Sky News presenter Andrew Bolt has outlined his belief that China is looking closely at Australia, searching for signs of weakness, in order to initiate armed conflict.
Universities that support transgender students, authors who identify with their indigenous ancestry, K-Mart advertisements, and naming ships after gay rights pioneers have been listed as elements of society that might encourage an outbreak of global war.
On his Monday night program Bolt said Australia needed to face up to a “rot in our culture that’s making us dangerously weak” before outlining his view that a Chinese apparatchik is studying Australian society and advising the Chinese leaders.
Bolt highlighted that Wang Huning, the First Secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party, was a person Australians should be concerned about.
“He’s there because he’s thinker, he’s a genius.” Bolt said,
“He was one of China’s youngest ever professors and in his thirties he got a scholarship to go and study in America, and he wandered around the US and eventually wrote a book called America Against America.”
“If you want to understand why China now thinks it could win a war against America, this book will tell you.” Bolt said, outlining the study of America’s drug problems, race tensions, the weakening of the family unit, and growing gap between the rich and poor.
“The same rot, you see it right here in Australia as well,” Bolt said before listing his examples.
First up was a job advertisement from Melbourne University for a Gender Affirmation Officer, a senior advisor who would assist students and staff members who were wanting to affirm their gender.
“Here you have the perfect example of the West’s obsession with ourselves, how we identify by gender or by sexual inclination, or race, and how we now expect universities to spend tax payers money to promote our tender self image.”
Bolt’s second example of “rot in our culture that’s making us dangerously weak.” was comments made recently by queer indigenous author Claire G. Coleman.
On Monday The Guardian published an extract of Coleman’s latest book Lies, Damned Lies – A personal exploration of the impact of colonisation in which she discussed why she identifies more with her indigenous heritage than her English and Irish ancestry.
“Colonisers often ask me why I don’t identify with my Irish and English ancestry, why I prefer to identify with my Aboriginal family. There are many reasons – all of them, to my mind, compelling. The first is the simplest: if you could identify with the bully or the victim, with the murderers or the family of the murdered, with the genocidal colonisers or the colonised, who would you choose?” Coleman writes in the book.
Bolt said the recent census had shown that more Australians were identifying as aboriginal, and based on Coleman’s writing, it was reasonable to assume that these people had a “disgust with their white identity” or “western civilization”.
“Ask yourself what China would conclude from all of this, identity politics and poor me and all that.” Bolt said. “While we’re obsessing about gender pronouns and our racial identity, and what gender we really are, and what victims we are too.”
Bolt said China is cracking down on individualism and promoting pride in their country and moving to reclaim Taiwan as Chinese territory through armed conflict. He also noted that China is amassing nuclear weapons and developing new hypersonic missiles.
The Sky News host said that he feared Australia would not be prepared to go into battle if Taiwan was invaded. “Are we prepared to lose Darwin in a missile strike?” he asked.
On Tuesday Bolt returned to the topic adding the US Navy’s recent launching of a ship named after gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk as another supposed trigger to conflict.
“I said last night how China would be laughing at how the west has let this idiocy of identity politics make us weaker and weaker, but I left out one amazing sign of this decline that will really have China’s military thinking ‘boy-oh-boy this is going to be too easy!'”
Bolt said that while the assassinated politician, who was the first out-gay person to be elected to office in California, had done a lot of good work – he had also had a relationship with a “disturbed sixteen year old boy who’d run away from home, and that boy later killed himself.”
Bolt may be referring to Jack Galen McKinley, who Milk reportedly had a relationship with in the early 1960s. He died aged 33 in 1980. Next added to the list of why China might start a war, was a recent K-mart advertisement on TikTok that featured a man wearing a series of dresses.
On Thursday Bolt returned to criticising Coleman, saying he was concerned on Remembrance Day that Australians had become to used to peace.
“I also wonder if we’ve become so used to peace,” Bolt said.
“I mean we’ve been treating war as something just evil and abhorrent and crazy, that just happened in the distant past, it’ll never come back, whether that foolish idea has made us become a bit complacent. If we look now China is preparing for war, its training even children how to fire mortars. But here – do you see any sign that Australians might have to fight and be prepared to fight, or even be willing to fight?”
Bolt said that years of Australians hearing about the genocide committed against Indigenous Australians and political tribalism was having a negative effect on Australians willingness to go to war.
“This crazy multiculturalism that emphasizes what divides us rather than what unites us, where we have people, academics, writers preferring to call themselves aboriginal rather than white.” Bolt said returning to the quote from Coleman’s new book.
According to Bolt war might break out and it’s because of K-Mart advertisements, statements by Indigenous authors, Harvey Milk, and universities supporting transgender staff and students.
War with China has been a common discussion point on the Murdoch owned news channel in recent months with the station’s ‘after dark’ line up on commentators and pundits regularly suggesting that Australia could be taking part in a global conflict in the near future.
Graeme Watson
OUTinPerth approached Claire G. Coleman for comment.
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