The dogwhistle to the frightened right falls in the tradition started by John Howard.

The producers of the groundbreaking podcast_Serial_ have just released a new work, The Trojan Horse Affair. It highlights how ready some Tories were to turn trivia in Birmingham UK into a grand matter of civilisational incompatibility and a weapon to harm Muslim British citizens. That impetus emerges from the same ideological thrust as Alan Tudges recently announced history curriculum refocused on the study of Western and Christian Heritage.

This dogwhistle to the frightened right falls in the tradition started by John Howard when he began chasing the voters tempted by Pauline Hansons bigotry. It also signals this federal governments intent to continue surfing the authoritarian wave flooding so many countries.

Education Minister Alan Tudgefearsthat a miserable impression created by a more balanced presentation of Australias dark history might make Australians reluctant to defend it. The idea that one learns a lopsided and bowdlerised view of history in order to join a nations military seems outdated not to mention bellicose.

This distraction from the ineptitude - even negligence - of the federal government as too many die each day in the pandemic is noteworthy. That is because returning history to the plucky lads and empire narrative is more significant that it may seem.

This is not merely some Baden-Powell throwback to train up chaps to steer, and bleed for, Empire as the boy scouts were intended to do. It is also a dogwhistle from the party that,accordingto_The Economist_, gave the world this ghastly political term in the 1990s. A political dogwhistle is silent to the average voter but signals in code to a base that can be animated by shameful impulse. It offers the politician deniability while proving sadly effective in galvanising misplaced fear and hatred.

What conservative politician could hesitate to defend Western civilisation and Christian heritage? It sounds anodyne and traditional to the average voter. To the base that the Coalition and their media partners have been forging since John Howards era, however, this is the language of the embattled white man, alarmed that he is to be replaced.

One aspect of the fear is of the radical left, as government representatives label anyone not voting for the Coalition. Among those forces threatening family values are the politically correct, feminists, and LGBTQI people. That animus was on display in Morrisons shelved Religious Freedoms bill.

The main fear, however, of the defenders of Western Civilisation and Christian heritage is that of ethnic and cultural replacement; that threat is embodied in the Muslim. In 2010, Scott Morrison isallegedto have suggested the Liberal Party use anti-Muslim sentiment as an electoral strategy. In 2016, when Pauline Hanson returned to the Australian parliament, shedeclaredMuslims were swamping Australia. She called for a ban on Muslim migration.

Aneventtook place in Melbourne in that same year that aimed to foster the fear at more influential levels. Melbournes elites gathered at a private club to hear local and foreign intellectuals describe the threat posed to Western Civilisation by people on the move. One representative British speaker named his presentation Ex Oriente Nox. Inverting the usual trope that enlightenment comes from the east, he presaged darkness coming with the asylum seeking masses.

The events coordinator brought the Hungarian former foreign minister, known for his eugenicist appeals, to speak to the establishment crowd between their canaps and chatter. The days most transparent speech was delivered by a senior journalist at Australias national broadsheet.

Australia can only keep official refugees and asylum seekers locked up indefinitely after 9 years because they have been depicted to the public as a threat, largely linked to a monolithic Muslim and brown identity.

The prospect of radicalisation from the narrative of the death of white civilisation is ugly. One Norwegian killed dozens of young men and women in 2011 to draw attention to the threat to Western Civilisation, Christendom, from its purported Islamisation. In 2019, an Australian killed many at a Mosque in Christchurch on the same mission. The same internet spaces that spawn the anti-health policy protests and save the children signs, also foster the sense that the white conservative Christian man is one of the most endangered intersectional identities in our world. These spaces are full of murderous declarations about what is to be done to people who dont fit the narrow definition of western.

The conservative figures that lead the right in America and provide models and tactics for our own right are mainstreaming language about threats to Western Civilisation and Christian Heritage all the time and in language that isominous. The Claremont Institute, a prominent conservative thinktank not only boasts one of Trumps key coup plotters in John Eastman but has taken on the role ofnativist fearmongering. The bigotry that created celebrations of Trumps Muslim Ban on the right had long been fostered by radio shock jocks, Fox News and lesser television stations of the right, amplified through that internet ecosystem.

The Center for American Progress undertook astudya decade back into the big money fostering Islamophobia, called_Fear inc_. Evangelical foundationsinvestedin this divisive disinformation campaign as a result of pro Israel tenets. Many Evangelical groups remain driving forces in the western heritage campaign, emerging from the traditions deeplyracist roots.

The Great Replacement, one of the key ideas of the white civilisation posse, says that Jewish people are orchestrating non-whites and non-Christians to outnumber and replace the white population of European countries and their settler-colonial outposts. This means that Islamophobia and race" bigotry are accompanied by a resurgence in overt anti-semitism.

The Coalitions politicians fend off accusations that they legitimise grotesque bigoted speech when they embrace dog whistle politics fostering prejudice. They use the deniability of the dog whistle to create a straw man argument that the left thinks there is no difference between defending western civilisation and shooting the prayerful at a mosque.

The radicalisation of our conservative parties in the anglosphere in recent years means that there is, however, a connection (if not a parallel) between the mainstreaming of bigotry and attacks on mosques and synagogues. The inflamed base hears the politicians references to key tropes of their internet conspiracies and see themselves vindicated, and some see themselves given permission to act.

When our politicians distract us from critical concerns like a failing aged care system or a wretched response to the pandemic with these religious and cultural campaigns, they do more than fail us on policy. Tudges history war is part of a fascistic politics that depends on heated division. Once created, those fear-filled groups can be driven to violence against the people they see as committed to replacing them. Fixing that rupture is much harder than creating the breach.