I don’t get to choose the headline for my column in The Australian Financial Review. On Thursday mornings, once a fortnight, I email my 700 words into the AFR, and then in the afternoon, I go online to see the headline. Nearly always the headline is better than whatever I would have picked. The advantage of an editor deciding a headline is that they make their decision according to what I actually wrote and according to the point they thought I was making. Whenever I come up with a title for something I’ve written (eg a Substack post), there’s a danger that I pick it to match what I think I said (even if I didn’t say it) or the message I hoped to convey (even if I didn’t). Summing up a 700 word oped into a few words is one of the great skills of the AFR’s editors.

Sometimes I see the title to my piece, and I think I didn’t need to bother writing it because the headline says it all. ‘Is the Liberal Party even trying to win this election?’ and ‘Why neither Albanese nor Dutton deserves your vote’ were headlines to two of my pieces during the federal election.

‘Hate has no place? If only that were true’ was the headline to my column from last week. It captured exactly what I was trying to say. The subheading was, ‘The best way to start to overcome anti-Semitism is to encourage young people to have a bit more empathy and a lot less hatred for those they disagree with.’

I began by saying that at the same time as Anthony Albanese was talking about building social cohesion and combating anti-Semitism, taxpayers were paying for Australia to be represented at the Venice Biennale by an artist who glorified Hezbollah.

I then said:

Anti-Semitism in Australia won’t be overcome by a government plan. Anti-Semitism is embedded in a culture that increasingly regards the expression of hate, either by word or deed, as legitimate and normal.

The authorities tend to pick and choose what variety of hate they condone and what they condemn.

‘Hate’ is a strong word, but there’s no other description for the emotions on display in the streets of Australia’s capital cities most weekends as demonstrators protest against causes ranging from the fossil fuel companies supposedly burning the planet to the structural racism of Western Civilisation. While anti-Semitism is different – the connotation of ‘net zero now’ is not that of ‘from the river to the sea’ – mainly, protests simply transfer the expression of their hatred of the world around them from one issue to the next.

After the most recent attack on a synagogue in Melbourne, the Victorian Labor premier, Jacinta Allan, claimed ‘Hate doesn’t belong in Victoria’. But the media, the police and the judiciary have turned a blind eye to hate for years.

The Albanese government’s Special Envoy on Anti-Semitism, Jillian Segal said anti-Semitism appears to be more prevalent among younger Australians. That’s probably true. Maybe that’s because feelings of hate are more prevalent among young people. I went on:

It’s no surprise that young people are more inclined to hate when politicians and teachers tell children to make people like Greta Thunberg their role model. In 2019, Barack Obama spent an afternoon in Washington with Thunberg discussing climate change. He said of the young climate activist afterwards, ‘She embodies our vision…A future shaped by young leaders like her.’

One can only imagine a future shaped by the Greta Thunbergs of the world. Not that we’re that far from such a future. We got a glimpse of the bitterness, rancour, and sheer nastiness of today’s public debate when Thunberg spoke at a UN climate change conference in 2019. That’s when she told the adults of the world, ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. HOW DARE YOU!’

There are any number of ways responsible adults could have responded. ‘Don’t be ridiculous’ or ‘Why don’t you finish school before you start lecturing us?’ or ‘Do you even have a clue what you’re talking about?’ are some of those ways. Instead, adults indulged her. Kevin Rudd said Thunberg’s speech captured ‘the anger of that generation and does so effectively.’ He said:

It might insult a whole lot of middle-aged white guys, because it is not the way we would talk, or we think that it is inappropriate for a young girl to speak that way, but when I speak to young people around the world, whether it is in China, here in the United States or back home in Australia, frankly there is a rising rage that our generation has failed to step up to the plate.

So, according to Kevin Rudd the way to deal with the ‘rising rage’ of young people is to encourage it.

When I wrote that adults tell young people to be like Thunberg, it wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. Greta Thunberg is in the National Curriculum. In the Year 9 Civics and Citizenship Unit, which rejoices in the thoroughly postmodern description ‘Citizenship, diversity and identity’, Australian 14-year-olds are encouraged to ‘research young people who are acting as global citizens, such as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg…’ Another young person listed in the National Curriculum as ‘acting as a global citizen’ is Bassam Maaliki. As a Youth Ambassador for Save the Children, Maaliki pledged to fight racism because ‘Racism is well and truly a big problem in Australia’.

(Just to remind you – although I’m sure you don’t need reminding. All of this is in the National Curriculum which was endorsed by the Coalition when it was in government. It’s the same National Curriculum that, during the federal election campaign, Peter Dutton said he wouldn’t change if he won the election. He said, ‘We don’t have any proposals’ to change the National Curriculum.)

Teachers and teacher educators are explicit about the political purpose of the National Curriculum. Writing in The Conversation a few years ago, a collection of university academics defended indoctrinating young children in climate change catastrophism. They praised a revised edition of the National Curriculum (done under the Coalition). No longer was climate change just in geography – it was everywhere, in ‘civics and citizenship, geography, history, science, mathematics, technologies and the arts. This means students have more opportunities to learn about climate change, and teachers have more direction on where and how to teach it’ and ‘learning about climate change must be suffused through all subject areas if students are to become climate literate.’

Many students leave school feeling betrayed and disempowered because their climate concern are not being heard or taken seriously. The new curriculum does not adequately acknowledge or act on the significant emotional impacts of growing up in a changing climate.

It’s almost as if these days, adults want children to feel betrayed, disempowered, angry, and anxious. And the end result is hate – hate directed at whatever the first thing is that young people see. Eventually, when young people grow up, their hate might be directed at all those adults who were all too willing to manipulate the childhood of young people for politics.

In the heady days of the children’s ‘Climate Change Strikes’ a few years ago, school principals allowed students to skip school to attend demonstrations. As the ABC reported, ‘Nelson File – the principal of the Friends school in Hobart – said he would prefer it if rallies were held on weekends, but that he supported students attending as long as their parents got them there and back.’ The ABC also covered the comments of ‘Trent’, who attended a protest with his eight-year-old child. According to ‘Trent’, his eight-year-old had been ‘looking at climate change at school, and they have a pretty incredible understanding of the science… These are kids that actually understand the science in a way that I think most parliamentarians don’t.’ There’s so much wrong with those two sentences it’s hard to know where to begin…

None of what’s happening is good for young people. Their academic performance is declining, they’re angry – and they’re anxious – as you would be if you’re told that life on earth will end soon and it is your fault. In May the IPA published a major research report by Clare Rowe, an educational and development psychologist – ‘Climate anxiety in pre-adolescent children: A neuroscientific and psychological perspective’ – you can read it here. This is from the introduction to the report:

…exposing children aged 5 to 12 to alarmist climate narratives contributes to the rising prevalence of eco-anxiety – a form of clinical anxiety rooted in fears of environmental catastrophe… children in the concrete operational stage struggle with abstraction and are therefore vulnerable to misinterpreting threatening information.

When climate change is presented in emotionally charged and alarmist terms, it can overwhelm [children’s] still-maturing emotional regulation systems, potentially leading to feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and mistrust in adult authority.

According to a report from the Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Youth Mental Health, the rate of mental ill-health among young people has increased by 50% in less than two decades – partly driven by ‘climate change fears’.

This week the American writer Joel Kotkin had an article in the UK Telegraph about the anti-Semitism of the American’s largest teacher union. What he said about school education in the US also applies in Australia.

[The] takeover of the teaching profession by the far-Left poses a profound challenge to liberal institutions. Teaching always had some inherent political implications, but in the past, the emphasis remained on learning maths and language skills while exposing students to various viewpoints.

Today, students in many places are treated mostly to highly partisan takes on issues, from the Middle East to gender and climate change, with little interest in alternative views…

All this bodes ill for the future of the West, as the pattern of indoctrination, and poor instruction grows deeper.

Once Western educational institutions, based on liberal principles, represented a distinct advantage. Now our educators seem more interested in ideology as opposed to knowledge. It’s bad news not just for conservatives or Jews, but for our society’s ability to compete against countries like India or China, who still focus on basic skills and prefer actual results…

This is how I finished my piece.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Thunberg now leads anti-Israel protests wearing a keffiyeh and shouting ‘crush Zionism’. Adults told young people to follow Thunberg and her ways, and that’s exactly what young people are doing.

Recommended watching

• I’ve started doing a new podcast with the IPA’s Daniel Wild. It’s called ‘The Mainstream’. We’re three episodes in and we’re having a lot of fun and I don’t think we’ll be running out of things to talk about anytime soon. Our episode from a fortnight ago has got about 18,000 views (you can watch it here) and we released a new episode this afternoon (you can watch it here). We discuss politics, policy, the Australian way of life, and topics such as Dan’s reaction to watching the last-ever Black Sabbath concert, the Roskam family dog’s appearance on Paul Murray Live on Sky News, and the books we’ve read recently.
• On the latest The Mainstream, Dan and I were talking about the decline in the study of Australian history in schools and universities (because so much of it is slanted to the left and completely boring) and we got on to why history podcasts are better than university lectures and then Joe Rogan and pyramids and dinosaurs came up. Which prompted a viewer of The Mainstream to get in touch and recommend an interview Rogan recently did with Ken Burns. I think Burns is terrific. I haven’t watched everything he’s done, but I have watched The Civil War, The Vietnam War, and Jazz. Burns’ next project is on the American Revolution. The whole discussion is nearly three hours long. So far I’ve only watched the first half hour, but I’m really enjoying it. You can watch it here. (The Mainstream has a little way to go to catch up to Rogan. His talk with Burns has just ticked over one million views – proving people will read and listen and watch history – when it’s interesting.)