From Charlie Kirk to Gaza, disagreement is treason

The escalating crackdown on dissenting thought and opinion is taking Australia down a dark road

“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

The Roman poet and satirist, Juvenal, was talking about Roman emperors and the public who allowed them, trading their collective power for panem et circenses – bread and circuses – or food and entertainment.

Thinking of it in today’s context is not exactly an original concept – the capital in the dystopian Hunger Games series Panem was named for Juvenal’s second-century observations – but it is more often than not applied to politics, when arguably the media is one of the first institutions to fall victim to baser instincts.

We saw a perfect example of that in the media’s response to the death of Charlie Kirk – when rightwing media acted on behalf of the propaganda machines and identified public figures it didn’t believe were mourning correctly. By that, it was anyone who was not slavishly lionising Kirk, or who dared to point out his actual history in his own words.

Hannah Ferguson and Abbie Chatfield were favoured targets – both for their reach, and because they have become the lighting rod for any leftwing criticism, along with Cam Wilson (for tame comments made in a private group chat) and myself. Ferguson and Chatfield bore the brunt (despite not having criticised Kirk and lamenting the loss of life) with Sky News and News Corp (the Daily Mail is barely worth mentioning) then targeting others for having liked any of their posts they disagreed with.

Bread and circuses indeed. Keep them fed and entertained and no one thinks too hard about what is actually going on. And while Australian media has dedicated thousands of words to the cancellation of US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, outside of new media, such as Lamestream, Deepcut and Ette Media, there has been no acknowledgement of the very real danger of News Corp and its subsidiaries aiming its attack armies at people for the sin of not mourning one of their chosen ‘correctly’.

News Corp have always leveraged their cultural influence and, increasingly, their US audience, strategically wooed for their YouTube views and the money those eyeballs bring with them, into attacking those it views as enemies – progressives, politically misaligned, women, minorities, or influential in a way it doesn’t agree with. But it is now working to bring more of the US media culture to Australia. Australia’s rightwing politicians are more than happy to jump on the bandwagon – LNP senator Matt Canavan has gleefully taken up invitations to criticise Chatfield on Sky News previously with little, if any, pushback.

What is left of the legacy progressive media in Australia rarely defends journalists or commentators from public attack, either going silent or reporting on the backlash with a few lines dedicated to what the chosen target either did or didn’t actually say. But it’s mostly a head-in-the-sand strategy, focussed on ‘not feeding’ the attacks – which creates the impression there is just the News Corp take and that’s it.

As the Trump regime continues ticking off Umberto Eco’s 14 common features of fascism (we are through the list in just nine months of this second term), ‘disagreement is treason’ is becoming more and more normalised.

You could see that in the response to the very tame questioning of the ABC’s John Lyons to Trump, where the veteran reporter asked the US president about maintaining his business interests while sitting in the Oval Office. There was nothing wrong with the questions, but sitting Liberal senator Sarah Henderson demanded the ABC explain itself (for what, the crime of journalism?). Former Howard minister Gary Hardgrave demanded someone “needs to lose their job over this” and former Labor minister Joel Fitzgibbon questioned how it was in the public interest for the national broadcaster to ask questions of the US president.

Why? Because Trump declared that being questioned was “hurting Australia very much right now”. And right on cue, those willing to kiss the orange assinego jumped into line. There was pushback there, but that we have reached the point of even needing it shows how far we have slipped.

None of this should be a surprise – Australian media and politicians have allowed the Overton window to slip even further to the right by the refusal to call a genocide a genocide, or even de-centre Israel, so of course we are seeing slips in other areas. None of it is unrelated, as many have been screaming from the beginning.

But we risk slipping even further. Australian media, held captive by US security-bros who cannot see the new world for the defence contracts, continues to demand we kowtow to a panicked despot who is about as stable as an elephant balancing on a pencil. In these circumstances, defending journalists for doing their job, or commentators for accurately reflecting history seems brave, when really it’s the bare minimum.

But in a world ruled by bread and circuses, all we can be hopeful for is crumbs.