This is part two of a two part episode. If you haven't yet, you can go back and listen to the COVID conspiracy pipeline. Hi, I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven Am. It's easy to dismiss conspiracy theories as fringe or imported, but conspiratorial ideas are gaining traction with everyday Australians. About one in three endorse at least one conspiracy belief. They're also being echoed by people in
power and have spilled into real world violence Today. Conspiracy Nation authors Cam Wilson and Ariel Bogel on how conspiracies lead from the fringe to the mainstream, including all the way to Parliament House. It's Thursday, August fourteenth. We've spoken about the Freedom Rally in Sydney in May of twenty twenty three, and there were these posters and placards at that rally expose the twenty eight, punished the twenty eight.
Can you tell me a bit more about that conspiracy and where it came from.
So in the book, like we were trying to understand Australian conspiracy theory culture, the kind of strongest threads that come through all the Facebook groups and telegram channels and in person rallies and protests that we have experienced, and there are a few we looked at conspiracy theories around Port Arthur. That's kind of one of the original conspiracy theories that's spread on the internet in Australia. But this idea of exposed that twenty eight is another.
Over to you, thank you, mister Chairman, mister Attorney General.
So back in twenty fifteen, Senator Bill Heffernan and Liberal Party senator stood up in Senate Estimates and said that he had a list.
It includes disturbingly documents that name in one document twenty eight people as alleged pedophiles.
This was the time of their Royal Commission inter Institutional Abuse, so Australia was kind of grappling with genuine cover ups of child abuse.
At the highest of levels. There's a former Prime Minister on this list and it is a police document.
But in terms of this document, there was not much to it. People that claim to have seen it say it's not signed, it's just conjecture. But for many of these groups, it's become like one of the original sins of Australia. So when you go to protests against renewal
but energy. When you go to protests that I went to in late twenty twenty three against the Indigenous voys to Parliament, you always see t shirts posters say expose the twenty eight and it's become a kind of shibalith I guess in Australian conspiracy theory culture.
Right, And so to what extent are we seeing politicians take these theories from various forums, fringe theories and capitalizing on them.
Yeah, well, certainly during the pandemic you did see some politicians doubling in this space because there was a potential political constituency there that they thought might be beneficial. So we did see some nods and some kind of like foot see I guess, between politicians and some of these groups.
But broadly we look at in the book the way that these conspiratorial tropes are kind of politically useful because they asked kind of so simple, us good guys fighting against them, bad guys over there conspiring against us all. And so we do see politicians use these frameworks. And one thing we look at is the public discussion of the Safe Schools program, which was an anti bullying program began a Victoria was being rolled out federally in the mid twenty tens.
Welcome turnbull is facing a new crisis in coalition ranks. Government MP's are deeply divibe about and bullying program is supposed to promote peace and harmony in the nation's schools.
And we did see some politicians using the term cultural Marxism, that is.
This program is about marx societeology, about sexual liberation of young people. I don't want it to be about sexual liberation young people.
So these are the ways that these kind of tropes can creep into our discourse, and we see this increasingly because again, yeah, it is just such a useful way to create a simple political narrative for people that want
to get clicks, get attention. Unfortunately, we do see them kind of get folded in themselves because some of those politicians that dabbled in anti lockdown kind of conspiracy theories themselves became the target of conspiracy theories when people kind of turned on them and accuse them of being part of the plot, the part of the kommal themselves. So these things do come full circle as well.
And what impact does it have having politicians who are very much part of the esta plishment lean into these kind of anti institutional ideas.
I think it's really dangerous. Anna Merliner, journalist in the United States who has looked at conspiratorial culture in the United States, you know, she talks about how dangerous conspiracy theories be as a way of framing the enemy. It can lead to hatred so quickly. That's why I think it is a very dangerous sort of framework for politicians to be using. In the book as well, we do look at the sort of threads of white replacement in Australia.
This is the conspiracy theory that white people are being eliminated in Western countries.
Today, proof that the Abezi government is destroying.
Australia, whether it be through immigration, destroying.
It almost literally, it's crazy immigration intake. Now, this is not a conspiracy theory, you know, the great replacement.
Through birth rate, through other means.
Our latest fertility figures show Australian women have never had fewer babies purpose not in the history of modern Australia. Just one point five babies now per woman.
And that means and of course in Australia, this has ties to one of the worst acts of terrorism committed by an Australian they're shooting two mosques in Christchurch.
In twenty nineteen, Brenton Terrant, a twenty eight year old Australian, he posted a seventy four page manifesto calling himself an avowed racist and citing his inspiration both the white supremacist who killed seventy seven people in Norway in twenty eleven and the white supremacist who murdered nine black parishioners at a Charleston, South Carolina church in twenty fifteen.
And so those sort of threads of a plot of invasion in Australia, you can see that coming time and again throughout Australian history, appearing in our media. Scholar Cassanjaj's looked at some of these issues, you know.
He argues that mainstream media.
And politicians have normalized white nationalist frameworks like this by treating them as representing legitimate concerns. So you can see the danger there, particularly when you look at christ Church as well.
Coming up, how Australia hasn't fully reconciled with conspiracy fueled violence. Cam I'd like to talk more about the real world implications of these kinds of beliefs. We've talked about the christ shooter, but there are other cases too, aren't there.
Yeah, there's definitely been other acts of violence linked to conspiracy theories in Australia. Probably the one that comes to mind for many people most is the wind Biller shooting, which happened in late twenty twenty two when three people ambushed and killed two police officers, injured some more and also killed a neighbor as well. And they had this wide spectrum of beliefs.
The Trained Family members subscribe to what we will call a broad Christian fundamentalist belief system known as pre millennialism. It's a belief system that comes from Christian theology.
Anti government. They're also anti vaccine.
A range of different things help contribute to their belief in this system, so the COVID pandemic, climate change, global conflicts, social disparity.
There is also a sense of some pseudo war and sovereign citizen ideology.
Now, early speculation around the motivation of the Trained Family members was that it's centered on sovereign citizen sovereign citizen ideology.
And it's an example of how these beliefs can lead you to extreme acts because they are extreme beliefs. When you say that you were on the side of good and other people are on the side of evil, and you see that they're doing terrible things and maybe not just threatening yourself, but perhaps threatening and actually harming lots of other people, that kind of mindset leads you very quickly to deciding that you want to take an extreme
response yourself. And if you spend any time in these communities online or even in person, they are ones where talk of violence is pretty common. Thankfully, it doesn't often become real acts, but it does enough for it to be a serious threat.
Can we talk a little more about this sort of the antique government sovereign citizen ideologies, because there seems to be a uniquely Australian kind of version of it.
Yeah.
So, I think what people might be familiar with these videos that spread online where people are having these bizarre confrontations with cops.
I'm not in your juris sorry, I'm not in your jurisdic.
Gives can you tell the police they have no authority?
Can you can you bring can you bring the most you don't have any authority?
What is the karan that's been committed?
No?
Maybe they say I'm traveling, not driving, so you don't have authority or something like this.
We are not driving, we are traveling, traveling.
You guys don't even know what use are on about.
I made your most seniors.
These I would class under this broad umbrella of pseudo law. So the term sovereign citizen is more common, but that's quartistically American. Pseudo law is broadly this idea that Australian laws are somehow illegitimate and don't affect the individual that is trying to use them. So when we've spoken to people that believe in these ideas or who once did and no longer do, people have often turned to them in a kind of moment of confrontation with power in
some way. You know, they've had something go very wrong in their life, whether it be a kind of financial issue, maybe they've run out of money and you know, haven't been able to pay the mortgage on their house, and in the confrontation with the bank, they turn to these ideas that are kind of out of a desperation. I think you often see people turn to these ideas and kind of in a somewhat logical way because the banking system, the legal system, like they are extremely complex, almost as
complex as sudo law itself. But there was a historian, Market Cabbage I spoke to, who's a historian of these movements in the United States, and he agreed about this complexity. People do kind of come up with these ideas in the face of immense complexity. But it's also just like a great get out of jail free card, like you've got to find just say you don't believe in the government, like you've got a mortgage you can't page, you don't believe in the government, like the council's told you not
do something. He's easy way out. And that's where I think it might tind this kind of complex relationship Australia has as a kind of post colonial nation. We do have a sort of uneasy place here on stolen land, and so sometimes I think at heart it's about that really uneasy relationship we have with what we as non indigenous people are doing here.
And let's talk a little more about how we as a country responding. We talked briefly about the christ Church attack. It obviously took place in New Zealand, but it was carried out by an Australian. Do you think the Australian government has reconciled with how dangerous these ideologies can be.
Yeah, in the book, we didn't want to just leave all these ideas on the table and not discuss at all how to address them, so we did look at how people are addressing them on a personal level, on a community level, and we did again look at the failure of Australian government to deal with some of the worst acts of violence that have been attached to these ideas, and I think Christ Church is probably the most prominent example of this.
Last week, on the eighteenth of March, Kebnet agreed to establish an inquiry into the Christ Church Mosque's terror attack. Today, Kebnet agreed the inquiry will be a Royal commission.
There was this Royal commission in New Zealand after the attack, and I've spoken to people from the Muslim community there who have very genuine concerns about how that process played out and the role that they were able to have in the process. But they point out to me that Australia did not even do that. So at least in public, we've had so little reckoning with the Australian roots of the man who committed this act, you know what kind of culture he was marinating in.
Here.
There has been reporting about his ties to far right groups in Australia which is very well documented. He was a par dissipant in our white supremacist scene on Facebook, on other platforms, he was a donor to white supremacist causes. But in terms of whether we could have spotted him before he traveled there, any of these questions remain unanswered in Australia because we haven't had any public process to question our role in growing this person.
And when you look at us politics, conspiracy theories no longer fringe. They've made it all the way to the White House. Your book is called Conspiracy Nations, So tell me how worried you are that Australia could have done that same path.
Look to compare different cultures in different countries, but the effect on individuals varies widely. Like saying that you believe that howld Holt was kidnapped by the Chinese and a submarine, very different to saying that you think that you know vaccines are filled with microchips, and so you won't let your children or anyone else in your life get vaccinated. I'm not sure if I had to say, I'm not
sure we're quite where the US is. But the thing is with Australia is that we have seen these conspiracy theories used by powerful people in public life, and ultimately this is something that needs to be resisted because we think that conspiracy theories are part of human nature. They're a way of understanding a world that is complex and often has conditions that feel unfair to us. But that doesn't mean that we should be resigned to accepting people
using them. We shouldn't accept them. We should be empathetic towards the people who are kind of falling under their spell, but to the people who are using them for their own game, which we coin them out because ultimately we really need that shared commitment to to a reality if we actually are to solve the problems.
That are facing all of us.
Ariel and Cam thank you so much for your time today.
Thanks Ruby.
Thanks.
Also in the news today, Australia has joined two dozen countries, including the UK, Canada and European allies calling for a flood of aid into Gaza. It comes as Israel has intensified its bombardments of Gaza City ahead of its planned occupation of the area, and a blacklisted childcare worker in Victoria was allowed to keep his working with children zech for years. Afterwards, the male educator was sacked for sexual misconduct in twenty twenty after an internal investigation found he
was grooming topdlers. The Victorian government says it's moving to cancel the man's working with children check. The case comes after allegations last month that another childcare worker, Joshua Dale Brown, abused eight children at a center in Melbourne's southwest. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM.
Thanks listening