In a recent speech at Oxford University, renowned thinker and writer Peter Hitchens lamented that conservativism is dead in Western society, that the left has succeeded in conducting a Marxist revolution that began 60 years ago, and that most of us didn’t notice it happen.

Observing the public reaction to unproven allegations of sexual abuse crimes against women of late, I’m becoming more and more convinced Hitchens is right.

‘Most of the country looks more or less all right. Great institutional buildings … are still standing after many decades of turmoil,’ Hitchens observed. ‘But they lie.’

‘People. Will. Not. See it.’ He emphasised, in a drumbeat. ‘They prefer the appearance to the reality. They regard the unchanged buildings, and take this as proof that all is well, and as it always was. [But] they did not notice one of the greatest revolutions in human history. They did not notice it when it happened.’

Hitchens was discussing the descent of modern Britain from a nation of vibrant philosophical discourse and political diversity to a more-or-less single-party State with only one socially acceptable worldview: that of the post-modern, neo-Marxist modern Left, or the ‘Woke’ as they have become to be known in common slang.

It is in a similar vein, I propose, that Australian men haven’t really noticed what’s happened to us this past half century, either. We live in a culture that endlessly mocks us, derides us in TV ads as dopey and daft, regularly biases against us in family law, and paints us as barbaric villains filled with ‘toxic’ masculinity. Yet most of us are so used to the idea that we are to be scorned, we don’t even notice anymore. A large minority even seem to embrace it in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome perversion. ‘The beatings will stop if I champion their cause against us, as much as they do!’

In modern inner-city Australian polite conversation, it simply goes without challenge that women are the victims of an ‘oppressive patriarchy’ and that everything must be done to correct this horrid injustice at every turn. If anyone dare question this worldview, they are roundly scolded by an equal number of people of both sexes, who seem to almost unfailingly share one thing: a worldview of precisely the kind Hitchens laments. Dare to suggest that in 2022 women have attained not just a level of equality, but of dominance (in terms of the choices available to them in life) and you can kiss any dream of a corporate or public career goodbye.

The modern conservative view is that there’s a big difference between equality and sameness. Men and women are equal. But we are not the same.

We’re gloriously different. In our physicality, in our psychology and mental strengths, and in our preferences and choices. We complement each other beautifully, and when we work together in a culture of mutual respect, magic happens. It’s as if evolution, nature or – dare I suggest – God, intended this complimentary outcome.

Any Australian of adult age before about 1950 would consider the fact we’re even having a discussion about whether men and women are different, to be an absurd over-statement of the bleeding obvious. But not in our modern and ‘progressive’ culture.

So is it any more surprising, that in 2020s Australia, many seriously believe that if a woman says a man raped her, then he most definitely did, and imprisonment for a decade or more is appropriate without any presumption of innocence, need for further evidence, or fair trial?

Should an accused man protest, or other men speak out in his defence, then this only further proves his misogyny and guilt. And those who defended him must have their own skeletons in the closet, naturally.

Should there be insufficient evidence to determine what actually happened, and guilt is unable to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, then this only further confirms the victimisation of women by a ‘failed justice system’.

The logical fallacies in this kind of thinking are so glowingly obvious as to be unworthy of inclusion in a first-year legal studies exam.

Yet a disturbingly large number of intellectually-challenged souls see no error in this obviously flawed reasoning.

Scarily, Australia in 2023 seems to sit near the intellectual level of Salem in 1692: ‘Throw the witch in the lake! If she floats back to the surface and survives, it proves she’s a witch and she shall be burned at the stake!’

This should terrify anyone who identifies as the modern equivalent of a woman in Salem: a heterosexual man.

Perhaps the first thing we need to do to correct this infantile cultural disposition we’ve adopted, is to let go of the myth that women are all holy saints of impeccable virtue.

We then need to let go of the idea that to dare suggest otherwise makes one a misogynist, or ‘suspiciously critical’, as one mental giant described me on Twitter recently. (Way to prove my point.)

It is truly infuriating to any decent person that some guilty rapists will go free under a system of law that ensures no innocent man (or woman) is wrongfully convicted. But that’s how our system is meant to work.

The social moral deficit of a guilty person roaming free, is deemed far less a blot on our collective civility than a guilty person being condemned.

In the case of sex crime – by its nature extremely difficult to prosecute – some bad people will get away with it. Thousands of years of philosophical musings have grappled with the problem of evil and the apparent injustices of mortal life. It’s not terribly surprising the intellectual giants of the inner-Sydney #Metoo crowd haven’t solved this conundrum. Those of us who have a belief beyond the temporal realm, take heart that divine justice will eventually be served.

Instead of lamenting that evil men are ‘getting away with it’, let’s focus on the 99.999 per cent of men who don’t rape women and speak of the virtues of being a man and of masculinity in general. We could stop telling young men how toxic their masculinity is, and honestly face the fact they are physically stronger than women, and remind them of the responsibilities that come with that. We could bring back the ‘white knight’ archetype, raising our boys to be protectors of women and children, as had been our role for millennia before the neo-Marxists got hold of our cultural psyche and sent us all mad.

The inconsistency of the idea that women are strong, fierce, powerful individuals, yet at the same time weakly cower at the mercy of predatory men like helpless maidens, is completely lost on modern ‘third wave’ feminists.

Women don’t need men to take care of them these days, do they? Is chivalry to be scorned or demanded under the rule book of modern feminism?

Our perceptions have been so muddied by the constant propaganda, that even polite or innocent scenarios seem shocking. We live in a world where courts readily believe improbable scenarios over probable ones based on the gender of an accuser and some kind of perverse desire to placate a social media movement.

As one young mother put it to me recently ‘I don’t feel safe raising teenage boys in this culture.’

Damn straight.

There is some merit in the fact that the #Metoo movement and recent high-profile cases around the world have brought some awareness to the need for men to ensure explicit consent is actively sought, and given. But how far should the arm of the State extend into our sex lives and bedrooms in the first place? Especially in a populist, media-driven, mob-rule climate such as contemporary Australia…

Everything seems the same on the outside, as Peter Hitchens noted, but underneath a rot has set in. The Salem witch-hunt logic of Australia’s so-called intelligentsia class is a very disturbing, and currently highly visible, sign.