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The rhetorical connection being made here between the at-risk health of the body of the citizenry and ethnic demographics is, ah, genuinely reminiscent of fascist media products. https://twitter.com/826maureen/status/1275898419773493248
The reactionary right wing press in Australia are adept at threading the needle between touching on xenophobic and nationalist talking points but maintaining the facade that a: many people are having these conversations, and b: that it's an important expression of free speech.
In this case, Bolt is touching on the notion of the civic body as an organism, complete with a (literal) pathogen and a nefarious foreign element / 5th column that knowingly or not, is assisting the pathogen in assaulting our national health. This is extremely poisonous.
Here is how the concept was applied by the Nazis. https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/koenigsberg-human-body/
Here is a key passage. Now, no one is saying that Bolt is a Nazi or believes in racial hygiene or Hitler's concept of the national organism - but his piece plays off exactly the same notes.
The flirtation with nationalist / xenophobic rhetoric and the relentless obfuscation and denial of responsibility for the results of this campaign, along with the insistence that these bizarre, derogatory and dangerous arguments are commonplace ideas, damages our social fabric.
The Murdoch press subsists off bad faith arguments and culture war pap. Bolt has a position because he generates anger and reactionary sentiment based on these nebulous ideas about the state of our culture that are presented as opinion in order to swat away rational antithesis.
This ideological programme moves us away from material reality and rational thesis because we live in a media landscape of pundits aiming to trigger people based on their honed reactionary sentiments. This is incoherent and confusing by design, it makes you doubt yourself.
But the facts are in front of us. The Australian corporate media industry is neither democratic nor meritocratic. This is only one example of pundits like Bolt generating confusion and anger as a base ideological project - it is bereft of intellectual integrity, or indeed shame.
Bolt is the master of producing thin-end-of-the-wedge xenophobic hatred, while Hildebrand is the gaslighting "centre-left" pundit who endorses neoliberal policy positions, and reactionary social positions, exclusively. The gaslighting aspect is the really damaging part.
