How to Sell a Massacre by Peter Charley

Author:Peter Charley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2020-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Hours later, the four were back together.

‘So, what do you really want to achieve this week?’ Rodger asked Ashby as they sipped a beer at the hotel bar.

‘If there are people here who are willing to back us with either ground support, if the NRA wants to rally their supporters within Australia, that’s one start,’ Ashby replied. ‘Two, I’d love to get my hands on their software. And three, if they can help us with donations, super!’

Ashby declared his admiration for the NRA-friendly president who now occupied the White House, and he praised Trump’s combative press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had been drubbed by mainstream news organisations for lying to journalists and for denigrating the press. Sanders had once told a gathering of journalists, for example, that ‘countless’ FBI officials had told her they were happy that President Trump had fired FBI chief James Comey.

That was a lie.66

She’d also told the media that Trump hadn’t dictated the administration’s response to news that his eldest son, Donald Jr, had met with a Russian operative in 2016.

That was also a lie.67

A year later, in late 2019, Sanders would say President Trump ‘reads more than anybody I know’.68

Did she seriously believe that?

‘I really like that young girl that Trump’s got working for him that does his media,’ Ashby said. ‘I really like her. Young Sarah, I forget her last name. But I tell you what, she’s been thrown in the deep end, and she’s swum fucking hard to the point where she’s making a name for herself because she’s bloody good.’ He added, ‘That’s what we do. We don’t follow the press. I don’t let them too close to me and I don’t let them anywhere near [Pauline].’

‘Oh, no, she needs some protection for sure,’ Rodger said.

‘Yeah, and see that’s why they’re all assholes,’ Ashby said.

Thinking he was in the company of like-minded, press-averse comrades, Ashby relayed an anecdote about a recent approach to One Nation by Facebook.

‘Don’t tell people this, but I was [contacted] a couple of months ago by the head of Facebook in Australasia,’ he said. ‘Don’t put that out publicly.’

‘No, not at all,’ Rodger assured him.

‘They said, “We want to meet with you in Canberra,”’ Ashby continued. ‘They came to the office, and Pauline was in the office . . . and they sat down and they had this whole presentation for us. And they said, “Senator, your page is the most viewed Facebook page of any politician or any political party in this country.”’

He looked around the group with a sense of pride.

‘And they said, “[Ashby’s] driving this . . . we can see what he does. We understand what he does. We just want to know why he does this because he’s just hitting all the right buttons and we can’t explain to other senators or any others because they just don’t get it.”’ Ashby said Facebook then invited him to a meeting at their Australasia headquarters in Singapore, where he was shown ‘what transpired there’.

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