Trying to interfere with ANU never goes particularly well for conservatives. Tony Abbott and his senior ministers led the charge against the university for divesting in fossil fuel company Santos in 2014, declaring the university was “stupid” to offload its investment. Weeks later, Santos’ share price fell off a cliff and four years on remains less than half of its level when Abbott and co were assailing the university. Oddly, we haven’t heard much from the government about ANU and Santos in recent times.

Abbott and his friends at News Corp have launched another holy war against ANU, this time over its reluctance to provide a figleaf of academic credibility to a culture war thinktank. Malcolm Turnbull, who sensibly declined to offer investment advice the last time ANU was in reactionary sights, has this time joined in, saying he would grill ANU Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt about knocking back the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. That might be a difficult phone call for the Prime Minister, who wouldn’t be used to talking to someone who is not merely smarter than he is, but several orders of magnitude so.

There was once a time when Turnbull would even publicly fight back against News Corp holy wars. Almost exactly ten years ago, Turnbull was the solitary politician to defend Bill Henson against a News Corp-inspired assault for his (admittedly, at best problematic) photography. Not so anymore; as Michael Pascoe once put it so well, “somewhere, a leather jacket lies empty”. Other Liberals have been vocal recently, too. Victorian senators James Paterson and Jane Hume have spoken out. In news utterly and completely unrelated to that, both are facing preselection pressure from the religious fundamentalist right in the Victorian Liberals. The Liberals are a broad church, of course, but all the room’s over on the right side of the nave.

The Santos business was purely about money, and the idea that ANU should not, as it turned out, lose a considerable sum of its investments pandering to the climate denialists of the Coalition. The Ramsay business is about the altogether more serious issue of academic freedom and intellectual rigour. One might regard it as ironic that “western civilization” is being invoked as basis on which Abbott, News Corp and whatever right-wing chin-strokers they can dredge up to ride on Jerusalem seek to trash the basic idea that universities are places of critical inquiry, and a school where ideas would be uncritically celebrated is anathema to that. But “irony” isn’t exactly apt, because such doublethink — the equivalent of slapping the word “university” on the IPA and treating it as a place of serious learning — is consistent with what remains of the ideology of the Right.

That’s where freedom of speech is a fundamental right, until it is used by people who aren’t white males, or used to kick upward, not downward, at which point hysteria ensues. That’s where the rigour of the marketplace is celebrated, until one’s business mates need a favour. That’s where the virtues of small government are held to be unquestionable, until your opponent attempts to curb handouts to your allies, at which point one must yell “class warfare”. Where freedom of association is cherished, except in relation to unions, which must be relentlessly persecuted.

And all of these issues are held to be of paramount political importance, because they obsess the Liberal Party base. These are the people who seriously believe 18C is a barbecue-stopper around the country, who believe voters think of nothing but throwing off the yoke of political correctness. In fact, voters are focused on their stagnant wages, how their kids will be able to afford a home, and the appalling length of time they spend commuting. Obsessing about holy wars ill-serves a Prime Minister already seen as dangerously out of touch.