Mob seeks ‘affirmation through alienation, virtue in victimhood’
Renaming ‘The Barry’ the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award because entertainer Barry Humphries made casual remarks about transgenderism is a perfect example of ‘illiberal liberals’ looking for an excuse to be outraged.
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At this time, the holiest of the Christian calendar, it is difficult to escape the enduring sense that nothing has really changed in the human condition since Jesus Christ was dragged by a baying mob before a Roman judge in Jerusalem and sentenced to crucifixion.
That same mob is with us now, 2000 years on, and has now, through the internet and social media, become universal.
As Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp, publisher of this newspaper, said last week: “There is no doubt that a mob mentality has taken hold in much of the West, and among the most pronounced of the mobs are illiberal liberals, who are roaming the landscape in the seemingly endless, insatiable quest for indignation and umbrage.
“It is vituperation as virtue.”
Mr Thomson, a former Melbourne Herald journalist who went on to work for the Financial Times before editing The Wall Street Journal and being elevated to his current role, was delivering the annual Keith Murdoch Oration at the State Library of Victoria.
Even as he was speaking of universal trends playing out on the global stage, elements of his theme were playing out locally.
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“One example of that (mob) trend,” he said, “is the seething secularism that portrays any person of faith, whether an evanescent evangelical or occasional attendee at mass or synagogue or mosque or temple as a nutter, a fruitcake, touched, a devotee of the deviant.”
He might have been talking about confected outrage over Wallaby star Israel Folau’s posting of a short sharp reminder of the Biblical position on homosexuality, adultery, and drunkenness (among other sins).
Mr Thomson, no prude, gave a nod to the enormous breadth of the frailties and accounts contained within the Biblical narrative, allowing “there surely are religious texts that, if you are literal, are a tad apocalyptic, a bit bizarre. Job’s endless sufferings and travails resonate across the faiths … in our time, surely a trial lawyer could have monetised his trials, his agonies.
“And there certainly have been egregious abuses in the Catholic and other churches for which the offenders must be held to account, but to focus solely, obsessively on the sins is to caricature all those who have faith.”
And he absolutely nailed the bizarre situation in what is now the People’s Socialist Soviet of Victoria where the local Comedy Festival has decided that its top award, the Barry, which once honoured the co-founder of the Festival Barry Humphries, creator Australia’s best-known comedic figure Dame Edna Everage and her co-star Sir Les Patterson, should be renamed the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award.
What a hoot that name is!
As Mr Thomson presciently noted in his speech: “We are going through a strange phase in seeking affirmation through alienation, virtue in victimhood.”
Offence has been taken at Barry Humphries’ casual remarks about the newly-emergent and apparently quite fragile population of transgender individuals.
Victoria has led the rush to embrace gender fluidity and has installed the openly Marxist-driven Safe Schools agenda which is engineered to create uncertainty in prepubescent children about their sexuality regardless of their biological sex.
Truly, there must be something in the Yarra water catchment area.
Mr Humphries once said he thought transgenderism was a fashion and that he regarded the severing of sexual organs as self-mutilation. Hence he has been condemned.
Mr Thomson dealt with this also, saying: “Australia famously dealt with a tyranny of distance, now the world has a tyranny of the distinguished, a smug, sneering elite that derides popular concerns as ‘populism’, and whose self-image is fuelled by an abiding sense of absolute superiority.”
And as we look at the effects of the mob, it is worth noting in this election how the truly disgraceful populist Leftist organisation GetUp is equally guilty of failing to understand not only the concept of intellectual freedom but the very notion of truth.
GetUp has thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars behind its campaign to unseat a number of Coalition candidates.
Their most notable target is former PM Tony Abbott in his seat of Warringah, and they have been forced to withdraw a number of totally false claims.
The mob supports GetUp, according to GetUp, and GetUp supports Labor and all those who oppose the economic security delivered by the Coalition, including the so-called independents Zali Steggall and Julia Banks.
The passage of time, 2000 years in the case of Christianity, shows however that those who were not part of the mob were (to use the oft-repeated claim of the Left) on the right side of history.
The message this Easter election is clear, do not be conned by the mob.