RUTHFULLY YOURS

It would be an exaggeration, although only a small one, to say the US bathes right now in the sunny optimism of another ‘morning in America’ like the one Ronald Reagan brought to a country sick half to death of Jimmy Carter, but by several handy measures the Second Age of Trump is certainly off to a spirited start. Republicans are dancing, literally, as are quarterbacks and prize fighters, and from the stunned Left there have been no outbreaks worth noting of the reflex to riot and protest. They’re whipped and they know it, those aggrieved intersectionalists, so unsettled by the loss of House, Senate and Oval Office that the instinct to fill the streets with public nuisances is for the moment in abeyance. But they know what’s coming. Trump’s proposed cabinet of slashers, heretics, critics, crusaders, protectionists, free-market libertarians and assorted silicon smarties is a proclamation of intent to gore the Left’s most sacred cows, a restoration of the First Amendment’s right to free speech high on that to-do list. 

All of which makes it very hard to be leaving the United States, especially when the destination is Melbourne, where my US election year ends next week at Tullamarine. It’s a dismal thought. Years ago, my friend Imre Salusinszky warned that the Australia of memory and imagination might not match the fact of a society changed deeply over the decades I had spent in New York. It was hard to believe. Whenever I’d flown home, the holidaying visitor to an overgrown country town by the Yarra, everything was as it should be — the easiness of life under a big blue sky, the footy, great food,  cheap golf, magpies instead of sirens, zinc creme and the Boxing Day Test. But Imre was proven right when I ignored his caution and came home for good. Things had changed and not for the better. A welter of Labor victories, broken only by the limp and hapless Baillieu years, saddled the state with debt and an authoritarian nannyism that grew more assertive and obnoxious year by year. But it was the Covid madness that did it for me, put pay to any last delusion that Victoria, its once lovely capital and the state’s most vital institutions were not in some way rotting before our eyes.

Who ever would have thought to see Australians firing volleys into fellow Australians, as did VicPol’s ninja turtles at every opportunity during the Great Lockdown? Or the sickening scene I witnessed on Altona Beach, at the end of my street: a posse of cursing cops holding down a screaming, heavily pregnant woman whose crime it was to have sought relief from the heat more than five kilometres from her home. Covid has faded but public debt, that other malady to which Victorian Labor is always prone, continues to spike Melbourne’s skyline with cranes and union banners while yet more boondogglers burrow for gold in their tunnel beneath. For all this and worse it is said we should be grateful. Has no one noticed that while so much is being built and dug and paved over — including, one suspects, the crime statistics — the very foundations of a healthy society and, yes, fundamental liberties in Victoria, are eroded day by day?

Now, come Tuesday, I’ll be heading home to a city that reports suggest has made decline its vocation. Masked Jew-haters in the streets every damn weekend, escorted by an infinitely more docile species of copper than those who set about the lockdown protesters. Multiculturalism’s Molotovs and a synagogue in flames. Dwell on that: in Melbourne, in 2024, after more than 12 months of the most vile chants and anti-Semitic harassment, Jews are attacked at their prayers for being Jews. It has taken quite some effort over many decades to brew this poison and give the nod for its release. What chance, do you reckon, those responsible will ever be called to account? Never, of course, and certainly not in Victoria, where diversity and division, imported hatreds and abhorrent customs enrich us all, don’t you know? Enjoy your falafel and don’t spare a thought for female genital mutilation, for that might lead to the dangerous thought that some cultures really are inferor to others.

It was that sad, shameful state of Victoria and the lingering stink of Daniel Andrews that made it so easy to stow my possessions in a shipping container at Alan Moran’s property and fly out on New Year’s Day for Miami, where a 1998 Chevrolet V8 campervan, Quadrant’s mobile office, was waiting. Tomorrow, some 27,383 miles later, the van goes into storage and I must leave behind the excitement of watching Team Trump implement the most sweeping reforms in generations.

What waits for me back home? A state in free-fall decay and, more broadly, an Australia in which it fell to a handful of Senate rebels to foil an appalling, near unthinkable attempt to have the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) regulate not only who can say what and where, but also what is true and what isn’t, this last to be reckoned according to the received wisdom of the Public Service mind. It’s a poor trade, especially when things are popping right and left in an America, where Joe Biden stumbles and snoozes through the coda of his four-year catastrophe and Trump is making all the running. Today as I write, he’s in Paris for Notre Dame’s reopening, President in all but name and oath amongst the fellow world leaders lining up, some reluctantly, to make his reacquaintance. Trump has been promising with characteristic modesty that he will achieve more before January 20, Inauguration Day, than Biden managed in four years. The man is in a hurry.

Reagan was no sooner sworn in than Iran wisely released the Tehran Embassy captives.  With an ear for history’s echo, Trump is promising there will be hell to pay if the Gaza hostages aren’t free by the time he moves into the White House. The prospect of beginning his second term with news footage of Hamas bending to his will, as the mullahs did for Reagan, followed by a White House photo op with American hostages — if any remain alive, that is — evokes the Gipper’s muscular willingness to use force in pursuit of US interests while simultaneously announcing that the foreign-policy fecklessness of the Biden years is over. Iran, for starters, can expect no more billion-dollar pallets of cash to be flown from Washington in the addled cause of making the mullahs a more reasonable lot, while Israel can count on getting the weaponry it requests when and how it wants it. There will be no more White House attempts to fine-tune Israel’s actions by delaying arms shipments or arguing, as did Biden’s empty vessel of a for-the-moment administration, that dropping 2000-pound bombs on terrorists’ nests would be overkill but 1000-pounders might be OK.

That’s one aspect of Trump’s emerging approach to the rest of the world. Another is the nomination of David Perdue as his man in Beijing. A seasoned China hand who spent decades based in Hong Kong, his other achievements include a six-year stint in the Senate and, before that at Reebok, moving much off the sneaker company’s manufacturing offshore, which is exactly the sort of ‘betrayal’ Trump denounced so often at his rallies. That Perdue’s extensive contacts with China’s elite outweigh the offence of exporting American jobs suggests there will be more nuance to Trump’s dealings with Beijing than his stump schtick about “beautiful, beautiful tariffs” suggests.

Domestically, Trump’s emerging assault on Permanent Washington is far more sweeping and, unlike his first term, far more targetted. You could pick just about any nominee as an example from this would-be cabinet of eager new brooms, but for the purposes of getting a feel for the next four years it is one of the so-far least noticed and more obscure nominations which captures in one man Trump’s broader intent. His name is Brendan Carr and he is up for confirmation as the next head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). 

Riding shotgun on America’s communications outfits has never been a particularly demanding role, more that of a facilitator for the smooth operations of TV networks, telcos and, over more recent years, ignoring cyberdom’s regulatory conundrums. Where predecessors’  focus has been on bandwidth and mundane oversight, Carr’s crusade is to so thoroughly mesh the means of free speech with the right to free speech that they will be forever indivisible. This is nothing short of revolutionary. 

For starters, there’s the matter of the ‘Section 230 exemption’ which bestows a limited immunity on ‘carriers’ — think here of Facebook — from civil and criminal charges arising from content shared by users. So Facebook is just like Optus, right, shouldering no responsibility for what is conveyed over its system? Well, not quite, as it also has a best-efforts obligation to find and disable such posts. This, you might think, makes Facebook a publisher and thus burdened with all the traditional legal perils that occupation implies. Again, not so fast. Rather than either/or, where regulation is concerned social media remains a chimera, bits of each but neither one nor the other and all very much in need of clarification.

Is it any wonder that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was one of the first to come cap in hand to Mar-a-Lago? It would have been an interesting conversation, especially if Trump raised the matter of the $400 million that Facebook donated to “grassroots groups” — read that as ‘Democrats’ — to get out the vote, especially the mail-in vote, in 2020.

All very well and good in theory, not so in practice. Had you tried to post a sceptical item about the 51 “intelligence community veterans” rounded up Secretary of State Antony Blinken to dismiss Hunter Biden’s laptop as “likely Russian disinformation” during the final weeks of 2020’s election season, Facebook would have taken it down for “violating community norms”. Likewise, when the Covidiocy was at its height, the only authorised and approved “truth” Facebook would permit was that the mRNA vaccines were safe, effective and guaranteed to stop transmission of the China virus. To mention, say, swollen hearts, blood clots, hasty production and inadequate testing would have seen your account suspended altogether, as would any endorsement of ivermectin as a remedy. Any voiced surmise that those first outbreaks in a wet market just two subway stops from the China-US jointly-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology constitute a prima facie case for the pandemic having begun with a lab leak would have been banned for alleged racism. Had those Senate heroes not scuttled Labor’s mis- and disinformation bill, it would be ACMA laying down the same proscriptions, the same bans, as the ultimate arbiter of what is right and true.

The notion that there can be only one permissible truth, the official one, is what animates Brendan Carr, who has been a dissident voice for unfettered free speech voice on the FCC’s board throughout the Biden administration. No sooner had he been nominated than he declared an open war on those who would regulate what can and can’t be permitted to be published. Here’s how he began his assault on “the censorship cartel” with a letter to the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. It’s inspiring stuff (emphasis added):

Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship. Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct. Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights. They targeted core political, religious, and scientific speech. And they worked—often in concert with so-called “media monitors” and others—to defund, demonetize, and otherwise put out of business news outlets and organizations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative.

Congressional investigations, press reports, and other evidence show that in many cases you did not act alone. Rather, you participated in a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called “fact-checking” organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself.

The relevant conduct extended from removing or blocking social media posts to labeling whole websites or apps as “untrustworthy” or “high-risk” in an apparent effort to suppress their information and viewpoints, including through efforts to delist them, lower their rankings, or harm their profitability.

This censorship cartel is an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled.

The letter, which can be read in full here, targets a US outfit called  NewsGuard, which is building a global business by rating websites and news outlets on their “reliablity” as sources of factual information. These findings are fed back to the social media platforms so they can police ‘disinformation’ by taking down or shadow banning content deemed problematic, and also to advertisers who are warned to take their money and plugs elsewhere. Carr accuses NewsGuard of censoring for the Left and despite the company’s insistence that it is fair, even-handed, scrupulously ethical and very, very smart, there is overwhelming evidence he is correct. NewsGuard, just by the way, has ambitions to lend ACMA a hand in deciding what is truth, as this March press release announced. The missive’s headline, reproduced below, leaves little doubt that whatever rating NewsGuard awards Quadrant Online (you must subscribe to learn its ratings) it won’t be favourable. Doubt that the world is paused to burn, the Great Barrier Reef will soon be no more and coal is the greatest threat to the world and you’ll be consigned broke and shunned to NewsGuard’s naughty corner.

“NewsGuard Expands Service to Australia and New Zealand, Rating News Sources and Tracking False Narratives; Finds Climate Change Misinformation to be Major Subject of Unreliable Websites“

As far as carr is concerned, it is NewsGuard which can’t be trusted:

It almost catches in the throat to admit the prospect of life once more in Melbourne is a downer. But here I am, booked in 48 hours to leave a country where the things of which conservatives dreamed but never hoped to see are being fulfilled by a Trump administration committed to refurbishing free speech and property rights, the twin pillars on which Western democracy rests and depends. 

Instead, it will be Jew-haters on parade, a politicised police force, courts packed with Labor mates and an opposition more passionate about its intramural party feuds and lawsuits than rescuing Victoria from debt, corruption and incompetence.

Forgive me for sighing, but I’m getting the worst of this deal.