Well, Here We Are Again, Yanks: A Foreigner's Perspective on What You're About to Do

This is bigger than America. The whole west needs to fight this ideology. It begins with you.

All right, America, here we are again. I guess we’re fucking doing this. It’s October 2016 again and it’s back to coin-flip odds between sanity and madness.

I often find myself hoping that my talking about American politics so much doesn’t count as foreign election interference because, for those new subscribers who don’t know, I don’t live in America nor am I an American citizen. I’m extremely online and the politics of my own country bores me. But that’s exactly the issue—I want it to stay that way and you guys are threatening my right to live in a country where we rightly shun anyone who’s interested in  politics as insufferable and frankly kind of suspicious.

Americans, I need you to help me write less about politics by stopping the infection at its root—your flirtation with fascism. That’s right, I said the F-word.

My subscribers come from all over the world including my corner of the map but statistically almost all of y’all are from the USA. My paying subscribers who see this a week before everyone else, you are the smartest and handsomest of my subscribers so I know you’re going to do the right thing but you still have over a week left to make sure you do all you need to do, and I know this is something that takes a lot of time and preparation and bureaucracy because your system is fucked. Next Friday I’ll treat you to something nice like another rant about AI or something.

Free subscribers: This is the last of my pieces that you will read before you Pokemon Go To The Polls. Godspeed to you on Tuesday, the day you have to try to find time on your lunch break to voice your opinion on whether your country, who did a historically decent thing four years ago and voted out Mussolini, should or shouldn’t fucking put Mussolini back and remove the safeguards and now he’s super pissed off at you.

Hey, have you ever actually wondered why election day is legally mandated to fall on a Tuesday? If you don’t know this already then you’ll think I’m shitting you, but honest to God, the reason is that you’ll be at church all Sunday, and you’ll be at the local market all of Wednesday selling your produce. That means you’ll need Monday to prepare provisions for the full day journey on horseback from the farm to your capital city where the only voting booth in your state is.

That’s the reason they made it the law a couple of centuries ago, anyway. The reason it’s still the law is because your system is fucked and your government doesn’t want you voting.

Let me tell you a bit about why this is important to me.

This is far from the first time that American politics has leaped over the Pacific Ocean to fuck Australia. It goes all the way back to 1776 when you guys decided to break up with England so the British needed a new land mass to dump all of its criminals on. Fast forward a couple of centuries and you guys are basically the culture-makers for the whole western world… for better or for worse.

The internet has only exacerbated the problem. Growing up in the 90s we still got a lot of American culture but it was delivered to us through a local cultural lens. We resisted American hegemony. Our politics was crap, but it was ours. One of my first subscriptions was to an Australian videogame magazine that combined a foreign-born cultural phenomenon with slang I heard in the schoolyard. There weren’t any stupid culture wars.

Something about right wing politics just loves to be colonised, though. Our leadership has historically leaned to the right, but it’s a different kind of conservatism to the one Americans would recognise in a lot of ways. Prime Minister is a job our conservatives consider if the Catholic seminary doesn’t work out. I’ve written before that our country doesn’t take easily to American style hysterical right wing politics. Our furthest-right mainstream party is literally named the “Liberal Party” and that’s not a deliberate misdirection like the National Socialists or something, it’s just an easy way of comparing our Overton windows. But there is an emerging class who are trying to change that.

Gradually our conservatives, who have made the folly of serving up a couple of really shit Prime Ministers lately, are working on a project to Americanise our culture to make it more susceptible to Trump style politics. They used to speak in deeply entrenched Australianisms, about the spirit of the Aussie battler and the culture of the Fair Go. It was forced and cringy and I never appreciated it until they quit with the regional dialect and started ranting about the Woke Mind Virus instead.

No! Shut the fuck up! This is even cringier!

The internet isn’t fully to blame for turning diverse western cultures into homogenous American reactionary slop. I also blame Rupert Murdoch, one of the worst human beings who has ever lived, and I will never stop feeling the need to apologise about him. He’s a colonialist himself, an Aussie conquistador who sailed to the Americas in search of exotic treasures and therein discovered Yellow Journalism. He made an empire out of it and then sailed back to where he embarked from to tell of his deeds, and with the skills he learned abroad, to conquer us as well.

Murdoch’s direct reach is faltering here among the younger generations but for older people he’s the source of almost all their news. He owns all the papers they read and still has control over the conservative political ecosystem. Before the internet he had to customise the propaganda to his audience but now it’s all relatively one-size-fits-all.

The little right wing private school city shits who populate student councils and keep up with the latest dank memes may revere John Howard as Australia’s Reagan but they don’t want another standard whiskey-sipping Catholic law professor braw-haw-hawing with his elite boarding school mates in the chambers. They want a Trump. They want a meme president of our very own.

They all look like this little fuckshit

So Rupert Murdoch, the Mogul Frankenstein whose opus was assembling Trump from the body parts of the 80s yuppie Americana that Reaganites love, the Fox News pundits that neocons love, the reality TV culture of Gen X, and the 4Chan culture of Gen Y, is busy teaching Australian politicians how to give more Trump. That means stupider haircuts, less professionalism, and reading more often from The Script.

Peter Dutton, the current head of the Liberal (more conservative) Party and prospective next national leader (Christ help us) has been trying to reinvent himself lately as our Trump.

We’ve been through every Voldemort joke alreadybut we’re ahppy to pass that torch over to you.

There’s a couple of problems with that. First of all, he is a career politician who’s been in our face for the past 20 years as the same kind of boring dickhead the party has been churning out our whole lives, rather than an “outsider” (read: celebrity or TV host) who can bring that contemporary appeal. But also, we already have two fucking Trumps. Two of them.

There’s Pauline Hanson, the white nationalist leader of the far-right “One Nation” party, who embodies all of Trump’s “mass deportations” energy, as well as her own line of shitty merchandise and a New Norm style “anti-woke” cartoon show.

And then there’s Clive Palmer, who embodies all of Trump’s “being a fat, obnoxious, far-right, billionaire lunatic” energy, too rich to fail despite his batshit ideas, and who actually does get called Australia’s Trump due to his directly ripping off Trump’s entire campaign slogan and aesthetic.

Trumpism—hard right, snide, obnoxious, inflexible, ignorant, hateful, cuntism—is bleeding into the fabric of my country in ways that make me feel deeply uncomfortable and foreboding, owing to its success abroad and the benefits that our local aspiring oligarchs and racists stand to gain from its normalisation. White nationalists are celebrating the return of dustbin philosophies.

Tomorrow, as it happens, I’m going to be voting in my state election for my home state of Queensland (Note: This was written on October 25. If you want to know how it panned out—The bad guys won), and an incredibly out-of-left-field issue on the line is abortion rights. We just don’t have a huge problem with women’s bodily autonomy in this country, and although the typical religious arguments about abortion are all still here, they never come up as any of the top political divisions on the national stage the way they do in the USA. Women’s basic rights are so comparatively settled here in a political environment that’s concerned mostly with mining and exports and inflation that to bring them back to the table almost seems archaic. And yet here we are, for the first time in ages, dredging up abortion as a debate topic, and why? Because of fucking Roe v Wade in America getting people all aquiver here about the possibilities of repealing established laws about people’s basic rights.

Yeah, yanks, you’ve been a real inspiration to us over here lately. I can attest to that every time I see someone bizarrely walking around with a MAGA hat. We have at least one senator here who is more loyal to Donald Trump than he is to his own constituents or country. That’s pretty bonkers.

And the rot tends to set in the less visible and more vulnerable parts of society first. There is an unintuitive flow of news, media, and ideology in the modern online era that means more remote and passive civilians are actually fed American news before Australian news even falls on their doorstep. Some of the people here, I swear, are so out of the loop and confused that they don’t even know that Donald Trump isn’t our president.

I was kind of astonished a few years ago when my mother took a “treechange” retirement move out into a remote small country township a few years ago, only to find that her new neighbours wanted to tell her about something called QAnon and how Donald Trump was going to save us all. I must reiterate, this is small country town bush Australia, where you would ordinarily expect people to be way more familiar with Con the Fruiterer than Donald Trump (and would sooner vote for him, too).

But then of course there was the Wieambilla shooting last year. You wouldn’t have heard of this abroad, but it was national news here. Three people living in a remote property so consumed by an echo chamber of QAnon/Trump/Mike Flynn conspiracy nonsense decided to ambush and murder some cops, and if you’re an American leftist reading this I’ll ask you to put aside whatever spring-loaded ACAB thoughts your might have about this and just know this: Mass shootings, ambush killings, Waco bunkers full of gun-hoarding End Times conspiracists, we don’t ordinarily have those here and we don’t want them, please and thank you.

For the love of God, please reject this ideology. I have friends in America who will be much, much more directly impacted by whatever is about to happen, but you have a million voices feeding you those perspectives already. Here’s one you won’t often get:

America flows downward. This is not just your election. Global hegemony has global consequences. Please take care of what you’re feeding into the pipes.