Remember when Hillary Clinton called half the voters in America “deplorables”? “Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.” Boy, that worked out well for her, didn’t it? But you can hardly blame Clinton for thinking that shouting insults at voters was a winning strategy: it’s been just about all the left have had for years.
Sometimes, it works, sort of: if the left shout and scream and stamp their feet hard enough, they can bully everyone else into a kind of acquiescence. Especially when they dominate the chattering classes of the media and social media.
And, boy, are they screeching themselves blue in the face over the “Voice” referendum. The default position of the “Yes” is as nasty and divisive as only the left can be: “Vote as we say, or you’re a racist, white supremacist, Nazi, fascist…”
Way to win hearts and minds…
The barrage since Wednesday is hardly unexpected.
From Indigenous leader Noel Pearson’s portrayal of Peter Dutton as the “undertaker” to Daniel Andrews’ description of him as mean and nasty, the backlash is as advertised.
The tone of the debate has quickly taken a turn.
And some of it is straight out the activist handbook, which favours playing the person rather than the ball.
Naturally, the current dripping wet cohort of Liberals-in-Name-Only are only too easily chickened into running away.
The pile-on has begun and the Liberal Party has suffered its first political casualty following Peter Dutton’s decision to campaign against the government’s Indigenous voice to parliament referendum model.
But former cabinet minister Ken Wyatt’s resignation from the dwindling West Australian Liberal division will come as a shock to no-one.
Wyatt was the first indigenous cabinet minister in a federal government and is widely respected.
Is he, though? Wyatt is well known for achieving bugger-all during his ministry. In that time, he was regularly lambasted by the “anti-racist” left as an “Uncle Tom”. Even his road-to-Damascus moment for the dodgy “Voice” only came long after he was in any position to do anything about it.
Yet his former colleagues say he never once advocated as Indigenous Affairs minister for the model now on offer.
It’s only since he fell to his knees and begged forgiveness from de white massas of the left that he’s been annointed a crusading hero.
But, in the real world, Wyatt is a nobody. Show a random selection of ordinary voters his name and picture, and the most common response will be, “Who’s that old white guy, again?”
Wyatt’s little virtue-signalling dummy-spit is a big deal only to the media and the leftist Twitter mob. Nobody else knows nor cares.
The same can be said for Bridget Archer, here in Tasmania.
The danger for Dutton is that while Wyatt is the first, he may not be the last to quit the Liberal Party in protest.
As unlikely as it is, considering Bridget Archer said on Thursday she was staying put, Dutton could ill afford one of his MPs to actually pull the pin over it.
As a Tasmanian, I have a particular loathing for the name “Archer”, especially when it’s preceded by “Bridget” — and it’s not just the effect of seeing her porcine visage leering from those damn billboards in Wellington street. Archer is the personification of Orwell’s derisive “dreary tribe of ‘high-minded’ women… who nock to the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”. She clearly wants to be a Green, but isn’t quite willing to trade her pearls and twinset for love beads and tie-dye.
The real problem with ditzy bints like Archer is that their gutless clucking only encourages the screaming bullies on the left.
Now that the political divisions have been set, the debate is becoming less a discussion of principle, the wording of the proposal or the function of the voice but one driven by personal attack.
The danger for Albanese and the Yes campaign is that any Australian who has reasonable doubts about the voice might take what is being thrown at Dutton as having a crack at them as well […]
Those two things are what the Liberal Party believes will give people pause for thought.
The Australian
A lack of understanding of what the voice actually is and how it will operate, combined with a claim that the debate is confined to the political elite.
In the end, though, there is silence in the voting booth. Just the voter, with the pencil and piece of paper, and the din of the howling brats mercifully silenced.