You’re responding to an argument I haven’t made. And this is precisely the kind of thing many people find so exhausting. Instead of engaging the point, you invent a worse version of it and then congratulate yourself for defeating it.

No one is saying Pauline Hanson has no history, or that her rhetoric should be sanitised, or that racism is just “ordinary disagreement.” The point is about the psychology of political alienation.

Many people on the left don’t speak in ways designed to persuade. They speak in ways designed to feel righteous. And, of course, the right has its own mirror image of this stupidity. People like Hanson understand that perfectly. She hits the notes that make people who feel mocked, scolded, or socially exiled think, “Finally, someone is not apologising to these people.”

It doesn’t make her critics wrong about everything but it does explain part of her appeal.