Orwell comes for your telly, conservatives hate on Peterson and Trump’s trial is magnificently stupid

The politician who cried Orwell Crikey is a mature enough outlet to occasionally register serious points of difference between our correspondents. So it was this week when I detected a note of scepticism in my colleague Emma Elsworthy’s coverage of Coalition Senator Hollie Hughes. Hughes had said the proposed move to pre-install free-to-air broadcaster apps on smart TVs is an inevitable precursor to “a ministry of truth”. Elsworthy seems to find Hughes concerns a “yawn”.

Frankly, I couldn’t disagree more — the invocation of George Orwell is a perfectly sane and normal way to respond to the prospect of citizens turning on their televisions to find the ABC iView and 10play. This, I say without any exaggeration, is a condition that soon enough will cause something to be killed in the breast: burnt out, cauterised out. Something from which we could never recover.

Hughes added that Greens senators “kowtow and suck up to the ABC” because they want a job there. And who can deny the pernicious and growing influence of the Greens on Australia’s media? While over the years conservatives have had no-one to represent their views except Amanda Vanstone and Tom Switzer at the ABC, or Ross Cameron, Cory Bernardi, Peta Credlin and Chris Kenny at Sky News, where they’ve been joined by former Labor leader/anti-Labor campaigner Mark Latham, former NSW premier and malfunctioning parachute candidate Kristina Keneally and Labor hard man/grandee Graham Richardson at Sky News.

This is obviously dwarfed by the roughly zero former Greens MPs who have gone on to have their own show on a major broadcaster. (Ed’s note: we’re taking the “philosophy of zero” approach here, with zero as a representation of a vast and absorbing nothingness. Compared with that, two hosts on the ABC isn’t much.)

Weigh, weigh down We can’t add a great deal to this except to insist it’s a real thing that absolutely happened: on Sunday, Israel’s Jerusalem Post published a self-help health article about how Israelis can use the stress from the war to “lose weight”.

“How to use the stress from the Israel-Hamas war to lose weight,” read the headline. “Fears of rockets and missiles amid Israel’s war with Hamas putting millions of Israelis in a constant state of anxiety and stress. But you can actually use this stress to lose weight and stay healthy,” read the article’s accompanying tweet. Both have since been deleted.

Trial period There are times, watching the legal troubles afflicting former and possible future US president Donald Trump, when we in the bunker are forced to reflect with the same sudden existential melancholy of Lieutenant Kilgore in Apocalypse Now: “One day this trial is going to end.” What are we going to do when the sheer unyielding horror of it all is no longer leavened by moments like Donald Trump Jr asking a courtroom sketch artist after he had testified to “make me look sexy”.

Courtroom illustrator Jane Rosenberg told Insider that Trump Jr, after assuring his father’s civil fraud trial that he didn’t know anything about his father’s companies, approached her and asked for a flattering rendering similar to the one that financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried apparently received during his trial. Trump Jr then showed Rosenberg an image that made the rounds on Twitter last week, appearing to be AI-generated and not resembling any of the sketches publicly available regarding the SBF trial.

And this doesn’t even get to Trump Sr’s testimony on Monday — so periodically on-brand as to create a new persona altogether, peppering his answers with attacks on the judge and prosecutors and surreal additions such as “I’m not a windmill person” and “I have a castle”.

“At some point, maybe in my very old age, I’ll go [to Aberdeen, Scotland] and do the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Aberdeen is the oil capital of Europe, very rich,” Trump began to say, before Justice Arthur Engoron shouted “Irrelevant!” to which Trump softly replied, “It is.”

Once this is gone, we will have nothing to distract us from the pain.

No Times for Peterson One has to feel for The Times’ James Marriott. First, googling his name will get several pages of results concerning the melancholy indie rocker namesake before getting to his work. Worse than that, he’s the guy the paper sends to go see panels led by Jordan Peterson (republished by the Oz over here).

Over what he describes as a “long night with Peterson and his superfans”, Marriott details being assailed by the “uplifting small-c conservative life advice dressed up in grandiose philosophical mumbo jumbo” which is “the heart of Peterson’s appeal”.

Marriot writes sympathetically of the various attendees and concedes: “It sounded so reassuring that I sort of wish I believed it too.” However, he concludes, “Horrible cynic that I am, I couldn’t help but cringe when I was instructed to become ‘an individual willing to take responsibility for every level of being’ or told that ‘everyone is a divine centre of intrinsic value’. The line between Jordan Peterson and Gwyneth Paltrow is thinner than is commonly recognised.”

This is the feedback that a major conservative paper in the UK now gives Peterson. The same thinker a flurry of our representatives rushed to hang out with at the launch of the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship.

Cat in the hat came back To prove we in the bunker can sometimes be nice without having to be, here’s a lovely detail we picked up from ABC Sydney radio’s coverage of the Optus outage: a woman rang in to share that her cat told her the news…

A woman who rang ABC Sydney radio said she found out about the Optus outage from her cat.

The cat has an automatic wi-fi feeder (connected to Optus) & when breakfast wasn't delivered at 6:10 am, the cat went to the bedroom to lodge a complaint with management.

— Denise C. (@SpudBenBean) November 7, 2023