In Britain, a 44-year-old Norwegian-born man dubbed “The Eunuch Maker” has been arrested following allegations he castrated dozens of willing men in his north London basement flat. “The castrations are believed to be part of the genital nullification — or “Nullo” — movement which has grown in popularity among those who do not wish to identify as male or female,” the Telegraph reported this week.
The suspect is not exactly your bashful type, having boasted in an interview of emasculating 58 participants.
To add to that, he also broadcast these procedures on pay-per-view television. Now each to his own, but I could not imagine any televised viewing more excruciating to watch, except for what we witnessed last week on ABC’s The Drum. According to one panellist, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s preference for white bread symbolises race, class, and patriarchy.
This was new territory for a show already notorious for its anti-conservative bias and alarmist claims.
“Who eats white bread in this country? Anglo menâ€
— Sandy Lanceley (@sandylanceley) February 7, 2022
I can’t believe these people are real
pic.twitter.com/jpkq4MZGHR
A few examples will suffice. There was the gay activist who called for “all men to put their hands up and acknowledge their misogyny, acknowledge the fact that they are profiting from toxic masculinity,” and the GetUp! director who labelled former PM Tony Abbott’s very existence as “offensive”. And it’s hard to top activist and author Magda Szubanski’s claim in 2019 that the Coalition had won the election because Morrison had employed “neuro-advertising” to “manipulate” voters.
“They’ll measure your brain and go straight to the amygdala,” she claimed. But topped it was following Morrison’s appearance on Sunrise last week.
Asked by co-host David Koch whether he preferred sourdough or multigrain bread, the PM indicated he liked “normal white bread”.
Politics of a simple sandwich
It was innocuous banter, but for Nareen Young, a professor of Indigenous policy at the University of Technology Sydney and a close friend of Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, it was her cue to say something really, really doughy.
“I think the comment about the bread — white bread — was really interesting,” she told The Drum co-host Ellen Fanning that same day. “Who eats white bread in this country? Anglo men. I come from a working-class background. We had brown bread because we were healthy. I think that it shows a deep lack of understanding as to who works in this country. I think that there’s a deep intersection of race and class.”
This is a fascinating theory, one no doubt backed up by months, perhaps even years, of empirical study. I too have long suspected Anglo male hegemony and processed foods have a symbiotic relationship. For example, it is an incontrovertible fact that women do not eat white bread. Nor is there such a thing as white pasta in Italy. And I challenge you to provide even a single example of an Asian who consumes white rice.
According to her profile, Young is “one of Australia’s leading and most respected workplace diversity practitioners and thinkers”. That her specialty is not in the field of nutrition and dietetics is of no surprise, especially given her effusive endorsement of brown bread – which, according to a scientific study is no better than the white loaf.
Incidentally, I love white bread but was forced to give it up last year. After eating just a couple of slices I would start to nod off, my brain became foggy, and I felt listless and depressed.
Much the same as I felt listening to Young’s imbecilic extrapolations, my symptoms aggravated by the realisation our taxes subsidise her generous wage.
This is a senior academic we are talking about. On that note, the Australian National University vice-chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, expressed “dismay” this week over the federal government’s vetoing of certain research projects on the basis they “do not demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money nor contribute to the national interest”. For the government to use this power was “political interference,” he claimed, saying “I see this as an existential threat to Australian universities.” Yes, vice-chancellor, it is true our tertiary institutions have a dire credibility problem, but it is an internal threat in the form of activists masquerading as academics. This faux-intellectual culture thrives because you and your fellow administrators are too timorous to acknowledge its existence, let alone address it.
Bread-and-butter bias
The same applies to the ABC board, which is incapable of rectifying the blatant left-wing bias of the national broadcaster. Fanning, for example, did not take issue with Young’s nonsensical assertions or even ask her to justify them. Presumably she is unaware of the organisation’s editorial policies regarding accuracy: “The ABC should make reasonable efforts, appropriate in the context, to signal to audiences gradations in accuracy, for example by querying interviewees, qualifying bald assertions, supplementing the partly right and correcting the plainly wrong.”
These issues are longstanding. In an internal review of programs in the lead up to 2019 federal election, former BBC adviser Kerry Blackburn found one episode of The Drum “was more than seven times as likely to contribute to a favourable impression of Labor and the Left than to a favourable contribution of the Coalition and the Right”. Another episode, a fortnight before the election, showed “not just a positive impression of policies identified with Labor’s platform but also at times a marked enthusiasm for a Labor victory”.
Sadly for the Morrison Government, it has succumbed to the delusion that it is possible to appease those who despise you, having announced this week it would end the indexation freeze of the ABC’s three-year funding deal. Responding to the announcement, ABC managing director David Anderson crowed it was “an important recognition that the ABC is needed now more than ever”.
As the Fin Review reported, the government was spooked into doing so. Polling commissioned by the left-wing think tank The Australian Institute in the Liberal seats of North Sydney and Wentworth revealed that two-thirds of respondents in each seat wanted funding restored to the ABC.
But for the government to capitulate as it has done is to believe the notion that the friends of the ABC and the friends of the Coalition can be accurately depicted by way of a Venn diagram. It is fallacious a theory as Young’s assertion that Morrison is a wheat supremacist.
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