The current advertising campaign for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers pens a letter to the perceived closed minds of Australia accusing them of various sins including ‘sexism’, ‘racism’, ‘polarising’, and ‘ostracising’ society. It finishes with a warning that ‘ongoing closed-mindedness will be met with extreme nuance, deep inquiry, and difficult questions’.

This campaign perfectly demonstrates the sad reality that the left has become bossy, snobby, divisive, while also being obsessed with virtue signalling, moral superiority, and threatening behaviour.

The back-patting is painful. Read, ‘you’re bad’, ‘we’re good’.

As a creative director with over 20 years of experience, I can say that the vast majority of advertising seeks to find a unique truth in a product and dramatise it. But occasionally, as a creative, you’re asked to open your box of tricks and convince people of a lie – to flip a flaw.

Case in point are bank ads that truly, madly, and deeply care about you and your loved ones. Although unnervingly in this instance, I’d bet my bum the folks behind this campaign are blissfully aware of the ruse, such is their moral certitude.

The sad truth revealed here is a glaringly obvious one: that the almost entirely woke left are the ones with closed minds.

They are unwilling to push any of their pillars: amongst them are climate change, Covid vaccines, freedom of speech, immigration, feminism, and of course Trump.

Utter anything that tiptoes from an approved narrative and you will immediately be called – in order – a ‘Climate Change denier’, ‘anti-vaxxer’, ‘Nazi’, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, or ‘white supremacist’.

So let’s pick the scabs off a few…

To criticise Biden is impermissible. To suggest that Trump might have been better for America than Biden is sacrilege.

Biden had the chance to unify a deeply divided country, but has failed drastically at every turn.

On his first day of office, he overturned Trump’s executive order to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) from being taught in schools. CRT is currently tearing the country apart and if it ever finds its way into the Australian curriculum, God help us.

In his first public address, Biden declared that the ‘most lethal threat’ America faces is white supremacy. This is laughably inaccurate.

Trump is repeatedly accused of being a white supremacist, but he enacted the First Step Act which freed thousands of black inmates, a bill the Democrats had repeatedly failed on.

It’s clear that Trump is a narcissist. Unhinged. Dangerous even. His string of lies is unfathomable. But the mere suggestion that Trump did good for the country is met with hot rage. It’s known as ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’, or more commonly ‘Orange Man Bad’. And that’s the point. The so-called inquiring mind of the left is already made up.

Let’s try on climate change.

I am an environmentalist. Remember those sad-as-all-hell Wilderness Society Bears? I was one. Only for a day but there you have it. Credentials offered. Embarrassingly.

It’s widely agreed that man-made climate change is real and I agree. But the extent to which humans have affected the climate and precisely what that effect will be is still largely unknown.

There are many other sides to this debate, an interesting one is the wholly scientifically accepted phenomenon whereby an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is feeding plants, resulting in a 30 per cent increase in biomass and growth, effectively greening the planet, particularly in arid areas like sub-Saharan Africa. Nasa has concluded that the Earth now has almost the equivalent of three ‘Australias’ more in leaf area.

Historically, the UN’s climate reports offer five scenarios from worst to best case. But in the pressing need to drive clicks, views and sell papers the sensationalist mainstream media have consistently offered up the worst-est case. So over time this has become the undeniable truth.

However, respected climate scientists’ predictions of environmental collapse have been wildly inaccurate. Frothing doomsayers have predicted the apocalypse since the 1960s, and they’ve duly been reported by a salivating media.

In 2000 The Independent reported that children of the day would not know what snow is.

In 2004 The Guardian predicted that Britain would have a Siberian climate by 2020.

In 2009 Prince Charles said we have 96 months to save the world.

In the same year, Al Gore stated the Polar Cap would be gone by 2014.

In 2013 US Navy scientists said the Arctic would be ice-free by 2016.

In May 2014 the French Foreign minister Laurent Fabios stated that ‘we have five hundred days to avoid climate chaos’.

The reality is that climate alarmism has dented the cause, transforming devotees into sceptics.

But to suggest that the current rhetoric on climate smacks of alarmism is met with, not with a deep inquiry as promised, but immediate accusations of being a ‘Climate Change denier’.

What about the concept of individual liberty as it relates to vaccine mandates?

A nuanced debate would centre on the philosophical and moral rights of an individual’s autonomy to decide on what they put in their body.

One might then raise that it is illegal for the government to force anyone to have the vaccine, by any means, including coercion which the Australian people are currently subject to.

In fact, it has been against international law since the creation of the Nuremberg Code in 1945 to administer a medical procedure against someone’s will.

Mention any of this and you’ll be labelled a ‘far-right extremist’ as Dan Andrews did to the very normal tens of thousands who protest in Melbourne.

Let’s ask some ‘difficult questions’ about the vaccine.

Mention any potential risks, like myocarditis, or question the effectiveness of the vaccine’s mRNA spike protein, and you’re immediately told the ‘science is in’. The same goes for suggesting that natural immunity to Covid is, in many reports, at least seven times more effective than the vaccine.

What about pharmaceutical companies’ motivation for profit, or the record time that the said vaccines were approved?

Ask any questions, or express any hesitancy around the vaccine and you’re labelled an ‘anti-vaxxer’. No debate.

Of the virus itself, if you gently suggest that Covid isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be for the vast majority of Australians who, on the balance of things probably should be allowed to get back to the business of living, you’re labelled a ‘selfish granny killer’.

Point out that many doctors have said that masks, aside from the P2 (N95), are mostly ineffective and you’re a social pariah.

What about freedom of speech?

Alarmingly, ‘free speech’ has become synonymous with ‘hate speech’.

A nuanced debate might point out that black men in the sixties actually marched for the right for Nazis to march and spew their bile. This is because they knew that the best way to fight hate speech is with more speech. Better speech.

But say you believe in freedom of speech and you’re instantly suspected of being a ‘Nazi’ or ‘Alt Right’. No questions asked.

If you believe there needs to be a limit to immigration, that respecting the sovereignty of the nation-state is crucial for a society to function you’re labelled a racist, a fascist, or a bigot. Again, no ‘deep enquiry’.

If you express concern that the current brand of feminism hero worshipping Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame might be misguided and that being a victim is not an achievement, that women are capable of far, far more than being victims you’re immediately labelled a ‘victim blamer’ or a ‘misogynist’.

If you contest the belief that the patriarchy is an all-powerful machine purely designed to oppress women and the marginalised you’re labelled everything at once. A nuanced mind would parse how, in such a world, Denise Coates of bet365 could be the highest paid CEO in history with a package of $422 million per year.

If you say there is no such thing as systemic racism, or white privilege you’re a ‘white supremacist’. And on it goes.

That is because the centre left have allowed themselves to be cannibalised by radical progressives who do not care one jot about the working class. They are purely a virtue signalling mob obsessed with gaining moral superiority and therefore social status. Will Storr’s The Status Game provides a sound argument for this.

In spite of what this ad campaign is telling you, the left don’t want to explore ‘nuance’, ‘enquire’, or ask ‘difficult questions’.

And the reason any debate is met with epithets and thought-ending cliches is because their morally dogmatic minds are made up, and they consider their rivals either amoral or stupid – or both.

How’s that for an open mind?

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