Hot Toilet Albo has lost the Gorman Belt

(Only one newsletter this week, I’m on the road with my family.)

On Monday night, Sydney Palestinians and the anti-Zionist Jewish organisation the Tzedek Collective led a protest outside the Enmore Theatre. The headliner at the Enmore that night was Douglas Murray, the most recent D-grade grifter to build a career out of scaring brain-addled FOX/Sky News addicts into thinking that white people are being wiped out and that the Holocaust wasn’t as bad as we’re told.

As documented by protesters, the Enmore’s management responded by calling the police and blasting music from their external speakers to drown out the protest.

The Enmore has form in letting antisemites and Holocaust deniers book its space. In 2019 the theatre had to cancel a planned appearance by conspiracy theorist David Icke, the guy who believes the world is controlled by giant lizards and that Jews did the Holocaust, after the government cancelled his visa.

(Most Australian Jewish organisations came out in force to oppose Icke’s tour and applauded his visa being cancelled. That hasn’t happened with Murray, despite his atrocious antisemitism, because he’s also an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s genocide against Gaza. The Australian Jewish News ran an extensive puff-piece interview with Murray in February, but didn’t find time to ask him about his 2023 remarks that Waffen SS commandos were “rarely proud of their average day’s work”.)

Besides being another exposé of the moral gormlessness of Australia’s arts establishment (maybe the protesters should have asked the Enmore to reject Murray on the grounds of “child and cultural safety”), the whole thing has crystallised some thoughts about Sydney’s inner west that have been rolling around in my head for a while. The inner west’s endlessly self-championed status as Sydney’s left-wing capital has taken plenty of hits in recent years, and not just because of the decades of gentrification that have made Erskineville the richest postcode in the country.