You’re being played – your part in the culture wars

Unless you’re on the crew on the International Space Station or you dwell permanently inside an opal-mine, you may have missed the news this month about Shooting Death No: 31,239 in the USA this year (by the time of reading, results may vary). Unremarkably, the shooting of an American male was committed by yet another young, white, terminally online American male with unfettered access to firearms in the land of the free and the home of the depraved. 

In fact, statistically, in the USA there was nothing remarkable about the shooting at all. But what was interesting was the reaction that washed over Western society in waves, or, to the people deeply committed to living their lives on social media, a tsunami.

Let me declare, I don’t subscribe to the plethora of conspiracy theories that the man in question was shot by someone sitting behind him (bullets can’t do U-turns), or that Mossad/Israel shot him (they only like to shoot defenceless little children and they’re much, much more cunning than that) or that it was the ghost of JFK or Tupac on the grassy knoll. No, he was shot and he died in a similar way to all the other individual or mass public shootings that take place in the USA every murderous day of every murderous year. But the reaction to it, the alleged ‘global reaction’ to it, now a great deal of that was already pre-formed and ready to wheel out.

And by ready, I don’t mean the shooting itself was part of the plan, (read previous paragraph). Our ‘highly organised, alert and ready’ assertion refers to the professionally organised culture wars that erupted breathtakingly quickly as a result of the event. 

Think about it for a minute. Allow yourself some clear air to ponder this. Within 24 hours, the man’s name was the number one search term globally, the number one trending topic on Google Trends and became the lead news item on yes – wait for it – Australia’s national broadcaster in their prime time evening news bulletin. Why?

The online blame game, the protests and the shrieking, the performative mourning that was largely driven by social media to begin with, a great deal of it all was from blueprints sitting there in large conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation waiting to be deployed in an event just like this one. 

The alleged outrage was at its core manufactured recreational grief-bait.

Apart from random people on the internet, there were no public figures “celebrating” the death of this man. No world leaders, politicians or celebrities “celebrated” the death of this man. The speedy creation of the ghoulish “celebration” myth was meant to divide and distract, and drag you onto the righteous side or to get you to fight so the believers could reaffirm their manipulated opinions about you. It was chillingly, almost to the letter what Josef Goebbels rolled out back in mid-January 1930 – the demonising of some imagined homogenous enemy and the ritual spectacle of the sacralised martyr. All of it was from a playbook.

In Australia, unbelievably, we had marches for this man in the streets of our capital cities, organised by the perpetually clueless, Red Ensign carrying, car interior YouTuber brigade. Not only were the cooker kings allegedly able to organise these marches with minimal notice and funding, but some also managed to hire planes to fly over their events with a trailing sign lionising the man in question.

All of these things are not only expensive, they also require planning skills and intelligence. And let’s be blunt – unlimited money, logistical skills and intelligence are the three things the aforementioned category lack in spades. Do Australians really believe that a group of people who don’t understand how government works, how basic science works, or the fact that their mobile phone was built by the Chinese workers they don’t want here, were really that highly organised, in-tune and cashed up they managed to create headline grabbing protest marches for a man they’d never heard of two days prior? All by themselves?

Or is it more likely that culture war’s groomers like Advance and the Atlas Group were the ones stoking the fires and lighting the matches for the poor, witless performative grievers to follow on cue? Like all wars, the fights going on in the filth of the trenches by the clueless and willing are being manipulated by the men smoking the cigars in the safety of their wealthy homes. (Insert a friendly wave to Jillian Segal’s multi-millionaire husband here).

Similarly, we had Parliament’s crier-in-chief, sobbing Senator Sarah Henderson participating in an act of desperately pathetic amateur theatrics once again, by eulogising the death of a man halfway around the world she had never known existed. Sobbing Sarah was very quickly joined by the predictable rage exploiters like Andrew Hastie who, reading from the same script Senator Sobs and Co had been sent, pushed professional looking memes onto his social media pages within hours of this man’s death. So taken was dear Andrew by this death that in his interviews he called the man by another surname altogether, not once but twice, proving how near and dear to his heart he really was. 

Cue in the angertainment outrage from Sky’s perpetually in the dark After Dark crew, including rage-baiter and Tony Abbott’s licensed handler, Peta Credlin, and the orgy of paid agitprop being posted on social media and you have the perfect amount of fringe-dwelling, anger content designed to drive the news agenda. And therein lies the point.

Because here’s the world order in 2025 you need to understand and accept. The news no longer drives social media – social media drives the news. 

It gets more interesting from an Australian perspective because many among you have asked why Australia’s national broadcaster headlined their evening news with the issue of the shot American, not just as a stand-alone story, but in saturation coverage all over their various outlets. Were Darryl and Cheryl eating their lamb chop on their lap in downtown suburbia really that interested in a paid American influencer with little to no profile in Australia? Were we all desperately craving to hear PK’s latest hot take on it in among the catacombs of lost words the ABC passes off as analysis these days?

Stay with me here. Two good friends happened to attend the LINA (Local & Independent News Association) conference at Port Douglas in late April 2024. They attended a session headed up by two of our ABC’s chief digital content managers, key people of influence in the ABC editorial team who shape the ABC’s news direction. The session topic for these two ABC managers was, “Building Audience”. And during that presentation, they revealed an interesting fact – the ABC makes a lot of their editorial news decisions based on Google Trends. Yes, correct, something you’ve long suspected is true. The ABC now follows the news trends rather than setting the news agenda.

This might be perfectly acceptable, albeit democratically amoral, for commercial networks – but for our publicly funded broadcaster to admit that an issue’s newsworthiness to the ABC is now based on numbers and rage-mentions, on eyeballs and traffic, rather than quality and credibility, is an alarming slide into the jaws of the culture wars. It also helps explain the bewildering decision by ABC news outlets to give this non-issue so much oxygen. They of course would argue, as they always do, that it is newsworthy. News for who exactly? Look, on a slow news day it may have been page 20 newsworthy, but because they’re now held captive by culture wars driven Google Trends, the ABC ensured the alleged ‘newsworthiness’ of the story became their own self-fulfilling creation.

There is a critical difference between what is briefly interesting to the public, and what is in the public interest.

Activism and ideology, winning at all costs, dopamine hits and the fight to be right, now matter more than facts and nuance. Nobody outside of politically engaged Americans knew who that man was a week ago. Now people are fighting over who’s mourning him correctly according to standards set by a Mar-a-Lago-faced airhead on Fox News. And more often than not, you’re arguing with somebody who’s being paid to do so. It’s not only AI that has taken a firm foothold on social media, social media is now increasingly dominated by millions of paid rage-accounts, many of whom operate hundreds of accounts at one time – and their sole purpose is to aggravate you and engage you.

The next time you’re tempted to one-up an account on social media posting irrelevant shite designed exactly to get you to bite, consider the fact that there isn’t even an engaged person on the other side of the screen. When Zack de la Rocha told you to rage against the machine, he didn’t mean you to take it literally. 

Agitprop. Fury bait. Yes, you too feed it. When you quote-post that Australian Senator who only went into politics because their arms were too short to steal bags at train stations, or respond to the posts from their account they pay a US troll-bot firm to post for them, when you drag up every piece of nothing-rage that fills the news cycle 24 hours a day, you too are part of the culture wars machine. You feed it, you extract from it and then you expel it. It’s like an online information version of the human centipede. 

Every day you, we, us, are part of the war. Part of the machine. A class war disguised as a war over ideas, funded by the wealthy and privileged and designed to distract you from the realities and policies of the day. It is aimed right at you. Like an expertly fired bullet, we cannot run from this. What we can do, however, is choose whether we enter the battlefield at all.