RUTHFULLY YOURS

Australian university students are starting to rise up against Left brainwashing and political correctness. But such rebels must be prepared to pay a high price for openly challenging the zeitgeist on campus.

Case in point: a young woman studying and working at Melbourne University, who spoke up at an Institute of Public Affairs function in Melbourne last night (Wed). She asked Spectator editor Rowan Dean, who was there for the launch of his novel Corkscrewed, how she could openly express her politically incorrect views at the university and still hold on to her job.

Dean said she would suffer for speaking out but ultimately would be respected. Many others were in similar situations. “You have to be true to what you believe in. Put up with  the ratbags. It’s sticks-and-stones stuff.  But, yes, you can lose your job unfortunately.  That is Australia today. It is terrifying, but do you want to work in a place where you are forever watching what you say?  If they do you wrong,  go to Andrew Bolt and spread it on national TV.”

IPA policy director Simon Breheny said young people are now  recognizing that Western ideology is best and also under attack. He told the student,  “You will lose friends but gain others. People must know what is happening. So many people are making the same calculations as you.   If they all keep quiet to keep their job, no-one will know this is happening. You’re not alone at all. Our IPA campus coordinators say a thousand kids have joined  our program in the past 18 months.

“Academics, school teachers, contact us to thank us for our work and say they feel the same way. In future there will be universities set up where truth is important; there’ll be big big changes in the next five to ten years. It’ll be massive.”

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IPA Executive Director John Roskam wondered what would happen in a university tutorial if a student suggested that Abbott had been an effective Prime Minister. “The spirit of inquiry at universities has entirely disappeared,” he said.

Dean, who has edited the Australian Spectator since 2014, said,  “If you don’t kick back against political correctness it gets you. Friends and family that 15 years ago were happy, strong conservatives have completely succumbed and think carefully about risking a wrong word — or they just stay silent.

“I had my sister-in-law screeching obscenities at Christmas lunch because I dared comment that London now resembles Bahrain.

“When someone says an idiotic, politically correct thing, strike back, say ‘no’. I talk of Sudanese gangs in Melbourne not because I’m racist but because that’s what they are:  Sudanese gangs. Your papers in Victoria won’t tell you that but in NSW, we know.”

A classic was Canadian PM  Justin Trudeau last week correcting a woman talking about charity volunteering who referred to ‘mankind’. Trudeau said the proper term was ‘peoplekind’.

“PC overtakes everything and is always there in the foreground clouding people’s vision,” Dean said.

Australia’s chief scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, Dean continued, had admitted it didn’t matter how much Australia reduced its emissions, as there would be no impact on global temperatures. ‘The whole climate story collapsed at that point. But most people remain genuinely confused, because conservatives have been too quiet and passive and continue to let climate people get away with falsehoods. In the UK if you query the climate change thing, they think you are completely bonkers.

“The chief scientist’s statement is one of those nuggets or insights  that sceptics should be spreading and provoking believers with, whatever the damage to goodwill at dinner parties.”

Dean ridiculed PM Malcolm Turnbull’s talk of a ‘trilemma’ [emissions, affordability and reliability] on electricity. “Piss off the emissions one; just have the dilemma about lower-priced reliable energy.”

He named Liberal MHR  Craig Kelly (NSW) as a person with the Margaret Thatcher spirit to sweep away falsehoods. “He is utterly unafraid to call out climate change as a fraud. We need politicians like that  who are not beholden to the prevailing political line. Another who is willing to speak the truth is Andrew Hastie [Lib., WA], in the face of vile onslaughts from the PC crowd.”

Dean was backed by Breheny, who noted another tragedy of the climat scare. “Science has been gripped by politics,”he said, “and politics has smashed science. It’s a great shame.”

Dean summed up by saying that humor and ridicule are the best weapons against the PC tribe, since humor reveals the absurdities of posturers. They want to be taken seriously for arguments that have no merit whatsoever.

He said his magazine’s three criteria for contributors were to be provocative, insightful and engaging. His London boss had told him the issue with the cover illustration of a young lady in a bikini and a burka was the best in Spectator’s history. But it could not run in the UK where political correctness ruled and the energy and excitement had been kicked out of the British people. It was as if all of Great Britain had become the ABC.