Fake news, Donald Trump, Fred Nile and Santa Claus

Complaints always roll in after Christmas and New Year.

“For the eight years I’ve lived on this earth I’ve believed Mum and Dad about Santa Claus being real, despite seeing three Santa Clauses in our local shopping centre alone. Now I have my doubts. Is Santa real?” wrote Tiffany-Jane Blankington-Thorpe in the first post-Christmas letter.

There were similar missives from children about reindeer, Rudolf, leaving beer out for Santa, why the cone of silence about Mrs Claus?, what’s the carbon footprint of an operation that promises to deliver gifts to two billion children on ONE NIGHT from a remote location like the North Pole, and whether that’s a load of first world rubbish anyway because one billion children live in poverty? The list goes on.

We sent a pro forma response to adults who complained after their New Year’s resolutions imploded by January 5. Yes, we wrote, if you resolve to lose weight/stop drinking/do more exercise/stop smoking/be kinder to everyone, you actually do need to do more than just make the resolution and tell people about it.

Here at CRACPOT we’re used to busy times because events that prompt them are part of modern life.

Kids will question how rabbits lay chocolate eggs at Easter, and shouldn’t we have an Easter Chook? (Our answer: Of course we should replace the Easter Bunny with an Easter Chook. The world would be better for it.)

There’s also healthy scepticism about the tooth fairy, and whether $1 really is the going rate for a baby tooth. (Answer: If there’s blood involved, hold out for whatever you can get.)

The periods before any elections are also frantic for an organisation dedicated to the search for truth. After all, we don’t have a photo of our patron saint, Tony “Sometimes in the heat of discussion I tell porkies” Abbott, on the west wall for nothing.

But 2016 and the first weeks of 2017 have been the busiest time EVER for CRACPOT since it was established in 1974 during the search for truth about the Watergate scandal, with a lesser investigation into how Paul Anka’s (You’re) Having My Baby ended up one of that year’s biggest hits. (Answer: Still a mystery.)

In 2016, after all, the world went nuts. Truth became the first casualty in the pursuit of public honesty.

It started with Donald Trump. It ended with Donald Trump. It starred Donald Trump from start to finish, but we’ll get back to Donald Trump.

In 2016 we had a federal election triggered by Australians’ burning desire to see the return of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. So burning was the desire that it was barely mentioned in the actual campaign, which became a long, long series of photo opportunities of men in suits wearing hard hats, high-vis vests and fixed grins. There was a short, funny bit at the end where each side accused the other of lying about something. Then we voted and sat on the fence while Labor and the Coalition negotiated with crossbenchers they swore blind they’d never even cross the road to spit at, let alone make friends with.

We had a lot of complaints after that one.

Federal Liberal MPs Cory Bernardi and George Christensen and the sadly departed Speaker Bronwyn Bishop have their own special files at CRACPOT after Bernardi set up a website “Cory Bernardi – Common Sense Lives Here”; Christensen lamented a tragic loss – “Where are the balls in politics? Where have they gone?” – and Bishop rushed to defend Sussan Ley over the “I bought a Gold Coast unit on a whim and taxpayers paid for the trip” affair, and found reds under the bed instead.

“There are socialists out there who want to attack free enterprise and anyone who sticks up for it. And I know that socialists, like alcoholics, will blame anyone but themselves. And whereas alcoholics can damage their own families, socialists can destroy the whole country,” said an outraged Bishop to journalists seeking expert comment about politicians rorting expenses.

We got a LOT of complaints on that one.

But it all paled once Donald Trump hit his straps in the US election. Truth became not only a casualty – it was bludgeoned, beaten, stomped on, kicked, battered, garotted, left dead, deceased, cactus, departed. It passed on. It was struck down. Truth is a dead parrot. It sleeps with the fishes.

As Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway explained to everyone in the first days of the Trump presidency, there are facts and there are “alternative facts”. If we’re going to start asking questions of Trump about actual facts, then we’re going to have to expect “alternative facts” in response.

As Trump-supporting commentator Scottie Nell Hughes helpfully volunteered, when people started getting their knickers in a twist about variables like the truth and public honesty: “Everybody has a way of interpreting them (facts) to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts.”

CRACPOT is putting on extra staff after that one. This is going to be a wild ride.

It’s easy to get despondent working at a centre searching for the truth. But every so often something happens that clears your head, gets your heart singing and gives you the strength to carry on.

Such a thing happened this week. Fred Nile was denied a visa to attend the Trump inauguration after the US decided the 82-year-old NSW conservative Christian MP presented an unspecified security risk to the American way of life, capitalism, or the right of Americans to keep eating deep fried hot dogs.

We KNEW IT. Fred Nile: case closed.