In a recent TV appearance on Channel 10’s The Project, comedian Reuben Kaye made a tasteless joke about Jesus Christ that upset many who watched it. While co-host Sarah Harris laughed along with the studio audience, the following night she joined in a straight-faced apology for ‘the particular offence and hurt that (the joke) caused our Muslim, but especially our Christian viewers’. Many complainants saw it as insincere.

To be fair, it was an in-joke which would have appealed to LGBTIQ+ viewers and their supporters.

In an open, pluralistic and resilient society, bad taste jokes are part of the cut and thrust, and in the eye of the beholder. But in today’s uncompromising world, ‘snowflakes’ take refuge in social media anonymity to amplify attention and seek retribution. It’s why Reuben Kaye doesn’t crack tasteless jokes about the Prophet Mohammed. Christians however are a soft target.

Former Wallaby star Israel Folau learnt the hard way. He was sacked for posting religiously inspired, anti-gay comments. A Pentecostal pastor, he lamented, ‘Upholding my religious beliefs should not prevent my ability to work or play for my club and country.’ He’s right, but it did.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison supported Folau saying, ‘If you are not free to believe, what are you free to do in this country?’ It’s a good question which, as prime minister, he ignored. How could he have missed the growing censorship and double standards developing under his watch? By failing to address historical revisionism and the weaponising of offence, he facilitated a process which left Australians less free and less self-confident as a nation.

What was once an unshakeable belief in the British Judeo-Christian traditions of tolerance and freedom of thought and expression, has become a relic of a bygone era. It means younger generations are largely oblivious to the critical role those values played in the rise of human rights, humanitarian charity and the abolition of slavery. Or how they inspired the eighteenth century ‘Age of Reason’, notable for its rigorous scientific political and philosophical discourse and important advances in science and medicine.

In 2017 enough of that ethos remained for 62 percent of voters to support marriage equality giving federal parliament the confidence to pass it into law. However, five years on and, despite a noisy campaign estimated to have cost half a billion dollars, only 24,000 people or, 30 per cent of those living in same sex relationships, have married. Disappointingly, the goodwill expressed by voters towards the LGBTIQ+ community has not been reciprocated.

In fact, Kaye and his ilk remain ‘in revolt against the ever-narrowing views of an increasingly conservative world’. They are a hostile chorus who maintain that the values of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry are not the birthright of a single culture. Without offering a superior alternative they mock Australian values and see the Bible and Jesus Christ as tokens of a civilisation they disown. To them, even the term ‘Western Civilisation’ is an oxymoron.

They promote this fallacy in the knowledge that should they practise homosexuality in the Middle East or Russia they would be imprisoned. Or, if they lived in Xi Jinping’s China, they would have to deal with societal prejudices, censorship, intimidation and, at times, detention by police.

Indeed, it’s no secret that China treats minorities appallingly. It ranks 106th out of 153 countries in the global gender gap rankings and Human Rights Watch called on Beijing to protect people of colour from blatant discrimination. Religious minorities are so abused the practice is increasingly being characterised as genocide.

Aided by social and legacy media and, adopting collective amnesia, Marxist-Leninist Red Guard imitators bully traditionalists, demanding they renounce the ‘Four Olds’ – old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. They are intent on a cultural revolution, which they repackage as the ‘Great Reset’, and woe betide those who fail to kowtow.

Monash University’s MBA course is a first mover. ‘White, attractive, upper or middle class and highly literate’ students must take a ‘privilege walk’ and undergo oppression training to ‘challenge the violence of leadership by confronting the hegemony of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal ideologies’.

This is straight out of Mao Zedong’s playbook. Mao believed education empowered the dominant classes and Monash University wants future business leaders suitably schooled on the environment and corporate social responsibility. Emphasis is on diversity, equity and inclusion; profits and risk-management, be damned.

The University of Melbourne, has also joined the revolution. ‘After consultation with related parties’ it revised its free speech policy with a new gender affirmation protocol along with self-contradictory guidelines for the appropriate exercise of freedom of speech. Teaching feminism courses must say nothing that could cause offence to transgendered students.

In a push to ‘dismantle privilege’, a student workshop moved ‘white males’ and those who look like ‘Liberal voters’, be forbidden from speaking during class. Of course they believe in free speech but, ‘It’s about giving space to people who don’t feel included on university campuses because of things like gender, language (and) queerness’.

There was a time, when all Australian universities claimed to preserve, defend and promote, academic freedom in the conduct of their affairs. Students were free, without fear or favour, to engage in critical enquiry, scholarly endeavour and public discourse. No more.

As George Orwell wrote, the aim of culture wars, ‘is to deny and obliterate (the people’s) own understanding of their history’. Like former prime minister Paul Keating, who draws moral equivalence or casts doubts on evidence which highlights the brutality of the West’s adversaries. It’s as though blinded by ideology or hate he sees his fellow Australians as pawns in an historical process. Reuben Kaye is feted as an effective culture warrior, more for naivety than his credulity. Playing to the politics of envy will always attract an audience.

Plato argued that the inevitable next step in political evolution after democracy is tyranny.

Perhaps he was right?