Since November 6th some of my closest friends have been looking decidedly glum. A few of the angrier ones have even stopped tweeting on X as if to teach Elon Musk a lesson. I’m sure he’s gutted. In TikTok-land there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of women shaving their heads and announcing a four year long sex strike as part of the 4B movement. But social media rants have one thing in common: they require carefully placed phones on mini tripods and editing before these ‘impromptu’ blood curdling outbursts can be published. Outrage has to be pretty professional these days.
Over on CNN and MSNBC they simply cannot believe how out of touch they are with their populous. Surely, it can only have been Russian propaganda that misled their people so badly. As leaders of the outraged community the mainstream media’s response has been to double down on the Hitler! rhetoric. The response from the demos was to switch off.
According to Newsweek “CNN’s coverage of the historic election was co-anchored by presenters Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper, with 5.1 million viewers tuning in to watch the network’s linear TV coverage of the night, a 44% decline in total viewers compared with the 2020 election” while MSNBC’s viewing figures have plunged by 54% since that fateful night.
This is payback for the culture of lies they built for us over the last decade. The culture of lies that told us again and again that Biden was cognitively at his best ever…until he wasn’t and they hooked him away like a pantomime baddie. The same culture of lies that told us Kamala was the most articulate and ‘joyful’ candidate, that the vaccines were safe and effective, that masks protected us, that the climate emergency is our greatest threat and increasing taxes will help make it go away, that inflation is down, that DEI and ESG make businesses more profitable, that children are often born in the wrong bodies, that humans can flip sexes (even though there are 98 new ones now)…the list of lies is endless and ever increasing.
But it’s all fake. Just like the vloggers setting up their phones and carefully editing their outrage, it’s all faux. It’s not with hindsight that we know Harris was a faux candidate pushed into the role when Biden went gaga. Everyone knew she was a puppet of the big state but kept schtum for the greater good. I’ve yet to meet anyone who thought she would really be in charge if she won. We lied to ourselves in the hope that it would eventually become the truth.
History will show that our culture of lies was turbo charged by the pandemic. We’ve just lived through a kind of post lockdown lunacy that saw: men boxing women, children identifying as wolves, gender affirming mastectomies, violent riots labelled ‘mostly peaceful’, male rapists in female prisons, nonsensical pronouns, cancel culture, maths and literacy called racist, language police, taking the knee, Facebook and Twitter colluding with the FBI, statue toppling, history rewriting, Nazis on every street corner and an epidemic of children born in the wrong body.
Perhaps more worrying, beneath these more memorable lowlights there grew a sinister culture of guilt that permeated every aspect of society. Guilt that warned us off eating meat, going on holiday, driving, flying, bathing, keeping warm, wishing for a better standard of living, buying and consuming almost everything, including gas, petrol, diesel, fashion and, of course, plastic. This was devastating for retail, a sector that was forced to juggle with the hypocrisy of sustainability at the same time as importing endless quantities of stuff we don’t need on diesel powered cargo ships. We cannot blame them for this. It’s what we demanded of them, after all. But all this hypocrisy, all this faux virtue signalling, all the lying to ourselves for the greater good has left the western world in a constant state of unease.
Then on the morning of November 6th, like an hysterical blonde in a 1940s film noir, we found ourselves on the receiving end of a sharp, politically incorrect slap across our pretty chops. Instantly, the smug smiles were wiped off the faces of Colbert, Kimmel, Degeneres and their like. It was also a much overdue slap across the face of the faux-journalists, the professional delusionists, the gender-provocateurs, the autogynephiliacs (Google it) and the normalcy deniers. Most significantly perhaps, it was a timely wake up call for stars like Clooney, Beyonce, Cardi B, J Lo, Swift, Oprah and Eminem who pocketed millions for endorsements that turned out to be completely and utterly valueless. (Paid for, incidentally by ten dollar donations from the middle classes. This is Robin Hood in a very warped parallel universe indeed.) Faux celebrity endorsement is well and truly dead.
The tide has turned.
Deny it if you must, but America is poised to race ahead of sclerotic, over regulated Europe as never before. The billionaire bulls have taken over the china shop and they will smash regulation and slash the parasitic NGOs, the lobbyists and the tax-bloated layers of hidden government that have held back growth for so long. They will cut taxes, reintroduce world fairs and build rocket ships to Mars. Compare that to our bureaucratic managed decline. Just imagine how small Sir Keir will look standing on his tired old wobbly platform of tax and spend in order to piss it away on net zero and Ed’s twenty billion pound ‘dream catcher’ (Thanks to Tim Stanley for that analogy)
Elon puts it beautifully: it’s no longer about the right versus the left. It’s the expansionists versus the extinctionists now.
In the short term we can expect the left to double down on its extinctionist policies. Europe’s leaders will be keener than ever to punish us with pay per mile and other punitive initiatives, taxes and regulations for the greater good. But in a few years it will simply look and feel out of sync with the leader of the western world. There’s even a chance that Germany can pull itself away from its suicidal trajectory. My guess, for that is my job after all, is that within three years if you or your business are still proponents of preferred pronouns you will be seen as an outlier, clinging onto the post lockdown years. It’s not that we’ll hate you, far from it, it’s that we’ll feel sorry for you like we do for those weirdos that still insist on wearing masks on the underground.
Already in the US, Target has brought back Merry Christmas signs to replace the Happy Holidays nonsense. Boots’ new Christmas ad looks old fashioned and unnecessarily guilty. Jaguar’s ridiculously woke rebranding has sparked a mighty social media piss-take. Guilt is finally in retreat. I believe there will be a cultural race back to sanity led by brands keen to tear off their hair shirts and grow once again.
Ultimately, what the extinctionists fear the most is not that the new Hitler is planning the next holocaust. No, their worst nightmare is that Trump and his X men will actually succeed in boosting the prosperity and morale of the deplorables. That’s when we’ll see some genuine outrage.
Merry Christmas.
Howard Saunders is a writer, speaker & Retail Futurist
Join me on X @retailfuturist for proof that we’re all going to hell in a handcart, but having fun on route.
