Nakkiah Lui Leads Charge Of People Wanting Andrew Bolt Cut From FODI

The Festival Of Dangerous Ideas describes itself as a festival that “brings leading thinkers and culture creators from around the world to the Sydney Opera House stages and online to discuss and debate the important ideas of our time“, which seems like an extremely generous way to describe whatever contribution Andrew Bolt could possibly make, given that they’ve decided to put him on the lineup.

Bolt is a dipshit blogger and dickhead columnist known partially for his particularly obnoxious extreme conservatism and more partially for getting successfully sued under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act for being an honest to God, deadset, legally-recognised racist.
Unsurprisingly, people are more than a little bit miffed that a guy whose whole deal is racism (to the point that it’s recognised by the state) is being made a speaker at a festival meant to celebrate (supposedly) the best minds available. 
It seems almost cruel to put one of the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement on the same lineup as a man who denies that the Stolen Generation even happened, but that is exactly what they did.
Deadset legend Nakkiah Lui, a writer and actor from ABC’s indigenous sketch show “Black Comedy“, took to Twitter to express the anger a lot of people were feeling and to call for him to get the boot:

She quickly shot down the bullshit predictable argument everyone has a right to an opinion – because it is legit dumb as fuck to think you have to give airtime to actual racists:

People love to bring up “free speech” when talking about the no platforming of people like Bolt, but it’s important to remember that a) Australia doesn’t have constitutionally protected free speech (look it up) and b) there’s a difference between censoring political speech and just straight up not paying money to a man convicted for hatespeech to talk at an event.
A lot of other people were mad angry at FODI for what really seems like a huge misfire in terms of panellist choice and did not mince words about it:

To top it off, FODI also booked Neil Strauss, who pretty much kicked off the gross Pick-Up Artist movement worldwide with his book ‘The Game‘. Like, for sure it’s healthy to embrace a diversity of perspectives and ideas and whatever, but we’re under no obligation to endorse actual misogyny and actual racism.
Photo: Getty Images / Pool.

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