Is There a Thaw in the Air of Social Debate?

Although Donald Trump's election into US presidency has dispelled many of the previous woke dogmas and brought signs of a quiet revival of personal freedoms, vigilance cannot be abandoned.

Have you noticed a social shift in recent months? Do you perhaps feel that, to a greater or lesser degree, people who had disappeared from your life in recent years have now returned? Perhaps those who were previously trying hard to claim empathy for African refugees on little boats, while ridiculing the small-towners caught in the state wheel of their country? But those who countered your doubts about an untested experimental drug with assurances of a hyperbolic change in the pace of scientific progress, just a few years ago, have also returned.

Do you remember that just a year ago, you had to constantly monitor what you said and how you said it? Not only to avoid pointing at anyone in the audience and thus putting them, potentially, in an uncanny position – I think almost all of us had acquaintances or even relatives who followed or even hunted for your statements that, in their mind, could compromise some third party. Those would have included people defined as “minorities”, though they were not present at the conversation and not even affected by it.

Some of the people with heads-up in the social circles had taken it upon themselves—but for the sake of others—an obligation of self-censorship and self-restraint. These restricted the vocabulary as well as the general free flow of a discussion. The number of prohibited or at least frowned-upon keywords and topics grew steadily. The atmosphere became increasingly tense until, at some point (at least in certain countries), a situation began to develop where careless use of words could threaten your well-being, your job, your financial situation... And even your physical freedom.

The fight against facts

“The decent people” began to reject you or stopped talking to you altogether if you did not conform to the increasingly specific canon. This meant not only an obligation to agree with their political points – no, the dogmas began to range from the historical to the biological and psychological. The most notorious of these dogmas was that you had to believe the migrants in your country had more rights than its native citizens. Things got to a point where even history was falsified in an attempt to claim the migrants were actually the indigenous people of that country.

Or, for example, when a man identified himself as a woman simply by his own claim for it, he was given the right to harass the fairer sex in toilets. And not only that – on the solid fact of his own claim, he could, for example, enter the women’s competitions and ask for prize money.

And perhaps most outrageously of all – if your own child, influenced by the psychological whims of puberty, suddenly “identified” as the opposite sex, other people had all at once the right to take him or her away from you. Based on the whims of a child who was not yet capable of responsibility and reason, their bodies could irreversibly be mutilated, and your protest against it could, in the worst case, land you in prison.

Now, however, some kind of a ‘thaw’ is to be sensed. The network of interconnected corporations once called the “mainstream media” is trying hard to keep the “factology”, the talking points and narratives alive, ugly as they were in the Biden era, and yet one can feel that even these giant media houses have already lost much of their former drive and steam power. To be true, their viewership has declined so much that it is actually difficult to still call them the “mainstream media.” In the best case, they have been relegated to be the “official media” (or so-called legacy media) of the Hararian empire.

The triumph of the “unofficial” media

It is likely that, at least for the more alert third of humanity, the sourcing of news has become very diverse. Perhaps it is not unfair to claim that the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) is now the central news channel. Under the leadership of Elon Musk, a visionary who values freedom, it has become the most important news app in most countries.

Elon Musk’s X has become an important news app in many countries. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

X itself is, of course, neither a news agency nor a journalistic publication, but it is a platform that brings together various news publishers under its (mostly) uncensored umbrella. News distributors have found their place on the platform, but more importantly, one can usually check the untampered source itself as well. This means that those interested in the news are not solely dependent on media-processed information, but can more easily access the original source of the news in order to form their own opinion on many of the stories.

Thus, for example, the US “legacy media” may ignore the story of a black man and a hardened criminal, released from prison 14 times, deciding to kill the Ukrainian refugee Irina Zarutska, but thanks to the news’ uncensored distribution on X’s channels, this shocking story, along with the background information of context, has been etched onto the minds of hundreds of millions of people.

An even more vivid clash of the old and new media, in the sense of downplaying or distorting a piece of news, was the murder of the political activist Charlie Kirk. The “legacy media” initially tried to ignore the story, then attempted to pin the blame on “right-wing extremists,” and finally spun it that the murder was up to of Kirk’s own rhetoric, the personality of Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ gun policy. However, these attempts to influence the public opinion had an effect on an increasingly small number of Americans, as the majority had already, to a greater or lesser degree, lost trust in the “official media” and got their news and related information about Kirk from more direct and unbiased sources, by-passing the unnecessary intermediaries.

And lo and behold – we also see science is making a comeback instead of “science”, people once again becoming aware of their civil rights, controversial historical junctions given fresher perspectives, and so on. The result is a situation where those who still want to distort scientific facts and axioms, or want to stir up unjustified panic (e.g., “climate anxiety”) and still paint up domestic and foreign policies in a simplified “black and white” propagandisms (deliberately ignoring the “fifty shades of grey”), are increasingly making fools of themselves.

Trump’s thaw

All of this leads to former university friends who had, for a while, gone along with the ideological trends once again welcoming those who remained faithful to science and facts over ideological oppression. Of course, people are still sensing the ground, remaining cautious, giving a wink half-secretly... But the changes are clearly in the air. The more intelligent “normies” can already see the former “fact checkers” and “representatives of scientific monopoly” have either already made fools of themselves or are about to do so, unless they promptly “change their tune.”

What has made this possible is not just the natural and inevitable advancement of the society (which should never have made it back to such a pro-totalitarian state in the 21st century!), but also a specific political event that is at the center of all these developments, just as Stalin’s death was in a certain political system at the time. And today that event is Donald Trump’s re-election as the president of the United States (or, in some ways, of the Western world). This unique event was made possible by the extraordinary society of the United States, which, unlike Europe, unfortunately rates absolute freedom as the highest value.

Donald Trump is comforting Erika Kirk, the wife of Charlie Kirk, who was murdered during a public appearance. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

Disclosure of Trump’s post-election team, questionable foreign policy moves, and broken campaign promises, or even the obvious attempts to cover up the Epstein story, have, for many, already brought about justified disappointment. One can always ask whether the US government’s foreign policy moves are currently bringing us closer to war or peace. However, I would argue that these (justified) concerns should not distract attention from the profound changes that the fall of the previous woke government in the US has brought about for the Western world. One can still make quite a convincing argument that Donald Trump’s re-election as the US president has, if not completely demolished a number of previous woke dogmas, then at least finally made them subject to criticism.

Let’s not fall back into a world of coercion

Despite all that, the risk of falling back is not over. It serves to remain aware that an average person’s embrace of truth and freedom is still cautious. Chains of organisations feeding on the suppression of freedoms, oftentimes under the guise of ‘protection’, are still alive and well. In many of the European countries, power is still held by political parties and “food chains” that have gained their mandate and legitimacy under anti-freedom slogans. It should also not be forgotten that there are still groups of people who benefited (often in the short term) from the previous situation. They would rather wish to restore a silenced society with “hate speech” controls. In other words, those who crave censorship and even political violence (at least in the form of political prison sentences disguised as “criminal cases”).

Thus, despite an apparent thaw in society, nothing has been decided yet, and nothing is guaranteed. We cannot rely solely on the “Trump effect” to work by itself. Should we stand here passively and wait for our retracted freedoms and civil rights to be handed back to us on a silver platter, and for the Western world to return to the Kennedy or Reagan era by itself, we will let our opportunity slip through our fingers – the opportunity to use the momentum, to speak, to talk and to act in the name of freedom. To prioritize our own citizens over “migrants”. To ensure that we receive fair compensation for meaningful work, that we can raise families, be with our loved ones, and protect our society from both internal and external hostile forces.

Should we miss the moment and allow ourselves to be confused by the ever-growing war hysteria, or crave “security” over freedoms, then we have already lost. If we do not actively re-evaluate the strategies that have brought us harm and demand an investigation into them—be it in education, medicine, border protection, legal system, etc. — along with exposing those responsible for them and ultimately holding them accountable — they will return through their well-funded networks. If the networks that seek to transform free society remain unravelled and undispersed, they will soon enough come up with new schemes to restore their position.

It is to be feared that we will not be given another chance. Elon Musk noted that the last election was a “fork in the road of destiny” that determined whether the West would remain free or not. While the election itself could be seen as a decisive turning point, what it really did was to just give us a hammer with which to forge our own armor for the protection of our freedoms over the next four years – to do it collectively and with each individual contributing. We must actively heal society and make it more cognizant than it has been recently. Only this can truly curtail the ability of organisations built on falsehood and fake morality to destroy Western freedoms. Or at least not by the soft and gradual method used until now.

Therefore, let us not become our own obstacles; let us not allow fake politeness and caution in our conversations to trample on what we know to be true. Let us recognize and exercise our civil rights in all fields. It is in this way that we can create an environment in which the imported false narratives and superficial morality will have a hard time flourishing.