Thanks to Eggboy, that can no longer happen. At least not for the next few weeks. Anning has been revealed, from at least half a dozen camera angles, to be … well, you’ve seen it. Our defamation laws do not allow me to write what I think of as the true nature of this man, but they do allow me to point out some recorded truths. Made to look foolish by a thin, teenaged boy, Anning is seen twice striking the child in the head, and possibly attempting to kick him, only to be restrained while his supporters pile onto the boy, using a number of crude ground fighting techniques to "subdue" him. Later, in another video taken at Melbourne airport, Anning is confronted a second time. On this occasion, his antagonist is not a child but a man, and the senator is not surrounded by a protective band of large, aggressive white nationalist street fighters. In this video, he doesn’t size up an undersized opponent and throw down for the challenge. He pleads to be left alone and hurries to escape. Nice work, champ. Really covered yourself in glory there. Will Connolly, meanwhile, has since advised anyone who might be tempted to egg a politician not to, because “you’ll get tackled by 30 bogans at the same time. I learned the hard way.”

He’s a smart kid. We don’t deserve him. But we can be worthy of him by being a bit more clear headed, not just about goons like Anning and the wannabe brownshirts he seems to attract, but about the much larger problem we’ve created for ourselves by allowing racism to become an engine driving both our politics and media. It was inevitable that the mass atrocity of 9/11 would stoke tribal fear and hatred. That was its point. But it has been a long time since those towers fell and these days that same fear and hatred drives profit cycles and poll numbers. Fraser Anning may be vile, but he is also calculating. He is saying the quiet part loud. This government and its leading figures have long said the loud part quietly by stoking fear and hatred for electoral gain in every election since 2001.

In this, they have been assisted by media companies routinely amplifying their racist messaging to consolidate audiences and secure falling profits in a severely disrupted industry. It was always going to end badly, this business of whispering the loud part quietly. And so it has, the whispers drowned out by gunfire and screaming in Christchurch. Some of the criticism of Will Connolly has focused on the way that breaking an egg over Anning’s head shifted the discussion of white nationalist violence from the Christchurch massacre to the farce of what the Italian press is calling "La Faceomlette”. Maybe. But this is the age of mass attention deficit disorder and we’d have moved on anyway. What Eggboy did was instantly disrupt Anning's reframing of a massacre in a way none of the professional journalists in that room were capable.

By uncritically reporting his comments, they were merely assisting Anning’s efforts, not exposing them, as the conventional wisdom would have it. Will Connolly reduced him to a figure of ridicule and contempt. And that should be the response whenever a politician or a columnist or a talkback host or whoever attempts to enlarge themselves by belittling others with racist dog whistling. After Christchurch, there can be no excuses for pretending surprise and alarm when you blow that whistle and the dogs come running.