Recently Peter Dutton, the Australian Immigration Minister, caused a multitude of leftist heads to explode by simply stating the obvious, that our immigration program doesn’t always benefit Australia one hundred per cent of the time.
The rage, tears, popped eyeballs, imaginary death threats, bulging neck veins and screams of horror in response to such a mild statement of fact were a great deal of fun to watch.
The standout was from Nick McKim, Greens Senator from Tasmania, who inadvertently summed up the absurdity of the left’s outrage in a single quote:
“Undoubtedly the advice he’s got is accurate. But just because something is fact
doesn’t mean that it’s reasonable or productive to talk about it.”
Usually the mask doesn’t slip quite so much.
The debates in this current year about Britain leaving the EU, the European Migrant Crisis and the issues surrounding the US election exposed similar instances where the left simply believed that the facts were so ideologically inconvenient that they shouldn’t be uttered.
Even before the Brexit debate was being had in earnest, anyone who questioned any aspect of the mass immigration policies of the UK was met with total denial.
The left-wing line was that the massive influx of people had only positive effects and added boundless enriching diversity; anyone who disagreed was a Nazi who hated curry and probably wanted to gas Jews.
When rape gangs and underground Sharia courts came to light, when the buses and trains were bombed, when a soldier was decapitated in the street and when London became a minority-English city, the mantra only intensified.
It became almost a mark of pride amongst the elites how much they could ignore the reality in front of their faces.
Fourteen hundred underage girls were groomed, drugged and raped by Muslim gangs in a single northern English town and the authorities even tried to jail some of those who spoke up about it.
The same happened with the European Migrant Crisis. I remember watching the ABC here in Australia and seeing endless pictures from multiple “reputable” news agencies of women fleeing with sobbing children begging to be allowed in.
As anyone watching since knows, the hordes crossing the borders were almost entirely healthy, well-fed young men from all points of the compass, fleeing not from war but to welfare.
The press never stopped mentioning the poor drowned Kurdish boy killed by his father’s greed. The same Journalists seemed hesitant to mention the ten-year-old Austrian boy raped at a public pool by an Arab “refugee” with a “sexual emergency”.
A single drowned toddler seemed much easier for the press to talk about than the multitude of rapes, robberies and sexual assaults that magically appeared all over central Europe whenever a local migrant shelter was built.
The press was even more silent when buildings set aside for new shelters started mysteriously burning down.
The same has happened with the issue of illegal immigration in the U.S.
No matter how many American citizens are raped, robbed or killed by people with no right to be in the country, the left covers up, ignores or denies.
No matter how many times a working-class tradesmen walks past a building site and sees a sea of non-union workers undercutting his labour, not only the elites but even his own union bosses deny that it is even happening.
No matter how many parents who were able as children to make a few extra dollars bagging groceries or raking leaves notice that there are no unskilled entry-level jobs for their own kids, the newspapers just make noises about inclusion and ignore it.
But as the vote for Brexit, the election of Trump and the surge in every right-populist movement in Europe demonstrates, the lies of the left have had a predictable outcome.
Very few people entirely believe the establishment line anymore.
When journalists and politicians use terms like “Enrichment” and people see crime, “Vibrancy” and people see violence, “Religion of Peace” and people see bombs, and when “Diversity” has increasingly come to mean nothing less than “fewer people like you,” the general population has begun to roll its eyes as factory workers in the old USSR must have every time the local morale officer began excitedly spruiking the wonders of the latest five year plan.
The left increasingly tries to win debates around public policy by openly lying and then furiously attacking anyone who exposes their lies, relying on the fact that they dominate the establishment to smother any dissent in an avalanche of hate, slander and sometimes outright violence.
The left has lost its ability to argue in much the same way and for much the same reasons as the Dodo lost the ability to fly. By refusing to acknowledge the validity of truths it finds inconvenient, the establishment have created an endless safe space for themselves where there is no need to hone their arguments or learn how they might persuade those who disagree with them.
Why learn how to debate when everyone who dissents from the party line is beneath contempt?
And that is why they’re losing.
If the left was able to admit that not everyone who disagrees with open borders is literally Hitler, if they were able to admit that the reason Muslims commit almost all the religiously inspired terror attacks might have something to do with Islam, if they were able to admit that not all immigration is always positive all of the time, that not all cultures are always equal, and that not everything bad in the world is always the fault of some evil white man somewhere, they might be able to convince some of those who now disagree with them.
But in order to do that, they would have to give up the self-righteousness, give up the snobbishness, give up bashing dissenters in the streets, give up the certainty that they are the true moral elite of the world and engage with facts that they may find uncomfortable.
And this they will never do.
Because as Senator Nick McKim said:
“Just because something is fact doesn’t mean that it’s reasonable or productive to talk about it.”
And that is why we’ll win.
Because people have eyes, and don’t like being lied to.
Photo by John Englart (Takver) 