The Forces That Imperil Public Order

On 13 August, an employment judge in the UK ruled that three white police officers had been discriminated against by being passed over for promotion to detective inspector in favour of an Asian woman applicant. The ruling came at the height of anti-immigrant riots that provoked a response of government-ordered tough policing against rioters and also against those deemed to have stirred up violence by spreading mis- and dis-information through social media posts.

That being the case, Michael Deacon asked in the Telegraph, shouldn’t some Labour members of parliament be prosecuted also for some of their false historical social media posts? But of course, no one expects this actually to happen.

Yet, efforts to censor speech in the public square have been normalised to such an extent that on 12 August Thierry Breton, the European Union commissioner for the internal market, felt emboldened enough to interfere preemptively in the US presidential election. He wrote to Elon Musk threatening regulatory warning over potentially harmful comments in the Musk-Donald Trump interview on X. Because the audience would include EU viewers, Breton was asserting a right to limit what Americans can hear from one of the two major presidential candidates.

Covid-19 was declared to be a global pandemic in early 2020 and seemingly out of nowhere, lockdown restrictions and facemasks in community settings were imposed in a cascading series of countries all over the world, contrary to the existing scientific and policy consensus on influenza pandemic management. The successful development of vaccines was announced by the end of the year and they were rolled out at speed and scale during 2021, backed by uncompromising mandates. Also in 2020, George Floyd was killed by a white policeman, and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and riots broke out across the US and spread like wildfire to many other Western countries.

That is when we encountered two-tier policing and public health policies. Anti-lockdown protestors were dealt with harshly with instant fines and brutal crackdowns. But while anti-lockdown protests were bad because they were super-spreader events of the coronavirus, BLM protests turned out to be good for public health. Many doctors argued that racism is itself a major public health concern and ‘protest is a profound public health intervention, because it allows us to finally address and end forms of inequality.’ In June 2020, more than 1,000 US healthcare professionals signed an open letter to that effect.

Before Covid and the ‘safe and effective’ mantra of vaccines, the ‘science is settled’ thesis had become entrenched in public debate and policy on climate change and the pursuit of net zero. Yet, the consensus had been curated by censorship-cum-coercion to check any and all deviation from the approved narrative. Climate sceptics and contrarians had been banished from the public square by being branded as climate deniers.

The focus of this article is not so much on the splintering of previously cohesive Western societies into antagonistic groups of ethnic tribes, but on the erosion of public trust in the medical profession because of Covid authoritarianism and in the government and media owing to two-tier governance that is visibly more tolerant of actions by self-lacerating Westerners while tough on those who wish to preserve Western indigenous culture. Both are examples of ruling elites indulging their inner totalitarianism to define the permissible boundaries of thinking, speech, and behaviour by individuals and businesses.

Covid Broke Trust in the Medical Profession

On 9 July, President Joe Biden’s former Covid czar Ashish Jha conceded that vaccine mandates, which he had backed, ‘bred a lot of distrust’ in the long run and did cause harms as well. Studies continue to be published to the effect that policy interventions to fight the pandemic – lockdowns, masks, vaccines – saved millions of lives. Thus a study by Watson et al. published in Lancet Infectious Diseases in June 2022 estimated, using mathematical modelling of course, that just in its first year to 8 December 2021, vaccinations saved 14.4 million lives. Christopher Ruhm, in an article in JAMA Health Forum on 26 July, found that if all US states had followed the restrictions of the ten most restrictive states, there would have been 118,000-248,000 fewer US deaths in the two years to 8 December 2022. Perhaps.

Other studies claim that to the contrary, the number of deaths that policy interventions have caused and are likely to cause in the long term from the combined downstream effects, including vaccine injuries, severely disrupted healthcare and pharmaceutical supply chains, missed childhood immunisations, learning disruptions, hunger, and poverty, will greatly exceed the sum of lives saved.

On 19 July a 521-page paper by Denis Rancourt, Joseph Hickey, and Christian Linard, based on data from 125 countries for 2021 and 2022, calculated the number of all-cause excess deaths ‘associated with’ Covid vaccines to be 16.9 million – 2.4 times the number of Covid deaths until February 2024 as per the World Health Organisation (WHO). An article published online on 21 June in Forensic Science International, based on a systematic review of autopsy data, found that 73.9 percent of all Covid-related deaths were either caused or significantly impacted by Covid vaccines.

In September 2021, the UK government, acting on the advice of Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty who overrode the more cautious Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation (JCVI), authorised the vaccination of 5–11 year-old children. This was done despite a warning from a group of 26 Tory MPs that overruling expert advice from the JCVI risked ‘dissolving the bond of trust’ between the public and the government.

A preprint on 20 May from a team at Oxford University reported on a study of a total of 415,884 vaccinated and unvaccinated children. They came to three important findings: there was not a single Covid-related death in either group among otherwise healthy children; the vaccinated had marginally better health outcomes on hospitalisation (1 additional child per 10,000) and A&E attendance (1 per 20,000); but these were mostly offset by the incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis which put 1 in 25,000 vaccinated kids into hospital. The economic cost worked out at £1.3/0.6 million per hospital visit/A&E attendance (not death) that was averted. The moral of the story: trust neither the science nor the scientists.

Record-level data for ten million people in the Czech Republic were analysed by Steve Kirsch to show that all-cause deaths among 45–69 year-olds given Moderna vaccines were more than 50 percent above those from Pfizer vaccines. Treating the latter as the placebo group allowed him to control for other potentially confounding variables and limit causality to vaccines. An Israeli study published on 26 June in the high-impact journal Nature explained how the Pfizer vaccine causes menstrual irregularities. For one compilation of scientific studies documenting vaccine injuries, with hyperlinks, see here.

Yet, articles and reviews critical of the official narrative on masks and vaccines, authored by well-credentialled experts and published in leading scientific outlets after rigorous peer review processes, were sometimes retracted or had cautionary notes added by nervous editors, only to be vindicated months or a year later, greatly diminishing their impact during the critical period. The eminent British oncologist Angus Dalgleish wrote on 11 July that there’s been a systematic suppression of the truth about the link between Covid vaccines and cancer and death.

In an interview with the Brisbane Times on 30 April 2020, Queensland’s then-Chief Health Officer (and now Governor) Jeannette Young made it clear that her logic on school closures was primarily political. She accepted the evidence that schools are not a high-risk environment for the spread of the virus but argued that closing them helped to convince people how grave the situation was. ‘So sometimes it’s more than just the science and the health, it’s about the messaging.’

There’s additional evidence of the creeping politicisation of the medical profession. The British Medical Association has rejected the much-praised Cass review into gender-identity services in England. Instead, it has called on the government to lift the ban on puberty blockers for adolescents disoriented about their sexuality. In another sign of the creeping ideological takeover of medical science, an article published in JAMA Pediatrics on 1 July substituted ‘pregnant people’ and ‘pregnant persons’ for pregnant women.

On 1 August, the Australian Medical Association warned that the nation’s overstretched health system is at a tipping point with a real risk of life expectancy falling over the next ten years. Yet the AMA went along with all the questionable Covid eradication policies that wasted billions of dollars that could otherwise have been used to strengthen the public health infrastructure and also with un- and even some anti-scientific interventions and mandates that damaged trust in the medical profession. It failed to stand up for doctors and healthcare workers who spoke out against health bureaucrats’ and regulators’ edicts.

One study published in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care last September reported the shocking statistic that in the four-year period 2018–21 inclusive, 20 healthcare workers under regulatory investigation by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) had attempted self-harm leading to 16 suicides. In what parallel world is it possible for AHPRA to escape criminal investigation and for the AMA to ignore such a colossal scandal? Rebekah Barnett has also highlighted another ongoing case, that of Dr. Jereth Kok of Melbourne, where the process is itself cruel and unusual punishment. 

No surprise, therefore, that a 24-wave survey of 443,455 US adults across the 50 states, published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that overall, Americans’ trust in physicians and hospitals had plummeted from 71.5 to 40.1 percent between April 2020 and January 2024. Trust had fallen in every socio-demographic group in the survey by age, gender, race, and income. Lower levels of trust correlated with lower rates of vaccination.

There’s little reason to believe the situation in Australia is much different.

The Perils of Two-Tier Governance

Authorities are reprising the techniques of managed messaging and gaslighting deployed with great success during the Covid years to exercise power and maintain control over the masses. There is no better illustration of the latter than the mantra of ‘safe and effective’ vaccines. Britain has been convulsed by race riots that flare periodically in US cities, except this time it’s whites rioting. The collapse of social cohesion and civic virtue risks the breakdown of civil order as the majority is silenced for voicing grievance over the continual appeasement of minority activists.

For Australians feeling neglected, patience, my friends. On present trends, before long this movie will come soon to a theatre near you too.

Woke Olympics

The last few years have also seen two-tier law enforcement against regular versus woke violence. The Paris Olympics will best be remembered for woke insanity, starting with the blasphemous opening ceremony in which a group of drag queens mocked The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Christian painting.

Another defining legacy will surely be male violence against women dressed up as spectator sport in the boxing ring. What else are we to make of men battering women, calling it sport and winning Olympic medals? What next – wife-beating as an event at the Brisbane Olympics? 

Italian boxer Angela Carini, a two-time former world champion no less, withdrew a mere 46 seconds into the first round. She was stunned at the power of the punches from Algerian Imane Khelif who has the XY male chromosomes that got him banned by the International Boxing Association from last year’s world championship in Delhi. Carini quit ‘to preserve my life.’ Who knew that men could punch more than twice as hard as women? The officials’ inane justification for the farce is that Khelif’s passport lists ‘her’ as a woman. Why bother with dope tests then? Just accept certificates from the countries that their athletes are clean and save a lot of money and time.

Khelif went on to win the gold medal. So did the second XY boxer in the women’s competition, Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan. They look male, fight male, and Khelif even performed ‘a ferocious war dance’ like a male to celebrate ‘her’ victory. Khelif won every round with every judge in every bout. Still, no doubt about it, both the two XY chromosome boxers winning gold in their weight class in the women’s competition is purely coincidental.

Mike Tyson said everyone’s got a plan until punched in the face. The Olympic officials’ plan to promote ‘inclusion’ has been dealt a vicious sucker punch by concerns for women’s safety. Now the place of boxing in the Olympics is in danger. Inclusion and safety are not considerations of equal weight in the balance. No, safety trumps – or should and, in a sane world, would – all other considerations.

Woke Backlash

Sectarian demands are precursors to racialised grievances. Mass immigration is the fuel. Identity politics is the box of matches waved around recklessly by progressives. Yet – quelle horreur! – they are surprised when it bursts into flames. The distance from ethnic tensions to civil war is short. Some countries cover it in a sprint. The more that public policy is framed through the prism of identity politics, the more often violent incidents are interpreted through the prism of race and ancestry. Preferential access to the policy process for minorities produces a delayed majoritarian backlash from groups whose identity, culture, values, and ways of life come under threat.

The perception, not necessarily the objective reality, of two-tier policing and justice, fuels intergroup grievances that in turn can erode the state’s claim to monopoly of the legitimate use of violence to keep order. Instead, groups start taking the law into their own hands as the curtain raiser to eventual civil war.

Prof. Matt Goodwin of the University of Kent explains very well how apparently unconnected events are symptomatic of disparate trends that are coalescing into a perfect storm of popular discontent and populist revolt. Muslim MPs elected on a sectarian platform in response to a foreign war. Early release of convicts from overcrowded jails. The Met failing to solve a single petty crime (car and phone theft, burglary) in three years.

Mass riots in Harehills, Leeds after four Roma children were taken into social services care. A lieutenant colonel stabbed outside his home in Kent by a member of a minority community. A Kurdish immigrant pushing a man onto railway tracks at a tube station because he’d been looked at disrespectfully. Dance groups of children attending a Taylor Swift-themed party stabbed, leaving three dead and eight injured. All in the space of one month.

The sense that law and order has broken down has led to a pervasive feeling of hopelessness at far too many West-hating peoples being let in. With the widespread perception that authorities have lost control of the country’s borders, streets, ethnic enclaves, and future, ordinary people are also taking to the streets to vent, testifying to the loss of civic virtue and social cohesion. The accompanying loss of public trust in the institutions of state is fuelling the spiraling unrest.

Complaints about ‘far-right’ extremists are self-deluding denialism. True to the inner authoritarianism of all control freaks, Prime Minister (PM) Sir Keir Starmer’s instinct is to ban, ban, ban. Like PM Anthony Albanese’s failure to read the nation’s room on the Voice, Starmer’s response to the street protests has been tone-deaf and contemptuous. He blames it all on ‘far-right’ thugs. However, like ‘anti-vaxxer,’ ‘white privilege,’ ‘TERF,’ ‘fact-checked’ and ‘Islamophobic,’ ‘far-right’ (translation: left behind) has lost potency as a weapon of mass delegitimisation. 

Douglas Murray compares the jobless statistics from riot-hit areas in the UK in 2011 (Sunderland, Rotherham, Hartlepool) to this year and discovers they are worse today than 13 years ago. Not the least because successive governments went in for the easy fix of mass immigration. The result? Of the 3.6 million additional jobs since then, 74 percent are held by immigrant workers. The job creation benefitted foreigners but neither Britons nor Britain.

What did authorities expect people would do when their rising sense of alarm at two-tier governance – policy, policing, justice, reporting – is dismissed, Goodwin asks? An elite grown intolerant of any questioning would rather shut down the conversation with censorship and platitudes – ‘diversity is strength’ – than speak to the ‘root causes’ of the rising discontent. Harsh crackdowns using facial recognition technology are readily directed against the reviled white working class while BLM and anti-Israel protestors are treated with kid gloves. When they insist that protestors do not represent ‘our values,’ whose values are they referencing, exactly?

The scope for the likes of Tommy Robinson to make a public impact would surely be less absent attempts to silence his activism against Islamism. If authorities stay silent on the identity of the perpetrator when children are mass-stabbed, such censorship fuels the flame of conspiracy theories which fill the resulting vacuum with combustible riots. Members of migrant communities are ‘deflectingly’ described as citizens or British-born. When they are named and their photos published, people realise they’ve been gaslit yet again and the rage builds.

Starmer blamed the far-right for the Southport riots. Did he blame the hard-left and Hamas-supporting Islamists for months of disruptions of life since 7 October? He took the knee during the anti-white and anti-West BLM riots in 2020, two days after they had turned violent in London and injured 27 police officers, to earn the moniker ‘Sir Kneel-a-lot.’ Some police too took the knee before BLM protestors. A YouGov poll shows 49 percent of people believe Starmer is handling the riots poorly and only 31 percent say he’s dealt well with it. His honeymoon is well and truly over. He is presently disliked by 60 percent.

Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley dismisses claims of two-tier policing as ‘absolute nonsense’ that endangers officers’ lives. Wrong. What puts their lives in danger, Sir Mark, is the rapid loss of community confidence that policing is done without fear or favour. People believe their own lying eyes and ears when they see on a regular basis tolerant, permissive, facilitative policing of Muslim grooming gangs and BLM and anti-Israel protests (a lone Israeli flag-waver taken into protective custody amidst an anti-Semitic mob) but vigorous, confrontational policing of Covid-related freedom rallies and anti-immigration protests. Many commentators responded with ‘three words: Muslim grooming gangs.’ Starmer was head prosecutor then.

One of the most disgraceful comments came from Jess Phillips, local MP and safeguarding minister in the Starmer government. She blamed the ‘far right’ for violent rioting by Muslims in Birmingham. As one critic put it, she was ‘refusing to see and condemn explicit lawlessness by one seemingly favoured group while using the full power of the state against another.’ Yet again, as with the ‘mostly peaceful’ BLM riots against the background of buildings ablaze, people are told not to believe their own lying eyes on two-tier governance that encompasses policing, justice, and often, reporting.

Former Labour MP and government adviser on political violence, John Woodcock, wants to reinstate Covid-style lockdowns to deal with the mass protests. Meanwhile, people can rest easy knowing that police are arresting people for posts on Facebook. As Elon Musk asked, ‘Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?’ and branded the PM ‘two-tier Keir.’ In another example of self-censorship on important public issues, energy market executives express worries about security, reliability, and net zero-associated blackouts in private while issuing bland assurances in public, because even they dare not have an open conversation about decarbonisation plans and net zero targets.

In Australia, too, identity politics has undermined social cohesion with rising anti-Semitism and threats of violence against Jews and glorification of a proscribed terrorist organisation, with the Greens as their political champions in Parliament. This undermines the policy of multiculturalism understood as promoting ethnic and religious differences at the cost of shared citizenship and civic identity. As disaffected whites learn that grievance politics pays rich dividends, they mimic the tactics they once abhorred.

Being unheard and vilified has broken public trust in the underpinning institutions of democracy. Pew Research Center polls show trust in the US government falling from 77 percent in 1964 to 22 percent in 2024 and in the national media from 76 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2024. Only 33 percent trust social media. In the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, developed countries had an average of 49 percent trust in government, media, business, and NGOs, compared to 63 percent in developing countries. In Australia, governments earned scores of -21 for competence and -5 for ethics; the corresponding scores for the media were –24 and -13. Furthermore, 59 percent believe that both government and media ‘are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.’

Australian democracy is not in the best of health.

Falling Trust in Media

The media could have helped to contain the deepening loss of public trust in the medical profession and the public health clerisy by adopting its customary role of interrogating official claims and reporting fearlessly and neutrally on the significant minority of medical and scientific opinion that expressed disquiet at the abandonment of established public health consensus on managing pandemics. Instead, as Adam Creighton argued in the Australian last year, ‘a too credulous, incurious mainstream media,’ with too many journalists acting as ‘cheerleaders for the health bureaucracy and politicians,’ must wear much of the blame for the ‘Covid vaccines’ wall of infallibility’ that has caused so much lasting harm.

The media collusion with authorities in shadow-censoring an open and transparent debate of socially charged and politically contentious topics like vaccine safety and efficacy and racial and identity politics deepens the public distrust of the horizontally integrated ruling elites that include the corporate, cultural, and educational sectors.

The Australian is the most likely of the MSM print media to be willing to question progressive orthodoxy. Yet even it has limits to what it permits on online commentary. The following are just two examples of rejected comments. On 23 July, Gerard Baker wrote that Kamala Harris ‘is the product of the modern elite’ who ‘deploys her status as a woman and an ethnic minority to portray herself, ludicrously, as a victim of structural racism and sexism. Which makes her, in fact, the perfect Democratic candidate.’ After quoting him directly, I added just two words: ‘Love it.’ Ludicrously, even this proved too much for the moderator.

It seems to me they cannot tell the boundary between responsible content moderation and harmful censorship.

The next day, in a story on an attack on two Australian TV journalists in Paris, a reference to ‘Ann Coulter’s Law of Mass Shootings’ was rejected. 

By now the story itself has been scrubbed. Interesting. Yet it’s still available on our ABC.

Public disquiet has grown but bubbled along under the surface for decades at unchecked mass immigration where rather than newcomers assimilating into the host community, the latter must accommodate the migrants’ values, practices, and language; and at serially repeating instances of police refusing to enforce the law for fear of transgressing multicultural and woke pieties. This year the pent-up frustration at being ignored, gaslit, and told to STFU has burst through as visceral rage and exploded in the public square.

This article combines and expands on two complementary articles published in Spectator Australia magazine on 10 and 17 August 2024.