view from Australia
New Religion, old hypocrisies
JANET ALBRECHTSENFollow @jkalbrechtsen
Journalist Andy Ngo after being attacked by left-wing antifa protesters in Portland, Oregon. Picture: AFP
A fortnight ago, Andy Ngo was bashed by a mob of antifa protesters, who are best understood as extremists from the new religion. Ngo is a young Asian man, a journalist who is not part of the left-leaning media. He carried his new GoPro camera to report on antifa’s march through the streets of Portland, Oregon. Ngo has been reporting on stories that major US media outlets would rather ignore, including the activities of antifa. Their name suggests they are anti-fascists, but bashing a journalist is a common tool of fascists.
While Ngo was mobbed by thugs in masks, police stood back. He ended up in hospital, treated for head injuries including a subarachnoid haemorrhage. Film of the violent assault went viral. Yet news outlets went largely silent, eventually shamed into some cynical coverage.
Ngo is the gay son of Vietnamese immigrants, which is worth juxtaposing against antifa’s make-up and mission. A group of angry white millennials protesting against white supremacy violently assaulted a young Asian gay man. Make sense of that.
The lack of concern from major media outlets speaks to the hypocrisy of the left’s moral code. Imagine their rightful outrage if Trump supporters bashed a young left-leaning journo. The same media organisations that routinely pounce on Donald Trump for his media baiting at campaign rallies — think CNN, The New “Woke” Times and The Washington Post — seemed relaxed with antifa’s excuse that Ngo deserved it because he reported on antifa.
When some media outlets finally popped up, Ngo was painted as a troublemaker who deserved no sympathy. “Don’t worry about Ngo. He’s been discharged from hospital, with a big fat GoFundMe of around $160,000 and any number of armed, right-wing groups offering to act as ‘bodyguards’,” wrote one misguided, or malevolent, pundit in The Independent.
The same chap suggested that the far right wanted to treat the assault on Ngo as “their own (cut-price) Horst Wessel moment”. Wessel was a 22-year-old Nazi stormtrooper who was fatally shot by communists on January 14, 1930, his death becoming a rallying cause that propelled the Nazis to power.
Ngo is not a Nazi stormtrooper. He is a curious journalist who challenges modern cant working in a liberal democracy, like ours, that is increasingly imperilled by a new religion that seeks to punish nonconformists in various ways.
Over two thousand years ago, Christianity set down a moral code for people. Biblical stories tell of deadly sins and heavenly virtue, commandments guide us, there are offers of forgiveness and paths to redemption. There were also dark periods when those who questioned rising and rigid religious orthodoxy, and hypocrisy, were shut down. And non-believers were persecuted.
Today, there is a new religion, with a new moral code enforced by a new sainted class that includes corporate leaders, government bureaucrats, those at the top of industry groups, university vice-chancellors and sporting bosses too. Like old established religions, the clerics of the new religion presume to hold a monopoly over morality. This new papal class also enforces a rigid orthodoxy similar to old established religions.
Those who stray from this new moral code do so at their own risk. There are public condemnations so fierce they aim to rewrite history. Think of those same-sex marriage activists who have not just attacked tennis player Margaret Court for her beliefs but consider her thought crimes so serious that the Margaret Court Arena must be renamed. According to Billie Jean King, Court’s Christian views justify trashing her record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles. Note that Court is not asking King to subscribe to her views. But King demands that Court change hers or lose her standing as a tennis legend. Only in degree is that different from historical cases of established religions persecuting heretics.
The new religion makes no room for nonconformists. Its followers want to shut down voices of dissent. Instead of changing the channel or reading a different newspaper, Richard Di Natale was caught during the last election saying that he wanted sections of Sky and News Corp shut down.
Proponents of the new religion search and punish people for tiny transgressions, confecting fake outrage. And they make no room for redemption or forgiveness. The orthodoxy is so powerful that conservatives are even sacking their own when faced with the shitstorm unleashed by disciples of the new religion. In Britain, Roger Scruton and Toby Young were both sacked from their quangos when the May government succumbed to social media outrage. Burning witches at the stake in a grassy field is an old variant of new witch-hunts on social media platforms.
It did not help that Young, a man with a passion for education, apologised unreservedly for comments he made during an earlier career as what he called a “journalistic provocateur”.
When you start from the same point — that dissidents are so morally depraved they must be stopped — only the consequences differ. Some adherents of the new religion chose to bash Ngo, while others demanded that Young be sacked.
It used to be the case that we rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s, and unto God the things that were God’s. The new moral code is so omnipresent it reaches on to sporting fields, into boardrooms, universities and bureaucracies.
The sacking of Israel Folau is bigger than a legal biff about a contract and a code of conduct. Folau was sacked for sinning against the new moral code. It is a totemic clash of religions, between old ones such as Christianity (but it could be Islam next) and the new religion promulgated by a new secular class that wants to stop a man from posting different moral judgments drawn from a centuries-old code of conduct called the Bible.
Some followers of the new religion have become blind to what is at stake. The ABC, for example, struggles to show much curiosity. Interviewed this week on Radio National about religious freedom, Barnaby Joyce mentioned the Folau saga. Presenter Hamish Macdonald interrupted, saying that Folau had been covered enough. Except it has barely been covered at all on the taxpayer-funded ABC.
Later, on Monday evening, a Q&Aaudience member raised the Folau matter. Host Tony Jones directed it to the openly gay panel member Penny Wong. No one else was asked for their views.
If the ABC is the media arm that spreads the new religion, Rugby Australia’s Raelene Castle has become its self-appointed priestess. During Folau’s code-of-conduct hearing, Castle seemed to suggest it was fine for Folau to post good bits from the Bible, but not bad bits. Was she presuming to sit in judgment of a book that is thousands of years old, with a few billion followers? Who is Castle to decide what individuals should decide for themselves?
People who presume to speak about moral issues for others, rather than just themselves, are found in droves in corporate Australia. A new class of corporate clerics presumes to speak for shareholders on everything from same-sex marriage to changing the Australian Constitution to preference one race of people with a special chamber of their own.
Corporate clerics are easily identified. They spend more time virtue-signalling about getting the right gender balance and exposing society’s unconscious bias than they do on issues that go to the core of their business: boring issues such as tax reform and industrial relations reform.
Alas, this hard work is handballed away by faux trust-seekers who would rather feel the warm glow that comes from standing in a room of like-minded corporate clerics signing up to social campaigns using other people’s money. And those quick to attack Qantas’s Alan Joyce should remember he is one of the few to advocate for social change and sound economic policy.
The reverence paid to diversity by corporate Australia mirrors the hypocrisy of Billie Jean King in sport. They make no room for political diversity. It’s another sign that the new moral code is religious in nature, because few religions, not old ones and not this new one, handle diversity of thought well.
A spokesman for the self-appointed corporate virtue-signallers, former KPMG chairman Peter Nash, told this newspaper last week that companies needed to push social causes to rebuild trust with people.
Here’s my advice — and it’s free. Companies will rebuild real and lasting trust by treating customers fairly, respecting the diversity of shareholders whose money pays their generous wage, and advocating economic policies that allow companies, workers and our economy to flourish.
At universities too, bureaucrats use codes of conduct to enforce new moral codes using vaguely drafted commandments that you must not behave in an uncollegial manner.
At James Cook University, vice-chancellor Sandra Harding used the university’s code of conduct to remove physics professor Peter Ridd from his job. Ridd taught at JCU for decades. Students adored him. His sin was to challenge the quality of research by some JCU colleagues about the state of the Great Barrier Reef.
A university committed to the liberal education of its students, and finding the truth, would have been curious about Ridd’s work. Instead, JCU sacked him.
How is his removal different to heretics being removed by established religions?
When it comes to thou shall implement gender equality, the new religion has become irrational and fanatical. As The Australian reported this week, the Queensland Mines Minister could not seek expert advice from the Coal Mining Safety and Health Advisory Committee because the committee, lacking 50-50 gender representation, was forced to cancel meetings.
Meanwhile six workers died in Queensland mines and quarries in the past 12 months.
It’s early days. But this new religion and sections of its ruling class are already so corrupted with hypocrisy, it needs a reformation, a Martin Luther to post 95 theses exposing the equivalent of those old papal indulgences. Consider this Thesis # 1.
JANET ALBRECHTSEN
COLUMNIST
New Religion, old hypocrisies
Journalist Andy Ngo after being attacked by left-wing antifa protesters in Portland, Oregon. Picture: AFP
- 12:00AM JULY 13, 2019
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A fortnight ago, Andy Ngo was bashed by a mob of antifa protesters, who are best understood as extremists from the new religion. Ngo is a young Asian man, a journalist who is not part of the left-leaning media. He carried his new GoPro camera to report on antifa’s march through the streets of Portland, Oregon. Ngo has been reporting on stories that major US media outlets would rather ignore, including the activities of antifa. Their name suggests they are anti-fascists, but bashing a journalist is a common tool of fascists.
While Ngo was mobbed by thugs in masks, police stood back. He ended up in hospital, treated for head injuries including a subarachnoid haemorrhage. Film of the violent assault went viral. Yet news outlets went largely silent, eventually shamed into some cynical coverage.
Ngo is the gay son of Vietnamese immigrants, which is worth juxtaposing against antifa’s make-up and mission. A group of angry white millennials protesting against white supremacy violently assaulted a young Asian gay man. Make sense of that.
The lack of concern from major media outlets speaks to the hypocrisy of the left’s moral code. Imagine their rightful outrage if Trump supporters bashed a young left-leaning journo. The same media organisations that routinely pounce on Donald Trump for his media baiting at campaign rallies — think CNN, The New “Woke” Times and The Washington Post — seemed relaxed with antifa’s excuse that Ngo deserved it because he reported on antifa.
When some media outlets finally popped up, Ngo was painted as a troublemaker who deserved no sympathy. “Don’t worry about Ngo. He’s been discharged from hospital, with a big fat GoFundMe of around $160,000 and any number of armed, right-wing groups offering to act as ‘bodyguards’,” wrote one misguided, or malevolent, pundit in The Independent.
The same chap suggested that the far right wanted to treat the assault on Ngo as “their own (cut-price) Horst Wessel moment”. Wessel was a 22-year-old Nazi stormtrooper who was fatally shot by communists on January 14, 1930, his death becoming a rallying cause that propelled the Nazis to power.
Ngo is not a Nazi stormtrooper. He is a curious journalist who challenges modern cant working in a liberal democracy, like ours, that is increasingly imperilled by a new religion that seeks to punish nonconformists in various ways.
Over two thousand years ago, Christianity set down a moral code for people. Biblical stories tell of deadly sins and heavenly virtue, commandments guide us, there are offers of forgiveness and paths to redemption. There were also dark periods when those who questioned rising and rigid religious orthodoxy, and hypocrisy, were shut down. And non-believers were persecuted.
Today, there is a new religion, with a new moral code enforced by a new sainted class that includes corporate leaders, government bureaucrats, those at the top of industry groups, university vice-chancellors and sporting bosses too. Like old established religions, the clerics of the new religion presume to hold a monopoly over morality. This new papal class also enforces a rigid orthodoxy similar to old established religions.
Those who stray from this new moral code do so at their own risk. There are public condemnations so fierce they aim to rewrite history. Think of those same-sex marriage activists who have not just attacked tennis player Margaret Court for her beliefs but consider her thought crimes so serious that the Margaret Court Arena must be renamed. According to Billie Jean King, Court’s Christian views justify trashing her record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles. Note that Court is not asking King to subscribe to her views. But King demands that Court change hers or lose her standing as a tennis legend. Only in degree is that different from historical cases of established religions persecuting heretics.
The new religion makes no room for nonconformists. Its followers want to shut down voices of dissent. Instead of changing the channel or reading a different newspaper, Richard Di Natale was caught during the last election saying that he wanted sections of Sky and News Corp shut down.
Proponents of the new religion search and punish people for tiny transgressions, confecting fake outrage. And they make no room for redemption or forgiveness. The orthodoxy is so powerful that conservatives are even sacking their own when faced with the shitstorm unleashed by disciples of the new religion. In Britain, Roger Scruton and Toby Young were both sacked from their quangos when the May government succumbed to social media outrage. Burning witches at the stake in a grassy field is an old variant of new witch-hunts on social media platforms.
It did not help that Young, a man with a passion for education, apologised unreservedly for comments he made during an earlier career as what he called a “journalistic provocateur”.
When you start from the same point — that dissidents are so morally depraved they must be stopped — only the consequences differ. Some adherents of the new religion chose to bash Ngo, while others demanded that Young be sacked.
It used to be the case that we rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s, and unto God the things that were God’s. The new moral code is so omnipresent it reaches on to sporting fields, into boardrooms, universities and bureaucracies.
The sacking of Israel Folau is bigger than a legal biff about a contract and a code of conduct. Folau was sacked for sinning against the new moral code. It is a totemic clash of religions, between old ones such as Christianity (but it could be Islam next) and the new religion promulgated by a new secular class that wants to stop a man from posting different moral judgments drawn from a centuries-old code of conduct called the Bible.
Some followers of the new religion have become blind to what is at stake. The ABC, for example, struggles to show much curiosity. Interviewed this week on Radio National about religious freedom, Barnaby Joyce mentioned the Folau saga. Presenter Hamish Macdonald interrupted, saying that Folau had been covered enough. Except it has barely been covered at all on the taxpayer-funded ABC.
Later, on Monday evening, a Q&Aaudience member raised the Folau matter. Host Tony Jones directed it to the openly gay panel member Penny Wong. No one else was asked for their views.
If the ABC is the media arm that spreads the new religion, Rugby Australia’s Raelene Castle has become its self-appointed priestess. During Folau’s code-of-conduct hearing, Castle seemed to suggest it was fine for Folau to post good bits from the Bible, but not bad bits. Was she presuming to sit in judgment of a book that is thousands of years old, with a few billion followers? Who is Castle to decide what individuals should decide for themselves?
People who presume to speak about moral issues for others, rather than just themselves, are found in droves in corporate Australia. A new class of corporate clerics presumes to speak for shareholders on everything from same-sex marriage to changing the Australian Constitution to preference one race of people with a special chamber of their own.
Corporate clerics are easily identified. They spend more time virtue-signalling about getting the right gender balance and exposing society’s unconscious bias than they do on issues that go to the core of their business: boring issues such as tax reform and industrial relations reform.
Alas, this hard work is handballed away by faux trust-seekers who would rather feel the warm glow that comes from standing in a room of like-minded corporate clerics signing up to social campaigns using other people’s money. And those quick to attack Qantas’s Alan Joyce should remember he is one of the few to advocate for social change and sound economic policy.
The reverence paid to diversity by corporate Australia mirrors the hypocrisy of Billie Jean King in sport. They make no room for political diversity. It’s another sign that the new moral code is religious in nature, because few religions, not old ones and not this new one, handle diversity of thought well.
A spokesman for the self-appointed corporate virtue-signallers, former KPMG chairman Peter Nash, told this newspaper last week that companies needed to push social causes to rebuild trust with people.
Here’s my advice — and it’s free. Companies will rebuild real and lasting trust by treating customers fairly, respecting the diversity of shareholders whose money pays their generous wage, and advocating economic policies that allow companies, workers and our economy to flourish.
At universities too, bureaucrats use codes of conduct to enforce new moral codes using vaguely drafted commandments that you must not behave in an uncollegial manner.
At James Cook University, vice-chancellor Sandra Harding used the university’s code of conduct to remove physics professor Peter Ridd from his job. Ridd taught at JCU for decades. Students adored him. His sin was to challenge the quality of research by some JCU colleagues about the state of the Great Barrier Reef.
A university committed to the liberal education of its students, and finding the truth, would have been curious about Ridd’s work. Instead, JCU sacked him.
How is his removal different to heretics being removed by established religions?
When it comes to thou shall implement gender equality, the new religion has become irrational and fanatical. As The Australian reported this week, the Queensland Mines Minister could not seek expert advice from the Coal Mining Safety and Health Advisory Committee because the committee, lacking 50-50 gender representation, was forced to cancel meetings.
Meanwhile six workers died in Queensland mines and quarries in the past 12 months.
It’s early days. But this new religion and sections of its ruling class are already so corrupted with hypocrisy, it needs a reformation, a Martin Luther to post 95 theses exposing the equivalent of those old papal indulgences. Consider this Thesis # 1.
JANET ALBRECHTSEN
COLUMNIST
