Turns out the racist Australian senator who was spectacularly owned by a boy and his egg after his racist anti-Muslim statement following the New Zealand mosque attacks did more to wound his own ego than injure the teen when he socked him in the head.
In a interview on Australia’s Channel 10, Will Connolly, aka Egg Boy, said that Senator Fraser Anning’s punch didn’t hurt—“not really”—and that he doesn’t remember what he was thinking when Anning began swinging.
The 17-year-old did, however, express embarrassment at how his egging of the senator went viral a week and a half ago after white nationalist attacks on two New Zealand mosques killed 50 people and injured tens more. Following the attacks, Anning blamed Muslims for the attack on the mosques, writing in a statement that the “real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.”
“It’s blown up completely out of proportion to the point where it’s kind of embarrassing, because too much of the attention is actually brought away from the real victims suffering,” Connolly said. “We should be focusing on them.”
Connolly told the outlet that he had just meant to record a video to show his friends for some laughs, and that he had actually listened to Anning speak for an hour before deciding that, yeah, he was gonna egg this asshole. From Channel 10:
After the tragedy in Christchurch, I thought the world should be supporting all those victims with giving them love and passion,” he said.
“And the senator released a statement which was pretty much a divisive hate speech blaming the victims for the attack.”
But the teenager said he didn’t attend the event having completely made his mind up on the egging.
“I actually went in there to listen to him for an hour, see if he’d change my mind as I’m a pretty forgiving person,” Connolly said.
Evidently, Anning failed to do so.
“In my mind I wanted to forgive him but then he started saying some more things...which empowered me to egg him,” Egg Boy said.
Alas, despite the praise Connolly received internationally for egging the senator, he said he understood “what [he] did was not the right thing to do.” (Debatable.) “However, this egg has united people.”
The egging ultimately facilitated greater support for the victims of the attacks—including nearly $80,000 raised to buy Egg Boy more eggs, which Connolly said will be donated to the victims.
The strangest part? This is not the first time Connolly has been called Egg Boy. He originally garnered the name for eating boiled eggs at lunch, causing classmates to comment on how much they reeked. But for now, he says, he’s “officially off the eggs.”