Guest Post: Cassie of Sydney – The progressive politicisation of everything


A friend of mine, whom I’ll call “Anna” (not her real name) is on Facebook. Anna uses the platform for work (she runs a small business) as well as to engage in Facebook groups with parents of disabled children (she is the mother of a severely disabled son). Anna is a member of a Facebook group which provides support to parents and shares information on disability resources, NDIS etc. Like me, Anna is right of centre and conservative politically and socially, unlike me Anna is non-confrontational and meek. Over the last two years Anna has, time and time again, complained to me how the private Facebook groups she’s involved with have become increasingly politicised and polarised, particularly since the Liberals won in May 2019. Anna has told me specifics and sent me pictures of how progressives use the Facebook groups to upload vicious, unhinged and frequently libellous progressive anti-Morrison and anti-Liberal propaganda and push far-left MSM lies. These people arrogantly assume everyone thinks like them. It’s classic chutzpah, they get away with it because most people are either too polite or too fearful to challenge them. So, whilst I’ve advised my friend to push back on this far-left progressive propaganda, I understand she doesn’t like confrontation and I respect that. Confrontation isn’t for everyone. But even Anna has a limit to what she can tolerate. Two days ago, she finally snapped, a woman in one of her Facebook groups sent the following around to all the other members, with the suggestion “If we don’t laugh we cry! Worth subscribing to her email news”. 

It was a link to Annabel Crabb’s weekly email or, as I prefer to describe it, Annabel Crabb’s weekly dross.  Here’s the opening salvo of Crabb’s dross….

Together In Electric Dreams

Scott Morrison is a former child actor whose parents ran a religious marching club and made him wear a tie to primary school when nobody else did. These early humiliations have – whether by design or accident – created a man who is functionally unembarrassable.” 

The rest of the Crabb dross is also unhinged, I won’t post it all because I don’t want the readers here to become physically sick.

On receiving the above Crabb dross, my friend sent the following message to all the group members….

“Dear All 

Please do not forward to me political commentary. I will discard. Anything to do with our kids, disability and NDIS is okay.” 

A very reasonable response. My friend remained polite (I wouldn’t have).

So, yesterday I received an email from George Christensen (I’m on his email list). I forwarded the email to Anna with the suggestion that she forward it to
her Facebook group, with the same line ”If we don’t laugh we cry! Worth subscribing to his email news” 

I wonder what the response from the group would be to Anna forwarding a George Christensen email. Well, here’s my guess, I suspect they would be horrified, firstly because no doubt they think Christensen is a far-right, neo-Nazi lunatic, secondly because no doubt they would think that Anna and anyone else who shares Christensen’s views are also far-right, neo Nazi lunatics (despite the fact that Anna is the daughter of Holocaust survivors) and thirdly, because such is the arrogance of the progressive in 2021 that they simply refuse to accept that others have different legitimate political opinions to their own and so it’s far easier for them to smear, belittle, ridicule and silence. No wonder they like the Crabb dross.

Oh, and unlike the Crabb dross, there’s nothing nasty in the George Christensen email but that should not surprise us.


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Boambee John
Boambee John
November 15, 2021 8:41 am

Cassie

Normal people have lives. The so-called “progressives” (an euphemism for fascists) have politics. Without politics, they have nothing. No real friends, no social life, only politics. Nothing else.

rosie
rosie
November 15, 2021 9:06 am

Why I got sick of Facebook.

Great your friend said ‘enough’.

miltonf
miltonf
November 15, 2021 9:10 am

I’d nominate zukerbook and the bush-blair-howard war as the greatest abominations of the 21st century so far.

Rabz
November 15, 2021 9:16 am

I shut my spacechook account down back in mid 2010 after getting into a particularly nasty confrontation with a bunch of collectivist imbeciles who were repeatedly sending anti-Abbott screeds to my best friend’s account. Another infuriating aspect of spacechook was the dinosaurs from my past (e.g. idiots I went to school with) popping up there seeking to be “friends”. Yeah, no, thanks.

Haven’t missed it for a second. It was only later on that I actually learned a bit more about that disgusting geek Zuckerberg, which made me even more relieved to have been rid of it.

Bruce of Newcastle
Bruce of Newcastle
November 15, 2021 9:24 am

Cassie – There’s a long essay today, which I’ve only read a part of so far, but I’ll give a link now since one section fits what you say like a glove:

Why Wokeism Is A Religion (14 Nov)

Why does there exist such a massive divide between perception and reality on so many important issues?

Part of the reason appears to stem from the rise of social media and corresponding changes to news media over the last decade. Social media fuels rising and unwarranted certainty, dogmatism, and intolerance of viewpoint diversity and disconfirmatory information. Social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram reward users for sharing information popular with peers, particularly extreme views, and punish users for expressing unpopular, more moderate, and less emotional opinions. This cycle is self-reinforcing. Audiences seek out views that reinforce their own. Experts seek conclusions, and journalists write stories, which affirm the predispositions of their audiences. It may be for these reasons that much of the news media have failed to inform their audiences that there are no racial differences in police killings, that emissions are declining, and that claims of rising trans killings are unscientific.

Another reason may be due to the influence of well-funded advocacy organizations to shape public perceptions, particularly in combination with social media. Organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Campaign, and Drug Policy Alliance have misled journalists, policymakers, and the public, about police killings, drug policy, and trans killings, often by simply leaving out crucial contextual information. The same has been true for climate activists, including those operating as experts and journalists, who withhold information about declining deaths from natural disasters, the cost of disasters relative to GDP growth, and declining U.S. emissions.

But neither of these explanations fully captures the religious quality of so much of the progressive discourse on issues relating to race, climate, trans, crime, drugs, homelessness, and the related issue of mental illness. A growing number of liberal, heterodoxical, and conservative thinkers alike use the word “woke” to describe the religiosity of so many progressive causes today. In his new book, Woke Racism, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that Wokeism should, literally, be considered a religion.

There you go. Facebook is now an actual religious order within which no heresy is allowed. Furthermore just about everything these progressives believe is wrong. Since it is emotional and religious they cannot be persuaded by any logic or real world data. They are true religious fanatics of a world-spanning cult as nutty as Jim Jones’ bunch were.

flyingduk
flyingduk
November 15, 2021 9:30 am

We all need to realise that there are now 2 species of humans (the woke and the awake) and at some point, one of them has to die out. Dont sleep with the enemy.

Boambee John
Boambee John
November 15, 2021 9:31 am

Brucde of N

Did that come from Spiked On-Line? If not, there is a good review of the book there.

GreyRanga
GreyRanga
November 15, 2021 9:34 am

Good post Cassie, Boambee John you are right, their lives are so empty. I have enough to do for another one or two lives, trouble is I am interested in too many things.

Angus Black
Angus Black
November 15, 2021 9:36 am

Remember when Facebook was a way for granny to keep up to date with her grandchildren across the country/world?

The Left destroy everything.

I’m a software engineer (ex-researcher) and I still remember the days when the internet was a wild wacky frontier world with wonderful world-shrinking work and social tools. A little difficult to learn, seriously clunky, but a modern day “wonder of the world”.

Then Tim Berners-Lee provided the syntactic sugar which turned Wonderland into the sewer that is the WWW.

Without Tim, there’d have been no Shitter, no HateBook…

Admittedly, we’d still be suffering the idiosyncrasies of Archie, IRC, Telnet and the rest of the guys…

Tim’s a decent man…but, sadly, doesn’t take an evil man to unleash evil on the World.

Delta A
Delta A
November 15, 2021 9:38 am

Please do not forward to me political commentary.

My niece, a conservative, posted a similar request to her ‘friends’ when any hint of criticism of Dan Andrews drew outpourings of love and support for the bat-eared mong*, along with nasty, personal abuse for daring to dislike him. Her family, including a son doing year 12, suffered through the Melbourne lockdowns and placed the blame squarely where it belonged.

*Thanks to the Cat who coined that phrase.

Bruce of Newcastle
Bruce of Newcastle
November 15, 2021 9:39 am

BJ – It’s by Michael Shellenberger on Substack from 12 Nov. Here’s a direct link. I tend not to give direct links to Substack because it’s a subscription platform a lot of the time, and I assume the repeat of the article on other open sites is with permission from the author, so is kosher.

Boambee John
Boambee John
November 15, 2021 9:44 am

Thanks Bruce, it looks to be more comprehensive than the Spiked item, but covers the same ground.

A reversion to Paganism in under way among the self-proclaimed “elites” of the West.

srr
srr
November 15, 2021 10:20 am

Gradual alright; since oh so very long before the WorldWideWeb of Deception put the politicisation of everything into hyperdrive there have been countless ‘little Solzhenitsyn’s’ out there, warning of what “new & improved ways” of things, were actually designed to bring about in the not too distant future.

Now, here we are at the threshold of that future, peering in, seeing the evils that fill that house we are all being herded into, yet still hating & blaming all the ‘little Solzhenitsyn’s’ for both caring to warn us and not forcing us to listen … because like spoilt brats, we’re still angry at Our Father for loving us enough to give us Free Will.

local oaf
November 15, 2021 10:28 am

All things LEFT are inherently religious and all left-wing people are believers.

The left-wing view of the world is simply a heavily bowdlerised version of Christianity.
All the awkward and uncomfortable, difficult aspects of reality are simply omitted.
The existence of any God or Gods, the inherent fallibility of flesh and blood human beings, the imperfection of all human constructs such as society, justice systems, all dispensed with.

The teachings of Christianity such as “you will always have the poor with you” and “render unto Caesar” explained away so that the left can believe that it is possible to construct a society without poverty. Indeed, a society in which there are no restraints on their desires.

What is retained, is all the parts of Christianity that allow the believer to feel good about themselves. Caring for the poor, outcast and marginalised. Being a good Samaritan, turning the other cheek, love thy neighbour, etc. Anyone consciously trying to live out these ideals would be more than tempted to believe themselves good.

Leftists simply feel that they are good people.

It’s not a conclusion they came to after extensive reading and research and a process of judgement, it’s purely how they feel about themselves. Usually how they’ve felt all their lives.

Any person might question things that they’ve learnt, even things that they’ve believed. I think very few people question how they feel.

Many on the left have felt all of their lives that they are good people. When confronted by other people who disagree with them, they can only conclude that the others are bad people.
If they were to allow that others might also be good, well-meaning people, there would be nothing to distinguish between the leftist and the others. An extremely confronting threat to the very identity of the individual leftist.

Roger
Roger
November 15, 2021 10:39 am

Leftists simply feel that they are good people.

With no doctrine of original sin Leftists believe man is perfectible.

And they’ve killed millions in the attempt to make him so.

Roger W
Roger W
November 15, 2021 10:42 am

local oaf, I think there is a difference between thinking you are a good person and wanting to virtue signal, which is largely what is going on.
In addition, those on the left do not want to debate or engage with evidence etc because this might require them to make more nuanced decisions.
They also seem to be full of hate and anger. Annabel Crabb is a classic example of someone who pretended to be a light, fluffy commentator until allowed off the leash, when she now regularly spews out hate-filled rants. Exactly what is stewing inside that head is anyone’s guess but it certainly is not nice.

EvilElvis
EvilElvis
November 15, 2021 10:45 am

Women on social media. Just look at the majority of comments under any political party post on Facebook, all women and predominantly fawning imbeciles.

The fact that these clowns feel it’s ok to graffiti a disability support page shows what they’re about. Lefty’s supporting lefty’s and the real purpose gets swamped, hopefully with a generous serving of taxpayer funds for whatever grievance they have.

I’ve found nothing on Facebook that special it warrants towing the line when a sharply directed comment is needed to pop the balloon of these loud and proud socialist Muppets. They do it because they think they can get away with it. Punch back hard.

EvilElvis
EvilElvis
November 15, 2021 10:55 am

Roger, local oaf and a few others above are onto it.

Socialist governments and social media have allowed the weak spirited in society to outsource any obligation or assistance they could render to their fellow man. No direct effort required, change a profile picture filter supporting the latest cause and pester through comments seemingly malleable governments into action! The taxpayer funds flood soon flows. Look how well you’ve done, it’s almost like you did it yourself. Now wait for the inevitable social media pat on the head.

Pathetic.

Roger
Roger
November 15, 2021 10:59 am

local oaf, I think there is a difference between thinking you are a good person and wanting to virtue signal, which is largely what is going on.

David Reisman foresaw this emerging social type in ‘The Lonely Crowd’ 70 years ago. But whereas then people signalled their worth to each other via the consumer goods they purchased, now it’s via sharing political opinions on social media.

That doesn’t explain the viciousness of much of it though. For example when Ashley Babbitt was shot Leftists took to social media to complain that WH security didn’t kill more protestors. There is something deeply amiss in the souls of people who think in that way.

dragnet
dragnet
November 15, 2021 11:20 am

As far as Facebook goes, you’ve gotta be in it to win it.
Regrettably there is a preponderance of leftist memes and tendencies on Facebook, but nothing is achieved by abandoning the field of play.
I am on Facebook primarily for enjoyment and escapism and getting and staying in touch with people I like from my past, and from overseas. I unashamedly will share lame pics and memes about cars, bands, and banter generally with a wide cross-section of people, including rusted-on leftists.
Nearly every day however, I will also post political content, whether of my composition, or Sharing articles from e.g Spiked, Takimag, Samizdata, Quadrant and Breitbart. In addition, if I see particularly egregious idiocy from leftist sources I will wade in and have a spray.
Whilst I receive and fend off blowback and brickbats from the lefties, I also will receive support from unexpected quarters, which confirms to me that there is a generally sensible mass of people who although not actively engaged in political activity, share a “rightist” world-view.
The trick is to walk the line between playing at being the ordinary happy-go-lucky punter and being an activist. If I were to overdo the latter people would quite rightly begin to see me as a repetitive nutter, and stop paying attention to my gems.

WolfmanOz (just existing in Melb. now)
WolfmanOz (just existing in Melb. now)
November 15, 2021 11:45 am

Ditto dragnet.

I used to post some blogs on FB which did infuriate some of my friends . . . the lefty ones.

I’ve posted rather less this year as I was find it tiring and it was just making me more and more angry – not that I’m NOT angry with the bullshit going on in the world at the moment.

Chris
Chris
November 15, 2021 11:49 am

Cassie,
Thanks for all you write.

local oaf
November 15, 2021 12:00 pm

That doesn’t explain the viciousness of much of it though. For example when Ashley Babbitt was shot Leftists took to social media to complain that WH security didn’t kill more protestors. There is something deeply amiss in the souls of people who think in that way.

Yes, I think lefties are actually threatened by anyone disagreeing with them. They feel physically threatened!
To them, it’s not just a dispute over ideas or practicalities, any disagreement is an actual assault on their very identity.
Words are violence, as they like to say.

Lee
Lee
November 15, 2021 12:18 pm

That doesn’t explain the viciousness of much of it though. For example when Ashley Babbitt was shot Leftists took to social media to complain that WH security didn’t kill more protestors. There is something deeply amiss in the souls of people who think in that way.

On one conservative blog, a lefty troll said that Babbitt deserved to be killed because she was guilty of “treason.”

Lee
Lee
November 15, 2021 12:21 pm

I have never used Facebook, Twitter, etc., and never will.
“Cesspits” accurately describes them.

rosie
rosie
November 15, 2021 1:43 pm

The one element of Facebook I maintain is messenger, for my overseas pals, and chat groups set up for siblings and another for my children. Handy way to catch up without unfriends sticky beaking.

Roger
Roger
November 15, 2021 2:37 pm

Yes, I think lefties are actually threatened by anyone disagreeing with them. They feel physically threatened!

Yes, it is likely that they are insecure because they’ve never systematically thought through the ideology they’ve subscribed to and examined the validity of its presuppositions. Rather, they’ve adopted it because it’s what all the “cool” people – starting with the hip teachers at school and on up to media celebrities – seem to believe and associating with them boosts their otherwise insecure identity. They therefore perceive criticism of their beliefs as personal attack. That also means that people who don’t share the same views are “othered” to the point of losing their human dignity and any respect owed them as a consequence of that. We know from the history of the 20th C. where that path leads.

local oaf
November 15, 2021 3:06 pm

We know from the history of the 20th C. where that path leads.

Yes, the “others” need to be separated from society so they can’t spread their evil.

We’re doing it tough out here in society- make them work hard in their camps.

We find it hard to make ends meet, why should their food be as good as ours. Halve their rations while they perform the slave labour we assigned them!

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Border Closure

Annabel Crabb says some lunatic stuff on Twitter. (“All Tories are morons” – that sort of stuff)
Rather surprising that she’s never been publicly called out for it.

However the above “weekly email” (crikey!) from her is new territory. It is almost deranged.
It’d be instructive to see the whole thing.

rosie
rosie
November 15, 2021 8:20 pm
Rohan
Rohan
November 16, 2021 9:39 am

To the average lefty, anyone to the right of Che Guevara is considered a right wing extremist.

However, many are waking up to the totalitarian nonsense we’re living through.

Miss Anthropist
Miss Anthropist
November 16, 2021 12:28 pm

Leftards ruin everything they touch.
Some people are less astute and it takes them a bit of time to realise that.
I blame the fact they are vaccinated.

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