Kevin Rudd: "Donald Trump may have lit the match that caused his country’s turmoil, but it was Rupert Murdoch who crammed the joint full of explosives"

Crikey, 12 January 2021:

SCOTT MORRISON AND DONALD TRUMP (IMAGE: AAP/MICK TSIKAS)

Donald Trump may have lit the match that caused his country’s turmoil, but it was Rupert Murdoch who crammed the joint full of explosives. 

His systematic manipulation and radicalisation of the American right-wing polity at large, and the Republican Party in particular, should ring alarm bells throughout our nation, including in the office of the prime minister. 

Over the past 25 years, Murdoch has used his Fox News network to unite American conservatives under his banner and shift them from the centre right to the far right with an intoxicating diet of grievance-driven, race-fuelled identity politics. 

By the time Trump announced his presidential campaign, these voters had been indoctrinated into a universe of “fake news”, “alternative facts” and elaborate conspiracy theories. The operational definition of fake news, in the eyes of the Trump presidency, became anything other than Fox News. 

After some initial disagreements, Murdoch backed Trump all the way to the White House. And they kept in lockstep throughout the Trump presidency. 

Trump would often repeat publicly the talking points he’d picked up from Fox. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker, recommended booking interviews on Trump’s favourite shows as among the most effective ways of communicating directly with the Oval Office. And nothing delighted Murdoch’s swaggering ego, hard-right ideology and business tax interests more. 

Fox covered up for Trump’s mistakes, trying desperately to keep track with his shifting claims about the mildness or severity of the coronavirus. 

When Fox’s news reporters found nothing newsworthy in documents relating to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, Murdoch’s New York Post (under the watchful eye of his leading Australian henchman Col Allan) swooped in by pressuring junior reporters to put their names to its dubious front page story.

Like Trump, Murdoch’s news outlets also gave succour to the dangerous QAnon cult, with the devastating consequences witnessed in Washington last week. 

It is now beyond time for Scott Morrison to stand up and denounce QAnon before it can fully take root here in Australia. Even if it strains the prime minister’s personal friendships with members of the far right, he should send the sort of crystal-clear signal that Trump proved himself unable to before it was too late.....

Read the full article here. 

Personally, I believe it is too late to save Scott Morrison from himself. He lacks the ability for genuine self-examination.

Morrison was always attracted to Donald Trump, as one flimflam man often admires another more successful confidence trickster.

SNAPSHOT: Peter van Onselen

Scotty from Marketing has clearly drunk the QAnon-Trump Kool Aid, wrapped himself in his personal closet racism, his foreign Legion of Merit medal and those evangelical & pentecostal contacts he appears to prize above the interests of the Australian nation, so that he is now willingly protecting those members of his own government who are just the sort of greedy, self-interested, ignorant crazies who have driven American society into the ground.