The media is a little bit befuddled about the rise of One Nation.
According to the narrative, this party was supposed to have been vanquished in the nineties, when all good, moral, compassionate leftists joined together to make sneering satire, scream at pensioners and use bricks to bash those with the temerity to show up to dissident political meetings.
All in the name of tolerance of course.
One Nation joined the long line of victories in the leftist historiography, a cosmology that ret-cons any loss into a victory and conveniently forgets the times the left was on the wrong side.
When One Nation returned to the Senate in such barnstorming style at the last election, the leftists educated in the last twenty years were visibly confused. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen.
Perhaps because of this, the response to Pauline Hanson has yet not been the screeching lefty-meltdown that I expected. Realising, perhaps, that beating up on an old woman who has suffered the slings and arrows of twenty years of leftist defamation rather makes you look like a bunch of pricks, the response from the more respectable part of the establishment has been muted.
They almost seem scared of her.
This is not the Australia they know, they live in nice suburbs surrounded by nice people, they went to the same nice schools and had nice friends from nice families in a variety of nice skin colours, they went to the same nice universities, read the same nice books, the same nice newspapers and watch the same nice television shows while retweeting the same nice hashtags.
To call it an echo chamber is to seriously understate the case.
The fact that One Nation and other minor right-wing parties got a million-odd votes at the last poll must seem as strange and distant to establishment talking heads like Carrie Bickmore and Peter Hellier, as rumours of bread riots were to courtiers at Versailles.
Since Pauline has knocked them off centre like a gyroscope spinning off its axis, most in the press have been grasping at her most prominent offsider, the second One Nation Senator for QLD, Malcolm Roberts. They set up a bear-baiting pit for him on Q&A, and seem to have assigned him the role of designated target in their war against scary right-wing populism.
When a recent Essential poll showing that 49% of Australians would support a ban on Islamic immigration was released, it seemingly confirmed their worst nightmares. The mouth-breathing, rednecked, white trash bogans of middle Australia they not-so-secretly despise were restless out there in the suburbs and the bush.
The sheltered leftist workshop that is Channel Ten’s The Project pulled Malcolm Roberts on to explain himself. How dare he have agitated the peasants so! The very impudence of the man!
Malcolm didn’t play by their script. He even deigned to criticise their magic pet Muslim.
“How far does it go?” panel member Peter Hellier quizzed Senator Roberts.
“Do we deport Muslims who are living here? Should the man who usually sits to my left, Waleed, be deported or relegated to breakfast TV in Syria? What are you suggesting?”
Senator Roberts replied: “No, but it would be nice if Waleed actually condemned and didn’t condone Islamic terrorism, wouldn’t that be a good start?”
The show’s panel members – including Carrie Bickmore and stand-in host Hamish Macdonald – appeared visibly taken aback and angry at the suggestion.
As all of us who have been infuriated by him know Waleed Aly does indeed make excuses for terrorism, from blaming the West for “making” Muslims kill us, to downplaying terrorist attacks that continue to kill Westerners as an “irritant”. He teaches an entire subject at Monash University explaining why terrorism is the fault of everything but Islam.
That his fellow panellists seemed so genuinely shocked and angry at Senator Roberts’s statement of the obvious, shows that they have seldom heard anyone actually criticise him before.
That anyone, especially someone from the despised “stale pale male” demographic, would publicly rebuke a Muslim man with brown skin, a Logie and mad-sick guitar-playing-skills, for any reason whatsoever, was a concept entirely absent from their mental universe.
After all, Waleed is the most oppressed man in Australia, and a future Australian of the year!
This is what we mean when we talk about an establishment; this is what is meant when we talk about elites. They are as distant from the people as any noble from history, supping on pheasant in the palace while those who support their comfort go hungry.
But we peasants need to take our joys where we can, so join me in congratulating Based Malcolm Roberts, the man who walks into ambushes with his head held high and rattles the psychological cages of people who should be locked behind bars.
As a final gloat, Senator Roberts posted on Twitter after the interview:
“Next time I appear on @theprojecttv hope they remember manners! They don’t like that their views are in minority https://t.co/psHL4E01D1“
— Sen. Malcolm Roberts (@SenatorMRoberts) September 21, 2016
Microphone dropped.
Senator Roberts, thank you for reminding us that having the given name Malcolm in Australian politics does not automatically turn a man into a hollow, blubbering shell of cringing, incoherent leftist neuroses.
Keep up the good work.