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 like those that flare periodically in US cities, except this time it’s whites rioting. For Australians feeling neglected, patience, my friends. On present trends, before long this movie will come soon to a theatre near you too.

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. Who knew that men can punch more than twice as hard as women? What next – wife beating as an event at the Brisbane Olympics? 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.

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. Groups start taking the law into their own hands as the curtain-raiser to civil war.

On Substack, Professor Matt Goodwin explains how unconnected events are symptomatic of disparate trends coalescing into a perfect storm of popular discontent and populist revolt: Muslim MPs elected on a sectarian platform in response to a foreign war; the early release of convicts from overcrowded jails; the Met failing to solve a single petty crime in three years; mass riots in Harehills, Leeds; a lieutenant-colonel stabbed in Kent by a member of a minority community; a Kurdish immigrant pushing a man onto railway tracks when looked at disrespectfully; and children attending a Taylor Swift-themed party stabbed, with 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.

Complaints about ‘far-right’ extremists are self-deluding denialism. True to the inner authoritarianism of all control freaks, Starmer’s instinct is to ban, ban, ban. Like 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. 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 per cent of people believe ‘two-tier Keir’ is handling the riots poorly and only 31 per cent say he’s dealt well with it. Starmer’s honeymoon is well and truly over. He is presently disliked by 60 per cent. 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 is the loss of community confidence that policing is done without fear or favour. People believe their own lying eyes and ears of tolerant, permissive, facilitative policing of Muslim grooming gangs and BLM and anti-Israel protests but vigorous, confrontational policing of Covid-related freedom rallies and anti-immigration protests. In Australia too identity politics has undermined social cohesion with rising antisemitism 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 difference 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 per cent in 1964 to 22 per cent in 2024 and in the national media from 76 per cent in 2016 to 61 per cent in 2024. Only 33 per cent trust social media. In the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, developed countries had an average of 49 per cent trust in government, media, business and NGOs, compared to 63 per cent 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 per cent 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 good health.