The Gag That’s no Laughing Matter

In the dying days of Julia Gillard’s government, her communications minister, Steve Conroy, brought in two bills to regulate the media, or more succinctly, to nobble the Murdoch press. After all, the 2013 election was only months away and the Murdoch stable much more often than not gave Labor a hard time.

Murdoch’s cheeky Daily Telegraph mocked up a picture of Conroy in Stalin’s uniform. Outraged progressives demanded an apology. The Teleapologised, but to Stalin not Conroy:

… we would just like to say: We’re sorry, Joseph.

Yes, it is true that Stalin was a despicable and evil tyrant who was responsible for the death of many millions. However, at least he was upfront in his efforts to control the media instead of pretending he supported free speech and then suggesting that cheeky, satirical or provocative newspaper coverage might be against the law. 

We also note that, despite his well-documented crimes against humanity, Stalin at least managed to hold a government together for more than three years. Nonetheless, we pay tribute to our new Commissar Conroy and stand ready to write and publish whatever he instructs us to. 

Conroy’s Bill to save Australia from the media was based on the flimsy pretext that in England, Murdoch’s News of the World journos had been hacking phones, not just of royalty but even the families of murder victims. (Some of Britain’s non-Murdoch press had also been into hacking). Murdoch shut down News of the World in response. Nobody claimed anything like the phone hacking had occurred in Australia.

Still, it was a chance for Gillard. Pushed by the Greens, she gave Judge Ray Finkelstein and a stray journo called Matthew Ricketson the job of drafting improved media regulation. They came up with a PIMA or “Public Interest Media Advocate” to oversee self-regulation. Under the Bill, if Mr or Ms PIMA felt self-regulation wasn’t strict enough, he/she/it would cause the offending newspaper, in practical terms, to be delicensed.[1] Newspapers would be obliged to publish mandatory statements of error and, should editors demur, contempt-of-court penalties would apply — in other words, they could be locked up and kept behind bars indefinitely. This modest proposal ended in parliamentary tears for Conroy, Gillard (hello, Kevin Rudd 2.0)[2] and the Labor government itself, downed by Tony Abbott.

Politicians’ memories are short and down the turnpike now comes Prime Minister Albanese’s bill, via Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, to censor online “misinformation”. The pretext this time is that fake and malicious information on social media is wrecking our minds and unravelling our hitherto resilient society.

The rigmarole seems templated on Gillard’s lamentable model. Labor will give an “independent” regulator power to oversee voluntary censorship codes by the tech giants like Meta, Google and Twitter. If they. are seen to falter, the regulator — namely the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) run by Nerida O’Loughlin on $610,000 per year (p88) — imposes its own standards. And she enforces it with fines literally up to billions of dollars per day ($6.88 million or 5 per cent of global turnover, whichever is biggest).

You can bet the tech giants will rush to self-censor any posts that might remotely annoy Nerida or the government. So goodbye to online “misinformation” like ‘renewables are expensive and unreliable’, or ‘compulsory Covid vaccines are somewhat unproven and dangerous’.

If you think the bill itself defines the sort of “misinformation”  that causes social “harms”, forget it. The definitions are broad as the earth and sky. Sure, actionable “misinformation” has to be “reasonably likely [to] cause or contribute to serious harm” but the “serious harm”  test is just jelly.

Labor’s reworded bill arrives any month now. The  Coalition hasn’t gained traction against it: after all, Scott Morrison’s team created the plan in the first place. ScoMo’s ethos, you might recall, was “freedom of speech doesn’t create one job.”[3] When Albanese kicked out the LNP in 2022, he merely dusted off and hardened the LNP’s handiwork. You might think Labor’s penalties are pretty draconian (Draco would execute an Athenian for stealing a cabbage). But for the leftist mobs, Minister Rowland’s onslaught against social media freedom doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The submission by the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) on August 6 takes the cake. I’m serious, ATSE applauds the draft and wants Labor to extend censorship to cover not just online screeds but all “traditional” media — newspapers, radio, TV, Quadrant and even private messaging. Why? Because “An ongoing flood of misinformation and disinformation through online platforms risks damage to Australian democracy, institutions and society.” That’s why. So we get

Recommendation 5: Expand ACMA powers to enable enforceable industry standards on traditional media sources, including print news media.

With the Murdoch press obviously in mind, ATSE continues (emphasis added),

Some Australian news providers have been shown to be havens for science denialism and science misinformation (Lowe, 2018), while other media outlets can unintentionally amplify misinformation in well- meaning attempts to debunk it. Furthermore, it is much harder for digital platforms to police information coming from traditional media sources, as these sources may produce a mix of misinformation and factual information. Given this oversized role of traditional media in spreading misinformation, any attempt to fight misinformation that does not address the role of traditional media will be insufficient.

ATSE’s favorable citation of “Lowe 2018” is the giveaway. Ian Lowe AO was Australian Conservation Foundation president 2004-14, and his cited piece “Climate of Denial” is up on ATSE’s own website.Here he spells it all out:

We are now seeing a determined campaign of misinformation by the Murdoch press. At one level, it consists of putting forward amateur contrary views as if they hold equal weight with the [climate] science. The Australian featured on its front page a sun-tanned Bondi surfer who said he had not noticed any rise in sea level, as if this anecdote cancelled out decades of analysis of about 10,000 tide gauges around the world. 

With respect, Ian, the Fort Denison tide gauge in Sydney Harbour has shown a puny 110mm of sea rise per century — that’s two-thirds the length of my iphone.

At another level, it is deliberate misrepresentation … There is now no real possibility of communicating climate science through our commercial media … The good news is the community overall has clearly moved on and the denialists in power are increasingly out of touch with reality. [His piece refers to the Coalition era].

Don’t imagine ATSE is some mickey-mouse show gone rogue. Its president from 2013-15 was the urbane Alan Finkel, who became Australia’s Chief Scientist a few years later, as well as a Fellow of the Academy of Science.. ATSE is currently headed by Dr Katherine Woodthorpe AO.[4] Her ATSE biog includes that she’s a past director of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and Vast Solar, which is now installing the $200 million Port Augusta Solar Thermal Project with the help of $65 million federal funds.

ATSE has another 900 fellows, billed as our brightest boffins. Here’s how ATSE imagines itself:

[A] Learned Academy of independent, non-political experts helping Australians understand and use technology to solve complex problems. Bringing together Australia’s leading thinkers in applied science, technology and engineering, ATSE provides impartial, practical and evidence-based advice on how to achieve sustainable solutions and advance prosperity.

ATSE wants WhatsApp to deliver “functionality nudges” (an Orwellian term reminiscent of a former NSW Premier’s Department’s “Nudge Unit”) to curb any “misinformation” on it. ATSE not only wants dissemination of “misinformation” labelled and limited across the board, it also wants (Recommendation 4) the censorship reach to extend to those private messaging services, subject to concerns about privacy and “weakening of encryption”. ATSE’s submission agrees piously that Australians’ trust in government is already low and falling, “so it is essential that legislation designed to tackle misinformation does not undermine what trust remains. This is reinforced by the fact that Australians are particularly concerned about misinformation from the government and politicians.”

The ATSE submission goes on to support indoctrination of school students based on the playbook of climate psychologists John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. They and ATSE prescribe “inoculation” of kids with supposedly truthful climate alarmism to condition kids’ brains against any reference to harmless warming and net zero impossibilities they might later encounter. Cook, whose research team indulged in some truly bizarre behaviour, was lead author for the 2013 paper falselyclaiming a 97 per cent scientific consensus for the orthodox warming hypothesis).[5]

ATSE’s big program for schools was established  by future chief scientist Finkel (above) himself. This program uses global warming alarmism as a bait to excite Year 5-10 kids about science. Or in ATSE’s words, it is “tapping into the high level of concern that most students have about global warming, climate change and sustainability.” This is circular as the ATSE alarmists helped stir up kids’ climate neuroses in the first place. 

The ATSE program is now running in close to 1000 schools in Australasia and Asia, with 100,000 kids and 1500 teachers involved annually, with topics such as “How to save our world?”. While ATSE-sourced science lessons for the kids is lively and educationally impressive, its text material features hoary and discredited memes like anxious polar bears on ice floes (their numbers in fact have tripled in the past 50 years of mild global warming. Moreover, the material bangs on about global warming melting the Arctic sea ice whereas the sea ice has stabilised since 2007 and last month was at a 21-year high). Most disgusting of all, the course thrusts at kids a misinformation video about Tuvalu drowning from rising seas, and tells kids to write a case study on it.  In the video villagers “already live with their feet in the water” and mourn, “This land will be — you know — nothing.” Fact Check against misinformation: even RMIT-ABC Fact Check ruled from scientific measurement studies that Tuvalu’s land area is expanding.

It gets worse for the reputation of science. The 2022 joint ATSE/Science Academy submission to DIGImirrors the 2023 ATSE job. DIGI is Meta (Facebook), Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and TikTok. The DIGI players are, of course, the linchpin of the new Misinformation Bill.

The two academies urged DIGI to censor and harass any Australians who circulated what they insultingly labelled “climate denialism misinformation”. They made no bones about urging the tech giants’ power to be wielded against Murdoch’s “Sky News Australia and its media personalities”. And the regime shouldn’t stop at online censorship. They urge censoring “misinformation” in the traditional media too.

Recommendation 2: Include misinformation from professional news content within the scope of the Code.

A COP26 paper, Deny, Deceive, Delay, which the Academies’ submission also cited with approval referred to “political right-wing … top influencers” as part of a conspiratorial “intellectual dark web”. Its alleged members included best-selling psychologist Dr Jordan B. Peterson and humourist Scott Adams and his Dilbert cartoons. The paper, incidentally, was particularly aggrieved that Sky News’ Rita Panahi had called Prince (now King) Charles a climate hypocrite and idiot. Would that be misinformation or treason?

Another paper cited and approved by the two academies was another far-left conspiracy rant “The Toxic Ten — How ten fringe publishers fuel 69% of digital climate change denial.” To smear sceptics by association, the list includes “Russian state media”. Big Tech blocking these key right-of-centre outlets with their 186 million followers would be a huge win for the net-zero enforcers. Not all of the 600 science fellows viewed the submission as a credit to their Academy. Garth Paltridge, a fellow for 30-plus years, is a retired atmospheric physicist.[6] He told us at the time,

The bottom line is that research on climate change is indeed still highly controversial – both in the prediction of the extent of the change and (even more so) in the prediction of the impact of the change on society. I just cannot understand how any science academy that is supposed to operate through rational debate can behave like this – that is, to use pure political brute force to prevent one side of the argument from putting its case.

I can only assume that the Academy is subconsciously ‘chasing the money’ and is influenced by the vast funding available these days for the support of alarmist climate research. Certainly there is virtually no money to support scientists brave enough to put their heads above the parapet with a contrary view. That might be why the critical scientists seem largely to be retired.

Quadrant covered that joint submission under the felicitous headline, “Shut them up, argues the Academy of Science”. The two academies are now on a collision course with the Australian Human Rights Commission (HRC) which wants the misinformation bill defanged, not augmented.

The Commission holds serious reservations about the current version of the Exposure Draft Bill’s ability to strike the correct balance. Legislation that necessitates censorship to fight misinformation and disinformation must do so in a way that prevents harm without unduly silencing reasonable minds we disagree with. Unfortunately, this initial Exposure Draft Bill has not found that equilibrium.

The HRC is not my favourite institution.[7] It lost me when then-president Gillian Triggs opined in Hobart in 2017, to a standing ovation of Greens supporters, “Sadly you can say what you like around the kitchen table at home.” But on this Misinformation BIll, HRC President Rosalind Croucher has monstered the censorship-lovers. Censorship is contrary to fundamental Australian values, she argues, and also contrary to UN human rights treaties signed by Australia. She warns that the Bill could “restrict public debate, censor unpopular opinions and enforce ideological conformity in Australia.”

Truthful information can be labelled as ‘fake news’ and delegitimized, Croucher says. “Similarly, categories [in the Bill] such as ‘harm to the health of Australians’, ‘harm to the Australian environment’ and ‘economic or financial harm to Australians, the Australian economy or a sector of the Australian economy’ are each categories about which reasonable people may legitimately have different perspectives and views.”  She complains about the Bill’s free pass to any government information, true or false, “given the enhanced legitimacy and authority that many people attach to information received from official government sources.” Arguing in surprising parallel with the Institute of Public Affairs, HRC is alarmed that government has immunity while it can get its critics censored.

As for other submissions, the draft bill is even making the ABC nervous, as its iView and Listen apps could get caught in ACMA’s censorship wringer. The ABC also complains the Bill lacks provision for ABC journos to protect their sources.

The journos’ leftist union, MEAA, like the ABC, loves the censorship Bill in principle for targeting “misinformation” that contradicts their woke opinions. MEAA’s submission complains that authorities during the Referendum failed to suppress “deliberate campaigns distributing incorrect, misleading, and damaging information” by No advocates. The MEAA — trust them, they’re journalists

believes fact checkers [like their RMIT/ABC ideological mate Russ Skelton] should be a mandatory requirement of any code or standard developed.

At the same time, the MEAA feared the enhanced ACMA blowtorch could burn its many freelance journos and small online publishers. These small-timers, unlike mainstream publishers of “professional news content”, are likely targets for the official censorship. MEAA also feared ACMA could misuse its power to censor “harmful” accounts involving “disruption of public order or society” such as street protests. In MEAA’s words, “there is a long history of important social movements being considered ‘disruptive’ by governments and powerful interests.” I’m sure the union likes rioters for Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and  the “Gas the Jews” mob, but not the peaceful anti-lockdown protestors which, in Victoria’s case, involved Dan Andrew’s troopers firing rubber bullets into them as they fled.

The MEAA solution goes like this: instead of exemptions for “professional news content”, make it exemptions for all those subscribing to the MEAA’s Code of Ethics. These (I presume) union members can be relied on for “a commitment to the highest standards of honesty, fairness, independence, and respect for the rights of others.” The MEAA’s other faux solution to “misinformation” online, echoing ATSE, is for kids to get “media literacy” training, under the watchful eye of the leftist fact-checkers.

 Even through its leftist goggles the MEAA can see that the censorship regime looks a bit dicey given its green-light exemption for all propaganda from all levels of government:

It is simply unreasonable that the view of governments be protected from the reach of this Bill’s definition of “misinformation” and paves the way for government to politicise valid criticisms of it[self] while engaging in misinformation of its own.

Other leftist submissions on the Bill are nervous that giving such powers to their friendly government might backfire when wielded by a cabinet of conservatives.

I’d better close now, I’d hate to give you any misinformation.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] “Death by a thousand consent forms”, as one analyst put it at the time.

[2] Gillard in desperation negotiated to replace PIMA with a three-person panel, appointed by a 12-person committee, six of whom would have been appointed by the Council of the Order of Australia, three appointed by the journalists’ union and three appointed by the Australian Press Council. The bill collapsed anyway.

[3] Actually, his phrase was, ” As a senior figure in this government … I know this issue [free speech] doesn’t create one job, doesn’t open one business, doesn’t give anyone one extra hour. It doesn’t make housing more affordable or energy more affordable.”

[4] Dr Woodthorpe previously chaired the National Climate Science Advisory Committee and currently chairs the Government’s “Vision 2040” committee.

[5] Another of the Cook-Lewandowsky papers on “deniers” (Recursive Fury) in 2014 was retracted by its hosting journal, Frontiers.

[6] Paltridge from 1990 to 2002 was professor and director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies at the University of Tasmania and at the same time, from 1991–2002, chief executive officer of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre at the University of Tasmania.

[7] From October 14  to January 28 the HRC  website had nothing to say about the country’s wave of “Gas the Jews/Where’s the Jews?” anti-Semitism, though it had earlier spent four years hounding and legally impoverishing some blameless QUT students who’d objected to being kicked out of an Aboriginal-only computer room. On January 29 it posted this sludge,

The Commission is extremely concerned about reports of rising incidents of anti-Semitism, neo-Nazi rallies, Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism. We will continue to support and engage with all communities in our society for an Australia free from racial hatred, discrimination, and unlawful harassment.

On February 19 it announced 

further anti-racism work to support communities in Australia affected by the war in Gaza and the Middle East, supported by a $2 million grant from the Commonwealth.  The grant responds to an increase in racism targeting Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and Jewish communities within Australia since the outbreak of the conflict.

The Company Their ABC is Keeping

The ABC has copped unexpected blowback in its collaborations to enforce censorship about COVID failures, US election-rigging and climate “emergencies”. Last November  ABC joined the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative(TNI), a consortium of Big Media and Big Tech global players. TNI’s gatekeeping goal concerning “misinformation” (i.e. contrary to the official line) is to flag it in real time, coordinate members internally and alert Big Tech’s enforcers to stamp it out.

But on January 10 President John Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr,  in a Texas District Court launched an anti-trust lawsuit for treble damages from TNI’s biggest news providers, namely the BBC, Washington Post, and global news syndicators Reuters and Associated Press. He wants TNI disbanded as an unlawful cartel. He cites the BBC because of its TNI lead role and US commercial operations involving millions of users.[1] The Kennedy lawsuit is here.[2]His brief says “It is also an action to defend the freedom of speech and of the press.”

If Kennedy wins, the consequences  are uncertain for the ABC, fellow-travelling TNI member SBS and other TNI members not named as defendants. The suit says,

Each participant in an antitrust conspiracy is jointly and severally liable for all the damages (including treble damages and attorneys’ fees) caused by the conspiracy, and the victims of an unlawful antitrust conspiracy are not required to sue all participants therein. (My emphasis, p93).

Quadrant emailed questions to the ABC’s media team Nick Leys and Sally Jackson including:

1/ The Kennedy lawsuit makes no reference to ABC or SBS. Is the ABC  involved in the lawsuit in any way – perhaps through an amended filing by the plaintiff or reference in proceedings?

2/ Has the ABC advised its relevant Minister about its potential exposure to the lawsuit?

3/ How has ABC been implementing TNI policies? Can you give me please any examples of “misinformation” control by ABC in line with TNI guidelines?

Quadrant sent similar questions to Guy Podmore of SBS Corporate Communications, also asking him whether ABC and SBS had joined TNI as a group exercise or independently. We received no replies by Thursday’s deadline (Feb 2) after 1.5 business days.

The BBC lists TNI’s core membership as the syndicators Associated Press (1300 media outlets), Agence France Press (1700 journalists,150 countries) and Reuters (3100 reporters, 1b audience).  In TNI the ABC and SBS has also joined with the leftist Washington Post, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union, The Hindu, NDTV and Indian Express (India), Dawn (Pakistan), NHK (Japan), Kompass (Indonesia), Financial Times (UK), and The Nation Media Group (East/Central Africa). The Big Tech members are Meta (aka Facebook),  Google, YouTube, Microsoft and Twitter (which pre-dates Elon Musk’s ownership). The tech giants act to kneecap upstarts’ revenues with a tweak of an algorithm, intimidating thousands of other bloggers into self-censorship. The ABC release says (emphasis added),

The creation of the Asia-Pacific network will enable the TNI’s regional partners to share insights and best practices to tackle disinformation, discuss trends in the region and alert each other to the most dangerous forms of disinformation through the TNI cooperative framework.

ABC News Director Justin Stevens lauded TNI, saying that dangerous disinformation

weakens our society and is a threat that must be addressed … As Australia’s most trusted media organisation the ABC has an important role to play in tackling this problem. We’re pleased to join the Trusted News Initiative and, in the process, provide Australian audiences with a deeper and better-informed view of our region and the world.

He says TNI is entirely separate from, and does not in any way affect, the editorial independence of any partner organisation. He lists TNI’s methods as

♦ “Fast alerts” when disinformation threatens human life “or disrupts democracy”

♦ Intelligence sharing” in real time about evolving disinformation

♦ “Media education” on how audiences react to disinformation, and

♦ “Engineering solutions”  for authentication of trusted news sources and improving the information environment

The ABC seems to enjoy its role as a minor Google vassal. Google News Lab crowed about the expanded TNI Asia-Pacific network: “Now, we’re supporting the TNI to deliver targeted, expert training workshops on a variety of digital tools to help journalists as they seek to continue day-to-day verification and fact-checking in newsrooms across the region.”

Google (market cap $US1.3 trillion) found behind its executive sofa $US300 million (equal to roughly a quarter of the ABC’s annual taxpayer gravy) to set up “Google News Initiative” for massaging the media and journalists.[3] A BBC spokesperson, echoed by the ABC, said, “The media organisations that now make up TNI’s new Asia-Pacific network have received training, funded by the Google News Initiative, to help their journalists navigate the disinformation environment.” I’d ask the ABC for the names of their Google-trained journos, but seldom get replies.

Kennedy’s lawsuit, less kindly, claims TNI’s commercial goal is to deplatform and crush  the myriad of upstart online publishers who are contradicting the official lines and reducing trust in big media, along with its ad revenues.  The legacy, high-cost media are smarting over competition from bloggers in the shift to digital publishing, with 85 per cent of Americans now getting their news online. US newspapers’ ad revenue between 2000 and 2020 plummeted from $US48.7 billion to only $US9.6 billion, Kennedy says (p28).

A further motive for the TNI censorship, Kennedy says, is to placate governments that are threatening adverse new regulations, potentially costing Big Pharma billions in fines, liabilities and lost revenue. US conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has satirised the Big Media censorship as: “We have a monopoly on telling lies. No one else can talk.”

I set out chapter and verse of mainstream media corruption and censorship a year ago here. Among 46 countries, the US media has become the least trusted  (only 29 per cent trust it). Just 11 per cent of Republicans – who comprise half the population – trust the media, and only 10 per cent of Americans trust the media’s reporting on COVID. In Australia reporters are the second-least trusted of 30 occupations, ahead of politicians but behind delivery drivers. Only 43 per cent of Australians trust the media, which is less than in Poland, Croatia and South Africa.

Currently Big Media and Big Tech are suppressing revelations from a US sting operation against Pfizer by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas gadfly. A Veritas operative romanced a Pfizer executive, Jordan Walker, last week and video-recorded him bragging about Pfizer mutating dangerous viruses for profit, hoodwinking the public and engaging in other seriously unethical practices. As The Australian’s US correspondent Adam Creighton noted on January 30, the “jaw-dropping” story had racked up 40 million Twitter impressions but mainstream (Democrat-friendly) media in the US – except Murdoch and his Fox News – wholly ignored it.[4] Google and YouTube have reduced or deleted its visibility. Creighton appears unaware of media cartels, like the ABC’s TNI, coordinating suppression behind the scenes. A search of the ABC website on February 2 likewise yielded no current hits on Veritas or Pfizer, whether because of ABC’s TNI collusion pledge or its normal aversion to news that embarrasses the green-left establishment.

Robert  Kennedy’s own newsletters had 680,000 followers before being de-platformed, censored and shadow-banned by Google/YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook/Instagram. His writ says BBC’s Jessica Cecil, TNI’s head in 2020-21, took evident pride in the assertion that the TNI’s suppression of others’ online reporting did not “in any way muzzl[e] our own journalism”. He adds, “It was apparently of no consequence that the TNI muzzles other news publishers’ journalism.” (p44). Cecil spoke of TNI’s “clear expectations” for members to “choke off” alleged online misinformation. This incidentally prevents any one member gaining traffic by publishing “prohibited reporting” the others have binned.

Kennedy says TNI’s Big Tech members collectively have a gatekeeping power over at least 90 per cent of online news traffic. De-platforming a small news publisher typically costs at least 90 per cent of its traffic. Even well-known major online news publishers can lose up to 50 per cent of their traffic from a  seemingly minor change to Google’s search algorithms.  Smaller online news publishers have been destroyed completely when shadow-banned, throttled, de-monetized, or de-platformed.

Examples from the lawsuit’s co-plaintiffs:

♦ Jim Hoft, owner of hugely-popular blog The Gateway Pundit grew from a one-man blog in 2004 to fourth-best-rated conservative US blog in 2021 with 2 million accesses monthly. Pre-censoring, and with a 1m-plus following, he specialised in reporting scandals that TNI members hushed up or misreported, including the Jussie Smollett “hate-crime” hoax in early 2019, Wuhan covid research and statistical inflations of US covid deaths. The Big-Tech’s attacks cost him $US25 million.

♦ CD [Creative Destruction] Media, owned by L. Todd Wood.  He flew Sikorski MH-53 Pave Low combat helicopters in Kuwait in 1991 and later did classified missions for three years supporting counter-terror ops for SEAL Team Six and Delta Force.  Before being shadow-banned, his multi-lingual websites ran exposures of election frauds and Biden family corruption.[5] Big Tech attacked him on many fronts including, a suspension by  the email bundler Mailchimp, freezing his funds and blocking his credit cards. His losses: $US10 million-plus.

# Erin Elizabeth Flynn, an on-line health journalist,  who pre-censoring by TNI members had 90,000 Twitter followers, a billion YouTube views and 1.2 million likes/followers on one Facebook page alone. Losses: $US2 million-plus.

# Ben Swann, owner of news website Truth in Media, won numerous Associated Press awards as well as three Emmy Awards and was a two-time winner of the prestigious Edward R. Murrow award. His output with 750,000 followers before TNI  censoring was holding mainstream media to account, gaining up to 2 million page-views per month.

It’s hard to know how TNI bigwigs determine what is sacrosanct orthodoxy, especially with frequent 180-degree turns in the official narratives. Linked-In permanently banned one commentator merely for noting the fact that James C. Smith, president and CEO of news giant Reuters, also happens to be on the board of pharma giant Pfizer, and for suggesting (not unreasonably) the perception on the part of some of a conflict of interest.

As Kennedy puts it, TNI’s members boycotts were promoting vaccinations while undermining cheaper treatments. This helped generate hundreds of billions in profits to Big Pharma, which in turn paid the TNI Big Tech members billions of dollars for advertising.    

Kennedy quotes the TNI alleged cartel making admissions. Last year Jamie Angus, then the senior BBC controller of news, said:

the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked” reporting “that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world. Of course organizations will always compete with one another for audiences.

But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just, just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations. [6] (p45)

The lawsuit also references suppression by the TNI group of electoral news harmful to the Democrats and other liberal establishment players. In particular the lawsuit cites the mainstream news blackout in the weeks before the 2020 Presidential election on the scandalous contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which revealed allocating 10 per cent to “the big guy” — his father, Joe Biden — of Hunter’s lucrative influence peddling with America’s opponent nations. This coordinated blackout was justified by the lie – belatedly withdrawn by the Washington Postand New York Times 18 months post-election —  that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Kennedy blames TNI for much of the blackout, thus the  “truth controllers” propagated untruths. (The ABC originally in multiple accounts treated the laptop revelations as conspiracies or nutty, and an ABC web search finds no story yet that the laptop is genuine).

Kennedy also quotes a Facebook information-moderation executive in March 2022 emphasising that it was a mistake to think of “misinformation” as consisting solely of “false claims,” because a great deal of it is “not provably false.” (p48).

TNI silenced legitimate reporting of evidence including COVID-19 coming from a Chinese lab[7]; lockdowns, masks and social distancing being ineffective; Covid vaccines failing to prevent infection; vaccinated persons transmitting COVID; official COVID death tolls being inflated, and COVID conferring more immunity than vaccination.[8]

This TNI alliance has common elements with another consortium, Covering Climate Now (CCN), dedicated to climate news manipulation. Like TNI, this group has signed up the same AP, AFP and Reuters syndicators and the Washington Post, but also about 500 other news and opinion outlets.  Its total claimed audience is two billion. CCN members pledge to hype global warming scares and suppress ”denialist” items – whether accurate or not. [9] The ABC and SBS have not yet joined CCN, whose chief Australian members are the climate-crazed Guardian[10] and the universities-based The Conversation.

 After all this evidence of degradation of the journalism profession, you might appreciate some light relief. The TNI censors have posted a climate video panel “Trust in News – Fighting Disinformation”.  In it BBC climate editor Justin Rowlatt says orthodox climate science is not to be questioned but it is OK to get alternative views to the mainstream solutions like “using taxes, making carbon more expensive [this has been brilliantly successful], subsidising things like wind turbines or forcing people to go vegetarian.” It’s great to get this BBC agenda out in the open.

Brazil Reuters’ Adele Santelli wants every media story to be a climate story: “Well-rounded and positive coverage doesn’t happen by accident, it must be consciously planned with a commitment to continuity [i.e. non-stop].” On the Ukraine war she says,

We have to do an effort to keep the agenda to climate change … Maybe we can use this war to keep talking about climate change and how we should really be investing in energy transition, it is unimaginable  but we are still watching a war that has to do with climate change somehow.

Belatedly she recommends that journos should not be activists– but of course not give  a platform to “extremist views” and or allow “lies” to be repeated – “certainly not without calling them lies”. 

BBC compere Philippa Thomas (no relation) got more than she bargained for when asking BBC Africa colleague Marsha Ochieng about African audience response to BBC messaging. Ms Ochieng put up a slide of social media feedback including

♦ “BBC 80% fake news”

♦ “Stop these lies please, this is an evil plan”

♦ “Stop using African youth to drive  your Western propaganda”

♦ “There are young guys looking for food, give food and offer them sleep and they will all be silent.”

♦ “Africa must not worry about climate issues now. Let the Europeans, Asians and their greedy cousins in the US worry about it for now.  Our main focus should be directed towards Islamist terrorism going on in Mozambique, northern Nigeria, Somalia, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and the tribal mad things going on in Ethiopia and South Sudan.”

♦ One responder simply posted a picture of a “Bullshit Amplifier/Detector” with the dial at maximum.

Ms Ochieng sums up lamely: “We need to help our audiences understand the issue … find innovative ways to make them care about it.”

Questions from viewers produce such wonderland material as: “Extinction Rebellion accuses the BBC of suppressing the most alarming news about climate change. When will the BBC allow people to hear the most frightening news?” Ms Thomas asks the panel if BBC is really “holding back” on the bad climate news. The panel doesn’t think so.

Final thought: has the ABC become even more trustworthy since joining the Trusted Media Initiative? I don’t think so.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is now available: Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com.

[1] Kennedy in 2021 authored a jaw-dropping investigative book “The Real Anthony Fauci – Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the War on Democracy and Public Health”

[2] In 2018, the National Trial Lawyers Association named Kennedy and his legal team Trial Team of the Year for their work winning a $US289 million jury verdict against Monsanto for selling carcinogenic weed-killer products.

[3] The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA), to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising”

[4] Creighton: “The silence was, for me, an unsettling insight into the power of pharmaceutical giants (among the biggest advertisers in the US), the groupthink in elite US media, and the Orwellian role of big tech in deciding what’s permissible.”

[5] On October 25, 2020, Facebook blocked all CD Media content after Todd Wood’s post that included images of Hunter Biden from LinkedIn and Facebook and stated, “we have the Hunter Biden sex tapes…one per hour being released.”

[6] Mr. Angus has gone from the BBC to a higher calling as executive  with Saudi Arabia’s state broadcaster.

[7] “Strikingly, all three platforms [Facebook, Google, and Twitter] not only banned the claim that COVID was deliberately created at a virology lab in or near Wuhan, China; they also banned the wholly plausible claim that COVID was accidentally created and released from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.”

[8] Kennedy says an economic motivation was expressly admitted in 2022 by the founder of the TNI, the BBC:

Of course the members of the Trusted News Initiative are . . . rivals. . . . But in a crisis situation like this, absolutely, organizations have to focus on the things they have in common, rather than . . . their commercial . . . rivalries. . . . [I]t’s important that trusted news providers club together. Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms . . . . That’s the real competition now in the digital media world. Of course organizations will always compete against one another for audiences. But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations. So actually we’ve got a lot more to hold us together than we have to work in competition with one another.

[9] The Australian Academy of Science has vigorously urged the tech giants to deal similarly with any  climate dissent and “inoculate” Australians against climate unorthodoxy.

[10] The Guardian stylebook mandates terms like “climate crisis/breakdown/global-heating” in place of the mundane term “climate change”.

The HRC Welshes on Ending My Pain

By current standards of ethnicity and lineage my ancestor’s leek-infested origins in some misty valley populated by sheep-botherers and not enough vowels makes me as Welsh as they come. So I’m hurting, really hurting, that Evelyn Waugh’s racist abuse remains on library shelves

The priority of Prime Minister Morrison should be to protect Welsh-Australians from insult and ridicule. I identify as Welsh via my great-grandmother, Cymreigis Thomas. Two years ago I petitioned then Human Rights Commissioner  Gillian Triggs over a Welsh-humiliating cartoon by the late Bill Leak, but although I got a response running to six single-spaced pages, the HRC has failed to stem hatefulness against Welshpersons.

I thought civic libraries were safe spaces but in my Moonee Valley Library last week, while leafing through Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall, I was newly offended, insulted and intimidated as a Welshperson.

I disagree with book burnings but each library  should have a naughty corner for works like Decline and Fall, Conrad’s book about that person of colour aboard the Narcissus, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, Guy Gibson VC’s  Enemy Coast Ahead (because of the name of the squadron’s black Labrador), Biggles in Australia, and a shelf-load of  other books literally beyond the pale.

In Britain it is justly an offence to disparage the Welsh and their language. A Sunday Times columnist was reprimanded last April  for saying that the Severn Bridge connected the rain-sodden valleys of Wales with the First World, and that the Welsh were entitled to foreign aid in the form of vowels.

As for Decline and Fall, take the scene of the sports day of Llanabba Castle school, run by Dr Augustus Fagan. He has hired the local Welsh band, and explains how the Welsh retained their ancestral Iberian purity: they are so unclean that no invaders have wanted to mate with them. He says of the Welsh,

“Their sons and daughters mate freely with the sheep but not with the human kind except their own blood relations…

 “The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,” he said with disgust, “sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.”

The Welsh band arrives.

“Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow,  crafty of eye and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his apelike arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the Doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and mouthing over their companion’s shoulders…After brief preliminary shuffling and nudging, an elderly man emerged from the back of the group. He had a rough black beard and wore on his uneven shoulders a Druidical wreath of brass  mistletoe berries…’

‘We are the silver band the Lord bless and keep you,’ said the [bandmaster] in one breath, ‘the band that no one could beat whatever but two indeed in the Eisteddfod that for all North Wales was look you.’

The Doctor ordered them to stay in a tent.

“There was a baying and growling and yapping as of the jungle at moonrise, and presently he came forward again with an obsequious, sidelong shuffle.

‘Three pounds you pay us would you said indeed to at the sports play…Nothing whatever we can play without the money first.’”

Dr Fagan produces his notecase “the sight of which seemed to galvanise the musicians into life; they crowded round, twitching and chattering…”

The bandmaster, Davies, led non-stop playing of Men of Harlech to visitors during the afternoon, also offering his sister for a pound or on special terms to titled visitors. Waugh remarks in the preface that his first publisher in 1928 thought it less indecent if the bandmaster were to seek work for his sister-in-law rather than sister. Editions from 1961 restored the sister to the original Welsh domestic duties.

Waugh’s book involves a full hand of racial prejudice, including anti-Semitism. The delectable prostitute-trafficker Mrs Margo Beste-Chetwynde brings her coal-black friend Chokey (real name Mr Sebastian Cholmondley) to the sports day. Chokey is a cathedral buff.

“When I saw the cathedrals my heart just rose up and sang within me. You folk think because we’re colored we don’t care about nothing but jazz. Why, I’d give up all the jazz in the world for just one little stone from one of your cathedrals…Salisbury is full of historical interest, but in my opinion York Minster is the more refined.”

“Oh you angel,” said Mrs Beste-Chetwynde, “I could eat you up every bit…Chokey shot a man at a party the other night, He gets gay [merry] at times, you know. It’s only when he’s on his best behavior that he’s so class-conscious.”

Waugh’s mysterious Untermensch, Solomon Philbrick, says, “N—s are all right. Where I draw a line is a C—-k, nasty inhuman things. I had a pal bumped off by a C—k once. Throat cut horrible, it was, from ear to ear.”

“Good gracious!” said the Clutterbuck governess. “Was that in the Boxer rising?”

“No,” said Philbrick cheerfully. “Saturday night in the Edgware Road.”

You might think Scott Morrison has bigger fish to fry than my hurt Welsh feelings. Well OK. Let him fix energy and immigration policy and restore the budget to surplus. But look you, bod yn barchus I bobl Cymru – don’t mess with us Welsh. It’s the land of my fathers, or at least, great-grandmothers.

tags

• australian human rights commission,
• torment of welsh-australians

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Allah is an Englishman

Holding a critical opinion of Islam is now grounds to be locked up by British officials, particularly if you intend to speak about terrorism, homophobia, misogyny and other unfortunate elements of multicultural enrichment. Indeed, being ‘right wing’ is enough to see the door slammed

On May 31, 2015, I did a Sunday gig at Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, which since 1872 has been an icon of free speech and British tolerance for dissent. I spoke with gusto, as pictured below, on the global warming scam but it was a rainy Sunday and my audience ranged from zero to five. My wife alerted me that none of the five, all fellow-tourists, were fluent in English.

How times have changed.

Last week Her Majesty’s Government thwarted an attempt by Generation Identity’s Austrian leader Martin Sellner, 29, to speak at Speaker’s Corner on “threats to free speech in the modern world.” He had been scheduled to speak at a UKIP youth-member forum but Leftists as usual threatened violence and the forum was cancelled, re-scheduled, and cancelled again for the same reason. He then forewarned authorities that he would give his speech instead at Speaker’s Corner.

Therese May’s “conservative” government responded by detaining him on arrival on March 9 at Luton Airport, claiming he was a racist who would provoke violence among spectators in Hyde Park (i.e. by Leftists). As persona non grata he was deported two days later. Sellner said, “I think it’s embarrassing the government is so afraid of me speaking. You can hold the speaker but you can’t hold the ideas.”

His lady friend Brittany Pettibone, 25, a Kansas-raised gonzo YouTuber and author, was with him and got the same treatment. Her main work this year has been filming a documentary on the murderous attacks on white farmers in South Africa. Sellner, with Pettibone accompanying, was a leader of the “Defend Europe” campaign last August, ineffectually targeting boats run by NGOs which sought to “rescue” illegal immigrants off the Libyan coast and bring them to Italy.

Pettibone was deemed by UK authorities a threat to civilisation because she planned to interview Tommy Robinson, another right-wing blogger whose past included anti-Islamic polemics and stints leading the English Defence League (EDL), along with gaol terms for a variety of “political” and ordinary offences. A complex character, he is by no means the Satan he is officially designated. See the Pettibone interview below.

Pettibone tweeted the official letter explaining her deportation. It is vulgar, Orwellian and weirdly illiterate. Any sane person would dub it a hoax. It maintained that this intelligent, outspoken young woman threatened “the fundamental interests of society”, no less, and would “insight” local tensions.

To: Brittany Alicia Merced Pettibone:

You have asked for leave to enter the United Kingdom as a visitor for 5 day (sic) but as you stated in your interview, I have reason to believe that you are seeking admission to the United Kingdom to interview Tommy Robinson – a far right leader whose materials and speeches incite racial hatred.

You stated at the interview that you will be filming your boyfriend Martin Sellner speech (sic) at speakers (sic) corner (sic) in London Hyde Park (sic).  Your boyfriend admitted in the interview to being a co-founder of the Austrian branch of  ‘Generation Identity’ which is viewed in the UK as a right wing organization.

Furthermore, Your (sic) boyfriend  have (sic) in his possession the Leaflets (sic) with scenarios regarding (sic) possible violence in his speech.

I believe that your planned activities whilst in the United Kingdom bear (sic) a serious threat to the fundamental interests of society and are likely to insight (sic) tensions between local communities in the United Kingdom…”

On the same weekend the UK’s Border Force swooped on a third potential wrecker of civilisation, Canadian Lauren Southern, all of 22 years of age. Like Pettibone, she happens to be drop-dead gorgeous, and a scourge of Left feminism. She’s a sponsor of right-of-centre views on the internet (half a million followers), author and creator of amusing stunts at the expense of the politically correct and the Religion of Peace.[i]  In one I really liked (below) she tested Ontario’s  sex-identity regime by firstly persuading a GP that she identified as male (30 minutes) and then using that doctor’s letter to get a driver’s licence as a male from a state public service (another 30 minutes). She fronted in make-up, high heels etc and just said she’d felt like a male for years and now liked hitting on women. The clerk immediately began addressing her as “Sir”.

https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/lauren-southern-man/

She was about to enter the UK via bus but was hauled off at Coquelles, at the French end of the Chunnel, and interrogated for six hours under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act (2000), which deprives her and anyone else of normal rights such as to remain silent and have access to a lawyer during the first hour’s interrogation. The Act was brought in to thwart imminent terrorist atrocities. Ms Southern is about as likely as Bambi to stab or blow up British citizens.

Interviewed on-air by Tommy Robinson (below), she told of being asked by Kent-based police, “Are you a Christian extremist?” And “How do you feel about someone driving a car or truck into a group of Muslims?”

Southern: “I literally started laughing. ‘What? Sorry I’m laughing, obviously I think that is horrific, in general a pretty bad thing to run a car into a bunch of people. I think you have your priorities messed up.’”

Police: “How do you feel about right-wing terrorism anyway?”

Southern to Robinson: “It was insanity.”

Robinson: “Do you think they would ask a Muslim detainee, ‘How do you feel about people running cars over non-Muslims?’ It’s scandalous, it would never happen.”

To keep her spirits up, she did successfully identify herself to the police as “Pakistani”.

Eventually they agreed to phone her father to let him know she was detained. Although awoken at 4.30am (US time), he had the wit to record the conversation. The official said Southern was “just answering a few questions” under the Terrorism Act.

Official: “Just so you know (laughs), it sounds worse than it is. Not that we suspect her of being a terrorist or anything like that. We have the power to stop anyone who meets certain criteria.” [at 7.30 minutes]

From his own lips, an admission that their use of the Terrorist Act was an abuse of State power…

The authorities deemed Southern a racist because, if you believe the main media (a bad mistake), she had handed out tracts saying “Allah is gay” in Muslim-heavy Luton, Bedfordshire. Put aside the authorities’ mistaken belief, also held by our ABC, that to be anti-Islam is to be ‘racist’. Here’s the facts:

Vice magazine, which has a British operation and edition,  ran a story  by Jules Suzdaltsev in 2015 asserting that Jesus was gay. He wrote,

“Worshipping at the feet of a ripped, hung man, seems at least a little homoerotic. But it’s Jesus himself who lights up my gaydar like a Christmas tree. He’s a skinny young otter-like guy, flocked by a mess of dudes, telling everyone to love and care about each other, who later gets the shit beaten out of him by a bunch of closed-minded conservatives who are terrified of change… As it turns out, this is not a unique theory. Dr. Reverend Bob Shore-Goss, an openly gay senior pastor, has written several books on the subject, including Queering Christ and Jesus ACTED UP: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto…”

Southern, an avowed Christian, wondered how Muslims would respond to their own fountainhead being branded gay. So with anti-Islamic crusader Tommy Robinson, she unveiled posters and handed out fliers in Muslim-heavy Luton with a faked “LGBTQI for Islam” message, namely, ‘Allah is Gay, Allah is Trans, Allah is Lesbian, Allah is Intersex, Allah is Feminist, Allah is Queer, Allah is All of Us.’ Who could object to that, in this LGBTI-friendly and gay marriage era?[ii]

Big  surprise! A great many bearded gents did object. The police shut her show down for the sake of public safety, but laid no charges. The authorities bided their time and struck by deporting her this month.

Southern complained, “I would hope that [the UK] would be pro-freedom of speech, and support people’s right to question Islam, to even have cheeky posters, make jokes and social experiments, to give a speech at Speakers Corner.”

The UK government’s vigilance in intercepting two young Christian women at the border contrasts with their official bumbling which recently allowed more than 400 British fighters for ISIS to come home  from Iraq and Syria and disappear into the community, for good or more probably, for ill.[iii]At the same time the authorities have cranked up desperate attempts to equate the menaces from Islamic and from far-right terrorists. Any terrorism is vile, but the relative UK body counts speak for themselves. If the letter to Southern is a guide, even to be “right wing” affronts the “conservative” May government.

The BBC in weasel words reported that the three deportations were “a move that some say is part of a crackdown on the far right”.

The media piled on by soliciting Leftist groups such as HOPE not Hate and the US-based Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) to slander the deported trio. The SPLC, for example, claimed Southern’s YouTube interviewees “tiptoe at the precipice of outright white nationalism” and branded her the “alt-right’s Canadian dog whistle.”

HOPE not Hate CEO Nick Lowles let a cat out of the bag by saying the government is now going after “softer targets on the hard right”. “These are people who have huge reach on social media, they are peddlers of online hate, and the online reach of right-wing hate preachers can have disastrous consequences.”

In other words, this new phase is naked political censorship. Ben Wallace, May’s security minister, dismissed complaints that he was treating two young Christian women as greater threats than  jihadis. “Total bollocks,” he tweeted.

Bollocks? You be the judge.

Tony Thomas’ book of essays, That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print, is available here.

[i] Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation. Written when 20.

[ii] Note that the mainstream media, by abbreviating her words to “Allah is gay”, distort her  message to discredit her.

[iii] Research by The Soufan Centre estimated that only Turkey (900), Tunisia (800) and Saudi Arabia (760) had larger numbers of returned foreign fighters.  About 300 fighters have returned to Germany and 271 to France.

Inky Wretches’ Inky Retches

According to members of the Fourth Estate, Donald Trump is a fascist or something close to it. As yet unreported is the charge that he roasts puppies over a slow fire, but given the media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome — a virus especially virulent at the ABC — it is only a question of time

President Trump’s “fake news” awards last week inspire me to make some Trump Derangement Awards on our local scene. It was only last night (Jan 23), for starters, that the ABC’s $400,000-plus woman Leigh Sales on 7.30 was fawning over Michael Wolff, author of a hatchet-job book on Trump, Fire and Fury, purporting to be an inside account of the presidency. Sales’ questions were as soft as a week-old puppy’s tummy.

LEIGH SALES: What is Trump like in private? When staff attempt to brief him on issues that he needs to know about, what is he like in those moments?

For heaven’s sake, Ms Sales! The White House says Wolff never got one interview with President Trump. Wolff never claims he did. In a typical obfuscation, he says he has had three hours of conversation with Trump including during the election campaign.

And in terms of the ABC’s impartiality charter, how’s this for a smug, insulting question from Sales about the American President, our most powerful ally in a rapidly-shrinking free world?

LEIGH SALES: How did Trump’s advisers work out what policies he wants and what he wants to do? 

It’s almost beyond belief, except that this is indeed the ABC. Trump is such a total moron, Sales suggests, that he’s just a puppet of nameless advisers. Trump himself, Sales imagines, has had nothing to do with turning the US into an energy superpower, driving home the biggest US tax cuts in 30 years, and sending the Dow Jones soaring 30% in the year to date.

Sales should have taken a look at the trenchant TV interview of Wolff by columnist Meghan McCain[i], who waded in : “You know, Michael, your credibility is being questioned. Trump says the book is full of lies.” When Wolff asked for specifics, McCain rattles off the following list of people: “New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, New York Times’ John Martin, David Brooks, CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, Tony Blair, Tom Barrack, Kate Walsh, Anna Wintour all denying quotes.” Wolff lamely responded that lots of people hadn’t denied their quotes.

Inside the ABC bubble there seems zero interest in the book’s truthfulness and accuracy. It’s as if Wolff had never said: “Read the book. If it makes sense to you, if it strikes a chord, if it rings true, it is true.” Even key parties in the US liberal media have excoriated Wolff’s tome.  CNN anchor Jake Tapper, for example, said the book “abandoned all standards”.

Credulous Sales is therefore a front-runner for the Trump Derangement Prize, but she has plenty of competitors. When Trump had been in office a bare five weeks, ABC airhead Geraldine Doogue was burbling about Trump and fascism to her interviewee, a totally Trump-deranged London academic Sarah Churchwell:

Doogue: Quote, ‘…a Fascist  is someone whose lust for money and power is combined with such intensity of intolerance towards other races, parties, classes, regions or nations, as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.’  It’s a pretty devastating old quote. You don’t think Trump is a fascist though really?

Churchwell: Yes actually I think he is. I do, I do.

Doogue: Oh you do! OK!

Churchwell:  That description is a very good description. I think Trump is a fascist in the strict sense of the term, a lot more like Mussolini than he is like Hitler.

Doogue (enthusiastically): or Berlusconi, it  is a very interesting comparison actually.”

If we follow the trend to giving prizes to collectives, like the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize going to the now jihadi-infested European Union, and Time’s person-of-the-year going to The Endangered Earth (Planet of the Year, 1988, no kidding), then in such a tradition, the ABC per se would contend for the prize.

If you google “ABC Trump Hitler”, note how seriously the ABC’s talent takes the Trump/Hitler analogy. Sometimes the analogy is raised and then disparaged, followed by a qualifying nudge the other way, as in

Mr Trump is no Roosevelt, nor Marx, nor Hitler, though there are some eerie parallels between the world that has given us soon-to-be President Trump and the period between the wars that gave rise to fascism.

My own variant, which makes equal sense, goes, “Victorian Premier Dan Andrews is no Roosevelt, nor Marx, nor Hitler, though there are some eerie parallels between the world that has given us soon-to-be Premier Dan Andrews and the period between the wars that gave rise to fascism.”

Night after night on the 7pm TV news are pieces-to-air on the past 24 hours’ anti-Trump fluff, no matter how trivial, faked or context-free.

Enough with the shilly-shallying. My Derangement Award goes to journalist Aaron Glantz. You’ve never heard of him? Fair enough, he’s a Californian  investigative reporter who has won a slew of prestigious awards on other topics, doubtless well deserved. But he displayed his drooling derangement in my own fair city of Melbourne as lunch speaker for the Melbourne Press Club.

The Press Club’s president last year was ABCTV newsreader Michael Rowland[ii] and CEO is  Mark Baker, former Age senior editor and former managing editor (National) of Fairfax Media. They organized a session, “Fake News Fightback”, in conjunction with the Walkley Foundation and featuring Glantz and another US journalist, Tonya Mosely, who among other things researches implicit bias in reporting.[iii]

I trotted along on August 29, naively expecting a clash of pro- and anti-Trump views from two dueling protagonists. No way! Both reporters were competing as rabid anti-Trumpers.

Glantz concluded, in all seriousness:

“I worry that America could slip in a fascist direction and you could have police rounding people up in my neighborhood, and throwing them in prison…

“It seems like members of Congress are not at this time inclined to move towards any kind of impeachment or anything like that.

“I don’t know quite how to approach it as a journalist. I say to myself , ‘This guy is going to be president for four years. You can’t kill yourself, they [media employers] are going to need you tomorrow. You need to be available tomorrow and the next day to continue to do your work. Sometimes I think we could all be dead tomorrow, so, anyway…’”

His co-speaker Mosely chided him,

“Oh Aaron, you were supposed to give us something to lighten up!”

The audience gave Glantz’s meltdown respectful sympathy. I didn’t laugh, that would have been like farting in church. I’ve disliked some Australian Prime Ministers — Julia Gillard, for example — but I never considered, in my professional capacity, killing myself over her.

Glantz scored this own-goal for himself, for the  Democrat-fawning media and for his hosts the Press Club, which is supposed to promote fair and balanced reporting, even on Trump.

Assuming Mr Glantz since August has not implemented his suicide, he therefore wins my antipodean Trump Derangement Prize. Readers can see how richly he deserves the award by watching the video below.

• Community service announcement: Any ABC or Fairfax journalist contemplating suicide over the Trump presidency should contact Lifeline.

Tony Thomas’s book of essays That’s Debatable – Sixty Years in Print, is available here.

---

[i] Also daughter of 2008 Presidential candidate John McCain

[ii] Currently, Adele Ferguson.

[iii] Glantz is a senior reporter at Reveal, the publishing platform of the San Francisco based Center for Investigative Reporting, whose investigations have sparked congressional hearings, legislative changes and high-level criminal probes in the US.

Mosley is a senior Silicon Valley reporter for public radio station KQED in San Francisco,  and been named Journalist of the Year by the Washington State Association for Justice.

Conscripting Babies in the Culture Wars

TONY THOMAS

Red nappies, green nappies — that’s how the progressive Left grooms its social justice warrior babies, a process that begins, as one kiddie-book author asserts, ‘fresh out of the womb’. Join us now at storytime and learn that  ‘A’ is for ‘Activist’, ‘L’ for LGBTQ and ‘T’ stands for for ‘Trans’

Progressives are concerned about the “indoctrination gap” which leaves many kids untouched by Green Left ideology. This gap involves the important demographic from birth through to three- and four-year-olds.

From four onwards, the kids are safely captured by state interventions, such as the Victorian Labor government’s political and gender-bending education down to pre-school and kindergarten level. For example, Premier Dan Andrews is now rolling out a $3.4 million program for 4000 educators to eliminate four-year-old boys’ “hegemonic masculinities”.

Closing the gap is under way through radicalising picture-books for toddlers. These include those board-books with hefty cardboard pages. Traditionally their content was of the “My First Colours” kind; the new authors fill them with images of their better society.

The gap-closing has gained momentum from the election of President Trump, to American progressives a near-unthinkable disaster. Some authors’ explicit goal is to raise a new generation programmed to avert any Trump lookalike in coming decades. “We’re going to have to start in utero,” one reviewer says.

Feminist Baby is by New Yorker and BuzzFeed worker Loryn Brantz. It’s for babies “fresh out of the womb” up to two-year-olds, as she puts it. Published in April and “the perfect baby-shower gift for today’s new parents”, it’s flying off the shelves at Australian bookstores and libraries.

Brantz told Time magazine, “Why not start kids off right away? Hopefully if we raise a whole generation of kids with Feminist Baby and with older books for kids about feminism and activism, something like this [Trump’s election] will never happen again.” Brantz is marketing the book with comics aimed at adult buyers. In these, “Feminist Baby serves as an under-age heroine bent on smashing the patriarchy and subverting tired traditions like the ‘gender reveal’ [that is, binary male or female].” In one panel, Feminist Baby punches Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who is dressed as a Nazi.

Brantz started to write the book pre-Trump, but obviously, “his administration is complicit in oppressing women of all shapes, sizes and colors”, which is why her book is so very important. Feminist Baby “is decidedly the one we need right now”, says another reviewer. “She’s here smashing your patriarchy, speaking her truths, and not taking anybody’s crap.”

Feminist Baby’s first words (tongue in cheek) are “Gender is a social construct.” In Brantz’s world, the feminised cradle-dweller “lives how she wants and doesn’t let the patriarchy keep her down”:

Feminist Baby chooses what to wear
and if you don’t like it she doesn’t care! 

When it’s snowing, let’s hope she doesn’t choose sandals.

And do it tough, Dads. If you coo to Feminist Baby that she’s beautiful, the infant swipes back, “And I’m smart and capable too!”

Another reviewer says presciently that the book should “imbue your tiny tot with all of the important characteristics necessary for her (or him) to become a lifelong, probably insufferable, feminist”.

Brantz sees toddlers’ books opening a cot conversation about “intersectionality and feminism”. (No, I don’t know what intersectionality is either.)

Another such author is Innosanto Nagara, whose book for children up to three years old A is for Activist has sold 50,000-plus copies. He’s “calling children and parents to action” on things like social justice and immigration. His board book is “unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and everything else that activists believe in and fight for”.

A is for Activist came out for in 2013 and was re-issued for over-fives last November. “I love reading this to my nine-month-old,” gushes one mum. Writes another, “Never too early to get progressive thoughts brewing in little minds.”

Nagara lives and works at an artists’ social-justice collective in Oakland, California, comprising five families. He helped raise seven children there before introducing his own infant to concepts like transsexualism. He had no experience with kids’ books, but crowd-funded $4000 for a home-brew edition of 3000 before Seven Stories Press took it up.

The typical family buyers are “unflinching progressives” who go on anti-war marches, and put up gay-marriage signs in their front windows. He says, “This family understands that even a two-year-old can appreciate a word like ‘camaraderie’ … It’s pretty awesome to hear a three-year-old saying ‘union power’.”

Nagara draws parallels between the oppression by the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia in 1977 and “Trump’s America”. He’s had earnest discussions with his now six-year-old son about the presidential election “and what we’re going to do between elections, given the outcome”.

This essay appears in the current edition of Quadrant.
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A reviewer suggests that families that have endured war, discrimination, repression and hardship have had to find ways to talk to their children about their traumas. Likewise, Trump’s election is another “difficult subject” to relate to toddlers without generating fear and despair.

Nagara’s first draft included, for “A”, “Actively Acting Against Atrocities”. Atrocities are just what toddlers need to know about. “C” was “Comrades Countering the Corporate Vulture”, later toned down to omit the “Comrades” reference. “L” was also toned down from “Lesbian and Gay. We’re here to stay.”

A is for Activist is nothing short of a masterpiece for the newly literate, writes queer reviewer Lindsay Amer. Her bio says, “When she’s not completely overwhelmed by adulthood, she’s probably plotting ways to overthrow the patriarchy while playing her ukulele.”

Author Naomi Klein, who wants grass-roots campaigns to overthrow capitalism, proclaims the book “Full of wit, beauty, and fun!” Try “Q” for such wit, beauty and fun: “Q is for Question. Querying coercion. Querying Qualities counter false assertions.”

The book starts, “A is for Activist. Advocate. Abolitionist [?]. Ally. Actively answering A call to Action. Are you An Activist?”

“C”, as amended, reads: “C is for Co-op. Cooperating cultures. Creative Counter to Corporate vultures.” Any baby enjoys a debate about incorporated vulture-like entities versus unincorporated mutuals.

“D” mystifies me. “Little d democracy. More than voting, you’ll agree. Dictators Detest it. Donkeys Don’t get it. But you and me? We Demand equality.” The own-goal here is that the illustration shows a blue donkey butting heads with an aggressive red elephant. Nagara seems unaware that the donkeys (that “Don’t get Democracy”) signify Democrats and the elephants signify Republicans.

A second howler is at “N”, not a bad score for a small board book. “N is for NO. No! No! No! Yes to what we want. No to what must go. No! No! No!” All well and good, except the illustration shows one kid holding up a sign, “NO war”, and another kid, “NO justice. NO peace.” Some mistake, surely?

Gender arrives in execrable doggerel. “L-G-B-T-Q! Love who you choose, ’cuz love is true! Liberate your notions of Limited emotions. Celebrate with pride our Links of devotion.”

By “S” we have a plug for solar power, contrasted with “Silly Selfish Scoundrels Sucking on dinosaur Sludge. Boo! Hiss!” Then “T” is for Trans … Trust in The True. The he, she, They, That is you!”

“X” is a stretch for Nagara, who settles on Malcolm X (Nagara is totally fluent in English after decades in the USA). “Remember Parks. Remember King. Remember Malcolm. And let freedom ring!” Reality check: Malcolm X, at twenty-one, was sentenced to ten years for burglary. On release he helped launch a black Muslim separatist movement, which was riven by infighting. In 1965 he was shot fifteen times by three disgruntled members of the Nation of Islam. Toddlers may wonder at Malcolm X’s relevance to their daily round of Play School, naps and Teletubbies.

With “Z”, Ragara’s desperate solution is “Z is for Zapatista. Of course.” Of course, indeed. The illustration shows an angry young man in a black hood with a horizontal eye-slit. He looks more like a rent-a-rioter for Berkeley campus than a Mexican rebel. A balaclava wearer doesn’t seem a good note on which to settle in a two-year-old for the night.

Politicisation aside, Nagara’s book is incompetent in any literary sense. Rhymes don’t rhyme. Lines don’t scan. The language level and content baffle adults, let alone toddlers.

His latest book is Counting on Community. Number 8, for example, is “Eight picket signs showing that we care”.

Pity these people don’t care about their offspring. In all my explorations, not once did I find a progressive wanting to leave kids to be kids.

Tony Thomas’s book of Quadrant essays, That’s Debatable: 60 Years in Print, is reviewed in the June edition.

 

Hillary’s Shameless Media Shills

Two political conventions, two grieving parents, two very different presentations of their respective stories. Khizr Khan used the death of his son to lambast Donald Trump and was hailed for his bravery. Patrica Smith directed a similar change against Hillary and was attacked for her partisanship

The mainstream media, let alone the ABC, no longer even pretends it is providing an unbiased coverage of the presidential quests of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

As a case study in partisan journalism, this piece will look at media coverage of Khizr Khan, the Muslim father whose soldier son, Humayun, was killed in Iraq in 2004 while defending his squad. Then, by way of contrast, I’ll  examine the attention given to bereaved mother Patricia Smith, who opposes Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. Patricia who, you ask? Exactly! You have likely never heard of her, as she is definitely not part of the media narrative — despite, or because — her son was killed by terrorists who attacked the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012 during Hillary’s term as Secretary of State. So here we go…

There are not many positive things the media can find about Hillary. Number one, she’s the first female presidential nominee. Second, horrible people call her names like “bitch”[i] and “lock her up”. Third, err, see 1 and 2.

Her term as Obama’s Secretary of State from 2009-13 was marked by endless disasters, such as the premature US pullout from Iraq (2007-11),  IRS targeting of conservatives for tax audits (2010-12), and Al Qaeda’s sacking of the US consulate in Benghazi. Her successes? Hmm. I’ll get back to you.

As icing on Hillary’s rancid cake, there was her use of a private email server for State business and her official connivance in the money-making corruptions of husband Bill, who has enhanced the couple’s wealth by  $US150 million-plus since 2001 (such as taking $US500,000 from Moscow for a speech in 2010 concurrent with Hillary’s department approving a Russian takeover of US uranium resources). By a further coincidence, Hillary clean forgot her undertaking to Obama to disclose $US2 million-plus  gifts to the Clinton Foundation from those uranium interests.

Hillary’s record is therefore of no interest to the mainstream media. Instead they focus on the latest gaffe or infelicity of her Republican rival, Donald Trump. Trump is dubbed a racist, violence-promoting, dangerous fool.  Like the magicians who distracts his audience’s attention with a waved handkerchief, the object is to distract the audience — America’s voters — from what’s actually important.

This month the story was all about how Trump, on July 30, disparaged the parents, particularly the silently grieving mother, of the  (genuinely) brave  Captain Humayun Khan. ABC TV continues to wallow in Schadenfreude about Trump’s boorishness. Cut to visual of Captain Khan’s headstone in Arlington cemetery. Cut once again to father Khizr Khan giving Trump that serve at the Democrat National Convention in mid-July. Hillary would never sink so low as to disparage the parents of a dead patriot, was the ABC’s unstated premise.  And yes, even conservative ABC viewers probably found Trump’s behavior (as distilled by the ABC)  indefensible, ungracious and discomfiting.

But it’s never smart for conservatives to drop their guard. The media’s specialty is removing the context and failing to tell the whole truth, even when not telling actual, outright lies.[ii]

So let’s unpack the Trump vs bereaved Muslim parents controversy, and see what really emerges.

About 100,000 Muslims immigrate to the US each year. After the  San Bernardino shooting of 36 people by an Islamist couple last December, Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslim would-be immigrants “until we can figure out what the hell is going on”. He subsequently and continually refined the idea of allowing re-entry of obviously “good” Muslims, such as US servicemen and those hailing from US allies such as the UK, and he redefined the proposed ban to involve only immigrants from nations “tied to Islamic terror” or those with a “proven history” of anti-Western terrorism. Grey areas include countries like France and Spain with their large Muslim populations. Note that Trump targets new  Muslim would-be  immigrants and has never proposed retrospective action against existing Muslim immigrants now resident in the US.

Two years ago a plan such as Trump’s would have been highly controversial, but Islamic barbarities in the West have escalated — the recent mass slaughter in Nice and throat-slitting of an elderly priest near Rouen last month being the but two of the most recent examples. Hence Trump’s proposed banning new Muslim arrivals, [1]pending a tougher screening regime, is no longer beyond the pale as a rational response to terror.

However, “progressives” have distorted Trump’s idea to mean that he would have excluded every decent/innocent Muslim ever to immigrate in the past.[iii] The argument is like saying that someone in early 1939 who called for the banning of German (including Nazi) immigrants, would have banned and/or expelled all German immigrants of the 1920s and 1930s.

Bereaved  father Khizr Khan not only waved his son’s shroud to assembled Democrat conventioneers, but did so in the context of a fiery attack on Trump and a call to elect Hillary as the candidate of love, amity and decency.

Khan told the convention,

“Tonight, we are honored to stand here as the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, and as patriotic American Muslims …

Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son “the best of America.” If it was up to Donald Trump, he [Humayun] never would have been in America.

Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims…. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country.

Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution? …[In fact, the constitution does not bar the US from discriminating against would-be immigrants based on their religion].

Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America — you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.

You have sacrificed nothing and no one.

We can’t solve our problems by building walls and sowing division. We are Stronger Together.[iv]

And we will keep getting stronger when Hillary Clinton becomes our next President.” 

Khizr Khan concluded by imploring all US immigrants to vote for Hillary, “the healer, not the divider”.

Thus provoked, Trump responded,

• “I’d like to hear his wife [Ghazala Khan]  say something” (implying that such Muslim women are kept subservient – Ghazala responded that she was too grief-stricken to speak);
• Khan’s speech was scripted by the Democrats (Khan denied that);
• He, Trump, had made sacrifices for the country as a business person employing thousands; and
• Radical Islamic terrorism requires counter-measures.

Trump honored the dead soldier and included respectful remarks about Khizr: “He looked like a nice guy to me,” but pushed back against Khizr’s accusations. Mainstream media went into paroxysms of indignation at Trump, omitting the context that Khizr Khan had done his utmost to offend Trump and promote Hillary.

At the start of this piece I mentioned pro-Trump Mrs Patricia Smith. She’s the mother of Sean Smith, one of the four  US embassy staffers who were murdered in Benghazi.  Hillary, as I noted, was Secretary of State at the time and ultimately responsible for the safety of US staff abroad. The run-up to the Benghazi assaults is not easy to summarise but includes

• Despite President Obama’s clear orders to deploy military assets, nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was en route to Libya when the last two Americans were killed almost 8 hours after the attacks began.
• A US Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) sat on a plane in Rota, Spain, for three hours, and changed in and out of their uniforms four times.
• With Ambassador Stevens missing, the White House convened a two-hour meeting at 7:30pm, which resulted in “action items” — the spin fed to the press — that focused on a locally-made anti-Islamic YouTube video.[v]

This was all unfortunate, but what is Patricia Smith’s specific beef with Hillary? Well, her accusation was that Hillary was not just responsible for Sean’s death. But standing by the son’s very coffin, Hillary had lied to the grieving mother that the video had provoked the Benghazi mob. These hotheads, Hillary claimed, spontaneously rioted against the US installations in Benghazi. Smith’s case is that Hillary knew at the time, as proved by a subsequently revealed email to  daughter Chelsea on the night of the attack, that the waves of assaults were planned and executed by al Qaeda-like forces.

Moreover, Hillary’s lie beside Sean Smith’s casket was overheard by other parents who lost children in Benghazi. So Smith took the stage at the Republican convention a week before Khizr Khan’s appearance at the Democrats’ gathering, and, in tears, had this to say:

“…The last time I talked to Sean, the night before the terrorist attack, he told me, ‘Mom, I am going to die.’

All security had been pulled from the embassy, he explained. And when he asked why, he never received a response.

Nobody listened. Nobody seemed to care.

The very next day, he was murdered by radical Islamic terrorists…

That night, we lost sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands.

We lost four brave Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for the country they chose to serve.

And, the American people lost the truth.

For all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the cynicism the tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton.

I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son.

In an email to her daughter shortly after the attack, Hillary Clinton blamed it on terrorism.

But when I saw Hillary Clinton at Sean’s coffin ceremony, just days later, she looked me squarely in the eye and told me a video was responsible.

Since then, I have repeatedly asked Hillary Clinton to explain to me the real reason why my son is dead. I’m still waiting.

Whenever I called the State Department, no one would speak to me because they say I am ‘not a member of the immediate family.’…

How could she do this to me? How could she do this to any American family? 

Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not…And, when it comes to the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism, he will not hesitate to kill the terrorists who threaten American lives…This entire campaign comes down to a single question. If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?”

So how did Hillary respond to Smith’s accusation? She more or less called Smith a liar (emphasis added).

CLINTON: “… I certainly can’t even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son, but she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong. I and everybody in the administration… we were scrambling to get information that was changing literally by the hour, and when we had information, we made it public. But then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it. So I testified [to congressional inquiries] for 11 hours… and when it was over, the Republicans had to admit they didn’t learn anything…[vi] And this is not the first time we lost Americans in a terrorist attack…At no other time were those tragedies politicized. Instead people said, let’s learn the lesson and save lives. That’s when I did.” (My emphases).

Note that Hillary dismisses Smith’s accusation in blanket terms, dodging all the specifics and then going off on a tangent.

How did the media react to Smith? With a classic pack attack. She was guilty of “extreme overreach”, “scary” stuff, “really disturbing” [i.e. reprehensible]  and  “a new crossing of a line and an ugly degradation of a norm in American politics.” The Republicans, by promoting Smith, were being both “exploitative” and “irrelevant”.

Fact-checker Politifact rushed to defend Hillary, tweeting, “Smith has said Clinton lied to her about Benghazi, but it’s not completely clear just what Clinton said.” Politifact further claimed, “No one recorded these brief meetings behind closed doors. Family members and Clinton disagree on what was said. Especially given the emotional setting, memories — both Clinton’s and the families’ — might be fuzzy.”

Sorry, but Smith heard the words, as did several other bereaved Benghazi parents. Politifact then tried to argue that, even if Hillary did blame the video, she might have believed, genuinely believed, the video was the culprit. This meme is regularly run when Hillary is caught out lying; she just made (yet another) “honest mistake”.

This week Pat Smith and another bereaved Benghazi parent, Charles Woods, filed a wrongful death lawsuit  against Hillary Clinton. They claim that Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server contributed to the attacks by, highly probably, exposing Benghazi embassy routines to hackers. They also accuse her of defaming them in public statements.

FBI head James Comey, in announcing last month the findings of the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s private e-mail server, said it was “possible that hostile actors gained access” to it but there was no direct evidence of that. A Clinton spokesman said that nine different Benghazi investigations had cleared Hillary Clinton.

By now readers should have a solid grasp of how the mainstream media is operating in this US presidential campaign, and how media “truthiness” is neither  truth nor the whole truth. The US public is wising up to the media spin, and that’s why Trump is getting a good shot at winning the presidency.

Tony Thomas’s new book of essays, That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print, is available here

 

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[i] Julia Gillard likewise gained victim-of-sexist-attacks status when her stature as Prime Minister fell to pieces

[ii] The ABC 7.30 footage of an Aboriginal child detainee in a spit-hood is a classic context-free message, as Prime Minister Turnbull has discovered to his embarrassment.

[iii] Pauline Hanson has been attacked thus for her similar proposed ban, with Q&A rabble-rouser Khaled Elomar, for example, demanding to know why his 11yo son is worried by Islamaphobia.

[iv] “Stronger together” is a Hillary  campaign slogan.

[v] The low-budget, amateur trailer entitled “Innocence of Muslims,”  for a never-shown film, portrays Muhammad as a womanizer who approved of pedophilia. The trailer’s author Mark Basseley Youssef,   an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian, was arrested and charged with violating terms of his probation, including making false statements regarding his role in the film and his use of the alias “Sam Bacile”.

He got  a year in prison.

[vi] The Republican-dominated report in fact concluded that Clinton and the Obama administration  should have realized how endangered U.S. outposts in Libya were and done more to protect them. Rep. Jim Jordan (OH) said:

“Obama Administration officials, including the Secretary of State, learned almost in real time that the attack in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Rather than tell the American people the truth, the administration told one story privately and a different story publicly.”

tags

• beghazi,
• donald trump,
• hillary clinton,
• Khizr Khan,
• patricia smith,
• us election 2016

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Hundreds More Reasons to Detest 18C

The law that makes it an offence to ruffle the sensitive tends to get headline attention only when a high-profile target, such as Andrew Bolt, is dragged before the courts. The truth is that it is deployed often — it’s just that we don’t hear about those cases, or of their legal costs and settlements

People think Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act has only really caught Andrew Bolt, plus a few luckless students and staff at Queensland University of Technology. Not so. Right now the Human Rights Commission (HRC) is considering eighteen more complaints – a fact elicited by the Institute of Public Affairs via a Freedom of Information request. And in the past six years, as we now know, aggrieved citizens have lodged a stunning 832 complaints.

This extraordinary data was disclosed today (April 28) by IPA Policy Director Simon Breheny at the launch in Carlton of a new Connor Court book on Section 18c: No Offence Intended: Why 18C is Wrong (270pp, $29.95). The authors are Murdoch University trio Joshua Forrester (Ph.D candidate), Lorraine Finlay, (lecturer in constitutional law), and Dr Augusto Zimmerman (senior lecturer in constitutional law and a WA Law Reform Commissioner). For those who need reminding, Section 18C makes unlawful any act reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or group of people because of race, colour, nationality or ethnicity.

Breheny said the QUT case involved legalized extortion, secret legal proceedings, and the pursuit of left wing political aims using the federal court system.

“The complainant is Cynthia Prior. Ms Prior was a university administrator at QUT until she decided she simply couldn’t work any more for fear of being offended. The basis of her distress were a number of remarks  made online by QUT students, including the factual statement by one student that Indigenous-only computer labs were an example of ‘QUT stopping segregation with segregation’.

“Three respondents have each handed over $5000 to make the issue go away. But the case continues for the remaining respondents. But this complaint is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Mr Prior, whose trauma must be extreme indeed, wants $247,570.52 compensation.

Breheny was asked how much the current 18 complaints emanated from Muslim, Aboriginal and Jewish complaints. He said he considered race and religion to be irrelevant to the issue. But from a back-of-envelope tabulation, he noted complainants include Lebanese (1), Pakistani (1), Sinhalese (1), Indian (3), Australian (8), Chinese (1), and non-specific Asian (1), “dark-skinned” (1) and uncategorized (1).

“The progress of these complaints ranges from an acknowledgement to a final response following conciliation at the commission,” he said. “Details of these complaints are not made public. The documents provided to the IPA under FOI are heavily redacted. They include some basic procedural information, dates, and the race of the complainant but none of the conduct which forms the basis of the complaint.

“The conciliation process within the commission is shrouded in secrecy.  HRC Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane admitted this last year: ‘To give you a sense of how the law currently operates, last financial year the Commission received 440-odd complaints [including s18c complaints]. Only about 3% of those complaints ended up in proceedings before a court.’”

Breheny says, “That means that 97% of all complaints are dealt with behind closed doors. Only in 3% of cases, where the matter is not resolved at conciliation, is the public ever made aware of the details of a complaint.

“Why is this relevant? Because had it not been for the QUT complaint advancing from conciliation to litigation, the public would never have known the extent to which s18C threatens freedom of speech. And without transparency around the conduct, the public doesn’t have the opportunity to assess the practical operation of the law.

“Many people, including the former Prime Minister (Abbott), have made the mistake of believing that S18C cases are aberrations.[i] But the HRC’s own statistics show S18C has restricted freedom of speech in hundreds of cases over the last six years alone.

“Malcolm Turnbull would do well to learn from the lessons of Tony Abbott’s time as prime minister in taking the leadership of the Liberal Party. Turnbull promised to lead a ‘thoroughly liberal government’. In line with that statement, Turnbull should make the case for freedom of speech to his colleagues and the public, and recommit to the repeal of S18C.”

In their  book No Offence Intended, the authors argue that s 18C is not only philosophically wrong, but also unconstitutional.  They note that there is no international human right not to be offended or insulted, and that s18C is so broad and sweeping that it infringes the implied freedom of political communication found in the Australian Constitution.

At the launch, co-author Lorraine Finlay said that Section 18C was having a real impact on public debate in Australia.  “Because of laws like Section 18C, certain topics are now off the table.  You can’t talk about them for fear of being sued.  What is worse is that this law doesn’t even achieve what it’s meant to.  We’ve had Section 18C for over twenty years now and all that it has proved is that banning supposedly racist speech doesn’t actually help to stop racism at all.”

Footnote: The QUT case involved three students entering a vacant  Aboriginals-only computer lab and being told to leave by Ms Prior because they weren’t Indigenous. Various students then commented on a QUT Facebook, including

# “I wonder where the white supremacist computer lab is…today’s your lucky day, join the white supremacist group and we’ll take care of your every need”

# A QUT lecturer wrote: “It seems a bit silly to kick someone out of an indigenous computer lab  for not being indigenous when there are computers not being used” and queried whether Prior was in breach of QUT anti-discrimination policy  by asking the students whether they were indigenous.

# Another student wrote that the lab was “more retarded than a women’s collective”

# Another wrote: “My Student and Amenity Fees are going to furbish rooms in the university where inequality reigns supreme? I believe if we have to pay to support these sorts of places, there should be at least more created for general purpose use, but again, how does these sorts of facilities support interaction and community within QUT? All this does is encourage separation and inequality. The psychology of living in the past is dangerous, and these ‘disadvantaged’ people will only stay in their given ‘seat’ in society iif that situation is reinforced.  There is a hypocrisy and bureaucratic taint in all attempts at making ‘special’ things for people who are ‘deemed unequal’ in order to ‘help make tem equal’. If you deem them unequal, well those poor bastards have no hope now. You’ve tainted them. I think the worst thing to do to a human is to tell them they’re unequal. They will forever doubt their integrity and ability.”[ii]

Tony Thomas’s own Connor Court book, “That’s Debatable…60 Years in Print” will be launched at Gambero’s, 166 Lygon St, Carlton, 6.30pm Thursday May 19. Buy it here

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[i] Abbott writes in the May edition of Quadrant that his failing to repeal S18C was a significant reason for his loss of office. He wrote, “S18C is clearly a bad law. Our debates should be polite  but they should never be guaranteed not to offend. With hindsight, I should have persisted with a simpler amendment along the lines of Senator Bob Day’s later private members’ Bill.”

[ii] Forrester, J et al, No Offence Intended. Connor Court, 2016 p 180-182

tags

• andrew bolt,
• lawfare,
• section 18c,
• white aborigines

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More Farce Than Class at the ABC

While it is always handy to have a sharp lawyer, nothing beats a sympathetic judge. Having appointed two of its most ardent admirers to investigate both Q&A and its overall coverage of science,  that wisdom gets no argument from the national broadcaster

Two inquiries into the ABC’s professionalism are due for release shortly: the Ray Martin report on Q&A and Fiona Stanley’s  long-overdue examination of science coverage. As each has publicly extolled both the ABC’s virtues and the Coalition’s villainy, their findings, if less than critical, will be inevitably and grossly diminished by the widespread perception that their tasks should have been assigned to other auditors.

The report on Q&A, launched on July 1, was projected to take three months for its examination of 22 episodes.  The review is led by one-time Q&A panellist and current ABC fan Ray Martin, who has been teamed with  former SBS managing director  Shaun  Brown. It was prompted by the June 22 grandstanding on Q&A by ABC-invited questioner Zaky Mallah, who had earlier been convicted and done hard time for threatening to kill security officers.[i] This record did not stop the ABC driving him to and from the studio and, before his on-camera moment, providing him with coaching by the show’s producers.

Barely one week after Martin’s appointment, he gave a spray on  Channel 7’s Sunrise to then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott for having temporarily banned federal ministers from appearing on Q&Awhile the inquiry  was proceeding. Martin not only called the ban “silly” but said host Tony Jones was as tough on the previous Labor government as on the Coalition. Some of the ”rants and raves” about Q&A  had been “crazy”, Martin continued, saying that he hoped his audit would bring some balance to the debate.

Capping off what many will see as a remarkable display of bias, he further suggested the Coalition had been beating up its criticism of Zaky Mallah and Q&A as a pre-election ploy. Any ethical organisation would have replaced Martin to preserve the inquiry’s credibility. Not the ABC, but.

An ABC spokesman responded  instead  by saying that Martin had been  chosen to conduct the audit because

he is independent and the public perceive him to be. That doesn’t mean he can’t express an opinion.[ii]He made it clear that his final view will be shaped by an orderly audit of previous programs. His comments related more to the boycott than to the program itself, and everyone has an opinion on that.

Let’s turn now to Fiona Stanley’s pending report on ABC science, especially climate coverage. Even allowing for delays perhaps attributable to some members’ personal issues, its report is long overdue. When ABC Chairman Jim Spigelman announced the review way back in mid-2013, he told the Academy of Science, loftily, that science reporters were a dying breed outside the ABC, where Robyn Williams and Karl Kruszelnicki were paragons. ABC science coverage stands “head, shoulders, thorax and abdomen”  above other broadcasters, he boasted. Strangely, he made this pronouncement in advance of his own panel’s findings. Kruszelnicki, by the way, claimed that global warming since 1997 was six times more than the British Met Office had calculated, then abused columnist Andrew Bolt for getting the figure correct.

Spigelman said that while he is not a climate sceptic, ABC journalists need “to hold scientists and technologists to account for their claims and conduct”. He said “impartiality” included  giving opportunities over time for key points of contentious issues to be covered. However, “balance”’ involved following the weight of evidence on topics such as climate change.

We must go beyond PR handouts, or what has been called ‘churnalism’ …  What I believe needs most work, is to develop our capacity to appropriately challenge scientists, not least those whose work is distributed by press release from organizations with a vested interest in favourable publicity. That includes, these days, universities.

He emphasized that ABC accuracy and impartiality was not just something the board should promote but which by law it was required to enforce. The panel, Spigelman said, would examine ten representative ABC science stories. After the panel reports, it would run a private symposium with ABC staff on science coverage. The ABC would then issue a public report on the whole exercise. Later, other non-science ABC subject areas will get similar scrutiny, he said. As a sequel to the review of science journalism, the ABC’s political coverage brims with potential.

Amid all Spigelman’s good intentions, he omitted one adjective for his panel: independent. People just assumed the inquiry would be independent, but the ABC speedily appointed one of its own board members, Fiona Stanley, to head the inquiry.

What are the chances of Stanley giving the ABC a stern report sheet?

# First, she adores the ABC.
# Second, she’s a global warming super-activist, making stump speeches for greenies about “saving the planet”, and comparing sceptics to child abusers. So what’s not for her to like about the ABC’s climate alarm coverage?

Here she is talking about the ABC a year ago:

From the age of five, when I was an Argonaut, the ABC has been a force for good in my life and work.  It has educated, informed, entertained and excited me for over 60 years.  It is a fantastic resource for this nation.

Unfortunately,  many of us have taken the ABC for granted. My hope is that readers will realise how valuable our public broadcaster is and fight to save it from further cuts and harassment.

If you only read The Australian, or listen to the views of some politicians, you would think that the ABC is struggling to provide fair coverage of events, is biased in its politics and its science, and that it is wasting tax-payers’ dollars. Have you noticed that journalists critical of the ABC have started to call it ‘the taxpayer-funded ABC’?”  [Well yes, Fiona, strange, that].

“As a scientist”, as Stanley described herself, she believes the ABC is doing a great job, while “We are now in a situation where a major commercial news organisation [i.e. News Corp] is denigrating the ABC with a vicious, sustained campaign which is extremely damaging to our public broadcaster and to the nation.”

The nub of Stanley’s science inquiry involves the work of Robyn Williams, the maestro of the ABC’s flagship Science Show.[iii] Any normal auditor would be alert against creating perceived bias for or against Williams. Not Stanley.

She went on Williams’ show, mid-inquiry a year ago, to publicly sing its praises:

Fiona Stanley: There are lots of ways in which both Robyn Williams and Norman Swan are impacting Australia. There is no doubt that there is a huge both listening public and podcasting public that pick up on their programs.

Sharon Carleton [co-presenter]: Praise indeed from respected paediatrician Professor Fiona Stanley.

Fiona Stanley: And many of those podcasts are actually international, and so they are used extensively by people who are interested in science and health. We use them for teaching, in medical schools, and I’m sure they use them in public health. And so the impact, I think, goes way beyond the initial program.

Two of her  inquiry panel members – we kid you not – are ex-Media Watch compere and climate alarmist Jonathan Holmes and ex-ABC Triple J comedian Adam Spencer. A mixed bag – see here – of half a dozen outsiders complete the panel. Stanley, who has a distinguished background in epidemiology, paediatrics and Aboriginal health,  has a new career as a climate doomster and public speaker, for which she charges as much as $15,000 per appearance. Almost 19 years of no appreciable warming  has not diminished her catastropharian zeal in the slightest.

In April last year, mid-way in the ABC inquiry into the impartiality and accuracy of the ABC’s climate coverage, she actually compared climate sceptics with child abusers! “The way we are living on this planet is unsustainable, and that’s why I’m worried for my children, and my grandchildren and their children,” she said. By analogy, our own great-grandparents circa 1900 should have been worrying about threats to you and me in 2015.

Stanley’s forward genealogical concerns extend even beyond her great-grandchildren. She was lead signatory to a self-described “Monster Climate Petition” launched by greenies and luvvies in mid-2014, which included in its preamble:

It’s 3:23 in the morning and I’m awake 
 because my great-great-grandchildren
 won’t let me sleep. My great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams what did you do while the planet was plundered? What did you do when the earth was unraveling? (My emphasis)

“I’m not a climate-change expert,” Stanley gushed with commendable frankness.  “But I do trust the incredible [well said, Fiona!] scientific evidence … We don’t actually know if [warming] is on the rise, but all the risk factors for it are on the rise.”   Make what you can of that.

Climate sceptics make her “anxious and angry”, she has said, because they were dissing her favourite scientists and hurting those generations as yet unborn.  What we should be doing, she said, is eating less meat and catching more buses and trains. Anyone spotted Fiona returning from one of her speaking engagements on a Transperth bus, possibly munching a carrot?

Her logic runs as straight as a worm in compost. On the one hand, she says “the data is very compelling”, but on the other

To expect science to be able to predict something as complex as what is going to happen on this planet, given human activity and other things, is extraordinarily challenging and I think it is pathetic of people to criticise the imprecise nature of the science…

My bet:  the two ABC inquiries will issue nuanced results like this:

Ray Martin/Brown inquiry: “Ten out of ten for Q&A!”

Fiona Stanley inquiry on accuracy and impartiality of ABC science coverage: “Ten out of ten for ABC Science!”

You read it here first.

Oh, and by the way, the ABC in both cases declines to reveal how much the two teams are being paid. Whatever sums are involved, if Martin and Stanley really care about the ABC’s credibility and their own, they should step aside and let others tackle these job afresh..

Tony Thomas blogs at No BS Here (I Hope)

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[i]

Justice Wood, when sentencing Zaky Mallah in 2005 to 30 months jail, had even then deplored the way the media had adopted Mallah and “gave him  an entirely undeserved and unnecessary exposure… Placing a person such as the prisoner into the public spotlight is … likely to encourage him to embark on even more outrageous and extravagant behaviour.”

Mallah registered to go on Q&A in 2011, went into the audience twice, and was booked by the ABC into the audience another three times, but was a no-show. He asked twice to join the panel but – and this is a mystery – Q&A rejected him. On a further occasion Q&A begged him to join an audience, but he in turn rejected the Q&A invitation. Then there was his June 22 appearance. (Dept of Communications report, 1/7/15).

[ii] Presumably the ABC would see nothing untoward in a judge remarking at the start of a murder trial, “Well personally I’d say this fellow’s innocent.”

[iii] Williams a year ago gave a platform to climate fabulist Naomi Oreskes to predict that global warming in 2023 would kill everyone’s kittens and puppies, a prospect that thrilled Williams because of its educative potential.

Williams: Yes, not only because it’s an animal but it’s local. You see, one criticism of the scientists is they’re always talking about global things…And so if you are looking at your village, your animals, your fields, your park, your kids, and the scientists are talking about a small world that you know, then it makes a greater impact, doesn’t it.

tags

• abc,
• fiona stanley,
• jonathan holmes,
• Q&A,
• ray martin,
• warmists one and all,
• zaky mallah

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The Real Backlash

Gathered to honour the memory of a crusading editor, some of the biggest names in the news business were told by one of their own that journalists covering the Parramatta murder of Curtis Cheng are being targeted with death threats. So far, his remarks have gone unreported

Journalists  covering the murder of police accountant Curtis Cheng in Parramatta on October 2 are working in a climate of fear because of death threats. Chris Reason, senior reporter for Seven News, Sydney said this last night in a speech to about 100 media people and friends at a Melbourne Press Club function at the RACV.

Reason and his cameraman, Greg Parker, provided live coverage throughout the Man Monis siege at the Lindt Café in Martin Place last December.

“Some media outlets are receiving direct physical violent death threats, specific threats not to go near Parramatta Mosque, where the 15-year-old went to pray. At one point a senior member of the Daily Telegraph turned up there with two  flak jackets,” Reason  said.

“The situation is deadly serious among journalists covering the story in Western Sydney. People have been seen videoing journos in their cars. Journos and cameramen are doing their job more cautiously, but they continue covering this critical story well.”

The Press Club function to legendary Age editor Graham Perkin, killed by a heart attack 40 years ago at the age of just 45. Reason last March was named 2014′s Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year. He told the audience last night, “This is the sort of story Graham Perkin would have chased down hard and fearlessly.”

The Age had no coverage of Reason’s talk this morning, nor did the Herald Sun, The Australian or ABC, at least according to online searching. Last night’s audience was a galaxy of past and present editors, investigative journalists, star columnists and commentators, and household-word media personalities.

Interviewed by Quadrant after the function, Reason said Sydney reporters, as far as he knew, were continuing to “keep going with their work” and their tone was not affected.

“The Telegraph received direct threats to their journalists and the word spread from there. There had been an explicit threat to a young female Tele journo that she would have her arms ripped off and she would be murdered. It was very violent language, she told us.

“Counter-terrorist operators in Sydney intercepted messages between certain groups threatening and targeting journos and media. The Telegraph was one of them, AAP another. Executives organised precautions. Most media organisations like (channels) 7 and 10 ended up hiring private security guards while covering the story in the first week.

“It’s an atmosphere of intimidation and fear. I have never seen anything like it in Sydney in 20 years. In my organization there’s been some serious conversation  on how to cover it, how to approach the story, how to protect ourselves. Some cameramen are worried, some journos worried. I don’t know what’s being done about security at people’s homes.

“We have not talked about it publicly. No reporter has talked or written about it in Sydney.”

Quadrant Online understands that Telegraph crime reporter Mark Morri received a number of the threatening calls. A sample of  the death threats being received by journalists was provided, by coincidence, yesterday by Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. An email he received and reproduced on his blog reads:

“hi there again you arrogant piece of shit!!! You f—ng Jewish dog, stop hiding behind your f—d up articles and office and say your shit in Lakemba if you had any balls, which you don’t. You’re a piece of shit that gets your frills by bragging about Islam every time. May Allah the Almighty God bless someone to burn you and have your head on display without your body intact and feed you to dogs. Burn in HELL.”

The death threats to journalists in Sydney and Melbourne come against the backdrop of the murders of 11  Charlie Hebdo staffers in Paris in January.

The media anxiety in Sydney contrasts with the insouciance with which the media deal with organized crime and bikie gangs. Underbelly-style reports are often treated as low-life comedy. Crime groups are aware that killing a journalist would be stunningly bad for business. This was demonstrated when a drug-syndicate hitman killed whistleblower Donald Mackay in Griffith in 1977. Mackay was a furniture retailer, not a journalist, but keen to expose corruption.

By contrast,  the murder of a journalist would be “good for business” in the eyes of hard-line Islamists, even more so than a random slaying. When ISIL beheaded journalists Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff in Syria a year ago, ISIL posted triumphant videos of the acts as a warning to America.

At last night’s  Press Club function, a former Age editor told Quadrant Online that tensions with the Muslim community were fiercer in Sydney than in Melbourne. In Sydney, he said, it was easy to find marked anti-Muslim sentiments, especially in the western suburbs where  he divined a sense of displacement because of refugees taking up scarce housing and government services including health. It was much the same syndrome exploited by nationalist Pauline Hanson, he opined. “You don’t get those sentiments in Northern and Eastern Sydney,” he said.

Quadrant was slightly taken aback by this analysis, not least because Reason in his speech described Islamist threats but said nothing about any anti-Islamism.

Tony Thomas blogs at No BS Here (I Hope)

tags

• andrew bolt,
• curtis cheng’s murder,
• threats against journalists in Parramatta

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