinformation to Tennis Australia where they are paid consultants. No wonder TA will only ‘recognise’ (rather than celebrate) the 50th anniversary of Mrs Court’s 1970 Grand Slam triumph. It is paying for advice from two dummies spreading fake news about the world’s greatest-ever female tennis player. The LGBTIWTF crowd never let the facts get in the way of a good lynching.

My third example comes from the world of climate change fabrication. There was a time when the public debate about global warming was reasoned, rational and evidence-based. Then the Left took over. The Greens invented the propaganda of a ‘climate emergency’, trying to get parliaments and local councils to declare an emergency and 100 per cent renewable energy policies. The fanatics (with help from the media) started to say that every problem, every disaster, every setback in society had just one cause: climate change. They were telling people to ‘follow the science’ but had abandoned any sense of proportion themselves in what the climate science was actually saying. Anyone giving a moderate, balanced view of climate change is now automatically attacked by the Left. Sadly, scientists are also subject to this treatment. They are reluctant to go against the new, hysterical leftist orthodoxy for fear of public humiliation. Climate has become a science-free debate. So how do we establish the truth? There was a time when climate scientists spoke independently, when they advanced facts publicly. We need to go back to hear what they had to say when the global warming debate started in Australia 15 years ago.

I was reminded of this recently, when the press pumped up Ross Garnaut as a prophet regarding this summer’s bushfires – quoting from his 2008 climate change report to the Rudd Government. But what did Garnaut actually say in a report which relied heavily on the best available science of its time? There was no talk of a climate emergency or of mass extinction. No banshee teenager screeching, ‘How dare you!’ Instead, the conclusions were repeatedly couched in doubt and wide margins of error. Climate change was presented as a 100-year trend, not an overnight apocalypse. ‘Single events, such as an intense tropical cyclone or a long-lived heatwave,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be directly attributed to climate change.’ The Greens say global warming means permanent rainfall decline and drought in Australia. Garnaut said: ‘Effects of future warming on rainfall patterns are difficult to predict. Rainfall decline has not been definitively attributed to human-induced climate change.’ And he reported that the extent to which the drought-inducing El Nino effect ‘is influenced by global warming is unknown.’

The Greens scaremonger about ‘more extreme weather events’. Yet Garnaut said it’s ‘difficult to draw definitive conclusions on whether observed changes in tropical cyclones can be attributed to climate change… Studies suggest that the frequency of East Coast cyclones will either remain the same or decrease by up to 44 per cent.’ These conclusions are on the best advice of the CSIRO and BoM – the science we are told to follow. In truth, the Greens have junked the science in favour of cheap-jack scare campaigns.

Re-reading Garnaut is like an antidote to Green-Left hyperbole. Are you worried about people frying alive due to global warming? Garnaut forecast, ‘In NSW, the number of annual temperature-related deaths is expected to decrease by 30 per cent’. What about the economy being destroyed, sector-by-sector, with mass unemployment from the impact of climate change? Garnaut said, ‘Australians will be substantially wealthier in 2100 in terms of goods and services, despite setbacks from climate change.’ It hardly sounds like the end of the world. My best advice: if you hear a Leftie banging on hysterically about doom-and-gloom, assume the opposite is true. They are full of fake news.