Living in a Fake World: A New Year’s Recognition

I was recently examining an old school bus for purchase in the hopes of completing its conversion into a rustic motorhome. Unfortunately, this specimen was not in good repair; a lot of shoddy work was apparent—apparent to me, that is, after a mechanic friend started pointing it out. Various fixtures were messily welded onto the frame of the bus, or inconveniently placed, or broken.

The last straw in my decision not to purchase the bus, however, was opening the hood and discovering not just the empty coolant tank (empty for how many engine hours?), but a thin diesel feed line for a fuel-run heater dangling free under the bus. It was just waiting to get caught in a wheel or snagged by a rock and rupture, spraying diesel fuel all over the hot engine compartment, electronic components, and who knows what else.

This bus looked good on the Facebook Marketplace listing, but once you saw it in person and got your hands dirty under the hood, a different story began to appear. It was an overpriced, poorly maintained, mechanical wreck. Sure, it turned on, but had I started driving it, it would have been a matter of time and chance before it went up in flames.

I’ve been thinking that our “first world” society is quite similar. The deeper you look, the deeper the dangerous fakes run in our society, like the dangling diesel line in the bus. The bus turns on, it drives apparently well, but unknown to the driver without the ability to look under the hood, the engine is burning up without coolant, and a fuel line is precariously dangling, ready to ignite that burning engine and take the whole bus with it. The deeper one looks, the more surreal everything becomes when it’s marketed as something that “runs great”. 

Maybe the news of recent months isn’t all that different from what’s come before—or maybe we’re seeing more obvious cases of a decay we’ve known is there for a long time. “Don’t believe everything you see or read” isn’t a new or surprising proposition for those of us trying to stay awake if not woke. 

But now it seems “don’t believe everything” is turning into “don’t believe anything.” 

A few disparate examples will demonstrate what I’m talking about.

Let’s start with toilet paper. Yes, that’s right. The wood pulp is processed with chlorine and formaldehyde. Chlorine can produce dioxins—toxins linked to issues with the immune system, reproductive, and developmental problems. Formaldehyde is a carcinogen, and some believe chlorine is as well. Some toilet paper includes undisclosed fragrances which often include phthalates—endocrine disruptors. Not only is one exposed to these chemicals when toilet paper touches the skin, they are also released into water once toilet paper is used—either in sewers or in landfills—and from there, trickle back into who-knows-what aquatic habitats, crop irrigation, and drinking water. Oh, and did I mention talcum powder—the stuff we’ve been putting on our babies for decades—has also come under scrutiny as a carcinogen?

Let’s jump from the bathroom to the Middle East and the “peacekeeping” troops supplied by the United Nations and supposed humanitarian organizations. As a number of articles at European Conservative have shown, there are serious questions as to how the UN “peacekeeping troops” could have been ignorant of the way Hezbollah fighters were using them as a human shield and fortifying positions “under their noses.” Other issues have to do with the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Video’s released from UNRWA-run schools include children appearing to be encouraged in anti-Israeli—and anti-Jewish—messaging. “One boy…claimed he was taught ‘to fight back and resist’ so that ‘Palestine will be liberated and our lands will return to us by the good grace of Allah.’ He also said the solution for Jerusalem is to ‘kill the Jews. We get rid of the Jews.’” That doesn’t exactly sound like giving “relief” to people living in Palestine, as the organization’s name would imply. Nor does the UN World Food Program’s resistance to “anti-terror vetting.” Interestingly enough, the videos which were live when the article was published are no longer available.

Which leads me to the puzzling reversal of the Left’s attitude to Anti-Semitism. For the past 70 years, being an anti-semite was one of the few unpardonable sins. And yet, all of a sudden, everyone is now allowed to hate the Jews…because they are being attacked. Leaving aside all the complex questions involved (such as “Should the state of Israel exist? Is it an unjust and arbitrary imposition on the political map over there?”), it is simply shocking what a complete about-face the whole establishment has made—and with little argumentation, nuance, or resistance. One day being a Jew-hater or Holocaust denier could get you jailed (literally, in Europe), and the next, you have mobs on school campuses and festivals not just shouting anti-semitic slogans but physically attacking Jews. Of course, these events involve different demographics: the European mobs are largely driven by immigrants with a pro-Islam stance, while the situation in the US is much more linked to the forces driving the DEI program.

Looking something up on Wikipedia the other day, I was struck by the wording of their Christmas donation campaign:

The internet we were promised—a place of free, collaborative, and accessible knowledge—is under constant threat. On Wikipedia, volunteers work together to create and verify the pages you rely on, supported by tools that undo vandalism within minutes, ensuring the information you seek is trustworthy.

This put me in mind of how Wikipedia itself is threatening the “internet we were promised” (as an aside—since when were we promised any sort of internet? We assumed and hoped the internet would be a lot of things, but since when was there any “promise,” and who did it come from?). An excellent case of this is how the Wikipedia page detailing the history of “Muslim Grooming Gangs in the UK” was edited to “Grooming Gang Moral Panic.” As one source, quoted by the European Conservative, put the reaction of some of the victims:

“It was a scandal where over 1400 children were raped and trafficked around England. I don’t see how they can class it as a ‘moral panic’ when every authority would not act because of racial tension.”

Another abuse survivor summed it up: 

“Once again we are reacting to people who are more interested in promoting political correctness and lies about the abuse that we suffered rather than owning up to the reality of what happened.” 

Wikipedia would rather fabricate a “far right moral panic” than admit that a group of Muslims is culpable for child trafficking. This is certainly not the internet Wikipedia appears promises us on its donation popup…or is it? Wikipedia would rather fabricate a “far right moral panic” than admit that a group of Muslims is culpable for child trafficking.Tweet This

Finally, we are all now familiar with the strange and sudden way the media was allowed to “realize” that Biden was no longer a coherent player on the stage of American politics (and the no less strange and sudden way that Kamala Harris, who had never been anything other than a political failure and embarrassment, was catapulted onto center stage). As Trump nears inauguration with an explicitly stated peace-oriented policy, Biden accelerates the War in Ukraine. He was like the hanging diesel fuel line: an invisible loose cannon. Yet another example of living in a fake world, where everything from toilet paper to the US president appears not just poor in quality or non-functional but counter- and anti-functional.

These and many other examples could be brought to light. It’s not as simple as corporate corruption or government crimes or misleading modern philosophy. It’s not even really comparable to the bus: that case was a case of a bus in bad repair with shoddy and questionable work done to it. This is more like looking under a bus hood and, instead of discovering anything to do with a bus, finding that the shell of the bus is made out of plasticized rat skins, and serves as a uranium power plant for the cryogenic corpse preservation of the Nubian royal family…when all the listing said was “converted school bus for sale.”

Oh, wait. I’ve thought of a better example. Imagine you were told a world-wide plague was spreading and that it was so dangerously contagious you couldn’t leave the house for months on end. Everyone who wondered whether or not it was as bad as people thought was canceled online. A medicine was invented for it, but whenever anyone pointed out that people were dying from taking the medicine (which didn’t stop the spread of the disease), they were also silenced. And imagine finding out later that whatever it was, it wasn’t what everyone had told you. The more you looked, the harder it was to find evidence for what everyone had said. Despite being a disaster, imagine finding that all the large corporations had somehow profited from the disease. The world feels like that sort of thing might happen any day, doesn’t it?

What are we to do? Before we do anything about it, we have to be open to discovering fakes. Before resolutions of reformation, we have to start with recognition. In my next article, I’ll discuss a few ideas for un-faking your life. Then we can start making New Year’s resolutions.

[Image Credit: Shutterstock]