Neo-Marxist Student Radicals Today; Globalist Elites Tomorrow
A few days ago on a sparkling Sydney ferry ride, with tourists photographing the Opera House and schoolchildren laughing in the sun, the author of a recent Spectator Australia piece overheard something that froze the blood. The kids were not chatting about the usual excursion excitements. They were bantering about unpleasant things they might do to "Pauline." What looked like an innocent school outing was, in the writer's eyes, something far darker: the Australian equivalent of a day out during Mao's Cultural Revolution, or a river cruise for the young cadres of the Khmer Rouge in Year Zero. Innocence was being twisted into hatred, optimism into propaganda, and the whole exercise directed at a specific political target.
That target was Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party. Across Australia, socialist-leaning students and school groups had staged walkouts and protests framed as opposition to One Nation's policies. In practice the energy was personal and visceral, aimed squarely at Hanson herself. The author saw the children's uniforms transformed into something closer to political garb, the kind that once filled the streets of totalitarian mobilisations. Taking the natural desire of the young to improve the world and channelling it into organised contempt for a democratic politician was, the piece argued, the opposite of democracy. It was fascism and communism at the core.
The wider context, the writer insisted, is that Australia already lives under a rigid monoculture, just not the one conservatives sometimes imagine. Debates about multiculturalism versus monoculture miss the point. What exists now is an enforced Left-wing monoculture whose settings are set by government, amplified by most of the mainstream media, corporate Australia, and above all the ABC, then pumped into schools and even kindergartens. The author coined the acronym UGLY for its custodians: Unions, Greens, Labor, and the Yartz, the cultural elites of galleries, festivals, Biennales and the arts establishment. Together they police the acceptable beliefs.
Those beliefs form a clear hierarchy. Aboriginal heritage, even a distant claim to it, confers unique moral authority; the slogan "always was, always will be" is repeated with quasi-religious force. Sexual identities outside traditional heterosexuality elevate the holder on the moral scale; "love is love" and the recognition of multiple genders are non-negotiable. Australian history is treated as an unbroken story of shameful oppression and greedy exploitation. The planet is boiling and Australia's highest duty is to de-industrialise itself in order to save mankind; there is no Planet B. Anyone who rejects this package is fair game for ostracism, mockery, vilification and, in the ugliest corners, open fantasies of violence.
The result is a culture that is anti-colonial, anti-tradition, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-free enterprise and anti-aspiration. It is nihilistic and intolerant of dissent. The old Australian monoculture of the 1950s may have been imperfect, but at least people could speak their minds. Today that freedom has vanished. Question any tenet of the new orthodoxy and the response is not argument but moral condemnation.
This pattern is not new. Over the years any serious challenge to the globalist consensus, whether on borders, culture, or sovereignty, has been met with the same reflex: the charge of racism. The treatment of anti-vaxxers during the pandemic offered a classic example. Scepticism about mandates and experimental medical policy was routinely painted as a form of racial bigotry, even though some of the most prominent public voices opposing the consensus were non-white. The label was never about evidence; it was a weapon to shut down debate. The same weapon is now being turned on One Nation and on Hanson herself. Students are mobilised, schools become staging grounds, and the language of moral emergency is deployed so that disagreement itself becomes illegitimate.
What the ferry scene revealed, in the Spectator writer's telling, is not a spontaneous outburst of youthful idealism but the successful transmission of a monoculture that cannot tolerate opposition. When children are taught that certain politicians are beyond the pale of ordinary democratic contest, the boundary between politics and persecution begins to dissolve. The protests against Pauline Hanson are only the latest symptom. The deeper problem is a political culture that has forgotten how to argue and has learned instead how to hate its past.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/the-pauline-protests-a-day-out-during-maos-cultural-revolution/
