Joe Hildebrand: Woke just won’t be warned by the Voice

Identity politics must die before it kills us all — including any fools who still believe in it, writes Joe Hildebrand.

A commanding lead and a virtuous cause. The support of corporate and cultural leaders. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent.

But the voters aren’t doing what they’re supposed to. And as the gap starts to narrow, the campaign gets anxious and desperate.

Opponents are labelled “racist” or “fascist” or “uneducated”; dumb grunts doing the bidding of sinister conservative forces. To combat this, millionaire celebrities are rolled out to demand they do the opposite.

And then defeat. Total defeat.

If this story sounds familiar, it should. It is the story of the 2024 US election and the story of the 2023 Australian Voice referendum.

And there is a moral to these stories written in 20-foot letters of fire, if only our supposed intelligentsia had the intelligence to learn it.

Even this humble arts student figured it out years ago.

For what it was worth — not much as it turned out — I supported Joe Biden in the 2020 election as the most moderate and mainstream Democratic candidate.

But as soon as he was elected the first piece I wrote was not one of celebration, like so many other fawning fools. It was a dire warning.

Biden may have won the battle, I said, but the war was just beginning.

Kamala Harris clearly anticipated a historic victory in the 2024 US presidential election, but her running mate Tim Walz seems here to be almost terrified – and with good reason. Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Image

This is not to be one of those annoying I-told-you-so people, but rather to stress that all the Monday morning quarterbacks now saying that in retrospect Kamala Harris’s defeat was clear and inevitable were wrong when it counted.

Also, just to be one of those annoying I-told-you-so people, I said weeks ago on The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand that Kamala Harris’s defeat was clear and inevitable.

And so these revisionists are like Covid lockdowners who demanded evermore draconian restrictions, only to claim — once these were proven to be utterly without scientific justification — “Oh well, we didn’t know that at the time …”

The point is that we did know at the time. People like me, and scarce few brave others on the supposedly progressive side of politics, were shouting it from the rooftops.

But it wasn’t just ignored by the great hive mind of so-called progressives, it was actively shunned.

Biden initially won the battle but the war had just begun.

So too when concerns were raised about the Voice by opponents, undecideds or even its own more pragmatic supporters, they were immediately denounced. And we all know how that turned out.

And so too, after Biden’s great victory speech in which he pledged to take all Americans with him did the American left seem to instantly forget that there were more than 70 million Trump supporters out there.

Instead the Democrats and their supporters gorged themselves on the low-hanging fruit of calling Trump a dictator and threat to democracy — something he and his supporters made almost too easy.

Meanwhile they squandered the gift of inherited border restrictions and instead unleashed a flood of migration that they could not control — a flood that wipes out the livelihoods of the low paid and low skilled by cleaning bathrooms in Hollywood and New York.

About half the Hispanic population voted for Donald Trump. Picture: CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP

And of course anyone who questioned this tsunami was branded a racist, which is perhaps why about half the Hispanic population voted for Donald Trump — as well as a record number of black men.

Democrat strategists assumed these groups would vote according to their ethnicity. In fact they voted according to their best interests — you know, like everybody else.

Likewise those who opposed the Voice were branded racist and yet it was the most multicultural non-white electorates in Australia that voted against it by up to two to one.

You wonder what more it will take for the modern left to realise identity politics is poison. And not just because it’s toxic in terms of social cohesion, nor morally repugnant to see people and their thoughts through the prism of race.

It is actually poison to the left’s own best interests. It is killing them in the electorate, yet still they are too blindly indoctrinated to see it.

The PM has jettisoned ideological indulgence and repeated the cost-of-living mantra enough to make a Buddhist monk blush. Picture: Tim Hunter.

Twitter leftists blame America for being fascist and racist. Likewise after the landslide Voice defeat, far too many simply blamed everything from racism to Peter Dutton refusing to do what he was told.

Just like the gaslighting around Joe Biden’s herculean cognitive abilities, ordinary people see through such snow jobs immediately and they never trust the perpetrators again.

By contrast the PM has jettisoned ideological indulgence and repeated the cost-of-living mantra enough to make a Buddhist monk blush.

And he has genuinely done a lot to tackle it: tax cuts for all, increases in the minimum wage, lower childcare fees, free TAFE. Yet he is constantly forced to wear the Voice albatross around his neck.

This is why identity politics must die before it kills us all — including any fools who still believe in it.

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