FIFA Women’s World Cup Hijacked by Fourth Wave Feminism

Australia’s ‘Matilda Mania’ has been co-opted by the establishment media as a vehicle for identity politics and woke Neo-Marxism

It’s a great time to be a woman, according to Channel 9’s Today show. And for once, Channel 9 and I are in agreement.

Channel 9 is Australia’s preeminent establishment propaganda node and its programming consists almost entirely of glib, big-budget contrivances aimed at propagating progressive neoliberal globalism.

Channel 9 is not as nakedly woke as our state-funded TV stations like ABC and SBS, both of which betray an alarming level of hard-left partisanism, but as a vehicle for Neo-Marxist globalism, it is far more effective.

Whereas our tired state broadcasters do a good job of corralling dyed-in-the-wool, down-home Aussie lefties into the monolithic echo chamber of bighearted progressive liberalism that came into vogue during the second half of last century, Channel 9 caters to a more modern, managerial demographic – trendy urbanites, young professionals, and the all-important upper middle-class families (household income of $300k-700k derived either from a single alpha male bread winner, or more commonly, the combined incomes of a corporate power couple; 2-4 children; a tidy house in Melbourne’s southeast suburbs; two late-model European cars possibly including a Range Rover for the school runs; a cavoodle; a small boat; and maybe a little weekend place on the Mornington Peninsula for those at the upper end of the bracket).

It is this demographic that is increasingly coming to define not just Australia, but the entire West and we can refer to them loosely as urban liberals. These folk don’t necessarily see themselves as ‘liberal’ in the leftwing, socialist sense (though many do) but rather ‘progressive’ in the corporate sense. They believe in capitalism (while maintaining over cocktails and barbeques that it is fundamentally evil) and they work for big corporations who pay them handsomely to faithfully serve the machine by assuaging their scruples with earnest proclamations about sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This is the new breed of liberal, and they require more sophisticated regime propaganda than the clunky Pravda-style missives of ABC. This is where Channel 9 comes in, who – with its hefty production budgets, squads of marketing, PR, and big data pros, and polished TV anchors – deliver an expertly integrated message. They don’t cart in some wild-eyed activist to lecture you about your original sin (well, not often anyway); they splice the message innocuously into marquee cultural and sporting events that ostensibly have nothing to do with politics.

Events like the FIFA Women’s World Cup.

This past Saturday morning as I was subject to my daily dosage of the Today show – as per the tenuous television armistice that Elizabeth and I have reached in the apartment – I was astonished to discover yet a new depth of cringe in the fetid scripting of the woke talking point of the moment.

Australia is currently in the grips of fervent jingoism as its darling women’s soccer team, the Matildas, make their way up the World Cup ladder, having achieved an unprecedented spot in the semifinals.

The contrarian in me, as well as the brutal individualist who despises mass hysteria of any kind, particularly over national sporting prowess, has always rolled his eyes at such outpourings of flag-waving zeal, but one tolerates it much as he does the presence of the Today show in his living room for a few hours each week. Where I draw the line however is the hijacking of these otherwise benign cultural moments by the Neo-Marxist agenda of the World Economic Forum and its constituent corporate oligarchs.

I should have learned by now that there is no low to which Channel 9 will not stoop, and yet, as I listened to the Today hosts Jayne Azzopardi and Clint Stanaway (self-described as “unashamedly passionate about just so many issues”) contextualise the Matildas’ ascendancy, I very nearly choked on my waffles and spilled my cup of tea.

“It’s a great time to be a woman,” exclaimed Jayne before going on to rhapsodise about the three things that she (Channel 9’s producers) feel really encapsulate the “economic power that women have right now”:

1. Taylor Swift’s sell-out world tour

2. The success of the Barbie movie

3. The meteoric rise of the Matildas

Well, ladies there you have it. A billionaire pop star can fill a stadium; a Hollywood movie has cracked $500m at the box office, and a national women’s sport team has made it to the semifinals of… an all-female competition. Looks like you’ve got it all wrapped up, it sure is a great time to be a woman.

I put it to the Today show that these three phenomena do not represent the “economic power of women” but the economic power of 1) Universal Music Group, 2) Universal Pictures, and 3) the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (the largest investor in Australian women’s soccer) – all of which are variously owned by the usual lineup of mutual funds including, of course, BlackRock and Vanguard.

The economic power of women? Please.

The most charitable reading of this drivel is that Nine Entertainment (Channel 9’s parent company) has a vested interest in inflating and maintaining the popularity of these three commercial success stories for the mutual benefit of the same incestuous conglomerate of institutional investors which unsurprisingly overlaps with their own stockholder pyramid, and identity politics is the most expedient way to achieve this.

The more cynical read is that these same corporate interests are engaged in a program of social engineering for purposes that transcend the profit motive, as we shall discuss.

And yet, the Today show is not wrong. In many ways, it is a great time to be a woman – though not for the reasons that they would have us believe.

The Western world of 2023 is a gynocentric corpo-matriarchy, but the average woman on the street (or in the office) derives no direct “economic power” from Taylor Swift, Margot Robbie’s Barbie , or the Matildas – these are merely the glitzy, commercial cash cows to which the narrative-spinners attach the notion of ‘girl power’; a dopamine triggering ‘Yass queen slay’ moment that deludes the average female into believing she is in some way associated with these elite outliers who in actuality have far more in common with the Harvey Weinsteins of the world than they do with Lisa from accounts.

The power that women wield today is cultural, not economic – at least insofar as they command no more economic power as a demographic than men do, but their cultural and social power outweighs ours easily by five-to-one.

I provide no sources for the following, so self-evident are the facts, but please feel free to cite reliable sources that disprove any of my assertions, if you can find them (which you won’t). On virtually every commonly agreed upon indicator of wellbeing in Western society, and many aside, women outperform men. Indicators such as:

• Educational achievement

• University graduation

• Life expectancy

• Cancer rates

• Heart disease rates

• Suicide rates

• Incarceration rates

• Drug addiction rates

• Awarding of child custody

• Victims of violent crime

• Victims of work injuries (also one of the reasons men outearn women in the mendacious aggregate figure used by the perpetrators of the ‘Gender Wage Gap’ myth – because they take on more dangerous, and thus higher-paying jobs)

Shall I go on? Okay:

• Victims of warfare

• Homelessness

• Awarding of matrimonial/shared property

• Likelihood of benefitting from DEI hiring and promotion practices

• Likelihood of arrest and prosecution for domestic violence (even though research suggests that women engage in this just as frequently or more often than men)

Shall we do some more?

I don’t think we need to – if you don’t have the picture yet I’m guessing there’s some cognitive dissonance going on.

The fact is that due to ingrained cultural and social forces, women in the Western world get a far fairer shake than men do. It is not only easier to be a woman, but also now cooler, and more socially acceptable. And it has been this way for at least a decade.

It is therefore odd that in the same breath as they extolled the golden age of womanhood and the vast economic power of the fairer sex in 2023, Jayne Azzopardi and Clint Stanaway of the Today show, claimed that “there is still work to do” …

Hooking one leg effeminately over the opposite knee, Clint adopted his most dulcet tones and asked Jayne with misty, poignant saucer eyes, “But does the fact that we’re even having this conversation mean that we’re actually not quite there yet?”

And there you have it folks – the old progressive catch-22.

Yes! It’s a great time to be a woman, and women have such immense economic power… BUT there’s still work to do! We’re not quite there yet!

Jayne went on to nod sagely at Clint and adopt a distinctly more strident and masculine tone as she agreed “Yes, and until we achieve equal pay and equal representation there’s a lot more to be done.”

Equal pay?! The utter balls on these clowns.

It’s difficult to get reliable figures, but Jayne Azzopardi reportedly earns $300,000 a year. I’m going to go right ahead and say I that I don’t ever want to hear the words ‘equal pay’ cross the lips of a toffee-nosed princess who outearns virtually every man I know by at least a factor of two.

But Jayne’s lack of self-awareness is beside the point. It is not her airheaded sliminess but the sinister machinations of her employer and its owners that concern me.

Do you see the game they play?

They attach themselves, like a parasite, to popular cultural forces such as international sporting events and leverage the patriotism of a nation to make the primary issue not one of sporting competition, but of politics – in this case the identity politics of Fourth Wave Feminism, a cornerstone of ESG-enabled woke capitalism.

They do so within the context of peripheral but completely unrelated cultural phenomena such as Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie, and in the same breath tell us that it’s never been a better time to be a woman BUT that women are oppressed, and there’s still a lot more work to do.

This is the essential formula of Maoism – a process of brainwashing that James Lindsay has recently described as “Unity – Criticism – Unity” that seeks to induce in people a desire for unity, and then once the desire is strong enough, criticism and struggle sessions begin to cement adherence to the dogma, through which, finally, unity with the socialist cult will supposedly be achieved.

We can see this formula applied in the Today show’s scripting:

Create a desire for unity: “It’s a great time to be a woman: look at the economic power we have; look at these cultural wins we can all rally around…”

Criticism and struggle: “Until we get equality there’s still work to do. We’re not there yet.”

Unity: This is the aspirational future state, the utopia (which of course is never arrived at because the nature of progressivism is perpetual) which we must all commit to achieving if we are to be unified – and thus our adherence to the program is assured and the cultural hegemon maintains its control.

As we have established, women in our society are not oppressed; the notion is patently absurd, and like all Marxist dialectic, the framing of this issue by Channel 9 does contain a kernel of truth – by many measures it is a great time to be a woman.

But this is only the hook they use to create the desire for unity.

It is the feelgood catalyst that rallies the unwitting punter to the cause, and thus we can all sit around our TVs this week gushing about female empowerment and patting ourselves on the back as the Matildas continue their march up the tables, unaware that our simple enjoyment of competitive sport and our folksy patriotism has been co-opted for entirely nefarious political means intended to induce the criticism and the struggle by which the World Cup ceases to be about sport and becomes a political issue.

For make no mistake, if the Matildas win, and likely even if they don’t, the resulting conversations will quickly move on from the afterglow of victory to dwell on the disparities between men’s and women’s soccer; the pay gap; the unfair treatment by certain commentators; the lingering misogyny… and thus the struggle toward progressive utopia perpetuates itself.

I could have dealt with the rampant jingoism had this just been about sport, and perhaps even gotten behind the team. But this is not about sport – it has in fact been so far removed from the spirit of sport that it is unrecognisable as such, and the Matildas themselves are far from blameless. Were I the team captain, I’d have publicly disavowed the way Channel 9 and the rest of the establishment are framing their success, but let’s not forget, Australian women’s soccer is sponsored by Commonwealth Bank, who are owned by BlackRock et al, and as such, the constraints of ESG would absolutely preclude such a statement.

And thus, at the risk of triggering my true-blue Aussie mates, and not that it will even make a lot of difference – but I bloody well hope the Matildas lose the World Cup.