#van badham

Van Badham, Australian author of QAnon And On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults. Quoted at The Guardian. 

Ms. Badham sees the anti-vaxxers, QAnon followers, insurrectionists, and other pro-authoritarian conspiracy nuts as part of a loosely connected common movement – despite being active in different countries.

Across these countries, protestors appear as a wild herd of “sovcit”, anti-vaxxer, QAnonner and more nefarious fellow travellers, alongside some more ordinary people. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether social media content about these events has been gathered by extremism monitors, or comedians.

Participants unwilling to be injected with a free vaccine safely used on hundreds of millions of people further advise each other that drinking one’s own wee is curative and somehow “camel urine deals with cancer”.

[ ... ]

But the relevant historical lesson is that the threat to democracy doesn’t come from the proportion of the people these groups can claim to represent. It’s about the size of the damage they are willing to do. 

(via A prime minister who lives by the photo op dies by the photo op – and Grace Tame owes Scott Morrison nothing | Van Badham | The Guardian)

This was the Scott Morrison who told the march of sexual violence survivors and their allies who Tame accompanied to Parliament House that the women were lucky to have not been “met with bullets”. The Scott Morrison who ignored key recommendations in the Respect@Work report, the Morrison who did not demote the minister who called alleged rape victim Brittany Higgins “a lying cow”.

This is the Scott Morrison who elevated to assistant minister for women one Amanda Stoker – after Stoker had promoted men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt, who herself had platformed the man who raped Tame as a child. The Scott Morrison who responded to Tame’s speech at last year’s Australia Day awards ceremony with the remark, “Well, gee, I bet it felt good to get that out.”

So I’ve been watching the facebook fallout to comments made on Q and A last night. Now this is not an unusual thing for a tuesday. There is always something that is said that is insightful or controversial that does the rounds on social media the next day. Usually I look at it, watch the clip linked in the articles and then go about the rest of my day. But today it has been really eating at me and pissing me off what was said, and that it is still ok to say this to a woman to silence her. 

“I think you’re just being hysterical”

This was a comment made by Steve Price, a conservative middle aged white male radio announcer said to Van Badham, a female journalist when she argued that Steve Price saying that a comment made by Eddie McGuire, a white middle aged  male media personality and owner of the Collingwood AFL Club saying that he would pay $50,000 to watch Caroline Wilson, a female journalist drown was just “a joke” and  “a bunch of blokes laughing at things they shouldn’t be laughing at”. When Badham rightly went on to say that the comments made by McGuire and Price caliing the comments a joke that went too far are a part of a culture that makes violence against women acceptable and a part of “cultural attitudes that treat women differently” he got all defensive, talking over the top of her saying that she needed to retract her statements as he has never made a sexists joke and doesn’t want to be painted in the same light as the men who made the comments about Caroline Wilson. So he made it about him. As Badham continued he said “Just because you're a woman, you're not the only one who can get upset about this." Followed by "Men can be just as upset about these things.", again making it about him and not the real issue. And finally, once Badham had finished making her point and answered the question, Price called her hysterical, as a way to silence her and shut down her opinion. 

Ok, time to rewind as to how we got here. On Q and A Tarang Chawla shared his story and asked a question of the panel. This was after Sam Newan, a white middle aged male media personality and former AFL player defended McGuire’s comments about Caroline Wilson. 

"My sister Nakita was stabbed to death by her partner in January last year with a meat cleaver. She was 23. How will politicians and the media play a better role in bringing about long overdue cultural shifts so tragedies like what happened to my family are not normalised?"