If you’ve been following the news recently as a good XYZ reader is wont to do, you would be aware that our entirely non partisan, totally unbiased, not at all totalitarian Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs made a speech for the Bob Brown Foundation.
Yup, you read that right, the Bob Brown Foundation. The same Bob Brown who founded and is the spiritual leader of the extreme-left Greens.
I will give you a second to imagine what the press response would have been if a senior public servant with responsibilities for regulating political speech made a keynote address at a “Pauline Hanson Foundation” or something similar.
Ms Triggs, apparently in all seriousness, used her address to state that while her department was successfully policing dangerous crimethink in the public arena “sadly you can say what you like around the kitchen table at home”.
The fact that neither her nor anyone else in the room found anything wrong with this statement is telling. But as many political figures have shown over the years a speech made for a private partisan audience can sound surprisingly tone deaf when made public, and even more so when made by an apparently unsackable public servant. It’s clear that Triggs probably didn’t think her remarks would see the light of day; or more chillingly that it wouldn’t matter if they did.
More interesting is that aside from conservative commentators, nobody in the press seems very concerned that the head of an unelected statutory body with the power to drag anyone whose speech they dislike before a court, just expressed regret that she couldn’t police the private opinions of citizens in their own homes.
One leftist inside the media establishment even decided to double down.
If you haven’t heard of Paul Syvret you’ve been missing out on some great unintentional satire.
I must admit that when I was working in Queensland and a copy of the Courier Mail had been left on the break room table, I would flip through the pages seeking out his furiously insane opinion pieces.
As a writer Paul somehow manages to recreate in print the inebriated, mumbled, ranted denunciations of an old ALP hack propping up the bar in a formerly working class suburb now infested with hipsters. Unlike that lonely old decrepit comrade trying to turn the ear of youths who neither know nor care what he’s on about, someone kindly gave Paul a newspaper opinion column. Now he gets to inflict his spittle-flecked diatribes on tens of thousands!
While most Australians reacted to Triggs articulated desire to police the thoughts expressed in the family home with horror or at least a small squirm, Paul had a different reaction, and happily he decided to crouch over his keyboard to share it with us all.
You see, Paul believes that Ms Triggs was bang on the money; in fact the not so hidden subtext of his article is that she didn’t go far enough.
In Paul’s mind, children are born as leftists, and only learn their evil non-leftist ideas from wicked outside influences like parents, playmates or Andrew Bolt. The solution is clearly to police thought and speech, not just in the public sphere but also in the private, thus removing the bad non-leftist thoughts from society forever.
In his mind, Ms Triggs regret that we don’t live in a totalitarian state with government microphones in every lampshade wasn’t a terrifying Freudian slip that exposes what the mainstream left really believes, but rather a “sane and reasonable voice of tolerance”.
And for that reason we can be thankful to Paul as well as Ms Triggs. The former’s lack of a filter and the latter’s private slip of the tongue display something that the more moderate face of the left normally tries to disguise; the fact that for them, policing speech in all aspects of society is not a horrifying dystopia but the stated goal.
As I’ve said before, the right needs to wake up. Those on the left, even the ones that seem nice, even the ones in your own family, want people who think like you to die out. They don’t want you to exist anymore. The only reason they don’t pick up weapons and try to kill you is because they believe that their victory is inevitable.
As we have seen with the mobs of masked thugs beating Trump supporters in the streets of America, the second they have cause to doubt that the triumphant march of the “right side of history” might not be so inevitable after all, otherwise non-violent leftist you have known all your life can turn into violent sociopaths.
It really shouldn’t need to be said but Leftists are not tolerant of dissent, they are not tolerant of disagreement, they are not tolerant of you. If a leftist is being nice to you it’s because they believe you are losing. It’s because they are absolutely certain that people like you will soon die out and that the leftist education machine will turn your children and grandchildren into copies of themselves.
Ms Triggs might seem unhinged when she talks about policing dinner table conversation; Paul might seem crazy when he calls her visions of a totalitarian state “Sane, reasonable and tolerant”, but what in our political scene today would convince them that this future they desire isn’t coming to pass?
Who in our country is going to stop them? Who is even going to try? The mask is slipping now not because the left is on the back foot, but because they are so far on the front foot many of them now feel no need to hide the totalitarian impulses that drive them. They want to control everything, and they increasingly don’t care who knows it.
Unless something changes, unless something dramatic occurs, their dream looks increasingly likely to eventually come true.
And that should terrify all of us.
Photo by publicstock
