So, the ‘March for Australia’ went ahead and the reactions are entirely predictable. The legacy media would have us believe it was a fringe, ‘racist’, ‘anti-immigrant’ and ‘neo-Nazi rally’, marred by ‘violent clashes’. Participants and the online centre-right would have us believe it was a tens of thousands of ‘peaceful’ multi-ethnic Australians rallying to ‘save our country’ and ‘nothing to do with neo-Nazis’.
As the saying goes, there are three sides to the story: the two opposing sides and the truth. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
Independent journalist Topher Field was one who avoided the march. He warned, in the weeks leading up to it, that some of the organisers were very bad faith actors, indeed. As he points out, most of the organisers went to great lengths to remain anonymous. One of the few who went public and claimed that it was about ‘unity’ privately told Never Again is Now, “We don’t want bloody Zionists involved, piss off”, said Field. Field also outlined other known neo-Nazis and white supremacists who are not just “some loudmouthed outsiders who are trying to claim this march as their own. These are people… who are directly involved at some sort of organisational level.”
Field clarifies that he doesn’t think the organisers are “full-blown National Socialist Nazis, but they’re pretty damn close. It’s like when a democratic socialist insists that, well, I’m not a communist.” This isn’t, he says, an “official neo-Nazi rally directly, but it is very clear that it is very close”.
At least some backing for Field’s warnings was the presence of the likes of Thomas Sewell, of the National Socialist Network, as a speaker at the Melbourne rally. In other cities, neo-Nazis were able to hijack the ‘open mic’ segment of the rallies. In Melbourne, as well, a handful of neo-Nazis attempted to attack Jewish-Australian journalist Avi Yemini.
On the other hand, the presence of neo-Nazis at rallies was greeted with boos and jeers. At some rallies their microphones were switched off. Footage showed White Australians hugging African Australians as they sang the national anthem. Aboriginal flags were present among the sea of Australian flags, without incident. Asian Australians held placards declaring that, “Immigration without Assimilation is Invasion”.
Not all legacy media were totally partisan. 9News in Sydney managed a surprisingly balanced report:
What became immediately apparent were the huge numbers of people who turned up […] there was no problems with the crowd. There was no violence.
Most of the speakers have called for a limit or an end to the current migration. The fear that people have here at the moment is that there’s so many people coming into Australia from overseas, it’s affecting jobs, and it’s affecting housing.
9News’ interviews with marchers had a common theme: mass immigration is the problem, with the country unable to accommodate record-high immigration that exceeds even the post-war surge. “I love migration, okay? I’m from a family of immigrants as well. The point is, how many you bring in the country... where do you house them?”
There were fears today’s march could get hijacked by far-right groups. That doesn’t appear that’s happened. And in fact, if there is another March for Australia, given what’s happened here today, they’re sure to get even bigger numbers.
Unsurprisingly, though, the majority of the legacy media mostly hyper-focused on the tiny minority of neo-Nazis. In the same way that they’ve studiously ignored the undeniable presence of anti-Semites and jihadis at ‘pro-Palestine’ marches. Not to mention that masses of the ‘pro-Palestine’ marches are happy to chant genocidal anti-Semitic slogans, in a way that masses of the ‘March for Australia’ protesters did not.
Just because a convicted terrorist was photographed waving a black Islamist flag on the Harbour Bridge doesn’t turn everyone who marches for Palestine into a jihadist […]
However, Sunday’s March for Australia was different. To take part was to admit guilt by association with the neo-Nazi nutbags said to be behind it. “This brand of far-right activism grounded in racism and ethnocentrism has no place in modern Australia,” Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly said last week.
That is weapons-grade hypocrisy, given that Aly publicly boasted that her father fought on the Egyptian side of the Six-Day War: a war whose explicitly genocidal aim was to eradicate the Jewish state. It was as gob-smacking as if Eric Abetz were to wear his great-uncle’s SS service as a badge of honour.
Yet, the legacy media politely overlooked it.
Character assassination has been multiculturalism’s modus operandi for decades. Geoffrey Blainey’s timely warnings in 1984 about emphasising separateness and the dangers of breaking Australia’s historical thread with British tradition were greeted with threats of violence, prompting the police to request the removal of his name and address from the public telephone book. John Stone’s criticism of immigration policy in the 1980s attracted a similarly indignant response […]
Rather than impugn the motives of those who marched, the political class should ask searching questions about why ordinary people with families and busy lives feel compelled to march at all. Surely the purpose of parliament and courts is to mediate civic disputes and allow the rest of us to do other things.
Once again, there were noble exceptions. Among them, surprisingly, ACT independent senator David Pocock. While the former rugby player’s politics definitely skew green-left, he is at least willing to concede that the March for Australia protesters have a valid concern that should be listened to.
Independent ACT senator David Pocock says Labor’s immigration policy is not taking into account pressures of high immigration on infrastructure and the environment and that this was a motivation for the anti-immigration protests across the country on Sunday […]
“I think there should be room for a sensible conversation amongst leaders so that, when people do raise these things, we can actually say, ‘yes, we have a plan that takes into account infrastructure, skills, and all these things’,” he told ABC TV.
That should happen some time after pigs take to the skies and the legacy media start telling the unadorned truth.
In the meantime, the legacy media remain one of the worst offenders in relentlessly silencing the centre and pushing them to the fringe.
