I am so irritated by the expression ‘vibe shift’: this is so much more than that

Identity politics, gender ideology, the death cult of net zero, the dogma of ‘open borders’ — every defining belief of the 21st-century technocracy has been executive-ordered out of existence.

US President Donald Trump holds up outgoing President Joe Biden's letter as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office. Picture: AFP

It’s only January and I’ve already chosen my most irritating phrase of the year: vibe shift.

Everyone’s saying it. With Donald Trump back in the White House and a gurning, giddy Elon Musk in charge of X, the vibes are a-changin’, we’re told.

Even stuffy technocrats who would never normally use a word such as vibe are holding forth on the “vibe shift”. The gold-collared super-class of the World Economic Forum say they will analyse the “vibe shift” following Trump’s return to power.

London’s Financial Times, the worthy organ of cosseted capitalists everywhere, is agonising over “the Trump vibe shift”. “The Great American Vibe Shift”, the New Statesman called it in its analysis of Trump’s policy program.

Here’s why this phrase gets my goat: it downplays what is happening.

It makes it sound like Trump’s stunning return to power is a bit like when punk usurped prog rock: a quake in trends, the fall of one fashion and the rise of another.

But it is so much more than that. Incalculably more. What we witnessed in the US across the past week was nothing short of historic.

It was not just the replacement of one president with another. Not just a right-leaning party pushing out a left-leaning one. Not just a switcheroo in vibes.

It was the ruthless dismantling of the entire ideology of the old ruling class. One by one, Trump consigned the tenets of the woke religion – the religion we have all laboured under for years – to the trashcan of history.

Identity politics, the gender ideology, the death cult of net zero, the dogma of “open borders” – every defining belief of the 21st-century technocracy was executive-ordered out of existence.

It felt, if you will forgive my language, like a bonfire of the bullshit. The old regime and its eccentric beliefs were unceremoniously ousted from power. Remember where you were when this happened.

With his flurry of executive orders, Trump put political correctness to the guillotine.

The gender ideology lies in ruins. For years, the hocus-pocus of gender fluidity was the closest thing our godless elites had to a religious conviction.

They chanted “Trans women are women” like a cultish mantra. They believed, in shameless defiance of logic and reason, that a man could become a woman simply by announcing himself as one, and should henceforth enjoy access to all women-only spaces. And they cast out, with wild-eyed glee, any witchy woman who dared to question their post-truth edicts.

Now, like a dazzling blasphemer, Trump comes to lay waste to this false religion.

The title of his executive order on gender says it all: “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”.

From now on, the order says, woman will mean “adult human female” and girl will mean “juvenile human female”. Government policy will be based “on truth” because truth is “critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself”.

It is a testament to the swirling lunacy of recent years that it feels so refreshing to hear a leader state that most fundamental of truths, a truth even our benighted ancestors of the Stone Age knew: men are not women.

A photo illustration shows the front pages of some of Britain's national newspapers. Picture: AFP

Trump has come for the racial hucksterism of identity politics, too. One of his executive orders demands the eradication of diversity, equity and inclusion programs across federal government.

DEI is a deeply divisive creed. It is fuelled by the belief that all whites are privileged and all non-whites are oppressed, and thus a vast machinery of race relations is required to manage interactions between us.

Trump has a different take – namely, that “every person” in America, regardless of race, should be treated “with equal dignity and respect”.

He’s channelling Martin Luther King. In defiance of the hyper-racial paternalism of the new elites, who fear whites and pity blacks, he’s saying we should judge people by their character, not their colour. I’m here for that.

Eco-fanaticism is likewise at risk under Trump. He has promised to kill the Green New Deal. We will “drill, baby, drill”, he said in his inauguration address. We’ll dig up all that “liquid gold under our feet” – oil, he means – and “be a rich nation again”.

I think this is the most radical thing I have ever heard a world leader say. We are living through an anti-industrial revolution. It’s all the rage these days to feel ashamed of humankind’s “footprint” on the planet. We are expected to bow down to that prophetess of doom, Greta Thunberg. And to beg Gaia’s forgiveness for disfiguring the planet with our gleaming cities and flying machines.

So how wonderful to hear the new leader of the free world cut through such neo-misanthropy and make the case for growth, industry and the use of nature for the benefit of man. Make Progress Fashionable Again.

And, of course, he has promised to fortify America’s southern border. He has sent 1500 troops down there. He has instructed them to “immediately repel” illegal immigrants.

The chattering classes will call it fascism. But, then, they call everything they don’t like fascism. In truth, America’s working classes want this. They want a better-policed border and a saner immigration policy.

They know that uncontrolled immigration benefits only the moneyed coastal elites who love having cheap labour from Latin America to do their gardening and raise their kids. For less well-off Americans, the rush across the border is disastrous. It drives down their wages. It nurtures a war of all against all for scarce jobs.

All of these things Trump is euphorically demolishing are not just policies – they are the ideological pillars of the woke ruling class.

T-shirts featuring President Trump on display in Tokyo. Picture: Getty Images

The gender ideology was the moral glue of that elite, the issue through which they noisily signalled their virtue to one another. Identity politics was the means with which they divided and ruled the masses. Climate hysteria gave voice to their haughty turn against industry and against modernity itself. And their cavalier attitude to borders expressed their abandonment of the ideal of national sovereignty in favour of the postmodern delusions of globalism.

In torching these ideas, in submitting them to the flames of reason, Trump hasn’t only turned the screws on the outgoing Biden administration – he has turned the screws on the entire cultural establishment of the 21st-century West.

It will have global repercussions. From Europe to Australia, all these orthodoxies will quake now that the most powerful man in the world has laughed at them and razed them to the ground.

Predictably, the left is branding Trump a stooge of the billionaire class. They point to his shoulder-rubbing with Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as proof that he’s doing the bidding of the super-rich.

This, too, is false. It was a historically unprecedented multiracial bloc of working-class voters that put Trump into power and pressed him to dismantle the woke regime.

It is America’s working class we should thank for the revolution of common sense that has swept the US and may soon sweep our nations too.