To mangle Churchill’s famous aphorism, if you’re in the media and you’re a socialist, you have no brain. If you’re in the media and you’re not a socialist, you have no friends. As Australian media figure Joe Hildebrand slowly swallows the red pill, he’s discovering to his chagrin just how little tolerance his former lefty friends have for different opinions.
This time last week I wrote a long, considered piece arguing that free speech, even that considered offensive or “hate speech”, should not be banned — with the obvious and explicit exception of any incitement to violence […] as it turned out, the reaction to the piece overwhelmingly proved its point.
The only irony is that the extremists it identified were all on the Left.
Indeed, the reactions themselves were also crippled by their own internal irony.
The reactions to Hildebrand’s measured argument betrayed not only the contemporary left’s staggering hypocrisy but their utter ignorance.
One respondent opened by calling me a “c**t” and then, in the very same tweet, bemoaned the lack of civil discourse in public debate.
Another began their first tweet with the words, “get f***ed Joe” and then in their second, complained that I wouldn’t have a polite discussion with them.
A third quipped: “Nothing good ever comes out of Dandenong” — a reference to my home town, one of the poorest, most multicultural and working-class Labor suburbs in the country. She was also, apparently, a Labor supporter.
There were also the obligatory pictures of dead bodies in Nazi concentration camps — according to the new hard Left narrative, history’s most infamous book-burners were in fact diehard free speech advocates.
And of course the more vicious the abuse, the more voiceless and victimised the abusers claimed to be. They also appeared to be mostly white and university educated, both statistically unusual indicators of oppression.
Not oppression – just ignorance. It’s astonishing just how many people can spend three years at university, yet remain an utter ignoramus. Such as a post-graduate of my acquaintance, a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, who had no idea who Mao was, for instance.
These days, as then, socialism is the domain of the disaffected, upper middle-class so-called intellectual. The only difference is that these days such insufferable twats can bang on about it 24 hours a day, creating the impression that it is a growing movement rather than just a spreading disease.
‘Twas ever thus, Joe: just read Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier.
As one former fellow traveller mournfully said: “ALP/Greens/lefty social democrat my entire life … and I am really starting to detest the left. De. Test.”
But, Hildebrand’s red-pilling still has a long way to go:
The good news is that the Labor Party has learned from [the election] and is in the process of recovering and recalibrating under the sensible stewardship of Anthony Albanese.
amp.news.com.au/national/politics/joe-hildebrand-a-message-to-the-lost-tribes-of-the-left-wing
He’s kidding, right?