Summarised by Centrist
The Biden presidency, from its heavily scripted appearances to its digital-era consensus enforcement, has come to an end with the feeble attempt to declare the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) “the law of the land” via social media.
Mary Harrington argues that this moment perfectly encapsulated the administration’s reliance on reality-by-fiat, where policy and ideology were shaped not by facts but by carefully managed narratives.
With Trump’s return, the Cathedral—the institutional elite that controlled political discourse through media, academia, and digital censorship—has lost its grip. But will the Trumpian era bring just a reshuffled version of manufactured reality?
Harrington describes how the progressive machine, supercharged by digital activism, transformed public opinion through “permission structures”—subtle social engineering techniques designed to induce compliance with approved viewpoints.
Under Biden, this system reached its peak, culminating in the belief that gender identity could be changed by mere declaration.
But the reality-distortion field had limits, and those limits were exposed first by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter—where he dismantled the censorship regime—and ultimately by Trump’s re-election.
Trump’s rise signals a rejection of the progressive utopianism that dominated the last decade, particularly its obsession with gender politics. From his first day back in office, he moved to reverse the Biden-era push for “gender identity” over biological sex, declaring that “there are only two genders, male and female.”