Back in my talk radio days on 2GB I used to refer to the wacky hall of mirrors, the world of the crazy concave and convex, to create an image of the politically correct where everything is so stretched, compacted, twisted and distorted out of shape so as to barely resemble the original. This was alluding to the sideshow hall of mirrors we used to see at the Royal Easter Show and other exhibitions around Australia.
The extract below is from the Andrew Bolt column Mirror morality, when evil is good and what he describes is becoming more and more familiar and no longer just “political correctness gone mad” but a main feature of cultural Marxism as it metastasizes across the Australian social and cultural landscape.
Bolt makes a very interesting point about how identity politics is “mirror morality” (ie) The opposite of what you would expect, like tolerating intolerance or fighting sexism with sexism or in the case if the QUT 18c case, fighting segregation with segregation and racism with racism.
“….THE ABC’s mad stunt on Wednesday — replacing male presenters with women — is the latest example of the mirror morality of the narcissists. Here is the ABC actually being sexist to show it’s not.
Similarly, we see the Left being racist to show they’re not. Being intolerant to show they’re not.
Everything is flipped, left to right, just as you get when you admire your face in a mirror. As people obsessed with identity politics do.
Let me give another example of this mirror morality of the narcissists, where everything is reversed in their self-admiring reflection. When I grew up, to be free of racism meant wanting to treat everyone equally — regardless of their race.
No one said that better than the sainted Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
But now? The narcissists pushing identity politics have flipped that around, too. These modern anti-racists now demand people be judged by their race. They demand people get special funding and rights on the basis of their race.
They demand that jobs be set aside for people of a particular race, like one the Victorian Government advertised last month, seeking “an Aboriginal Victorian as a Commissioner of the Victorian Environmental Water Holder”.
My third example? I know as the child of migrants that to be tolerant was once thought to mean treating everyone alike, regardless of their culture. But now tolerance means treating people of different cultures differently. In fact, tolerance now means defending intolerance.
For instance, Matthew Myers, a judge who identifies as Aboriginal and leads a federal inquiry, last month suggested a startling change to make sure we jailed fewer Aborigines.
“We might need to look at the law and say, do we actually need to treat people differently so that they may be treated equally,” he said.
By which he meant jailing some people less for the same crime simply because of their claimed “race”.
Yes, this new tolerance means not treating people differently, depending on their culture, even when that means tolerating what we shouldn’t….” Andrew Bolt: Mirror morality, when evil is good