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This Week in the New Normal #93

Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.

1. “new footage” of 9/11?

Big news on the 9/11 front this week, as previously unseen footage has come to light after 23 years. People are busily dissecting it to see if it shows any new evidence:

…of course, the most important question is “Is it real?”

We just published an article a few weeks ago about the possibility of fake media becoming increasingly easy to make and harder to detect, and this is precisely what we were talking about.

Maybe this video is real, maybe it’s not. But a 20-year-old video suddenly “coming to light” is pretty suspicious, and if it were to “accidentally” disprove “conspiracy theories”…well, isn’t that lucky?

This video might show evidence of explosions (that itself is a possible narrative, more on that during the week), but the next one might not.

This is exactly the kind of thing we need to be sceptical of in the modern world.

2. The War on Parents Continues

Two weeks ago California introduced a new law removing the requirement of schools to discuss kids’ gender identity with their parents.

Meaning Little Boy X can go to school, tell his teachers he is really a girl, and the school will then treat him as if he is a girl without ever confirming with the parents.

This is framed as a purely Trans issue, but it’s not. It’s about the ongoing war on parental rights and the family unit as a whole.

3. The Manchester Airport Fake Binary

A few days ago, footage emerged of a police officer kicking and stamping on a man’s head as he was lying on the floor at Manchester Airport:

This kicked off days of outrage and argument about police brutality and anti-Islam feeling, plus a potential law suit.

But THEN the “previously unseen” CCTV of the incident leading up to the kicking was released, showing the man in question being violent and injuring a female police officer:

Cue the counter-outrage and defense of the police and calling on politicians to resign for backing the victims.

All this just in time for two big marches on Saturday, one for each side.

This is classic binary narrative construction. Give both sides just enough evidence to fuel dueling outrage, sit back and watch them fight.

Bonus: Re-written History of the week

In 2021 Joe Biden named Kamala Harris his “border Czar”, it was doucmented at the time, then suddenly this week the MSM decided that never happened, and called the “border czar” label “misinformation”…

Is this a genuinely incompetent attempt re-write history? Or staged incompetence to generate content engagement?

Who knows.

*

All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention the EU proposed “asset register” or Singapore’s newly approved edible insect products.

There’s a lot of change in the air, a lot of agendas in the works, if you see a headline, article, post or interview you think is a sign of the times, post it in the comments, email us or share it on social media and we will add it to the next edition.

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