Earlier this month Bill Maher, no Republican voter, said that he could find no examples of a woke person ever being fired for being hard-left and woke and open about it. In other words, you can be as far left as you want politically and big corporations, the public service, the national broadcaster, sports teams, all of them and every other employer will leave you in your job. You might get a slap on the wrist but you won’t be fired. The flipside of Maher’s point is that we all know of countless examples of conservatives losing their jobs for voicing conservative positions. In the Anglosphere university world the examples are myriad. Then there are sports stars like Israel Folau. There are sports broadcasters like former baseball star player Curt Schiller who was fired by ESPN for objecting to trans men using the women’s loo while left-leaning ESPN talking heads in the US can call conservatives racists, attack Donald Trump relentlessly, be overtly political, be as left-leaning as they please and nothing happens. Pick a field and this Maher point about the asymmetry of what is allowed to be said politically seems overwhelmingly to be true. Well, last week we might, just might, have seen the first steps leading to an actual counter-example. The Bud Light marketing VP in the US who gave the green light to the transgender ad with Dylan Mulvaney that has seen some $5 billion wiped off the market capitalisation of Anheuser-Busch has – wait for it – been told to take a ‘leave of absence’. I hate the whole cancel culture ethos. But I also recognise that if one side plays ruthless hardball this way and the other wraps itself in Marquess of Queensberry gallantry and gentlemanly conduct then the former wins and the latter loses. So I hope the significant conservative boycott of Bud Light beer and Stella (the latter is sold here in Australia, by the way) keeps going until this VP is fired, probably too the CEO, and there is a real (not faux) apology. I’ve become pretty Old Testament about this stuff because it’s what game theory demands – tit for tat reciprocity, give them back what they give us – if we’re to have any chance of getting back to proper norms and conventions of live and let live. Fight the culture wars, Libs!

On this theme of one set of rules for them and another for us it’s now been a month since the transgender person shot up the Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.  The FBI refuses to release this mass murderer’s transgender-linked manifesto. Of course any time there is the remotest hint a mass murderer might be a white guy with a grudge against anything progressive, that shooter’s manifesto is leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post before sundown. It’s online within the hour – within minutes if the white dude happens also to be a Christian – and being discussed non-stop in the press. On what basis is the Nashville murderer’s manifesto seemingly uniquely being kept from the public by the FBI? I mean you’d think the Bureau was overtly party political or something. Sort of like the way it has been sitting on the Hunter Biden laptop for years and done nothing. (How quickly would charges have come against Trump Jnr had it been his laptop? How hard would the press have pushed for such charges for a Trump when they don’t for a Biden?)  Or remember the 51 senior US intelligence people who signed the open letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop had ‘all the hallmarks of being Russian disinformation’?  This allowed Joe Biden in the final presidential debate before the 2020 election to point to this letter and say the laptop was fake. (He knew it wasn’t.)

And there is plenty of polling data to show that had the US public thought the laptop to be real, with its strong evidence of Biden family corruption, that Trump would have won in 2020. Does anyone today believe these intelligence officers who signed that letter really believed it was Russian disinformation? Look at the cutesy, lawyerly wording of ‘all the hallmarks’. Add to that the way the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in pursuit of supposedly classified documents (with TV cameras, flak jackets, press notified to be there, etc) but worked quietly with Biden’s lawyers and without any televised raid, etc when it came to the Democrat’s classified documents (which were more in number, littered around more places, more unsecurely kept and which could never be declassified by Joe as the then vice president in the way the Don as President could constitutionally declassify whatever he wanted just by saying so). All up you’d have to forgive the growing ranks of leading Republicans who think there needs to be root and branch reform of the FBI.

Here’s another reflection. It’s about all the climate change hysterics. It’s by now abundantly clear, isn’t it, that many of them are out-and-out hypocrites? By that, I mean they just don’t act as though they actually believe that the world is soon going to end. The rich virtue-signallers continue to fly in their private jets – Bill Gates, Al Gore, Boris, the list goes on to the horizon – and they can’t even make the small sacrifice to fly commercially. Ex-president Obama buys his beachside estate. If you judge people by their actions, not by their words, you see almost everything being done is being done to others, to regular deplorables. That, I’m afraid, is not the sign of real concern. Heck, if anyone honestly believed that the planet was really threatened with doom then the West would have to take drastic actions against China and India because they are building new coal-fired power plants every week. Their actions are basically to keep trying to produce cheap power to lift their people out of poverty (and I don’t condemn them for it in the least). What we’re doing in Australia or even in Britain amounts to fiddling at the edges.

So where are the calls by the climate doom-mongers to cut all trade with China, in the name of the planet? Ditto with India? And while we’re at it, when are the hysterics going to flesh out an argument of why we in Australia should be impoverishing ourselves when China’s and India’s actions make ours wholly irrelevant? It is factually correct to say that we could go back to the Stone Age tomorrow (so faster than Labor plans to do so) and it would make zero, yes zero, difference to the world’s temperature trajectory (whatever that would otherwise be).

Does any Green politician or anyone else really believe our actions make us a moral exemplar others will copy? It doesn’t take a genius to make this argument to the public, as is being done finally in Germany and Europe and the US by the way. It takes Liberal politicians in Australia with bravery.

We’ve finally seen it from Peter Dutton on the Voice (which despite Albanese’s disgraceful move not to fund the No case will go down, I predict). Now let’s see it on energy.