In which the Lynch mob does woke, and the bromancer contends with a glowing burst of White ...

 

In other news, news from Tasmania continues MIA at the top of the weekend edition of the lizard Oz ... and instead the usual suspects are out and about ...

Poor Devils, and the big brouhaha, the showdown of showdowns, currently taking place in the United States, is also MIA, though it seems to have entered a Sitzkrieg phase (Sitting or Phoney war if you will).

Over on the extreme far right, the Australian Daily Zionist (* formerly the Catholic Boys Daily) continued its usual routines ...

Given the news out of Gaza - Netanyahu supporting a bunch of criminals, so they could loot relief trucks, the last two hospitals in a precarious condition, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation acting as a front for barking mad fundamentalist Xian Zionists - there was no way the pond was going to sit through this sort of guff ...

All the drip-feed ‘news’ that fits Hamas agenda
Hamas has not only successfully infiltrated Gaza but also the Western media, with journalists across the world failing in their duty of fairly reporting Israel’s ongoing war.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)

The pond woke up to the news of the BBC trying to get to the bottom of the shameless fraud of the Strangelovian Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, founded in Delaware to evade inspection, and that was more than enough of all that. 

Ditto the pond couldn't summon the strength to handle the Ughmann ...

COMMENTARY by Chris Uhlmann

How young climate change activists are living a lie

Have activists ever wondered if their cosy life is linked to the fossil fuels they despise?

Why is it always projection with these reptiles? As if climate science denialists of the Ughmann kind aren't daily living a denialist lie ...

The pond will concede it has already supped deep and long on the US fuss, but yesterday this caught the pond's eye ...

Perfect. What the pond needed was a deeply weird take on the recent deeply weird events, a kind of Lynch mob dessert to wash it all down, a riff that might even take on the surreal aspect of a Lynch movie ...

First the pond should present the official reptile line ...

Trump and Musk are soulmates
Donald Trump showed a lack of foresight in letting Elon Musk too close to his inner sanctum. And Mr Musk showed poor judgment in overestimating his likely power.
Editorial
less than 2 min read

The Donald Trump-Elon Musk bromance was always an unlikely pairing that was destined to end in tears. Two men with big egos and unconstrained by convention are now at war with each other. No big deal there, except one is the world’s most powerful person and the other the world’s richest.
Mr Musk has linked Mr Trump to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and said the President should be impeached and replaced with his deputy, Vice-President JD Vance. Mr Trump has fired back that Mr Musk’s companies should be stripped of their access to government subsidies.
What happens next will affect the fortunes of millions of people, most notably the pair involved. In short, Mr Musk has buyer’s remorse because he cannot control the actions of the man he helped put into the White House. Having won the prize, Mr Trump has got what he wanted from Mr Musk.
A running commentary on what the President was doing wrong was likely never part of Mr Trump’s imagined future with Mr Musk. Given both men control their own social media outlets and are beyond discretion, the only thing certain about how this all plays out is that it will be done in public.
Mr Trump has less to lose. He can’t run for president again so he can afford to ignore Mr Musk’s threats to back a rival candidate or set up a party of his own.
But it is still all bad. Mr Trump showed a lack of foresight in letting Mr Musk too close to his inner sanctum. And Mr Musk showed poor judgment in thinking that as a rich, non-elected official he was going to be more powerful than he actually was.

That's it? That's all they wrote? 

How lucky that the Lynch mob had hovered into view, with that astonishing art work given a full, a bigger, splash ...

The header: Inside the rise and fall of the woke right as conservative politics fractures, There is a disturbing similarity in how the extreme left and right behave. But there is reason to believe this double dose of woke will inoculate America against something much worse.

The caption, with Emilia unwisely refusing to credit AI: US President Donald Trump, centre, JD Vance, left, and Joe Rogan. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

The meaningless injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

On to the feast, but the pond should note that the insistent use of "woke", even a "double dose of woke" immediately triggered a contractual requirement ...

Done and dusted, and the pond can now ignore the many times that "woke" gets trotted out, such that it becomes even more meaningless than it usually is.

Are we dealing with a fuckhead? Judge for yourself ...

The great Irish writer Brendan Behan quipped that the first agenda item of any Irish republican movement was “the split”. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the People’s Front of Judea shout “Splitter!” at the one remaining member of the Popular Front.
Behan and Monty Python were satirising how leftist radicals hate each other more deeply than their opponents on the right. But now the right is getting in on the act.
The Coalition crack-up in Canberra last month has been the latest to afflict the conservative side of politics.

Of the many effects Donald Trump has had on the political right, one is surely the rise of the narcissism of small differences. The concept is Sigmund Freud’s. “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike,” Freud said, “that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.”

Impressive, showing our Henry how to do it, moving from Behan to Python to Freud in a nanosecond, but speaking of Freud, don't expect any interesting gossip ...this sort of thing, Why Trump Fears Musk’s Epstein Bomb Most of All: Biographer, IN PLAIN SIGHT, Michael Wolff weighed in after the feud between two of the world’s most powerful men “escalated into nuclear territory.” (*archive link).

“I have seen these pictures. I know that these pictures exist and I can describe them,” Wolff alleged. “There are about a dozen of them. The ones I specifically remember is the two of them with topless girls of an uncertain age sitting on Trump’s lap. And then Trump standing there with a stain on the front of his pants and three or four girls kind of bent over in laughter—they’re topless, too—pointing at Trump’s pants.”

Juicy stuff, though Wolff provided his own answer. Any snap would immediately be greeted as a cry of fake news, an AI fraud. The tech bros have now undermined reality so much that nothing's real, nothing's believable.

Why if King Donald assembled a vast squad of cameras and journos to film him shooting someone on 5th Avenue, it would be discounted by the faithful as a fraud, or perhaps a justifiable assassination.

To celebrate this new freedumb, the reptiles offered this snap, Donald Trump speaks at the policy conference of the Faith & (sic) Freedom Coalition, a conservative Christian group, in 2024. Picture: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

WTF? What deeply weird AI determined that this was a useful interruption? That's a nightmare image the pond that will haunt the pond's dreaming for weeks ...

Back to the Lynching ... which weirdly manages to drag in Sussssan and Little to be Proud of ...

Trump quake

Sussan Ley and David Littleproud have postponed for now any Freudian marriage counselling. But their brief separation speaks to the tensions within conservative politics more generally. Ranged against a Labor behemoth in parliament, Liberals’ and Nationals’ first agenda item was the split.

The reptiles began to pile on the snaps, The brief separation between Sussan Ley and David Littleproud speaks to the tensions within conservative politics more generally. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Oh just get on with the Lynching ...

There is a fracturing along several conservative fault lines, here and abroad. The global earthquake was Trump.
Beginning in 2015, the Republican Party began to divide between a now dominant MAGA wing and the more cerebral but less effective and smaller Never Trumpers and Trump Nose-holders. During Trump 1.0 there was some jockeying for control. The Nevers and the Nosers attempted to balance Trump’s worst (and best?) MAGA instincts with a Mike Pence here and a John Kelly there. Neocon hawk John Bolton came and went.
Trump 2.0 has been a different story. The White House this time is full of MAGA loyalists. Trump’s success has been the creation of a populist right with expectations that what it has secured politically it can now win culturally.

What's a political and cultural win? 

Look no further than the ProPublica story “The Intern in Charge”: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention, One year out of college and with no apparent national security expertise, Thomas Fugate is the Department of Homeland Security official tasked with overseeing the government’s main hub for combating violent extremism.

...News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.
Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.
“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”

Colbert had a lot of fun with that lawnmowing "entrepreneur", but it was a ship that sailed right past the Lynch mob ...

Conservative fracture
Trump sits atop a movement sufficiently large and unarguably successful that it will inevitably fracture. Elon Musk will not be the first to leave in a huff. Australian conservatism has been riven by defeat, American conservatism by success.
There are, of course, good reasons not to count Trump as a conservative. It is enough to say it is the right, rather than the left, that is having to deal with the wages of victory. The rise of what has been called the “woke right” speaks to what those wages might be. The American right faces a fractious future – and a possibly happy ending, which I’ll come to.

Would the pond be better off recommending Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker? The Musk-Trump Divorce Is as Messy as You Thought It Would Be, The world’s richest man and its most powerful leader channel their inner middle schooler in a breakup for the ages. (archive link)

Quite possibly ...

...Amid so many headlines, you might have missed that Trump also spent an hour and fifteen minutes on Wednesday on the phone with Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, in a call that went so poorly that Trump’s subsequent account of it included two startling disclosures: first, “immediate peace” between Russia and Ukraine was not going to happen, and, second, Putin stated “very strongly” that Russia will retaliate in response to Kyiv’s daring surprise attack earlier this week on its strategic bomber fleet. Trump’s post about the call appeared on his Truth Social network at 1:56 P.M. on June 4th, and perhaps history will record that as the moment when one of Trump’s most flagrantly impossible campaign promises finally flamed out—his pledge, oft repeated, to instantly end the war in Ukraine.
Technically, Trump had long since failed to deliver on this one, given that he had insisted throughout the 2024 campaign that it would take him less than twenty-four hours to stop the fighting. (CNN compiled a non-exhaustive guide to fifty-three times he made this pledge, including saying that he would have the war “settled” even before he returned to the White House.) Until recently, Trump still claimed to be pursuing this goal, and while he admitted the obvious to Time that his self-imposed deadline was an “exaggeration” just “to make a point,” he nonetheless insisted that peace would soon be forthcoming. On April 25th, he even announced that the two warring parties were “very close to a deal” and that “SUCCESS seems to be in the future!” A week ago, Trump said he needed just two more weeks to see what was possible with Putin. But on Wednesday came the classic Trump walk-back, never acknowledged as such but a walk-back just the same: He’d had a “good conversation” with Putin, according to his post, but not one that was going anywhere with regards to Ukraine. Back in February, Trump demanded an immediate ceasefire in the conflict; by Thursday, in a meeting with Friedrich Merz, the new Chancellor of Germany, Trump was offering only a noncommittal “Maybe it will end.”

The Lynch mob isn't that much interested in real world consequences, he just wants to keep blathering about the woke ...

Woke right?

A 2022 book by Stephen Wolfe, a Westpoint graduate and now a Christian political theorist, argued that the right needed to awaken to its oppression by a secular, managerial elite. In The Case for Christian Nationalism, Wolfe adopts the style and tactics of the woke left. But he does so in defence of family, faith and nation. He is a Christian identitarian and, importantly, a victim.
Sound familiar? It is the kind of progressive posturing easy to find on any Western university campus, rainbow flags fluttering in the breeze. Your oppression is your strength; you are a victim of systemic injustice; you must seek redress and silence those who have silenced you; your racial identity is not a crime; we are your allies.
There is a disturbing similarity in how the woke left and right behave. Both are invested in identity politics. Each has its fair share of social media warriors. Language use is policed. The establishment, both claim, is not to be trusted.
There is even a new sub-field in political theory examining how the radical right has imbibed the critical theories of the left. “At the heart of this ideological project,” notes one of its theorists, Rita Abrahamsen, “is a critique of liberal globalisation that seeks to mobilise transversal alliances against a common enemy: the ‘New Class’ of global managerial elites who are accused of undermining national sovereignty, traditional values, and cultures.”

Meanwhile, on another planet ... for a little light relief, Nicholas Florko in The Atlantic, MAHA Has a Pizza Problem, Functionally banning school pizza is a tough sell. (archive link)

The Lynch mob has no interest in lunch ...

The debt to Marx

The woke right debt to Marxism is fascinating. In a hardly subtle rewriting of The Communist Manifesto, the anti-woke James Lindsay made Marx the inspiration for right-wing conspiracy theories: “In its precious world market – its bright Golden Calf – liberalism, however classical, sells the lie of ‘Free Trade’, but what it trades are peoples and their organic communities for its own bloody profits. In one word, liberalism is betrayal, veiled by religious and political illusions. It has substituted for life a naked, shameless, direct, brutal betrayal of everything and everyone who made its rise possible in the first place.” You get the idea. The woke right, says Lindsay, sees the world in a similarly binary and dialectical way as the woke left.
Trump, hero of this new right, apologises for US power – see his contrition in the Middle East recently – and so does the woke left. Both forms of wokeness distrust America and want to redeem it.

Why blather about Marx, when fascism is all the go? 

See Adrian Carrasquillo in The Bulwark with Masks Off ...

...The letter comes after Goldman reportedly confronted masked ICE agents in a Manhattan building where immigration hearings are held, a building shared by his office. Asked why they were wearing masks to detain immigrants, one agent told the congressman, “Because it’s cold.” The agent then walked away when Goldman asked him if he would testify to that under oath. Another agent admitted to wearing a mask “so that they are not caught on video.”
Goldman, who called the agents’ actions “Gestapo-like behavior,” told The Bulwark he coauthored the letter to the Trump administration in part because of his concerns over agents wearing masks.
“I was a federal prosecutor for ten years and worked with numerous immigration officers who have had to confront and arrest violent criminals—far more dangerous than immigrants showing up to routine court appearances,” he said. “None of them ever wore masks to hide their faces. These fear tactics aren’t about the safety of well-trained and armed federal law enforcement officers but are instead designed to intimidate and terrorize immigrants.”
The letter comes as White House senior aide Stephen Miller reportedly berated and threatened to fire senior ICE officials if they didn’t ramp up interior enforcement actions. Yesterday, ICE made more than 2,200 immigration arrests—the most ever in a single day—with hundreds detained at court hearings or scheduled check-in appointments.
These new tactics—using migrants’ compliance with the immigration system as a means of rounding them up more handily—recently led to an outcry after a Bronx high school student named Dylan was detained.

Say what you will about the Gestapo, and many have said a lot, they didn't resort to wearing masks. They were shameless, they were out and proud, so calling the masked goons as exhibiting Gestapo-like behaviour is a defamation of the Gestapo.

If you want examples of mask-wearing thugs, you have to look to other totalitarian, fascist and authoritarian regimes, or terrorists of the KKK kind, but why go past King Donald, now exhibiting advanced Caligula characteristics, and no doubt soon to appoint a horse to lead an investigative team to further explore DEI matters.

Speaking of DEI, cue the Lunch mob ...

An inverted DEI?

This is the woke right: a mishmash of sometimes conservative and often populist preferences pursued with the zeal of the woke left. It started as the preserve of podcasts. It now commands significant political influence, if not power, in the Trump administration. Trump has not obviously disparaged it.
His ambush of South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa during a meeting at the White House on May 21 synchronises with the ethnic solidarity emphasis of the woke right: whites are oppressed, too; not all refugees are people of colour.

At least that allowed the pond to slip in the joke that started that Bulwark link ...

You may think of Donald Trump as a reckless arsonist of federal bureaucracy, but you can’t say the big guy isn’t willing to spend some government dollars when it’s for a good cause. For instance, the Atlantic reports this morning that the Trump Department of Transportation allotted more than $2 million for celebrity defense attorney Alex Spiro to investigate whether DEI policies have been causing planes to crash. (The apparent answer: They haven’t been. But hey, at least now we know!)

Cue another yarn in The Atlantic, Isaac Stanley-Becker's The Trump Administration Is Spending $2 Million to Figure Out Whether DEI Causes Plane Crashes, The president may be disappointed by the findings.

Meanwhile, the reptiles were flinging in a snap, Donald Trump confronts South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during a meeting at the White House in Washington last month. Picture: AFP

Now that's the sort of situation the bromancer would love to see Albo in ... (see below).

The Lynch mob ploughed on ...

Among Trump’s most recent executive orders was “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. As a front in his bracing culture war, it takes no prisoners: “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”
Trump took special aim at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington: “The National Museum of African-American History and Culture has proclaimed that ‘hard work’, ‘individualism’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture’. The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports … Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”

Speaking of cancel culture, does it get any better than the cancelling of Harvey Milk?

Back to the Lynch mob finding virtue in cancelling stuff...

Marching back through the institutions

There is a crude logic to this assault: if the progressive left has marched through the institutions, our task, Trump’s culture warriors say, is not to snipe from the sidelines but to march back through them. The right lacks the cultural footholds that the left has been hammering away at for decades. It now has the political power to change that. Trump’s wars on Harvard and Hollywood have an underlying strategy.
And the strategy is not without some virtue.
The commanding heights of American culture are mostly in progressive hands. Ideological diversity in classrooms is essentially non-existent. Movies preach the pros of left-wing social theory, rarely its cons. Have you seen the new Snow White?
Yet dataset after dataset reveals an American population more miserable, more prone to mental ill-health, more opioid addicted than any in history. These maladies especially afflict the young, the generation most subject to a progressive cultural hegemony. So why not seek to change the culture?

Then came a ripper...

What the woke right gets right

The woke right has got on to the agenda questions that have been suppressed for too long. Is America really structurally racist? Is gender infinitely flexible? What price has the black family paid for Democrat welfarism? Is masculinity toxic?

Pretty much sums it all up, though no doubt the Lynch mob thought that was clever rhetoric. Alas it was interrupted by a snap of a fundamentalist Catholic bigot with a singular capacity not to understand the theology of the Catholic church ...US Vice-President JD Vance. Picture: AFP

Dear sweet long absent lord, as if the pond hadn't already been swamped by conspiracy theories that Uncle Leon and the tech bros would install JD and seize power, and govern by way of techno fascism ...

The Lynch mob seemed to think that might be a jolly good idea ...

Trump’s 2024 victory has empowered men such as JD Vance and Christopher Rufo to address these questions. Importantly, their mandate (inside and outside the White House, respectively) is to help move the culture in a new direction. Why not? Since when was American democracy not a contest of ideas? Will the Democrats lie supine in the face of this challenge? The game’s surely afoot?

Then came a first class rhetorical flourish ...

Is the woke right really a thing?

My caution about all this is two-fold. First, semantics. Is the “woke right” really a thing? As dissident Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann has warned, we are at risk of “conceptual stretching”. “Woke refers to a very specific phenomenon: the making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual groups,” Kaufmann says. “This informs a moralistic world view that judges people’s core character. A reverse wokeism would require making whites, men and straight people sacred.”
There is no evidence in the MAGA movement of this inverted sacralisation. Consider how that would play out in the mind of a woke right activist: “The left sacralises women of colour, I’ll do the same for white men.”

WTF? Deeply weird, and that was interrupted by a snap of the cult in action, Trump supporters flood into a campaign rally in October last year, in the build-up to the presidential election. Picture: AFP

It was the penultimate visual interruption, and the pond was disappointed that the Lynch mob didn't mention the splendid idea of deporting Uncle Leon back to South Africa, what with him being an illegal alien ... (much like Melania) ...

Trump could carve out a 51st state for white refugee farmers from Transvaal. That would still not be making them sacred.
There is no intersectionality league table on the right. The woke left has become obsessed with measuring identity points. A gay black woman is worth more than a straight white male. A poor trans man gets the job over a rich black lesbian. You’d be in neo-Nazi territory before finding a part of the right that mimics this bizarre approach to human worth.

Speaking of Freud, there's a world of Freudian analysis in that lot ... and there's more to come, what with the way that the word "woke" has fried the Lynch mob's brain ...

Negative impacts

Second, consequences. If the style and tactics of this new right-wing movement ape its self-declared enemies on the left, we could well end up in a worse place.
I work on a university campus. If the end of progressive hegemony necessitates its replacement by a right-wing one, I’ll defend the former. The latter is a practical impossibility anyway. Like the great conservative thinkers Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott, I believe in a diversity of ideas, not the certainty of my own. I want a campus full of ideological competition. Wokeness of any stripe negates that.

Chamberlains, not Churchills

More than my discomfort, though, is the impact of a woke right on America as a democratic project. David Brooks, the bestselling conservative columnist, has called them “catastrophising narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.”
There is an irony, mostly missed, that the questioning of Churchill’s legacy is now being undertaken by far-right activists such as Ian Carroll (a crackpot) on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It was the social justice left that defaced Churchill’s statue; now elements of the right have joined in metaphorically.

As a desperate attempt at trading off and establishing relevance, the reptiles provided a final snap, American podcaster and political commentator Joe Rogan.

Any clearer now about what's really going on as a deeply weird very rich man has a lover's tiff with a very powerful president?

Probably not ... stand by for more from a prof with an extremely limited vocabulary, such that many might be yearning for sleep ...

This querying by both woke wings of some bedrock assumptions about Western democracy is bad news. It tempts further conspiracy theorising. It is no coincidence that the woke right has decided, like its left-wing peers, that democracy is not the answer and is rigged. The US presidential election results of 2016 and 2020 were rejected by too many in both camps.

Peak right woke?

Wokeness is not a conviction one arrives at through common sense. It requires ideological conviction, a suspension of reality. These tend to peak. If Queers for Palestine was peak woke – that is, the point of maximum cognitive dissonance and absurdity for the left – what might constitute peak woke for the right? Possibly the embrace of Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine, by conservatives such as Tucker Carlson, is that peak. Please God, Trump will now become a bit more Churchill and a little less Chamberlain on the Russian threat.
The emergence of the woke right may be evidence of Trump’s creeping failure. Like going bankrupt, this failure will happen gradually as the President ages into his 80s, and then suddenly when he leaves office in 2029 – under 45 months away – with any successor likely deficient in the charisma that holds MAGA together.

Trump as vaccine

Between now and then, various ideological entrepreneurs of the right (and we can assume of the left when the Democrats get their mojo back) will rise and fall. There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Parties of the right will split and shed support. Conservative politics will fracture as it tries to appease its multiplying wings.
There is a case for optimism. The rise of left and right wokeness, their shared absurdities and exaggerations, banalities and conspiracies, create an opening for a more commonsense politics.
This is what Trump presages. As he passes from the field, the forces he has unleashed will oblige both sides to return to the middle ground. Trump was a vaccine. American politics needed a double dose to inoculate it against something worse.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne

Once again, the Lynch mob has successfully managed to defame the University of Melbourne, and send the pond into agonies thinking of the hapless Lynch mob students, yearning for a snooze, hoping for a slumber, but constantly having to endure all that blather about the woke and being awake...

And so to the bonus, a standard lecture on defence by the bromancer, inspired by Champers Pete ...

The header: Donald Trump is right to scold Anthony Albanese on Australia’s defence, In defence, we are the Mr Magoo nation, continuing on our way sublimely indifferent to the circumstances around us.

The caption, explaining that Frank was determined to take the credit, though he could have passed the buck to AI:  Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles are facing the wrath of Uncle Sam. Artwork by Frank Ling.

Now as it's a ten minute read, the pond isn't going to interrupt the bromancer. 

Instead the pond has arranged for Hugh White to provide a response immediately after the bro has had his say ...

The Trump administration, through Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a conversation in Singapore last weekend, demanded Australia lift its defence spending from the pathetic 2 per cent of GDP, where it is now, to 3.5 per cent. This was, Hegseth said, because of the threat posed by China’s military build-up and its intention, perhaps imminently, to take military action against Taiwan. Beijing denounced Hegseth but also Australia’s Richard Marles, more or less for nodding in polite agreement.

Last Sunday, Ukraine destroyed billions of dollars of Russian warplanes, including strategic bombers, with cheap drones smuggled into Russia. Australia has only one armed drone and no significant counter-drone capacity. (Australia does spend billions of dollars on projects like Ghost Bat, an unarmed surveillance plane without a pilot, but has none of the cheap, lethal drones that Ukraine used against Russia.) Chief of the Defence Force Admiral David Johnston declared this week that for the first time since it was attacked by Japan in World War II, Australia might have to wage war from its homeland. The implication of Johnston’s revolutionary comments is that there is now a potential adversary that, with missiles, could hit any part of Australia. And that Australia needs to be able to defend itself.

Keir Starmer’s British Labour government brought down its strategic defence review this week. Starmer has already committed to lifting defence from today’s 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent in less than two years, 3 per cent in the next parliamentary term with the intention of reaching 3.5 per cent. Germany is committed to 3.5 per cent on defence and another 1.5 per cent on defence infrastructure. Britain plans a bigger army, more reservists, increasing nuclear attack subs from seven to 12 and spending £15bn ($31bn) modernising its nuclear warheads, which are launched from its separate nuclear missile submarines.

In words that apply equally to Australia, Britain’s review commented: “The West’s long-held military advantage is being eroded as other countries modernise and expand their armed forces at speed, while the United States’ security priorities are changing.” The future will involve “multiple and concurrent dilemmas, proliferating and disruptive technologies, and the erosion of international agreements”.

The reptiles decided to turn to Jennings of the fifth form, himself something of a Champers Pete man, 

Strategic Analysis Australia Director Peter Jennings discusses Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s call for Australia to up its defence spending. “We are so far back … because we have been riding on American security coattails for the better part of 20 or 30 years,” Mr Jennings told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “During the Cold War, we were spending between three to three and a half per cent of defence over that period of time and it has fallen very significantly since then, so really this is a warning from our closest ally.”

The pond suggests skipping to Hugh White below might be more useful ... but no doubt a dedicated few will keep ploughing through the bromancer ...

The British will spend billions of pounds on drones and counter-drone capabilities. Like the American military, the British will integrate drones and counter-drone capabilities into mainstream military doctrine.

Through all these crushing waves of military threat and turmoil, the Albanese government smiled vacantly. What do you think of all this, the Prime Minister was repeatedly asked. His response, metaphorically, channelled Peter Sellers playing Chauncey Gardner, the most unlikely man ever to be president, whose pathological passivity was mistaken for shrewdness: I like to watch.

In defence, we are the Mr Magoo nation, continuing on our way sublimely indifferent to the circumstances around us.

Everyone who gives the matter thought tells the Albanese government it cannot defend Australia, it certainly can’t acquire nuclear subs as well, with 2 per cent of GDP. We have a modernised version of exactly the same defence force we had in the 1980s – 100 fast jets, six submarines, six battalions, a surface fleet of 10 or 12. Except most of our force now, apart from our air force, is old and decrepit.

Hegseth in his keynote speech in Singapore noted the biggest Europeans are moving to 5 per cent of GDP for defence. Apart from Germany, Britain and Poland, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But virtually all the Europeans are significantly increasing defence spending. Marles himself said China is engaging in the greatest military build-up since World War II, without transparency or reassurance. Hegseth’s question is unanswerable: in the face of this, how can Australia stay so puny?

The Australian defence budget has bounced around 2 per cent of GDP for a decade. In 2017-18 it was just under 2 per cent, in 2021-22 it was just over, this year it’s just over again. Yet Albanese government ministers fatuously proclaim they’ve undertaken the biggest defence funding increase in peacetime.

They make this highly misleading claim through two sleights of hand. First, the high inflation their spending caused meant every area of government spending went up in nominal dollars. The other sleight of hand is to give themselves credit for spending increases that they’ve only promised for the future.

Thus Albanese, Marles and Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy boast they’ve committed $50bn extra to defence. But this doesn’t start to appear significantly until 2028-29. That’s in the third Albanese government – a dismal lack of urgency.

Financially, defence has been a low priority for the Albanese government. In the coming financial year, Australia will have a staggering $777bn in federal government expenditure. Defence spending is about $55bn. If we moved from 2 per cent GDP to 2.5 per cent, this would require $13.5bn additional expenditure. Instead the Albanese government plans to reach just 2.3 per cent of GDP by 2033.

Cue a caption for a snap explaining why the bromancer was terrified at being excluded from the cult,  The Trump administration is demanding its allies increase their defence spending or risk being cut off by the superpower.

On with the bro in his usual state of panic, worried about having enough kit for his war with China by Xmas...

The Trump administration, in contrast, puts its money where its mouth is. The US plans a 13 per cent increase in defence spending to $US1 trillion ($1.5 trillion). Every American makes a contribution to allied security well over twice the contribution we make. Our defence budget translates to $US36bn.

The US population of 350 million is about 12½ times our population of 28 million. If they made the same contribution we do, their defence budget would be about $440bn, just over 40 per cent of its current level. The US couldn’t then provide the vast intelligence and logistics support, plus physical security, plus extended nuclear deterrence, that it supplies to Australia right now.

Few Australians appreciate how comprehensively we rely on the US. Ed Husic, when industry minister, in a typical act of farsighted genius, abolished the program under which we were going to launch, own and operate low Earth orbit satellites. That of course would just have been the beginning of our satellite journey.

Low Earth satellites have lots of limitations. But as it stands, we’re entirely reliant on US satellites. Without the alliance, we couldn’t even fire those very few sophisticated weapons we have because we couldn’t locate the targets.

The disproportionate US contribution goes far beyond this. The US spends many billions of dollars on its nuclear weapons beyond the defence budget, in the Energy Department. These weapons allow it to impose some constraints on the behaviour of Russia, China and others.

It’s actually much worse than it seems. The Australian military is in crisis. With 59,000 full-time ADF members, about half a Taylor Swift concert, we’re 6000 short of where we should be even under our present unbelievably modest plans. Joining the ADF is still an epic bureaucratic obstacle course that initially interested smart young people routinely drift away from.

Nothing in Australian defence happens in realistic, useful or meaningful timeframes. Every capability undergoes death by delay. The Ukraine war has been going for more than three years. It has revolutionised techniques of warfare and underlined that we live in the age of missiles and of drones.

Critics have been telling the ADF this for years. But still we have only one armed, lethal drone actually established in the ADF. We have Australian companies that make drones for Ukraine but they don’t make sales to the ADF.

Naturally there was a snap of the allegedly reformed drunk, Champers Pete, though the pond wishes that someone would tell the AI thingie that cutting off his face might be a relief, but it isn't a professional look, Pete Hegseth, US Defence Secretary, has told Deputy PM Richard Marles that Australia needs to nearly double its defence spending to $100 billion, or 3.5% of our GDP, to satisfy US demands.

Back to the bro, who by now has entirely forgotten the years he spent explaining his deep love and devotion to nuking submarines ... the many columns he spent agonising about whether to go with Japan or France or wherever, before giving his thumbs on to nuking with the US ...

The Ukrainian drone strike was a devastating proof of the strategic power of cheap drones. They embody a contemporary philosophy of arms – the cheap, the many and the swarming defeat the big and the cumbersome.

Our defence force is addicted to buying tiny numbers of exquisitely complicated platforms, often endlessly redesigned for Australia’s allegedly unique conditions, completely ignoring the small, the cheap and the many.

The Houthis taught us a similar lesson to the Ukrainians about drones attacking ships in the Red Sea. Yet Australia has neither armed drones nor any serious counter-drone capabilities.

Retired major general Mick Ryan tells Inquirer: “We’ve got a crisis on our hands. You talk to people in the Australian Army, they never see drones. You talk to Ukrainians, they see drones all the time.”

Ryan’s point is that, partly for budgetary reasons, partly because of a top-heavy, woefully process obsessed and above all slow bureaucratic culture, the ADF is almost entirely missing the dominant form of today’s conventional warfare.

That drone and counter-drone technology can change quickly is no bar to a regular military using them extensively. Go into contract with an Australian company, buy as many drones as the ADF can use, then use them all up in training. Train too in counter-drone technology and keep buying new drones to replace the old as the technology shifts.

Drones are so cheap, you could buy, use, cannibalise, restock etc all for less than the salary costs of starred officers working on AUKUS.

We also have almost no ground-based missile defence systems. Our northern air bases, our air force squadrons, much of our naval assets could be destroyed on the first day of conflict, especially if we weren’t given notice, by conventional missiles.

Admittedly drones would be cheaper. Getting drones within range of the target is simple. Sail a ship into harbour with a container full of drones. Send a few agents into Australia to hire trucks and drive drones near our bases. Launch drones at our coastal bases from nearby ships. Carry swarms of drones in a big plane’s cargo bay. Design drones that travel a long distance. So long as they’re cheap, get to their target and go bang in the night.

The Albanese government isn’t doing any aspect of its job in defence. The Defence Strategic Review called for layered missile defence programs to protect military and other key assets. The National Defence Strategy of 2024 abolished most of our ground-based missile defence programs.

When the Albanese government came to office the nation had eight aged Anzac-class frigates and three air warfare destroyers. The government decided not to do the scheduled military upgrade on Anzacs, though it has improved some of their weapons.

One of the Anzacs had to be retired. It’s widely rumoured another will soon be kaput. Even without that, our surface fleet consists of 10 ships – seven tiny, decrepit, radically undergunned Anzacs and three AWDs. It’s the oldest surface fleet we’ve had, and one of the smallest.

Then came another AV distraction, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has rejected America’s push for Australia to raise its defence spending. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth is pushing the Australian federal government to increase spending on defence to 3.5 per cent of GDP. Mr Albanese claims Australia will determine its own defence policy.

The face of that heretic sent the bromancer off the deep end as his beloved war with China loomed large ...

Our six aged Collins-class subs are in desperate trouble. It transpires we can’t do the full life-of-type extension we planned to get another 10 years life out of them.

Former Defence Department deputy secretary Peter Jennings thinks LOTE is now so expensive, and so uncertain of success, that we should approach the Japanese to sell us their Taigei-class conventional submarines as the interim capacity we’ll need. We could get four or six. Otherwise, Jennings argues, there’s every chance of a prolonged period with no subs.

This is a smart idea but wildly too radical for Australia. The smart way to do it would be to get the subs built in Japan with no alterations at all. Just use Japanese combat systems, torpedoes etc. We can operate these alongside our nuclear subs when and if they ever arrive.

But we never do a smart thing in defence, ever. Conroy, decrying the nay-sayers, was boasting that we’ve bought Tomahawk missiles, which give us long-range strike. But we once planned to put Tomahawks on the Collins, then we changed our minds. Now the Tomahawks will go only on the three AWDs. The AWDs only have 48 vertical launch cells each. You need a lot for self-defence. The navy’s rule of three means that of three AWDs, when everything is going well, we’d expect to have one on operations.

So all the Albanese government’s bluster about buying Tomahawk missiles – and it’s not clear we actually possess any stocks yet – comes down to one ship being armed with a handful of Tomahawks sometimes. When you have a pathetically tiny navy – effectively three modestly sized AWDs – you can’t be formidable.

Just addressing drones, counter-drones, missile and air defence, and offensive missiles, this would more than absorb an increase in the defence budget from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP.

The government is still taking forever to decide whether to buy a Japanese or German general purpose, very small frigate. Like everything, it’s insanely slow. The choice should be obvious. The Japanese is the more powerful ship and Japan the nation with which we have a more important strategic relationship. But anything would be better than nothing.

One reason Hegseth spoke with such urgency about our need to do more is that, along with every other serious analyst, he believes a Chinese military move against Taiwan a strong possibility.

If that happens and America doesn’t come to Taiwan’s aid, probably the whole US alliance system in Asia collapses. Japan and South Korea could well acquire their own nuclear weapons. China would dominate our region. If America ever fully retreated to its own hemisphere Australia would be isolated and completely undefended in the most dangerous strategic environment since 1942.

One last snap ...Labor faces a delicate situation in the Pacific as China ramps up its military presence.

Thus far it's pretty much been standard bromancer stuff, but he always saves his best to last, and he delivered a ripper ...

The best way to stop all this is to convince Beijing of the credibility of allied military deterrence. Australia contributes its flag, its territory and almost nothing else. Yet in a US-China military conflict over Taiwan we would almost certainly be attacked, by missiles, drones, cyber and who knows what else.

The Albanese government is perfectly asleep to all this. In World War I we made a heroic contribution to allied victory. In World War II we did our best, which was very good. Since then, we’ve designed the ADF not to provide for Australian security, defend the continent or undertake any strategically significant military task. It has been designed entirely to provide niche contributions to American expeditionary wars, the diplomacy of managing the Americans, to entrap them into providing our security.

The AUKUS subs project can probably be seen in this light. When Scott Morrison announced them he didn’t tell the nation they’d require a huge boost in defence spending. If Albanese had signed on to that, we’d be much better off.

But I’ve come to suspect the AUKUS project is not mainly about acquiring a military capability but, rather, cajoling the Americans into more intimate association with us, basing one or two of their subs here, in effect providing for our security while we do almost nothing.

It’s not the Americans who lead us into foolish wars. It’s we who pretend to do much more than we do, to lure them into providing our security.

Say what? So Australia led the United States into Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention other ventures listed in a wiki, shamelessly acting like a hussy to lure the hapless Yanks into providing us with security?

The pond had to stop rolling around the floor in an hysterical fit to get to the last bromancer line ...

Donald Trump seems unlikely to swallow that deal in the way previous presidents have. I guess Albanese will avoid a joint White House press conference with him at almost any cost.

Indeed, indeed, who wouldn't want to go through the ritual humiliations recently endured by South Africa, Germany, etc etc. (see snap above).

And so as promised Hugh White as a rebuttal ...

The header: Yes, spend more on defence – because we can’t rely on US, We need to ignore Pete Hegseth and start thinking for ourselves.

The caption celebrating the reformed drunk and cancel culture warrior, Champers Pete: US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth delivers his speech during 22nd Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth delivers his speech during 22nd Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore.

The meaningless instruction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version

Take me there

Now the pond could simply have referred to Hugh White in The Graudian, offering an actual extract, In Australia’s post-US future, we must find our own way with China, The Canberra establishment thinks we must depend on Washington more than ever in today’s hard new world. That misses a vital point, Hugh White writes in this Quarterly Essay extract

But of course it's not just the Canberra establishment, it's the bromancer, and the pond found it piquant that the reptiles gave White space.

The pond had saved it up, knowing that the bromancer would be out and about at some point, and that White would shamelessly trample on the bro dreaming ...

There are very good reasons for Australia to increase defence spending to 3 per cent or even 3.5 per cent of GDP across the next decade. The fact US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth demands it is not one of them.
On the contrary, we will keep getting our defence policy completely wrong if we see defence spending as the price we pay for the US to defend us. We must see it instead as the investment we make in our capacity to defend ourselves independently in the decades ahead when the US will no longer be here for us.
Hegseth’s performance at the annual Shangri-La defence dialogue in Singapore last weekend showed exactly why we can no longer depend on the US and must focus decisively on our own defence.
In his big keynote speech Hegseth boldly proclaimed that the US was determined to contain China’s challenge in Asia. He boasted that the Trump administration was ready, willing and able to go to war with China, and “insisted” US allies in Asia get ready to help.
This is delusional, for three very powerful reasons. The first is Donald Trump doesn’t agree with Hegseth and never has. People say Trump is unpredictable, but on this question he has been completely consistent since long before we went into politics.

The reptiles even offered a snap of Champers Pete, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and Australian Minister for Defense Richard Marles.

That seemed to make White determined to dump on him ...

He is a true old-fashioned isolationist who does not believe the US has any duty or any need to spend its blood and treasure upholding the global order or defending foreign countries.
Trump does not see allies as assets but as costly and contemptible liabilities. He is relaxed about China’s ambitions to build a sphere of influence in East Asia, just as he is happy to see Vladimir Putin’s Russia extend its influence in Europe.
In fact his administration’s vision of a multipolar world in which a number of great powers each dominate their own backyards is very close to Beijing’s and Moscow’s. That is why his focus is on dominating America’s backyard, threatening Panama, Greenland and Canada.

Clearly this was too much for the reptiles, because they rushed to include Sharri, full disrespect, Sky News host Sharri Markson discusses how defence spending will be a “sticking point” on Australia’s relationship with the United States. “Donald Trump’s top counter-terrorism director has doubled-down on the warning to Anthony Albanese to ramp up our defence spending,” Ms Markson said. “This is going to be a major sticking point in Australia’s relationship with the United States.”

Poor Sharri, thrust into the front line to take on the heretic ... with White not so keen on the bromancer and Champers Pete's war with China by Xmas ...

And that is why – contrary to Hegseth’s bold talk – Trump has always been deeply sceptical about the idea that the US should defend Taiwan or any other Asian allies. And in Trump’s Washington, US policy is whatever Trump says it is. Hegseth was way out of line.

The second reason to ignore what Hegseth said in Singapore is that no one else in Asia is buying it. Our neighbours in Southeast Asia have long ago decided they will not bet their future on America’s staying power in Asia and its willingness to respond effectively to the fundamental transformation of the regional strategic order driven by the rise of China, India and, before long, Indonesia.And they are right, because the third and strongest reason Hegseth was talking nonsense in Singapore last weekend is that the US no longer has the power it once had to impose its will on China and perpetuate its leadership in Asia.For 30 years America’s military position in Asia has stagnated as China’s forces, especially its air and naval capabilities, have grown exponentially.Contrary to Hegseth’s boyish boasts, no one today seriously believes the US can win a war with China over Taiwan. Most likely a bloody stalemate would lead swiftly to a nuclear standoff that China would win because its stake is higher, or to a nuclear war that neither side could survive.

Cue a snap of the cultists gathered in a gaggle, President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after signing executive orders regarding nuclear energy in the Oval Office.

On and on went the knocking heretic, smashing the bromancer's dreaming around the park ...

No one in Washington really believes America’s leadership in Asia or its allies there are worth that. Just as no one there is really willing to contemplate nuclear war with Russia to defend Ukraine or even its NATO neighbours. That is why Poland is talking about getting its own nuclear weapons. So is South Korea.

The underlying reality we confront is that in today’s multipolar world the costs and risks to the US of defending its strategic pre-eminence in key regions such as Asia and Europe exceeds the imperative for it to do so.

That is ultimately why the US has failed to respond effectively to China’s challenge in Asia and to Russia’s in Europe. And it is ultimately why Australia cannot depend on the US to keep Asia safe for us in the decades ahead. We live in a post-American world.

Nothing Hegseth says can change this. So it was embarrassing to see our Defence Minister, Richard Marles, praise Hegseth’s speech as “a very clear articulation of American intent, that what they seek is peace through strength”.

And it was unseemly for him to concede any place for Hegseth in Australia’s conversation about our future defence spending, just as it was unseemly of his new opposition counterpart, Angus Taylor, to say we needed to spend 3 per cent of GDP “to ensure we are a good ally”.

What they both need to understand is we cannot buy US protection by meeting some arbitrary American demand on defence spending. The US will defend us or our neighbours only if it thinks it is plainly in America’s vital interest to do so. In World War II and the Cold War, the US thought it was. Today – to judge from what the US does, as well as from what Trump says – it clearly thinks it isn’t.

Just to rub it in, the reptiles offered a snap of the heretic, Hugh White...

Then came a final short gobbet ...

That is why we need to ignore Hegseth and start thinking for ourselves about how to defend Australia independently. That will mean spending more on defence – quite possibly as much as 3 or 3.5 per cent of GDP.

But what really matters is what we spend it on, and to get that right we need to make some hard decisions.

The place to start is with AUKUS, which commits us to spend immense sums of money on nuclear-powered submarines we do not need and will never receive, all to prove our loyalty to a US alliance that is already, if we only knew it, passing into history.

Hugh White is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University. His new Quarterly Essay, Hard New World: Our Post-American Future is out this week.

Hopeless. Useless. Really Hugh? Really?

As if there was any way to make the bromancer start thinking for himself. 

He's a member of the hive mind, he's a paid-up member of the cult with so many glasses of kool-aid down him that he's as wired as Champers Pete is...

On the other hand, you did save the pond a lot of bother, by strutting your heresy inside the reptile hive, thereby helping the pond avoid doing the bromancer dance.

And after all that time to wrap up proceedings with the immortal Rowe ...

As usual it's in the detail, and didn't that plucked chook or duck or whatever lay a bloody good egg ...

Ah, after that heavy diet of reptiles, the pond is well beyond insanity Buzz ...