Peter Strempel, 13 July 2026
Over the weekend I foolishly spent a few hours commenting on a post by a Broome-based ‘digital creator’ masquerading as a ‘citizen journalist’ (BASE News Australia) who had decried an interview (by Sarah Ferguson on 7:30) with an Iranian professor as proof that the ABC has been captured by evil right wing ideologues, and proclaiming a pretty simple-minded Iranian propaganda message as a triumph of ‘flaming’ or ‘burning’ (or some other such juvenile punishment) of the ABC host.
The point I made was that the ABC host was constrained by an editorial policy that has been unethically influenced by long-term attacks from right wing extremists, and that the professor offered a defence of Iranian terrorism visited on its own people, and the rest of the world, as somehow being a secret Israeli conspiracy all along. It was such a silly proposition I couldn’t quite understand how anyone could think it credible.
Nor could I understand how dismissing Iranian propaganda must necessarily be mistaken as support for Israeli-US attacks on Iran. And yet that was the argument I let myself be drawn into: that I must be a supporter of Judaeofascist genocide for not taking the Iranian side. Uncritically. As if ignorance of contemporary world history, ethics, or even my own self interest as an infidel Iran has declared fair game for torture or murder must be dismissed as irrelevant.
My argument was that all the armchair do-gooders on the thread were stunningly uncritical in enforcing binary thinking, demanding that issues are always black and white, only that side or the ‘other’ side, our tribe or theirs. I can think of many entirely rational grounds for dismissing both sides in this binary confrontation, or to be indifferent to either. That’s called pluralism, and relies on independent thought and the freedom to give voice to it.
I faced not just bots and fake profiles seeking to condemn me as a supporter of Israeli genocide, but real people earnestly trying to mansplain (there were a few women in there too, but is womansplaining a thing?) to me how I must either support Iranian or Iraeli-US lies. No permission to choose a third option, or multiple alternatives.
My response was to reject this artificial binary constraint. My interlocutors either could not understand, or refused to acknowledge pluralism as a valid option. As far as I can tell that failure or refusal to understand and/or acknowledge pluralism is a totalitarian impulse; a kind of pseudo-religious ideological faith.
Unfortunately, the same totalitarian impulse seems to have infected more formal progressive politics too. None more so than the appalling Stalinist political correctness that appears to hold sway inside the Australian Greens.
The Guardian ran an editorial comment today that suggested the Australian Greens had flatlined in opinion polling while One Nation had soared because the former had not ‘connected’ with voter anger. Maybe. What they have connected with is tribalism and censorious claims to moral certainty, which is always an ominously absolutist claim, and more than a little religious in its ambition. A claim to knowledge of absolute, objective truth.
The worst political mistake the Greens made in recent times is to align themselves with Iranian propaganda defending its sponsorship of world wide terrorism, including the funding and control of Hamas, and their joint, complete lack of empathy or mercy for the Palestinian people. Neither Iran nor Hamas give a damn how many Palestinians are slaughtered in their cynical game. Not too many voters would defend Israeli genocidal policies. But why would that mean they would choose to support murderous Iranian imperial ambitions instead? And why would anyone using social media let mostly anonymous Greens zealots lecture or condemn them for not supporting a doctrinaire policy enforced with the methods of Stalinist witchhunting, coercion, cancellation, or even expulsion from the party? Would the Greens take people into the woods and shoot them in the back of the neck if they could get away with it? I sometimes wonder.
Which brings me to a second, less high profile strategic mistake made by the Greens that is possibly even more unforgivable: the obscene, perverse obsession with gender queer-transsexual ‘rights’. Most recently it erupted in the expulsion of Greens co-founder Drew Hutton for defending freedom of speech against the sacred cow status within the party of so-called ‘trans rights’. It turned out the expulsion was illegal even under the party’s own rules, but it demonstrated the Stalinist orientation of the Greens. Free speech and pluralism of opinion were to be sacrificed to the politically correct accusation—not reality or truth—of transphobia, and the demonization of gender critical feminists, now pejoratively dubbed trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) despite the fact that most of them simply want the same thing the scared cows do: the right to choose their own identity. Not long ago this unhealthy ideological obsession led to the expulsion of a party convener on entirely vaccuous grounds. (I have examined the TERF witchhunting hysteria in detail previously.) Nothing to do with transphobia, unless you also accuse such feminists of misandry, and a kind of politically incorrect misanthropy more generally. (See Freri and Ferguson, Sakkal and Massola, Feminist Legal Clinic, Tuohy.)
For me the foulness of this Stalinist culture war was driven home by a conversation I had a couple of years ago, in which I was called a transphobe by a Greens supporter for proposing that there are no rights if they don’t apply to all people equally. The argument from my interlocutor was that trans people deserved special rights because they were more discriminated against than most others. I asked the question: ‘You argue that trans people deserve not one, but two identities. They are trans people, but also either men or women, depending on their chosen orientation. But feminists insisting on gender specific definitions of their own identities get to have no legitimate identity at all. Isn’t that just misogynist witchhunting dressed up in politically correct clothes?’
What I got in reply was adolescent petulance about not acknowledging how wrong I was in not just agreeing with the Greens’ ideologically distorted view.
I responded by arguing that any right reserved for only one group of people is not a right at all, but a privilege. Implicit in such a conception is the idea that all ‘rights’ become arbitrary and contingent on whim, subject to being bestowed or withdrawn by fiat. And that the largest group of people facing uninterrupted historical discrimination are women, however defined, but that the Greens make no argument to elevate women to sacred cow status, because there’s no guarantee that such a position could offer cynical exploitation of culture wars tropes.
The response was a hurt expression, followed a few seconds later by a repetition of the charge that I was a morally deficient person for not agreeing to be dictated to, and censored, in the name of some imagined righteousness, and absolute certainty about a ridiculous subversion of ethics and logic.
I doubt many voters have much sympathy for such tyrannical, ideological, and dishonest positions. If the Greens choose to be totalitarian in their political instincts and actions, they will never transcend minor party status. There just aren’t enough sacred cows who vote, and plenty of voters for whom creation of a scared cow status for anyone is anathema to their daily concerns.
The Greens’ ideological imbecility aside, perhaps worst of all for Australian voters is that the supposedly progressive ALP has endorsed a special envoy for Israeli subversion of Australian sovereignty. An envoy who is busy demanding that Israeli counterintelligence be in charge of supervising the public conduct and speech of every Australian, especially in government, in universities, and now also at the ABC and SBS. There is little doubt the current Israeli regime is a genocidal Judaeofascist autocracy—fascist because it gives the power of law to ideological/religious bigotry. But it may soon be a crime to say that. There’s nothing progressive about such a policy, and imposing partisanship in a foreign blood feud with no outcome other than barbaric cruelty and bloodshed in perpetuity is not a popular policy in Australia.
Being dispassionate about such issues makes it easier to understand why there is still so much support for right wing extremists, whose policies are undoubtedly the worst for the nation, and who are uniformly supportive of the Judaeofascist Israel. In fact it was the right wing News-Nine-Seven media cartel that conducted a hysterical public campaign demanding the subversion of Australian sovereignty in favour of censorship by Israel in this country. But the political right has successfully positioned itself as the saviour from ‘left wokeness’. Never mind it has its own baleful political correctness.
It seems no matter which way you may choose to
vote, you have to vote against secular democracy, freedom of thought
and speech, and against the pluralism without which individual
liberty and political choice in Australia will be extinguished. And,
for all the ideologically deluded numbskulls who want it this way, my
final word is that multiculturalism isn’t possible in such an
environment either, so the ‘progressives’ I described here are
actually not much better than One Nation nihilists and their
monoculture.