The FitzSimons Assumption

Leftists stick together. You’ve got to be a remarkably hopeless media Marxy-pants before the Guardian’s Amanda Meade takes a swing at you.

Sam Kerr and a stupid white bastard. Fact-checked on all counts. No errors detected

But our old mate Peter FitzSimons, whose pathetic predictions and epic ignorance are matters of record, finally committed an error so hilariously revealing that even comrade Amanda couldn’t look away:

Peter FitzSimons, a Sydney Morning Herald star columnist, paid the price this week for rushing to judgment with sparse facts to hand when he penned a column arguing Sam Kerr should lose the captaincy of the Matildas for allegedly “uttering racist epithets”.

At that time, the exact nature of Kerr’s alleged racism was unknown. FitzSimons evidently assumed it was an attack on someone granted victim status by his fellow lefties. Someone of colour, most likely.

With that basic concept lodged in his head, racism expert FitzSimons blundered on:

“Curveball must cost Matildas captaincy for now” was the headline on the comment piece that ran in print, arguing the news of the Kerr incident came as such as shock because the footballer was a woman, a lesbian and ethnically diverse herself.

No wonder Peter was shocked. Everybody knows that diverse lesbians are incapable of saying anything naughty. It says so right there in the Woke Handbook for Poncey Pirates.

“We can safely assume the least likely to utter racist epithets will be those who have suffered racism themselves …” Fitz said. “And yet, we all know what happened Tuesday morning.”

Meade’s sharp retort:

Only we didn’t know.

And the column, which was promoted on page one of the paper, was soon overtaken by allegations that Kerr had called the police officer a “stupid white bastard”. Not the type of racist incident Fitz had assumed.

Indeed, but that shouldn’t have been a particular issue. Surely racism is racism, whether the alleged target is black, white, brown, yellow or whatever.

But no. At the Sydney Morning Herald, news that Kerr had allegedly insulted a white person threw the place into absolute panic:

Additions were hastily made to the online version of the column, which was published on the front of the SMH website under the headline “The incomprehensible nature of Kerr’s alleged transgression”, resulting in a confusing read as the bold argument fell apart.

“But from here, without knowing any other circumstances – because we continue to fly blind – if it is, we can surely agree it is on the very lowest end of the scale,” Fitz said belatedly.

Some of the additions were so tortured they barely made sense.

Amanda, you sweet summer child. Have you never previously encountered this FitzSimons fellow? Bless.

There was initially no acknowledgment on the column that it had been amended to take account of the overnight news.

The Herald’s editor, Bevan Shields, told Beast: “The Herald always tries to note when pieces have had a substantive clarification, and that should have happened in this instance. It was a miss and we have since noted at the end of the column that it was updated post-publication to include the new details about the alleged nature of Kerr’s remarks to the police officer.”

According to a glowing FitzSimons self-assessment: “One of my jobs as a journalist is to puncture pomposity and call out nonsense.”

Call out yourself, punctured Pete. Call out your own pompous self.

UPDATE. From reader Gregory in comments:

Bah! Humbug! The plight of the taxi driver hasn't ranked a mention.

Steady on, Greg. We don’t even know his colour yet. Or his preferred pronouns. He may go by they.

UPDATE II. The ABC's Jonathan Green doesn't get it:

I don’t get it. How is it possible to
give racist offense to a white person?
It’s hurt feelings against the exercise of racial power through language.
Conservatives think they win by turning everything on its head.

— Jonathan Green (@GreenJ) March 6, 2024

Let's discuss "the exercise of racial power", then. Black Australians on low wages pay millionaire Green's ABC salary.

Enjoy the power, white boy.

UPDATE III. Reader Martin accurately notes that the column in question “contained a superb Fitz-propism”:

Her [Kerr's] minimum job as captain was to shout to the engine room, “torpedo off the starboard bow, 450 metres and closing fast, batten the hatches and DIVE, DIVE, DIVE!” The fact she didn’t even do that, allowed the whole of Football Australia to be hit amidships.

As Martin asks: “Since when do ships dive to avoid a torpedo?”

UPDATE IV. As a sidenote to the above, sub-on-sub combat is extremely rare:

In fact, the only time a submarine has ever been known for successfully hunting down and destroying an enemy submarine while underwater was in February 1945, with the destruction of the U-864, a German Type IX U-boat off the coast of Norway by a Royal Navy sub.

Imagine how many commas that paragraph would be lumbered with if punctured Pete had punctuated it.

UPDATE V. Perhaps a chatty crapademic and a leftist lawyer can make sense of Sam’s shenanigans:

Accusing people like Sam Kerr of ‘anti-white racism’ reveals a lack of understanding of a world still divided by race … 

In other words, in the dominant understanding of racism heavily promoted in the context of the “whitelash” that met the global Black Lives Matter movement, racism has been stripped of what the sociologist Miri Song calls its “history, severity and power”. Racism is no longer the ideology that accompanies racial capitalist systems of colonialism, slavery and imperialism; it becomes a matter of individual morality. Race, best understood as a technology that produces and maintains white supremacy as a global system of power, is reduced to bad behaviour. This view has particularly dangerous ramifications when considering the police, an institution that has form when it comes to institutional racism with, often lethal, effects, as the number of deaths in custody in Australia attest.

Via a part-Indian millionaire soccer gal vomiting in a London taxi and allegedly racially smearing a police officer, we somehow ended up at Indigenous deaths in Australian prisons. Impressive.