Censorship exists to protect bad ideas from public scrutiny. Because it is effectively a toxic four-letter notion, governments in thrall to the control of information that members of the public can freely access have taken to an entirely new typology. ‘Fake news’ is news that’s made up as an act of mischief, including false reports of deaths, affairs, birth certificates etc. ‘Misinformation’ is false, inaccurate or incomplete information created or spread inadvertently without intent to deceive. ‘Disinformation’ is the spread of knowingly false information to conceal truth and influence opinion. ‘Malinformation’ is the deliberate spread of false information to cause harm, for example AI-generated embarrassing or otherwise damaging video or audio. In sum, fake news is false, misinformation misleads, disinformation deceives, and malinformation harms. There is also, of course, good old-fashioned government propaganda, which promotes a message and narrative with the view to change public behaviour in line with government preferences regardless of the facts and the science. Distinct from all these, ‘gaslighting’ is when actors attach the labels mis-, dis- and mal-information to true information and real facts in order to delegitimise them and promote their own narrative with the view to manipulate people’s opinions and behaviour. The ‘liar’s dividend’ pays off when those who sow mistrust successfully then use the ensuing confusion and loss of trust to their own financial, political or professional advantage.

Examples

The 51 former US intelligence officials who denounced the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation is a perfect example of gaslighting. In the UK, the Starmer government’s initial response to the frenzied stabbings at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport in July that killed three beautiful little girls is another. The ethnically African killer was initially described as a Cardiff-born UK citizen and suggestions of terrorism were attacked as racist disinformation despite multiple threads of evidence suggesting otherwise. The Cass Review’s Report exposed the fear-mongering lie of gender-confused children at high risk of committing suicide without gender affirmation policies. How can we spot climate change gaslighting? Look for the jet-flying alarmists (who prove by their actions they don’t believe their own heated rhetoric on global boiling) and the subsidy-seeking grifters. Remember Albanese and Bowen’s separate RAF jets to the same event in Hunter Valley in March 2024? The Covid deep state was an architecture of political coordination by the administrative state with other institutional actors, the legacy and social media, academia, NGOs, and foundations. In mid-2020, before Covid vaccines had been developed, a team of five scientists conducted two experiments on public messaging to encourage vaccine take-up by overcoming hesitancy in pursuit of herd immunity. They examined several different strategies. The first experiment found that messages that frame vaccination as a joint cooperative action to protect others and emphasise the reputational damage that would be caused by vaccine rejectionism were the most effective both in increasing the willingness to get the jab and generating spillover effects to advise others to do so. They concluded: ‘Our findings are consistent with the idea that vaccination is often treated as a social contract in which people are expected to vaccinate and those who do not are sanctioned.’ We now know that such strategies were indeed widely adopted by several governments, including federal and state governments in Australia. ‘Permission structures’ were manipulated using digital communications to nudge people into progressive beliefs by the promise of moral standing among peers if they adopted the approved viewpoint. What I find striking about the Yale team’s experiment is that the public messaging was not anchored in any way in actual scientific or empirical data. It was pure propaganda, lying about the individual and social impact of vaccines as a legitimate technique of public health messaging. What the 2020 team did not study was how, once increasing numbers of people realise that the government had deliberately lied to claim or imply that vaccines would stop infection for individuals and wider transmission to the community, vaccine hesitancy would go up and overall trust in government, health authorities, and the media would plummet. As two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Professors Jay Bhattacharya (then of the Stanford School of Medicine and now Trump’s nominee as director of the National Institutes of Health, the world’s biggest funder of medical research) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard Medical School), wrote recently:

Despite lacking key data, public health agencies made unsubstantiated vaccine claims, published unscientific vaccine recommendations, and imposed unethical vaccine mandates. As a result, vaccine hesitance has increased while the trust in public health has deteriorated.

Separately, Kulldorff wrote in an op-ed in December that putting the well-known vaccine-sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr in charge of the vaccine research agenda as Secretary of Health and Human Services is the most effective way ‘to restore public trust in vaccination – which has taken a big hit since the lies attending the rollout of the Covid vaccine’. The phrase ‘DEI’ was deployed to mean the exact opposite of the three constituent words: uniformity of thought and behaviour; unequal treatment of individuals to support group-defined equitable outcomes regardless of merit, qualifications and performance; and exclusion and excommunication of heretics and apostates. The puppeteers in the Biden administration anointed themselves the font of all wisdom and, emulating New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, the guardians of truth. When confronted with contradictory evidence, the keepers of reality chose to sanctify error. Consistent with this and betraying a lack of self-awareness to the very end, Biden complained in his farewell address of ‘an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation’ from ‘a tech-industrial complex’ that was ‘enabling the abuse of power’.

Course correction by Trump

In his inaugural address and teleconference address to Davos Man on January 20 and 23, Trump promised ‘to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom’. His suite of executive orders have ended the Green New Deal, withdrawn America from the Paris climate pact, and revoked the EV mandate so ‘you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice’; and terminated DEI policies to return to ‘a colour-blind and merit-based society’. US policy has also defaulted back to ‘there are only two genders: male and female’. Starting with a bang is proving popular – who’d have guessed? According to a Quinnipiac University poll, Trump begins his second term with a ten-point higher approval rating (46-36), the Democratic Party has the highest unfavourability rating ever (57 per cent) and the Republicans their highest (43 per cent). An I&I/TIPP poll released on February 3 showed that on 12 key issues covered by Trump’s executive orders, four were backed by a majority of voters, five by a plurality, and only three were opposed by a plurality or majority. ‘Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,’ Trump said on Day One. ‘Our liberties will no longer be denied.’ Which is the bigger denial of science: the Earth is flat or any man can be a woman just because? Yet, without free speech, we cannot criticise and oppose any wrong propagated by the ruling authorities. Nor defend any other human right, civil liberty or economic freedom. There are examples galore from Covid, Net Zero, and gender-ID policies of governments trying to play God and claiming the ability to control the virus, climate and biology. They clearly demonstrate that governments are among the biggest and most consequential purveyors of malevolent forms of public communications and messaging. The most perverse act of gaslighting is exploiting the prevalence of mis- and disinformation as the justification to crush civil liberties and political freedoms, grow the bureaucracy, expand state power, and subjugate citizens. This is what the social media regulations for the young and the office and head of the eSafety Commission is all about. How about, instead of scolding us that our analysis is the result of toxic misinformation that should be banned, the response was: ‘What you just said is wrong. Let me explain why.’ Recall that the office was established and its head appointed by the last Coalition government. Free speech matters to them not as the foundation of human liberty and freedom, but as a vote-swinging transactional issue. Peter Dutton’s professional instincts as a police officer seem stronger than his commitment to liberal principles. Douglas Murray recalls Vaclav Havel’s lament of life in ‘a contaminated moral environment’ under communism. That was made possible and maintained only with the passive complicity of the people. By throwing off the yoke of oppression, by taking back power, citizens took responsibility for both the past and the future. Similarly, by pledging to return government to the people, Trump promises to restore the political compact between citizens and the government by cleansing the moral environment. He has so far exceeded expectations with a raft of measures aimed at dismantling the deep state, not in the fabled first one hundred days, but in his first one hundred hours. May the good times keep on rolling. Martin Gurri wrote in the New York Post, ‘The open society was closed for repairs until further notice.’ This is why Trump’s restoration of free speech rights is of greater first-order importance than his energy, gender and immigration policies, consequential as the latter are. The US weight in world affairs gives it an unmatched gravitational pull on world attention. Trump’s words and actions are being noticed everywhere. His immediate bold decisiveness in translating people’s priorities and preferences into executive actions show up the timidity and weakness of other so-called leaders on things that matter to citizens. Will the ripples spreading out from US shores turn into tidal waves by the time they reach our shores? We can but hope. This is extracted from a much longer article published in the Brownstone Journal on 7 February.