I think if you cast your mind back and you think about what it was like at the start of the pandemic, this is this time where the whole world changed.
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The World Health Organization has now confirmed what many epidemiologists have been saying for weeks. The coronavirus is a pandemic.
There was a time of great uncertainty of like little information, and what information we had, there was not a lot of confidence in it, and so when people decided to grasp for understanding of it, we found that some people went towards these fringe, extreme ideas of COVID conspiracies and conspiratorial thinking that gave them a kind of certainty and a simple understanding of the world at a time that really defied that.
A quarter of the world's population is now living under some form of lockdown due to coronavirus. Than three billion people in almost seventy countries and territories have been asked to stay at home.
We saw the protests in the streets, We saw narratives about a week control and secret, shadowy plots.
But it's actually not a very weird thing. It's a very human and relatable thing. Which is they wanted to make sense of the stuff that was happening to them.
During the COVID nineteen pandemic, we saw protesters take to the streets. They weren't just protesting lockdowns. They were rallying around a tangle of fears and conspiracies. Those threads fused into a broader worldview that pulled people down a pipeline and built a small industry of influencers. I'm Ruby Jones and.
You're listening to seven AM today Conspiracy Nation authors Arial Bog and Cam Wilson on the conspiracy pipeline, how it works, who benefits, and where it's heading.
Now.
It's Thursday, August fourteen, and this is part one of a two part episode. Ariel and Cam, thank you so much for joining me on seven AM.
Thanks for having us.
Great to be here.
I want to talk about the protests movements that emerged from the COVID lockdowns in Australia, and in particular, there is one rally that you went to and witnessed, Ariel, which was the May twenty twenty three Rally for Freedom. Tell me about it.
Yeah, I went to this one and it was started at Sydney Town Hall, there's always protests there if you've been to Sydney, you know, for all different kinds of causes. But what was really distinct to me about this one was the cacophony of issues that were on display. Twenty twenty three, you know, a lot of those restrictions had
been lifted. We were coming out of that period of staying at home, but yet these marches were and of pretty decent sizes what they call so as I turned up and like turned onto George Street, I could see posters about vaccines. I could see posters about fifteen minute cities, which is a kind of conspiratorial understanding of a town planning idea that claims it's a way to lock us down and put us under government control instead of being
about walkable cities. I could see t shirts with the line exposed the twenty eight on it that refers to a conspiracy theory that spread widely in Australia about a list of twenty eight elite pedophiles, including a prime minister. I saw things about the Russia Ukraine War. You know, it really showed to me how so many of these ideas had kind of merged and were able to share space even if people didn't show up for the exact
same reason. They shared a common sentiment, and the idea was that there was something really wrong in the world. And you know, that's not a unique feeling. A lot of us feel like that. But they had decided the blame was on a sort of shadowy force that was out there trying to put us under the thumb to control our lives against the common good.
Can we talk a little bit more about that kind of cacophony of issues that you mentioned so far, g vaccines, child abuse, rings, How these ideas that do seem disconnected and random, how they come together into this kind of overarching belief system.
Many of the people there believe completely different things, and it's almost bizarre to see the different kinds of people and their array of grievances that sometimes, if you think about it, actually all couldn't be true at the same time, like it actually wouldn't make sense. And yet that's not
a problem for these movements. Like you might believe that nine to eleven was done by Massad, or you might believe it was done by another group of people, but actually, you know, you can kind of be and up because what you agree on is this idea that you're not getting the whole truth, that there are these bad forces, and that you're on the right side of history. People have all kinds of reasons ultimately that they get into
these groups and start to espouse these beliefs. But we understand that these are all kind of influenced by these broader societal factors, like, for example, the Internet has been such a big force in bringing these people with disparate views together, So ultimately you end up with this really like connected group of people united by the same kind of energy.
Yeah, and on the one hand, it's obviously a pretty bleak way of looking at the world, but just having access to that belief system provide comfort to people who believe in it.
I think it can certainly like it is a way to put a kind of simple US verse them, enemies versus good guys narrative around really complex events the COVID nineteen pandemic. As can was saying, you know, this evolving situation where the science was not one hundred percent firm. We're gaining understanding every day, but I think it's important to say here, like there are real conspiracies. You know, if you just take any kind of look at Australian politics.
You see the revolving door of lobbyists. You see how power and money operates. So we're not denying that at all. What we're talking about here is a kind of dedication to us verse them narrative despite all available evidence and an unwillingness to accept, you know, counter claims. And there's some really interesting sort of work on this. There's an academic in the United States, Joseph Kushinsky, who's framed this
is an understanding of power. He argues that conspiracy theories are a way to comprehend power, our institutions, the global sort of community of nations, a very complex ecosystem. Some of us might turn to these narratives as a way to kind of understand what is happening in the.
World coming up, how online communities replace real ones and the people left behind. You've been speaking to people who have family members, partners, loved ones who have gone down various conspiracy rabbit holes. Can you tell me about Danielle and Emily.
Yeah, I spoke to Danielle, who I found through a subreddit, an online community space dedicated to people who had lost loved ones to conspiracy theories and She was someone who had been in a long term relationship with another woman, Emily, that'd been together for I believe more than a decade before the pandemic. Emily was already quite a nervous, anxious person.
She had early life trauma that had predisposed her to being that kind of way, but when COVID happened just supercharged it, and so it drastically changed her behavior over just a few months. You know, she started worrying about vaccine genocides. She started begging her partner to start storing stuff in the house and preparing for a doomsday. They got chickens as a way of kind of future proofing
themselves against anything that would happen to food supplies. And while she did have some kind of work that did keep her someone to touch the outside world, it really
didn't do much to shake this group on her. She would spend hours and hours every day just ingesting enormous amounts of conspiracy content through social media that was, on one hand, you know, kind of like giving her the answer, you know, it was telling her what was going on, explaining it, But the other hand was completely freaking around. It was telling her everything was going wrong, that everyone she knew was under thread that was going to die. And then as time went on, this really had an
enormous strain in their relationship. There's this heartbreaking moment that Danielle told me where she was, like it was her fiftieth birthday around then, and they decided to travel across Australia.
Danielle would remember they would stop in the middle of nowhere and Emily would like jump on top of the car or go find hills and trees to get on top of to try and find just some internet connection so that she could stay attached to the latest theories coming from these conspiracy theory influencers who she was connected to. Emily even started to share these transphobic and homophobic views
despite herself being in a gay relationship. Ultimately, this change and her loved one took such a toll Danielle couldn't handle it anymore. You know. They tried together, they went to therapy, but the long term relationship broke down as a result of it.
And so it sounds like Emily was consuming content twenty four to seven. So can we talk about what it was that she was watching and listening to and the people who were actually producing that content and was motivating them.
Yes, so like many of them, she was in a whole bunch of different online communities. Some are just like you know, other people with similar beliefs, and some are more led by figures at the top who are kind of more dedicated to this and published content on it.
Evening Australia, Riccardo Bozi, National Leader of Australia one, well, it's been a busy couple of weeks and where and the warf of the world continues.
You know. One example is a guy called Ricardo Bozi, who is a SAS guy who at one point during the pandemic said that all doctors and nurses should be hung.
The loads of individuals that run this country for the time being an offer months longer have persuaded too many of us that we have to kill our kids.
And he was one of those people that Emily was really locked into.
So if the wars are coming, it's because the globalists want the war. They wanted a trigger the world control and they tried global cooling in the seventies, then they tried global warming, They tried all sorts of nonsense and they finally got the pandemicandemic.
And so you had, you know, at the same time as Danielle was, you know, waiting for updates on COVID numbers like all of us, Emily was simultaneously in on platforms like telegram and other fringe spaces where they were getting this completely alternate reality that was helping transform her into someone that daniel didn't recognize.
And so how cynical are you now about these influences. Do you think that they all believe what they're saying or is there a kind of cohort who manipulating people for profit.
It's really hard to know exactly what people believe. Sometimes you have suspicions, but ultimately we can see that there are incentive structures that make it possible for these figures with influence to keep doing it. You know, they make money off it, or at the very least they get attention.
You know, they promote these ideas. They tell you to be fearful of everyone and everything, and the only person you should trust is them, and very often they directly even cash in on that by selling things, whether it's courses or supplements or something like that. So we try to be quite empathetic towards people who believe conspiracy theories because we actually think it's a very human and understandable thing to search for answers, even if they're not things
that most of us would agree with. But the people who are responsible for encouraging people's beliefs, feeding those, regardless of whatever they actually think, we view them critically because ultimately they are feeding beliefs that end up changing these people lives and are often directly benefiting from it themselves.
And we all know that COVID was a time of uncertainty and disruption, and it makes sense in a lot of ways that conspiracy theories. You know, people were more susceptible to believing them during that time. Has the effect of that been long lasting or do you think that people are now less susceptible because we're mostly out of that error.
It's a great question.
There was a lot of discussion about whether this anti lockdown, you know, quote unquote freedom movement might emerge as a political force in Australia.
So in the.
Twenty twenty two election, I can remember as reporting on that, we saw a lot of influences from that ecosystem promoting connections with some of the minor parties here in Australia, and so there was this open question about whether they would be able to get actual members of Parliament senators elected. Ultimately that didn't really bear out in kind of state or federal level. That's a bit different actually at the
council level. In recent council elections in Victoria, New South Wales, we did see candidates get onto councils in various sort of regional areas in particular that do have ties to some of these pandemic era movements and have fringe beliefs about say vaccines or town planning. You know, when we look at some of the science around conspiratorial belief, you know there are limitations on a lot of these studies, but there is some correlation between perceptions of inequality and
corruption and conspiratorial belief at the national level. I think, as all journalists on this program right now, we can safely say that transparency is lacking in government. If you've ever tried to FOI any government department, you'll come up against so many different barriers. I have turned a lot in this book to some work from Naomi Klein. She wrote a book on called Doppelganga, which it really sort of fits into this discussion, and she said that conspiracy
theorists get the facts wrong, but the feelings right. So the feeling of living in a world with shadow lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else's profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation extraction, and the feeling that important truths are being hidden. Like, I don't disagree with that feeling at all, and I can see why people might turn to these ideas when faced with that.
And that's the kind of question that we should be asking on a national level, how to address not the feeling that so much as the reality of how that happens.
In the next episode, we look at how it can speak. Heirises can leap from the dark corners of message boards to mainstream politics and the devastating and deadly consequences of unchecked wise it's called from fringe to Parliament, and it's in your feed now