Much as it pains me to say this (and this is an area in which I am not able to maintain a veneer of bipartisanship), Miranda Devine (Miranda Devine!) understands the internet better than Jonathan Green could ever hope to.
“Frannie and friends removed the video from the 10:10 website when complaints started, but it was too late. She has let the cat out of the bag.”
Devine is cognizant of the fact that nothing on the internet ever dies, which is why I’m able to link you to this absolutely abhorrent piece that she wrote in 2007 conflating The History Boys with pedophilia.
That aside, it’s time to actually address her premiere blog post in her new home on the Herald Sun blogs, “What it really means to be Green”. Devine starts with an easy target, Richard Curtis’ “10:10 No Pressure” video:
The problem is that Devine has chosen to take this ill-advised (and, more offensively, boring) video as a serious indication of the actual leanings of environmentally minded people: she sincerely believes that Greens are determined to kill everyone. This is not even paraphrasing her and twisting her words: she has literally referred to greens as a “totalitarian death cult”, and makes repeated references to Nazism. She takes everything to such extremes that it’s difficult to take her seriously, but she absolutely wants you to.
Devine’s work is actually a perfect piece of opinion writing, online or off. It is tempting to simply quote the entire thing because, regardless of what you actually think of her opinions, she is a master craftswoman of the form. She writes polemics, and people can’t help but be inflamed by them (or, somehow, agree with them).
Miranda Devine earns her money, and she is clearly more at home in her new News Limited digs than she ever was at Fairfax. Godspeed, Miranda. Never stop doing what you do.
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