Andrew Bolt: Outraged mob cares more about feelings than facts
As vandals deface statues and beer is called racist, what level of stupidity must we reach before hypersensitivity and outrage can stop? Feelings, not facts, are all that seem to count to the zealots, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Has this country gone out of its mind? Everywhere we look, hysterics, offence-takers, scolds, liars and race-hustlers run riot.
Yesterday I drank a beer — a very good one — made by the family-owned Colonial Brewing Company.
But that company is now in trouble because some fool insists its beer is racist.
Arts journalist Shaad D’Souza claims just seeing the words “colonial” on the can is devastating. He feels a “very deep personal upset”.
What a petal.
I’ve been in journalism for 40 years and never heard of D’Souza. But now he’s famous just for having a tanty over a word on a beer can.
But he’s famous only because a liquor outlet, Blackhearts and Sparrows, is so weak or woke it’s caved in to his pestering and agreed never to sell this racist beer again.
Where does it stop when we get to this level of stupidity? But no one is stopping, because this mob feeds off things that outrage them.
Their hair-trigger supersensitivity — which we’d once have wisely called a weakness — gives them power. Gives them their licence to bully. And if they can’t find something to outrage them, they’ll invent it.
Check these vandals now attacking statues. Many have no real idea of what they’re destroying, and barely care.
In Adelaide, protesters want to tear down the statue of “racist” former premier Charles Kingston, even though he actually was a workers’ hero who gave women the vote.
In Britain, Black Lives Matter protesters demand the removal of statues of Sir Robert Peel, mistaking the great reforming Prime Minister for his father, who’d defended slavery.
But do these vandals look embarrassed? No! Feelings, not facts, are what counts.
Tragically, that’s true even of the ABC. So little do facts matter to our national broadcaster that it’s once more broadcast more fake history from its pet fake Aborigine.
Bruce Pascoe claims to belong to three Aboriginal tribes, but Aboriginal leaders deny it and genealogical records show his ancestors are all from England.
Still, Pascoe tells the kind of “history” the ABC likes, so back came their “indigenous historian” this week to announce — unchallenged — Australia has made slaves of Aborigines.
This is fakery on an industrial scale, to denounce our civilisation and any institution which defends it.
So statues of Captain James Cook, a brilliant and humane explorer, must go, but the giant statue of Ned Kelly at Glenrowan is safe, because Kelly murdered police, and Black Lives Matter protesters claim police defend the racist state and “kill” Aborigines in jail in their hundreds.
More fakery. Aboriginal prisoners are actually less likely than white prisoners to die in jail, and those who die do so overwhelming of natural causes, accidents or suicide.
But show me one Premier who dares contradict the protesters’ lies.
They know facts don’t matter, and won’t save them.
See how even Prime Minister Scott Morrison caved last week after the media abused him for telling the truth — that Australia never had slavery.
“My comments were not intended to give offence, and if they did I deeply regret that and apologise for that,” he said.
Pathetic. But that’s why this new Tyranny of Feelings is so dangerous. Facts can’t protect us from the statue-breakers.
Our only comfort is that every revolution eats its own. Even Robespierre lost his own head in the French Revolution.
Josh Thomas is our Robespierre. Last week this comedian was denouncing Coon cheese as racist (a whine with your cheese, Mr Thomas?), because, look! Its name!
In fact, the cheese is named after Edward William Coon, who invented the process to make it. And it offends no one with sense.
Thomas was just virtue signalling. Yet days later he’s on the guillotine himself, accused of being a racist for years ago saying it was tough casting an actor to play a 7/11 worker:
“Do you make them Indian? Or is that offensive?’. Or then, if you make them white — is that a bit like you’re lying, really,” he had said.
Is that really racist? Doesn’t matter! It’s an excuse to denounce.
So Thomas now grovels to the mob he last week tried to lead: “I’m super ashamed of the comments I made.”
Not good enough! Nothing ever is.
Thomas is worse than the Ku Klux Klan, insists race warrior and actor Michelle Law: “White moderates are more dangerous than outright racists.”
Against such zealots, which of us is safe? Which statue can stand when judgment has fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason?