Viewpoint – Year of realisation

The 47th President of the United States has been sworn in and the Trump effect is 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 despite vitriolic condemnation from celebrity Hollywood.

In the end, none of that mattered because in a democracy what matters is what people think, not what the establishment think 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”.

Just last week Facebook made a startling announcement that they were abandoning the use of ‘fact checkers’ because they were politically biased. They are now going to allow the community to self-regulate content. These are the fact checkers that the mainstream media embraced to control “misinformation”. It seems it was they who are spreading the 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. People are now realising we have been gaslighted on many issues.

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 are seeking to impose on us.

How often have we heard from doomsday politicians and alarmist media that the planet has 10 years to live, that we are at a tipping point … that the polar bears are stranded on ever-diminishing icebergs, where 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. One prime example is ice. The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) said, in a statement on January 7, that by the end of 2024, Antarctic sea ice extent had recovered to 7.3 million square kilometres – very close to the 1981 to 2010 average.

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.

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.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s personal opinions and not council policy.