It’s hard to imagine climate fanatics smashing roof-loads of solar panels, gluing themselves to wind turbines or scrawling offensive semi-literate slogans on Chris Bowen’s electoral office. But you never know with the left. One minute something is approved of, the next it’s an unmitigated evil.

Take feminism. From being pioneers in the left’s campaign to remake our inherited culture, feminists of the original sort are now denounced as bigoted ‘terfs’ intent on repressing the hard-won freedoms of transfolk, especially of those men who masquerade as women so they can shine more easily at sport or affirm their new ‘gender identity’ by changing in the ladies’ and watching the girls take off their clothes.

Tesla cars are the current object of leftist inconstancy. Until recently Teslas were loved for their electric contribution to saving the planet from climate doom. Suddenly they represent fascism reborn and must be destroyed. Set them on fire, or at least when you see one parked in the street, ‘key’ it and disfigure the enamel – an infantile act of pointless destruction however much leftists might present it as a courageous protest against the Hitlerian pretensions of Donald Trump and his sinister henchman Elon Musk.

The previous adulation of Musk for inventing the Tesla took a knock when he bought the reliably leftist Twitter and, changing the name to X, sacked its platoons of online censors and decreed that X would aim for impartiality. That was bad enough, opening up a vast social media platform to the free dissemination of what had hitherto been suppressed as ‘misinformation’, i.e. facts and opinions uncongenial to the left. (We in Australia are fortunate that this noble goal of silencing any utterance the left disagrees with is still being pursued, with mixed success, not only by an ‘e-safety’ commissioner imported from the United States to tell us what we are allowed to read and say online, but also by our very own ABC.)

But Musk went from bad to worse when he took on the job of cost-cutter-in-chief for the world’s most hated villain, in leftist eyes, since Attila the Hun. It doesn’t help him that most of the costs he is cutting are for projects of various degrees of wasteful fatuity endorsed by the left.

How damaging or destroying Teslas is going to hurt Musk, who has already made his money on the sale, is one of those illogicalities inherent in any leftist proposition. But it does hurt the Tesla owner, for whom it must be doubly distressing. One pictures him or her, a Green or Labor voter, convinced that conventional cars are poisoning the atmosphere but not prepared to do without motor transport altogether. An electric car is the perfect conscience-salving but non-inconvenience-demanding solution.

The purchase made, the new owner drives the Tesla proudly out of the showroom – unless of course we are in the US and the showroom has been burnt down by protestors – and parks it in the drive, all the while allowing himself a quiet glow of self-satisfaction at the favour he has done the planet. Then along comes some anti-Musk nutter and scratches furrows in the pristine bodywork. This is the unkindest cut of all (no pun intended). To have a car you have bought as an exercise in leftist virtue ‘keyed’ or worse by your fellow leftists. O perfidy.

The thoughtful leftist must wonder which of his idols will fall next. What if a contingent of Queers for Palestine, gaily arrayed in keffiyehs, took a trip to Gaza and there discovered, or those that hadn’t been hurled from their hotel balcony did, that Isis was as barbaric as Israelis say it is? If they came home and announced this they would be instantly excommunicated by the leftist establishment, spat at in the streets and their sharehouses vandalised. Our national broadcaster might even disapprove enough to dismantle ABCQueer.

Free speech is something all leftists say they’re in favour of, although they don’t say that this is only as long as they agree with what is being spoken. Presumably leftist free-speech enthusiasts include the high-minded Teal MPs with their pious commitment to ‘open government’. One of them, Dr Monique Ryan, boasted upon her election, to cries of ecstatic leftist approval, that she would ‘do politics differently’. She didn’t say differently to what, but if she meant good old Aussie fair play she was right on the money. Monique’s husband decided to help her chances in the next election by tearing down a rival’s poster. His thinking, if one can fathom it, was to deprive those electors who might have seen the poster of the awareness it would have given them that there was a rival. There’s free speech for you – fully in the totalitarian tradition of censoring or shouting down anything you find inconvenient.

Monique’s posters are all over the place in the seat of Kooyong. Doesn’t free speech in the form of free proclamation of your candidacy extend to all contenders in an election?

I have found it to be an infallible rule with the left – we might call it Akehurst’s Law – that it is not an action that is right or wrong – in this case putting up posters for election – but who is doing it. Presidents Obama and Biden ‘repatriated’ thousands of illegal immigrants and no one batted an eyelid. President Trump does it and it’s a wicked outrage against human rights. Biden stashes secret documents in his garage and no one cares. Trump takes documents home and is prosecuted. If Trump brought universal world peace the left would give him no credit. If Biden in his dottiness had brought universal world war the left would have found a way of excusing him.