Friday 29th of March 2024

pandering to the miasma of freedumbs...

idiotsidiots

I am watching my favourite song on YouTube and right in the middle of the best trill, here comes an advert for UAP, with Craig Kelly yapping like a mad dog... He's desperate. I would not mind the interruption so much, if it were an ad for a new vacuum cleaner with extra suction, cordless and reverse self-cleaning. But Craig Kelly? And in front of the UAP yellow-piss background???

 

I know, YouTube is free and it has to make money by advertising something. But I draw the line. Craig Kelly is the pits of your nightmares... He's joined the "biggest number of Freedumb supporter at the Clive Palmer farm" for ratbags. One wonders if Craig hasn't been sent by Scott Morrison himself, to capture the extreme-right voters who think ScoMo is a wimp in regard to flogging refugees a bit less these days and for having "caved-in" to the Climate-Change-People... Has ScoMo gone soft? Is it a ScoMo trick to capture the "middle-ground" while letting his mates, Craig and Clive, corner the market of ultra-idiots on the right?

 

So we revisit an article written 5 months (24/08/2021) and still relevant today:

 

The Prime Minister needs help to win the upcoming Federal Election. Dr Martin Hirst suggests that Morrison’s white knight might just be the Craig and Clive clown show.

 

IT’S HARD TO PICK this week’s scariest moment from the car crash on replay that is Australian politics right now.

Was it Squirmo’s grotesque “Delta Dawn” speech, or MP Craig Kelly announcing he has joined the political circus that is Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party?

These two highlights are intimately linked, as I’ll explain, but first let’s deal with the Craig and Clive clown show.

Scott Morrison now has some serious competition on his right flank. This week’s unsurprising announcement that rogue Liberal MP Craig Kelly has joined Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party means that the battle for the votes of angry racist conservatives who are marching for some ill-defined anti-government freedom is well and truly engaged leading into the 2022 election season.

Uniting Kelly’s political base with Palmer’s dirty millions creates a potentially viable proto-fascist political formation in Australia for the first time since the New Guard of the 1930s. The anti-lockdown marchers have shown a strong desire to engage in political violence and the Nazi filth is actively trying to recruit from this milieu.

Palmer may come across as an ignorant fool (he is), but only a bigger fool would underestimate his ability to buy votes and appeal to the kind of voters who are willing to “march for freedom” while willfully ignoring any scientific evidence that the coronavirus can kill you or leave you unconscious on a respirator in the ICU.

Palmer has made a direct appeal to the miasma of disaffected voters known as the “freedumbs” who gathered in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and other places recently to rail against public health orders and defiantly declare that they are anti-mask, anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown.

This group might be scientifically ignorant, but they have been goaded to anger by the right-wing media and those supposedly sensible centrist journalists who can’t see past their own short-sightedness, or through their fogged-up ideological spectacles.

 

The so-called “freedom” these deluded mobs are chanting for is devoid of any real content, it is reactionary and ultimately not even in their own narrow health or economic interests.

In philosophical terms, they don’t really know if they want freedom-from or freedom-to.

They’re confused, incoherent and don’t seem to care or realise just how stupid their vacuous shouts of “freedom” are in the face of the pandemic.

Despite their lack of insight or cohesion, Craig Kelly is a favourite of this semi-outcast “petty bourgeois” and lumpen mass. He proudly claims he won’t get vaccinated and has been booted off most social media platforms for his obnoxious blend of QAnon conspiracies and COVID-19 quackery.

Now Kelly’s joined forces with the crooked and cooked Clive Palmer and the apoplectic freedumbs finally have a champion to focus on and a political party to shift their votes to.

Is this a problem for the Prime Minister?

Well, it could be, if Palmer and Kelly’s candidates can pull votes away from the Coalition in Liberal and National seats. That would certainly threaten Morrison’s tenuous grip on the government benches but only if there was a drift of their preferences towards the ALP.

This is unlikely, so too is a sweeping victory by Palmer’s shock troops, even though they are threatening to stand in every House of Representatives and Senate seat across the country.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/freedom-protestors-and-craig-kelly-central-to-morrisons-re-election-plan,15438

 

 

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SCOMO'S GOT TO GO !

The vanity of our Prime Minister along with a complicit mainstream media have destroyed the fabric of democracy, writes Dr Jennifer Wilson.

MILLIONS OF WORDS have been written about Prime Minister Scott Morrison, including a few from me, in what I think is an effort to come to grips with his unrelenting awfulness. Decent people don’t get half the attention. They must make do with praise and admiration rather than bookloads of complex analysis.

There’s something about unrelenting awfulness that compels us to description and naming. It’s an attempt, I think, to relieve the uncomfortable emotions aroused by mastering them with language. And indeed, language is the only weapon we have against the awfulness, assuming we aren’t contemplating a physical response.

Whether or not Morrison reads any of these words is impossible to ascertain, however, what is clear is that they make no difference to him. They may even make him worse — it’s hard to tell. Given that he appears to have several of the characteristics attributable to the narcissistic personality he may be delighted to receive the attention, no matter that it’s negative. 

I imagine that Morrison has always been driven by the desire to see how much he can get away with. There are people who are compulsively anti-authoritarian yet paradoxically become authoritarians — Scott may be one of them.

This would in part explain why he is determined to undermine as many of our democratic institutions as possible, with his animosity towards the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) being the current example of this ambition. Morrison abhors the concept of accountability, particularly the kind demanded by democratic institutions.

 

At the same time, he professes a profound belief in a Pentecostal religious cult that, conveniently for him, preferences the importance of God’s laws over those made by man. ICAC and other institutions are therefore a personal affront, psychologically and spiritually.

Driven by anti-authoritarian instincts validated by complementary religious belief and in pursuit of his barely disguised desire to be an autocratic leader, the Prime Minister is engaged in the project of dismantling the institutions of democracy that, awkwardly, require accountability. Like former U.S. President Donald Trump, Scott’s plan is to retain the appearance of democracy by peopling its emptied shell with members of his own ideological tribe.

 

For example, it is his stated goal to establish some kind of federal body that conceptually oversees parliamentarians, a body that in practice has no teeth at all, but can be shown to exist, its existence used to prove democratic intentions. In much the same way, Parliament, the heart of the democratic project, now sits so rarely it is of limited use as a tool of accountability. However, nobody can deny that it and the Westminster system it represents exist — ergo, democracy.  

Through the enactment of this plan, democracy eventually becomes a meaningless concept. What we are left with is the simulacrum of democracy. All we have left is the performance. It is a coup from the inside, bloodless and not requiring the military. Unless you’re well engaged with politics, you might not even notice.

A coup such as this one requires a complicit media to act as the propaganda arm of the Government. The population must be reassured that all is well and the necessary safeguards are apparently in place. Government and media, in a symbiotic relationship, control the narrative.

It’s sometimes assumed that the majority of the Australian media is gullible, hoodwinked by Morrison into unquestioningly publishing his spin. In fact, Morrison does not and cannot control the media barons and can be brought entirely undone by Rupert Murdoch, for example, while being unable to exercise any control over the billionaire’s News Corp empire. Murdoch picks governments and Murdoch can withdraw his favours. Scott is his servant, not the other way around and should Scott cease to be of use, he will go.

 

When the interests of media barons are indistinguishable from those of a government dedicated to destroying democracy in the pursuit of authoritarian populism, you have the perfect storm. In Australia today, we have that perfect storm and Scott Morrison is its perfect political leader.

Which is not to say that Morrison will inevitably be returned to government. His precursor, Donald Trump, was not. However, the Republican Party he led bears little resemblance to that of earlier Republican presidencies and a similar observation can be made about the Liberal Party in Australia.

 

In seeking to destroy institutions, both Trump and Morrison have been instrumental in destroying the fabric of the Parties that gave them power. The Liberal National Coalition has within its ranks representatives of the hard Right that seek to emulate Trumpian Republicans. How powerful this faction is and how profound its effect on the Party remains to be seen.

This is a long game. The destruction of democracy won’t be achieved overnight. Yes, an election may be lost, but that offers an opportunity for powerfully destructive opposition, leading to victory next time. While you, the vanquished, wait it out, you’ve left the victors with a mess it will take decades to clean up.

 

 

Dr Jennifer Wilson is an IA columnist, a psychotherapist and an academic. You can follow Jennifer on Twitter @NoPlaceForSheep.

 

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READ MORE:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/scott-morrisons-ego-is-killing-democracy,15847

 

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/35525

 

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