An open letter to elite progressives
Stop. Stop now. Stop before it's too late for you, fools.
Dear elite progressives,
We need to talk. Well more to the point, you need to listen.
We’ve had to listen to you a lot. You’re the politicians, the celebrities, the media personalities, the academics, the health authorities, the school teachers.
We’ve spent our whole damn lives listening to you people. Now it’s your turn.
‘But who are we?’ I hear you ask.
Good question.
You’re pretty much anyone who went to uni. You’re all the people in Australia who complied with the teacher enough to get the piece of paper that said you get to be a professional.
You’re the ‘educated’. That’s what moulded and formed your caste. You were indoctrinated on campus into a worldview that you see as so natural and normal and obvious that anyone who doesn’t share that worldview must be evil and ignorant and gross, and you have spent every day since you graduated immersed in a culture which reinforces that worldview in an expensive, usually taxpayer-funded echo chamber.
‘And who are you?’ I guess is the logical follow-on.
We’re everyone else. Your heroes call us things like deplorable, racist, white supremacist, Nazi. I’m going to call our group heritage Australians. We’re the ones who never got indoctrinated enough to buy into the utopia. We’re the ones who haven’t changed.
Let’s talk more about you, though. Let’s break down why I’m calling you elite as well as progressive. I’ll start with progressive.
You most likely grew up in or adjacent to one of our capital cities, or else moved to one after school. You probably grew up religion-free, or else had experiences with inauthentic religion that made you an even more hardened secularist. If you’re from an immigrant background, you may have kept a superficial religious veneer that you could wrap around your progressive identity in order to gain more status among your group.
You people are very into status.
The void of meaning in your life was filled by the doctrines you imbibed at school and university. Your school calendar was filled with celebrations of things like International Women’s Day, Harmony Day, NAIDOC Week, Sorry Day and Earth Hour.
Your school lessons reinforced the same ideological worldview. In English, you learned that the voices of straight white men are privileged and the voices of brave and stunning BIPOCs and refugees are silenced. In History, you learned that white supremacist British stole the land from the peaceful Indigenous people. Just to make sure you learned it, you were taught it every single year.
In Science, you learned that greedy white capitalists driving cars was killing polar bears, and then in Sex Ed you learned that dildos are an authentic and liberating way to express your sexual identity.
Most of all, however, you learned that people like you are more advanced than the rest of humanity because you are enlightened. People like you have left behind the dark superstitions of tribe and race, and instead are global citizens ready to enlighten the brave and stunning people of colour everywhere so that one day a transracial, transgender and transcendent post-human people-kind can reach to the stars and fight racism and fascism in distant galaxies for all eternity.
You can fully expect to be on those spaceships one day too because you’re in the upper crust. You’re smart. You’re educated. You’re the elite.
And for as long as we all can remember, the wind has been in your sails. Technology was creating a digital global village while open borders policies were making your local neighbourhood into an actual one. The noodles just got better and better every year. Consumer capitalism was making the gadgets you became addicted to cheaper every year too, and as your job usually requires you sitting at a computer all day sending emails the COVID lockdowns were no hassle at all.
In fact, you got to spend more time eating noodles with your cats in your one-bedroom apartment and swiping on Tinder. Life was good.
There are stormclouds on the horizon of your utopia, though. We know it and you know it. An ominous foreboding that somewhere something or someone might be preventing your galactic rainbow federation utopia from being realised.
First, there was Brexit. Then Trump. Then Mark Latham became a Nazi. And Pauline was back.
What the hell was happening?
You noticed you kept getting trolled really hard online by nasty bogans who didn’t run away when you called them the names you’d heard them called by your teachers at school. When you argued with them, their points were like nothing you’d heard before. The more you became outraged, the more they laughed. You realised something horrifying.
There are people in this country who don’t think like you. Not only do they not think like you; they don’t like you, either.
It was really triggering, wasn’t it?
It’s OK.
You can let it out.
Just breathe.
I’m writing to you on behalf of those people, the heritage Australians. We didn’t go to uni, mostly. Or if we did, it was a miserable experience during which we had to pretend to think otherwise than common sense and clear reason would dictate.
Most of us don’t work jobs which require just sitting at a computer. Some of us work in things like warehouses, where we ship out your Amazon packages. Or in hospitality and retail, where we take your order and find the right size for you. Or we drive trucks or dig holes or cut down trees or build houses or do a million other jobs which are invisible to you but which create the physical utopia you inhabit while you send emails and Zoom.
The last couple of decades have, on the whole, not been great for heritage Australians. 50 years ago, a hardworking man without a high school certificate or trade could still provide for a family and have a decent standard of living. There were jobs in factories or in shops or in transportation that could provide enough for a family so that the wife could stay home and do her role of caring for the kids.
That’s not possible anymore, largely thanks to decisions made by you, the elites.
Elites in finance made decisions that made housing unaffordable for heritage Australians. Elites in politics made decisions that offshored high-paying working-class jobs to Asia, while opening the borders to those same people for their kids to go to uni and then become elite here.
Elites in government created burdensome rules and regulations which have made the work heritage Australians do harder and harder. Since the biological attack from China two years ago, elites in public health have launched attack after attack upon the small business sector that heritage Australians rely on for employment.
And then, the cherry on top of it all, the political elite decided that anyone who wouldn’t take the untested jab would have their livelihood taken away.
When we look back one day on the unprecedented popular revolt which overthrew the Australian elite in the early twenty-first century, that will be seen as the trigger. The mandates were the spark that lit the bonfire.
All of it will be your fault.
You see, you think you’ve been sorted into the decision-making caste because you’re clever and special. That’s not really the case. What made your admittance to the elite possible was that you’re ideologically compliant. You’re willing to say 2 + 2 = 5 every day without fail if it means keeping your job, your status and your ability to look down on those bogan loser racists you hate so much.
Those stupid bigots who still, like, believe the Bible lol.
You just want them all gone, don’t you? Deplatformed, fired, exiled, starved, unpersoned, whatever. Just, like, cancel them already.
You’re going to find out pretty soon where that path leads. Once this class struggle goes kinetic, you’re going to stop winning very fast.
Get out of your bubble and develop a skerrick of self-awareness and humility before it’s too late.
Stop this mad course you’re on. If not for your sake, do it for the sake of your cats.
Who’s going to buy them noodles if you’re not around anymore?
You can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of doing so.
I’m beginning to look forward to the fast approaching Day of the Rope.