Tim Blair: Supremes step in and stomp woke dreamers

Put any dumb American idea in front of Australian leftists and they’ll go for it every single time, says TIM BLAIR.

Greens member for Griffith Max Chandler-Mather thinks Australia would somehow be better off if our country copied demonstrably failed housing policies pursued by ridiculous foreign governments. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Put any dumb American idea in front of Australian leftists and they’ll go for it every single time.

They’ll walk straight past all the best American ideas – enshrined free speech, superior barbecue, elevated highways and overpasses rather than insanely expensive tunnels – and instead embrace all the worst.

The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 were an especially dumb American idea, as any who lived in destroyed neighbourhoods – black Americans, mostly – can tell you.

So what did our leftists do? They saw the damage and despair, and decided: we’ll have some of that.

So they presented their own, paler versions of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, largely minus the flames and ruined businesses, but generating a similar level of media support.

Our leftist health administrators additionally followed the examples of US counterparts by imposing ridiculously extreme Covid restrictions.

Leftists in general continue importing every woke excess created or amplified in the US.

Subsequently, of course, they decry US influences on Australian culture. They’re not particularly self-aware.

Just last week 14-year-old Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather cited an American case to support his party’s economically and socially poisonous rent control policy.

“In San Francisco,” Chandler-Mather approvingly tweeted, “a rent stabilisation board determines how much landlords are able to increase the rent. This year the limit is 3.6 per cent.”

That’s probably also the average fentanyl content in the bloodstreams of San Francisco’s swarming homeless population, whose filthy tent cities have done more than any legislation to repel residents and crush general housing demand.

According to the San Francisco Standard, a quarter of a million people fled San Francisco’s Bay Area between 2020 and 2022.

Covid was only one cause of their departure, because 3.6 might also be close to the percentage of San Francisco sidewalks covered in human waste.

Rent control combined with a raft of other leftist policies that would be applauded by the Greens have turned San Francisco into a squalid, seething hell pit.

In March, television network CNN sent a team to San Francisco for a report on out-of-control street crime. It wasn’t a challenging assignment.

While their vehicle was parked outside City Hall, robbers broke in and stole all their equipment – including senior reporter Kyung Lah’s passport.

The really cool part: CNN had hired security to protect the van.

But nothing stands in the way of rampant civilisational collapse caused by leftist idiocy.

Well, almost nothing. Last week the US Supreme Court – one of the few major western institutions that hasn’t entirely caved to leftist insanity – stood up and stood tall against the forces of woke.

Australian leftists who reflexively adopt the policies of their senior US counterparts should take note. If you’re going to make US-style mistakes, you should also make US-style Supreme Court corrections.

And, my God, what sensational corrections they were.

First up, the court took down so-called “affirmative action” policies that allowed US universities to select students based on race.

The intent of those policies was to address historic anti-black racism, but in practice they enforced racism against a different group that, on results alone, should have gained university admission.

As US commentator Ben Shapiro noted: “All those who claim that blacks are going to be irreparably harmed by ending affirmative action were just fine with Asians being harmed by affirmative action.”

Yep. Just something for Australians to think about there when it comes to our own racially discriminatory policies and ambitions.

By and large, it might serve us well to discard them.

Next, the court ruled that nobody should be compelled to promote beliefs they don’t personally hold.

For example, a website designer should not be obliged to provide a design promoting same-sex marriage if he or she holds religious objections.

This is being framed in left-leaning media as an attack on LGBT-ETC rights, but it’s more a protection for Christian business folk who have endured targeted harassment.

It’s presumably also a protection for Islamic businesses. Oddly, though, LGBT-ETC activists rarely make any demands of such places.

Finally, in the Supreme Court’s most beautiful move, it demolished President Joe Biden’s brutal class-warrior plan to make minimum wage earners pay for student debts owed by greedy, responsibility-dodging university graduates.

As currently constituted, the US Supreme Court is itself owed a debt – a substantial debt of gratitude.