Climate denial and dark arts linked in a moral panic

Skilled journalism by N Cohen in the Observer today to join lots of stories into a wholesale liberal moral panic:

It starts with some calm criticism of S Morrison, Australian PM:

Australian English is rich in its descriptions of worthless men: as useful as tits on a bull, a dry thunderstorm, a third armpit, a glass door on a dunny, a pocket on a singlet, an ashtray on a motorbike, a submarine with screen doors, a roo-bar on a skateboard. Morrison is all of the above, but a British saying sums him up: “too clever by half”.

My ears pricked up at that as you can imagine -- it's usually an insult aimed at people who could but do not want to join the new petite bourgeoisie and offer critique instead. What was he too clever at? Disappointingly, it is only electoral dark artery:

Morrison won last year’s Australian general election, although his conservative Liberal party was expected to lose, by slyly mobilising opinion against tax rises in general and environmental taxes in particular....Morrison and his campaign team managed to turn it into an election about the Australian Labor party’s tax plans.

We can suspect a link now, and here it is:

So impressed was Boris Johnson that he hired Morrison’s boys to win the British general election. Fawning coverage followed of the digital “whiz-kids” from New Zealand: Sean Topham, 28, and Ben Guerin, 24...  [who]... banged home the crude message in a thousand different ways that Johnson would “get Brexit done”. 

Did he need whizz kids to invent that slogan?  It must have been something really powerful and subtle, of course, to convince people to vote against the national interest, world peace, environmental protection and climate control pursued by the noble EU.The light will dawn -- but too late.

The Brexit Morrison’s operators helped to sell to the British is, like climate change, an exercise in three-stage denial. First comes the refusal to admit there will be pain. Then a guarded concession that there may be “bumps in the road” and,you can predict, in a couple of years, when it is too late to save the car factories and science parks [Save the Science Parks!] , will come admission that Remainers were right, but that doesn’t matter now....you cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever.

The whole argument is given further legs by another Observer exclusive: 

Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’

the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse [said a former spook] while CA may have been exposed and eventually shut down, other, even more sophisticated actors will have been emboldened to interfere in our elections and sow social divisions”. 

There are attempts to manipulate voters by politicians (Hold the front page!):

“There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing

All that fear-based messaging targeting the most vulnerable swung the vote for Remain and then the Second Referendum, after all.

It seems to be old-fashioned money games that are involved rather than any subtle (!) manipulations of voters via their Facebook likes,however:

“There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics.”