The spirit of Cain

Last month the ABC broadcast a young woman inviting the nation to imagine what it would do to Gina Rinehart when the revolution comes. There was a stick. There were her intestines. There was a sausage roll. The national broadcaster said the tone was satirical.

I have no interest in whether the ABC was embarrassed, whether it should have pulled the clip, or what its Ombudsman is reviewing. That argument is a distraction and the broadcaster would be delighted for us to have it. A four-minute film is the surface of the water. What concerns me is the mile of black depth beneath.

Because that film did not appear from nowhere. A young woman thought it. A producer commissioned it. An editor approved it. An executive signed it off. Not one person in that chain felt what a healthy human being feels when they picture a woman being disembowelled for sport. That reflex is gone. It has been removed, deliberately, over decades, by people who knew precisely what they were doing.

Cain did not kill Abel over property. He killed him because Abel's offering was accepted and his own was not. He could not endure that another man stood higher, and rather than lift himself he put his brother in the dirt permanently. It is the oldest murder in our tradition and it is entirely a murder of resentment.

We have spent forty years teaching Cain's argument to children and calling it justice.

Consider what an Australian now absorbs, from kindergarten through university, and into the human resources department of every large firm. That any gap between two people is evidence of theft. That success is never earned, only extracted. That the rich are rich because somebody else is poor. That whole categories of person are guilty at birth – wrong race, wrong sex, wrong faith, wrong ancestry. That speech is violence and disagreement is oppression. That there is no truth, only power, so the man who says he is merely pursuing the truth is either a liar or a threat.

Feed that to a generation and you do not produce social justice. You produce Cain with a degree.

I wrote last September, after Charlie Kirk was shot through the neck in front of a crowd of students, that his assassin was not alone – that he had accomplices in every newsroom, every faculty lounge, every campaign office that had mocked truth and exalted envy. I was told this was intemperate. I have not moved an inch since.

Look at what the police reportedly found. A cartridge engraved with the words, 'Hey fascist, catch.' A young man allegedly telling his family he had had enough of Kirk's hatred. The word 'fascist' was not coined on that rooftop. Kirk's alleged killer did not privately reason their way to the conclusion that a man who debated undergraduates was a purveyor of hate. Those words were pressed into their hands, over years, by respectable people with salaries and credentials. It is alleged that one man supplied the trigger. The world at large supplied the ammunition.

Australia is being taught the catechism with a substitution. The American target was a man with the wrong opinions. Ours is a woman with the wrong bank balance.

Gina Rinehart plays the part in Australia that Elon Musk plays in America: the rich face people pin an entire system on. The joke was never really about Gina Rinehart. She was the demonstration model. The lesson was how to abhor a kind of person, and she was there to show what one looks like.

Let us be plain about who did this, because vagueness at this point is a mercy nobody has earned. The left built this. Not by accident and not by oversight. The left built its entire moral authority on grievance. It taught a generation that resentment is a credential, that envy is conscience, that hatred is permitted so long as the target is sufficiently fortunate. It sneered at responsibility and called it oppression. It dismantled truth and called it liberation. It called men fascists for their success, their sex, their race, their refusal to apologise for existing – every day, for decades, from every institution it captured.