In one fell swoop, Overland editor Jeff Sparrow* slaps down Miranda Devine, the “populist Right” and the Young Liberals, whose “undergraduate” bleatings about Left-wing bias in universities and schools were rightly dismissed as “farcical” at the conclusion of a Senate Inquiry last week:

But the Young Libs are, at least, authentically undergraduate. Miranda Devine, on the other hand, is old enough to know better. Yet she too threw her weight behind Make Australia Fair – and with accusations that were even more risible. Why, there’s a Brisbane school, don’t you know, that celebrates Mao Zedong as a “freedom fighter”, right next to George Washington and Mahatma Gandhi – Liberal Senator Brett Mason popped in once and caught them in the act.

Devine’s revelations about Brisbane’s Long March High are not just nutty. They, like the Make Australia Fair campaign, epitomise the peculiar brand of petulant victimology that now grips the populist Right. The Young Liberals’ education campaign website reads, in fact, like one big pity party, a compendium of stories of youthful Tories oppressed by mean teachers, and books with which they don’t agree and posters they see on university walls.

“I have found the constant liberal-bagging, jokes and Labor pushing agenda threatening and frustrating,” confesses one disconsolate young reactionary. “In class discussions I constantly feel like my opinions aren’t welcome and quite often I do not say anything.”

But hang on a second. Aren’t the Liberals the champions of individual responsibility? Don’t the Young Libs themselves proudly proclaim their opposition to the “nanny state” and declare that “while we believe the government should provide the individual with the best opportunities possible, we recognise that the onus is on the individual to seize the opportunity”?

Didn’t, in fact, Ms Devine herself devote her next column to an attack on the whole notion of government intervention?

And there’s plenty more gold where that came from. Read it and weep, wingnuts.

* Writing, in this instance, in Crikey, which I can’t access because I’m a tightarse non-subscriber.