In this brave new world, many see victimhood as an aspiration

Jussie Smollett leaves court in Chicago. A lawyer for Smollett is asking a judge to allow the "Empire" actor to travel while he is free on bond on charges he falsely reported being attacked by two masked men. Picture: AP

It reads like a Coen brothers movie, one of those black scenes from Fargo. An African-American gay actor unhappy with his wage dreams up a sure-fire way to get rich. He hires two men to stage a racist and homophobic attack on him. The man, not the sharpest tool in the shed, pays his “attackers’’ with a cheque. And the hired guns wear Make America Great Again hats to point to the real perp responsible for this hate crime: Donald Trump.

During the make-believe assault, the attackers aim racist and homophobic slurs at the victim and put a noose around his neck.

In the Victimhood Olympics, this man wins gold. Following the hoax hate crime, the man becomes a celebrated symbol of not just a crazy US president but centuries of racism and bigotry.

Scratch that last bit. Like the ninnies in Fargo who bungle a fake kidnapping, Jussie Smollett, a barely known actor from a drama called Empire, was arrested last week by Chicago police for staging a fake attack in January.

Smollett says he is innocent, but the cops have gathered damning evidence. And they are fuming. “It’s just despicable,” said Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson. “Why would anyone, especially an African-American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations … to further his own public profile?”

The dismal answer is why not? Smollett first tried his hand at victimhood by sending a racist letter to himself. When that didn’t ­work, he upped the stakes a week later by ­allegedly staging a hate crime against himself.

File this one under our brave new world. This alleged hoax is the predictable end game of a victimhood industry that is both seductive and lucrative. The guiding principle is simple: find out who has the power and you will locate the guilty party.

Anyone who wears a MAGA hat, for example, is part of the oppressor class, racist and homophobic too. Ipso facto they are guilty. No questions asked about the details of this bashing.

People like New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cause this warped victimhood industry to thrive. This was not a “possibly” homophobic attack, she said after newspapers first reported the alleged attack. This “was a racist and homophobic ­attack”, she said. No questions asked. Find the powerful and you have located the guilty.

It is no surprise that the congresswoman has failed to slam the alleged hoax as wicked. It is as if a hoax hate crime is entirely forgivable in this new world order because there are so many real hate crimes. What does one hoax matter? It matters a lot if we believe in truth. And there is a growing band of dissidents in this brave new world who still believe that truth matters.

I bumped into some of them a few days ago. Just a regular Tuesday night with my 18-year-old son. Pizza, beer. Followed by hours discussing existential ­dilemmas, our proclivity to evil, the search for purpose, and why a misguided woman on Q&A was so damn wrong to imagine she can be a Christian and a Marxist.

Yes, we were listening to Jordan Peterson, along with thousands of other Sydneysiders who turned out to hear him. Lots of men in suits, some in shorts and cut-away tanks, all neat and polite and eager to listen. Some women too, but mostly men, and mostly young men.

This Canadian psychologist became famous only a few years ago for refusing to follow a Canadian law that instructs people about which pronouns to use. That Peterson is a now a cultural phenomenon is itself a phenomenon worth pondering.

Jordan Peterson on Q&A.

His fame speaks to the enduring power of reason. It tells you that not everyone has fallen for the new rules where victimhood must be prized, and feelings are the new measurement of morality. There is a hunger for Peterson’s core messages about responsibility and reason, values many others have discarded as relics of another age.

Peterson took his rapt audience on a tour of the importance of truth, in part by examining this question to the panel on Monday night’s Q&A program.

“Do you believe in God?” asked someone in the audience.

Peterson critiqued the answer from one panel member in particular. In response to the question, feminist, trade unionist and writer for The Guardian Van Badham said she is both a Christian and a Marxist. Wrong, said Peterson. You can be a Christian and a Marxist only if you are deluded or disingenuous. It is not that Christianity and Marxism are different, like an apple v a pear. They are ­diametrically opposed to one another. Only someone who understands only one or the other, or neither, could claim to be both. Why did Peterson pursue this issue for so long on Tuesday night? Because truth matters, and it matters to understand the difference between being a Christian and being a Marxist.

Peterson took the audience on a long excursion through the collective guilt and class war tenets of Marxism. It is a doctrine premised on materialism and the violent overthrow of a rich oppressor class. Christianity is a spiritual belief system for the soul that focuses on the power of the individual. Christianity makes room for the state: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. Whereas Karl Marx believed that “the first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion”.

Victorian pastor Murray Campbell kicked a goal for truth too, writing on his blog after listening to Badham that not a single country that has fully embraced Marxism has allowed for religious freedom. In fact, “the sum total of Marxist states that support Christianity is zero”.

Badham can be either a Marxist or a Christian. She cannot be both. Care to punt whether she prefers collective guilt or individual responsibility?

The Marxist idea of collective guilt is having an unfortunate resurgence. It explains the Smollett story after all. The actor faked a hate crime on himself because he assumed that people would jump to defend a gay black victim bashed by two men in MAGA hats, no questions asked.

Covington Catholic High school students face a Native American elder.

Just as so many people sided with a woman to stop a white, middle-class, conservative man being appointed to the Supreme Court, no matter how flimsy the evidence against him. Just as people jumped, brains disengaged, to condemn schoolkids from Covington Catholic school so they could side with a Native American man, even though the adult man was the ­aggressor.

In this brave new world, social justice movements are based on this one guiding principle: in the hierarchy of power, if you’re up near the top, you are presumed guilty of oppressing those below.

Notice that this word “social” is used to signal incontrovertible goodness, as in social justice, ­social conscience, social equality, social licence to operate, or corporate social responsibility. Being incontrovertibly good renders them beyond challenge by decent people. Except they are not always good.

The #MeToo movement was always prone to abuse by those who assume an accused man is a guilty man because women must be believed. It explains why Gillette knew it would hit a social conscience sweet spot with an advertisement premised on all men being bad, hence the need for a commercial telling them to be good.

Other movements, from Black Lives Matter to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Jewish businesses, are all premised on this same crooked notion of presumed collective guilt.

Here, then, is the next question for those interested in the truth. Can we trust our justice system not to succumb to this same misguided tenet of our times? What happens if the idea of collective guilt seeps into the legal system, into a jury room, and ensnares an innocent man?

Take the shocking sexual abuse crimes within the Catholic Church. What if this new, yet old Marxist idea — if you find the powerful, you will locate the guilty — dislodges the fundamental idea that a person’s guilt must be established beyond reasonable doubt?

Is the guilty verdict against Cardinal George Pell, convicted last December for sexual abuse crimes in a he said/he said trial, an example of this new form of justice? The first jury could not agree on Pell’s guilt.

The second jury found him guilty. Pell has always maintained his innocence. There are legitimate concerns about the evidence supporting a guilty verdict.

To be sure, none of us here knows what happened in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral in December 1996. But all of us should agree that the truth matters. Except many don’t agree that truth matters.

On Wednesday, The Australia Institute’s Ben Oquist plumbed the sewers of collective guilt. He claimed that the causes that Pell believed in, from his support of traditional marriage to his scepticism about the hype over climate change, and political allies who shared those views are now diminished by Pell’s conviction.

Welcome to our brave new world where the retreat from reason and truth continues apace.