At face value it is odd, then, that Jordan Peterson’s new venture, The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), should boast an acronym designed to invoke the story of Noah while simultaneously railing against ‘the false idol of apocalyptic ideology.’ Look closer, however, and the contradiction resolves itself in a familiar, albeit familiarly veiled, way. The apocalypse is indeed here, only it isn’t global heating that poses an existential risk to humanity but the usual culture war suspects.

The ideological ground occupied by Quadrant, Fox News, Quillette, The Australian, Sky News, Infowars et al. is founded on the same essential creed: under the banner of identity politics, the Left is undertaking a deliberate campaign to police speech and behaviour in order to create a society in which conservative dissent is erased

Free speech no longer emerges, in the words of Jacques Rancière, in a time and in a place you’re not supposed to speak, exercised by those who aren’t allowed to speak. Free speech is now a weapon in the right’s arsenal: by invoking free speech, they simultaneously bludgeon an ‘intolerant’ left who dare disagree with them.

The best that can be said about the Ramsay Centre’s proposal to sponsor an elite course in Western civilisation is that it has revived a flagging discussion about the intellectual and political considerations that shape the humanities curricula of Australian universities.