Guest comment by Craig Jepson, Mayor, Kaipara
District Council.
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.
