Andrew Bolt has been called many things, several of which we can’t print because they involve intimate body parts in a pejorative sense and others we can’t print because they make us laugh too much to get anything else done. For an example of the former, skim through the leftist hivemind groupthink machine Twitter and for the latter, check out “The Outsider”, a fifteen-page blow-job delivered to Bolt in January’s The IPA Review magazine. For our purposes, let’s just go with calling him A Groinal Itch: unpleasant and you really wish it would go away, but scratching it feels nice, in a wrong way.

He incites anger in people, whether they hear his dog-whistling and respond with “arglebargleCAPSLOCKJULIARBOATPOEPLE”, or, like me, call upon the part of the brain that yells “Bullshit!” Either way, it’s an emotional response that brings release of some sort and, thereby, a small amount of pleasure.

And now Bolt finds himself in court, defending a charge of Racial Villification because he offended some indigenous people. He mentioned their race, so they’re allowed to take this action against him, whereas raving leftard lunatics like you and I just have to cop all his insults with whatever grace we can muster behind our sandals and beards.

There’s the rub: I can call someone a leftard or a fat bastard or a femonazi or a whore and their only comeback is to ignore me, or argue with me or return the name-calling, or punch me in the moosh. But if I refer to their race, they can take me to court. “Faggot” is just an insult, but “black faggot” is a criminal offence. Both are abhorrent, but why are they different? And who gets to decide where we draw the line between offensive and criminal? Should it be at race, religion, sexual orientation, physical appearance, political affiliation, socio economic status or dress sense? Do we make upsetting anyone a criminal act? In an ideal world there would be no racists, homophobes, elitists or Andrew Bolts, but in the real world if we want to limit how offensive people can legally be someone has to define it, police it and enforce it and that’s where we run into difficulties.

Free speech is a crucial element of democracy and the only way you can have truly free speech is if no speech is actionable, as long as it is not defamatory or an incitement to crime.

Bolt offends me and, no doubt, I offend him every month when the mailroom at MTR shits itself because it’s actually received something and Bolt carefully steams open his plain-wrapped copy of The King’s Tribune. That’s our right, as human beings, to offend each other.

Bolt said some nasty and stupid things and he’s admitted to getting plenty of facts wrong, but the remedy is to write a reply and have it printed in the Herald Sun, or if that’s not forthcoming, get published somewhere else and take the whole five minutes necessary to utterly destroy his bullshit arguments, show up his errors, his misquotes and his allergy to anything resembling intellectual rigour. Call him a dickhead and prove it, then let it rest until next time - far more effective than paying a QC to call him a Nazi and giving him the opportunity to squawk “poor me” in his columns and his blog for the next six months.

Speaking of bullshit artists, I’m grateful to Bob Ellis for pointing out exactly why the ALP lost in NSW last weekend: it was nothing to do with incompetence or corruption or the Right knifing two premiers in three years. The real reason was that the media were prying into the private lives of ministers and MPs and apparently O’Farrell is fat and Kristina wasn’t quite enough of a MILF to get them over the line. Oh, and not enough voters read Bob’s poetry.

Enjoy April, dear readers. Love to those who love us and a week as Bolt’s researcher to those who don’t.

J&J Shaw

+ 1

+ 3