When Twitter launched, its tagline was “Tell us what you really think”. Which is an exhortation that a great many public figures have taken them up on — and lived to regret. Because, when a great many people, from celebrities to politicians, apparently tell us what they really think, it can be very revealing.
Especially political candidates whose mouthing-off on Twitter comes back to haunt them.
A Labor politician’s controversial tweets have emerged where she describes Jesus as ‘gay’, denies Sydney’s Lindt cafe siege was a terrorist attack and tells the Pope to ‘get your head out of your a***’.
Mich-Elle Myers, the party’s number five pick on the NSW Senate ticket and a friend of Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, shut down her social media profile as the cache of bizarre messages emerged.
But it came too late – with the tweets surfacing on Monday, three weeks out before the Federal election.
The internet, as they say, is forever. And so are screen captures.
And candidates ought to know by now that dirt units on all sides are going through social media histories with a gimlet eye.
In one message, supplied to Daily Mail Australia, Ms Myers weighed in on the 2014 Lindt Cafe Siege when extremist Man Haron Monis held 18 people hostage for 17 hours before killing two of them.
The Labor candidate took to Twitter in 2016 to deny it was a terror attack – despite an inquest later declaring it was one. ‘Martin Place was NOT a terror attack! Stop spreading the fear!’ she tweeted.
‘The nutcase in the cafe wasn’t a terrorist he was a nutcase with a gun that killed innocent people.’
This is a common gambit by would-be minimisers of jihadi terror. But it’s a false dichotomy: being a nutcase with a gun is not mutually exclusive to being a terrorist. In many cases, it’s a necessary condition. Especially when it is well-known that terrorist recruiters often deliberately seek out the mentally vulnerable, because they’re easier fodder for recruitment.
As seems so often the case with the left, the reflexive impulse to hand-wave away Islamic terror goes hand-in-hand with seething hatred of Christianity.
Ms Myers has also been critical of the Catholic Church, dropping a series of controversial messages about religion in 2013.
‘Jesus was gay! You heard it here first,’ read one of them.
Another read: ‘I’ve had enough of the catholic (sic) church & the sh*t that comes from their mouths’.
It should perhaps surprise no-one that Myers is an ally and close friend of notorious union boss, John Setka.
Ms Myers said she regretted the tweets and apologised for any offence they might have caused.
‘Ms Myers has apologised for her past comments. They do not reflect Labor’s views,’ an ALP spokesman said.
Daily Mail Australia
But they do apparently reflect her’s. Which can’t be so easily hand-waved away with an unconvincing pseudo-apology — especially when the whole lot is hastily scrubbed.
As Sky News commentator Chris Kenny says, “Doesn’t this give us an insight into what some senior Labor people and candidates really think?”
Sure, it’s often pretty nasty that journos and activists trawl through someone’s social media looking for anything to pin on them, in this case it should be noted that Myers tagged many of her extremist tweets “#QandA”. In other words, these aren’t just private postings inadvertently made public, she was consciously targeting them at a leading national political broadcast. She wanted the left-leaning audience of QandA to know what she really thought.
Well, now we know. So does Anthony Albanese — what’s he going to do about it?