Virtues and Villains
Recently, YouTube issued a week-long ban to Sky News—a bargain bin channel of outcast “conservatives” owned by Rupert Murdoch—for broadcasting coronavirus disinformation to their 1.85m subscribers. Given Australia is currently battling an outbreak of the Delta coronavirus, with a bungled vaccine rollout that saw us initially rank last among OECD countries for vaccinations (we’re now third-last), it is deeply concerning for all that Sky News is broadcasting dangerously misleading information that could be the difference between life and death for many among its audience, and many more who aren’t. It’s even more concerning that this action was taken by a tech giant, which apparently has more rigorous journalistic regulations than our government; this is the same platform that radicalised Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant and which studies point to as a breeding ground for extremism. And a major outlet in Australian media is too extreme for it. At least for a week.
This isn’t a problem that is ours alone, either—even were we not in a pandemic which literally requires us to act collectively for the benefit of all—as Sky News’s audience online is broadly international. A great deal has been said about Murdoch’s influence in poisoning politics and culture abroad, notably through the derangement known as Fox News in the US, but his impact is more pronounced here. In 2016, Murdoch-owned publications accounted for 65% of circulation in national and capital city print dailies, and more recent data from 2020 shows he has doubled the audience of his next largest competitor in the market. In this recent Fact Check, the ABC points out that print media is a declining source of news for most people, but News Corps also owns five of the 10 most popular online publications, and on Facebook and Youtube, its reach is growing. On Facebook, in the six months leading up to January 2021, it dominates with 4.4 million shares of its content and on Youtube, it had 762 million views in March 2021 alone, 257 million more than ABC News.
This is why even something as tepid as a one-week ban is so notable and predictably, has outraged Murdoch’s stable of outraged goons. This is an attack on press freedom and “the ability to think freely,” apparently. After all, if one should advise another to drink snake oil to cure a deadly contagious disease, what matter if it’s broadcast to millions under the masthead of news? Think freely and drink that snake oil! There’s a similarity here to the conservative line that one should have the “right to be a bigot” and they both end in the same place: where an individual right is trumped by a responsibility to not harm another person, particularly in the public sphere. Putting that aside for a moment, I want to turn now to the idea that is endlessly supported by both conservatives and white liberals, which is that conversation is both the point and the outcome—anything is justifiable under the guise of speaking “freely”. Speaking freely, for a conversative (that was a typo but I’m leaving it in because lol), actually means a desire for their speech to have either equal or more weight than other speech. Particularly the speech of “experts” with their “degrees” and their “science”, and don’t even get them started on the speech of First Nations, Black peoples, women, queers, migrants, refugees or God-forbid, the qualified experts among those unspeakables.
The obvious inverse here is that it is commonly argued that people from disadvantaged groups should be given greater emphasis and inclusion to redress a deep structural and cultural imbalance across all areas of life but also and specifically in conversations about their lived experiences, history, culture, and communities. (This argument, unlike the other, is backed by decades of research, and decency.) Wealthy middle and upper class conservatives, many of whom not so long ago—and many still today— counted themselves as experts on the underclass, have stayed mad about this perceived loss of “free” speech and if today is any indication, their fury and its consequences are only mounting. Nothing exemplifies this more than the popularity of the phrase “I’m not an expert, but…” What typically follows is an appeal to common sense, what the average joe might feel. And I mean that literally, as what is common specifically to Joe, and not Jamal, for example. This very specific uncommon sense is little more than an unspoken well of shared assumptions, truisms, experience, and lies, informed by culture and propaganda consumed over a lifetime—it should not be invoked so often by our university-educated millionaire politicians and media figures to counter qualified advice in increasingly complex fields where critical knowledge is absolutely necessary for our survival. And yet it is.
I want to pick at this (un)common sense, and its relationship to political correctness, and virtue signalling. How is it possible that it’s more acceptable to dismiss someone for signalling virtue than it is to dismiss someone for being a villain? In an article for The Saturday Paper, I wrote about “PC” hysteria and the way in which its usage has shifted over time, from what a politician might say to toe the party line, to the present claim of correctness constituting censorship:
“What has remained true throughout is the poisonous notion that whatever the line is, it is a deception, a cynical ploy to get around the real or true order of things. I say poisonous because you need only consider what falls under the label of this correctness to realise how far we’ve come from a moral or ethical centre: racial equality, women’s rights, trans rights, queer liberation. We’re not just talking about injustice, we’re talking about kindness; any request to consider another human being’s feelings or material reality is now seen as inauthentic.
First and most importantly we need to address the question of power. Who has it? If society’s most disadvantaged peoples have such a stranglehold on politics that censorship is a necessity, would they still be marginalised today? It doesn’t make sense… Somehow, conservatives get away with running things exactly how they want, while complaining loudly that they’re unable to because of censorship. They are both underdog and victor, gagged yet constantly heard.”
In the three decades I’ve been alive, I’ve seen the news as the source of authoritative information dwindle, and opinion be elevated above actual reporting by journalists; I’ve seen education, particularly tertiary education, come under continual attack, through funding cuts, enabled by smears in the public sphere; I’ve seen tolerance and freedom as ideas twisted to include harm and violence; I’ve seen a relentless uptick in violence and hateful speech directed at every marginalised group advocating for equality. It is no surprise, then, that even in the middle of a pandemic which has killed millions and is still a threat to us all, conservatives are fighting for their ignorant opinions to be given a manifestly unearned consideration. What we are witnessing in real time is the collision of conservative rhetoric with a fatal reality they manufactured—one where a bigot’s misleading viral video is more important to produce and witness than the truth which would help us survive a deadly virus.
This is deeply fucking weird, to say the least, in how self-destructive it is, but it also reveals how profoundly unequal and unstable conversation is as a field. We have endless evidence to show how discriminatory society is at every level, but it doesn’t matter, because how we talk about and understand that evidence, how it’s disseminated to the public, is not in our control. Once the volume from those who suffered it reached a critical mass—demanding an end to police brutality, to legal inequalities, to economic, educational, and environmental injustice; demanding, in short, equal access to the material benefits of empire, to policy-making, in addition to cultural representation—conservatives flipped the switch. Thanks to social media, white people have been exposed en masse to the opinions, expert and not, of people they rarely had to hear from before, leading many to feel bad, to feel discriminated against, without actually having to suffer any negative material consequence. If you want the freedom to be gay, trans, Black, Muslim, Indigenous, Other, without being disadvantaged by that, well then they want the freedom to be fucking assholes without being called assholes or being in any way impacted.
We’ve been seeing this shit for so many years now. The rhetorical strategy hasn’t even changed. “Oh you’re just playing the race/gender/sexuality card” became “oh you’re just being PC” became “identity politics has gone mad” became “stop being so woke”. Thought-policing, free speech, the right to being a bigot, reverse racism. The last one is so ridiculous it tells us a great deal. Reverse racism as a concept can only exist in the abstract field of conversation—which everyone supposes to be equal, but isn’t—separate from the many material concerns and criticisms that have been articulated.
The reason these strategies are working, despite being so transparently stupid, has to do with the degree to which the public sphere is inherently conservative, and the degree to which education has successfully been undermined. I’ve said this many times before: there is little that I, or any Muslim, can do to “correct” or counter the Islamophobic narrative put forward by Murdoch media, which in one year alone, ran three thousand articles across the mediated landscape that negatively tied Islam to violence. There is a reason every person who speaks about discrimination is plagued by fatigue, ground down by repetition; there’s a reason we can look back each decade to see a crowded field of brilliant individuals articulate the same problems even more eloquently, without change. It’s not a question of being unheard so much as it is one of being swamped by determined opposition that has far more resources at its disposal, far more channels to distribute its narrative and disinformation. Consider the way Black Lives Matters has been flattened to a hashtag, ignoring key organisations like the Movement 4 Black Lives, which has numerous policy goals and community transformation as its aim? It’s not that Black Lives Matter as a movement cares about nothing other than race, so much as the incredibly racist commentary in our mass media has reduced a complex platform to identity alone, and even more specifically, to three words, such that its counter is no more than a contemptuous, facile rejoinder: “All lives matter”.
The hypocrisy of it all is so brazen as to almost go unremarked on. It’s often called a “culture war”, yes, but the battlefield is populated mostly by people educated at the same institutions, those deemed to be “left” or “right” are often of the same class, often work and socialise in the same place, and benefit from the same protections. The most substantial difference between the two, outside of policy (which is shrinking all the time), is largely one of performance: rich “right-wing” politicians and elites perform the speech and mannerisms of the poor and working class, while doing their very best to keep them shackled to their misfortune, and accuse the “left” of the very same thing—that is, a dishonest performance and one that is given by uppity artsy folks with too many feelings. This kind of projection enables them to renew their ideological positions as a response to imagined threats: “they’ll let too many brown people in” (now they want crueller detention policies), “they want to teach our kids about sex and gender, they’re sick!” (we already teach kids about gender and sex, it just conforms to conservative values, now they want a license to openly target queer and trans teenagers), “they’re trying to rewrite the textbooks”, textbooks always change as we learn more and there has never been a more censorious force in the world than the conservative one.
They’re moving further along these lines than ever before—locally through initiatives like the Ramsay Centre, and in the US through policing Palestinian movements like BDS and a new hysteria around “Critical Race Theory” which has Republicans legislating to ban a subject that was never taught, and using that to justify excluding Martin Luther King Jr from the public curriculum, along with the KKK. The logic being that the antidote is the same as the poison, “it’s racist to point out our racism”, so do away with both—in public conversation, and in classrooms—with the end result being plenty of poison, embedded as it is not only in our systems and our bodies, with no sanctioned way to fight it. If you fight it non-violently, you’re a “social justice warrior” or fighting the “culture war” by playing some cards and supposedly policing thought, and if you fight it violently, you’re an ANTIFA-thug, and that’s not how we do things in a civilised society. (Sidenote: it’s funny how much these people profess to love the police, who routinely brutalise poor brown and black people, while professing to hate thought-police, which they characterise as brown and black people demanding they stop being so racist.)
In sum, things are getting worse because our public sphere and speech is dominated by conservatives who have enough power to frame and warp discourse to suit their ends. They are doing everything they claim “the Left” desire: forcing their ideology into underfunded public schools, pressuring universities to change what and how they teach, diminishing already insufficient textbooks, policing speech and thought they disagree with, etc. It just so happens that the effects of their changes always makes things worse for anyone who isn’t straight, white, cis and Christian. To some degree this has always been the case. What’s remarkable about the shift in conservative rhetoric—governed as it always is by corporate greed, naturally—is the degree to which its vitriol is eating away at the very institutional pillars that in many ways uphold the status quo. They are destroying the very fields they once heaped false praise upon as uniquely “Western” triumphs—the university, science, arts and culture—all of which used to be far more segregated and elitist. They are still deeply unequal spaces, but there’s no doubt that as far as conservatives are concerned, too many undesirables have been let in, they’re too vocal, and they speak too much. The idea of arguing against specific evidence is of course too much, instead they have set about destroying the notion of evidence entirely, the notion of “scientifically-proven” as a concept—unless, of course, the evidence puts brown and black people in prison or justifies another slaughter in the “Middle East”. And now we are all paying the price.