Qld shooting: Cop killers reveal sinister threat to Australia
The shocking descent of the Queensland cop killers is an ominous warning sign for Australia, experts say.
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The happy, fresh-faced photos of respected school principals and once married couple, Nathaniel and Stacey Train, are irreconcilable with the emerging picture of the conspiracy-preppers turned cold-blooded killers they became.
Their descent into a murderous rampage alongside Nathaniel’s brother and Stacey’s second husband – Gareth – is as shockingly horrific as it was unexpected.
But it also flags a wider and more sinister threat to the rest of the country.
The growing intersection of online conspiracy theorists with violent extremism possibly fuelled by crises such as Covid which unleashed the “force and reach” of the state.
The case of Nathaniel and his rapid free fall from upstanding citizen with an obvious sense of humour and Christmas baubles decorating his beard just over a year ago, into such extraordinary violence, experts say, is an ominous warning sign.
“While everybody’s path to violence is unique and idiosyncratic.
“The vast majority of people who may have extremist beliefs, conspiracy theories and kooky beliefs – do not commit violence.
“One of the messages here is, while the violence is bad, and this was egregious, there is a more insidious threat and risk to us all.”
Ms Khalil said there has been a 250 per cent increase in right-wing terrorism globally in recent years and law enforcement and intelligence agencies have disrupted a number of plots related to right-wing extremists in Australia.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) said last year that right-wing extremism makes up 50 per cent of its priority caseload.
“This growth in conspiracy theories and anti-government views is undermining our society and if it continues we won’t be able to function as a democratic society,” Ms Khalil said.
Nathaniel, Stacey and Gareth Train were all killed by police late on Monday night after they ambushed and shot dead Queensland Police constables Matthew Arnold, 26, and Rachel McCrow, 29, and their innocent neighbour, Alan Dare, 58, at their rural property in rural Wieambilla, three hours west of Brisbane.
They had been involved in a tangled love triangle with Stacey who was married to Nathaniel and has two children with him, leaving Nathaniel and marrying his brother Gareth.
Their family life was also complicated with neither brother seeing their pastor father for more than 20 years.
And it is reported that Nathaniel had married again and it was his second wife who reported him missing, sparking furious text messages to her from Gareth and ultimately leading to the police looking for him at Gareth and Stacey’s property.
But if all that family history wasn’t bizarre enough, it came to light that Gareth had succumbed to wild global conspiracy theories, anti-authority rants and paranoid obsessions. Stacey too became a conspiracy theorist sparked by Covid.
She was the head of curriculum at Tara Shire State School before quitting last December over her anti-vax views. Colleagues say that is when her radical thoughts started to emerge publicly.
Nathaniel had left his job after a heart attack last year and amid his complaints about the education system.
It has been discovered Stacey and Gareth had turned their isolated rural property into a fortress with barbed wire, gates, and underground tunnels, compete with hidden cameras and a large amount of ammunition and weaponry.
It has been revealed that an account in the name of Gareth Train had posted radical conspiracy theories online claiming the 1996 Port Arthur massacre was a “false flag” operation and a “government psy-op massacre”, and that Princess Diana was killed as a “blood sacrifice”.
In one chilling post on Citizens Initiated Referendums, Train talked about citizen’s rights and police officers attending his property.
“I have directed law enforcement to leave my premises over the last 20 years, having no reason or grounds and at times have also asked them to remove their hands from their weapons or pull their pistols and whistle Dixie,” he is believed to have written.
“Fortunately for me they have all been cowards. Our country is at a point where even cowards are now dangerous because they are unpredictable in groups, turn your back and you may find yourself out cold on the floor with law enforcement dancing on your head.”
Train also wrote that he and his wife erased and dumped their phones after apparent suspicious phone calls and posted about drones and surveillances planes buzzing their property in late 2020.
“Unknown helicopter followed and hovered overtop of vehicle for several hundred metres. Followed by motor bike with pillion passenger several attempts to come alongside …” he posted.
But it is intersection between the online conspiracy theorists and right wing extremists and the real possibility that one group is recruiting from the other that has authorities really worried.
ASIO has warned more “angry and alienated Australians” could turn to violence after being exposed to “an echo chamber” of extremist messaging, misinformation and conspiracy theories during the coronavirus pandemic.
The head of ASIO, Mike Burgess, has said the pandemic had sent online radicalisation “into overdrive” and it was linked to anti-vaccination agendas, conspiracy theories and anti-government sovereign citizen beliefs.
A new study has found that those conspiracy theories are thriving particularly on social media platforms like YouTube.
Where conspiracy theories flourish: A study of YouTube comments and Bill Gates conspiracy theories, by social media researchers at the University of Sydney and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) looked at 38,564 YouTube comments, drawn from three Covid-19-related videos featuring Bill Gates and posted by Fox News, Vox, and China Global Television Network.
The comments were heavily dominated by “conspiratorial statements, such as Bill Gates’s hidden agenda, his role in vaccine development and distribution, his body language, his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, 5G network harms, and human microchipping. “
The study results suggest during the pandemic, YouTube’s comments feature may have played an underrated role in spreading conspiracy theories.
Researcher Dr Joanne Gray said they found the process of developing a conspiracy theory quite social.
“People come together and socially ‘join the dots’ or share new pieces of information that they use to build conspiratorial narratives.”
She said YouTube’s content moderation (often automated) is not good at detecting social conspiracy theorising.
Ms Khalil, also a Research Fellow at the Lowy Institute and an Associate Research Fellow at Deakin University said there had been an “uptick” in conspiracy theories during the bushfires and the Covid pandemic.
“It seems crises can be a trigger, Ms Khalil said.
“We are living in highly volatile, stressful, and uncertain times. The Covid pandemic was the first time many people felt the force and the reach of state.
“Those communities that are already heavily police are used to dealing with it. But what the government could and did do, made many people uncomfortable.
“The government’s response (to the pandemic) opened the door to people in the conspiracy world.”
Ms Khalil said the speed of the take-up of conspiracy theories by the Trains is not unusual.
“We have seen people fall very quickly into conspiracy theories like the QAnon nonsense.”
The real question is how did it escalate so quickly into violence? And how much did Nathaniel believe before his heart attack and mental decline?
“I would be focusing on who he was networking with on and offline.”
“The puzzle is – in this case – what was the trigger for such violence?” she said.
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