Bolt the door
Back in March, Crikey revealed a memo from the Australian Press Council following complaints about the Herald Sun using the outdated and offensive term “Aborigine” in a headline. The memo did not refer the complaint for further consideration, but stated that Hun editor Sam Weir had “undertaken to use the terms ‘Indigenous or Aboriginal people’ in future in lieu of the term ‘Aborigine’”. But as a tipster got in contact to point out, guess who didn’t stick to that?
Yep, last week, Andrew Bolt — in an oddly listless piece about the scourge of “anti-white racism” that sews together many of Bolt’s long-standing preoccupations and shocks them awake like an elderly Frankenstein — used the word to describe then Indigenous affairs minister Linda Burney. But then, Bolt has always seemed subject to different rules than everyone else, which is ironic, given how much he hates that sort of thing.
Heralding a sale
Well, look at that, guess who’s currently offering a substantial discount?
As tempting as 50% off The Sydney Morning Herald might sound, it’s actually not that great a deal considering they’re currently providing less than 50% of their usual number of journalists.
Olympic-level idiocy
The switch on the right-wing commentary machine appears to have gotten stuck on “righteous fulmination” (rather than its other setting, “everyone needs to stop being so ready to be offended“). How else to explain the genuinely incredible response to the Olympics’ opening ceremony this weekend?
The event, which featured apparent allusions to group sex and (unrelated) Serena Williams looking like she was going to puke, prompted this response from The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan:
The Paris Olympics foulness illustrates the cultural self-hatred and contempt Western artistic elites have for their own civilisation. It’s a human death wish and civilisational suicide.
This was in response to the apparent recreation of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper with drag queens (or what Sheridan calls “the transvestite parody of … what Christians believe was the first holy communion”). Sheridan’s was just the loudest and most extreme (outside social media’s far-right fringes) of the teeth-gnashing the tableau prompted, which the media was happy to take advantage of.
“Blasphemy is not only legal, but also considered by many as an essential pillar of freedom of speech in a democratic society,” marvelled Rob Harris, moonlighting as an Olympics correspondent while his colleagues at Nine are on strike.
Aside from some confusion as to whether the piece was depicting the Last Supper, a Dionysian bacchanal or some weird French combination of the two, it’s always interesting what prompts this kind of response. Surely for someone who elsewhere damns “the politically correct censors of great art and literature”, some confused and mildly transgressive art doesn’t really represent “not only an attack on Christianity, but on human dignity and the wellsprings of meaning”?
Surely a paper that dedicated several novels worth of words attempting to strengthen Australia’s right to humiliate and offend people based on their race as a core tenet of a robust pluralist society could find one writer to defend what happened in Paris? What passes for “a human death wish and civilisational suicide” to a guy who delights in the recrudescence of the far right in Europe? Extra marks for Sheridan and everyone else arguing that “Muslims would never be treated this way” about an event that, a few days earlier, had banned a Muslim woman from attending because she wanted to wear hijab.
It was the moment I Weird
In the past eight years at least, one of the arguments that has dominated the centre left has been how to actively communicate in opposition to Trump and Trumpism. Focus on the threat he presents to democracy and thus risk presenting no positive vision of your own? Call attention to his relentless vulgarity and bigotry and fall victim to what Guy Rundle calls “the taking of offence becoming a defining political act of the progressive class”?
The answer may end up being the most transparently, ridiculously obvious one. Point out what a bunch of weirdos they are.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who is in the running for Harris’ VP nomination, has been going hard on this for a while, but it really took off after an MSNBC TV appearance where he pushed his folksy progressive shtick and explicitly said, “I’m telling you: these guys are weird.” The Democratic Governors Association — predictably, given its lead by Walz — amplified it and it has now been heartily embraced by the Harris campaign.
Who knows if it’ll work in the long run, but it seems to have gotten under a few Trump supporters’ skins: Vivek Ramaswamy, who was once called the “most obnoxious blowhard in America” for his mockery of other Republican presidential candidates, called the approach “dumb & juvenile” on his way to a quite supreme burn by our old friend, the Menswear Guy.
