The world was recently stunned to hear a US Supreme Court nominee tell the Senate what ‘progress’ it was to see a woman selected for the great post – and then with her next breath expressed confusion as to what a woman was… Her astounding reply that she ‘didn’t know because she wasn’t a biologist’ says much about what the far-fringe has been promoting in the public forum for decades.

It’s little surprise this absurdity has finally arrived in Australia, landing in the words of an esteemed federal judge.

There have been incessant attempts to replace common sense with the bedlam of extremist partisanship producing quite a few shocks prior to this particular one. Eternal, perfect, and infinite mathematics has been deemed, for example, to possess a racist component. Moreover, men can (supposedly) have babies, confirmed by Apple launching their pregnant man emoji. Paedophilia is no longer a crime but a mental condition, and people are much safer when made defenceless by disarming them. Amid all this, in the background there’s a mass environmental apocalypse looming in ten years – every ten years.

All that doom and chaos is deemed the comeuppance for Western culture, whose heroes and founding fathers are now portrayed as villains who don’t deserve capitals named after them or statues erected in their honour – and never did.

The uber-sophisticated 21st Century’s leisure, comfort, safety, riches, and abundance for billions has nothing to do (we’re told) with the astonishingly creative spirit that created it. Any culture capitulating to the mental gymnastics and the sort of sophistry required to twist and demean its own brilliant centuries-old chronicle is destined for only one place…

Along the way, perhaps there’s something positive that might still be eked out of the society-destroying mantra: consider Australia’s Thunderbirds. Dromornis stirtoni, giant flightless ‘Thunderbirds’, were pushed to extinction coinciding with the arrival of humans in Australia tens of thousands of years ago. Thanks to the collective political insanity that now passes for public policy there is a simple and painless solution to remedy this ecological misstep also known as extinction.

If subjective self-identification is really all that’s needed to thwart reality and create any existence that pleases, surely Aussies can collectively close their eyes and wish with all their might for another creature to identify itself as a Thunderbird? Extinction solved. And there are such animals conveniently already farmed in Australia: emus.

It is no more ridiculous than an invitee who addressed the Democratic National Convention in America during 2020 self-described as a ‘Black-Vietnamese, transgender nonbinary/gender transcendent mermaid Queen-Kin’.

If it’s worked to bring mermaids into existence, it can surely blur the difference between two fairly similar birds…. All that’s required is for academics, pundits, politicians, and self-styled activists to work their wizardry. This coterie has successfully peddled far more astounding groupthink than magically converting emus into Thunderbirds. And any who refuse to go along with this could be subject to the wrath currently being used to bully cowed populations into line.

The lockstep influence of the hive-mind isn’t to be underestimated. That it reaches into Senate confirmation hearings for the highest court in America speaks to its power. 

George Orwell in 1984 wrote that the party insists that all reject the evidence of their eyes and ears, their first and most essential commandment. Fewer and fewer today dare to trust their own eyes rather than the collective fantasies of their political handlers.

It’s a surety that the world would opt in the end to pretend and move forward with a miraculous resurgence of Thunderbirds, and in no time at all.

David Nabhan writes science columns for Newsmax (Shaking Up Science ) and The Times of Israel (Tectonic Shifts).