This is redolent of the Rockefellers in the 1950s. Create a crisis. Make it global. Come in with a solution. And make that global. Rule the world.

US commentator Joe Rogan has nailed it.

Step 1: You cause chaos.

Step 2: You step in to stop the chaos.

Step 3: You install new rules to make sure that there’s no more chaos anymore.

Step 4: You bring up a solution.

Step 5: That solution allows you to gain more control, and you just keep doing it until you have ultimate control over the people.

It is better still if you can create a moral panic – like suiciding teens responding to mean social media posts – that everyone (almost) can relate to.

Bring in some cooked polls to show the proposed measure’s popularity. And in doing so lock in your mainstream political opponents. Then, you are away!

This is beyond “never let a crisis go to waste”. This is “create the crisis then propose the solution”. See also under “pandemics”. This is the new bible of policy development.

Then we come to Labor’s misinformation legislation.

Australian lawyer Chris Baxter sums it up: “Today is the darkest day for Freedom of Speech in Australian history. The Labor Party has introduced its revised misinformation legislation to Parliament. Having read the legislation and posted my interim thoughts throughout the day, here is a summary of why you should be extremely concerned about it.

“This legislation creates a two-tier rule book for what Australians can say, depending on who they are.

“On the one hand, government approved ‘professional” media gets a free pass to publish whatever they want, and on the other, all sorts of punitive actions can be taken against platforms that allow citizen journalism.

“Whilst the punitive measures are cleverly not directly aimed at authors, they are such that digital platforms will have no choice but to shadow ban or otherwise silence those who persist with posting information the government deems as misinformation or disinformation.

MECHANISMS

“Government has also created mechanisms for the State to intrude within private chat groups that are beyond a threshold size that they will decide.

“A register of misinformation will be created and maintained by ACMA and published on their website. No doubt this will become an important reference tool for institutionalising the government’s narrative, if it is not already, within mainstream media and education.

“Of course, no totalitarian imposition on free speech is possible without threats to the individual and so now any person who ACMA deems to have information in relation to what it regards as misinformation can be hauled before its ‘secret police’, at threat of fines.

“Cunningly, the legislation also creates so-called ‘media literacy plans’ which I believe will be used to force digital providers to add government approved framing and contextualisation to people’s posts.

“The new law will apply to almost every type of digital content including search engines and AI, because of course they couldn’t have AI wrong-think either.”

“So many perspectives of ordinary Australians are soon to be silenced: from people who do not believe men can become women, to those who have doubts about the legitimacy of the banking system through to those who have different perspectives on health, medicines and vaccines.

“Finally, and most ironically given the harms to democracy the legislation purports to address, the legislation unequivocally sets the need to mitigate ‘serious harm’ above freedom of political communication.

“Australians have just been surrounded.”