Johannes Leak paints faux bleeding hearts into a corner with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris cartoon

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

There is plenty of room for debate over why Kamala Harris was appointed by Joe Biden to be Democratic vice-presidential nominee in the upcoming US election. She is an impressive candidate, an accomplished and articulate politician, a former prosecutor, a congresswoman. The problem is that Harris, and the rest of us, can never know if she made the cut because she is talented or because she is female and a multiracial mix of black and brown heritage.

When Biden said last week that Harris’s appointment was an inspiration for “little girls, particularly little brown and black girls”, he once again laid bare the absurdity of his party’s embrace of race to win the election. The Democrats picked an old white man because they think he has the best shot at removing an old white male president. And then they claim to be hip and woke on race by making it a Biden-Harris ticket.

Like so many parties on the left, and increasingly across the political spectrum, the Democrats under Biden have showcased their public addiction to identity politics. During a Democratic debate in May, Biden said: “I commit that I will pick a woman to be vice-president.” Biden excluded any other candidates, no matter how exceptional they might have been, because they were born with the wrong chromosomes.

And who can forget Biden, a week or so later, saying if you’re black and you vote for Donald Trump, you’re not really black?

The faux bleeding hearts in the Australian media, and in politics, who have attacked The Australian’s cartoonist, Johannes Leak, are in a terrible bind. Leak’s cartoon, sending up Biden’s risible exploitation of race, was deeply uncomfortable for them because it also poked fun at them. They purse their lips in disgust and claim Leak’s cartoon is racist. Yet they are responsible for replacing old versions of racism and sexism with new versions that routinely favour black people over white and women over men. And, in a pointer to their rejection of reason, they call this progressive.

As peddlers of politics and policies that seek special favours for people based on sex and race, they cannot complain with credibility if we are to wonder whether Harris was appointed because she was once a little black and brown girl.

Leak’s critics can’t bear to have their complicity in the modern conundrum of promoting people on the basis of sex or skin colour exposed by a cartoonist or anyone else. In a further sign of their intellectual weakness, Leak’s critics chose to hurl abuse at him to deflect this reality rather than debate important issues thrown up by identity politics.

How many of Leak’s critics have addressed the condescension of Biden telling black people they are not really black if they vote for Trump? Biden’s comment was not some slip of the tongue; it goes to the rot at the centre of modern political movements that deploy sex and skin colour, and any of the LGBTQI traits, to strip people of their freedom to choose who they vote for and what they think.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Picture: AFP

When Hillary Clinton faced off against Trump in the 2016 election, Madeleine Albright told an audience at a campaign event: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” In other words, it is evil for women to vote for a man over a woman. Albright and Clinton are exhibits in the modern-day betrayal of feminism. The suffragettes in the early 20th century surely didn’t fight for the right to vote so women in the 21st century would be threatened by a woman ordering them how to vote.

It is easier to shout about a cartoon from the Twitter bunker than display even low-level curiosity as to whether it is disempowering to appoint a person to a job for their skin colour, or their sex or, in Harris’s case, maybe both.

Kevin Rudd has dobbed to the Australian Press Council and the ABC’s Michael Rowland tweeted that he “feels really sorry for the good journalists” when their stories appear in the same paper that published Leak’s cartoon. “Shameful,” he tweeted.

Oh, how pompous of you. Will you be also complaining about the hordes of leftists who have deliberately misinterpreted the cartoon and defamed Johannes?

— Fred Pawle (@FredPawle) August 16, 2020

Spare us the faux emotion. The ABC is a showcase of what’s wrong with identity politics: diversity at Aunty means boasting about employing people of different race and sexuality. But the nation’s largest media organisation cannot muster the courage or decency to employ people who may diverge from ABC orthodoxy.

In an interview with an ABC host last year, ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose said Andrew Bolt was not the right “fit” for the ABC. Lest there be any confusion, she explained that when she said the ABC should be more diverse, she meant more culturally diverse. The result of Buttrose’s diversity agenda is that Australian taxpayers must continue to shell out for the kind of unthinking left-wing activism that attacks Leak. Rowland isn’t so lucky as to work for a media organisation where journalists and cartoonists are free to question whether measuring people according to skin colour and sex is a retrograde step.

A letter in The Weekend Australian pointed to the dilemma raised by Leak in his cartoon last week. Molina Asthana wrote that she found Leak’s cartoon “distasteful” for trivialising Biden’s choice for vice-president. Then she wrote this: “As a woman of colour who has achieved a lot on my own merit … I question whether the boards I’ve been appointed to, many as the first person of colour, have been a tokenistic gesture rather than on merit.”

Illustration: Johannes Leak

That is the problem when a political party, or any other organisation, embraces identity politics. It is impossible to know if a person is appointed for their individual worth or because they were born with a favoured skin colour or preferred set of chromosomes. Speaking on the ABC’s Radio National on Monday morning, Workplace Gender Equality Agency director Libby Lyons bemoaned how unfair it was when half the population — women — were excluded from employment opportunities. She’s right. It is equally unfair when a booming industry seeking special favours for women rules out the other half of the population — men — from securing appointments.

Alas, intellectual consistency is not a drawcard for the advocates of identity politics, quotas and special privileges for certain groups over others. Like a Victorian-era puritan clutching her pearls, those who attacked Leak regard their views on such matters as a moral code beyond challenge. When a cartoon pokes fun at their views, they turn it into a scandal, uttering equal doses of disgust and pity so as to discourage others from thinking for themselves.

It might kill off any deviant discussion at their next dinner party, but it won’t stop freethinkers at The Australian.