The narrative goes like this. Ordinary people could not REALLY want to vote for political party and politician X. They could not REALLY want to support policy Y. They could not REALLY want to protest about issue Z. They are just “misinformed”.

They read a “misinformed” tweet. They listened to a “misinformed” populist. They watched a “misinformed” video. They rely too much on “misinformed” social media.

In short, rather than accept that millions of people might not want to live in the kind of society that’s now being imposed on them from above by an out-of-touch, insular, and hyper-liberal if not radically progressive elite class, the members of this ruling class are now smothering themselves in a comfort blanket by portraying voters as irrational, ignorant, “misinformed” lemmings, who are being pushed around by Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin … [insert your preferred villain here].

It’s the populists, in short, who are stoking political chaos and carnage by cultivating and spreading “misinformation” around Western societies. Hence why the elite class is investing so heavily in politically-motivated “fact-checking”, “verifying”, and, as we now see in the UK, a growing clampdown (2) on free speech and free expression. If you can’t change people’s minds, you can at least control the supply of information (3).

And nowhere is this strategy more visible than on the issue of immigration, where time and time again we are told by politically-motivated journalists, fact-checkers, and the so-called “expert class” that ordinary people expressing concern (4) about this issue simply do not understand the facts and figures. They too are suffering from an outbreak of what we might call “misinformationitis”.

Think mass immigration is worsening the housing crisis? “Misinformed!” Think it’s driving up crime? “Misinformed!” Think it’s weakening the economy? “Misinformed!” Think it’s costing the taxpayer billions in welfare payments? “Misinformed!”

Which brings me back to that REMARKABLE revelation in parliament, which was quietly made by a renegade Conservative Member of Parliament during a committee discussion about immigration, with Nigel Farage and Reform MPs looking on. What was the revelation? Well, brace yourself because there wasn’t one but a series of bombshells, each one more mind-boggling than the last and each one underlining how it’s not populists who are stoking misinformation — it’s the elite class.

The revelations — by the respected and rigorous Neil O’Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby, and Wigston — really are devastating.

He pointed to not just a government but an entire political system that is either deliberately concealing masses of information from voters about the impact of immigration, or is doing so through sheer incompetence.

Just look at what he revealed:

•  The department for Work and Pensions has STOPPED publishing data on welfare claims by nationality, making it impossible for anybody to ascertain the impact of immigration on the welfare system (and the cost)

•  HMRC have STOPPED publishing information on the tax paid and tax credits received by nationality, again making it impossible to build up an accurate picture of how immigration is impacting on the national economy

•  the Home Office is now REFUSING to answer detailed questions about the immigration status of people who are imprisoned in UK prisons, making it impossible to gather information on how, if at all, immigration is impacting on crime rates and imprisonment

•  even worse, the Home Office actually have these data but they are deliberately REFUSING to publish them

•  the Home Office does NOT collect either nationality or immigration data on those people who are arrested on these islands, again making it impossible for us to know how, if at all, immigration is impacting on crime and social order

•  the Home Office does NOT reveal, in detail, what it is spending on hotel rooms and accommodation for illegal migrants in the asylum system, once again making it impossible to verify, dispute, or support claims being made

•  the Home Office says it DOES NOT KNOW how much it is spending on loans to refugees which is, once again, taxpayer money

As I pointed out on Twitter/X (5), in a tweet which has now been viewed by nearly 400,000 people, this, not populism, is what is breeding distrust among voters.

Either the elite class is completely incompetent, or it is deliberately concealing this information from you, the taxpayer, knowing full well that if this information was collected and released then it would likely confirm people’s suspicions about the damaging effects of illegal and legal immigration on their society – as data in other countries (6) – is already doing, including Germany, which I discuss in the piece below.

What we have then is an out-of-touch elite class that is simultaneously accusing voters of suffering “misinformation” while concealing this very information from them! How can ordinary people be misinformed when the state refuses to make critical information like this available to all? What are elites scared of?

If they are so confident in their policy decisions, in their political choices, in their continual assertion that things like immigration are an unalloyed positive for our society then why don’t they just release all the data and let us see it for ourselves?

I think we all know why. Which is why I and others will not stop drawing attention to this glaring hole in the national debate until we get the information, the transparency, and the assessments that the British people, that TAXPAYERS, deserve.

So, what can you do? Well, you could write to your local Member of Parliament and ask them why the above information is not being made public. And you could also explore submitting Freedom of Information (7) requests. Because the status-quo, with the elite class portraying much of the rest of the country as misinformed thickoes while keeping this data and information hidden from them is, clearly, unsustainable.

But this is also bigger than one issue. As I argue in my forthcoming short film (8), it’s high time that the people who run our country start treating the people who live in our country and are forced to pay the costs of the elite’s disastrous decisions with the respect and decency they deserve. Too many ordinary people are being asked (no, forced) to pay the costs of radical political experiments they neither voted for nor support. The very least the elite class could do is make this information available so we can assess the impact of the decisions that are being forced on the rest of us.

Because, look, if leaders across the West do not want to continue fanning the flames of populism, polarisation, and protest then they urgently need to start treating voters with the respect they deserve —and they could start by making this information available so that we can all have an “informed” debate about what is really happening to our country. Because until they do one point will remain inescapable. It’s not just populists who are stoking “misinformation” —it’s the elite class.

I ATTENDED a private conference last week where I was introduced as “a man who has made a career of stating the self-evident”. While some might see this description as a slight, to me it is a source of tremendous satisfaction. In a society which has forced large swathes of its citizenry to pretend that what they see with their own eyes must never be uttered out loud, describing the obvious reality is a worthy endeavour. That being the case, what is the self-evident truth of the last 48 hours?

I woke up on Sunday morning to the news that President Trump had been shot in an assassination attempt. My phone was bursting with notifications; a mixture of concern and unprintable memes. Like many, I experienced a range of emotions. From shock, to relief that the assassination failed, to concern for the future of an America in which this sort of thing could happen.

What occurred at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania had — and may still have — the potential to be one of those singular moments in history which changes the world forever. One need not reach for the overused example of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand which sparked the outbreak of World War I. Every significant revolution in modern history from the French, to the American to the Russian, was the product of events that no one could have predicted having the outcome they did. Likewise, the unanticipated and still-not-fully understood consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and the Global Financial Crisis plague us to this day.

Preoccupied with these historical precedents, my busy mind took many hours to settle. And it was only when it did that I realised the sad truth. There was one emotion I hadn’t experienced: surprise.

Obviously, I do not mean that I had prior knowledge of the attack or that I was aware of some sort of conspiracy to murder President Trump. I mean only that, for some time now, we have lived in a society in which this sort of thing could conceivably happen.

To be clear, this article is not meant to blame the assassination attempt on my favourite political complaint as politicians and commentators of every stripe have done over recent days.

Republicans attempted to present recent comments by President Biden in which he argued that enough time has been spent on debates about his mental acuity as the motivating factor for the attack. Apparently, we are supposed to believe that Biden incited the shooting when he said “We can’t waste any more time being distracted. I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump” before adding “It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.” (1)  Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose main achievement is to demonstrate that a low IQ is no impediment to success in politics, went further, tweeting that “The Democrat party… just tried to murder Donald Trump.” (2)

Many Democrats, on the other hand, have, for once, abandoned their pretence of being the party of good people. YouTuber Destiny, who you might remember from a recent debate (3) on TRIGGERnometry, had a full mask-off moment when he celebrated the death of Corey Comperatore, a man whose only crime was to be in the crowd. Comperatore was killed as he dived on top of his daughter to protect her from the gunfire with the only thing he had: his body.

“A person in a crowd cheering for and supporting a traitor to this country caught a stray? I’m so sad, please” Destiny tweeted. (4)

Mehdi Hasan, meanwhile, spent the last few days using the attack to score political points, retweeting things like this to his 1.5 million followers:  https://x.com/JamesTate121/status/1812474974675825129?t=BB7i3ByFp_zRQfbJ_V56rw&s=08&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Naturally, all of this is abominable behaviour in and of itself–even more so when it concerns an event in which a man died and several others were seriously injured. But to focus on this would be to conceal a more fundamental and self-evident truth: the way we talk about our political opponents is simply criminal.

In this instance, the right will justifiably paint the rhetoric, jokes and military metaphors deployed by the left as the cause of the assassination attempt. The left will deflect by citing Donald Trump’s suggestion that the problem of Hillary Clinton could be solved by the Second Amendment (5) and other irresponsible comments. Both will be right because, as with most issues nowadays, whatever case you want to make, the evidence is all there. The real question for someone who doesn’t believe that jokes and metaphors make people shoot politicians is: “What is the context in which an attempt on the life of a presidential candidate is no longer surprising?”

Like you, I know nothing about the would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. I heard someone on TV describe the 20-year-old as a “nutjob”. Is that the most logical explanation?, I thought to myself. After all, in a political climate in which Trump has been described as “Hitler”, “fascist”, “Nazi”, “dictator” and so on, would it really be crazy to assassinate him? I know that you and I are sensible, emotionally well-regulated people who never took these allegations seriously, whether we liked Trump or not. But not everyone out there is sensible, emotionally well-regulated or educated about history. What if you were a 20-year-old man? What if, like most 20-year-old men, you were seeking a mission worthy of your life? What if you were emotionally dysregulated? What if you lacked the judgement, IQ or plain common sense to disbelieve the people on your screens who kept screaming that he is a Nazi? What if you actually thought Trump was Hitler? In that situation, as a patriot and a dedicated citizen who wanted to go down in history, would you not be duty-bound to grab a rifle, climb on a roof and pull the trigger? After all, how would history remember a man who managed or even attempted to eliminate Hitler? Do we not make movies (6) about men like Colonel von Stauffenberg who did just that?

To be clear, I make no claim as to the shooter’s motivations. I am merely attempting to process my own lack of surprise at the assassination attempt itself. The self-evident truth is that we have ceased to love our neighbour. We may never know what the true reasons for the shooting of President Trump were, but what we do know is that it is time for this type of politics to end. Because if it doesn’t, something else will.

(1)  https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/07/08/congress/defiant-biden-tells-donors-were-done-with-the-debate-00166834?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

(2)  https://x.com/mtgreenee/status/1812551674705195066?t=Xj9R-NN2v2U2EZb-AWZO7Q&s=19&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

(3)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3E0urpQbTo

(4)  https://x.com/TheOmniLiberal/status/1812372669733494981?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

(5)  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

(6)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie_(film)?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email