The left at their worst described perfectly by Chris Kenny of The Australian.
It certainly describes a few of the narrow minded left contributors to the political thread that we are all well aware of.
Left-wing journalists try to censor the inconvenient facts
The hysterical preeners of the virtue-signalling Left must exhaust themselves daily with mental contortions working out what facts are suitable for public consumption and what needs to be suppressed. Slaves to political fashion, social media memes and their own sanctimony, these people seem to lack any guiding principles or intellectual integrity.
If they had their way, media reports last week would have told us about a fatal stabbing rampage and shown a man standing on a car in Sydney’s CBD, beeping out the audio of what he was yelling and telling us merely that there was some shouting. Apparently, the public could not be trusted with the knowledge that the man yelled “Allahu akbar”.
You need to remind yourself that these same activists tend to have an anarchical attitude to government secrecy, supporting the Julian Assanges of this world who would share even the most highly classified secrets. Yes, secrets are evil to these leftist activists, except the secrets they want to keep from a public they believe is not wise or woke enough to be trusted with reality.
They want to save the mainstream from their own bigotry and knee-jerk reactions. They must consider themselves secular saints — arbiters of the national debate for the common good — but in truth they are delusional.
My Sky News colleague Laura Jayes ran headlong into this idiocy when she happened to tweet breaking news from last week’s stabbing, including the fact that a man, armed with a knife, was yelling “Allahu akbar” as he called for police to shoot him. Jayes posted video showing exactly this.
Soon enough on social media Jayes was criticised for being unhelpful, encouraging “unnecessary othering” — whatever that is — and “Islamophobia”. News reports yesterday revealed “Allahu akbar” also got a mention on a grotesque video made by the alleged killer; I guess that should never have been reported either.
The activist Left seems to demand a virtue-signalling monoculture. We saw plenty of that last week when the Left — including most journalists, of course — sided with the illogical, hypocritical and alarmist criticism of Australia by some small island nations and New Zealand over climate action.
Cartoonists couldn’t resist drawings of drowning islands. Journalists with furrowed brows talked about the existential threat of climate change to these islands.
Never mind that Tuvalu’s land mass has expanded by almost 3 per cent over the past few decades, with three-quarters of its islands growing rather than shrinking. Never mind the most pressing dilemmas for almost all of these nations is poor governance, inadequate education, healthcare and employment opportunities.
And never mind that Australia is committed to Paris Agreement emissions reductions and that global emissions continue to rise steadily thanks mainly to China — a benefactor these Pacific nations don’t criticise. We must be the only country where our journalistic cohort’s natural disposition is to agree with any criticism of our country, no matter how ill-founded.
The facts often don’t fit the narrative, so the Left prefers to leave them out. And increasingly they will bully any journalist impertinent enough to report any facts that the green-left evangelists find too confronting.
