There is something very dystopian and peculiar about our present dispensation, but this has developed out of our embracing liberal principles as much as any departure from them; and this should be obvious without the state requiring everybody be locked at home and encouraging experimental injections.

Liberal heroes are limited to superhero franchises, because they cannot be human beings; the logical incarnation of the liberal hero is the antihero. Contrary to popular belief, we still need heroes, and the lukewarm selection we have been recently served by those toiling in what Adorno called the culture industry do not pass muster

Attempts to quantify teaching in scientific terms, to make it circle around datapoints, effect-sizes and graphs that fly about this way and that, are guaranteed to kill the thing as surely as a stake to an undead heart. Much of what makes a good teacher is innate. All our vanities about how to improve teaching forget that, at day’s end, if the teacher hath not love, she hath nothing

For those who grew up in an earlier time, who remember the apocryphal Catholic nun who was perhaps a little tyrannical with the ruler, or watched the hypocrisy of religious leaders with an eyebrow raised, the departure of religion from the stage might not have seemed such a bad thing. The question that ought to have been asked was about what would replace it

We might consider liberalism the Great Eater which has managed to force nearly everything into itself, to absorb most features of modern life under its mantle. That which cannot be packaged, sold or neutered in the face of the liberal schema must be resisted: only religious foundationalism and ethnic nationalism have remained impervious to such an all-consuming appetite, so it is no wonder they are the enemy and targets

The only Australia our elites seem to think matters is the Australia that doesn’t exist yet, an Australia severed from the past and couched in banal progressive sentiments. This is the Australia imagined by the most fervent university professor, ABC journalist, or member for the Greens, leaving us to wonder if a motley collection of bad principles with no purchase among the young is worth anything at all

Leninism is about bringing together the wretched of the world, promising to make them a little less wretched, and then deploying them as cannon-fodder to batter the existing order to pieces. If you ever wonder how feminists can make common cause with ultra-patriarchal Muslims or bourgeois BLM kids with criminals, there's your answer. It's how the Left rolls

The heroic masculine, once the dominant ethos in Western civilisation, is now on life support. Yet, if you were to take one look at ABC News, you would assume we were living in a patriarchal tyranny that would make Sauron blush. Within every man is a rapist trying to get out; toxic masculinity, we are endlessly reminded, lurks everywhere