As I wrote recently, in an utterly mind-boggling move, the Albanese government is seeking to legislate itself the power to literally flood the internet with AI propaganda bots. I’m not making that up.
But, to damn them with faint praise, they’re only attempting to do openly what they’re already (allegedly!) doing so under a cloak of secrecy.
Media personality Kyle Sandilands says his new streaming platform has been under cyber attack by bots from Canberra, Russia and China ever since he talked to One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.
This is all par for the course. During the Covid era, anyone who dared speak out against the disastrously failed, police-state policies of the Victorian government immediately found themselves swarmed by bots parroting the “I Stand with Dan” propaganda.
Of course, the legacy media will defend this Orwellian stuff to the hilt. Because, firstly, it’s their own Dear Leaders who are doing it. Secondly, because Kyle Sandilands is pretty low-hanging fruit. The legacy media have long hated Sandilands and have run a decade-long campaign of Two Minutes of Hate to try and take him down.
As the great Jack Marx observed:
Journalists aren’t very bright. They feel as if they are, because they’re pontificating to the world each day, but the truth is that anyone can be a journalist. I can count on one hand the number of journalists I know who are truly brilliant minds […] They’re clever, but they’re not very bright.
Dumping on someone like Kyle Sandilands makes journalists feel good about themselves. Like jailhouse murderers who “despise” pedophiles, journalists appreciate a character like Kyle […] Every dumb hack looks better when compared to Sandilands.
But, just like the White Australia Party’s High Court case and free speech, if we don’t defend even someone like Kyle Sandilands from being swarmed by government propaganda bots, we have no right to complain when it happens to us.
To trace the genesis of this digital vendetta, one must look to his recent professional recalibration.
The outspoken former shock jock launched his own subscription show called Kyle Sandilands Live after losing his 10-year $100 million contract as breakfast radio host with KIIS FM earlier this year.
Unmoored from corporate radio gatekeepers, our man Kyle promptly committed the ultimate heresy: he actually sat down and conversed with Pauline Hanson.
In an epiphany that surely caused mass apoplexy across the length and breadth of the Quinoa Belt, Sandilands declared Ms Hanson to be “Australia’s most trusted politician”, praising her steadfast refusal to blow with every passing cultural wind, unlike the poll-driven weather vanes populating our federal parliament.
Naturally, the ruling caste could not let such heterodoxy pass unpunished. Within a fortnight of platforming not only the One Nation leader but also that perennially florid agrarian bête rouge, Barnaby Joyce, the digital stormtroopers arrived in force. As Sandilands detailed in an Instagram broadcast on Wednesday, his burgeoning digital domain has been besieged by electronic vermin from every conceivable direction.
There’s bots coming out of Canberra and Russia and China, this is weird, right, but true, all trying to shut down our platform, trying to shut our show down.
There seems to be a rather surreal unholy alliance between foreign autocracies and our own domestic thought-police. Sandilands added, with characteristic defiance:
We will not be shut down, we will not be silenced, we will say whatever we want, and we will investigate government waste…
Quite right, too. Because what has truly rattled the gilded cage of the Canberra press gallery is not merely Sandilands’ aesthetic vulgarity that has long offended the delicate sensibilities of our bureaucratic puritans, but his newfound appetite for forensic accounting.
Before the cyber-blitzkrieg commenced, the erstwhile shock jock had train-wrecked the official narrative by shining a harsh, unfiltered light on Canberra’s bottomless pit of frivolous expenditure. Specifically, he drew attention to the astronomical ballooning of multiculturalism grants. When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese ascended to the Lodge, these disbursement programmes commanded a modest six million dollars. By the most recent financial year, that figure had metastasised into an eye-watering 326 million dollars. Much of it showered on Islamic groups peddling anti-Jewish hate.
Fifty times the original sum, funnelled straight into identity-industry fiefdoms and drooling jihadi hate preachers, while ordinary Australians grapple with a cost-of-living crisis and a collapse in social cohesion that culminated (at least so far) in the massacre of 15 Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach.
Is it any wonder the administrative state deployed its silicon infantry? When you threaten the gravy train, the machinery of government immediately swings into the mode of a petty, vindictive protection racket.
Sandilands may not be a classical liberal scholar, nor a graduate of some faux-sophisticated arts degree. But his clumsy, unvarnished, populism has exposed the authoritarian fragility of our political ruling class. If the regime can marshal an army of algorithms to crush a broadcaster simply for chatting with Pauline Hanson, then our vaunted democracy is nothing more than a Potemkin village. We ignore his plight at our absolute peril.
