This past week Ian Rintoul led a refugee march again.
And just like every other time no journalist bothered to point out his decades long record of violent extremism.
To be fair to the fourth estate it seems no-one much cared. Ian has been playing this game since 1999 and while he remains the most quoted man in the Australian media on the subject, when even arch-leftist Robert Manne admits that the left got it dangerously wrong on Refugees it tends to take the wind out of the sails.
But Ian and his merry band of Australia-hating ideologues continue marching, mainly because the Refugees were never the point in the first place.
Just as with the violent attacks against he organised against One Nation supporters in the nineties and the rioting he helped organise around Crown Casino in 2000, the point of Ian’s endeavours has always been less what is scrawled on his banners and more preparation for the violent revolution that after four decades he still feels is inevitable.
The evil “right wing” Murdoch-owned Australian as well as most other local papers didn’t even bother to send reporters and just reprinted the Australian Associated Press newswire release. Most international outlets published the Reuters version written by Australian Journalist Alison Bevege [who famously sued the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir]. Ms Bevege neglected to point out Mr. Rintoul’s thuggish history but at least mentioned that the protest was led by “Socialists”.
Interestingly enough, the English language version of Deutsche Welle alone amongst international outlets took Ms. Bevege’s article and edited it to remove any mention of Socialism, while renaming “protesters” as “human rights advocates” and reclassifying the Australian Governments “hardline immigration policy” as “draconian”. No agenda there clearly.
But the lack of local media interest in Rintoul’s decade and a half dog and pony show seems obvious. The pictures posted by Reuters show almost more banners than protesters carrying them. The days of tens of thousands rallying against offshore detention with Ian marching proudly at their head seem to be over.
The Australian public saw exactly what happened when Kevin Rudd opened the borders to people smuggling, and it’s difficult to virtue signal your compassion over the smell of a child’s bloated, drowned, weeks-dead body being fished out of the water by the Royal Australian Navy.
While it’s easy [and fun] to laugh at Ian ranting through his megaphone to ever decreasing numbers of faithful, the danger posed by this extremist still remains. The point of the Refugee protests was never to affect any sort of policy change, it was to allow Rintoul and other extremists like him to recruit under a banner more amenable to the sensibilities of middle class left-wing Australia than outright Communism.
Once these recruits were drawn in they could be “educated” in the Marxist view of the world and helped into positions of influence in education, academia, the media and politics.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Ian and other extremists like him have worked for decades to slither their slimy tentacles into the institutions of our nation, and thanks to the media running interference for them they’ve met almost no opposition.
In August of this Year Ian’s revolutionary Marxist party “Solidarity” held its annual “Keep Left” conference. While not as well attended as the Melbourne conferences of their rival Socialist Alternative this smaller meeting was interesting for different reasons.
Conspicuous among the speakers were noted Stalinist Senator Lee Rhiannon and slightly-less-noted flag-burning advocate David Shoebridge, an MP in the NSW upper house. These two are the most visible leaders of the openly extremist Left Renewal faction of the NSW Greens.
Left Renewal, much like Ian Rintoul, wishes to abolish capitalism and implement various flavours of socialist paradise. Unfortunately for them since coming out of the closet late last year they’ve met resistance from their less obviously insane comrades who have initiated a factional battle for control of the NSW branch.
Unsurprisingly Rhiannon and her cohorts have received support in this struggle from all Australia’s major political extremist groups; from Socialist Alliance, to Socialist Alternative and of course Ian Rintoul’s Solidarity, who have hilariously accused the ABC of being part of a right-wing conspiracy with Richard Di Natale.
Yes, seriously.
So Lee Rhiannon and her monkey David were honoured speakers at the national conference of a group that wants to abolish capitalism and institute a totalitarian socialist state [it’ll work this time, we promise].
The same group wants to abolish Parliament, the armed forces, the police, the courts, the constitution, the Australian national flag, national borders, the concept of gender, free speech, free assembly, the right to own property and the traditional family.
And nobody in the media cared.
A clue as to why can be found in some of the other speakers at the conference:
Professor Joseph Collins: a lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at Sydney University, editor of a forthcoming book marking 150 years since Karl Marx’s Capital and author of the refereed journal article “Beyond Distributional Debates: Toward a Marxist Theory of Rent in the Contemporary Period?”.
He teaches our future economists.
Professor Lesley Rogers: neurobiologist and the author of Sexing the brain which argues against attempts to explain gendered behavioural traits through biology and genetics. Lesley was Professor of Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at the University of New England, where she is now an Emeritus Professor.
Her main claim to fame is alleging that Gender isn’t real but only exists as an oppressive cultural construct.
Senior Researcher Paddy Gibson: works at UTS, a fully paid up member of Solidarity and co-founder of Stop the Intervention Collective (STICS). He is currently researching the history of socialists and the fight against colonialism. He spoke on the attempts to spread the flames of revolution across the world in the aftermath of the Russian revolution in The Comintern 1919 – The Hope of International Revolution.
Paddy gets paid by the taxpayer to work full-time creating entitlement culture in Aboriginal communities. He has also written for and worked with SBS, has written for New Matilda, has been quoted uncritically by the Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC, was hilariously prohibited from protesting against APEC in 2004 and even more hilariously was the “minister for food and health” in a socialist sharehouse in 2007.
Last but not least:
Professor David Zyngier: Senior Lecturer in the Education Faculty at Monash University. David is a long-term activist against any government money being allocated to non-government schools and an equally long-term advocate of banning all religious instruction in schools, as well as a hater of home schooling. He volunteered in his youth to spend time as a kibbutznik on an Israeli socialist farming commune.
A common thread through all his work and activism is that the instruction of children should be entirely controlled by the state with as little outside influence as possible. He’s particularly interested in removing Christianity from the curriculum, arguing that to do so would:
“ensure that the damage that is being done…to our most vulnerable children end sooner rather than later.”
This is one of the men responsible not just for teaching the teachers who instruct our children in how to view the world, but for setting the curriculum those potential teachers must study.
So Ian Rintoul, a man responsible for organising bloody political violence over the course of four decades and who openly campaigns and organises for the violent overthrow of the Australian state, held a conference at Sydney University with prominent speakers from academia and elected representatives from a supposedly mainstream political party, and nobody even reported on it.
Ever wonder why Australian journalists seem so blissfully unconcerned about the violent political extremists in our midst?
One answer is depressingly simple.
Usually from the moment they began their schooling, all the way through the primary and secondary system well up into the halls of Australian higher learning, the people of the fourth estate whose responsibility it is to inform the public have been taught by people who have themselves been taught by extremists or extremist fellow travellers.
They are taught by people like those who spoke at this conference.
This is how the left wins. As anyone following the same-sex marriage debate, or any other debate in Australia on any political issue from refugees to Islam, knows the left has no real arguments beyond appeals to emotion.
They win because they get to control, or at very least influence, the people who are teaching the teachers. That’s how an idea like Gay marriage which only a decade ago was dismissed as ridiculous by the likes of Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and even Penny Wong is now such a moral touchstone that you can be beaten up in public by a cheering crowd for even questioning it.
Until this cycle is broken, until thugs like Rintoul are called out for the extremists they are, until it becomes a career killer to even attend the same meeting as a scumbag like him let alone speak at, it the relentless drift of our society towards the abyss will continue.
That’s why it’s important to call out the lazy journalists when they let people like him get away with not only pretending to be decent human beings but dressing themselves up as paragons of virtuous compassion.
Because if nothing changes, nothing about this system will change; and that should terrify you.