Western liberal media outlets and the ABC spend an immense amount of time, budget, and moral posturing depicting Chinese society as uniquely closed-minded, xenophobic, and intolerant. Australians are fed an unrelenting diet of commentary insisting that liberal democratic institutions hold a global monopoly on multicultural virtue, while foreign adversaries wallow in chauvinistic prejudice.

And then along comes this absolute legend: One Nation candidate and activist Mark Nicholson.

Rather than bothering with nuanced policy debate or traditional campaign door-knocking, Nicholson decided the quickest shortcut to internet fame was to open up Chinese generative video AI (Seed Dance / Doubao) to flood social media with crude, hyper-inflammatory caricatures. In Nicholson’s AI-generated viral video, all Muslims are suicide-vest wearing terrorists, Africans are machete-wielding street criminals, and Indians are visa-dodging pests.

What makes this spectacle truly extraordinary is the layers of biting geopolitical irony. Here is a self-styled Australian patriot, loudly claiming to defend Western civilization against foreign encroachment, relying entirely on algorithms developed in Beijing by Chinese engineers to generate his political messaging.

Even better, Nicholson is doing the work of the CPC’s Central Propaganda Department with an efficiency that state broadcaster CCTV could never replicate. If Beijing sat down to design an information warfare campaign intended to prove to the Global South that Western societies are fracturing under unhinged racial animus, they could not have scripted a more devastating case study.

What a legend. Completely pro bono, Nicholson has delivered Beijing the ultimate talking point on a silver platter, proving that when Australian far-right populism meets Chinese neural nets, the Communist Party gets the last laugh without spending a single cent.