For many decades now, conservative political men and media companies have worked in concert to parachute a white guy who’ll do their bidding and is also breathing and seems to be facing the right way into the Prime Ministership.
They see (or saw) in Peter Dutton a man like themselves. They see (or saw) few or no glaring flaws in him. And as they also surround themselves with other same-same white men as advisors, senior employees and mates, they’ve never seen any big problem with the criteria they used to choose Pete as their man for the top job. In fact, they all thought they could successfully sell Dutton to Australians simply because like them he’s straight, white, wealthy and (most importantly) in full possession of a Y-chromosome.
The huge flaw in this age-old strategy is that most Aussies are no longer as stupid as those holding power want to believe. The world’s a different place to the one these men grew up in: the one where the mainstream media was really the only place people could get decent political information; where black and brown and gay people mostly knew their place; and where women were either rendered irrelevant or beaten into submission.
And because of that crucial miscalculation, these shitwankers conspired to this time choose a man who never had any real hope of winning. Since huge numbers of Australians knew that this time, they were being sold an absolute cunt.
Most of us have always known Peter Dutton has as much charisma as a tube of toothpaste and as much charm as a bucket of spew, is as erudite as the average pot plant and as engaging as a mouldy pie, and furthermore has as much appeal to the average woman as a protracted bout of vaginal thrush.
A man worth tens of millions of dollars yet “forgets” about properties and multi-million dollar trusts he owns can’t sell anything to younger people who wonder how they’ll ever buy their first home. A man condemning millions to higher supermarket prices and paying for ludicrously expensive and unnecessary nuclear reactors can’t win people over with a few paltry cents off at the petrol pump. A man who idolises the rapist in the White House will never get most women to warm to him. And a man who won’t even live in the home provided for him in Canberra yet insists the plebs mustn’t work from their homes is clearly, to anyone with a working intellect, an absolute piece of shit.
This is how the mainstream media has destroyed their own industry as well as the political parties they’re intertwined with. They’ve tried too hard and for too long to force people who aren’t like them into doing what they demand, and are now failing miserably because they’ve totally lost the trust and goodwill they once took for granted.
They’ve destroyed their own golden goose. They leaned so far into winning power and profit at any cost they forgot that in this internet age, people can and will choose not to do their bidding. They could have helped create a world where the rich still had plenty but the plebs also had comfortable and meaningful lives, but they were far too greedy, stupid and self-absorbed to allow that to transpire.
This is as true for men like Kyle Sandilands and his disgusting bosses as it is for the rest of the legacy media. All of them bombard us with gaslighting nonsense and glaring abuse and contempt, then think they can also tell us how to vote. Yet never before has the phrase “tell ‘em they’re dreaming” been more true.
Both conservative politicians and the mainstream media will hopefully continue to pay the price for their dog-whistling misogyny, racism and all other kinds of bastardry in coming years and decades. The rest of us can’t fucking wait to watch it play out.
What’s more, we’ll continue to try to ensure their demise sticks by continuing to call out their hatred and bullying and lies, and by continuing to ask advertisers to refuse to fund it.
If you also wish for this outcome, let’s fucking go.
#ToYourBrooms