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Snarky Gherkin, Pyalong (2025)

19/12/2025

Tony Abbott is very concerned about antisemitism now. Gravely concerned. Furrowed brow, strong words, Sky News lighting.

Which is interesting, because when he actually had the keys to the place, he tried to water down Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act... the very provision that gives legal protection against racial vilification, including antisemitism.

For those playing at home... 18C doesn’t ban criticism, debate, satire or offence. It bans behaviour that harasses, intimidates or humiliates people on the basis of race. It’s the legal line between “free speech” and “open season”.

Abbott didn’t just flirt with repealing it. His government introduced legislation to weaken it. His Attorney-General at the time publicly defended the “right to be a bigot” in Senate hearings. The only reason it didn’t pass was because the backlash was ferocious... including from Jewish groups who understood exactly where that road leads.

Fast forward to today and suddenly Abbott is the self-appointed guardian of Jewish Australians, accusing Labor of “hand-wringing impotence” on hate speech. The same man who, when actually in charge, tried to loosen the guardrails and then quietly shelved the plan when it became politically radioactive.

This is the pattern.
Out of office... culture war nonsense.
In office... deregulate protections, then pretend it never happened.

You don’t get to spend years trying to dilute anti-vilification laws and then rebrand yourself as the moral sentry against hate because Sky News needs a clip.

If antisemitism matters (and it does) then legal protections matter too. Consistently. Not just when they’re useful as a cudgel against your political opponents.

History didn’t forget. Some people are just hoping you did.

19/12/2025

PAF (weekend protest) updates just dropped with a speaker announcement and statement.

It opens with the solemn declaration that “our reason for doing this event is very clear and justified"... a breathless, rambling slab that tries to do everything at once.

The event wants to be a memorial, protest, government sacking, unity rally, civilisational warning and moral sermon.

All in the same paragraph. No structure. No hierarchy. Just nonsense.

The spelling and grammatical errors matter here... not because spelling is sacred, but because this is meant to be the moral justification for exploiting a national tragedy. If you’re going to claim the ethical high ground, at least proofread the manifesto. “doina”. “iustified”. These aren’t typos in a group chat... they’re in the document that supposedly explains why this had to happen right now.

It reads like it was written in a rush, emotionally charged, ideologically ivermectined, and absolutely uninterested in reflection. Which tracks, because reflection is the one thing this movement has never done since the pandemic began.

And then, almost comically, the statement pivots to unity.
Unity... from the same crowd that has spent years dividing Australians into “awake” and “sheep”, traitors and patriots, enemies and insiders. Unity, apparently, but only after the government is sacked and everyone else is told they’ve been complicit.

You don’t get to be the arsonist and the fire warden. You don’t get to inflame for years and then wrap yourself in solemn language when it suits the optics.

The statement isn’t clear.
It isn’t justified.
It’s panicked, reactive, and written like the movement itself... fragmented, desperate, and scrambling for relevance.

Then there's the big news... Barnaby Joyce will be a speaker.

And there it is. The penny drops. This isn’t grassroots. This isn’t spontaneous. This isn’t “everyday Australians finding their voice.” This is One Nation in a fake beard, standing on the shoulders of a tragedy and pretending it just happened to be passing by.

PAF was already dominated by One Nation figures at its last rally... a rally so sparsely attended you could’ve safely socially distanced from all the drivel. Now they’re not even pretending anymore. This is just One Nation with better fonts and worse spelling.

At this point, PAF is basically GetUp! for morons.

18/12/2025

Somewhere between the outrage, the Telegram spirals and the ivermectin smoothies, PAF organisers have either forgotten, not noticed, or quietly changed the Sydney location from the Opera House to Hyde Park. Which is already causing angst among the "freedom warriors" who need to be told precisely where to stand, at time and what to say. Changing it constantly is a recipe for another flop in the making.

Now to the substance... or rather, the lack of it.

Monica Smit has been calling for the government to be sacked since Labor won the election. Not lost. Won. A clear, democratic outcome she has never accepted. Every grievance since... vaccines, migrants, flags, weather, Guy Sebastian's Christmas hits... has just been stapled onto the same pre-written conclusion: “sack the government”.

And now she’s doing what cookers always do after tragedy... retrofitting grief to justify a position she already held.

The Bondi attacks were horrific. They deserve seriousness, care, and a bipartisan response. What they don’t deserve is being laundered into a political stunt flyer with a candle emoji and a slogan accusing the government of “importing terrorists”.

Because the inconvenient bit they keep stepping around... one attacker arrived in Australia in 1998. The other was born here. This isn’t an immigration issue. It’s not a single-party issue. And it’s not solved by screaming “treason” into a megaphone on a Sunday afternoon.

Gun laws are determined at the state level, not by the Prime Minister. And yes... there were periods where conservative governments loosened firearm access, expanded certain categories, and cut funding to intelligence and preventative services. That’s not opinion, that’s public record.

If you actually cared about public safety, you’d be calling for consistent national gun standards, properly funded mental health services, fully resourced intelligence and prevention and the calling out of all forms of extremism, not just the ones that fit your brand.

And honestly, we don’t need this stupid s**t right now.

We don’t need cookers turning up in their dozens... each carrying their own half-baked cinematic universe about what they think “really happened”. No shared facts. No coherence. Just nonsense, screenshots, and a deep belief that they alone have cracked the code while everyone else is asleep.

That’s not mourning. That’s not accountability. That’s not civic engagement.

It’s noise. It’s corrosive. And it actively makes things worse.

In moments like this, Australia needs calm, clarity and unity... not a pop-up grievance festival where every cooker with a Telegram feed gets to audition their theory in public.

Tragedy doesn’t need a rally. It needs adults in the room.

And right now, this ain’t it.

18/12/2025

It’s a scorcher in Melbourne.
The kind of heat where even a gherkin can dry out.

So we stay brined.
Gin. Tonic. Ice doing heavy lifting.
Fan pretending it’s contributing.

We’ve almost made it through another week of cooker meltdowns, conspiracy sudoku, and people confidently wrong in public. That alone deserves citrus and botanicals.

Hydrate. Stay salty.
And remember... clarity improves dramatically after the first sip.

Cheers 🥒🍸

17/12/2025

Following the Bondi tragedy, a curious thing has happened in cooker-land.

They’ve decided Pauline Hanson should lead the country.

The same Pauline Hanson who was caught on camera expressing a willingness to accept money from the US gun lobby in exchange for advocating softer gun laws in Australia. Not alleged. Not whispered. Filmed. Documented. Internationally reported.

Pauline’s eyes lit up like a poker machine that’s just hit free spins. The exact second she thinks the NRA cheque book was about to slide across the table.

The kind of thing that should end a political career on the spot. And yet here we are.

After a mass-casualty event, the crowd screaming loudest about “law and order” has landed on the one politician who looked at America’s gun carnage and thought, “Yeah, let’s import a bit of that energy.”

You genuinely could not make it up.

Australia’s gun laws are one of the few things this country gets almost universally right. They exist because we chose less dead people. They work because we resisted the exact ideology Pauline has spent years flirting with... the American fetishisation of fi****ms, culture-war bravado, and NRA-style cash-for-influence politics.

So when cookers say they want Pauline in charge “for safety”, what they actually mean is this... they want someone who validates their rage, their paranoia, and their permanent sense of grievance, even if it comes at the cost of the very protections that keep mass shootings rare here.

17/12/2025

BREAKING: The co**se of 'Put Australia First' (PAF) has been resurrected for a last-minute rally.

Just when we thought the movement had finally been laid to rest, someone’s wheeled the cadaver back out of the freezer, slapped on a hi-vis vest, and declared it “the people’s uprising”.

Yes... 'Put Australia First' is back. Not with a plan. Not with momentum. But with the unmistakable stench of desperation.

This one hasn’t been marketed by Smit or Reignite. No big buildup. No grand narrative arc. Which strongly suggests this isn’t a coordinated campaign so much as Morgan Jonas going rogue, desperately trying to re-enter the chat after the Bondi tragedy... because if there’s one iron law of cooker politics, it’s that no crisis goes unexploited.

Same playbook as always.
A traumatic national moment gets immediately repurposed into a vague, breathless call for “treason”, “dismissals”, and “saving Australia”... with precisely zero legal basis and even less coherence. Just vibes. Dark, angry vibes.

The demands are to sack Albanese, Burke and Wong. Why? Because… reasons. Something about visas. Something about people who have “publicly vowed to destroy Australia”. No names. No evidence. Just the usual nebulous menace doing laps around Telegram and Twitter / X.

And of course, it’s a snap rally. Because planning is hard. Unity is harder. And the factions are currently too busy stabbing each other to coordinate anything more than a rushed post and a location pin.

Melbourne gets Parliament steps.
Sydney gets the Opera House forecourt.
Theatrics remain high. Numbers... it'll be another fizzer.

Now, a quick meteorological briefing for those playing along at home... Melbourne is forecast to receive heavy rain on Sunday. Which means the excuses are already being drafted.

If attendance is low, it won’t be because the movement is hollowed out, fractured, and running on fumes. Absolutely not. It’ll be Dan Andrews, targeting his weather machine directly over the cookers, from the Forbidden Palace. Chemtrails will be in overdrive and any brief sunny breaks, will be put down as Gods will.

So here we are again.
Emergency rally.
Zero mandate.
Tragedy-surfing for relevance.
A movement that keeps dying, then clawing its way back up for one more go.

Same script. New weekend.
See you all laughing in the comments this Sunday.

17/12/2025

As we continue to eagerly await The Pouye Files (still loading, apparently) a brave knight named Liam has ridden in to save the realm.

According to Liam, I (The Gherkin) “wouldn’t do this with someone who actually has studies to back up their claims”. By "this" he just means asking for evidence.

It's then followed by 3 links which supposedly prove vaccine harm.

So let’s look at the studies...

Link 1: “Cancer HRs being up post vax”

(PubMed ID: 41013858)

This paper does not show vaccines causing cancer.

What it actually looks at is hazard ratios in already-diagnosed cancer patients, many of whom had delayed screening during COVID, had worse baseline health, had COVID infections themselves and were older with immunocompromisation.

The authors explicitly caution against causal interpretation.
No mechanism is established.
No comparison to unvaccinated-but-infected cohorts showing higher or lower risk.

This paper has been repeatedly misused by anti-vax groups who stop reading at the abstract and start posting at the headline.

Link 2: “Chronic illness up post vax”

(MedRxiv preprint)

This one doesn’t even make it out of the warm-up room.

It’s a preprint, not peer-reviewed.
It relies on self-reported diagnoses.
No clinical verification.
No control for COVID infection severity.
No baseline health correction.

The authors themselves state *in bold* that no conclusions should be drawn.

Using this as “proof” is like citing an online Wiggles concert review as Supreme Court precedents.

Link 3: “Vaccines cause poor prognosis in cancer patients”

(PubMed ID: 40563656)

This paper does not say vaccines worsen cancer outcomes.

It discusses outcomes in patients undergoing cancer treatment during the pandemic, where COVID infection itself dramatically worsened prognosis, vaccination status correlated with exposure risk and treatment timing and confounding factors were substantial.

In fact, multiple oncology societies recommend vaccination because COVID infection, not vaccination, is associated with worse cancer outcomes.

The Pattern (and it’s always the same) is find a scary-sounding paper, ignore the limitations section, pretend correlation means causation, omit COVID infection as a variable or pretend it's not real and declare victory on Facebook.

If vaccines caused cancer at population scale, it would be obvious in national cancer registries and detected in pharmacovigilance systems.

It isn’t.

So yes, Liam... I absolutely do this with people who post studies.

Especially when those studies say the opposite of what they’re being used to claim or aren't studies at all.

17/12/2025

That rare moment when even the “just a flu” crew are silent on the release of a new study.

Two separate studies... one from South Korea and one from Queensland confirmed what immunologists, neurologists, and anyone with a functioning frontal lobe have been concerned about since 2020...
COVID. Fecks. With. Your. Brain.

We’re talking real, structural damage.
Not “brain fog” from your third latte... actual neurodegenerative processes.
Even after mild cases.

Major issues include cortical thinning in key areas like the cingulate and insular cortex, increased susceptibility in the hippocampus (your memory centre), elevated astroglial damage markers... basically, your brain's support cells waving a white flag and oxidative stress, synaptic dysfunction, and inflammation linked to dementia pathways.

This isn’t just a headache that lingers. This is brain rewiring. The kind that affects memory, judgement, emotional regulation, and impulse control.
..Which might explain why some of the loudest “unmasked, unvaxxed, unhinged” types seem to be getting louder and less hinged these days.

They’re not just angry.
They might actually be neurologically altered... by the very virus they thought didn't exist and downed horse dewormers over.

These latest findings aren't about “long COVID” in the bedridden sense. These were mild cases, a year on.
People who thought they “got through it fine.”
But their brain scans disagreed.

Meanwhile, back on Telegram, some bloke called Dazza is still yelling about spike proteins while his hippocampus is waving a white flag in the background.

COVID isn’t done with us. Not even close.
The virus moves on. But the damage it leaves stays.

Get vaccinated. Protect your brain. Stay Pickled.

16/12/2025

Fake outrage, real racism.

There’s a video doing the rounds... pushed by far-right accounts here and overseas claiming “Muslims stormed a Christmas market in Germany.”
Same footage, different captions such as “No-go zones”, “intimidation”, “the death of tradition.” All of it nonsense.

The footage was filmed in Essen, Germany, in December 2024, and it shows Syrian refugees and expats celebrating the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad... a regime that tortured, bombed and disappeared hundreds of thousands.

They were walking through a Christmas market, the town centre, not storming it.
Waving Syrian independence flags.
No intimidation. No riots. No violence. Just raw, emotional relief.

And it wasn’t just Syrians. German locals also came out in solidarity, recognising the historic moment and the human toll behind it.

The police and city officials confirmed it was a peaceful demonstration, no disturbances.
But that hasn’t stopped anti-immigration influencers from pumping the footage full of rage-bait and shipping it worldwide like it’s some kind of festive horror story.

These lies are being spread deliberately... timed with far-right rallies, rising xenophobia, and culture war campaigns.
They’re exploiting the warmth of Christmas to inject cold division.

Meanwhile, the very people they vilify... migrants, refugees, Muslims, are helping staff food drives, donating blood, and decorating streets alongside neighbours.

Don’t fall for it.
Verify before you share.
Recognise the useful idiots spreading it.
Call it what it is... disinformation designed to divide.

Let’s not let racists rewrite Christmas. The truth matters... and it travels best when we carry it together.

16/12/2025

It’s only Tuesday. Somehow.

Social media is a war zone. The inbox is on fire. And the cookers have been pumping out more nonsense than Netflix during a writer’s strike.

While the worst of Australia finger-pointed, deep-faked, and played trauma dress-ups for algorithmic clout... The best of Australia kept it steady. Kept it human. Kept it real.

And I see you.

Every level-headed comment. Every calm rebuttal. Every “mate, that’s not how the sun works” reply to some bloke named Blayde, rocking a Guy Fawkes filter and an IQ that starts with a decimal.

You’ve been tireless... and bloody brilliant.

So here’s to the ones who didn’t flinch. Who didn’t take the bait.
Who know grief isn’t a marketing strategy, and facts aren’t flexible depending on what your Telegram guru reckons.

Raising a glass to you.

Debunking resumes tomorrow. Because we don’t forget. And we won't let it slide.

Cheers, snarky weirdos.

16/12/2025

Cookers, once again, singing from the same paranoid hymnbook.

In the immediate wake of tragedy, they’re not grieving... they’re sleuthing. Desperate to make it about them. And in doing so, they churn out yet another AI-generated fever dream held together by melted pixels and their hatred of nuance.

This one is a collage of Frankenstein limbs, trotter for hands, stump wrists, and a conjoined SUV that looks like it was 3D printed on a toaster. For the avoidance of any doubt, the actual victim whose shirt clearly reads 'United States'. Not “AF[ED ĞLYE§” or whatever it spat out.

It's a pattern. Just like anti-vaxxers who claimed vaccine trial photos were staged, or that every ICU nurse was a crisis actor. They need the world to be lying to justify their warped lens. It’s not curiosity... it’s confirmation bias in a tinfoil hat.

They seek division, not truth... They bend facts to fit the narrative... And they'll wipe their mess with your empathy.

My advice is if the hand has seven thumbs and the van has two butts… maybe don’t build your worldview on it.

15/12/2025

Bec Freedom... organiser of the MFA flop, professional outrage merchant, and now apparently Acting Police Commissioner of Facebook Comments Pty Ltd.

According to Bec, women “shouldn’t do a man’s job.”
A bold take, delivered confidently from her couch about a female police officer doing her actual job... directing pedestrians away from an active shooter situation at Bondi.

Let’s be very clear about what’s happening here.

That officer wasn’t “failing.” She wasn’t outmatched. She wasn’t proving some grand biological theory cooked up on Telegram.
She was containing a live threat, moving civilians to safety, and doing exactly what she was trained to do...

The woman who hasn’t held a job since 2017 wants to tell professional women putting their lives on the line how to do theirs.

Not because she knows better. But because she resents them.
Every uniform, every woman with purpose, every show of strength... it stings.
And you can see it in every post.

But the Bondi tragedy has been like Christmas morning for certain types. And Bec’s been absolutely feral since it happened.

Suddenly, every death is a talking point. Every image is propaganda. Every uniform is a prop for her anti-immigration, culture-war fantasy.
It’s not grief... it’s opportunism. It’s not concern... it’s desperation for relevance.

Because when your movement flops, your rallies fizzle, and your audience shrinks, you don’t reflect. You escalate. You latch onto trauma. You bend tragedy into a “See? I told you so” pretzel and hope the algorithm rewards you for it.

If Bec truly cared about safety, she’d be amplifying police instructions.
She’d be urging calm. She’d be telling her followers to stop spreading bile while families are burying their dead.

Instead, she’s playing dress-ups as a law-and-order hardliner while undermining the people doing the actual work.

So no, Bec.
You don’t get to armchair-commissioner your way through a massacre.
You don’t get to turn a woman doing her job into a meme for your failed movement.
And you sure as hell don’t get to claim moral authority while feeding off grief like an influencer at a funeral.

That officer showed professionalism under fire.

You showed us exactly who you are.

Snarky Gherkin

19/12/2025

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