The 47th President
of the United States has just been sworn in, but the Trump effect is already
being felt. Trump’s re-election is a remarkable thing. Remarkable because he
did so in the face of huge opposition from the political and media
establishment and Hollywood.
In the end, none of that
mattered because in a democracy what matters is what people think, not what the
establishment thinks or what the Oprah Winfrey’s of the world say. In a
democracy, the vote of the person on the minimum wage flipping burgers at McDonald’s
is worth exactly the same as the celebrity who gets paid a million dollars to
say Kamala Harris is the best thing since sliced bread. In Trump speak:
Democracy - It’s a beautiful thing.
Shortly after Trump’s victory,
Facebook made a startling announcement that they were abandoning the use of
“Fact Checkers”, because they were politically biased! These are the same Fact
Checkers that the mainstream media and socialist politicians embraced to
control “misinformation”!
This should be a wake-up call for our mainstream media but history would suggest otherwise. 2025 is likely to see a further decline in the relevance and influence of the traditional mainstream media as a source of information. They are now primarily a source of derision as they continue to push their increasingly less credible agendas.
The dawn of 2025 has a
refreshing sense of opportunism about it. At last New Zealand is emerging from
the dark days of the Ardern administration and people are now finding their
voice to speak out against the nonsense that others want to impose on us.
How often have we heard from
doomsday politicians and alarmist media that the planet has ten years to live,
that the polar bears are stranded on ever-diminishing icebergs, and that every
bush fire or weather event is an “I told you so moment” for climate alarmists.
This year more people are
likely to realise the empirical evidence is showing us nothing is happening
outside normal climate variability. Regime change all around the world is
showing us that ordinary folk are more concerned about the necessities of life
than they are about sacrificing themselves at the altar of the global warming
cult. People want roads, not cycleways.
It’s a clear signal that our
politicians should heed. As a nation, we cannot afford the luxury of
giving vast amounts of money via COP29 to so-called emerging countries which
include India and China who are opening new coal-fired power stations weekly.
Yet again our primary sector
will be asked to pull us out of a financial hole and lead the economy out of
its recession, but at the same time the rural sector is being told to reduce
stock numbers in the name of the climate and our PM wants us to feed our cows a
pill to reduce methane emissions. Nationally we need to back our farmers
realising already they are the most efficient farmers in the world providing
grass-fed natural protein.
In October, local communities will have a say about how they want to be governed. It will be a wake-up call for many local government politicians who believe they know better than the communities they are supposed to represent. Tragically, most local councils no longer represent their communities because they are populated with people who have lost sight of what democracy means. I recently read scientists have grown a human spine in a Lab. That’s exciting but a bit late for many local politicians. As shown by recent overseas elections populaces are intolerant of politicians who do not represent their voters, and New Zealanders are no different. Bloated bureaucracies such as the Northland Regional Council will find a new broom demanding on behalf of their voters a reduction in staff, the concentration of work programmes dedicated to core services and less time preoccupied with race politics.
This is the year we will come to the realisation we need to get back to basics and focus on the realities that matter to ordinary folk, not the privileged few who think they know what’s best for others. Let’s make democracy a beautiful thing.