Andrew Bolt: Our cultural elites really do prefer fakes to facts

Arguably the greatest fraud in Australian literary history will star at the Melbourne Writers Festival, proving organisers want fantasy over reality.

I may be some time. I start my huge retirement trip this week, hoping to worry less about the death of truth.

Perfect timing. The Melbourne Writers Festival starts on Thursday – a towering example of the unchallenged power today of lies.

Oh, wait. My critics mustn’t crack that champagne just yet. I obviously got talked out of retiring this year, but not out of cancelling this trip, because I’ll sure need it.

That’s because Professor Bruce Pascoe, arguably the greatest fraud in Australian literary history, flies into Melbourne this week to star at this taxpayer-funded festival and prove our cultural elite really does prefer fakes to facts.

Bruce Pascoe will star at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Picture: Luke Bowden

This threatens me, because I’m an outsider who thought truth and reason could save me from the mob.

In fact, the Melbourne Writers Festival claimed just last year to also believe facts were sacred, asking a panel to discuss “how Australia can prevent the proliferation of fake news and disinformation to safeguard public and political discourse”.

Yet now these hypocrites invite Pascoe to talk as a “Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian writer” when he’s a white who identified as Aboriginal only after a Canberra Times reviewer said his first novel would have been better had he been one.

There can be no one in the festival management who does not know Pascoe’s claim to be Aboriginal is shonky. An hour of Googling would confirm that two organisations representing tribes to which he now claims to belong have called him a fraud.

They’d also learn that his bestseller, Dark Emu – claiming Aborigines were originally farmers living in towns of 1000 people – is bunkum.

The question is: Why, when the truth is so obvious, do our guardians of public debate prefer Pascoe’s falsehoods? This is the true significance of Pascoe.

True, some on the right also prefer fantasy to facts. Just last week I damned Tucker Carlson, the sacked Fox News host, for peddling bizarre conspiracy theories (and wait until now-redacted emails from the Dominion court case shed light on his character).

But whoever’s worse, we suffer the final ghastly victory of the “deconstruction theory” invented 70 years ago by philosopher Jacques Derrida, encouraging lazy and stupid people to dismiss someone’s argument not by checking the truth but attacking their motive.

So why keep flinging facts at people who prefer Big Lies?

Time to chill.