THE FRONT DORE: Donald Trump, the assassin and the billionaires behind the monster that has unleashed mayhem

When this monster was first unleashed, politicians indulged it, fed it, feasted on its scraps. Halfwit political brains, too foolish to know better, embraced the emergence of social media platforms to parade unfiltered political messages to the masses without the troublesome interference of that troublemaking intermediary, the journalist.

This was a godsend for politicians, too sheltered to understand what was going on and too vain to imagine the consequences for anyone other than themselves of facilitating the demise of the fourth estate.

They salivated at the prospect of punishing their pesky critics, and celebrated what they saw as a mainline directly into the homes of constituents. All they could see was an opportunity to take control of their messaging. Never again would they be edited into obscurity or misunderstood and manipulated by miscreant knuckle draggers in the media. They loved it.

As lawmakers, they became so blinded by self-interest, they ignored their public duty and were oblivious to the slow decay in the quality of information being disseminated through the community. They couldn’t see it, because they were consumed by themselves, intoxicated by their own image.

While they were looking into the mirrors of their mobile phones, a couple of freakishly voracious American companies hijacked the world, and we are still yet to escape their clutches.

Our politicians have never understood what was really up for grabs in the social media wars. This was never a battle over who owned information, who controlled the news, it was only ever about one thing, money: eyeballs and advertising.

And unlike print and digital news media companies, social media magnates were not for a moment interested in how they accumulated audiences. The quality of information they platformed was — and is — irrelevant.

They flirted with news initially for one simple reason: to steal the audiences off media companies, and have consummated the affair by cuckolding the commercial news media — tricking their readers into leaving them and cleaning out the bank accounts of their old lovers.

The problem for society is two-fold. News gathering is now a boutique business as newsrooms have been gutted, hollowed out and held to ransom. Journalism today is almost unrecognisable, even as technology has opened up new avenues to access and deliver information. It should be the golden age of journalism. In truth, journalism is simply too expensive to produce.

Secondly, social media platforms are now serious peddlers of outrageous lies and fakes, viral super-spreaders of false information and dangerous disinformation. They are the source of unbridled and unfathomable violence and create a caustic and calamitous environment for young and vulnerable souls. This is an unregulated, unrelenting pervasive hellscape at its core, masked by a divinity scene in its front window.

Once oblivious to the dangers, smugly embracing the new world, our politicians are now left hapless and hamstrung, unable to arrest the decline in values and the violation of civility. They have lost control of this beast, and have no way of getting it back into its cage.

He is not the first president or presidential candidate, to face an assassination attempt. But Donald Trump is the first in the social media age. There is a tragic inevitability to this attempted political murder.

Americans have been whipped into a frenzy. US politics has been in a slow painful descent into the absurd, facilitated by the out-of-control, unregulated dominance of a malevolent social media, its unhinged and unreliable influence on public discourse and the resultant competitive hysteria of the hyper-partisan politics in America’s increasingly myopic and desperate mainstream news media.

Traditional news outlets have lost their collective minds, fighting for relevance against their marauding, manipulative new media rivals.

The landscape is incomprehensible for most Australians, but it shouldn’t be. American politics has become the theatre of the surreal, a comical distraction, but here at home we are racing in the same direction. We have endured nine months of insanity, fuelled by inanity on the major platforms, idiots revelling in division, undeterred by derision.

And it has crept into our politics. The Greens party, infected by a cruel and callous contempt for truth and inspired by a cretinous collective of corrupted minds, make a mockery of decency while claiming a moral superiority. They are in the business of using social media to spread blatant lies to a captured, inexplicably miseducated, audience open to catching a cause and collaborating with confusion.

The Trump assassination attempt has changed everything. The ramifications will be massive. Trump’s defiant fist-punching response, bleeding from the ear after being grazed by a bullet, will drive his supporters to new heights. It will also present a picture of strength that is undeniable.

Trump’s supporters will now see their candidate as the epitome of an American hero, a larger-than-life figure capable of defying the murderous madness of a crazed assassin.

The contrast to his shrinking, ailing rival will not be lost to any sensible American voter. It will only hasten the push from so many dismayed Democrats to replace Biden with a candidate who might have some chance of offering a viable alternative to Trump.

But the fallout from this shocking day will reverberate well beyond this presidential race. The rabid political atmosphere encouraged by social media giants allowing anything and everything to run free on their platforms will only intensify from this point. Already conspiracy theories are rampant, casting another dark shadow on an already febrile environment. It is anyone’s guess where this will end now.

Trump will need to be careful navigating the urge to capitalise on political division in the aftermath, with the need to unite a dreadfully divided nation.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s intervention, urging an immediate tempering of the hyperbolic divisive politics of the Greens and their feral supporters, is right but spectacularly optimistic.

Albanese does have a chance, as our PM now into his third year in power, enjoying a dominant electoral position, to influence the way politics is played in Australia.

Unfortunately, threatened by the Greens’ corrosive political cosplay, Albanese has so far been unable to rise above the clamour. If he is genuine about elevating the nature of political and public debate, to stand above the pettiness and the puerile, he should do it.

Albanese shouldn’t just mouth the words, “We should be able to have political discussion and disagreement, and do it respectfully”, he should live it. “There is a lot of shouting going on.” Albanese is pointing at others, but he is not immune from making a point in “capital letters” himself. Or radioactive memes for that matter.

Albanese also urged “everyone to exercise caution when reading unverified reports … and to seek out credible news sources … and be on guard against those seeking to use disinformation to create division”.

He’s right. But it’s time for Albanese and our political leaders to take serious action to dismantle the purveyors of destructive, dangerous and diabolical discourse, the social media maniacs who are tearing us all apart.