Unless you’ve been living under a rock these last few weeks, you will have seen that Marty Sheargold became the latest figure to have his life destroyed by our leftist commissars.
Like Charles Murray, Amy Wax or Steve Sailer in America, the Australian comedian has been erased from polite society for offending the pieties of our priestly caste.
His crime? He spoke ill of women’s sport.
The other Monday on Triple M Sheargold mocked Australia’s women’s soccer team, The Matildas, claiming they behaved “like Year 10 girls” and that he’d “would rather hammer a nail through the head of [his] penis” than watch the team play.
The reaction was swift and unforgiving. On Tuesday, Triple M received a flood of complaints about the comments. On Wednesday morning, Sheargold and the station issued apologies. On Wednesday afternoon, his program was taken off air. By Wednesday evening he was gone, with Sheargold and the station having “mutually agreed to part ways”.
Sheargold’s axing was followed by the usual feigned outrage and pile-on. Football Australia announced they were “deeply disappointed” at the “unacceptable comments made by Marty Sheargold on Triple M regarding the CommBank Matildas”.
Over in the media, the Sydney Morning Herald spouted the liberal establishment view by calling the comic a misogynist and “pale, male [and] stale”.
The problem is that Sheargold was right. Although clumsily phrased, the thrust of what he said was true: women’s sports are less interesting than men’s and women do perform at physically lower levels.
The reason, of course, is physiological. Men and women do not have the same capacities as we do not have the same physiology. To do even the most cursory review: on average, men weigh more than women; men have more muscle mass and are stronger; men have denser and stronger bones, tendons and ligaments; and men are around 7% taller. Men also have larger hearts, greater lung volume and a higher red blood cell count.
This plainly affects performance. As our anatomy is different, the results will be too. In running events male records are around 10% faster than female. In the 100 metres, the men’s record is 9.58 seconds while the women’s is 10.49. In the marathon, the men’s record is 13 minutes faster than the women’s. Swimming is the same, with men around 8% faster than women. In soccer, our beloved Matildas were thrashed 7-0 in 2016 by a group of teenage boys.
These physiological differences plainly lead to different spectacles and experiences. In grand-slam tennis, for instance, women’s matches are played over 3 sets and are done in around 90 minutes. Men’s matches, meanwhile, are played over 5 sets and last over 150 minutes.
In the AFL, the gender gap is that vast it is almost embarrassing. In the men’s game, each team kicks around 12 goals and scores 80 points. In the women’s, the average team kicks 6 goals and scores 40 points. So bad is it, even the AFLW was forced to report on a series of games where teams couldn’t score above 10 points for the entire match.
This obviously leads to differing levels of attendance and interest. Men’s AFL games draw crowds of over 50,000, while women’s games attract 2,500. This clearly then causes discrepancies in media coverage, advertising revenue and commercial interest. It also inevitably calls into question our sacred notion of equality: why pay the same for two radically different products?
Yet the point is not to criticise women per se. There are plainly many areas where women outperform men. Women, famously, live longer: outlasting men by around 7 years globally. They also have lower suicide rates and a higher verbal capacity. Further, women are less likely to smoke, be overweight or be homeless.
The issue at stake here is the tremendous veto our leftist establishment wields over anyone they perceive as conservative, right-of-centre or even slightly out of line. As the Sheargold case proves, largely factual comments and normal human banter are no defence against an inquisitorial class who’ll cancel you for speaking or deny you a platform in the first place.
As an example of the latter we only need look at a recent episode of Q+A. In what we might call The Case of the Two Jordans, the bias of the national broadcaster was on full display.
Does the ABC want to clarify why they cancelled my invitation to ask a question about immigration because “I worked in politics”, only to let a Victorian Socialist Senate candidate ask a question? https://t.co/vol17Vdxu1
— Jordan H Knight (@jhk_______) February 25, 2025
Jordan Knight, Migration Watch Australia founder and contributor to The Daily Telegraph, was prohibited from asking a question about immigration, ostensibly because he had “worked in politics”. Yet on the other side of the aisle, a hard-left Senate candidate for the Victorian Socialists named Jordan van den Lamb – aka Purple Pingers – was allowed to ask a question and given a position of prominence.
The reason for this is a simple one of power and the famed friend/enemy distinction. Mr van den Lamb is on the left and a friend, while Mr Knight is on the right and an enemy. This also explains the ABC ignoring the fact that Mr van den Lamb supports squatting in vacant homes, shares memes encouraging class-based violence, and has the murderous hammer and sickle logo in his Twitter bio.
Other examples of this hypocrisy abound.
Anyone even vaguely conservative or traditional is ignored, driven to the margins or cancelled – see Cory Bernardi or Geoffrey Blainey, for instance. Left-liberals like Peter Fitzsimons or Craig Foster, however, are everywhere and have essentially been given free rein to share their opinions. This is not to mention the scores of normal Australians who have been driven out of jobs or who have not been hired at all because of their regular right-of-centre views.
As things stand, the Australian public are not permitted to question obvious elite-driven dogmas and falsities for fear of the new commissariat. Legitimate queries regarding whether men can ever be women; whether diversity has any downsides; whether differences in intelligence have a genetic component and are not purely social constructs; whether progress is a myth and things really were better in the past; have all been rendered verboten and made taboo.
Anyone who raises these questions is squashed or kept silent via the threat of doxing, “unpersoning” or unemployment. Even the law is no help, as women like Sall Grover have found out – with our judiciary recently engaging in an act of absurdity by prioritising the positive law of anti-discrimination over the natural law of dimorphism or two distinct genders.
We remain, therefore, like reverse Galileos. We are made to remain silent or to utter obvious untruths due to the stultifying leftist managerialism we are forced to live under. What our elites are still engaged in is their ultimately futile quest to “manage” inconvenient parts of human nature and to forestall the return of what American writer RR Reno has called the Strong Gods.
Yet a glimpse of what life could be like outside this leftist yoke was recently seen in America. Earlier this year, 25-year-old Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee Marko Elez was fired from Elon Musk’s pet project due to “spicy” comments he had made on social media.
But instead of throwing Elez to the leftist wolves – a la Sheargold in Australia – Musk forgave the boy and reinstated him. Even Vice President JD Vance said Elez should be “given a second chance”.
This case is not primarily about Elez, of course. It is simply an emblematic example of prominent people holding strong in the face of the liberal outrage mob. It is a rare instance of those in power not capitulating to our leftist commissars and them not allowing a person’s life to be destroyed for natural human sentiments and comments that were common until a few decades ago.
If the Australian right ever wants to return to prominence it will have to address this issue. It will have to dismantle what American writer Nate Hochman, echoing Antonio Gramsci, has called our system of “fortresses and earthworks” – i.e. our entrenched left-leaning media, educational and cultural establishment that both forms and polices the opinions and norms of the populace.
Until that happens, there isn’t much hope for the right. The culture will continue to be left-liberal and anyone who steps an inch off the reservation will be booted from it like Marty Sheargold.
Header image: Marty Sheargold (Triple M).
