The fact is, jingo bells, jingo bells, jingoism all the way
jingoism is alive and kicking. This has nothing to do with the 147-word vocabulary-constrained logorrhoea of Donald Trump. Or the equally muddled manifesto of Project 2025 — a political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation that aims to promote conservative and rightwing policies to reshape the US federal government if the Orange One wins in November — which could elevate the standing of the US presidency at the expense of that nation and make some frustrated autocrats in other large democracies green with envy.
Instead, it has everything to do with the steadfast rejection of that silently dissenting historical witness: fact.
This is a serious problem in an age liberated by individual interpretation, PC rendering, social media influence, and compensative revisionism. In such a situation, fact is bound to be unreliable, because it stubbornly refuses to be explained, restrained, swayed, or altered. This is why fact-checking should only be invoked to contest the statement of an opponent, never to question the foundation of a belief.
You can imagine my relief, therefore, when I met an Ivy League college prof, who held that only the US had the right to develop and manage social media platforms because, unlike some other Asian and European countries, it was a nation of laws that held individual privacy and liberty to be sacrosanct. Despite such unshakeable conviction, I chose, in a Luciferian moment, to test him further.
'Didn't President Obama initiate a mass surveillance programme of citizens through the
