I portion out my yikes quite sparingly, but this is very much one from me https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-29/townsville-vigilantes-hit-the-streets-amid-spike-in-crime/12696864

This "patriot" tag is absolutely a white supremacy red flag, not explaining as such is an abrogation of responsibility. The piece plays at "balance", yet is a carbon copy of the glad handling Blair Cottr*ll enjoyed from Ch 7.

Interesting... "self-described patriot" is real masks off stuff, given what is really happening here (white adult vigilantes attacking Indigenous kids), so the ABC's way of dealing with this has been... an edit to help pull the slipped mask back up. [h/t @tiredandstrong]

And another one bites the dust...

The article has been updated, but there's nothing on the page to indicate these changes have been made, or why they have been made. The violent vigilante who was granted anonymity used "patriot", ABC reported it, but now they've deleted it.

The vigilante bit is the main problem here, obviously, but ABC has now taken what was arguably already a fairly sympathetic piece on "well-meaning" vigilantes and further laundered the racism / white supremacy out of it.

Okay, so now we have at least a third version of the article. The "patriot" hasn't returned, but we have extra lines from the Griffith University report and (most interestingly) a whole new person - a fresh crime victim *against* vigilantism. Why wasn't he there to begin with?

I just don't think this article was anywhere near ready for publishing in the form it first appeared. It's an important subject with a long and complex history and deserves to be treated as such.

Australia in a nutshell

There's also something decidedly distasteful about "We provide something that the system doesn't" on the same day the Sentencing Advisory Council put out this report highlighting the systemic racism underpinning a blowout in the number of kids on remand. https://twitter.com/SACvic/status/1310704757036609536

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are remanded at *25 times* the rate of non-Indigenous children nationally, but please tell me more about white vigilantes being required to bash them because the justice system isn't quite racist enough. https://www.sentencingcouncil.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-09/Children_Held_on_Remand_in_Victoria.pdf

This really should be needless to say, yet here we are... https://twitter.com/JamesPurtill/status/1310764562019356674

Eight hours later... and deleting the three "patriot" mentions?