Events this week have ripped the masks from the faces of our elite journalists and “human rights activists”.
The veil has been in part removed from the comfortable splendor of their newsrooms and taxpayer funded offices, where they sit tapping their keyboards languorously pontificating to society with regurgitated pap first ejaculated from the diseased minds of second-rate humanities academics even more privileged and remote than themselves from the rest of us who labour to support them.
David Leyonhjelm, an LDP senator with an unquestionable commitment to free speech and free society, decided to utilise the notorious federal anti free-speech laws to strike a blow for common sense.
This particular blow is being struck at Mark Kenny, one of the sneering sanctimonious snobs who seems to believe that having white skin and being a male somehow abrogates both your right to an opinion and your ability to be offended (unless you happen to write for the right paper, work for the right public broadcaster, sip coffee in the right faculty lounge or have the correct opinions, of course).
For most people out there in the real world, it may come as a shock to realise that the majority of journalists, academics, politicians and teachers in this country actually agree with Mr Kenny.
That the establishment in your country believes that those from that minority group cursed as being both white and male are so unfairly advantaged that to balance things out they deserve second-class status under the law may even come as a shock.
If you grew up believing the buzzing union drones who taught you in school that laws should be colourblind and that equality before the law was what counted, it might come as more than just a shock.
But those who
have experienced the pure hatred of the left towards anything “male, pale and stale” it’s just all too depressingly familiar.
Most on the left have responded to Senator Leyonhjelm’s courageous stance with derision. They almost seem to pity this poor fool who doesn’t seem to realise that he doesn’t deserve the same rights under our laws as any other citizen.
After all, he’s a white male, and being so privileged means being legally second class.
Latika Bourke, able to comment as a non-white woman and so therefore presumably unstained by the evil of unearned privilege, has managed, despite the huge burdens of being so disadvantaged and oppressed, to gain access to inside sources within the Human Rights Commission, who said:
“A source familiar with the Human Rights Commission’s processes predicted the commission would dismiss the complaint, ruling white people can’t be offended.”
Did you catch that?
According to our peak taxpayer-funded body for policing the thoughts and speech of others, offending someone on the basis of race is unacceptable.
However, since white people (being so fantastically privileged) might use this to pursue those that offend them, the HRC has in its wisdom ruled that white people, alone of the many races that inhabit Australia, are solely and uniquely unable to be offended on the basis of race.
When confronted with his own double standards and mendacity Mark Kenny did what Social Justice Warriors always do, he doubled down:
“I was making a point about power here, the idea that … white males in our community, who were born essentially into more privilege than any other cohort, that they would have any deep understanding of what entrenched discrimination looks like, is quite laughable”
Those of us without high-paying jobs as political journalists find it harder to laugh, Mark.
Those of us unlucky enough to be born male and white who grew up poor and had to fight our way out of bad neighbourhoods also find it hard to see our own “privilege”. Even when rich, pampered, pale, popinjays privileged with a media platform like you so helpfully point it out.
When Mark next decides to get on his high horse and talk about “lived experiences” of people from non-European backgrounds in Australia he perhaps should consider his Indian-born female colleague Latika Bourke, who despite the terrible institutionalised racism and sexism of the establishment, managed to get picked for a job at 2UE before even graduating from her university course.
Amazingly, in less than four years she was gifted a Walkley, a job at the ABC, a column with Fairfax across both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age as well as a position in the Canberra press gallery, while most of her fellow students at Charles Sturt University had to settle for a slightly more arduous struggle up the career ladder.
Imagine if you can what she could have done had she been “privileged”!
Photo by Backbone Campaign 