The great and the good of the centre-right came to London this week from around the world to mount the barricades and save Western civilisation. Over 1,000 political, business and cultural thought leaders gathered for the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), the brainchild of Dr Jordan Peterson, the clinical psychologist who dared to say no to woke.

The purpose of ARC, according to its founders, is to restore the notion of individual sovereignty, to push back against a declinist mentality, and to understand the most pressing issues of our age, seeking answers by being proximate to those most deeply affected by them.

Peterson kicked off proceedings in his ‘Heaven and Hell’ suit, half navy blue sheep’s wool, half magenta goat’s hair. He has 12 of them, one for each of his ‘rules for living’, which was the subject of his best-selling book.

‘I’ve been reading the Book of Job’ he said, which is understandable given the trials he has been put through this year by the College of Psychologists of Ontario for Orwellian wrong-speak. He talked about Abraham as a role model but appeared to be channelling Noah. In the autumnal rain it seemed that we were being invited to board his ark and embark on a life-changing odyssey.

The conference had a performative element with rap poets, chamber music, horn-blowers, and speeches that occasionally felt a little like sermons in a Billy Graham revival meeting.

But mostly there were excellent presentations by outstanding people such as Professor Steve Koonin, physicist, Obama appointee and author of Unsettled who debunked climate change, US presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy who exposed woke capitalism, Michael Shellenberger who spoke on the horrendous cost of renewable energy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali who talked about how she has moved on from atheism to seeing herself as Judeo-Christian, and Jonathan Haidt on the dangers posed by social media to children and teenagers to give just a small cross-section of the depth of talent.

Adding an apocalyptic edge to the urgent need of the West to put its house in order was the spectre of the 7 October massacre in Israel and the pro-Hamas rallies on the streets of Western cities. Yet considering that the West has spent the last four years trapped in a Covid dystopia, the pandemic appeared to be the pachyderm in the room that nobody wanted to mention.

Perhaps it’s not so hard to figure out why. On the one hand, there were over 100 parliamentarians from the UK, the US, Europe, and a hefty contingent of Australians some of whom were directly responsible or complicit in terrible attacks on fundamental freedoms and individual sovereignty.

On the other hand, there were some of the leading lights of opposition to the pandemic lunacy including Professor Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Dr Aaron Kheriaty who together joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana and other co-plaintiffs in filing a suit in federal court challenging the Biden administration’s Covid censorship industrial complex.

Dutch independent Member of the European Parliament Rob Roos, who famously asked a Pfizer representative whether the Covid vaccine was tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market to which she replied, ‘No, we had to work with the speed of science,’ exposing the fact that governments had no evidence to say the vaccine would stop transmission. The Aussie contingent included Dr Gigi Foster, Senator Alex Antic, NSW MP Tanya Davies, NSW independent Mark Latham, Speccie contributors Rocco Loiacono and Augusto Zimmerman, and a young police officer who still cannot work because she refused to be vaccinated.

It was probably the first time that so many high-powered people from both sides of the Covid divide had been brought together in a single venue to talk about threats to the West and it was a pity that there was no opportunity to start addressing what went so terribly wrong.

The only person with a platform who mentioned the pandemic was hedge fund billionaire Sir Paul Marshall, the founder and owner of UnHerd Media, a main shareholder of GB News, and a key donor to ARC who is reportedly interested in buying the UK Telegraph and The Spectator (including The Spectator Australia). He didn’t miss. He observed that capitalism only prospers in societies that have a shared understanding of virtue whereas corrupt societies practice cronyism, saying wryly, ‘Think Somalia, or Sicily, or Davos’, which he described as ‘an exclusive venue, an annual conference in the Swiss mountains where the cronies gather together once a year to collude in the most efficient way possible on a global scale’.

What ought to worry us, he says, is that we live in an age of cronyism where, for example, two-thirds of the US Congress receives funding from the pharmaceutical industry. The returns are stunning. Pfizer spent a paltry $11 million yet in 2021, it made $35 billion dollars of incremental sales and at least $10 billion of incremental profits from the Covid vaccine. In addition, they were granted fast-track authorisation and immunity from all liabilities just in case there were side effects. ‘That is what I call lobby money well spent,’ he said ironically. Did the political handmaidens of Pfizer squirm in their seats?

It is time, as Marshall said, to remind ourselves that capitalism and all the miracles that it can deliver are not possible without freedoms of speech and conscience, freedom to trade and exchange goods, and functioning democratic institutions.

The threat to those freedoms comes from within and without, from above and below, from jihadists who put murder ahead of their own survival, and from Western elites that unblocked billions of dollars to fund the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. From pharmaceutical companies that capture regulators to politicians that show stony indifference to persistently high rates of excess deaths and to the plight of people who are still locked out of the workplace by mandates, who have lost jobs, careers, reputations, businesses, health, schooling, or worst of all, loved ones, because of the botched response to the pandemic.

In this challenging environment, Konstantin Kisin, comedian and host of Triggernometry delivered a tour de force. He managed to see something humorous in even the darkest moments – ‘Say what you want about Hamas supporters at least they know what a woman is’ – but his theme was deadly serious. We cannot give up because we are in the fight of our lives, but we should not lose sight of a fundamental truth. ’We do not get to choose whether we live or die. We only get to choose whether we live before we die.’ When the going gets tough in the battle for Western civilisation, I hope I am within earshot of Kisin on the barricades.