If campaigns had forensics, there would be one recurring finding that drowned out the rest: Death by Celebrity.
There’s almost no cause, however worthy, that can’t be rendered nauseated or impotent by the vocal endorsement of an A-list star or second-rate royal.
In Australia we learned this when the Gillard government chose Cate Blanchett to lead the carbon tax and other climate measures.
The condescending and cartoonish advertising campaign was a total disaster, reinforcing the belief among many working Australians that action on climate change was an ideological and utopian obsession of wealthy elites.
And it was probably almost entirely as a result of failing to win public support for the carbon tax that Gillard was dumped by her own party, which in turn was rejected at the next election.
Since then, Labor has reinvented its position on the fight against climate change, rightly promoting it as a massive economic opportunity for Australia, and without a celebrity in sight. No wonder it is now the ruling party.
In the US they learned this when Hillary Clinton spent the 2016 presidential campaign playing with megastars like Beyonce and attending Hollywood fundraisers.
At the same time, Donald Trump was reaching out to masses of blue-collar workers in America’s rust belt. No wonder Clinton lost what was supposed to be a must-win election and the Democrats are still in disarray.
The Black Lives Matter movement, started by American activists in 2013, was also a celebrity motif. His most famous endorsement came from NFL player Colin Kaepernick, who “took a knee” in September 2016. Two months later Trump was elected president.
Then the shocking police shooting of George Floyd in May 2020 supercharged the #BLM campaign again. A Pew Research poll at the time found that two-thirds of Americans had some support for the movement.
Needless to say, the #BLM hashtag was voraciously taken up by an endless pantheon of Hollywood stars. Two years later, a YouGov poll found that support had plummeted to just 31 percent, including a drop among African Americans themselves.
The #MeToo movement originated in the very heart of Hollywood, emanating from the grotesque sexual assaults of Harvey Weinstein, so Hollywood could hardly be blamed for getting involved in it.
The message of the stars, both literal and metaphorical, was that no assault could ever be tolerated and these demigods of the silver screen would lead the way to create a new and better world free of violence.
Then Will Smith stood up at the Academy Awards and punched a man in the face and a who’s who of Hollywood tripped over themselves to offer him comfort and support, not for the person he was hit, yes, but for the person who hit him.
The celebrity establishment cheered Smith feverishly that night. Now his career is toast.
Today, possibly the most prominent vocal crusader against all kinds of oppression and injustice is Meghan Markle, whose main discernible calling is to claim that she is a victim of racism and sexism.
How someone who married royalty and lives in a $20 million mansion in Montecito could claim to be a victim of anything is a question I cannot answer. Yet this week, Markle somehow managed to draw comparisons to Nelson Mandela
In an interview with US magazine The Cut, she claimed that a South African actor from The Lion King told her at the film’s London premiere in 2019: “I just need you to know: when did you get married with this family, we rejoiced in the streets as we did when Mandela was released from prison.”
It is almost impossible for a normal person to even imagine how such a statement could come from the lips of any human being, even if it were true. And needless to say, like many of Markle’s crossover comments, it isn’t.
As a result, the only South African actor in the film told the Daily Mail that he had never met Markle, let alone said something so ridiculous.
Dr John Kani, who voiced Rafiki’s character, said: “I’ve never met Meghan Markle… I’m the only South African cast member and I didn’t attend the premiere in London.”
And he added for good measure about Mandela’s release: “This was a world event. Surely Miss Meghan or anything marrying into royalty cannot in any way be said in the same breath or even in the same sentence as that moment.”
And that’s the problem with celebrities who desperately cling to noble causes. They cheapen them, derail them and, in the worst cases, delegitimize them.
And that brings us to the recruitment of Shaquille O’Neal to campaign for an indigenous voice in Parliament.
The Voice is a profound, practical and necessary step for our nation if we are to properly recognize our history and deliver effective and efficient policies for First Nations people.
We don’t need an American basketball to sell it, it sells itself. And O’Neal’s odd insertion into the debate is at best a distraction and at worst plays into the hands of critics who see this sensible, pragmatic proposal as yet another elitist cause of the day.
Celebrities don’t help causes, they hurt them. And left-wing celebrities are more of a danger to the left than a thousand Donald Trumps put together.
Read related topics: Meghan Markle