Fighting the culture wars doesn’t come cheap these days. Tickets for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference at the ExCeL Centre in London cost a discounted £450. A bargain said the organisers, as the original price was £1,500. Maybe they had a point. All 4,000 tickets were sold long before the event began. Even access to a live stream set you back £150. A meta-event where only the global elite are welcome to watch a global elite take on the global elite.

This was “alt-right” heaven. A gathering of some of the biggest names on the circuit. Douglas Murray. Jordan Peterson. Nigel Farage. Niall Ferguson. An echo chamber of self-referential congratulation. A place where people come to have their ideas confirmed, not challenged.

Time and again you heard speakers insist they were saying the unsayable. That their free speech was under attack. And yet no one is stopping them saying or doing anything. They are not under attack from the police or the government. This is not a clandestine meeting. The ExCeL Centre was rented on commercial terms. The only person being excluded from the conference is me. I emailed and texted four different ARC contacts asking for access. No one got back to me. Maybe it’s me who is saying the unsayable. In the end I coughed up for the livestream.

Over the years, I’ve watched some batshit events. This one was right up there. Men and women fighting imaginary battles against an establishment of which they are part. Fighting diversity, inclusion, equality. Anyone who looks and thinks differently to them. All the while, there is literally a war going on in Ukraine. Men and women are dying defending their democratic rights, while the US and Russia meet in Saudi Arabia to carve up the mineral rights of their country without any input from the Ukrainian government. The dictators are taking over the world.

And what did we get in London? An appearance from Katalin Novák, a former president of Hungary, congratulating members of the audience for having had three children or more.

It was everyone’s moral duty to have children to save what was left of our civilisation. Needless to say, Novák omitted to say she had been forced to resign after granting a presidential pardon to the deputy governor of an orphanage who had been imprisoned for his part in covering up a paedophile ring. I guess some children are more equal than others.

The morning had begun with a fanfare from a chamber orchestra and then out stepped Murray. No one has a bigger regard for Dougie these days than Dougie. He has done very well out of the rightwing speaking circuit and now believes himself to be the Divine. He seems to regard other people with mild irritation for not matching his own perfection. His sense of humour replaced by the certainty of his own resurrection. His speech pattern has become more of an extended sneer.

Dougie opened with a complaint about east London. It was too ugly for him. He would have been happier talking somewhere much grander. Still, needs must. There were bills to be paid. He then moved on. We were at a tipping point. The west was in crisis.

Only a return to Christian values could save us. It was time to return to the Bible as the central building block of our civilisation. God would have approved of Elon Musk cutting USAid, he said. Now to get on with slashing the budgets of the US education department. It was only turning out illiterates.

“Ours is the greatest civilisation of all time,” Dougie declared. And it wasn’t too late to protect it. We just had to stop allowing so many foreigners into our country. He was a heartbeat away from saying that people like Kemi Badenoch could never truly be as British as someone who was born white. There again, Kemi has drunk so much of the culture war Kool-Aid, she might even agree.

Next up was career charlatan Jordan Peterson interviewing Nigel Farage. At least that was the way it was billed. In practice, it turned out to be Jordan interviewing Jordan. Peterson is even more of a narcissist than Nige and automatically assumes he is the most important person in any room. You dread to think what would happen if you put Jordan and Dougie together. An ego death match. It’s not often Nige is the sanest person in the building. Very low bar and all that.

What Jordan most wanted to talk about was why net zero was an appalling act of wanton self-destruction. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Jordan considered himself an expert in climate science by virtue of having no expert knowledge. It was all a myth. We should use as much oil and gas as we could. When he finally got a word in, Farage admitted he had no scientific knowledge either but didn’t consider that a drawback either. He also wanted small nuclear reactors, which he forgot to mention is a Labour policy.

Then Jordan moved on to his favourite subject. What the world needed was more heterosexual couples to get married. Homosexuality was a deviation. There was too much abortion and divorce in the world. You’d be hard pushed to hear a more unpleasant rant all year. It was too much even for Nige, who confessed he had been divorced twice. He looked nervously at Jordan before ending by saying there would be more children under Reform. Trying to win over the audience. Still, at least no one asked him about his admiration of Putin. I’ve never seen Nige more pleased to leave the stage.

It was hard to top that weirdness. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali had a good go. Her call was for more nationalism. People were wrong to say that the second world war had been caused by German nationalists. There were good nationalists and bad nationalists. Good Nazis and bad Nazis. We needed more Maga, less globalism. Donald Trump was merely the embodiment of the Christian message as written in Genesis, Leviticus and Romans.

The morning ended with the historian Niall Ferguson, husband of Ali, declaring he was sorry to have missed a good war. Change only happened through armed conflict and he couldn’t wait for the next one to see off anyone who didn’t read the Bible. Or the Torah. In neo-con world, the Israelis are honorary Christians. Most incredibly of all, Niall seemed to think that SAS Rogue Heroes was a documentary series.

I think I need to lie down in a darkened room for a while.