Every now and then a video re-emerges on your social media feed even if it’s not new. This happened to me this morning when an interview between an Australian podcaster and British journalist Melanie Phillips popped up on my screen, and I watched it again. I doubt it will ever not be relevant.
First off, that podcaster conducting the interview wasn’t just any podcaster. It was former Deputy Prime Minster of Australia John Anderson. Phillips is a journalist, broadcaster, author, and pundit, best known for her conservative insights and commentary. The two spoke in February 2025.
As with the words of any great thinker, you can’t just snip a 30-second sound bite and capture the full essence of what she said. I’d definitely advise listening/watching the whole thing. But for our purposes, I would want to call your attention to this part of the interview.
Melanie Phillips drops a nuclear truth:
— Camus (@newstart_2024) January 7, 2026
"Truth has become a right-wing concept."
If you speak it, you're evil.
Dissent from the ideology? You're cancelled, silenced, removed — because questioning "goodness" makes you against all progress.
We're in an age of unreason —… pic.twitter.com/aSPANy6uOh
Here’s the pull quote:
Truth has become a right-wing concept. You cannot say it because if you say it, you are considered right-wing. And to be right-wing is to be in league with the forces of evil. It is a Manichean division between ideologies of one kind or another and those who don't subscribe to those ideologies. And the ideologies brook no dissent because they represent in the minds of people who promote them. They represent goodness, brotherhood of man, progress, reason, education, and anyone who opposes them is against all good things.
This is reinforced when we often hear the left talk about being in a post-truth world, or when they describe one of their own as “speaking his truth,” as though each of us has a separate and unique truth. That the truth is not universal.
It’s not unusual for liars to see the truth as the enemy, for obvious reasons, and so their first aim in any debate is to attack truth itself. Phillips says that if you’re one of those actual conservative truth tellers, specifically telling a universal truth, you’re not just wrong, but rather, you’re someone to be removed and silenced because “you're against all good things.”
So, it's that division between good and evil. And unfortunately, you know, if you stand up against an ideology like, I don't know, so-called anti-racism, which basically says all white people are bad, critical theory. Or you stand up and say a woman is defined by her biology. So, you're against transgender. So, as you know it's there's no discussion. You are cancelled. You are removed. You have to be silenced.
This dissent cannot be permitted. So, we're in what a thinker of a previous age called cultural totalitarianism,” Phillips said.
As a conservative, you know what that means. You lived through the COVID-19 pandemic. You’ve seen how the left keeps trying to trot out climate change as a means to take power and silence opposition. You’ve seen how entire institutions seem dead-set on forcing you to believe men can get pregnant.
There are consequences if you don’t play along. This is what Phillips means by “cultural totalitarianism.” Another term for this is “cancel culture,” but I think Phillips’ description is not only more accurate; it also carries the necessary weight of direness. “Cancel culture” almost sounds like a fad.
Phillips calls this an assault on your individual freedom and your freedom of speech. Just as importantly, she says this is a repudiation of reason itself. You can’t think for yourself.
“And so, the irony is that in an age of supposed reason, we're so rational that we've dispensed with religion. Only idiots have any kind of religious sense because it's not based on reason. That's the thinking.
‘So, we're so rational, we've got rid of religion, and yet we are repudiating rationality completely. This is something that doesn't quite add up. So, I would say that we are in a new age of unreason.”
Do you remember the refrain during the COVID pandemic where conservatives were attacked for not believing in “the science”? Science is rational. Religion is not. Science is truth. Your conservative politics are not. The science is indisputable. Your questions cannot be permitted.
And yet, with all this emphasis on rationality, you can’t question “the science” any more than a medieval heretic could question the pope. There were severe consequences for the questioner in both cases, in both time periods. "The science" itself had a religious feel from the Dark Ages.
Phillips reminds us that in getting rid of religion, the current powers that be “have unleashed an age of unreason and what follows from that is the erosion of freedom. Freedom to think, freedom to speak, freedom to act.”
This is good food for thought. It’s very centering, but it does no good to simply hear Phillips’ words and not be prepared to act on them. In the coming months, as the political climate gets more and more volatile, the left will do everything to win the midterms -- not just say anything but do anything.
Know that every truth you speak will be regarded by leftists as merely a political statement, and there is nothing you can do to change that. No reasonable counter-argument will help you with the people you know. Don’t let that get to you.
Instead, speak the truth and be unapologetic about it. Dissent when others want you to cave into using their terminology, or accepting their premise. Don’t give an inch. Persistence is what wins. The truth needs an advocate and a defender. That would be you.
