On 26 January 2026, at an Invasion Day rally on Boorloo's city CBD, a man is alleged to have thrown a homemade explosive device into a crowd of thousands. It did not detonate. That 'failure' is the only reason we are not counting bodies.

Police and political leaders have since described it as an act of terrorism, and the accused has been charged under terrorism laws.

We should not treat this as an aberration. Not as a lightning strike. Not as the work of a lone, inexplicable monster who arrived from nowhere.

This is what it looks like when decades of hateful lies about Aboriginal people are allowed to calcify into 'common sense,' and when that 'common sense' is then weaponised, amplified, memed, monetised, and pushed into the bloodstream of politics and media as AI slopaganda.

If Australia wants to understand how we got to an alleged attempted bombing of First Nations people exercising the oldest democratic right—to gather, to speak, to mourn—then we have to name the story we have been telling ourselves about Aboriginal humanity.

Because the device may not have exploded.

But the ideology behind it has been detonating for a long time.

The 'respectable' mask of the culture war

Australia has conducted a kind of slow national ritual for generations: question Aboriginal truth; resent Aboriginal presence; mock Aboriginal pain; then call it 'debate.' The absurd othersideism of the history wars were not merely academic disputes. They were moral rehearsals.

Publications like Quadrant and the ecosystem around it played a role in hardening these contests into culture-war identity; where the point was not to test evidence, but to train audiences to treat Aboriginal testimony as suspect and Aboriginal political claims as fraudulent, greedy, or dangerous.

Even when arguments were framed as scholarship, the social effect was often the same: Indigenous people became the problem to be solved, managed, and contained.

Keith Windschuttle became one of the most prominent figures in this era. His work and his place in the public argument helped institutionalise a posture of disbelief toward Aboriginal accounts of violence and dispossession, and the broader history wars became part of a national culture conflict, which still echoes today.

Now, let's be clear: debate is not terrorism. A magazine article is not a bomb. But ideas have consequences, and dehumanisation is not a neutral intellectual sport.

When you build an audience on the premise that Aboriginal people are liars, manipulators, and civilisational threats—when you teach people to roll their eyes at massacres, to sneer at stolen children, and to laugh at land and language—you are not simply 'arguing.' You are preparing the ground for cruelty.

And in our time, cruelty does not stay confined to the page.

Fringe libertarians, grievance merchants, and the pipeline to extremism

The culture wars did not end. They evolved.

In the age of algorithms, a certain strain of fringe libertarian politics—suspicious of government, contemptuous of human rights language, allergic to the very idea of structural injustice—has often merged with a more openly racial politics.

These networks build a sense of heroic victimhood through what they tell Australians who are not Indigenous: "You are the silenced majority; you are under siege; elites are replacing you; 'woke' is tyranny; Indigenous rights are a scam."

It is an intoxicating story for people looking for someone to blame.

Australia's security agencies have repeatedly warned about the growth of nationalist and racist violent extremism, and about online radicalisation, especially among young people.

This matters because the alleged Perth attack is not just 'racism' in the abstract because the alleged perpetrator is young. Authorities have said it was ideologically and racially motivated, and that the accused had consumed pro-white material online.

That is the contemporary pathway: grievance, content, community, escalation. A person goes looking for 'answers' and gets drawn into the pipeline.

And that pipeline does not begin with a swastika.

It often begins with something that looks respectable: a column, a podcast, a 'just asking questions' thread, a fundraiser, a lecture, a culture-war slogan.

The 'No' campaign and the permission structure of contempt

We also have to speak honestly about the darker quarters of the No campaign during the Voice referendum period: not every No voter, not even every No organiser — but those corners that treated Aboriginal aspiration as a kind of audacity deserving punishment.

Those who turned constitutional recognition into a story about Aboriginal takeover. Those who manufactured panic and resentment — who framed First Nations people as a special interest trying to steal from 'ordinary Australians.'

In that online swamp, the line between political campaigning and racial agitation was too often blurred. The point was not only to win an argument, but to cultivate contempt in what non-Indigenous Australians were told about us as Aboriginal people: "they want more; they're never grateful; they're dividing us; they're lying; they're corrupt; they're coming for your backyards."

Once contempt becomes normal, violence becomes imaginable.

Right-wing terrorism and the return of Nazis to the public square

And then there are the people who do not bother with masks.

Neo-Nazi and white supremacist networks have become more visible in Australia in recent years, including through public intimidation and propaganda. Again, authorities and inquiries have documented the persistence of nationalist and racist violent extremism as a security concern, and the public record contains repeated warnings about these movements.

When Nazis march—when they harass communities, perform salutes, and dare the law to stop them—they are doing what they have always done: testing a society's boundaries, looking for weakness, searching for permission.

But permission does not only come from extremists.

Permission comes from silence.

From minimisation.

From the insistence that 'both sides' are equally to blame.

From the refusal to name white supremacist ideology for what it is.

And permission comes from a long cultural practice of treating Aboriginal people as a problem whose existence is an irritation to the nation's self-image.

What this moment demands

If an alleged act of terrorism targeting First Nations people does not force a reckoning, then what will?

This is not a call to ban opinion. It is a call to restore moral responsibility to public speech.

If you have spent your career telling Australians that Aboriginal people fabricate history, fabricate pain—fabricate identity—you do not get to stand innocent when someone decides the 'fabrication' deserves punishment.

If you have built influence by feeding audiences a diet of resentment toward Indigenous rights, you cannot wash your hands when resentment curdles into violence.

And if you are a politician who winked at the ugliest elements of the culture war because you thought it was useful, you cannot pretend surprise when the ugliest elements turn into an act that courts now treat as terrorism.

The answer is not more policing alone. The answer is not only stronger laws. The answer is also cultural: we have to end the national habit of treating Aboriginal dignity as negotiable.

Because Aboriginal people are not a 'debate.'

We are not a 'problem.'

We are not a threat.

We are human beings, and this continent and islands adjacent carry our memory in every river, ridge and scar. The crowd on Boorloo did what people have always done: gathered to tell the truth of the day. To mourn, to protest, to insist that the nation face itself. And for that, they were allegedly met with an explosive device.

Australia must decide what it will tolerate: not just the bomb, but the story that made the bomb thinkable.

The device didn't detonate.

But the lie, the lie has been detonating for generations.

And it is time we disarmed it.

Jesse J. Fleay is a Boorloo-born Noongar writer and academic living on Naarm. He lectures in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. Views are his own.