The kids were meant to be the face of Melbourne’s anti-Hanson rally. It took one question to find out who was doing the talking for them.

I asked a young protester whether she knew the Victorian Socialists’ policies. She hadn’t read them yet but planned to after the march. Plenty of teenagers turn up to things before they understand them, and I don’t hold that against her. She didn’t get the chance to answer for herself anyway. A 27-year-old man stepped in to argue communism on her behalf.

His pitch was collective ownership of the means of production. I asked where in the world that had actually worked. He went straight to Russia in 1917, when workers took over the workplaces until civil war crushed them. If socialism was going to fail on its own, he asked, why did the West bother trying to crush it?

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I asked again for one success story that lasted more than five years. He said people once said the same thing about capitalism in feudal times, as if mass murder were still an untested idea.

I looked up his golden age afterwards. The Russian Civil War killed between seven and twelve million people, most of them civilians lost to famine and disease. Executions under the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror alone are estimated as high as 200,000. That was the model he offered Australia.

I told him socialism is good until it isn’t. He insisted it’s simply good. It has been tried again and again, and it ends in mass murder every time. Capitalism has success stories. Communism has a body count.

So I changed tack. I asked how he felt about kids who know half of what he claims to know being used as props, carrying slogans on gender and migration that sound nuts to ordinary Australians. He answered with Israel.

He asked whether Australia should close its borders to Israelis over war crimes. He said he was anti-Zionist, not anti-Jew, and called Israel an ethnostate where Arab citizens, about one in five Israelis, lack equal rights. They have them. They vote, Arab parties sit in the Knesset, one joined the governing coalition in 2021, and an Arab justice sits on Israel’s Supreme Court. My own officer in the IDF was not Jewish.

When I put that to him, he dropped the qualifier. Zionists were the modern Nazis, he said, which let's be honest is the same as saying Jews are the modern Nazis. Calling yourself anti-Zionist doesn’t change what that is. It’s antisemitism.

By the end, the teenager he had stepped in to rescue was the one rescuing him.

He wasn’t the only one at the rally struggling with history. Later I asked a young migrant for a socialist success story Australia should copy. He said almost every country that tried it got bombed by the US. The USSR was communism gone wrong. China was fine, minus the sweatshops, until Mao. Communist China began with Mao, so he was defending a period that never existed. Every example he raised came with an excuse attached.

These protests are sold as young people finding their voice. What I found was kids who hadn’t read the platform standing out front while adults filled the gaps with Russia, America and the Jews. It’s a conveyor belt for failed ideology and imported hate, and you won’t see any of it on their ABC.

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