Musk salutes Aussie take on woke culture
Elon Musk has saluted an Aussie’s viral take on woke culture, as users slammed SBS for airing a controversial political correctness debate.
Elon Musk has praised an Aussie for calling out woke culture after the man’s take during a TV debate went viral online and sparked social media uproar.
SBS panel show Insight returned for a new season on Tuesday with an episode titled “Politically Incorrect” in which it asked: “Has political correctness gone too far?”
One guest’s insight attracted widespread attention as he delivered an assessment of “off the rails” wokeness.
“The difference between PC and woke is politically correct, in terms of being respectful to others’ feelings and not being racist or sexist, is fine, but woke has gone completely off the rails. It is a completely different animal,” Insight guest Sean Masters said in a widely shared clip from Tuesday’s episode.
Mr Masters’ take was rebutted by fellow panellist Pauline Jacobs, who said she could “understand where Sean’s coming from” but did not agree.
“Wokeness for me is turning from somebody who was brought up on the tail end of the White Australia policy, great amount of change in my formative growing up years, to a person who is very different to what my mother and father knew,” Ms Jacobs said.
Responding to a question on whether his political views had changed, Mr Masters finished with an assessment on the difference between “old” and “new” left-wing politics.
“I was raised in a left-wing family whose primary concern was the wealth disparities as they affected the working class, and I share those sensibilities,” he told the show.
“But around the 2010s, what could be called the old-left that I’ve just described have allowed themselves to be completely consumed by the new-left and an obsession with identity politics, and the new-left have gone so far down this path of identity politics that they are beyond the horizon and over the waterfall. So, to me, it is not so much an issue of left and right but more liberalist versus anti-liberalist.”
A clip of Mr Masters’ take, which also circulated when it was featured in season promos late last year, was shared on Wednesday by controversial right-wing commentator Avi Yemini.
“This bloke NAILS IT with absolute class,” Yemini, who rose to prominence for his coverage of the Melbourne lockdowns and was last year banned from entering New Zealand, tweeted.
The assessment even received attention from Twitter CEO Elon Musk himself, who tweeted in reply: “Well-said”.
His take on political correctness had cost him personal relationships, Mr Masters claimed.
“If you express any hesitancy around the vaccine, you’re an anti-vaxxer. If you express a desire for freedom of speech, you’re told you’re supporting hate speech. If you express concern that biological males in women’s sport might break girls’ hearts as well as their limbs, you’re a transphobe,” he said.
“It becomes impossible to have conversations and it fractures relationships at an interpersonal level, and the same thing is happening at a societal level and a national level because there’s no longer any political discourse.”
Former Liberal Party candidate Katherine Deves, who was also a panellist on Tuesday’s show, was shown nodding through Mr Masters’ speech.
Ms Deves lost her bid for the Sydney seat of Warringah in a stunning election defeat last May, after attracting controversy over her comments relating to trans people. In now-deleted social media posts, Ms Deves called trans children “surgically mutilated and sterilised” and likened her lobbying to stop transgender athletes from competing in women’s sport to standing up against Nazis during the Holocaust.
Ms Deves told Insight she would not apologise for the comments.
“It didn’t assuage the people who were coming after me, so I think it’s better to simply never justify, never explain, never apologise, just continue on,” she said on Tuesday’s show.
Social media users slammed SBS for allowing Ms Deves to appear on the show.
“How incredibly disappointing and shameful that SBS is platforming transphobic bigotry. Trans people are at higher risk of suicide and self-harm. Giving bigots a platform can cause serious harm to vulnerable, marginalised people who should not have to debate their human rights,” one user said in response to an SBS post promoting the episode.
“SBS allowing (trans) medical care to be referred to as ‘mutilation’ with no pushback from the hosts, the most toothless journalism possible in the face of rhetoric they are obligated to challenge if they decide to platform it,” another wrote.
“Never been more disappointed with the SBS. Australians voted out KD (Katherine Deves) and her bigoted party, democratically, that’s not “pc”. Deves is a big reason why they lost, why are you platforming her? For clicks?” asked a third.
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