Pure H E double L for me Last week we speculated on how News Corp would cover the fourth divorce of billionaire nonagenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch if it weren’t for the fact that he was the boss. The approach it’s actually taken? Deathly silence. Former Fox employee Roger Friedman has lamented that the usually brutal English press — across the board — are apparently spooked out of any coverage:
I was interviewed for a big piece that was supposed to run on Sunday in a British paper. I’ve just received notice that it’s been ‘spiked’. The tabloids, even the ones not owned by Murdoch, are scared of libel laws and retribution …
He points out the same veil of silence in his native New York. Now given Friedman’s record and his less than amicable split with the Murdoch empire, you may wish to take his views with a grain of salt — but it’s undeniably a big story generating a surprising lack curiosity.
Waiting in the Q In case America wasn’t chaotic enough last week, the mysterious figure behind QAnon is back. The verified account for Q — the eponymous individual whose posts fuelled a sprawling movement that believed that former US president Donald Trump was fighting against a satanic cannibal paedophile cabal — made its first post on internet image board 8kun in nearly two years.
The account’s cryptic, nonsensical posts stopped soon after Trump lost to Joe Biden and new evidence came to light suggesting the 8kun administrator was behind the Q account. Neither of these things stopped the movement morphing into a self-sustaining loose network of conspiracy theorists who continue to obsess over imagined symbols and meanings everywhere that all “prove” their political opponents are evil incarnate.
So what does this re-emergence mean? There’s a neat parallel between Q and its central figure, Trump. His pursuit of the 2024 Republican nomination is being challenged by the stratospheric ascension of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and hurdles like the January 6 Committee. It looks increasingly likely that Trumpism may no longer owe fealty to Trump. Same can be said for Q. As the movement became absorbed into mainstream conservative politics, it might have moved past its founder.
That’s Hughes to us We in the bunker are torn between our favourite post-election response from the losing party. Of course we love the profanity-strewn slating of former colleagues, best exemplified in this case by the anonymous MP saying, of Scott Morrison’s support for transphobic Warringah candidate Katherine Deves: “He fucked us and his fingerprints are absolutely fuckin’ everywhere on that. The bloke thinks he is a master strategist. He is a fuckwit.”
But the other genre is the defiant retreat into fantasy. We got that over the weekend from Senator Hollie Hughes, whose diagnosis of the Liberal Party’s ills at the election, particularly with younger voters, had two causes, both equally plausible:
One of the issues … [is] we’ve got an education system that’s basically run by Marxists. When kids are at school and they’re being taught all this absolute left-wing rubbish, that’s where they’re leaving school and that’s where they’re landing … Maybe their parents need to turn their internet off, limit it to one hour a day, and stop them using the car to make them get public transport.
Yep, leaving aside the fact that Hughes doesn’t appear to know what Marxism is — a continuation of Peter Dutton’s attempt to import yet more US culture wars to our shores — we’re particularly intrigued by the thought that the Coalition might not have lost several formerly blue ribbon seats if kids made better use of buses.
Stop Ryan your heart out It will be fascinating to watch how the narrative develops around the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, the philanthropic journalism operation undergoing a bit of a public rupture. We note the big piece in today’s Nine papers features concerns from several unnamed sources regarding the “frustrating and inconsistent” experiences with JNI under outgoing CEO Mark Ryan — but the people willing to go on record all insist the blame lies elsewhere and are largely laudatory towards Ryan. We shall keep a close eye on what else emerges.
