When Even Media Watch Almost Gets It

Recently viewers across Australia were left open-mouthed when the ABC’s Media Watch screened an episode which didn’t contain any of the usual inner-city-green-left-feminist-indigenous propaganda that routinely masquerades as current affairs on the national, taxpayer funded network. The story was, incredibly considering the source, about whether the trans-ideology-supporting lobby group ACON (The Aids Council of New South Wales), has undue influence over state institutions in Australia, including police departments, local governments, the Department of Defence, SBS, and the ABC: in total, over sixty local, state and federal agencies. Media Watch asked if the ideology of Britain’s Stonewall, the increasingly embattled LGBTQ+ rights organisation, (which is a trans lobby group), had been imported wholesale into Australia. (watch the segment here)

The subject is doubly controversial because Stonewall has recently been put under considerable pressure in the United Kingdom because of possible malpractice, including allegedly providing false legal advice to organisations and government departments in relation to trans issues.

Nestled within the Media Watch segment, though, and mentioned favourably by presenter Paul Barry, was the idea that the philosophy of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) represented a positive approach to social issues. The ideology was accepted, on its face, as a force for good. This is similar, at least in its approach to evidence, to the claim that Lysenkoism (the pseudo-science officially sanctioned in the Soviet Union), which caused untold suffering due to food shortages, especially in Ukraine, had nothing to do with the ideology of Marxism. In other words, Paul Barry was looking at the trees but didn’t see the forest. This is a perfect example of how DEI works – explicitly designed to appear benign, moral and decent to casual observers. The appearance, though, is an illusion designed to mislead about its true aims.

DEI ideology is a Trojan Horse designed to override reason, logic, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, the scientific method, the free market, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of conscience. Put bluntly, DEI attacks basic truths in all their obvious simplicity. Moreover, to put this in plain, but perhaps, to the unenlightened observer, hyperbolic language: the entire Enlightenment project is under threat because of the implicit, irrational postmodern assumptions underpinning the DIE.

How advocates and activists achieve their aims is through the constant use of the logical fallacy of equivocation, where a word or a concept, which on the surface has a commonly understood and seemingly obvious meaning, is recast by activists in an arcane or unusual way. Two people having a conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion can use the same words and language, but they could be talking about two entirely different conceptions of the world. The result is akin to an honest man shaking hands with a pickpocket: he thinks a handshake signifies honesty, but it’s only afterwards he realises that his watch, wallet and phone are missing. To give one paradigmatic example, used repeatedly by DEI activists (there are so many instances of fallacious arguments it’s almost impossible to choose from so many examples): ‘intersex’ does not mean a person has no sex or that they are situated biologically somewhere between the two sexes. It also doesn’t mean that they had their sex arbitrarily assigned at birth. Intersex people are definitively male or female – there are only two options. Their condition is a developmental anomaly, and the reason they were historically ‘assigned a sex at birth’ was because of the unsophistication of earlier medical science.

What, though, do the words and the DEI ideology mean in practice, and not in the zany, multicoloured smorgasbord of smiling wonderfulness in which it is commonly presented? To put it simply: it’s the deliberate diminution of individual human rights in a liberal democracy. Instead of the current policy of negative rights predominant in Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, where people are told what is illegal and what actions they explicitly cannot do, but where all other consensual actions are permitted, we are now trapped in a social jail, a panopticon, in Foucault’s terminology, where all our speech and actions are possible crimes. This is literally the world of a dystopian novel where paranoia about saying the wrong thing is pervasive and commissars parse every syllable for thoughtcrimes.

DEI in practice is the privileging of politically acceptable groups or ideas over individual rights. It is not diversity of opinion, inclusiveness of individual conscience or equity of association. DEI disallows opinions which don’t conform to a socially imposed consensus. At its most benign, dissidents will not be promoted at work, or hired in the first place; at its most malign, iconoclasts will pay a significant price for their nonconformity by having their reputations traduced and their lives ruined. You will have noticed name-calling and the destruction of offenders’ reputations are the immediate reaction and first strategy of advocates.

In practical terms, under the rules of DEI, individuals are not allowed state their beliefs in matters of conscience or of personal morality. Redefinitions of what is deemed ‘hateful’ will limit expressions of free speech, no matter how worthy or noble the person’s intentions. And following the inevitable social or legal prohibition of iconoclastic ideas, the right of citizens to protest the government, or against what they perceive as socially unacceptable behaviour, or against perceived unjust laws, will be redefined as ‘hate crimes’.

A less noticeable impact of DEI will be on the success or failure of young people who have been told that the existential problems of life are signs of ‘neurodiversity’ or of mental illness, thus excusing self-destructive behaviour that will have profoundly negative consequences. DEI follows the philosophy of Queer Theory which aims to make the normal abnormal and vice versa. In other words, it ‘queers’, how we view the world. The normalising of mental illness is part of this process. In the words of the ideology, we are all neurodiverse, which means that there is no difference between someone, for example, who suffers from schizophrenia and someone who doesn’t like spiders or is afraid of heights. That this will have grave consequences for people suffering debilitating mental illness goes without saying. Government funding of programmes aimed at alleviating genuine suffering would be overstretched if everyone is neurodiverse – and if everyone is neurodiverse, then nobody is. The distinction between normal and abnormal behaviour has been obliterated, and deliberately so.

If, though, you want to see a perfect example of DEI in action, look to the behaviour of the Big Tech companies over the last few years. Modern fascism is no longer a picture, as Orwell said, of a boot stamping on a face forever, it’s an emoji of a smiley, neurodiverse, indoctrinated, cultish, eternal adolescent manipulating what can be said from behind a computer while posting ‘Be Kind’ messages on social media. It’s the revenge, in simple terms, of people with a grudge, who are angry because they can’t have everything they desire, and who are consumed with, and project, envy onto an entire society.

To give a real-world example of DEI and how the ideology violates all previous understandings of logic, reason and common sense, the head of Stonewall in the United Kingdom, Nancy Kelley, said that lesbians who refuse to have sex with biological males simultaneously identifying as women and as lesbians, were ‘sexual racists’. This is in relation to the issue, using the language of trans activism, of ‘breaking the cotton ceiling’. The cotton ceiling is named after the everyday cotton knickers worn by women, but in this case, lesbians. Lesbians, then, who don’t want to have sex with men are not, according to the ideology of DEI, being equitable, diverse and inclusive. Sexual agency, choosing who you want as a sexual partner, is not sacred according to the dictates of DEI.

(Take note that Stonewall is the organisation that runs the Diversity Champions scheme in Britain, whose philosophy and methodology have been replicated in Australia by ACON. The DEI training you’ve experienced at work was devised by Stonewall and is being administered in Australia by ACON through its Workplace Equality Index, which benchmarks employers through the lens of, guess what, diversity, equity and inclusion.

To be even clearer, a same-sex attracted woman, a lesbian, who doesn’t want to have sex with a man, is now a bigot, a transphobe, and a TERF (a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist); and lesbians who reject the idea that men can be lesbians are having their lives ruined because they believe, as people have believed since the start of time, that people are attracted to biological sex rather to self-identified gender.

Any ideology that countenances such an absurdity should be pushed to the fringes of a civilised society. At the very least, the philosophy should not be taught as fact in local, state or federal government departments.

The above examples are nothing unusual, though. Deceitful methodology is commonplace among advocates of DEI and their relentless disingenuousness is how rights are being removed by stealth in Australia and around the world. To state the obvious, not everyone who smiles, or professes how kind they are (this shouldn’t need to be said), is your friend or telling the truth. Some people are simply manipulating narcissists or are so wedded to an ideology that any action is considered justified to advance their cause.

DEI is not a benign philosophy. It is a covert, explicitly political project, which should have no place in any secular, non-philosophically partisan, apolitical government workplace in Australia, or in any liberal democracy.