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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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These people even manage to infiltrate the elected offices of government too. You of course would've heard of the many astonishing deeds of Lidia Thorpe but I doubt anyone else would've.

Lidia Thorpe got into the Senate as a Green, has since become an independent. She's run a very American-style black liberation operation, demanding sovereignty be handed back over to Aboriginals.

  1. She was in a relationship with the ex-president of an outlawed bikie motorcycle gang while she served on the joint parliamentary law enforcement committee - not a good look.

  2. She laid down in front of a police Mardi Gras float

  3. In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said she was there to 'infiltrate' the Australian parliament and that the Australian flag had "no permission to be here".

  4. She added the words "the colonising" in the required Oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II by saying "I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Australia, Her heirs and successors according to law." She later retracted it and took the oath properly.

  5. On 16 April 2023, footage emerged of Thorpe in a verbal altercation with men outside a Melbourne strip club. Thorpe claimed the men provoked the altercation, while the manager of the club claimed she provoked the incident by approaching white patrons and telling them they'd stolen her land.

These people even manage to infiltrate the elected offices of government too. You of course would've heard of the many astonishing deeds of Lidia Thorpe but I doubt anyone else would've.

In Thorpe's defense, she is an elected politican, so it's explicitedly her job to be political, even if those politics are extremely radical and unsavoury.

What is a bit a disgrace is her leaving the party that got her elected less than a year after the election because they weren't radical enough for her, and now she's going to sit on the crossbench for the next five years while I would argue not really having the democratic legitimacy to do so.

You also missed one juicy Lidia Thorpe controversy that happened just very recently, where she got into a huge argument with Labor Indigenous Senator McCarthy during this same round of Senate Estimates, both of them calling each other disgraces to the Indigenous community and resulting in Senator Thorpe storming out of the proceedings.

Trying to undermine the coherence and stability of the state is a bit much though. The Greens could've chosen not to run her as a candidate, they could've chosen not to platform her. There were so many red flags!

I heard about that controversy, thought it sounded a little too anodyne for the motte.

After I read this I googled her and realized that she's white. I don't know why I didn't see that coming.

Indigenous ethnicity in Australia is more a cultural thing than a literal biological genetic thing. The reality is that the majority of Indigenous people in Australia are heavily genetically European due to generations of interracial marriage, Stolen Generation etc. Many urban Indigenous are physically indistinguishable from whites (they basically are white, genetically). But this is not disqualifying. The only Indigenous who are pure Indigenous ethnically are a small minority located in very remote Australia.

In this context, Lidia Thorpe is 100% indigenous, there's really no argument given the current way Indigenous is defined/percieved. She has the credentials too, as her grandmother was a prominent Indigenous activist in her own right.

What makes you think she's white?

Wikipedia says "She is of English, Irish,[8] DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara descent."

The presentation of heritage gives a false impression, like it's fifths of a pizza pie, but it's more likely that she's ENGLISH and irish and homeopathic amounts of the rest.

In other words, a Dolezal. She looks a bit brown in her photographs, but much like other fakers like Shaun King there's a ton of things you can do to look mulatto. If Trump claimed to be Namekian because of his spray tan I wouldn't put too much credence on it either.

In Australia this is normal. Pale-skinned aboriginals are commonplace and to be found on both sides of politics. This is not really like Elizabeth Warren style fakery.