Where to begin with Miranda Devine’s hate-mongering first post at her new News Ltd digs, “What it really means to be Green“? (Note the capital “G” there.)

To start with, it’s not a good sign when your opening salvo is nothing more than a smear by association.

Devine’s weapon of choice is the idiotic “exploding children” video commissioned by a UK climate change group called “10:10”. It was tasteless, and stupid – and the Australian greens and the Australian Greens that she seeks to attack in the rest of her piece had nothing to do with it. They did not endorse it, did not participate in it, and are not related apart from also wanting action on climate change – so using it to attack them is like ascribing something, say, Robert Mugabe does to Devine on the basis that both of them despise Western lefties.

In fact, Miranda’s efforts to fairly unsubtly try to link the video back to her new paper’s target, through supposedly left-wing institutions, through a local-born actor, through wild exaggeration – “in partnership with the Guardian newspaper”, “Even our very own Hugh Jackman”, “the considered message from the very heart of the green movement” – fail embarrassingly for any alert reader who realises that she can’t show a single such connection to the actual Australian Greens (either case), or indeed anyone related to them. (Not that continually cynically conflating them with any extremists you can find doesn’t work for some audiences.) She hasn’t mentioned them by name yet, but she’s hoping you’re all set up for the big reveal.

And then she goes completely off the deep-end:

…climate change alarmism is a death cult.


No, seriously, anyone advocating for sustainable emissions is represented by homicidal maniacs:

We heard the message in its starkest form last month from the US Discovery Channel’s suicide bomber James Lee, whose eco-manifesto demanded no more “filthy human children”, before he was shot dead by police.

And:

…whatever way you dress it up, the climate alarmist message ultimately can be boiled down to death.

Terrifying, and so true! I only recycle my bottles because somebody put a horse’s head made out of tofu in my bed.

And when Miranda finally feels comfortable slipping in her real target by name, the political party for which almost 1.5 million Australians voted in August, she tries to claim the following as part of “that message”:

And we heard it in the subtle endorsement by Father Frank Brennan when he defended a vote for the Greens during the last election. “On some policy issues, I daresay the Greens have a more Christian message than the major parties,” Brennan wrote in rebuttal of Cardinal George Pell’s rather better description of the Greens as “sweet camouflaged poison”.

Um, what? If someone can explain to me how Brennan’s quote links the Greens to this alleged message of death, I’d love to hear it. Is she saying that having “a more Christian message” is akin to being “a death cult”? She can’t be, but I can’t see how else that paragraph makes any sense.

Things are not looking good for Devine’s smear attack against the party her new employer wants “destroyed”. She’s trying to portray them as sociopaths, monstrous fiends, and all she’s managed so far is to accuse them of having “a more Christian message”. Come on, Miranda, what else have you got in your grab bag of vacuous attacks?

Ah, a shameless misrepresentation of the euthanasia debate:

No surprise that the first big issue in the kinder, gentler new parliament for Brennan’s pet Greens was euthanasia. It’s where their heads are at. Killing people.

Yes, that’s what the euthanasia debate is about. Diabolical Greens plotting TO MURDER LITTLE OLD PENSIONERS. Your GRANDMOTHER, even. Because “it’s where their heads are at. Killing people.”

Mwoo, as they say, ha ha. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to cleft a terminally ill person in twain. For kicks. BRB.

…

Damnit, there’s another shirt I’m going to have to leave soaking in the phosphate-free hippy Sard. Anyway, what other examples of our perfidy can Miranda muster?

And if you’re not dead then they’ll make you suffer.

Already this winter we have had stories of people forced to huddle over hot water bottles and even sleep with cats to keep warm because they can’t afford to keep paying soaring electricity bills.

I’m not prepared to give myself the kind of head injury that would be required to fail to notice that these “soaring electricity bills” have occurred in a time when the Greens had no power to pass – and little to push for – any legislation, and that Devine doesn’t identify a single existing Greens-related piece of legislation that can be even indirectly linked to this problem. So, sorry – I can’t help you process this idiocy, which goes on for another few paragraphs.

And for a free market advocate, Miranda has a rather melodromatic way of portraying how market mechanisms are supposed to work:

The pain inflicted is deliberate. You are intended to suffer. In this land blessed with abundant reserves of cheap coal-fired energy, your suffering is what environmentalists and policy makers call reducing demand. You are being forced to turn off the heater, pull out your electric plugs and bathe in lukewarm water in order to – ahem – stop climate change.

Let’s ignore for a moment that the above is totally untrue, and nobody’s suggesting that people should “suffer” in the way Miranda claims – “bathe in lukewarm water” indeed – and, in fact, I’m fairly confident that the Greens advocate for better welfare services so that nobody would ever be forced to endure such hardship.

The really weird thing in all this hyperbole is that with respect to every other activity of the market, every other cruel way it penalises the poor, I’ve never heard Miranda raise a single word of protest. Isn’t the thinking behind Work for the Dole that we can force “dole bludgers” to comply by threatening them with starvation? Or the idea behind a two-tier education system to make the children of the poor suffer for foolishly being born to parents who can’t or won’t send them to a private school? Isn’t this kind of “suffering as incentive” the entire basis of neo-conservative theory?

Except when we’re talking about being cautious regarding the atmosphere of the only planet that supports life, I guess.

Actually, I’m going to stop there. The rest of Miranda’s piece is the same kind of vacuous denialist rot (it’s not really warming! Somebody’s put the satellites next to air conditioning units!) that Tobias has repeatedly covered, and that I don’t have the time or energy to go over again.

Suffice to say, Devine concludes by comparing the “Green” with Nazis.

I suspect she and News Ltd will be very happy together.