Now and then culture warriors are forced to get creative. Perhaps the facts won’t easily support their prefabricated opinions. Maybe the complicity of their political enemies with evil can’t be shown in any straightforward or honest way. Sometimes it’s necessary to reinflate the opinion bubble as it sags under the pressure of outside events. The risk they run is that their selective and partisan retellings begin to seem delusional.

At the conclusion of the siege at the Lindt cafe in Sydney’s Martin Place, the NSW police commissioner confirmed it was not an organised terror attack but an “isolated incident” carried out by an individual. There were overwhelmingly good reasons for thinking that Man Haron Monis was no more in death than what he had been in life — a violent, troubled, mendacious and misogynistic man.

You might think that the absence of a plot would make it difficult for rightwing columnists to smear “the left” on the basis that they are “soft on terror”. After all, how could Monis be labelled a terrorist without expanding that category to include the everyday horrors perpetrated by all of those weak men who compensate for their failures by abusing or killing others?

Miranda Devine’s ingenuity in finding a way to indict her opponents for this tragedy shows us why she gets the big bucks. Her last column argued that “the left” was culpable because they offered assistance to those who might be subject to racist attacks through the #illridewithyou campaign – because Monis was a Muslim. Devine says:



Denial, deflection, projection. They see themselves as morally superior to the rest of Australia, which they imagine as a sea of ignorant rednecks. In their eyes the threat is not terrorism but Islamophobia.

Given the upsurge in strangers physically and verbally abusing Muslim women since Australia upgraded its terror alert; and that race riots have started in Sydney over far less than what occurred in Martin Place; and that we’ve already seen public displays of racism in places far removed from the scene of the siege, offering support may not seem like such a bad idea.



But Devine saw an opportunity to fill column inches. Those promoting the #illridewithyou hashtag, she argued, were making a “despicable slander” on what she called the most successful immigrant nation on the planet. Stridently (and falsely) she said that anti-Muslim racism was virtually unknown beyond “vicious trolls on social media”.

Devine’s Australia is “the very model of a strong, harmonious society”, united in its grief. The permanent, prominent fifth column of “leftist troublemakers” (whom Devine has devoted her career to excoriating) just demonstrated how complete this unity was.

When, on Twitter, Media Watch host Paul Barry pointed out that the @boltcomments Twitter account complicated such celebratory views of Australian tolerance, Devine shot back: “Paul, that’s a parody account. The leftist imagination creating division where there is none. Stick w the truth”.



But it’s not a parody. It is what those in the trade call a “txt account”, which tweets verbatim quotes from a website or forum – in this case, from the blog of Devine’s News Corp colleague and fellow culture warrior, Andrew Bolt. Devine read the authentic comments of his fans as all-too-obvious joke.



The irony would have been easier to savour were it not for what those comments said about many Australians’ response to the siege. In recent days, as reflected in the @boltcomments stream, Bolt’s blog has been the forum for user comments suggesting all Muslims in Australia be expelled, that the Middle East in its entirety should be nuked, that Monis’s corpse should be fed to pigs on camera, that all Australian mosques should be pulled down, and that Islam and the ALP could be equated with Nazism.



It is striking that Devine is willing and able to avert her eyes from this section of the readership of News’s rightwing columnists.

She could scroll up from Bolt’s comment threads to see how they are responses to his own opinions, which regularly condemn Islam tout court as a species of barbarism. As he wrote in the wake of the siege:

We’re told, as always, that those who take seriously [violent] passages in the Koran and Hadith are a tiny, unrepresentative minority. But wait. The Sydney Morning Herald reports Monis had more than 14,000 “likes” on Facebook and a Muslim community leader asked by counterterrorism authorities to find the [Isis] flag Monis demanded said: “I found plenty of people who had one, but they didn’t want to give them up. ... the racism of the anti-racists, it all must end.

We can’t hold columnists responsible for every troll that appears in their threads, but neither can we ignore the consistent approval by racists of their output. Under Bolt’s article appears an endorsement from one reader: “[B]ravo for speaking your mind, and just what I was thinking. I will now look sideways at all likely muslims”.



Whether or not Devine’s ignorance of the views of at least a part of her colleague’s readership is wilful, it could be dangerous. It raises the possibility that these columnists don’t know that their positions appeal to some who openly fantasise about unchallenged racial supremacy, and dream of violently bringing it about.

By contrast, Australia’s Muslim communities are expected to be hyper-aware of the profile of their own communities. In Monis’s case, Australian Shia’ reported him as a “fake sheikh” some years ago – with no result.



Devine’s comments also show how little the culture warriors now matter on the grand stage of national policy. Devine, Bolt, and the rest of News’s hard right club are so far adrift from the official response to the siege, that they seem barely to be in contact with reality at all. Just as the police commissioner and Mike Baird emphasised that Monis acted alone, Abbott refused to blame Islam for what Monis did, saying that it would be like blaming the Pope for the actions of the IRA.

This isn’t the first time Abbott has left his rightwing supporters swinging in the wind: think of how the “reform” of 18C was traded away so that security agencies could get their way on enhanced terror laws.

News Corp spear carriers like to bang on about the threat from radical Islam; the government that was meant to confirm their triumph has also left them looking like isolated outsiders on this issue, too. Abbott and Baird won’t endorse the view that there’s a violent culture war waiting to explode, as rightwing columnists often imply. Ironically, the “harmony” that Devine celebrates may be most threatened by the reactionary imagination that the columns of her and her colleagues give succour to.