By Bradley Billings
Over at the ABC (funded by the Australian taxpayer at a touch over $1 billion a year but who’s counting?), they tackle the big issues of the day. When 84 people were killed in Nice and it became clear this was an Islamist attack, to add to the countless other attacks by … err, Islamists, the ABC sought to tackle the ‘moral issue’ this presented. A normal, decent human being might think this had something to do with the immorality of killing 84 innocents, including many children and many women, and indeed many Muslims, in the name of a warped interpretation of a religion. But ABC radio hosts are no ordinary human beings; they’re so much more morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us. Behold then, Waleed, Scott and their guest, William, on Radio National’s ‘The Minefield,’ a program on which the big moral issues of the day are openly discussed and debated – unless of course they in any way might impinge on the sort of Green Left narratives and fantasies that prevail at the ABC, such as the one about Islam being a ‘religion of peace.’ No, Waleed, Scott and Will were onto the much bigger issue of how our ignorant, immoral and uneducated response to the Nice attacks (in which 84 people I remind you, women and children among them, were killed) might cause us to wrongly use our free speech in a way that causes some offence or insult against someone.
Step forward then exhibit one – Sonia Kruger on a morning television show no one I know has ever watched. At last report there were no reported casualties, and no one deceased, as a result of Sonia’s comments about immigration on said television program – but for Waleed, Scott and Will this was proof enough that the brainless plebs out there in the suburbs (i.e. you and me) were not to be trusted with a thing like free speech. Add in a reference to the now-active ghost of Pauline Hanson, and a standard slur at Donald Trump, and the moral superiority and smugness is complete.
Of course, irony is lost on the humourless types who populate the ABC, so it never occurred to these three goons that they were openly questioning whether their fellow citizens had the education, intellect or morality to exercise their right to free speech, whist their own speech was not only free and unhindered, but made possible by a national platform funded by the taxes of others.
What Waleed, Scott and Will never addressed is the larger question as to who will decide and determine what speech is acceptable, and so permitted, and what is not. You see, according to Waleed, all opinions are not equally valid, for there are ‘theorised’ and ‘un-theorised’ opinions (seriously!) Presumably only ‘theorised’ opinions should be permitted – to protect the vulnerable and the victims (i.e. Muslims) of course. So who decides what speech, or what opinions, are ‘theorised’ and which are not? And what is the penalty for uttering an ‘un-theorised’ opinion? Perhaps this will be left to the commentariat come the revolution, but either way, it’s an utterly chilling thought, and all funded by your taxes.
We are quite literally seeing the light of the Enlightenment fade before our very eyes, and we will miss it when it is gone.