Mush In, Mush Out!

If the events unfolding around us were merely the plot of a movie, they might register as mildly amusing absurdities, the kind of over-the-top satire that leaves an audience chuckling at the sheer inventiveness of human folly. Because they are happening in the real world, the same scenes feel considerably less funny. The old computer maxim was "garbage in, garbage out." Our institutions have developed their own version: mush in, mush out.

In Australia, the latest illustration begins with the aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre. What should above all have produced a clear-eyed examination of Islamist extremism and the institutional failures that allowed it to culminate in mass murder was broadened into the more amorphous territory of "antisemitism and social cohesion." The royal commission is examining the terrorist attack, intelligence and policing failures and the wider problem of antisemitism, and its work may yet expose important failures. The danger is that the central issue becomes submerged beneath the familiar language of social cohesion, competing grievances and community sensitivities.

The Bondi attack did not occur in an intellectual vacuum. Jewish Australians had already endured an extraordinary period of threats, intimidation, vandalism and heightened security concerns. The massacre itself targeted a Jewish Hanukkah celebration and was carried out by Islamic State supporters. Those facts demand direct examination, not euphemism.

Yet the Australian political instinct is almost irresistible: when confronted by something frighteningly specific, make it reassuringly general. Radical Islamist antisemitism becomes "social cohesion." The problem of protecting Jews becomes a conversation about everybody feeling safe. Specific ideological motivations disappear into general discussions about racism, intolerance and extremism in all its forms. The edges are progressively sanded away until everyone can agree that hatred is bad and harmony is good.

Mush in, mush out.

This does not mean anti-Muslim hatred should be tolerated. Muslims are entitled to exactly the same protection of person and property as every other Australian. Anyone attacking an innocent Muslim because of his religion should face the law. But acknowledging that proposition does not require pretending that every social problem exists in identical proportions or arises from identical causes. If a particular form of extremism produces a particular atrocity, the responsibility of government is to identify it accurately.

Otherwise "social cohesion" becomes a mechanism for avoiding the very conversations necessary to preserve social cohesion.

The same danger exists when governments respond by reaching for additional restrictions on speech or giving institutions greater discretionary powers to regulate expression. Australia already possesses extensive laws dealing with threats, incitement, terrorism and violence. Before creating still more powers, the obvious question should be whether existing ones were adequately enforced and whether authorities correctly identified the threats developing in front of them.

Universities provide a warning about discretionary speech regulation. Administrators who speak confidently about safety, inclusion and respectful discourse can become remarkably uncertain when confronted with politically fashionable activism. The pro-Palestinian encampments demonstrated how reluctant some universities could be to draw firm boundaries around disruptive protest. It is reasonable to wonder whether additional powers over allegedly harmful speech would always be exercised with equal enthusiasm regardless of the politics of the speaker.

That is the Australian madness. Across the Pacific, another cultural argument has produced a form of theatre so absurd that satire can barely keep ahead of reality.

American sports broadcaster Clay Travis offered $10 million of his own money if a WNBA team could defeat a boys' high-school championship basketball team of his choosing. The proposal was deliberately provocative. Its purpose was not to organise the greatest sporting contest of the century but to dramatise an elementary biological point: elite female athletes are extraordinarily talented, but male puberty produces substantial average advantages in height, strength, speed, power and explosive athletic performance.

This was once among the least controversial observations imaginable.

Nobody thought acknowledging biological differences between men and women diminished the achievements of female athletes. Indeed, those differences are precisely why women's sporting categories were created. If biological sex had no meaningful effect upon athletic performance, separate women's competitions would never have been necessary.

Yet contemporary gender ideology has managed to make even this proposition contentious.

The wider controversy over transgender participation in women's sport asks institutions to reconcile two propositions that ultimately collide. The first is that people should be treated with dignity regardless of gender identity. The second is that female sporting categories exist because biological sex produces performance differences that matter enormously in competitive athletics.

The first proposition does not logically require abandoning the second.

This is where the trolls have entered the arena, and inevitably they have discovered rich material. Men associated with professional basketball have jokingly announced female identities or suggested they should enter women's competition, turning the logic of gender self-identification back upon the sporting establishment. The joke works precisely because everyone understands the biological reality underneath it.

A large former male professional basketball player does not become physically equivalent to a female basketball player because he announces a different identity. Everybody knows this. The comedy arises from forcing people who know it to pretend that they do not know it.

We have therefore reached the extraordinary spectacle of men pretending to pretend to be women in order to mock men who are accused of really pretending to be women. Future historians attempting to explain the early twenty-first century may eventually put down their pens and seek stronger medication.

Twenty years ago, almost nobody on the mainstream political Left would have hesitated if asked what a woman was. Feminism itself rested upon the proposition that women constituted a recognisable biological class whose interests sometimes required specific legal and social protection. Women's sporting categories were among the clearest examples.

Then the intellectual inputs changed.

Sex became gender. Gender became identity. Identity became subjective. Subjective identity acquired demands for objective institutional recognition. Institutions frightened of being called discriminatory accepted premises whose implications they had apparently never followed to their conclusions.

Mush in, mush out.

The Australian royal commission and the American sporting circus concern completely different subjects, but they reveal a common institutional pathology. Once ideology determines the vocabulary in which a problem may be discussed, evidence becomes secondary. Institutions can spend enormous amounts of time addressing everything surrounding a problem except the uncomfortable fact sitting in its centre.

In Australia, the danger is that ideological delicacy prevents institutions from speaking plainly about Islamist extremism and antisemitic violence. In women's sport, the danger is that ideological delicacy prevents sporting authorities from stating plainly that biological sex matters.

Neither proposition requires hatred.

One can defend Muslims against discrimination while investigating Islamist extremism without euphemism. One can treat transgender people decently while maintaining female sporting categories based upon biological sex. These positions are not contradictions unless ideology first insists that they must be.

The deeper problem is that Western institutions have become frightened of elementary distinctions. Every distinction is interpreted as discrimination, every generalisation requires a dozen qualifications, and every uncomfortable observation must be wrapped in sufficient bureaucratic padding to prevent anybody feeling that the observation applies to anything in particular.

Eventually language stops describing reality and starts protecting institutions from reality.

That is when absurdity becomes dangerous.

A ridiculous theory about basketball can wreck a sporting category. A muddled understanding of extremism can have consequences infinitely more serious. When ideological conformity prevents institutions from confronting the causes of lethal violence, or from defending the biological basis of women's sport, the answer cannot be another commission, another slogan or another carefully calibrated statement promising that everybody's lived experience has been heard.

Sometimes reality is complicated. Sometimes reasonable people genuinely disagree about difficult questions. But sometimes the first responsibility of an institution is simply to say what is in front of it.

Garbage in, garbage out was the warning from the computer age.

Our age has improved upon it.

Mush in, mush out.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/its-a-mad-mad-mad-mad-world/