Confronting reality in an election year - Part 1

Migration, deepfakes, and the denial of biology

2024 is an election year - in the UK, in the US, in India, in South Africa, and in many other countries. In the US and UK,  right wing  politicians have sought to make migration a key election issue. They often weaponise concern about migration to scapegoat ‘others’ and divert attention from political failures in relation to, for example, housing or jobs. Migration is likely to become a bigger issue in decades to come, involving much greater numbers of migrants, if we are not successful in bringing global heating to a halt. Huge areas of the tropics will become uninhabitable if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. If migration to temperate regions is blocked, then the death toll will be massive.

Layers of reality denial are already in play. Politicians who deny that global heating is real are often the most insistent that modest levels of immigration bring danger. Yet their opposition to policies which slow down global heating will result in many more climate migrants seeking entry.

Laws that deny reality

The UK Government’s pursuit of a policy to deport asylum applicants to Rwanda is a small-scale example of the intellectual contortions that will be needed by politicians who continue to deny climate reality in a world that is becoming increasingly uninhabitable. The UK’s Supreme Court has deemed that the proposal contravenes international law, because of Rwanda’s poor human rights record. So the government now proposes to require decision makers to treat Rwanda as if it were a safe country, and to ignore any international laws that determine otherwise.

“It’s the first time in our lifetime, and quite possibly in British legal history, that a government has legislated for people's perception of reality. This is the key characteristic of the legislation. It does not operate on reality. It operates on perception. It prevents courts, ministers or immigration officers from stating that Rwanda is not a safe country.“

(Ian Dunt, Rwanda: Nothing makes sense, Substack 8 Dec 2023)

Dunt is right to draw attention to the absurdity of the government’s Rwanda policy. But government legislation that is based on perception rather than reality is far from novel. Three examples that I have written about, here,  relate to legally sanctioned false identity records. The Adoption of Children Act 1926 created records that suggested that adoptive parents were the original parents. Similar records are proposed for commissioning parents in the Surrogacy law reform proposals currently under consideration in the UK. In these two cases, the reality of the actual mother who gave birth is erased. And the Gender Recognition Act (2004) allows men who claim to be women, and women who claim to be men, to have their birth certificates changed to reflect their delusion rather than their biological reality.

Fake news

Laws that operate on perception rather than reality are comparatively rare. There is, though, nothing rare, and nothing new, about fake stories becoming enormously influential in shaping people’s perceptions of reality. Such fake stories were common in the early decades of the last century.

• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) was a fabricated document, originating in Russia and aimed at persuading people, in many different countries, that there was a Jewish plot for world domination. It continues to be published by anti-semitic groups as if it was an authentic historical document.

• Racism featured, too, in the 1912 ‘Piltdown Man’ fraud. An amateur archaeologist in Sussex put together the skull of a human and the jaw of an orangutan, and claimed that this was a missing evolutionary link between apes and humans. The fraud was widely accepted for four decades, and used to justify racist claims that different ‘races’ had different evolutionary origins.

• The Clitoris Cult Conspiracy (1918) combined racism and homophobia. Written by a prolific anti-semitic journalist, it claimed that Germany planned to “exterminate the manhood of Britain” by luring men into homosexuality and that a small group of powerful British lesbians had plotted to turn their country into a vassal state of Germany.

• The Zinoviev letter (1924) was a forgery, made to appear that Comintern chair Grigory Zinoviev had written to the Communist Party of Great Britain calling on them to use a Labour victory in a forthcoming general election as an opportunity to promote communist revolution. It was published by the Times and the Daily Mail, four days before the election, to deter electors from voting Labour.

In 2002 the UK government issued a dossier claiming that Iraq continued to possess biological and chemical weapons that its government was supposed to have destroyed. Presented as an assessment of the available intelligence, the document had been ‘sexed up’ to make a more powerful case for military intervention, and its publication was a key factor in building support for the 2003 Iraq War. Particular prominence was given to a claim, taken up by a headline in The Sun, that Britain was ‘45 minutes from doom.’ All the allegations in the dossier were subsequently proved to have been false.

Fake news has, of course, become commonplace on social media, and it was particularly persuasive in influencing voters in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, and the Presidential election that same year in the USA.

Brutal online pornography (a key driver both for traumatised girls to identify as boys and for middle-aged men  to ‘come out’ as autogynephile) has become an inescapable part of sex education for children, and it is changing their brains as well as their behaviour.

Deepfakes and conspiracy theories abound, and we are increasingly encouraged to avoid the actual reality of human connection and become immersed in a virtual reality whose characteristics are determined by tech corporations. Any boundaries are systematically blurred.  Already,  groups of real men are sexually abusing the avatars of real girls in the metaverse, leaving the girls with real psychological scars - real sexual harassment that is dismissed because it is experienced in virtual reality.

Long before a likely UK general election in Autumn 2024, more than 100 deepfake ads impersonating Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have appeared within a month on Facebook. Such ads, impersonating the leaders of all the main parties, will almost certainly multiply as attempts are made to influence voters once an election date is announced.

Denying biological reality

It is no wonder that exposure to social media contagion has resulted in widespread dissociation. A major manifestation of this is the recent rapid growth in the number of children who come to believe that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. It’s a belief that has been promoted by a medical industrial complex which profits not only from lifelong hormone treatments and surgical mutilations, but also from the gamete freezing/IVF/surrogacy nexus that exploits the new marketing opportunity created by the sterilisation brought about by medicalised ‘transition.’

“Children are being groomed to think of themselves as commodities for the technological reproduction market, not as wholly sexed beings. They are being taught that they are a set of interchangeable parts; penises, breasts, vaginas, chromosomes, genes, sperm, eggs, and wombs. This is the gender industry, and it has nothing to do with freedom of expression or human rights. We either end it or we don’t. It’s not something you negotiate with, especially when the side you’re arguing against has all the money and power. Your strongest defence is the tool you have left: the truth.”

(Jennifer Bilek, X, 28 Dec 2023)

Key to this grooming process is a concerted effort, by media corporations,  to reframe this commodification of human bodies for profit as a human rights issue, analogous to women’s liberation or gay liberation. Nothing could be further removed from the grass roots organising that won significant rights for women and gays in the 1970s. Half a century later, these rights are under attack. Not from old style misogynists and homophobes, but from ‘progressive’ organisations obsessed with validating and normalising synthetic sex identities.

“A man who decides to call himself a woman is not giving up his privilege. He is simply using it in a more insidious way.”

(Judy Antonelli, quoted in Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, 1979)

These organisations see no conflict between their supposedly ‘progressive’ values and their support for policies whose only beneficiary is a profit seeking medical industrial complex. They jettison women’s (sex-based) rights and gay and lesbian (same-sex) rights, in order to affirm the identities of those who have been persuaded to disown their sex.  They support irreversible medical interventions for children which result in lifelong health issues. They celebrate the reduction of whole human beings to interchangeable body parts, and they actively promote a project whose end goals include corporate-controlled technological reproduction and the integration of humans and machines.

One of the most pernicious aspects of the normalisation of the claim that humans can change sex is its insistence that we all buy into the lie that this is a real possibility. In order to be ‘kind’, we are asked to respect someone’s ‘preferred pronouns’.  When we repeatedly call a man or boy ‘she’, or a woman or girl ‘he’, we are participating in a lie, a lie that damages our brains. This damage is particularly acute for children, whose brains are developing, and whose ability to assess risk depends in large part on their ability to perceive a situation accurately. It’s a damage that has all too often been exacerbated by misguided school policies on ‘inclusion’.

“Children who might otherwise grow up to be happily lesbian, gay or bisexual are being told, at school, that an attraction to someone of the same sex may be an indication that they were ‘born in the wrong body’….We abhor the indoctrination of children with fantastical theories and nonsense ideologies. Truth matters. It cannot be right for any school to, knowingly, teach children to lie.”

(LGB Alliance, Gender Questioning Children, Dec 2023)

In the run up to a general election in the UK, neither the Conservatives nor Labour appear willing to call a halt to the promotion of synthetic sex identities.  It seems likely that the next government, whether it is Labour or Conservative, will seek to adopt the Law Commissions’ recommendations on surrogacy reform, enabling the enhanced commodification of women’s bodies. And it remains a possibility that therapeutic support for troubled children who experience body hatred will be made a criminal offence.

Voting to defend reality is not going to be easy this election year.

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In Part 2, I shall explore political parties’ obsession with economic growth, and how this exacerbates the climate and ecological emergency and fails to meet basic human needs.