Donald Trump highlights why Anthony Albanese’s ‘keep calm and carry on’ will not work

The overwhelming sentiment from Trump’s corporate audience appeared to be relief.

The World Economic Forum was at its obsequious best as it gathered for an address by the newly inaugurated US President on Thursday. Donald Trump joined the global elite for the best part of an hour to deliver scripted remarks and respond to questions from a panel led by WEF president Borge Brende.

“We know that you called President Xi Jinping,” remarked Brende. “He called me,” Trump corrected him. “I think that we’re going to have a very good relationship.”

There can be little doubt who called whom to arrange the video link between the White House and the WEF forum. Trump’s uncompromising performance at the festival of corporate virtue-signalling showed the level of authority he commands.

In January 2021, the month Joe Biden became president, the theme of the annual Davos forum was the Great Reset, a blueprint for a system more diverse, equitable and inclusive than the privileged, predatory and patriarchal system under which the assembled delegates became rich.

This year, a wave of collective amnesia swept through the Swiss mountain resort, rendering delegates unable to recall the nonsense they’d been talking for the past four years.

Peer-level exchanges between DEI officers, partnerships to dismantle systemic racism, ensuring the full participation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer individuals in socio-economic life and other worthless schemes appeared to have vanished from delegates’ memory banks as they greeted the US President with unctuous applause.

“My administration has taken action to abolish all discriminatory, diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense,” Trump said. “America will once again become a merit-based country.

“There are only two genders: male and female. We will have no men participating in women’s sports. Transgender operations, which became the rage, will occur very rarely.

“I terminated the ridiculous and incredibly wasteful Green New Deal. I call it the green new scam. I withdrew from the one-sided Paris climate accord and ended the insane and costly electric vehicle mandate. I declared a national energy emergency to unlock the liquid gold under our feet. I’m also taking swift action to stop the invasion at our southern border

“No longer will our government label the speech of our own citizens as misinformation or disinformation, which are the favourite words of those who wish to stop the free exchange of ideas and, frankly, progress.”

If there was a murmur of disapproval from the audience, it was inaudible on the official recording. The overwhelming sentiment from his corporate audience appeared to be relief. No more endless meetings with bloated HR departments, no more protection money to the corrupt and subversive Black Lives Matter movement, and no more tedious board papers on triple bottom lines.

The President had given them the authority to do what business does best: create wealth and expand prosperity. Millions of pages of mumbo-jumbo could be committed to the shredder. Capital could be allocated on the advice of the capital markets rather than responding to government diktat. Liberation day had arrived.

Rightwing writer, filmmaker and activist Christopher Rufo. Picture: Supplied

Trump’s inauguration marked much more than the transfer of power from one administration to the next. It was the start of the counter-revolution predicted by Christopher F. Rufo in 2023 in his book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo has Trump’s ear and was part of the transition team at Mar-a-Lago. His influence in Trump’s inaugural address is unmistakeable: Trump follows his prescription for counter-revolution against the left’s cultural revolution.

Trump failed in his first-term goal of draining the swamp. In his second term, his goal is to dismantle the anti-democratic DEI departments, capture bureaucracies and turn them to dust. He intends to split the nexus between the cultural revolutionaries and the deep state, restoring the power assumed by judges, bureaucrats and social engineers, and returning authority to the people.

Rufo traces the links between today’s militant culture warriors and America’s cultural revolution that began in 1968 with student uprisings, urban riots and revolutionary violence. It became the template for everything that followed. The intellectual foundation was laid with the critical theories of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paolo Freire and Derek Bell, from which the strategy of the long march through the institutions emerged

Race replaced class as the new proletariat. The precondition for revolution was the complete disintegration of the existing culture, economy and society.

It would require introducing what Marcuse termed “liberating tolerance”, which manifests as intolerance of conservatives.

The new regime would enforce strict censorship on universities, corporations, media outlets, educational institutions, political parties and the state itself.

The radical left’s stranglehold of universities, cultural institutions, the public service and the corporate world has tightened considerably since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, giving the new woke establishment the appearance of invulnerability.

Yet Rufo maintains that the new regime harbours critical weaknesses and that its gains could be reversed.

He writes: “Ultimately, critical theory will be put to a simple test: Are conditions improving or not improving? Are cities safer or less safe? Are students learning to read or not learning to read? The new regime can only suppress the answers for so long.”

Former president Joe Biden. Picture: Allison Robbert/AFP

With hindsight, it was Trump’s good fortune to sit out the past four years and allow the Biden administration to be the crash-test dummy for critical theory pushed to extremes.

Biden reaped the ugly legacy of defunded police, diversity-hire firefighters, hundreds of billions lavished on lunatic green boondoggles, and self-inflicted pain from rising gas prices.

Trump, meanwhile, made political incorrectness his hallmark, violating every woke stricture with impunity and evident delight. Like the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the rebellious instinct is infectious, and the end will come quickly.

The dominoes are falling across the English-speaking world as the gap widens between woke’s utopian abstractions and concrete failures.

Jacinda Ardern’s foolish excesses paved the way for conservative government in NZ while the Trudeau experiment is drawing to a dismal end in Canada. The reckoning will come for Keir Starmer’s accidental Labour government once the Conservatives can get their act together.

Anthony Albanese should have executed a handbrake turn 15 months ago when the world’s first referendum on identity politics came down decisively on the side of common sense. Yet he lacks the courage or intelligence to confront the nutbags in his own party or the destabilising and divisive policies of the Greens.

Albanese will be judged by his record. He has been unable to solve everyday problems such as soaring energy prices and inflation even on his own terms. Family structures have eroded, and his pro-immigration, pro-Palestinian indulgences have damaged the social fabric. The ever-expanding state has usurped Australia’s culture of self-reliance, and the industrious middle class is discouraged and despondent.

Trump’s storming start to his presidency has further highlighted Albanese’s impotency. His attempt to keep calm and carry on will ultimately prove as futile as Kamala Harris’s vacuous and valueless presidential campaign.

Nick Cater is senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre