World-renowned epidemiologist, Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, has made the point that the biggest source of disinformation during the two plus years of the Covid pandemic was government and its agencies. Around the democratic world, and certainly here in Australia, governments deliberately instilled fear that was in no proportion to the actual risk to anyone under 75. They pretended everyone faced the same risk when healthy young people faced effectively zero risk from Covid. (Take a look at some recent studies from overseas. In one country they could not find a single person under 30 who had died from Covid who didn’t have at least two seriously bad pre-existing medical conditions. Not one! The same results are coming out in other countries.) Governments and elites tried to suppress and censor arguments and evidence that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, sometimes on the ridiculous basis that such claims were racist. Today we know that the lab-leak theory is overwhelmingly likely the correct one. Governments and our ruling elites also pretended that masks work. The gold-standard scientific Cochrane review recently came out and said there was no evidence supporting mask wearing as effective. I could go on and on.

Then we have the recent backtracking (aka ‘arse-covering’) exercise around the massive damage we have done to young people not just by locking them up for two years but by closing down schools. In the UK, all sorts of the elites who pushed lockdowns with a ruthless self-righteousness now say that they didn’t know just how bad the damage to the young would be. Oxford epidemiologist (and by most accounts the best one in the world) Professor Sunetra Gupta has just called this out for the bollocks it is. She and Bhattacharya and then Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, had made plain very early on in the pandemic the damage that would ensue to the young. Moreover, a fortnight ago or so in the UK Telegraph Professor Gupta pointedly pointed out that anyone who today says he or she remains committed to lockdowns but wouldn’t next time close down schools is (my words) ‘an idiot’. If you keep schools open there is no point at all in any sort of lockdown. You have to pick. The right choice is the one Sweden made (and realise, readers, that no-lockdown Sweden has the OECD’s lowest cumulative excess deaths, something our elites never, ever mention).

Then there were all the incorrect claims we were told about the vaccines – that they would stop you from getting it (no evidence for that; never tested for that in fact; and patently false), stop you from spreading it to others (again, not tested for this and not true), and was worth getting on a cost-benefit basis whatever your age. The last of these now looks to be clearly false. Young healthy people were basically at zero risk from Covid but the risk of the vaccine to them (argue about just what it was) was most definitely non-negligible. So government and corporate and university vaccine mandates and pseudo-mandates were flat out immoral.

Or I could remind you all that the ruling laptop class, imposing diktats that ruined the lives of small-business owners, the young and many others, never took a pay cut or suffered any financial cost to themselves at all – giving an Orwellian twist to claims about how ‘we’re all in this together’. Likewise, I could run through the total silence of the myriad self-styled human rights brigades (most definitely including the $400,000-plus per annum commissioners on our Australian Human Rights Commission) who said not a peep about the police thuggery, the government misinformation, the closed borders, the legions of petty and useless rules that led to untold suffering and inhumanities. Not a single peep out of any of these people about the worst inroads on our civil liberties in three centuries!

Or go and read the recent Johns Hopkins’ meta-study that found the costs of lockdowns to be ten or twenty times higher than the benefits (a totally predictable outcome as we here at The Spectator Australia in fact predicted it right from the start).

As I said, the two-plus years of the Covid pandemic showed our elites and the political, legal and medical establishments to be woefully useless. As Bhattacharya said, they were ‘the biggest source of disinformation’ going. Trust in these elites has rightfully cratered as plenty of US and UK polls now show. But maybe readers are inclined to think ‘well, it was just the pandemic and sure our elites didn’t cover themselves in glory but in regular times they’re pretty good’. If that’s your thinking change it because it’s wrong.

Take the Voice referendum by way of example. Virtually the entirety of the establishment – the legal elites in big firms and at the bar and on the bench, charities, big corporates (including the pusillanimous mining sector), nearly the entirety of the university sector, the public broadcaster, all of them – have come out in favour of the Voice. And yet the majority of voters look likely to tell these morally sanctimonious people in the key positions in society to get stuffed. It reminds me of the 2016 Brexit referendum.  And truth be told, the elites are wrong and the regular middle-Australia voters are right.

The same goes for the plethora of ‘culture war’ fights. Our elites (and of course I speak in generalisations knowing there are a few exceptions here and there) never find any issue on which to fight and stand up for common sense. Where are you at in a society when top bureaucrats, politicians and even top doctors cannot tell you what a woman is? And do any of these people really believe there are 68 (or whatever today’s ideologically imposed number is) genders? Because if you believe in the fact of an external, causal world that imposes mind-independent truths on us, whatever our personal feelings or druthers, then the fact is there are two sexes.

If we use the word ‘gender’ with any connection to external reality and not just in some Alice in Wonderland ‘words can mean whatever I want’ sense then there are two of those two. Yet our elites overwhelmingly are afraid to fight on this terrain as well. They implicitly seem to think someone’s feelings of offence and of catering to those subjective feelings matter more than facts about the world.

Next week I am going to follow on from these thoughts to say why I believe the only path to victory for conservative political parties is to fight the culture wars. In Europe, parties that do this are winning. Conservative parties that run from these fights are being crushed. Think about how hopeless it is to fight, say, purely on an economic terrain in favour of smaller government and lower taxes (aka today’s state Liberal parties) when the dominant culture disdains self-reliance, risk-taking, delayed gratification and the like. A healthy economy demands a healthy culture and so there is no way to sidestep the culture wars.

But that’s next week. For now, just think about how we seem to have the most cowardly, corporatist, incompetent and self-serving ruling elites of any of our lifetimes. And weep.