Social media: where civil discourse gives way to personalised abuse, vendettas and hysterical comparisons with the Nazis.
Oh, wait — that’s The Australian.
Consider last Friday’s extraordinary effusion by Francis Galbally, a “former lawyer and now a Melbourne-based businessman and investment banker.”
In his piece, Galbally declares “alarming similarities between Adam Bandt’s Greens and Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party of the 1920s and 1930s”.
He explains:
Bandt’s rant a few days ago has all the hallmarks of a Nazi rally. He accuses the major parties of ‘slandering this movement’. He calls on the Israeli ambassador to be expelled. He calls on sanctions against Israeli [sic]
[…]
Like Hitler, Bandt uses propaganda, discontent and fearmongering to gain support. He finds support among antisemites and uses climate action and anti-capitalist rhetoric to feed his supporters. Bandt would massively raise taxes and drive business from Australia. His rhetoric on tax and anti-business plays to his supporter base, much as Hitler did. And, like Hitler, he gets support from some individuals and businesses.
He forgets to mention that Adam Bandt puts on his trousers one leg at a time — just like Hitler did!
At a Sydney Writers Festival event on May 26, ABC journalist Laura Tingle referred to Australia as a “racist country”, spurring conservative opinionators to lose their collective mind.
Yet Tingle’s comments pall beside Galbally’s bleak assessment.
At the most recent federal election, the Greens polled nationally at about 12%, meaning that some 1.8 million people opted for a party that Galbally says “look[s] increasingly like the National Socialist Workers’ Party.” In the electorate of Melbourne, Adolf Bandt received no less than 49.6% of primary votes.
Tingle might have called Australia racist. Galbally depicts it as on the cusp of fascism.
Oddly, he contrasts the (bad) Greens of today with the party led by Bob Brown, explaining that “I do not criticise those who truly support the original Greens’ stand: protection of the environment and action to mitigate climate change.”
The Australian was, you’ll remember, famously supportive of Bob Brown, environmental protection and climate action.
If Galbally’s silly article deserves attention, it’s because of the light it shines on the publication in which appeared.
Back in the day, the Murdoch press campaigned for what became the News Media Bargaining Code, which pushed Meta and Google to pay for journalism. Since then, both tech companies have, for slightly different reasons, lost interest in news, and Meta certainly won’t be re-signing their lucrative deals with legacy media outlets.
That’s why you’ve been reading so many recent News Corp articles denouncing social media, along the lines of a recent speech by executive chairman Michael Miller who attacked big tech companies for the “collective damage they cause — to our young and elderly, businesses, big and small, to our democracy, and to our economy”.
The Galbally piece shows the hypocrisy of all that.
You can find rants denouncing Adam Bitler and his Greenshirts all over Facebook, generally alongside all-cap boomer complaints about grandchildren and confused apologies for being hacked.
But the distinctive character of The Australian (and its opinion pages in particular) comes from its translation of a social media sensibility into a broadsheet format, almost as if its editors decided that the belligerent elderly would really love 4chan if they could somehow access it without a new-fangled computer.
Think of the anonymous character describing himself as “The Mocker”; think of the sealioning pedantry of Gerard “Reply Guy” Henderson. The Australian lives and breathes troll culture, from the regular and vengeful pile-ons targeting designated enemies to the array of contrarians columnists prepared to argue anything at all for the sake of pwnage.
In part, its evolution represents a broader (and mostly unconscious) adaption by the media as a whole to norms established online. But, more specifically, it reflects the influence over the Australian right of an American conservatism now far more committed to culture war than any coherent philosophy.
If you actually care about antisemitism, the pernicious consequences of Galbally’s “everyone-I-don’t-like-is-a-fascist” argument should be obvious. As the Gaza war becomes increasingly indefensible, many of Israel’s supporters resort to monstering as an incorrigible racist anyone who defends the Palestinians. But if Adam Bandt becomes a Nazi for *checks notes* opposing genocide, the concept of fascism loses all meaning — and it does so just as the nativist far right breaks through electorally across Europe.
Now, more than ever, we need real conversations about racism. But The Australian only cares about owning the libs.
