Let's pretend

We live in pretend times. Nearly everything is fake. Fake news is more common than real news. Our current reality makes The Truman Show look real in comparison.

The political and media class and most of our institutions engage in a 24/7 campaign of subterfuge, deceit and outright lies about the past, the present and the future.

They pretend many things. For example, they pretend that the importation of millions of people from foreign cultures hasn’t had an effect on crime, terror, division and unhappiness. In fact, they claim the very opposite, that immigration has enriched us and ‘diversity is strength’.

They pretend that Islam isn’t a civilisational threat to Britain and the West. When confronted with the murder of one of their kind by an Islamist, MPs instead debated the perils of social media. Labour MP Jess Phillips pretended that the reason the 2024 election was ‘the worst I have ever stood in’ was because of the behaviour of men. And not Islamists, which was the case.

With every atrocity that (a small number of) immigrants or their loving sons commit, the Pretend Machine goes into overdrive. The assailant is ‘from Newcastle’, or ‘from Cardiff’. The phrase ‘mental health’ will be trotted out. ‘From a normal family’. 'Not terror-related'. The rumours circulating on social media are ‘wrong’ the police will say, while withholding inconvenient truths that they believe would destabilise society further if they leaked out. The incident will be heavily spun, and then it will be memory-holed. The Manchester Arena bombing and the mass rape of white working class girls by mainly Pakistani men up and down the country over several decades are horrors beyond belief, and yet they are played down for reasons of ‘community cohesion’.

It's not just pretending that multiculturalism has been a success. They – the authorities – pretended in 2020 that forbidding people to leave their houses ‘without a reasonable excuse’ for months would have beneficial health outcomes. That you would somehow be less likely to fall ill if you avoided sunshine, fresh air, exercise and purposeful tasks, and instead rattled around your house feeling lonely, depressed and anxious, taking solace in alcohol, drugs, food and online porn.

They pretended that a porous cloth mask would protect you from a microscopic airborne virus. They pretended you had to wear one to protect yourself and others whereas it was to ensure they knew who was a good little citizen, and who wasn’t.

They still pretend that there was a covid vaccine, one that was safe and effective, whereas it was not safe and it was not effective. Funny how the most jabbed people I know are the ones who seem to keep getting covid. Funny how my mate’s previously healthy wife had a heart attack a week after her injection (not funny, of course).

Our new Labour government pretends it can lower our heating bills, power economic growth and save the planet with their militant net zero plans. Whereas the reality is that your heating bills will go up, the country will slip even further into the red and the climate of the planet will not be affected one jot. The government pretends that by 2030 the grid will be carbon-free. It won’t be. We might have blackouts, though.

The government also pretends it can build 1.5 million more homes in this parliament when in reality it can’t force builders to build anything like that number. It also pretends it can create economic growth, but governments can only create the conditions for economic growth.

They pretend that an ever-shrinking tax base can continue to support an ever-growing legion of the old, the unwell, and the ‘unwell’.

Both the political and media class pretend that a man can become a woman. The man doesn’t even have to have any surgery; if he says he is a woman, he is one. When even notionally conservative publications like The Mail and The Telegraph call mentally unbalanced narcissist Eddie Izzard ‘she’, you realise how deep the rot is. Our country has become an amalgam of Alice In Wonderland, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and 1984.  

(There’s a bloke in our office – nice bloke – who wears a dress and has enormous fake breasts and people have to call him ’she’, otherwise they will face serious repercussions. Maybe being smacked ten times with a rolled-up copy of The New European, I’m not sure.)

Courts pretend that they believe a male rapist who says he is a female is a female, and admonish his victims if they call the rapist ‘he’.

The armed forces and the security services pretend that women can be as suited to certain physical roles as men are. The security services also pretend that the threat of ‘far-right’ terrorism is equal to the threat of Islamic terrorism. It isn’t.

Semi-terrorist organisations like Just Stop Oil pretend that life on Earth will cease to be if we continue using fossil fuels, whereas the likelihood is that if we stopped using all fossil fuels tomorrow, within a year billions of humans would die.

The airline industry pretends that it will recruit vastly more female pilots without a problem. The Met police and the London Mayor pretend they can hire nearly as many black officers as white officers.

The advertising industry pretends that Britain is about 40% black, rather than 4%, and that in any social gathering in an ad there will be always be non-white people present. Pretending has long been the way in advertising of course, but in the last decade the industry’s embrace of diversity has been something that's become impossible to ignore.

Perhaps the advertising industry is influenced by Hollywood, which has been putting out pretend scenarios for years. Recently we had (excellent) Pixar animation Inside Out 2, which pretends that junior hockey teams in the US are almost entirely non-white. Which isn’t the case.

The BBC pretends that it is impartial, whereas it is an organisation stuffed to the gills with left-wing activists. The civil service is the same. Google pretends it offers the objective truth while it manipulates search results to fit the agenda of crazy Californian Democrats.

In the US, though, they take pretending to a whole new level. The Dems and their army of supporters in the media pretended that Joe Biden was not a senile old man. Until they suddenly didn’t, when they started pretending that cackling communist with the IQ of a gerbil Kamala Harris would make a fine leader of the free world.

DEI purveyors pretend it is about diversity, equity and inclusion, where it is really about conformity of thought, the Marxist idea that everyone must end up in the same place, and excluding certain people, normally straight white men. They pretend it’s all about fairness whereas most at the head of the movement know it’s a way to make money and accrue power. And they claim that people are not hired for DEI reasons while simultaneously promoting DEI, which is quite extraordinary when you think about it.  

Vegans pretend that their diet is healthier than meat eaters', which it isn’t. (But they do have a point about it not inflicting cruelty on animals.)

In our godless age, our secular, pompous overlords pretend they can control a virus, pretend they can control the climate, pretend that trillions of dollars of debt doesn’t matter. They will pretend to the grave. The EU will always go on pretending that it is democratic.

What is the biggest pretence? What are the biggest lies? Probably around immigration. The Establishment will highlight the positive and neglect the negative. Yet there are always pluses and minuses. And so:

We get horrific blood-soaked knife atrocities, the industrial scale sexual abuse of white working class girls, acid attacks, and billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money spent on security measures, DEI, healthcare and translation services… but have lots of nice Indian restaurants.

We have bombs blowing up children, soldiers being stabbed, cities that are tinder boxes, an indigenous population regularly belittled, pro-Hamas hate marches, machete battles, sectarian politics, and women in full niqabs… but you get your Amazon delivery in under 24 hours.

We have our ability to complain restricted, 10,000 potential jihadists walking the streets, taxes dodged on a huge scale, occasional riots, a shoplifting epidemic, MPs killed and given death threats, and a million other micro difficulties every single week… but you can usually get an Uber pretty sharpish.

Just some of the trade-offs in a country that has undergone demographic transformation on a scale never before seen in history – because the elite wanted it. The elite that pretended they were honest and wise and munificent. They weren’t.