If You Like Sarah Palin, You’ll Absolutely Love Cory Bernardi
[an]...Islamophobic, climate-change denying South Australian senator, he’s...importing the Tea Party’s ‘astroturf’ techniques and now training others in the faux-grassroots campaigns first cultivated by the American far right.Menzies House...a website that was set up only a few years ago by Bernardi...ran an incendiary piece (right next to its links to Support Andrew Bolt, Close the Tent Embassy and Stop Gillard's Carbon Tax websites), complaining Bernardi had been "hung out to dry by his own party".
"Why? Because he had the guts to tell the truth, and his PC political mates were too chicken and too spineless to back him up," it thundered.
This surely sets some kind of precedent. Has Tony Abbott ever been condemned before for being politically correct?...
...Bernardi is perhaps the Australian politician best connected to manifold manifestations of the far right of politics, not only in this country but internationally...
...Bernardi's most important connections are with the Tea Party movement in the US.
He has assiduously fostered links with the same right-wing think tanks, funders, vested interests and propagandists who underpin that movement in America. He has absorbed their techniques...
Let's go to a few examples, easily found by looking at Bernardi's entries in the register of senators' interests, filed with the Parliament.
Like this item..:
"Accommodation provided by the Heartland Institute 30/9/10 and 1/10/10." This Chicago-based conservative/libertarian outfit promotes itself as "the world's most prominent think tank"
promoting climate-change scepticism.The institute spends millions every year funding fringe scientists and others, including some in this country, to produce work denying human involvement in global warming.
Bernardi has twice been a speaker at its conferences.
In association with an equivalent think tank in Australia, the Institute of Public Affairs, the Heartland Institute has involved itself in the setting up and funding front "environment" groups devoted to denying climate change and opposing alternative energy. Bernardi has spoken for them too.
A little further into Bernardi's declarations for the register, in the section relating to organisations to which he makes donations or in which he is an office holder, he records the Catholic Church, the Liberal Party and then a few more obscure organisations, including the Conservative Leadership Foundation (CLF).
The Senator is both chairman and founder of the CLF, which claims to be a "non-partisan education and training organisation".
One way it educates and trains is by sponsoring young conservatives to go to the US to be instructed in techniques for running effective political campaigns...
...Cory Bernardi has a big problem with Islam.
Back in February last year he earned rebuke from Abbott for his denunciation of Islam as a "totalitarian political and religious ideology".
Bernardi's Christian fundamentalist view of the world makes no distinction between the minority of violent, radical Islamists and the Islamic majority; as he said in one radio interview at the time, "Islam itself is the problem".
Thus the Senator offered help in arranging a visit to Australia by the extremist anti-Muslim Dutch politician Geert Wilders; the man who has compared the Koran to Adolf Hitler's biography Mein Kampf, and who is on the Movement Alert List...
...Thus he condemned the government for flying survivors of the Christmas Island refugee boat disaster to Sydney to attend the funerals of those who died.
Bernardi's Islamophobia extends beyond the ugly to the ridiculous: he rails on his personal website that "many Australians now unknowingly consume Halal slaughtered livestock."
It's just not kosher, according to Cory.
But we shouldn't scoff; this is serious. Bernardi is changing the Australian political landscape with his imported American-right methods.
As Sally Neighbour wrote in her piece on him in January...:
"Inspired by the tactics of the Tea Party, Bernardi established the Conservative Leadership Foundation in 2009, which in turn set up the Conservative Action Network (CANdo) that Bernardi likens to 'a Facebook for conservatives'. CANdo rallied dozens of like-minded groups and thousands of individuals to join an orchestrated 'grassroots' campaign — also known as 'astroturfing' — against the ETS [emissions-trading scheme].
Their efforts persuaded Liberal MPs to revolt against Turnbull, killing the ETS and propelling Abbott into leadership."
You will no doubt be surprised to learn CANdo lists as its "National Council of Patrons" Hugh Morgan and Alan Jones.
You will no doubt be surprised to learn CANdo lists as its "National Council of Patrons" Hugh Morgan and Alan Jones. CANdo promotes fear and suspicion: of government, of unions, of the nanny state...of refugees, of alleged plans to steal our property, our freedom of speech.
Its multiple websites do this through a mix of misrepresentation and wild hyperbole. To cite an example of the former, wind farms represent a government attempt to effectively steal our property rights. To cite an example of the latter, Gina Rinehart is a "great Australian patriot"...
http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/if-you-like-sarah-palin-youll-absolutely-love-cory-bernardi/390/#