COMMENTARY: By Victoria Fielding

I once heard someone say that when the Left and the Right became polarised — when they divorced from each other — the Left got all the institutions of truth including science, education, justice and democratic government.

The Right got the institution of manipulation: the media. This statement hit me for six at the time because it seemed so clearly true.

What was also immediately clear is that there was an obvious reason why the Left sided with the institutions of truth and the Right resorted to manipulation. It is because truth does not suit right-wing arguments.

• READ MORE: Other truth-telling reports

The existence of climate change does not suit fossil fuel billionaires. Evidence that wealth does not trickle down does not suit the capitalist class. The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion (yes, I put those words in that order on purpose) is better for everyone, rather than a discriminatory, hateful, destructive, divided unequal world is dangerous for the Right to admit.

The Right’s embrace of the media institution also makes sense when you consider that the institutions of truth are difficult to buy, whereas billionaires can easily own manipulative media.

Just ask Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and turned it into a political manipulation machine. Just ask Rupert Murdoch, who is currently engaged in a bitter family war to stop three of his children opposing him and his son Lachlan from using their “news” organisations as a form of political manipulation for right-wing interests.

Right-wingers also know that truthful institutions only have one way of communicating their truths to the public: via the media. Once the media environment is manipulated, we enter a post-truth world.

Experts derided as untrustworthy ‘elitists’
This is the world where billionaire fossil fuel interests undermine climate action. It is where scientists create vaccines to save lives but the manipulated public refuses to take them. Where experts are derided as untrustworthy “elitists”.

And it is where the whole idea of democratic government in the US has been overthrown to install an autocratic billionaire-enriching oligarchy led by an incompetent fool who calls himself the King.

Once you recognise this manipulated media environment, you also understand that there is not — and never has been — such as thing as a rational public debate. Those engaged in the institutions of the Left — in science, education, justice and democratic government — seem mostly unwilling to accept this fact.

Instead, they continue to believe if they just keep telling people the truth and communicating what they see as entirely rational arguments, the public will accept what they have to say.

I think part of the reason that the Left refuses to accept that public debate is not rational and rather, is a manipulated bin fire of misleading information, including mis/disinformation and propaganda, is because they are not equipped to compete in this reality. What do those on the Left do with “post-truth”?

They seem to just want to ignore it and hope it goes away.

A perfect example of this misunderstanding of the post-truth world and the manipulated media environment’s impact on the public is this paper, by political science professors at the Australian National University Ian McAllister and Nicholas Biddle.

Stunningly absolutist claim
Their research sought to understand why polling at the start of the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum showed widespread public support for the Voice but over the course of the campaign, this support dropped to the point where the Voice was defeated with 60 per cent voting “No” and 40 per cent, “Yes”.

In presenting their study’s findings, the authors make the stunningly absolutist claim that:

‘…the public’s exposure to all forms of mass media – as we have measured it here – had no impact on the result’.

A note is then attached to this finding with the caveat:

‘As noted earlier, given the data at hand we are unable to test the possibility that the content of the media being consumed resulted in a reinforcement of existing beliefs and partisanship rather than a conversion.’

This caveat leaves a gaping hole in the finding by failing to account for how media reinforcing existing beliefs is an important media effect – as argued by Neil Gavin here. Since it was not measured, how can they possibly say there was no effect?

Furthermore, the very premise of the author’s sweeping statement that media exposure had no impact on the result of the Referendum is based on two naive assumptions:

• that voters were rational in their deliberations over the Referendum question; and
• that the information environment voters were presented with was rational.

Dual assumption of rationality
This dual assumption of rationality – one that the authors interestingly admit is an assumption – is evidenced in their hypothesis which states:

‘Voters who did not follow the campaign in the mass media were more likely to move from a yes to a no vote compared to voters who did follow the campaign in the mass media.’

This hypothesis, the authors explain, is premised on the assumption ‘that those with less information are more likely to opt for the status quo and cast a no vote’, and therefore that less exposure to media would change a vote from “Yes” to “No”.What this hypothesis assumes is that if a voter received more rational information in the media about the Referendum, that information would rationally drive their vote in the “Yes” direction. When their data disproved this hypothesis, the authors used this finding to claim that the media had no effect.

To understand the reality of what happened in the Referendum debate, the word “rational” needs to be taken out of the equation and the word “manipulated” put in.

We know, of course, that the Referendum was awash with manipulative information, which all supported the “No” campaign. For example, my study of News Corp’s Voice coverage — Australia’s largest and most influential news organisation — found that News Corp actively campaigned for the “No” proposition in concert with the “No” campaign, presenting content more like a political campaign than traditional journalism and commentary.

A study by Queensland University of Technology’s Tim Graham analysed how the Voice Referendum was discussed on social media platform, X. Far from a rational debate, Graham identified that the “No” campaign and its supporters engaged in a participatory disinformation propaganda campaign, which became a “truth market” about the Voice.

The ‘truth market’
This “truth market” was described as drawing “Yes” campaigners into a debate about the truth of the Voice, sidetracking them from promoting their own cause.

What such studies showed was that, far from McAllister and Biddle’s assumed rational information environment, the Voice Referendum public debate was awash with manipulation, propaganda, disinformation and fear-mongering.

The “No” campaign that delivered this manipulation perfectly demonstrates how the Right uses media to undermine institutions of truth, to undermine facts and to undermine the rationality of democratic debates.

The completely unfounded assumption that the more information a voter received about the Voice, the more likely they would vote “Yes”, reveals a misunderstanding of the reality of a manipulated public debate environment present across all types of media, from mainstream news to social media.

It also wrongly treats voters like rational deliberative computers by assuming that the more information that goes in, the more they accept that information. This is far from the reality of how mediated communication affects the public.

The reason the influence of media on individuals and collectives is, in reality, so difficult to measure and should never be bluntly described as having total effect or no effect, is that people are not rational when they consume media, and every individual processes information in their own unique and unconscious ways.

One person can watch a manipulated piece of communication and accept it wholeheartedly, others can accept part of it and others reject it outright.

Manipulation unknown
No one piece of information determines how people vote and not every piece of information people consume does either. That’s the point of a manipulated media environment. People who are being manipulated do not know they are being manipulated.

Importantly, when you ask individuals how their media consumption impacted on them, they of course do not know. The decisions people make based on the information they have ephemerally consumed — whether from the media, conversations, or a wide range of other information sources, are incredibly complex and irrational.

Surely the re-election of Donald Trump for a second time, despite all the rational arguments against him, is proof that the manipulated media environment is an incredibly powerful weapon — a weapon the Right, globally, is clearly proficient at wielding.

It is time those on the Left caught up and at least understood the reality they are working in.

Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. This article was first published by the Independent Australia and is republished with the author’s permission.

The January 6 assault on the US Capitol may have been a fitting end to Trump’s presidency. It was the embodiment of his trademark violation of norms and desacralisation of institutions.

Along with the second impeachment, it was also the logical culmination of four years of violently partisan rhetoric.

Donald Trump is, of course, less the cause but rather the natural expression of a populism run amok, and one for which Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement were the harbingers.

• READ MORE: Trump has been impeached – what happens now?

Still, he is an impressive – and appalling – expression of American populism. As the only representative elected by all Americans, the US president has both institutional and rhetorical power given his unique media exposure.

The “commander-in-chief” is also the “storyteller-in-chief.” His January 6 “Save America” speech is a perfect illustration of the way a populist narrative can sway the masses.

It is essential to understand its mechanism and to recognise its characteristics if we want to prevent a repeat.

Turning the crowd into ‘the people’
Populism is a complex and contested political concept. It is nevertheless identifiable by certain characteristics. First, of course, it often involves some form of demagoguery, a rhetorical device that Donald Trump masters perfectly, as rhetoric professor Jennifer Mercieca has shown.

“You’re stronger, you’re smarter. You’ve got more going than anybody,” he told his audience on January 6. He also praised the crowd’s pride and supposed patriotism, calling out “a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts […] an overwhelming pride in this great country.”

But flattery in itself does not define populism.

As political scientist Jan-Werner Müller has demonstrated, what characterises populism is above all a very restrictive and exclusive definition of “the people”. In his inaugural speech, President Trump contrasted the “forgotten people” with a corrupt elite.

When he addressed his supporters on January 6, he said: “You are the real people” which he defined as “the people that built this nation”, and contrary to “the people that tore down our nation”.

Trump’s “American people” are also the people who “do not believe the corrupt fake news anymore”.

As used by Trump, “the people” is both a rhetorical construction and an embodied metaphor found in phrasing like “the incredible patriots here today” and “the magnitude of the crowd” stretching “all the way to the monument in Washington”.

For the president, size is a sign of moral virtue: “As this enormous crowd shows,” he says, “we have truth and justice on our side.”

As many observers have noted, Trump is obsessed with crowd size. One of the very first lies from his spokesperson regarded the size of the 2016 inauguration crowd, how it was bigger than Obama’s in 2009, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

This was the first of thousands of “alternative facts” that came to define Trump’s presidency.

A victimised people
Another characteristic of Trump’s “people” is their victim status. They are the victims of a corrupt system and the “fake news media”.

He also makes a link between “the country that has had enough” and a we who will “not take it any longer” because “that’s what this is all about”.

Trump’s people identify with him through this victimisation. Hence the use of the subject pronoun we. “It’s incredible what we have to go through” he laments, building a cognitive bias that favours adherence to his numerous falsehoods.

Victimisation is an essential element of the populist discourse. It emphasises the innocence and the purity of the people (and their leader). It makes any future action, even illegal, morally justifiable.

“When you catch someone in the act of fraud,” said the president, “you’re allowed to follow very different rules.” In other words, it gives a blank check for illegal actions that will happen next.

An inner enemy
This rhetoric of victimization is also illustrated by the construction of the figure of an enemy who is no longer a foreign outsider but fellow Americans, as I have analyzed thoroughly elsewhere.

In Trump’s “Save America” speech, this enemy was primarily the news media. They “suppress speech,” and even “thought”.

They are the “enemy of the people” and “the biggest problem we have in this country”.

The expression “enemy of the people” is not new: it has its origins in the Roman Republic and was used during the French Revolution. But there is a certain irony in Trump using a term made particularly popular by the Soviet Union while comparing the suppression by the media to “what happens in a communist country”.

This view of the “enemy press” echoes that of Richard Nixon, as outlined in a recent article by RonNell Andersen Jones and Lisa Grow Sun. But Trump is much more vehement in his public attacks.

And the enemies he mentioned are not limited to the press: he also attacked the “big tech” who “rigged the election,” the Democrats and the “radical left” that will “destroy our country,” the Republicans such as Mitch McConnell, Bill Barr, and Liz Cheney who refused to back his false claims, or the Supreme Court that “hurts our country”.

An existential threat
The populist discourse also requires the construction of a permanent crisis. The enumeration of numerous enemies leads to an implacable logic: “Our country has been under siege.”

This type of war lexicon is all the more effective that the emotional charge is reinforced with the evocation of children:

“They also want to indoctrinate your children at school by teaching them things that aren’t so. They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy.”

This threat of “indoctrination of children” validates the policy in favour of private schools put in place by the Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. It may also echo QAnon’s conspiracy theories that portray Donald Trump as the hero of a struggle against the “deep state” and a supposed cabal of Democratic politicians and celebrities baselessly accused of abusing children.

But, more generally, what is at stake is the very existence of the nation: “If you don’t fight like hell,” the president warned, “you won’t have a country anymore.”

So now, said the president, “the American people [are] finally standing up and saying, “No”.

Heroic action: virtuous strength versus shameful weakness
By standing up and fighting, Trump’s “people” can become heroic. It is common for US presidents to rely on the trope of the hero, a figure whose strength is always kept in check by virtue.

Donald Trump presents a very different narrative where heroism is exclusively defined by unchecked strength, to the point that strength is a virtue in and of itself, as I developed previously in my research.

“You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he repeated, and members of Congress who promised to oppose the certification of votes became “warriors”.

The claim that “We will not be intimidated into accepting the hoaxes and the lies” is also a way to refuse to be weak. After repeating the term “weak Republicans” several times, Trump clearly showed he enjoyed this expression, insisting he was going to use the term from then on.

This binary view of strength vs. weakness echoes a very conservative and gendered narrative that appeals to Donald Trump’s base, especially evangelicals: Trump’s hypermasculinity is contrasted to the Democrats’ enlightened masculinity, portrayed as weak and feminine.

An extreme incarnation of this hypermasculinity can be found in the neo-fascist organisation Proud Boys present among his supporters.

At the end of his speech, when Trump encouraged his supporters to take action by going to Capitol Hill, he asked the crowd to “give our Republicans – the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help […] – the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country”.

As the speech reached its crescendo, Trump emphasised his supporters’ strong emotional bond with him, and his with them.

“We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you”, he promised, as if they would be protected by a Christ-like presence that did not even have to materialise – and it didn’t. Instead, as what was now a mob moved toward the Capitol, Trump was driven back to the White House, where he watched the assault unfold on live television.

The remains of the day
The tragic events of January 6 and their aftermath are now well known. Five people died, including police officer Brian Sicknick, who was beaten to death by the pro-Trump mob.

Despite the violent attack, Congress was able to reconvene and formally recognise the victory of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris. But the risk was grave and the wounds deep.

All of this was made possible by Donald Trump ability and willingness to heighten and take advantage of his supporters’ sense of exclusion (economic, social or otherwise), fear of cultural and identity dispossession, and distrust toward US institutions.

Trump’s populist narrative and coded language gave them a feeling of empowerment and encouraged them to imagine that a violent attack on Congress would be a patriotic, heroic act.

This is partly why, despite what happened on Capitol Hill, his approval rating remains at 40 percent. If his popularity among his voters may have slightly declined, it is still close to 80 percent, and about one in five Republicans (22 percent according to Reuters-Ipsos, or nearly 15 million Americans) claims to support the rioters’ actions.

Most importantly, a large majority of them continue to believe what the president has been saying for months: that the election was “rigged”, and that Joe Biden is therefore illegitimately president-elect.

With the second impeachment against Donald Trump and the threat of further attacks by his supporters on American institutions and elected officials in Washington and across the nation, and a pandemic, the next few days, weeks, and even months could prove crucial for American democracy.

By Dr Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, assistant lecturer, CY Cergy Paris Université. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Looking back at 2016, it’s easier to come up with a list of bad things that happened than good: Brexit, Trump and the rise of post-truth politics; the Syrian disaster, and the subsequent European bungling of the influx of refugees; and China and Russia flexing their military muscles on the borders of Europe and in the South China Sea.

Closer to home in the United States for wind we have the Brazilian political and economic disaster leading to zero auctions for new capacity; continued increase in the outrageous curtailment in China; and corruption at the highest level in South Africa trying to kill the renewables industry just as it starts to bloom. The list could be much longer.

But there is plenty to be positive about as well: record low onshore prices in Morocco (less than $0.03/kWh); 12 months ago in Argentina we had nothing — now there’s a solid 1.4GW pipeline, which will be added to in 2017; despite the politics, the US industry is arguably healthier than it’s ever been, with record capacity under construction; the Australian market has come back to life; and amid the general European malaise, offshore prices have cratered in the past six months. Offshore wind’s prospects are now brighter than ever, not least because prices make it likely that the industry will expand outside of Europe in earnest in the coming years.

So what’s in store for 2017?

First of all, the US: the only thing I can say at this point is that I don’t know what they’re going to do, and I don’t believe that they do either.

Donald Trump has now appointed a bunch of climate-denying billionaires as his key cabinet nominees — the confirmation hearings will be interesting; and in his “conciliatory” New York Times interview, he spewed such a load of nonsense about wind power it’s hard to know where to start.

On the bright side, energy secretary nominee Rick Perry is the former governor of Texas, and in that role at least was a big wind supporter. More than 80 percent of US wind installations are in Republican congressional districts, and key Senate figures have vowed to oppose any moves to undo the production tax credit deal done last December.

Whether that resolve will hold in the face of the coming whirlwind remains to be seen. Given the level of construction activity at present we would expect 2017 to be a good year for the US market.

Both the International Energy Agency’s Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report 2016 and the World Energy Outlook 2016 are quite bullish on the outlook for wind power in the medium to longer term — to the point where the IEA’s 450 scenario is beginning to look a lot like our Global Wind Energy Outlook’s moderate scenario.

The wind industry and the IEA’s outlook have moved a lot closer over the past several years, and I’m happy to say that most of the movement has been on their side.

That said, it is still curious that for the short to medium term, the IEA’s scenarios always posit that the year that has just finished will be the largest market ever for wind power, and 2016 and 2017 are no exception, with predictions of double-digit drops from 2015 market levels for both years.

In the world’s largest market for wind, the downward revision in China’s feed-in tariffs at the beginning of 2018 means there will be another rush of installations in 2017 to beat the deadline. The move to shut down coal plants and even cancel some plants under construction will not solve the curtailment problem in China, although it may help a bit; and the ongoing  “airmageddon” in Beijing and elsewhere only boosts the call for clean energy as the country wrestles with its killer air pollution.

The cancellation of Brazil’s auction in December was the latest signal that its wind industry is another potential victim of the political and economic crisis that has occupied the country for the past year. As a result of the stringent local-content requirement attached to the only realistically available Real-denominated financing (from the BNDES national development bank), many OEMs have invested in factories in Brazil. But now that demand has dried up (temporarily, I believe), those investments are at risk.

Looking south to the burgeoning market in Argentina, the Brazilian industry is hoist on its own petard, because its local-content requirements make Brazilian-made turbines uncompetitive. It’s going to be a couple of very hard years in Brazil. Even though the build-out from the previous auctions will keep the installation numbers up for 2017 and a bit beyond, without new orders the supply chain will start to fall apart.

The refusal of South Africa’s state-owned utility Eskom to sign power-purchase agreements for the fourth round of the REIPPPP tenders for more than 18 months now is just another facet of the moral and political bankruptcy of the Zuma government. The publication (four years late) of the updated Integrated Resource Plan shows clearly that the cheapest and cleanest way forward for South Africa is based on wind, solar and a little gas, with no need for nuclear until 2037, if ever. However, shortly after its publication, Eskom defiantly put out a tender for a new nuclear plant. There are many other narratives at play in this unfolding drama, but it will probably get sorted out during the course of 2017 and the market will flourish again.

Elsewhere, we see strong markets developing across South America, especially in Argentina, Chile and Peru. Mexico continues with its own energy revolution, and the Canadian government’s rediscovered commitment (pipelines and tar sands notwithstanding) to the climate issue bodes well for that market.

If India is able to recover from the government’s spectacularly disastrous attempt to flush the “black” money out of the system — the so-called demonetisation exercise — then we should see a strong market in 2017, following on from significant market growth in 2016.

There are also stirrings in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Colombia, Senegal, and elsewhere across Africa, Asia and Latin America, which should be enough to occasionally distract us from the political messes in Europe and the US.

But we will inevitably be preoccupied with Trump. After signing on to a letter to President Barack Obama in late 2009 saying, “We support your effort to ensure meaningful measure to control climate change… if we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet”, Trump spent most of the campaign talking about climate change as a Chinese hoax. Go figure.

The response of most of the rest of the countries at last year’s climate summit in Marrakech was that they were moving ahead regardless of the US. The Chinese delegation emerged as the somewhat reluctant global leaders of the climate effort, and reminded Trump that the establishment of the IPCC and the beginning of multilateral efforts on the climate issue were instigated by US president Ronald Reagan and UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Post-truth politics, indeed.

Steve Sawyer is secretary-general of the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).