Wokus Pocus and the Culture War – The Spectator Australia

As we fight to tackle the climate crisis and the inequality crisis, we should be campaigning side by side with socialistssays Adam Bandt, the poster boy for all things Woke down under.

The Liberal Party must fight the latest Australian infection of the Western ideological virus misleadingly termed the Culture Wars but is more accurately described as an assault on the values of Western civilisation by the deep green progressive Left.

With the Greens keen to wage a Culture War, the Liberal Party simply cannot afford to ignore it. Many Australians may not personally be interested in the Culture War, but the Culture Warriors of the Intersectional Left are very much interested in them (as well as the books they read, the television shows they watch, the food they eat, the video games they play, and the curriculum which is taught to their children).

The Liberal Party should start rearming itself along classical liberal lines to fight the war on three fronts: Immigration, national guilt, and political correctness in schools all of which are core business of the Woke Intersectional Left Internationale.

In this war, the Liberal Party must avoid the kind of tactics which define American politics, where the influential US Christian Right denies evolutionary biology, was complicit in the Iraq debacle, and its right to liferdom that undermines female autonomy and pushes women toward the Left. Thankfully, such an agenda has no substantial support in Australia.

Nevertheless, something must be brought to bear against the cultish doctrines of the Woke Intersectional Left. What we need is a return to classical liberal values.

Immigration and refugee policy in Australia is typically framed in extreme terms: 100 per cent pro-open borders, or complete bans on immigration (often highlighting particular races and religions).

From a classically liberal perspective, the critical issue for migration is ensuring that potential new Australians share a love of civil liberties and established freedoms while having a set of beliefs compatible with Australias existing culture. This is the difference between accepting migrants from diverse cultures while excluding those who harbour extreme or radicalised views on politics, religion, and other social issues at odds with society. Liberals have a no tolerance policy for troublemakers and radicalised violence, while the Left fail to distinguish dangerous behaviours in prospective arrivals.

In theory, the Left should agree with Liberals on this point, given they would no doubt raise an objection if the ruling party began importing new migrants from an overwhelmingly hard-line Christian-right region whose influx would endanger progressive activism, such as the overturning of same-sex marriage. Yet, due to the Lefts fixation on intersectional victim politics, it is considered racist to worry about fundamentalist behaviour even if it contradicts directly with progressive ideology. Some call this, competing victimhood identities where one category in Woke supersedes the needs of another.

This brings us to the second issue the Liberals must address: national guilt. In the words of the poet Justin Bieber: Is it too late now to say sorry?

Australia is a country of immigrants and, of course, its original inhabitants. This messy melting pot is what made this country great. The illiberal response to this natural evolution of ethnicities is that we should feel guilty about creating a multicultural and prosperous first-world country. Guilty because of British colonialism (they forget and dont ever consider what it would be like under the Dutch or the French God forbid the Chinese or Belgium conquest).

Instead of celebrating what has been achieved, our institutions focus on Indigenous victimhood. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the Senator for the Northern Territory and the former deputy mayor of Alice Springs, has pointed this out numerous times and suffered for it. Indigenous communities need groundwork, not symbolic gestures. National guilt is a self-indulgent farce that has created a profitable activist industry and very little else. The Liberals must address this.

How? It must begin with education. Liberal-led education can have no place for Woke, Intersectional Social Justice, or Marxist-derived national guilt ideology. Its most toxic variation, Critical Race Theory, is a manifestation profoundly culturally and politically divisive. Its aim is to turn innocent children into victors and oppressors based on skin colour. The Liberal Party needs to reject CRT (or any pedagogy derived from it), and for two core reasons: firstly, it is unscientific, and secondly, because it is profoundly illiberal not only in its divisive conclusions but in its racist premises.

Let us be clear it is a matter of historical record that atrocities did occur during the colonial period. These are parts of Australian history and should be taught denial of reality is setting oneself up for failure. But Critical Race Theory is, as the name suggests, atheorynot historical fact. As the liberal philosopher Karl Popper showed a scientific theory is necessarily falsifiable. CRT is not only unfalsifiable; it rejects demands for data or evidence. It dismisses science itself as a manifestation of white male hegemony. Liberalism demands individual freedom, but CRT brings even the existence of the individual into doubt.

It is impossible for a major political party to not have a position on CRT and its woke aficionados. We now have a Labor government in bed with deep Green wokery. The Liberals must make their stand to safeguard the future of Western Civilisation by making sure there is an acceptance of secular civic values, a rejection of national original sin also known as collective guilt, and to bring an end to totalitarian-like ideology in the education system that is pushing us toward an era dominated by social pseudoscience.

Article co-authored by Lana Starkey PhD candidate in seventeenth-century literature at the University of Queensland and a freelance writer and Dr. Andrew Russell.

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Wokus Pocus and the Culture War - The Spectator Australia