Contra Trump
TDS
In February 2003, Mark Latham, the leader of the Labor Party opposition in the Australian parliament, said that a government delegation visiting US President George W. Bush in Washington was ‘a conga line of suck-holes on the conservative side of Australian politics.’
The backbench sucks up to the prime minister and the prime minister sucks up to George W. I thought it was an arse licking effort in that Australia needed a prime minister who was willing to stand up for Australia’s best interests.
Latham was a lout of a politician who ousted by his own party. He subsequently took a swerve right and he has remained on the ugly fringe of state politics ever since. His line about ‘a conga line of suck-holes’ resonates anew as both sides of Australian politics attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Trump White House.
As we noted in The American Green Zone in Our Consciousness, an early chapter in Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium, Washington continues too loom large in the ‘Australian imaginary’. As Patrick Marlborough, a writer and comedian based in Perth, Western Australia, observed:
The greatest trick America’s ever pulled on the subjects of its various vassal states is making us feel like a participant in its grand experiment. After all, our fate is bound to the American empire’s whale fall. … America has effectively built a Green Zone in our cultural consciousness, replete with the obligatory Maccas. Our imaginations, memories, and selves have been well and truly occupied, and the schizoid psychic agony of mainlining our nation’s duel nightmares is, more often than not, excruciating.
Marlborough continues his assault on the American cauchemar in his discussion of ’Aussie Trump’ —Hanson, Palmer and the drongology of Australia’s far right — reproduced below. (See also https://cormacmccafe.bsky.social.)
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The rubric of this chapter in Contra Trump is TDS or ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. This fictitious psychological condition is named after ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome’, a term coined in 2003 by Charles Krauthammer, a conservative political commentator and psychiatrist, who defined it as ‘the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.’
TDS was used to mock and dismiss critics of Trump during his first presidency. As it turns out, however, the contra Trumpistas of T1 were right to be alarmed: with the rise of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, the patients really had taken over the asylum.
Just as the Minnesota Senate was considering a bill aimed at classifying TDS as a mental illness, it was reported in The Guardian that
A Republican state lawmaker in Minnesota who recently introduced a bill to create a mental illness category for liberals obsessed over Donald Trump was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly soliciting a minor for prostitution.
Minnesota senator Justin Eichorn was arrested and booked on Tuesday. He believed he was talking to a 17-year-old female, but was communicating instead with detectives from the Bloomington, Minnesota, police department, police allege.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
19 March 2025
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Larrikin Sinology & Australia-China:
- Celebrating New Sinology, China Heritage Annual 2025
- Cindy Carter, Translation: “Why is Everyone Talking About China ‘Seizing’ Australia?”, China Digital Times, 19 March 2025
Patrick Marlborough on Elon Musk:
- The Ret@rd, The Yeah Nah Review, 23 January 2025. To quote:
… having turned twitter into a Boer racebait forum, and having gone mask-off white-supremacist crypto-currency crypto-fascist, we’ve had to see a lot more of Elon Musk. His performances on the campaign trail last year were a study in anti-charisma — a blackhole of charm and likability, blithering and bloviating like the ketamine and speed that keep him going were running a train on his already fragile frontal lobe — a gelatinous prolapse of chinless grotesquery, detonating dumbfuckery as his cars detonate their passengers, a balls-to-the-wall nimrod of the first order, whose impossible wealth and incestuous mothering has left him slack-jawed, malformed, and rotten, like a Hapsburg princeling raised on Stormfront, web rips of fatal industrial accidents, “barely legal” totally illegal pornography, Adderall, CoD, and, worst yet, Afrikaans.
He is a repugnance ripped straight from a Troma movie, a gormless Cenobite, who makes the jump-scare ghoulies of the late David Lynch’s filmography look downright huggable.
He is, in short, a capital “R” Ret@rd.
(Marlborough’s X account was suspended after he repeatedly suggested that Musk should be ‘unalived’. — Ed.)
‘Cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, and engage in the national interest.’
In November 2022, Penny Wong, Australia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, articulated an approach to the relationship with China aimed at moving it beyond the preceding five years of acrimony. Wong articulated the government’s new approach in a Whitlam Oration, one named after Gough Whitlam, the Labor Prime Minister who had normalised relations between Canberra and Beijing in 1972. Wong said that:
Fifty years on, we seek to stabilise relations with China. There are two elements in our present context. The first element is the structural differences between Australia and China — different values and different interests.
As China has sought to assert itself in the world, those differences have become harder to manage. The China of today is not the same as the China of the 1970s, or even the 2000s. Some may prefer to pretend otherwise, but President Xi himself has made that clear. It is an insult to all Gough did to prepare us for the future if we act as though we live in a world that has long since passed.
The second contextual element is that the previous government, rather than try to navigate differences in the national interest, tried to exploit them for domestic political gain.
Our Government has our own approach. Our national interests have not changed. The priority of our national security remains paramount. Stabilising our relationship is in the interests of both Australia and China. It will take time, because our differences are not trivial. But we will not be trying to make media headlines out of the China relationship.
We won’t weaponise national security for political purposes. We will seek to navigate our differences wisely – something, in fact, we believe both our countries should do. And I have now met twice with my Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, the first engagement at that level for some years.
In those meetings I expressed Australia’s views candidly on a range of bilateral trade, consular and human rights issues, as well as regional and international security. And I have said to him that Australia’s approach will be calm and consistent.
We seek to cooperate where we can and will disagree where we must. And we will engage in our national interests.
I have made it plain that we will speak out as necessary on the issues that matter to Australians, including human rights and upholding the international rules to which we have all agreed.
Thereafter, the Australian government has tirelessly repeated Wong’s dictum — ‘cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, and engage in the national interest.’ Confronted by a turbulent second Trump presidency, the ‘congistas’ in Canberra’s ‘conga line of suck-holes’ may have no choice but to adopt Wong’s China strategy to its dealings with Washington.
— GRB
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Source: David Rowe. See @rowecartoon.bsky.social and @roweafr
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The drongology of Australia’s far right
Our leading right-wingers are unique in their daginess and drongotry, a parochial grotesquerie built in by design.
Patrick Marlborough
19 March 2025
Folks, there’s never been a better time to be a dolt and/or a drongo.
We are living through relentlessly stupid times, where Nazi-Boer grifters and sex-pest veneer-dependents are teaming up to drive the world into a brick wall over and over again, like a Cybertruck packed with flammable crash-test dummies and loose nitroglycerin. It’s basically Wages of Fear if the truckers had ketamine habits and steered into every speed bump and pothole.
Such is the drongology of everyday life right now; there’s no escaping it.
Being, as it is, the season of lead poisoning, Australia’s far-right dunderhead brigade has seized on this hellish moment to finally go full drongo. This gaggle of unflushables — floaters who have mostly haunted our political landscape since the early ’90s — are slotting as seamlessly into the new stupid as they did the old.
It’s a hustle as old as time, a sweaty mountebank game made all the more pathetic and desperate by the tragic dagotry of its Australianness.
Where to begin?
A few months ago, Benjamin Letts Dawkins — a former Labor, former One Nation, now independent member of the WA Legislative Council — legally changed his name to Austin Letts “Aussie” Trump so he could appear as “Aussie Trump” on the state’s ballot roll. Aussie Trump was expelled from the ALP after pleading guilty to 35 breaches of a domestic violence restraining order. Pauline Hanson booted him because he didn’t “pass the pub test” in his commitment to the job.
A lot has been made of the rise of “the family court dad”, an aesthetic entwined with the far-right’s ascendancy. Elon Musk is perhaps the apotheosis of this phenomenon — if perhaps too cartoonishly so — with his skinny-leg jeans and crazy-tees 9gag circa-2009 vibe that embodies an “every-second-weekend trip to Sportsbet with papa” energy.
Aussie Trump is a distilled, Australian version of this new far-right: gone are the billions of dollars, the celebrity, the $10,000 hair transplant. In its place is a quasi-tragic “background extra in Porridge” reality, a flip-flop trot to Coles at 11pm to buy a bachelor’s-handbag narrative that can’t help but seep through our nation’s shrunken perversity.
It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic — if this creep factor wasn’t everywhere.
Mark Latham and Pauline Hanson are the height of an atavistic form of drongology that has skulked Australia since Percy Reginald Williamson and William John Miles seized the fascist dipshit trumpet in the 1930s. Both have become Lynchian tulpas of their roiling internal horrors — faces wrought in gout and constipation, hair and makeup by way of the Harkonnens in Lynch’s Dune. They wear their philosophies on their faces, as both warning and advertisement.
The grotesquerie is built in by design, at this point. Part of what makes Latham, Hanson and other long-lived Australian jackboots have such a long half-life is the self-sustaining consistency of their inherent ugliness. A consistent product sells, and if you keep an aisle at the supermarket called, I dunno, “melted children’s toys with Satanic auras” open long enough, you’ll eventually find they have a regular — even eager — buyer base.
Much has been made already of AI being the “the new aesthetic of fascism”. Its innate soullessness is a natural draw for these hucksters and their base. It promises laziness, and more excitingly, exclusion and extinction — of artist from process, and eventually society. Naturally, when Palmer launched his Brass Trumpetters Party, or whatever it’s called, he announced it with an AI logo that looked like it would appear on a lo-res printed poster for bingo night at an outer suburban sports pub.
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This is the vibe. This is what they’re going for because it’s all they need. They are playing limbo with the bar raised to the ceiling fan — what does it matter if they’re flashing nutsack through worn-out Carman boxers? Nobody really cares.
Such is life in the colonies. The daggotry is intractable. It is baked into our national identity, our way of being, so these people can slide by without friction.
If I detail the only true antidote to such symptoms I’ll be blacklisted from here and elsewhere, maybe with good reason. But we need to call an orc an orc in times such as these. To equivocate is to give into it. We are already up to our bottom lip in shit, do we really think that’s a good time to start whistling dandy?
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Source:
- Patrick Marlborough, Hanson, Palmer and the drongology of Australia’s far right, Crikey, 19 March 2025
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