I love watching old documentaries on youth cultures from the 1950s and 60s, with rockers and hippies, into the 1980s with punks and goths. The earnest cluelessness of the “squares” as they try to keep Mr and Mrs Suburbia clued in on “what the young people are doing today” is often unintentionally hilarious.
Well, as John Lydon has noted, the left today are the establishment squares and the right are the hip, young “cool ones giving the middle finger to the establishment”. So, when the paragon of establishment leftism, Australia’s ABC tries to explain the Freedom Protest movement to its establishment left readers, the results are as unintentionally hilarious as a crew-cut, sports-coat wearing square trying to explain “hippies” to 1960s Middle America.
For many observers, it’s been puzzling trying to understand the myriad forces at play in the regular anti-vaccine mandate rallies in the Perth CBD.
At these rallies, nurses in scrubs, people in high-vis vests and parents with small children march alongside people in Donald Trump caps and QAnon t-shirts.
In other words, it’s a diverse movement that doesn’t fit into the ABC’s narrative of “far-right, white supremacists”. But the ABC can’t bring itself to admit something so shocking. So, like the 1960s documentary trotting out “medical experts” warning that LSD damages your DNA, the ABC trots out a “political extremism researcher”, to comfort their establishment left audience that it really is all just a “far-right” plot.
To try to understand what is going on behind these protests, the ABC looked at some of the symbols and slogans they use.
These photos are from a rally at Elizabeth Quay in Perth’s CBD on December 4.
In this photo, the Australian national flag and the red ensign flag, flown at sea by Australian merchant ships, lead the way across the Matagarup Bridge in East Perth.
But they’re being flown upside down, which is a sign of extreme distress, according to University of South Australia law lecturer Joe McIntyre.
Well, duh. I found that out by actually asking protesters, who were happy to explain that they were conveying that their country is in distress and danger. But the ABC wouldn’t stoop so low as to actually talk to “deplorables”.
So, they leftsplain instead.
Dr McIntyre said the use of the red ensign was associated with sovereign citizen groups, who believed that admiralty law was the only valid law.
This fringe movement’s supporters dispute that Australian laws apply to them, believing that state governments and their police forces have no legitimate power to enforce coronavirus laws, lockdowns and vaccination mandates.
They have been identified as a potential terrorism threat by NSW Police […]
Ooh, scary! Then we get this prosaic admission.
He said the red ensign was often adopted as the de facto national flag because it was the only national Australian flag that the general public could use.
Oh, but that’s so boring and un-sinister. Can’t the ABC’s “expert” find some way to make this about “white supremacy”? But, of course!
But Dr McIntyre said the use of the red ensign by sovereign citizen groups could also be because it was associated with a time in history when the White Australia policy existed in Australia.
And what better to get the ABC’s readers clutching their pearls than invoking the Bad Orange Man?
But some protesters have co-opted and adopted symbols and slogans from overseas, including supporters of former US president Donald Trump.
For example, on the right of the photo below, two people are wearing matching red “Make Australia Great Again” caps […]
In the photo, a man is wearing a T-shirt of the QAnon conspiracy theory, based around a belief that the world is run by a global cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles who control American politics and the media.
Yeah, what a crazy idea… sorry? Jeffrey Epstein, you say? Um… next slide, please…
Many of these protests are being billed as “freedom rallies”, with some people seeing the vaccine mandate as a restriction on their ability to work.
Which is literally, 100%, true. So much so, that even the ABC has to grit its teeth and almost admit it.
“There’s a concern — and it’s not entirely unfounded — that these mandates produce a de facto second-class citizen who doesn’t have access to all of the economic freedoms expected as a member of the Australian public,” Dr Rich said.
Others also see the vaccination mandates as representative of excessive government control, carrying signs calling for freedom from the “medical apartheid” and “medical tyranny” of vaccine mandates.
Some attendees at the rally also bore signs and badges stating “my body, my choice”, appropriating a key slogan of the pro-choice abortion movement.
Well, how dare they turn the left’s own slogans back on them!
Then there’s this sparkling gem of un-self-awareness:
A lot of this language has been taken from interstate and overseas anti-government movements, where government-imposed lockdowns and rules have been more restrictive than in WA.
“I’d say most of these ideas are not coming out of WA,” Dr Rich said.
“They’re mostly being transmitted in WA through social media, through mass media and inspiring people here.”
ABC Australia
You mean, like the Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and anti-Trump protests in Australia?
As for the idea that restrictions are less severe in WA — which is the only state in Australia which is still completely isolating itself from the rest of the nation?
The ABC: if they’re weren’t taking billions of our taxes, their complete inability to grasp that “there’s something happening here” would be almost entertaining.
Don’t criticise what you don’t understand, squares.
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