The Chronicle

IDEALISM IS HATRED IN DISGUISE

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RACISM is just one way people can be cruel. Black Lives Matter supporters have shown us other ways — but their ways are apparently OK.

Former broadcaste­r Mike Carlton, who this month won an Order of Australia, is a big supporter of the race protests: “So good to see this!” But this same Leftist wondered why another ABC panellist didn’t “leap from his seat and strangle” Liberal MP Nicole Flint, called commentato­r Daisy Cousens a “b----”, and last week abused Daily Telegraph writer Sharri Markson as a “lickspittl­e”, “halfwit” and “toady”.

All this without a peep from the anti-racism protesters, social media activists or journalist­s who claimed to be incensed at milder criticisms of female prime ministers by conservati­ve broadcaste­r Alan Jones.

Carlton even infamously abused Jewish readers, telling one he was “the classic example of the Jewish bigot”, yet now brays that racism is bad, as if anti-Semitism doesn’t count. So, does kowtowing to Black Lives Matter, an essentiall­y racist movement, wash away other sins? Does it even licence you to commit other forms of cruelty?

Take NRL star John Hopoate, who last week claimed TV presenter Erin Molan, actually a lovely woman, had made a racist joke about hard-to-pronounce Polynesian names.

It seems that to Hopoate, at least, Molan’s “racist” joke was an excuse to unleash weapons-grade sexism. He tweeted how he could also use a joke excuse should he “accidental­ly trip this RACIST B***H over and she falls and scrapes her RACIST mouth on the ground”.

Worse is comedian Dave Chapelle. He has now released a rant on Netflix in which his supposed hatred of racism is his excuse for disgusting misogynist­ic abuse of black activist Candace Owens, who’d criticised protesters making a saint of George Floyd, killed by police in Minneapoli­s.

“I don’t care if (Floyd) personally kicked Candace Owens in her stinky p----,” raged Chapelle. “I don’t know if it stinks, but I imagine it does.”

What is extraordin­ary is that Netflix, so sensitive to “racism” that it even cancelled shows in which the brilliant Chris Lilley played characters in “brown-face”, ran Chappelle’s vilificati­on in full.

How right philosophe­r Bertrand Russell was: “Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.”

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