Courage is in shorter supply than genius.

What Konstantin Kisin gets right (and wrong) about Australia.

This is the great paradox of the woke takeover of any society. 'Why are you being a divisive culture warrior?' they'll scream at you as they take the foundations of your society apart, brick by brick.

Konstantin Kisin

I've mentioned Konstantin Kisin to you before. He's a Russian-born comedian now living in the UK with a podcast and YouTube series, 'Triggernometry'. His presentation was one of the highlights of Jordan Peterson's Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London last year. If you haven't seen it already, I've included the link at the end of this email. Kisin recently visited Australia with the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies. I saw him at a sold-out IPA event in Melbourne. He talked about 'Why our culture is special', and I've linked that speech, too.

If you watch Kisin's IPA speech or at ARC or the speech that made him famous at the Oxford University Union 'Has Woke Culture Gone Too Far' with its 2.8 million views, you'll notice something. 

He's engaging, he's funny, he's provocative (at ARC he made a joke about Hamas) and he's great to listen to. But he doesn't say anything new, and he doesn't say anything you haven't heard before (unless you listen only to ABC radio and read only The Guardian).  

What Kisin talks about today was standard fare as recently as ten years ago. He says things like: 'freedom of speech is good', 'capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty', and 'Western Civilisation has produced unprecedented human flourishing.' Saying that in 2024 provokes students at the University of Sydney to start screaming and attempt to smash the door to the university hall to stop an event at which Kisin and Tony Abbott were speaking. On X (Twitter), Kisin wrote, 'This is like a scene from Game of Thrones! Protester at my event at Sydney Uni with Tony Abbott trying to break down the door. Unsuccessfully. A soy diet will do that.' He attached a video of the scene to his half a-million followers. (It might be that some of Kisin's followers from around the world will ask themselves how many of these protesters at Sydney University were at the Sydney Opera House on 9 October.)

The point is that while what Kisin talks about might be obvious, fewer and fewer people dare to say it, and as a result, fewer and fewer people are hearing it. 

It's unlikely the students yelling at Kisin and Abbott would have downed the placards at the end of the event to attend a lecture on how Britain was the first country in the world to abolish slavery with the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, outlawing the Atlantic slave trade, and then in 1833 the Abolition of Slavery Act ending slavery in all British colonies. Between 1808 and 1860, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron freed 150,000 slaves at the cost of the lives of 17,000 British sailors who died in action or from disease. When slavery was abolished in 1833, the British government paid 46,000 slave-owners a total of £20m, the equivalent of 40% of the country's budget. As the UK Treasury Department publicised in 2018 - 'The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn't paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.' Nigel Biggar, in his brilliant 'Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning', comments - 'The decision to compensate the slave-owners in 1833 is often used by anti-colonialists to discredit the abolition movement today… There is no denying that it was a political compromise, but peaceful politics usually requires compromise, and some compromises are morally justified, even obligatory.' If you're a Sydney University student trying to break down a door to an event with speakers you disagree with, you're probably not much interested in 'peaceful politics' or in anything Biggar has to say.

Kisin himself put it better than I could. On his Substack account, he said this about his visit to Australia.

For the last two weeks, I've had the great pleasure of travelling around Australia and speaking at various events… While a terrific honour for me, this is undoubtedly a bad sign for Australia: the tragedy of my career is that I say obvious things that everyone knows and am lavished with entirely unmerited praise in response.

It pains me to point this out but if Konstantin Kisin has been invited to give a series of talks in your country, all is not well.

That is so true. He goes on.

This is the bad news for Australia: it appears to have been infected with the same mind virus as the rest of the Anglosphere.

The symptoms are all too familiar. Identity politics fuelled by the false teaching of history. Political polarisation. Two-tier policing with anti-lockdown protests brutally suppressed, followed by the police standing by as crowds chant 'Gas the Jews' outside Sydney Opera House due to fear of upsetting 'social cohesion'. The number of children being treated for gender dysphoria at Victoria's Royal Children's Hospital gender clinic has increased by over 1,000% in less than a decade. Some journalists at the ABC, the country's national broadcaster, avoid revealing their nuanced political views to colleagues for fear of appearing insufficiently woke. Corporations jump on every progressive cause with enthusiasm. Activists want to cancel Australia Day: instead of being a day of national unity, they want to turn it into one of shame and self-flagellation.

It is all happening for the same reasons, too. In the words of pioneer investor Peter Thiel, courage is now in shorter supply than genius. This is, sadly, also true in the land down under. While the centre-left appeases its extremist fringe, many on the centre-right hesitate to challenge the cultural vandalism they observe for fear of being described as 'culture warriors'.

He might only have been here for two weeks, but that's a pretty good summary from Kisin of what's happening. 

And he didn't even mention climate change and net zero.

(Kisin's mention of Peter Thiel is interesting. Douglas Murray's 'The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity' includes a famous passage about Thiel and how he was treated for supporting Donald Trump in 2016.

The date of 21 July 2016 should have been a great moment for supporters of gay rights in the United States. That day, Peter Thiel took to the stage of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and addressed the main hall. A gay man had appeared on a Republican platform before, but not alone, and not openly identifying as such. By contrast the co-founded of PayPal, and early investor in Facebook, made a clear and head-on reference to his sexuality as he endorsed Donald Trump as the candidate of the Republican Party for President. During his speech, Thiel said, 'I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.' All of this was received with huge cheers in the hall. Such a situation would have been unimaginable even a few election cycles before. NBC was among the mainstream media to report all of this in a positive light. 'Peter Thiel makes history at RNC' ran the headline.

Murray explained the consequences:

…when Peter Thiel endorsed Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, he immediately became a non-gay in the eyes of the most prominent gay magazine in America. To have gone to the right - and to the Donald Trump right at that - was such an egregious fault that Advocate excommunicated Thiel from the church of gay.)

Visitors from overseas regard the success of the No campaign in the Voice referendum as more significant than we seem to ourselves. 

It's understandable why the centre-left and the ALP don't want to talk about the Voice. The referendum revealed that when Australians are given the chance to express an opinion, they will reject the Marxist-inspired identity politics of the left. Australians do not want to be divided by race. The left (and the media who barracked so hard for it) have airbrushed the Voice from history. Last month, Anthony Albanese confirmed his commitment to 'truth-telling and treaty' as if the referendum had never happened.

This is what Kisin said about the Voice.

On cultural issues too, while apathy is how woke activists are able to continue hollowing out the country's institutions, when forced to step away from the barbie and vote in the Aboriginal Voice Referendum last year, ordinary Australians made their feelings clear. Fronted by the courageous Jacinta Price, the 'No' campaign overturned a one-sided onslaught from the country's media, corporate and political elite, with 60% voting against embedding identity politics in the Constitution.

The referendum result was an enormous victory for 'ordinary Australians', but since 14 October 2023, the Coalition hasn't said much about it.

It's as if the Coalition doesn't know what to do with its victory - much like Boris Johnson and the Tories didn't know what to do with the forty 'Red Wall' seats they won from the Labour Party at the 2019 election. If the polls are correct, at the British general election later this year, the Tories will give up all of those Red Wall seats and then some. The Conservatives are likely to be thrashed.

Kisin's conclusion about his Australian visit is sobering.  

This is the great paradox of the woke takeover of any society. 'Why are you being a divisive culture warrior?' they'll scream at you as they take the foundations of your society apart, brick by brick. It is difficult to oppose robustly until the majority of people notice the problem. 

By which point it may be too late. 

Getting ordinary Australians to recognise the threat before the dangerous threshold is reached is the big challenge for the country's sensible elite. Whether they can succeed remains to be seen.

I don't quite share his view that it's for the sensible elite to get ordinary Australians to recognise the threat to our way of life. Ordinary Australians know precisely what's going on - as proved by the Voice result.

The problem is that ordinary Australians' views are rarely heard in Australian politics. It was only because of a political miscalculation of the ALP and the political left that the Australians got to have a say on whether identity politics should be enshrined in the Australian Constitution. It's not as though Anthony Albanese was genuinely interested in giving Australians a say in their future. The left's mistake on the Voice is unlikely to be repeated anytime soon. Every politician in Canberra knows what would be the outcome if ordinary Australians got to vote on net zero, for example. This is why no politician from any major party would dare suggest such a thing.  

In any case, even if there is in Australia such a thing as a 'sensible elite' (which I doubt), it's not their job of an elite (sensible or not) to save the country. That's a task for ordinary Australians.

Recommended Watching and Listening

With Easter coming up, you might have some time to enjoy these few things. 

• This is the link to Konstantin Kisin's speech to the IPA in Melbourne last month, this is his presentation to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London last year, and this is him at the Oxford University Union debate.

• I mentioned Douglas Murray today, and he's currently in Australia. Many of his shows are sold out, but tickets are still available in a few cities. In 2022, Murray and Matt Taibbi were against Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg in a debate in Canada on the topic 'Be it resolved, don't trust the mainstream media'. Murray and Taibbi were on the affirmative and they demolished Gladwell and Goldberg. It was embarrassing. Up until that debate, I quite liked Gladwell, and I'd read some of his books. After the debate, I couldn't look at Gladwell the same way. Gladwell is not dumb. He realised how terrible he looked and then made a podcast about it. I'm not sure Gladwell has yet recovered. In the same way, Sam Harris has never recovered from what he said about Hunter Biden on Kisin's Triggernometry podcast. This is Reason TV's important discussion of the Harris/Kisin conversation.  

• Talking also of Peter Thiel, I attended a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University a few years ago. A highlight was this discussion between Thiel and Peter Robinson about political correctness and freedom of speech, the future of Artificial Intelligence, and China's rise (and potential fall). It’s very interesting.

• Finally, I'm halfway through a new podcast series 'Finding Matt Drudge', and I'm enjoying it and learning a lot. The creation of The Drudge Report in 1995 changed journalism and politics - not only in America but around the world. The tale of how Drudge rose to prominence after publishing an article on the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal - an article Newsweek had refused to print because 'the story was too big', is fascinating.

kind regards John