Flat White
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29 March 2023
4:00 AM
Some of you may know 16th century poet, John Donne, whose famous body of work, The Holy Sonnets, explored a crippling salvation anxiety and a fear he could not stand up to divine judgment.
Today, it seems the left is battling such demons. Hell-bent on repenting for the neo-original sins committed by Western Civilisation and answering to the new age of moral puritanism.
It is, however, important to draw the dichotomy between the two; Donne’s trepidations were hidden by poetic conceit and focused on his own internal struggles, in contrast, the left marches boorishly forward, projecting their angst onto the world.
One can find this kind of postulancy that animates the spirit of the Woke Church on Twitter, where a certain member of the elite culturally blocked a number of people trying to engage in a discussion about a Mail on Sunday article written by Peter Hitchens.
In a piece entitled End this crude smear against conservatives – Hitler’s Nazis were in fact left-wing racists, Hitchens responded to the left’s obsession with accusing anyone who holds a centre-right position of being a fascist.
Unsurprisingly, Hitchens’ article drummed up a frenzy of outrage from the left-wing mob, who were disgusted by his attempt to dissociate Nazi policy from conservatism and link elements of progressive politics to fascism.
It may seem tedious to criticise someone for blocking people on Twitter, but this behaviour is reflective of a broader theme. Rather than offer a counterpoint to the argument made by Hitchens or others, they suggested that anyone who agreed with Hitchens must support fascism and then blocked some of those users so they could not respond or defend their position.
Hitchens’ article should be criticised and questioned — especially for his lack of tact and inflammatory language which exposed conservatives to being disparaged — but far too often we see the left refuse to debate the merit of the argument, opting instead to attack someone’s character by categorising them as one of the many ‘isms’ so they can discredit their opponent and remove them from the debate.
These all-seeing left-wing prophets went on to bizarrely suggest that thoughts like those expressed in Hitchens’ article lead to death. The declared Hitchens’ work as part of a broader line of thinking, such as climate denial or people who question Covid policies (which have ostensibly killed a significant amount of people).
Here, they use a tactic that is equivalent to ideological vandalism, where any thought outside of the progressive orthodoxy is likened to violence.
This smear tactic even made its way onto our national broadcaster’s marquee show, Q+A, where one guest that said Australian television looks like ‘a neo-Nazi’s wet dream’. Naturally, this comment was met with applause, and the moderator did not challenge the statement.
Dogmatic language such this only divides people further. It needs to stop if the left wants to engage in meaningful, productive conversations which will have a material impact on our society.
It begs the question as to who the real fascist is. The one challenging the zeitgeist in a pursuit of truth or the one declaring anyone who disagrees with them to be the embodiment of pure evil.
We saw a similar game play out last weekend where those attending the Let Women Speak Rally in Melbourne — which advocates for women-only spaces to be protected from trans women (biological men) — were called far-right wing extremists because a small group of neo-Nazis gate-crashed the rally.
Instead of listening to the reasonable claims of these women, who are concerned by fairness and safety issues the trans movement presents, politicians such as Adam Bandt and Daniel Andrews are leading the mob which is seeking to denounce these women for an association (which does not exist) to Nazis in order to delegitimise their cause.
Some politicians are even claiming there is alliance between these ultra-nationalists and the female rights protestors, while the Victorian Liberals have suspended one of their MPs, Moira Deeming, for nine months because she attended the rally.
While the left-wing media class are refusing to call them women’s rights advocates and distorting the truth by positioning them as anti-trans.
One of the leaders of the Let Women Speak Rally, Katherine Deeves, pointed out the irony brilliantly when she said, ‘We have to call men who pretend to be women, women. When women say we are women’s rights advocates we get called anti-trans.’
To be clear, there is no place in Australia for ideas like Nazism, but it seems there are different rules for different groups of people.
According to Deeves, the police warned the woman at the rally that they were under real threats of violence from trans activists running a counter-protest. If we were to apply the same faulty logic as the left, then we would class the whole trans movement as violent misogynists who want to bring physical harm to women. After all, guilt by association is a major part of their narrative. A ridiculous notion, obviously.
Another pertinent question is, ‘Why did the police stop trans activists but allowed the Nazis to gate crash the Let Women Speak campaigners?’
However, no one is asking this or condemning the high potential for violence against women. Instead, people who fight for female rights are told their views are harmful and are killing trans people.
Again, we see a false equation of words to violence. Even though trans people are much more likely to suffer from mental health issues, there is no conclusive data to support claims that the rhetoric used by women’s rights advocates are contributing to this.
Instead, we overlook extremely important evidence which contradicts the trans activist movement.
For instance, the world has completely ignored the situation where part of a gender clinic in the United Kingdom was closed down and is facing a lawsuit from up to 1,000 families that claim it rushed teenagers into irreversible treatments.
Furthermore, there are organisations that track the horrific murder of gender non-conforming people and attribute them to transphobic hate crimes, without providing sufficient evidence that this is actually the case. This data is then used to stop any conversation about whether biological men should be allowed in women’s spaces, or if this radical ideology should be taught to children.
Likewise, we see laws that ban the teaching of LGBTQ+ concepts to young children as a ‘don’t say gay bill’ or American states prohibiting the performance of drag in front of children as ‘anti-trans’.
Through this, there are activist groups out there deliberately mischaracterising reality because they cannot win based on the contents of their arguments.
This type of nonsense, absolutist rhetoric is everywhere; ‘the lottery system is racist because high income groups spend less money on it’; ‘a black police officer beating an unarmed black man is because of systematic racism’; ‘every single bad weather event can only be a result of climate change’; or, ‘if a man does not want to have a romantic relationship with a trans woman it is because of transphobia’.
These lines are endlessly parroted by politicians, activists, the expert class, and news organisations, with little to no reverence for truth or logic. They cannot see the world outside of their narrow prism and will make anything fit within it, even if it means bending the truth.
It manifests in a worldview that is philosophically corrupted by misanthropy, pessimism, and nihilism, where they can only understand bad events through the lens of oppression, bigotry, inequality, and climate change.
They aggressively use emotional blackmail to shame you into bowing down to their ideology and make you say, ‘two plus two equals bigotry’.
It’s plain to see in the left’s unashamedly contradictory arguments such as ‘believe the science on climate change but ignore biology when it comes to gender’; or ‘News Corp is a biased news outlet but we should never allow conservatives on the ABC’.
New South Wales Green’s Member for Newtown, Jenny Leong, recently revealed the name of the game.
Over the past few weeks, she has criticised the New South Wale Liberal Party for their low number of female candidates and said, ‘Democracy works best when Parliaments reflect the diversity of our community.’
However, she also celebrated that ‘for this state election 51 per cent of our lower house candidates are women – and 78 per cent of our upper house candidates are women. Even more importantly 100 per cent of our most winnable seats – and all of our continuing MPs – are women!’
This logic is completely flawed. How can she demand diversity from the Liberals while also celebrating the lack of men in her own party? In fact, by gender quotas, her upper house does not even meet the standards she insists on as women are over-represented.
It strongly suggests the politics of gender quotas, for instance, are not about diversity or equal rights at all — it is about power. To be sure, their pseudo-morality is a Trojan Horse to gain cultural domination.
As John Donne once said, ‘I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.’
Nelle's journey 