While both Grace Tame, a victim of sexual abuse, and Brittany Higgins, who was allegedly raped in Parliament House, have every right to argue men are misogynist and their mistreatment of women is motivated by a thirst for power – their appearance at yesterday’s Canberra Press Gallery cannot go unchallenged.

While the woke commentariat attending responded to every criticism and attack with applause and nods of approval, the reality is what occurred represents an appalling lack of journalistic impartiality and objectivity while serving as an example of mindless group think and mob hysteria.

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, set at the time of the Salem witch hunts but also reflecting the anti-communist inquisition led by Senator Joe McCarthy, mob mentality and unchecked emotion rule the day.

A play where Abigail and her accomplices conjure the devil to accuse the innocent, including John Proctor, and where the court betrays any sense of justice and a commitment to the truth.

A play where Miller reveals a deep-seated, primitive side of human nature and where once the laws are trounced there is nowhere to hide.

While Grace Tame is no Abigail, anyone who saw her performance yesterday witnessed somebody accomplished in working the audience by using every utterance, every pause and inflexion, and every movement to reinforce her message that Scott Morrison and the Liberal government are beyond redemption.

A partisan performance, where an alleged phone call by an anonymous senior bureaucrat is used as evidence to prove the Prime Minister is insensitive and callous and consumed by a thirst for power.

Although Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations have yet to be tested in court, she also swayed the audience to abandon any sense of objectivity. Reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts, an unproven accusation was taken as truth with no attempt to question the events surrounding the alleged crime.

Higgins, working in concert with Tame, also accused the Prime Minister of insincerity and an unwillingness to admit his complicity in what both characterised as a parliamentary atmosphere riven with misogyny and sexual abuse.

As argued by the American feminist Camille Paglia, such is the pervasive influence of the cultural-left’s political correctness and cancel culture. We are living in a time ‘where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group’.

A time where primitive emotion trumps reason, language is weaponised to enforce mindless group think, and where conservative men – condemned as white, male and stale – are especially targeted and forever guilty.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a senior fellow at the Australian Catholic University and editor of Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March.