This is from a walk-on-both-sides-of-the-fence government that doesn’t believe in vaccine mandates but allows them to happen everywhere on its watch.

Sometimes, it actually creates and enforces them itself. This time, it is being steered by the Minister for Home Affairs. I speak of the brand new super-charged funding of anti-“terrorism”.

THROWING

Here is a headline from 2018: Senate hears questions over Karen Andrews throwing object at staff member.

Moving to 2021, we have this (in March) in relation to Ms Andrews, one of Morrison’s bomb-throwers (pun intended): Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews promoted after she made my life hell, says female staffer.

The story went as follows: “A senior Liberal adviser has taken stress leave from Karen Andrews’ office after claiming the new Home Affairs Minister bullied, humiliated and victimised her over a six-month period.

“The complaint, first made by the long-serving female adviser in August and raised again on March 14, has come to light after Ms ­Andrews was promoted from the industry portfolio by Scott Morrison on Monday in a reshuffle ­designed to enhance focus on women’s issues.

“In a letter sent to Ms Andrews earlier this month, the senior­ ­adviser – The Australian has agreed not to name her at her ­request – claimed the workplace bullying was so significant she was “suffering severe stress, anxiety, sleeplessness and depression”.

“She also alleged Ms Andrews’ office had asked her to “undertake work outside my employment”, claiming she was asked to “organise a fundraising event for the Liberal Party of Australia”.

“The adviser has worked for NSW and federal governments for more than three decades, is highly regarded by cabinet ministers and has personally known the Prime Minister for 20 years.

“She first lodged a complaint in August last year when she spoke with Ms Andrews about the culture and conduct in her office. The next day, she claimed in a letter sent on March 14, Ms Andrews’ chief of staff ­directed her never to call the minister again.”

The Minister has denied all allegations. What she cannot deny is that she and her government are bullying everyday Australians, every day. And in ever new and exotic ways.

MEASURES

Andrews has just announced $61.7m in new funding for counter terrorism measures. What is this all about?

It turns out it is about all of those pesky protesters who think the Government in Australia (pick one, any one) stinks.

Ms Andrews said the Government had “zero tolerance” for anyone threatening “the peace and cohesion of our society by trying to use violence to achieve a political, religious or ideological goal”.

“Australia is a peaceful, tolerant and harmonious country, but we cannot be blind to the fact that there are those among us who seek to sow hate, fear and discord,” she said.

One report (from the hyper-woke SBS) stated breathlessly: It comes amid an alarming uptick of anti-government conspiracy theorists.

Alarming? 

Who, apart from Karen Andrews, her overpaid bureaucrats, a few ASIO spooks paid to worry about these things and rent-an-academic media stars like Professor Greg Barton of Deakin University (just oozing with media mentions), thinks that this is “alarming”?

The professor is a specialist in Islamic extremism. What he knows about the benign, broad-based, diverse, mums-and-dads protest movement – clearly the target of the Government’s latest bullying effort – is not clear.

Now, worrying about government overreach (a very, very polite term for what has happened to us these past years) qualifies you as a terrorist.

Conspiracy theorists? These would be the people who are clear-headed and who do their research. And who have been spot-on about just about everything that has occurred in relation to COVID and to the “pandemia” (Alex Berenson’s term).

REALISTS

Gigi Foster, one of Australia’s few brave and sensible COVID realists and co-author of the book The Great Covid Panic, speaks of “crowds” in the same way that the talented and now famous Belgian psychology professor Mattias Desmet speaks of “mass formation”.

Foster punts out of the park claims that the freedom movement is extremist and dangerous. Rather, she finds a far-from-uniform group of protesters, people who have been impacted by the COVID State in many different and horrible ways.

They might be someone who:

• Has lost his or her job;
• Believes politicians have too much power;
• Doesn’t want to be vaccinated;
• Believes that what is being done is an insult to his or her bodily integrity; or
• Has had a child who suicided during the lockdowns and home detention.

Put simply, they are protesting for the right to live a normal life, as Mark Steyn and Brendan O’Neill have recently discussed.

Some of our protesters might believe odd things, but most probably don’t. Very few would be remotely “extremist”.

Even fewer would be prone to any violence. They certainly aren’t right wing, or any “wing”, whatever the spooks at ASIO and the broader worrying class might think or say.  (“Wings” are so the-day-before-yesterday, and those who still talk in these terms politically are not keeping up.

They haven’t noticed that the world has changed, and that the only political bifurcation that matters is the rulers and the ruled). 

Many of the protesters aren’t even anti-vaxxers in the way that term used to be defined, until eight minutes ago.

On the other hand, Foster accurately describes COVID Cult politicians as “crazed” and obsessed”. It is the Branch Covidians about whom we should be worried, not the dissidents who were initially called stupid and selfish, sometimes granny-killers, and now re-branded as extremists, even terrorists.

KOOL-AID

The “crowd”, as Foster calls the suppers of the Kool-Aid who have bought the propaganda hook, line and sinker – indeed, they have driven it – are actually the people that are easy to stereotype. Of one single mind.

Ill-informed, obsessed, panicked, hysterical, fevered, craven, fearful, suspicious, masked, jabbed, malevolent, dare one say, cult-like.  Now there is an irony, Ms Andrews.

The Government’s gaslighting package contains $10.7m for community grants “to combat extremists”.

Community grants!  The ScoMo Government still dares to speak of grants. (Well, Bridget McKenzie – as in the adventures of Bridget McKenzie and gun club grant rorts – is one of Andrews’ colleagues at Home Affairs, along with the tennis-star-deporting minister Alex Hawke).

One can only imagine the uses that will be made of such grants by their no doubt worthy recipients.

Perhaps there will emerge some more of the bum puppets recently funded by the Australia Council.

This Government in Canberra, we already know, is so good at disbursing grants.

The Communications Minister has been grilled over a taxpayer-funded grant awarded to a queer cabaret artist who has created a “bum puppet” featuring a drawing of the PM on her backside.

A Chinese Australian poet who writes on toilet rolls about bodily fluids has also been given the Australia Council for the Arts fellowships worth $80,000.

Despite the opportunities for further merriment, there is something much darker going on here.

The sneering, spiteful, insulting, scapegoating, dobbing culture that has emerged in Australia during Covid, among the Covid Kool-Aid class – personified by Jack the Insider, low-rent journalist-academics who see the unvaxxed as “free-riders” or worse, Melbourne cops and curtain-twitchers who ring CrimeStoppers to report maskless barbecues – is, in effect being rewarded with grants.

PROPAGANDA

On top of all the propaganda, the diet of lies, the daily COVID death porn, the casual and not-so-casual discrimination against dissidents, the fines, the shut borders, we now have government grants to “combat” the deplorables.

This is simultaneously risible and sick-making.

 An expensive distraction, yes, but clearly a sign, too, that the Orwellians are still firmly in control in Canberra and ruthlessly determined to keep the jackboot on the throats of citizens. Shaming us all the while, while shaming themselves.

The fact is that all the COVID extremism has come from the governments of Australia, and their acolytes in the bureaucracy, the corporate media, the universities, and the like, not from protesters.

Extremist language and extremist policies, executed ruthlessly.

Extremist, anti-constitutional legislation.  Extremist resort to the abandonment of parliament.

Extremist courts bending reflexively to the iron will of governments. Extremist treatment of the unvaccinated in the Northern Territory, lugging them off to detention camps.

The violence has come from police, not citizens. They are the ones with the rubber bullets and capsicum spray. They are the ones clubbing septuagenarians. Banging heads into the pavement.

Perhaps the impressive film-maker, Topher Field, who made the chilling documentary Battleground Melbourne, should apply retrospectively for a grant.

EXTREMISTS

As Sarah Mclellan points out, the so-called conspiracy theorists have now been reclassified as extremists, and will be the target of next-level government attention: “The rationale that dominates the minds of the mainstream, which for over two years has dictated the dominant discourse, seems to be now moving into very dangerous territory that ought to be horrifying by anyone’s standards.

“The government has re-framed what it means to be an ‘extremist’ causing eerie echoes of the Orwellian Thought Police to grow unnervingly apparent. ‘Extremists’ are portrayed as anyone who questions or supports a different view of the COVID narrative perpetuated by the government and media.

“They are seen as threats to national security akin to the Jihad terrorists. Citizens who dare think for themselves, research, and actively engage in critical thinking are targeted.”

The Karen Andrews approach is straight out of the playbook of (now in hiding) Justin Trudeau, as the freedom-fighters of Canada lay siege to Ottawa.

Othering and labelling with falsehoods. Trudeau branded protesters in Ottawa as a “few people shouting and waving swastikas”.

It sounds a little familiar. Andrews has implied as much. Fancy a Liberal minister modelling herself on the Canadian boy wonder.

As The Mail reports: “Angry truckers have lashed out at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after members of their convoy protest were arrested and charged with hate crimes during another weekend of unrest in the country’s capital city. 

“They have also strongly denied that they have ties to ultra-right-wing groups, insisting they are just ‘ordinary truckers’.

“It’s intimidation, nothing else,” Freedom Convoy protestor Guy Meister told dailymail.com on Monday.

“We are just a bunch of hard working truck drivers who are out here protesting the Government’s COVID mandates. 

“We aren’t political, we are the working class.

“…‘We are not right-wing conspiracists, we are hard-working everyday Canadians who just want our freedom back,’ said Doull, who lives in Grand Manan, New Brunswick.

“Since dailymail.com arrived in Ottawa last week we have seen no indication of violence or vandalism or any extremist political agenda. In fact, the demonstrations have shown the opposite.  

“Apart from the incessant honking of their horns, all has been peaceful. The truckers seem to have united the people of Canada in a common goal, to get rid of government mandates.

“People who came out to support the protestors brought food, clothing and other supplies. Families came with their children in tow, some with newborns, in sub-zero temperatures to show their support.

ARGUMENTS

“We have not even seen any arguments with the few counter protestors who were in attendance.”

I think we all realise who the Nazis are here. If anything, “Nazis” infiltrating the peaceful crowds, who are acting more in the spirit of Gandhi and MLK than Hitler, are likely to be security force plants. Yes, it does happen.

Or perhaps Andrews is taking her cues from Uncle Joe Biden, whose Department of Homeland Security is now starting to crack down on dissent.

As Alex Berenson, himself fearing being targeted by the spooks, reports: “The White House has begun an extraordinary assault on free speech in America. It is no longer content merely to force social media companies to suppress dissenting views. It appears to be setting the stage to use federal police powers.

“How else to read the National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin the Department of Homeland Security issued on Tuesday? Its first sentence:

“SUMMARY OF THE TERRORISM THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES: The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories... [emphasis added]

“You read those words right.

“The government now says ‘misleading narratives’ are the most dangerous contributor to terrorism against the United States.

“The bulletin’s next sentence: ‘These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. [emphasis added]

“You read those words right too.

“A federal agency says that to ‘undermine public trust in government institutions’ is now considered terrorism. Speech doesn’t even have to encourage rebellion or violence generally, much less against anyone specific. It just has to ‘potentially inspire’ violence.

“Potentially.

“Later, the bulletin explains exactly what speech the government now considers a terrorist danger: ‘Widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.’

“There’s that word misleading again.”

PROTEST

As in Canada and now Biden’s America, so in Australia. Peaceful protest in order to get back nothing more than normal life.

Freedom in diversity and diversity for freedom, might well be the motto, as Gigi Foster says.

To suggest anything more is simply a smear. Is this the new Liberal Party way of interacting with everyday voters? 

The Karen Andrews-led gaslighting is next-level, sooling ASIO onto us as is suggested in its Annual Threat Assessment.

The headline reads: Dating apps like Tinder and anti-COVID vaccine mandate protests drawing ASIO’s attention, according to annual threat assessment.

The Director General warns: … how COVID-19 has sent online radicalisation into “overdrive”, with isolated individuals spending more time exposed to “extremist messaging, misinformation and conspiracy theories”.