Last week I looked at how Anglosphere democracies seem to have surrendered the agenda on gender critical theory, trans activism and border control. UK Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch insists that clumsy quota-filling diversity drives are not a substitute for effective action to redress inequalities. Often, instead of unity and inclusion they produce division and alienation. The woke activists who egg them on have little understanding of the real world beyond their privileged existence, would not understand real equality if it hit them in the face and are engaged in a permanent protest against fairness and merit. Educators, for example, are conceding defeat and kowtowing to the soft bigotry of low expectations by abandoning the requirement for basic maths literacy because, allegedly, this is racist discrimination against minority students and reinforces systemic white privilege. Shhh –don’t mention the superior abilities and performance of Chinese and Indian students!

This week I’d like to extend that analysis to other examples that collectively demonstrate how today’s dominant metropolitan elites are dedicated to the proposition that citizens should be forced to live by their rules on what we can say, think, read, watch, do. Which cars and heating appliances we buy. Ofcom, the UK’s broadcast regulator, has knuckle-rapped GB News because, I suspect, its success with viewers is threatening the cosy dominance of the legacy media with their unwatchable woke-tinted broadcasts. Jordan Peterson may be the best-known cancelee by his professional college, but he is not the only Canadian. Ottawa surgeon Miklos Matyas and Ontario doctor Kulvinder Kaur Gill, among others, have also been punished by their respective regulators for having the temerity to use their own professional judgment when advising patients on Covid.

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. 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 claim of 97 per cent 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.

Because of the fixation on CO2 emissions, market forces and consumer choice are not permitted to determine what people buy and businesses make and sell. Instead governments use state power to dictate production and consumer choices, from nuclear power to EVs. While EV sales have been slowing, dealers stocks are not budging beyond fleet sales. Hertz is cutting its losses and eliminating its EV fleet of hire vehicles. Manufacturers have put production on hold. Sales of hybrids have grown thanks to no range and charging station anxiety. On 21 March, Audi issued a second recall of EVs sold in Australia owing to battery fire risk. Like the doomed heat pump mandate in the UK, President Biden is imposing a government fiat on consumer preference in the US with a sweeping crackdown on petrol cars. Let’s wait and see how this holds up against the bumper-sticker opposition ‘Biden is coming for your truck’. If vehicle emissions were measured 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 be disincentivised for being among the worst performing. British citizens have been awakened to the real-world impacts of the rush to embrace heat pumps and EVs. The perennially struggling NHS prefers to spend half-a-billion pounds on switching to electric ambulances instead of hiring more frontline nurses.

Another pet hate is self-service checkouts that have wiped out jobs and reduce still further the daily human interactions so essential to our sense of wellbeing as social animals. Now the smart business types are discovering that as they reduce their customers’ shopping experience to a purely transactional exchange, the normative restraints against petty theft have softened and the incidence of shoplifting has increased. More and more staff are needed to check customers, angering the honest ones even more at being treated as potential thieves, and eroding brand loyalty; and staff are still required to deal with equipment failures and inadequacies. In other words businesses have been seduced by false economies. And so it is coming to pass that in both the UK and the US, shops are doing away with self-service in favour of manned checkouts once again.

As this shows, people are mobilising to fight back. The ‘Bud Lite moment’ has entered marketing folklore as the perfect lesson of ‘go woke, go broke’. Hollywood and Disney, which has just capitulated to Florida in the dispute with Governor DeSantis, are re-learning that people watch movies and TV shows to be entertained, not lectured on morals. 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, female swimmers are suing their professional association that allowed Lia Thomas to share bathroom facilities with more than 300 women despite ‘full male genitalia’. This exposed them ‘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 a 12-year old girl 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.

The groupthink afflicting elites is compounded by the bribery, coercion and censorship of legacy and social media which, intended to deprive people of alternative thinking, has instead disconnected elites from how Hiluxland is thinking. Hence the cultural-political aftershocks when voters prove their refusal to be cowed and shamed. The revolt by European farmers has not only brought electoral success in the Netherlands. It has forced the European Commission, against advice from climate scientists, to slash environmental regulations for the agricultural sector.

Like the Voice referendum in Australia, Ireland’s twin referenda on family and women were defeated decisively despite the united support of the metropolitan and political elites. Canada’s Conservative leader shows that clearly and forcefully confronting progressive rostrums is richly rewarded by voters. How long till the Libs grasp the truth that the cultural hegemony is not as crushingly successful as believed by the elites?