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When your favourite climate crusader contradicts your favourite diversity crusader, who exactly are you supposed to cancel?

Spare a thought for lefties. It’s been a bruising weekend.

Their troubles began with an announcement on Friday that police would not be charging five Sydney Swans players with sexual assault.

The so-called Pullman Five — who posed as carpenters to hire strippers, who were then quickly reimagined by the left as ‘exotic dancers’ — are free to get on with life.

There was not enough evidence to charge them with anything other than poor judgement. And that, at least for the moment, is not a criminal offence.

The Pullman Five: Guilty Until Proven Innocent?

Were they stupid blokes being stupid blokes? Yes.

Were they Russell Brand or David Williams? Not even close.

Between a lapse of judgment and a crime lies a vast moral canyon, and a great many columnists had already built condos on the wrong side of it.

All across Sydney’s inner West, almond milk lattes were going cold.

Sam Mostyn’s Premature Moral Lecture

Every second leftie with a phone and a BlueSky account and an unhealthy appetite for public denunciations likely now owes the Swans an apology. Not least of all, the Governor General.

Sam Mostyn had seized on the allegations as an opportunity to lecture the AFL, and men more generally, about their moral shortcomings.

She told the ABC after the incident and well before the police investigation had been finalised:

“The lack of respect for women across the country remains an issue for us all to be concerned about.”

Quite so.

And the lack of respect for the legal principle of innocent until proven guilty also remains an issue for us all to be concerned about.

Pat Cummins Commits Progressive Heresy

Just as the left was beginning to process the possibility that the Sydney Swans players might not, in fact, be the sexual predators they had enthusiastically imagined, along came another calamity.

Saint Pat Cummins, the left’s favourite cricket captain and unofficial ambassador for the moral superiority of renewable energy, held a press conference in which he effectively called the left’s other cricket darling, Usman Khawaja, a liar.

Khawaja had suggested that everyone knew about the ball-tampering during Australia’s 2018 tour of South Africa.

Cummins wasn’t having it.

He also dismissed Khawaja’s suggestion that he had been overlooked for the Australian captaincy because of his skin colour.

A nonsense, according to Cummins.

When Reality Refuses to Cooperate

This presented the left with a rather awkward problem.

For years, Cummins has been celebrated as proof that Australian sport can produce not merely great athletes but enlightened citizens who understand that cricket is a platform for lecturing the rest of us about climate change.

But now he has gone and challenged the claims of a Pakistan-born Muslim, thereby threatening the cherished left-wing conviction that racism is so deeply embedded in Australian culture that it can never be sandpapered over.

Worse, Cummins has left progressives with no choice but to side with David Warner.

David Warner!

The man whose public relations strategy once appeared to consist largely of looking angry while wearing a cricket shirt.

Imagine the existential distress.

A week ago, Cummins was a progressive pin-up. Now he’s an apostate for questioning the testimony of a person the left would very much prefer never to question.

And, worse, the Swans players aren’t even sexual predators.

One can only hope it all ends soon. There are only so many inconvenient facts a political movement can be expected to absorb in 48 hours.

So as you enjoy your week, spare a thought for lefties.

It’s not easy being morally certain when reality keeps refusing to cooperate.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.