Falling into the ‘freedom’ movement ... and getting out

At the height of Melbourne’s anti-lockdown protests, Ash Jackson was a familiar face. Front and centre of screaming crowds, she dutifully waved flags, clashed with police and was arrested several times.

For almost a year she was totally consumed as a follower of the ‘freedom’ movement – entire days were spent online, reading and watching anti-government videos and posts on encrypted social media apps, becoming increasingly paranoid, angry and obsessed. Jackson turned up on the news more than once after being arrested and was shunned by family and friends.

Former “freedom fighter” Ash Jackson.Credit: Eddie Jim

But now she’s out. About eight months after leaving the movement, she still can’t believe the grip it had on her life.

Jackson says if you had asked her a year ago where she might be in 2022, she would have said in a concentration camp for the unvaccinated or engaged in an insurrection after a communist takeover.

“I was thinking by this time ... that we’d have an underground movement with weaponry,” says the 48-year-old.

In her small Melbourne apartment, Jackson brings up a YouTube video on her television. It’s a Channel 7 report from February 20, 2021, the day hundreds of protesters marched to the Shrine of Remembrance and ended up being corralled by police at Fawkner Park, where dozens were arrested.

Amid the angry mobs, Jackson points to herself. That day, while attending the protest, she was arrested after marching up to a group of police to conduct a “citizen’s arrest” of the officers for “crimes against humanity”.

“I was so brainwashed,” she says as she watches the chaotic scenes, shaking her head.

The ‘freedom’ movement, initially centred around anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine sentiment, saw protesters take to the streets, particularly in Melbourne, every weekend for almost two years to reject COVID health measures.

Last year, as lockdowns lifted, the movement’s leaders shifted their attention to vaccine mandates. This year protesters have descended on Canberra, including on Saturday, talking about everything from the dangers of vaccination to QAnon-adjacent theories about paedophiles within the Australian government.

‘Convoy to Canberra’ protesters marching towards the parliamentary triangle in Canberra on Saturday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

At the extreme edges are those who claim they are willing, as “sovereign citizens”, to launch a full government takeover – violent or otherwise.

In his latest annual threat assessment, delivered this week, the boss of Australia’s counter-espionage agency ASIO, Mike Burgess, highlights growing concern about online radicalisation during the pandemic, noting vaccine mandates and lockdowns had fuelled extremism that is not “specifically left or right-wing”.

“More time in those online environments — without some of the circuit breakers of everyday life, like family and community engagement, school and work — created more extremists,” he wrote.

The federal government this month announced it would commit more than $60 million to countering violent extremism amid an increase in conspiracy theories during the pandemic and concerns about MPs’ safety, and on Wednesday the Victorian Greens secured a parliamentary inquiry into the growing threat and influence of far-right extremism in Victoria for the same reasons.

But another complex problem has been left in the pandemic’s wake: the path back for thousands of individuals whose lives, livelihoods and personal relationships are in tatters after going down the rabbit hole of these conspiracy theories.

While the path is different for each person, experts and former conspiracy theorists say we urgently need to better understand why and how this descent happens.

Falling in

Just before the emergence of COVID-19 in early 2020, Jackson was working part-time as a musician; composing music for productions, gigging around Melbourne’s suburbs in cover bands and teaching guitar. Victoria’s initial six-week lockdown drove her out of work. She had no real social interaction for more than two months.

At home, scrolling on her phone, she found anti-lockdown groups starting to call out what they saw as overly harsh measures from an increasingly dangerous police state.

“I stumbled across some things on the internet, and I was like ‘oh this makes sense, I don’t want to be locked down’,” she says. She can’t remember the specific video or post that first touched her conspiracy nerve, but she became a big fan of influencers such as Monica Smit of Reignite Democracy Australia – a lobby group backing Craig Kelly and the United Australia Party – Smit’s partner, podcaster Morgan Jonas, and Avi Yemini from Canada-based right-wing commentary website Rebel News.

“I was slowly finding myself getting brainwashed,” Jackson says. “I kept looking into conspiracy theories, including QAnon. I started rooting for Donald Trump, which was ridiculous. Being trans … he’s not very favourable to us.”

Once a born again Christian, Jackson had left her faith over a decade earlier, ousted from her church for coming out as transgender. It was a deeply wounding experience she still has trouble talking about.

“I’ve sort of been a little bit of a loner [since],” she says. “I found a bit of community in the anti-lockdown movement.”

She became a regular on the front line at Melbourne’s anti-lockdown rallies, coming onto police’s radar for disseminating a handbook on how to thwart officers at protests.

“I got sucked in big time to the point where I was doing ... very dodgy illegal stuff that I’m ashamed of now, but at the time I thought it was totally justified,” she says.

She’s visibly distressed about the abuse she hurled at police on the front line.

“I gave them so much shit, I called them every name under the [sun],” she says.

The trouble for policymakers and concerned family members is a lack of information available to help them navigate relationships with loved ones who have succumbed to misinformation.

‘Freedom’ protesters at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne on September 22, 2021.Credit: Eddie Jim

Conspiracy theories are not new, but in the internet age they grow and morph quickly. Pre-pandemic, QAnon – a theory that the world is run by a cabal of paedophiles who drink the blood of children – was dominant online. Evidence from online support groups suggests that now the overlap between QAnon and anti-vaccination sentiment is strong.

One of the moderators of the 230,000-person Reddit page “QAnon Casualties” is Sydney man Jitarth Jadeja. Five years ago, he returned to Sydney from a university exchange in the United States and was living at home, studying part-time with no job or partner. He became increasingly obsessed with US politics. “I was really basically on my own, on the internet just all day, every day.”

He was shocked when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidential election in 2016. His “worldview was shattered”, and he questioned how it could have happened, searching for alternative media and less mainstream social media platforms. Before long, he fell deep into the fast-growing worldwide conspiracy theory of QAnon.

Eighteen months later, a series of lightbulb moments made him realise QAnon was a “con” (he wrote about this experience in a Reddit post which later went viral). He has since talked publicly about his experience, of going down the rabbit hole and climbing back out, to help others understand why people believe in conspiracy movements.

”One thing I’ve found, and this is anecdotal, but I really have found this to be a common trait is that there’s [often] some sort of preceding trauma that occurs before someone falls down a rabbit hole,” Jadeja says.

“For me it was finding out I had ADHD ...I think people forget that when COVID hit it was very traumatic for everyone. It happened very quickly.

“I don’t think it was just that people were online more often. People are online all day at work. But it was a trauma … I think people were traumatised and they went looking for answers. So that really expedited the whole conspiracy situation.”

Research has suggested that conspiracy theories often prosper in times of crisis, with a 2017 study finding that during times of societal upheaval, people’s experiences of fear, uncertainty and being out of control stimulate a motivation to make sense of the situation, increasing their likelihood of turning to conspiracies.

Another study, published in 2018, found that the emotions which make up the psychological origins of believing in conspiracy theories include anxiety, uncertainty, or lacking control. Research conducted by psychology experts in Britain shows that belief in conspiracy theories is particularly strong among people with unsatisfied psychological needs.

Colin Klein, an associate professor at ANU’s School of Philosophy, has studied online conspiracy theory communities. Many people assume the path into misinformation and conspiracy theories is similar to that of a virus, where people bounce around online, get exposed to misinformation and get infected.

Instead, his team’s research, which analysed a large set of Reddit comments, found that those susceptible to conspiracy theories tend to seek out fringe and conspiracy forums “because it fits with either how they’re thinking about the world or experiences they’ve had”.

“And so it looks like people aren’t just passive consumers of information. They’re working towards finding stuff that makes sense to them, or makes sense of the world for them.”

The lightbulb moment

For Jackson, it was her experience with Victoria Police that planted the seed for her escape.

In late May last year, at her last ‘freedom’ protest, she was encouraged by other protesters to throw herself in front of police after receiving a move-on notice.

Police arrested her, while she says the others ran away. “I was kind of thinking, ‘where the hell are my friends?’” she recalls. “They all just buggered off and left me.

“I was confused ... so I didn’t give the police a hard time at all. And they said, ‘Look, we’re going to give you a move-on because you’ve been so cooperative’.”

The following week Jackson was arrested at home and taken in for questioning over her role in the protests and the anti-police booklet circulating online.

When the formal interview was over, she says officers spoke to her candidly about their life, their families and how difficult it had been working on the front line during the pandemic, showing sympathy for her struggles with her gender and mental health. “I realised, ‘these aren’t the Gestapo or anything … I had it all wrong’.

“I had tears when I was just talking candidly with them just saying, ‘God how have I f---ed my life up like this?’

Police didn’t lay charges that day, and offered Jackson a lift home.

“I said, ‘no, actually, I wouldn’t mind walking. I need to think about my life’.”

Jackson went home and fell into a deep, days-long depressive spell, during which she self-harmed. By this point she had lost ties with her extended family, had a criminal record and felt she had been manipulated.

Around this time she found others online who had grown sceptical of the movement, and had begun questioning the extraordinary amounts of money being raised. This and follow-up welfare visits by the police were the final impetus for her to leave the ‘freedom’ movement.

“The weight that came off my shoulders instantly – it was unbelievable,” she says.

“If I didn’t leave, I would have probably ended up in some sort of psych ward or something. When you believe that strongly in something and that the police are coming for you, the government’s coming for you, you’re going to get sent to a concentration camp.

“I used to be in my apartment and I’d have the door barricaded with a couch and tables. I’d booby-trapped the windows.

“It was consuming and eating me away. Totally just destroying my soul and my friendships – I lost a lot of friends.”

It was consuming and eating me away. Totally just destroying my soul and my friendships.

Ash Jackson, a former follower of the ‘freedom’ movement

Jadeja, whose father still believes in QAnon after he introduced him to it, says trying to reason with those caught up in conspiracy theories is fruitless.

“Focus on their behaviour rather than their beliefs. Chances are if they believe in this, their behaviour changed ... they become more anxious, they’ve become more agitated, more aggressive, they can’t not talk about it ... so focus on their behaviour,” he says.

Jitarth Jadeja says the focus needs to be on behaviour, not contesting beliefs.Credit: 60 Minutes/Nine News

“Say ‘it’s fine, I don’t care what you believe, but that doesn’t explain why you haven’t done the dishes or picked up Jamie from soccer the last two Sundays in a row’.”

Jadeja hopes that sharing his story and the lessons he and others have learned can increase conversation around de-radicalisation. Now more than ever, being able to better understand the influences that lead people to QAnon and other conspiracies is crucial, he says.

“They say ‘tinfoil hat brigade’. What has that got to do with a goddamn thing? You’re acting like these people are crazy, like they belong in a nuthouse. These people go to work. They have family. And they believe you are a part of a controlling cabal, and they will justify incredible misdeeds as a justification for righting wrongs. And that includes violence,” he says.

“I just don’t think that anyone has quite grasped how serious the situation is.”

Those who come out of the rabbit hole should be able to find a path back to normality without being shamed, he says. “There has to be some sort of pathway back to polite society for most of these people because most of them haven’t done anything. If there isn’t, then there’s no incentive for them to come back.”

Rebuilding

Jackson says she is now getting her life back on track. She’s recently moved house for a fresh start after a long period of recovery living with her parents, and this week is going back to university to study a master’s degree in music. She recently recovered from COVID-19 too, a mild case she attributes to now being vaccinated.

She becomes emotional when she talks about her extended family, who welcomed her back at Christmas.

“The biggest moving part for me was seeing my nieces,” she says. “I didn’t see my nieces for like eight months, and I love my nieces. And just seeing them again was amazing.”

“I was expecting I was going to have to spend [Christmas] by myself and I got a call from my brother the day before and he said, ‘You’re more than welcome. What’s in the past is in the past, and we’re glad that you’re safe and that you’re out of that’.”

Ash still keeps an eye on the movement, which was responsible for a fire at Old Parliament House in December and has now set up a permanent camp at the Canberra Showgrounds with leaders claiming to stay put until the government is “cleaned out”.

Amid calls for an end to vaccine mandates and vaccine passports are speeches about the “paedophile cabal” by leaders who have repeatedly called for MPs to be hanged.

Last week convoy leader James Greer, who raised almost $200,000 in crowdfunding for the protest, was arrested after police found a loaded rifle and ammunition in his car at the protest campground.

“It’s so different to what it was even a year ago,” says Jackson. “I can fully see some sort of domestic terrorist thing happen.”

She believes most people will “have to hit rock bottom themselves” in order to leave the movement, and hopes her story helps others.

“I still care about some of these people, you know? I hope they can get out.”

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