Social justice warriors take a sledgehammer to the truth
The behaviour of will.i.am is serious because it carries all the common traits among a growing cohort in our modern age.
Earlier this year, a Year 10 girl accused her teacher of sexism because he gave her detention after she refused to behave in class. Some boys had mucked up too and when told to pay attention they did. The teacher told the girl to test her assertion this way: if she behaved and he still reprimanded her, then yes, some kind of injustice was being done to her.
It is not hard to understand why the girl, barely a few years off becoming an adult, would make accusations of sexism rather than accept responsibility for her actions.
Her antics were repeated by a grown-up, a member of American band Black Eyed Peas no less, on board a Qantas plane last Saturday. The behaviour of rapper Will.i.am during a Qantas flight from Brisbane to Sydney is not a random tantrum by a spoilt celebrity. If only. Then we could put it in the file of boorish behaviour by miscellaneous morons alongside Guns N’ Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin, who urinated in the galley of a plane in 1989 because he couldn’t muster a little patience to wait his turn. Stradlin claimed he was exercising his first amendment right to express himself, but no one took this twaddle seriously. And he duly apologised to airline staff, under direction from the FBI.
The behaviour of will.i.am is serious because it carries all the common traits among a growing cohort in our modern age: a deep-seated sense of entitlement, that the rules do not apply to him; claiming to be a victim to extricate oneself from shoddy behaviour rather than taking personal responsibility; using powerful words as weapons to wreck a person’s reputation, in a way that will ultimately rip meaning from words; and shaming anyone who dares question any of the above.
Wearing sound-cancelling earphones during his Qantas flight, the singer ignored instructions to stow his laptop for landing. Maybe he didn’t hear, and then the right reaction would be to apologise, and to stow the laptop just as other passengers are required to do. The rule exists to stop items, especially laptops, from becoming dangerous projectiles during bumpy landings.
Instead he lashed out at the flight attendant, tweeting: “I don’t want to believe she racist. But she has clearly aimed all her frustrations only at the people of colour.”
The singer could have chosen not to believe racism had anything to do with a flight attendant asking him to abide by the rules. He could test it this way next time he was on a Qantas flight: if he followed the rules and was still targeted by a flight attendant, then maybe there was an injustice of some sort.
But the injustice happened at the hands of the rapper when he named and shamed a flight attendant, defaming her as a racist to his 12-million-plus Twitter followers.
Qantas boss Alan Joyce is backing his staff to the hilt, offering support should the flight attendant wish to sue the rapper for defamation. Will.i.am should be held to account, along with the manic social justice movement he promotes to create a compassionate and caring world. “This is what Twitter is for,” will.i.am tweeted, adding: “we are supposed to call out wrongdoings so we can have a safer more compassionate world.”
The rapper told one newspaper: “Hopefully this is a lesson. She shouldn’t lose her job over it — if anything she should be retrained on how to deal with people. This is an opportunity to be pleasant to everyone.”
This has been one heck of lesson — about how a social justice movement is now riddled with injustice. When will.i.am pretended to be a victim, he inevitably mocked genuine victims. When he accused a flight attendant of racism, he neutered the power of words to describe real racism. When he named and shamed the flight attendant, he blew the whistle on intimidation done in the misplaced name of social justice.
The communists had the hammer and sickle to symbolise proletarian solidarity among farmers and construction workers. The social justice warriors should have a sledgehammer resting next to a witch’s cauldron to symbolise the bullies using noxious social media cauldrons to distort words, language and truth to assert power over the masses.
The lesson attracted a useful postscript too when Australian girl band the Veronicas chased yet another headline by claiming, using the cesspit of social media, that they were also subjected to abuse by the same flight attendant. Sisters Lisa and Jess Origliasso are wrong on both counts. They were not subjected to any abuse during their flight a few weeks ago. And it was not the same flight attendant who asked them to stow their own luggage, another rule that applies to all passengers.
Truth does not matter for these phony social justice warriors. Like the kid in the classroom making accusations to escape taking responsibility for bad behaviour.
Each step taken by will.i.am during and after that Qantas flight is standard operating practice in a morally ambiguous social justice movement that has an armoury of truth-distorting weapons. Politicians such as Greens leader Richard Di Natale describe views he disagrees with as “hate speech”, a strong accusation aimed at censoring and shaming people. Labor’s Penny Wong also wields “hate speech” a little too freely and loosely, describing it as “inimical to democracy”. It is one thing to call out genuine hate speech, using sunlight as a disinfectant. That is the essence of a liberal democracy. The antithesis of freedom is to endorse laws that can be used subjectively to stifle debate.
Every day, social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook cull views using the same loaded accusations. As former chief justice Robert French observed a few months ago, “hate speech” and “bullying” are losing their meaning at Australians universities too.
“Hate means to loathe or despise,” he said. “When you broaden out the term ‘hate’, what you’re doing is you’re borrowing the negative moral connotations from its core meaning and you’re applying it to a much wider range of conduct, which you call hate speech.”
This is not just a case of our language evolving, as every language does over time. To be sure, there are words we don’t use any more, like the N-word and other equally crude and hurtful words used by real racists and genuine sexists. But will.i.am and other social justice warriors are doing something entirely different, and very deliberate for a political purpose: they are using words to shame people they don’t like, or disagree with, in a way that destroys their meaning. These are words that need to carry moral weight if we are to accurately describe heinous episodes of racism or sexism.
Using a growing arsenal of tactics, in a few short decades SJWs have built an oppressive “cancel” culture that aims to silence and shame dissenters, and other refuseniks. While it should be heartening to see people such as former US president Barack Obama calling out cancel culture, it is about as convincing as the Australian Labor Party declaring it got too caught up confecting a class war at the last election. Where have you been? This is not rocket science. Is there conviction behind their new-found clarity?
Even more so because the model used by social justice warriors today was explained by George Orwell almost a century ago. “As Orwell perceived, the first target of every revolution is language,” Roger Scruton writes in his 2015 book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. “The need is to create a Newspeak that puts power in the place previously occupied by truth and, having done this, to describe the result as the ‘politics of truth’.”
It will be a matter of serious regret when the English language is left with neutered words, where once they packed a moral punch. Not just for people on the receiving end of genuine injustice but for all of us care about calling it out. The boy who cried wolf resonates as a story of faux overreach for a reason.
For words to have the same moral power and influence in another 100 years, the self-appointed social justice wardens will need to put down their weapons. One way to encourage sanity is to expose their movement as a sham operation that will end up hurting the people they claim to be protecting. Maybe will.i.am has done us all a favour by making his bogus claims, distorting language and expressing faux compassion.
Settler-colonial ethos is our least worthy export
Like other Australians confronted with daft academic ideas, I blamed the US or France and ignored my own country’s contribution. It was easy, but unfair.
What have our universities become?
A lurch towards activism and a focus on funding have desecrated our universities. They should once again become safe spaces – for the getting of wisdom.