When I woke up yesterday morning and did my obligatory scroll through Facebook, I saw the following post from a friend.

“MADNESS AT THE OSCARS!!”

I initially thought that Suggs and the Nutty Boys must have put on a great gig. That theory was soon put to bed (although it didn’t stop me hilariously replying with, “Did they play ‘House of Fun’?”). Headline after headline featured the story of Oscar nominee, Will Smith, slapping comedian, Chris Rock. Ukraine being blitzed was old chip paper, at least metaphorically.

Red Mist

I immediately thought, “Oh no, we have got a whole day of this now”. It’s not so much the assault that makes my toes curl, it is the responses to it. I have no idea what Will Smith was thinking but it looks to me like the red mist came down in defence of his wife. By the time he reached the stage, the mist had lifted to a point where common sense diluted his anger, meaning a potentially dangerous punch turned into a hearty slap. Of course, I don’t know that, but in normal times that would be the common assumption.

But that’s not good enough in 2022. We are living in a time where misinformation is so tangled, barely anyone knows what is or isn’t, reality. That means that this minor assault had to be staged. Why? Because all the people who know sod all about anything, want you to believe they do. They want you to think they are in the know because of the sources of information they have made up in their head.

When something like the Oscars incident happens, it can no longer be as simple as it seems. It can’t just be a chap getting angry at a joke about his wife before getting overprotective and briefly losing the plot. It has to be a pre-planned publicity stunt. Yeah, yeah, of course it was. One of the most famous celebrities in the US who was just about to pick up a Best Actor award at the Oscars, must be desperate for a bit of bad publicity. How else would anyone know who a famous actor and Oscar winner is?

David Baddiel

I thought comedian David Baddiel summed it up quite well. He calls it ‘naïve sophistication’. People who think they will appear sophisticated by naively, with a raised eyebrow, saying that “nothing is what it seems”. The truth is, nearly everything is what it seems. The occasions when everything isn’t what it seems, are far outweighed by the reality of what you see with your own eyes.

Of course, this may all seem pretty harmless and in the case of an actor and a comedian having a little spat, it is. However, there are other occasions when reality being “not what it seems” is dangerous and used in power struggles. Russia have been indulging in misinformation for years, interfering in elections and politics via social media hacking. It has been proven that the referendum in the UK and American elections have been infiltrated by misinformation.

We have seen biblical abuse of public funds during the pandemic, yet people choose not to believe it. The government couldn’t have possibly nicked billions from the public purse, could they? Surely that’s just Bermuda Triangle stuff? It may look like they have been throwing public money at their donors and handing out knighthoods to oligarchs and sacked ministers, but all is not what it seems. Unless it’s written on a bus…then everything is just as it seems.

Bombarded with Misinformation

We have been bombarded with so many conspiracies and tales of things not being as it is seen, we can easily dismiss the truth. It’s almost like those in power get away with corruption by making it so bloody obvious, it looks like a conspiracy. Let’s face it, making the wife of the government anti-corruption tsar, the head of handing out test and trace contracts, is so utterly ridiculous, it has to be a conspiracy theory. But it is true, check for yourselves.

Someone recently told me to prove this link, insisting I was the nut job. I told them to look it up, but they said, “show me the evidence”. What more evidence do they need than Dido Harding, the head of Test and Trace, being married to John Penrose MP, the government’s champion of anti-corruption? Yet there I was, feeling a bit embarrassed about someone thinking I was a misinformed amateur detective.

The world is turned upside down to a point where lies are the truth, and evidence is a conspiracy.

How bonkers is that?