Adapting To Trump’s Changing Climate.

New World Orders: The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly.

IT IS, SURELY, the ultimate Millennial revenge fantasy. Calling senior Baby-Boomer and Gen-X bureaucrats and asking them to justify their salaries. “Come on, dude, just tell me what it is that you do!” All the time knowing that the hapless federal employee at the other end of the call is fighting for his job, his status, his self-respect.

Except, this scenario is no fantasy. Such conversations have been going on for days: proof that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is every bit as real and scary as its critics predicted. Musk’s twenty-something “tech geek” hires are cutting a swathe through the federal bureaucracy with the implacable determination of the Grim Reaper.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world struggles to make sense of the Trump Administration. What is its ultimate purpose? What is the nature of the political dynamic driving the raging torrent of Executive Orders pouring out of the Trump White House?

It is a testament to the essential mildness of their country’s politics and politicians that New Zealanders struggle to make any kind of sense of Donald Trump. Can he really be serious? Is there the slightest method to policies that strike so many Kiwis as utter madness?

There is – but it’s in the service of an agenda so completely foreign to the thinking of the vast majority of the world’s politicians, administrators and journalists, that even conceptualising it requires considerable effort.

Consider the following self-characterisation, offered-up to a puzzled world by one of Trump’s most hardcore supporters, Steve Bannon:

“I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too.”

Seriously? How can a MAGA Republican possibly cite the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, as his inspiration? Wasn’t Lenin responsible for establishing one of the most ferocious states in all of human history?

He certainly was, but Bannon’s Leninist sympathies amply confirm the old French aphorism: Les extrèmes se touchent. (The extremes find each other.)

Certainly, that is what the world is currently witnessing in the United States. The deliberate destruction of the 80-year-old state machine arising out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies of the 1930s – by right-wing revolutionaries determined to create a new one?

It’s what Bannon attempted to do in 2017, when he was, briefly, Trump’s White House chief-of-staff. But, he failed.

The strength and resilience of the old state machine was simply beyond the First Trump Administration’s powers. The “Country-Club Republicans” had yet to be purged from the Republican Party. The Supreme Court was not yet fully harnessed to the Right’s agenda. Most importantly, Trump and his MAGA court had seriously underestimated the obstructive capabilities of the ancien regime. Transformative regime-change clearly required an “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” battle-plan – and Trump 45 didn’t have one.

The crucial difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47 is that the forty-seventh president of the United States does have a battle-plan, Project 2025, and one of its principal authors, Russell Vought, has been safely installed as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. If the American ship-of-state has a bridge, then the OMB is it.

Trump’s greatest challenge, over the next four years, will be working out how to smash the status quo without, simultaneously, smashing the working-class Americans whose votes carried him to a comprehensive (if narrow) electoral victory. That Trump’s MAGA movement expects him to unleash holy vengeance upon the “Deep State” (aka the old state machinery) is indisputable. Less certain, however, is whether those same working-class voters appreciate how effectively the old state machinery has protected them and their families for the past 80 years.

If Elon Musk is to keep his promise to carve one trillion dollars off the Federal Budget, then the health, education and welfare services currently available to working-class Americans cannot avoid taking a massive hit.

Trump’s Democratic Party opponents simply cannot understand why American workers don’t get this. But, the very fact that the Democrats don’t “get it” is the very reason so many of those workers gave their votes to Trump. The extraordinary cluelessness of Democratic Party politicians when it comes to communicating effectively with ordinary Americans, let alone understanding their grievances, explains entirely the latter’s indifference to the plight of those federal bureaucrats on the receiving end of Musk’s tech geek interrogators.

Revolutions happen when, at roughly the same time, both the elites and the struggling masses arrive at the same conclusion: things cannot go on as they are. That the respective solutions advanced by these two groups are likely to diverge spectacularly only begins to matter after they have, between them, brought the failing system to its knees.

New Zealanders who shake their heads in disbelief at the speed and breadth of the Trump Administration’s changes are either too young to remember “Rogernomics”, or too embarrassed to acknowledge how fulsomely they embraced its breakneck “reforms”. If the machinations of Elon Musk seem sinister today, then so, too, should the machinations of Bob Jones and all the other ideologically-driven members of New Zealand’s elites back in 1984.

Those who argue that the “quiet revolution” of the 1980s simply represented New Zealand’s rather belated recognition that the world had changed, can hardly now object that the USA has collectively made the same determination. The economic and geopolitical doctrines that have dominated the policy-making of the last 40 years have been recognised, by billionaires and “deplorables” alike, as no longer fit for purpose.

Globalisation. Free Trade. The International Rules-Based Order. Donald Trump’s black felt pen has confirmed the death sentences of all three. Likewise the entrenched institutional power of the professional and managerial classes which emerged out of the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly. Faster and better than anybody else, Trump has grasped the possibilities of a world which is more in tune with the nationalist and imperialist marching songs of the Nineteenth Century, than the Kumbaya globalist singalongs of President George H. W. Bush’s and President Bill Clinton’s “New World Order”.

A President who openly canvasses the annexation of Greenland, Canada, Panama and the Gaza Strip, to the applause of an admirer of Lenin who once, rather incautiously, confessed: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power”; should alert us to the fact that, like Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard of Oz, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 February 2025.

Vigorously Independent? Not Really.

Government-Funded Media? Elon Musk has instructed his Twitter minions to describe all the great public broadcasters of the world as “Government-funded Media”. The BBC’s been tagged. So has National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service of the United States. Canada’s CBC has suffered the same indignity, while across the Tasman, the ABC has been similarly humiliated. Even here, at the bottom of the world, RNZ has been tagged as Government-funded Media.

ELON MUSK is on a mission from God. Or, at least he’s on a mission from the godlike position of the world’s second-richest man. Musk’s colossal wealth, and what it permitted him to discover, is the inspiration behind his mission. What did he discover? He discovered that Twitter, the social media platform he outmanoeuvred himself into purchasing, had allowed itself to become – without disclosing the fact – an arm of the United States national security apparatus.

It really pissed him off.

So much so, that Musk has instructed his Twitter minions to describe all the great public broadcasters of the world as “Government-funded Media”. The BBC’s been tagged. So has National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service of the United States. Canada’s CBC has suffered the same indignity, while across the Tasman, the ABC has been similarly humiliated. Even here, at the bottom of the world, RNZ has been tagged as Government-funded Media.

To say these august bodies resent being so described would be a considerable understatement.

Megan Whelan, RNZ’s head of content, has gone on Twitter to denounce Musk’s description.

“RNZ’s editorial independence is enshrined in our charter and editorial policy. Twitter’s own policy defines government-funded media as cases where the government “may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content”, which does not apply to RNZ.”

According to Whelan: “Not only is our independence protected by the law, we guard it vigorously.”

Those familiar with the history of public broadcasting in New Zealand would probably balk at the word “vigorously”. They might even have some difficulty with the word “independence”.

As Wellington lawyer and Free Speech Union executive member, Stephen Franks, tweeted in response to Whelan’s protestations:

“Who determines your charter, appoints your Board, determines how much you can spend?”

When the answer to all three of these questions is: “the government of the day”; it’s hard to fault Musk’s designation.

What Whelan fails to acknowledge is that the public broadcasters’ social licence derives from the ordinary citizen’s well-founded suspicion of private media. At the time the great public broadcasters were being set up, in the 1920s and 30s, it seemed reasonable to offset the growing power of private media by establishing publicly-owned and funded networks answerable, ultimately, to the people’s elected representatives.

What that meant, however, was that public broadcasters could never be truly independent. Indeed, any assertion of editorial freedom that threatened to become excessively “vigorous” was bound to raise political eyebrows. The persons appointed to run public broadcasting networks necessarily required considerable diplomatic skills. The trick was to convey the appearance of editorial independence, while ensuring the organisation remained safely within the boundaries of political and cultural tolerance.

The very worst thing a public broadcaster can do is allow its audience to form the opinion that “their” broadcaster has an “agenda”. The moment the audience begins to feel that it is being preached to, and that those who refuse to convert to the new religion will no longer be heard, then public broadcasting is doomed. That’s why the principles of fairness and balance are so crucial to the survival of state-owned networks. People of all political persuasions (or nearly all) need to see and hear their ideas and beliefs carried on the public airwaves.

Elon Musk’s rage at the social media giants’ willingness to co-operate with the US national security apparatus is readily understood. Their active censorship of individuals and organisations accused of disseminating “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation” – as defined by the state – raises the spectre of totalitarianism. That the state-owned news media has actively colluded in what amounts to a public-private partnership dedicated to protecting the political narratives of the Powers-That-Be, can have only one outcome – the forfeiture of its social licence.

That public broadcasters all over the world are responding furiously to Musk’s “Government-funded media” tag merely confirms their estrangement from the public they are supposed to serve. Being government-funded is only a problem if the citizen’s faith in the state is being steadily eroded.

Back in the days of the NZBC (which quietly ran a political blacklist to ensure its National Party paymasters never became too alarmed by what was carried on the airwaves) being described as government-funded media would have been an unremarkable statement of fact.

That RNZ is affronted by Musk’s description smacks of an institutional guilty conscience.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 April 2023.

Restoring The Narrative: The Political Logic Behind The Campaign Against Disinformation.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Political Narratives: A sovereign state is not characterised solely by the monopoly it enjoys over organised violence. Of equal importance (some might even say of greater importance) is the monopoly it is also supposed to enjoy over the creation and control of the stories that the nation tells itself. A state that loses control over these core political narratives hasn’t long to live.

PERHAPS JIM MORRISON’S HOSTILITY toward Establishment America was born out of his father’s role in the notorious Tonkin Gulf Incident. Not many people know that The Doors’ lead-singer’s father, George S. Morrison, was an admiral in the United States Navy. Even fewer realise that he was one of those commanding the US naval force patrolling off the North Vietnamese coast in 1964. The very same naval force that was “attacked” by non-existent North Vietnamese gunboats in an “incident” that never happened, but which served as the pretext for Congress’ “Tonkin Gulf Resolution”. The very same resolution that gave President Lyndon Johnson the authority to escalate American involvement in South Vietnam to the level of full-scale war.

Jim Morrison wrote about “weird scenes in the gold-mine”. Today, we’d call the completely fabricated story that kicked-off the vast American tragedy of Vietnam “disinformation”. And the thing to remember, right from the start, about the Tonkin Gulf Incident is that it was official disinformation – i.e. deliberate lying by the state.

Too long ago? Ancient history? Okay. So, let’s bring everything right up to date.

Elon Musk buys Twitter and discovers that for years its previous owners had been operating hand-in-glove with the United States security apparatus in a massive effort to rein-in what the state deemed to be “bad actors” using social media to spread misinformation (unintentional lies) and disinformation (deliberate lies) across the Internet. Musk copies the celebrated American investigative journalist Matt Taibbi into “#Twitter Files”, and pretty soon the whole world knows what Establishment America has been up to.

Which is what – exactly?

Perhaps the easiest way to characterise what the United States Government has been engaged in is “patch protection”. Because a sovereign state is not characterised solely by the monopoly it enjoys over organised violence. Of equal importance (some might even say of greater importance) is the monopoly it is also supposed to enjoy over the creation and control of the stories that the nation tells itself. A state that loses control over these core political narratives hasn’t long to live. Exposed in #Twitter Files are the lengths to which the American state was prepared to go to shut-down the purveyors of alternative political narratives – to protect its patch.

Controlling the narrative was obviously of enormous importance in the circumstances of a global pandemic. Alternative versions of the significance of Covid-19 raised the spectre of large chunks of the population becoming convinced that the demands of the state, especially the measures it mandated to keep the population safe and to protect the public health system from being overwhelmed, were, in light of their “research”, unreasonable, unwarranted and unwise. For the scientific community, in particular, it was vital that this sort of misinformation and disinformation be countered with all the resources at the state’s disposal.

But, if the Covid Pandemic was the proximate cause of the US Government’s full-court-press against misinformation and disinformation, it was far from the only one. Those responsible for maintaining the national security of the United States were becoming increasingly uneasy about the capacity of the Internet – especially social media – to empower its adversaries. By making it possible for non-state actors to engage in the same sort of subversive and destabilising activities that had, hitherto, been the sole preserve of the US Government, social media was fast becoming an enormous and existential threat.

Brexit, and Trump’s election as President, had a worryingly familiar smell to them. Both countries’ spooks began to suspect that the United Kingdom and the United States had been subjected to something alarmingly similar to the sort of “colour revolutions” the US had unleashed on Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. In the case of both Brexit and Trump, the state had lost control of the political narrative, with dramatically and irrevocably destabilising consequences. Cui bono? The Americans and the British were convinced that the bodies responsible were in some way linked to the Russian Federation – they just couldn’t prove it.

What they could prove, however, was the extraordinary impact that well-directed hate could have upon the minds of the ideologically and psychologically vulnerable. The exploitation of the Internet and social media by the ISIS terrorist organisation set new bench-marks for hateful propaganda. In the name of its “holy” cause, ISIS demonstrated repeatedly its followers’ willingness to carry out the most daunting atrocities. Hate proved to be a great mobiliser. Hate made things happen.

The ingredients had been gathered for the worst sort of state-sponsored stupidity.

Before the arrival of the Internet, both the British and American states had been superb manipulators (and, if that failed, intimidators) of the news media. Publishers were courted, editors were co-opted, journalists’ careers advanced (or retarded) by stories planted and details leaked. Certainly, there were always small outfits digging away in places they had no business sinking their little spades, but they could be handled. A bloke in a bar would suggest to his “reputable” media contact that the offending muckraker was an unstable “conspiracy theorist”. That usually did the trick.

But, the Internet – the f**king Internet! Now there weren’t just a handful of publishers to get on side. Now any fool could become a publisher – free, gratis, and for nothing. Now there were no properly-briefed editors to spike “irresponsible” stories, no ambitious journalists to steer into safer pastures. Now every bastard and his brother was a “citizen journalist” with audio and video capabilities yesterday’s hacks would have given their eye-teeth for. It was out of control!

So, of course, the spooks decided to set up special misinformation and disinformation entities to identify and neutralise the offending misinformers and disinformers. Matt Taibbi’s stories set out in jaw-dropping detail how the US national security apparatus recruited a small army of academics and techies to staff a host of “arms-length” research facilities and think tanks. Using the “data” amassed by these bodies, the spooks then attempted to turn the equivalents of the publishers and editors of yesteryear, Google, Facebook and Twitter, into their secret censors. And, God help us, it worked!

Even in the Shire, even in little New Zealand, the long arm of American spookdom – operating through the Five Eyes Network – found mischief it could make. The trusting Kiwis bought the warnings about the danger of misinformation and disinformation during a pandemic. That made sense. It also seemed sensible, at least to some, that following the Christchurch Mosque Massacres, something needed to be done about hate. In the absence of ISIS, Action Zealandia would have to do.

Following the American model, our very own “Disinformation Project” was set up by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Once established, it was shucked-off to the University of Auckland, from which it could take on an “independent” academic lustre. The Americans had warned their Kiwi mates that too close an association with the state would only encourage the conspiracy theorists to (rightly) accuse the government of abrogating the civil and political rights of its citizens. Suitably separated from the powers that be, however, this sworn enemy of unacceptable political narratives would find it pathetically simple to sell its wares to a new generation of journalists who had never heard of the Tonkin Gulf.

And how eager they were to buy them! When the genuine victims of misinformation and disinformation turned up on Parliament’s front lawn, filled with anger and consumed by hate, the Press Gallery’s terrified journalists couldn’t heap enough dirt on the unruly protesters and their shadowy sponsors. Or do enough to ensure that the New Zealand state’s monopoly over the creation and control of the nation’s political narratives was restored.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 13 April 2023.