There can seem to be a phenotype for people in the Liberal Party, and it’s most exaggerated at the level of the Young Liberals, a couple examples above, where you can usually spot instantly that they are of upper class origin, or at least solidly comfortable middle class, and they tend to have puffy, soft faces, and give the impression of being in it for the socialising and networking opportunities. In the past you would have added “Protestant” as a descriptor but Catholics are thoroughly integrated into these things now.
The amazing thing is that this party can win 40% of the primary vote, when many of its voters share little in common with it phenotypically and socio-economically, though perhaps there is an aspirational element to this, or it’s just a function of inertia, in that the party is long established and things will just keep trundling along, powered by the efforts and achievements of men many years past, until some great, sudden event or shift occurs that finally, mercifully, kills the damn thing.
One specific example is Barclay McGain, a young political operative for the Liberal Nationals in Queensland, and spare a thought for him, as he’s been in the wars in recent years and it’s going from bad to worse.
His first ‘controversial’ adventure went under the radar initially, when in the happy days of January 2018 Barclay visited China, and filmed himself at the Great Wall doing a Trump impression, having the Trump persona refer to Chinamen, or maybe Mongolians, as “chikedy chongs” (sic) and “bing bongs” (also sic).
His audio-visual racist terror was just getting started though, and in December 2019 he went around Youtube-interviewing people during the annual (BC: Before Covid) raucous degeneracy of Schoolies week on the Gold Coast, and one teenager made a joke about Aborigines never having invented the wheel, with Barclay making the terrible mistake of smirking at this. White boy smirking is a serious offence as is known, though at least he didn’t smirk directly at an actual First Person, like that kid in Kentucky, USA, did, sort of, and there was a national uproar, and the young man lost his headship of the Gold Coast Young Liberals over it.
Despite these distressing racism controversies, or maybe because of them, Liberal MP Andrew Laming, who has a list of “controversies” of his own as long your arm including allegations that he implied Aborigines were “petrol sniffers” in a Facebook post, gave our young hero a job as an electorate officer, and McGain remains in this position even after this, his most recent, likely dumb-inadvertent, shit-stirring effort, at a Halloween party this year:
Unfortunately, and this is inevitable really, he semi-cucked, apologising thusly:
The costume was not necessarily an endorsement or condemnation of Rittenhouse’s actions. I thought it was topical. He had just been found not guilty, and you know, like any Halloween costume, I guess you’re trying to excite people, entertain people.
Same as someone who dresses as Edward Scissorhands isn’t saying, ‘oh, you know, he was great to children’… The notion that I was impersonating a murderer or glorifying a murderer, I just don’t think it stacks up.
But redeemed himself:
People need to learn to respect the rule of law. He was clearly found not guilty … You know, this guy, his whole entire life will never be the same. You know, he’ll never be able to go down to the shops for a cup of coffee. He’ll never be able to get a normal job where he just isn’t recognised by people. Like this has changed his whole life forever, and it’s because of the media backlash that he received, which in my opinion, framed him as someone who was going out intending to kill people of colour because he didn’t agree with their political views.
On Rittenhouse, obviously people being allowed to openly walk around with guns is completely weird and nobody wants that here (but you should be able to keep weapons at home for self defence, if they’re going to flood us with immigrants at least let us have that recourse. This is actually a deeply disturbing thing, if you have a family, that you’re basically legally not allowed to defend them in any effective way) but if your own government and police are not willing to do their number one job, MAINTAIN ORDER, then it’s understandable and admirable what he tried to do (defend his town from savages).
Finally, and no longer funnily, Barclay has suffered one of these exceedingly rare heart complications from the vaccine:
The media are unaccountably uninterested in this the most recent notable episode in the travails of young Barclay McGain, this time it’s not narrative advancing.
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