Police murders show disturbing rise of the conspiracy mindset
In the killing zone in Wieambilla, four constables encountered the face of human evil. But they also met minds and lives wretchedly warped.
Out in Wieambilla, roughly 300km west of Brisbane. Rural Queensland. The sweetest spot on earth. The salt of the earth, rural Queensland. Waltzing Matilda country. Older Australians might remember the rural Queensland of the Dad and Dave stories, a kind of bush Garden of Eden in which our sense of ourselves once took shape.
A welfare check in a tiny hamlet in the big state’s hinterland, it should be an Australian version of the village bobby in a Miss Marple story.
The four young police officers were all impossibly good-looking. They could have stepped into A Country Practice or Doctor Doctor or any TV wonderland you like.
But those police didn’t inhabit that sylvan glen of our common imagining. The Australian bush isn’t usually US-style Deliverance country. But when they walked up the driveway, two good, decent, fine young people, constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, were savagely shot to death. The other two police escaped, not least through heroic actions of their own.
A kindly neighbour, Alan Dare, come to see if he could help, was also shot and killed. The murderers, one in combat camouflage gear, stood over the dead officers and fired again.
Pause for a moment, as parliament rightly and nobly did this week, to express our grief, our shock, our anguish and the deepest appreciation we can for our police. For every day they walk into a dozen situations that could become deadly. And they do it for us.
What did the constables encounter when they walked into that driveway killing zone? Certainly they encountered the face of human evil. But they also met minds and lives wretchedly warped by conspiracy theories.
We don’t know anything like all the factors at work among the three killers, Gareth Train and his wife Stacey, and his brother Nathaniel. All human situations are complex and this looks more complex than we can imagine. But we do have a series of Gareth Train’s social media postings.
He seems to have been well into the sovereign citizen set, a conspiracy theory-laden movement that thinks laws and taxes are invalid. It started, like so much of this stuff, in the US. Train was also involved in citizen-initiated referendum websites. He thought the Port Arthur massacre was a fake, undertaken by government to justify disarming the population. All three killers were fierce anti-vaxxers. Gareth Train boasted that he had told police to stay away and threatened them with firearms. He accused the Victorian police of crimes during Covid.
Which leads us to this question: why are conspiracy theories so prevalent now across the West, so widely believed, so often connected to violence, so pervasive, especially the crazier ones?
Lydia Khalil is head of the Digital Threats to Democracy Project at the Lowy Institute and author of a new book, Rise of the Extreme Right. She is a brilliant analyst of extremism, with a long background in Middle East politics and Islamist terrorism.
She told me the conspiracy mindset has always been around. But what’s new, she says “is this increase in anti-government conspiracy theory movements”.
“That sort of conspiracy mindset was often evident in the Middle East. But that was in an environment of high degrees of corruption, distrust, authoritarian systems where people were never told the truth. We’re starting to see this more now in consolidated democracies.”
Among democracies, it’s worst in the US, but globalisation and the internet mean it spreads all around.
The anti-vax movement predated Covid, but Khalil believes the pandemic hugely accelerated conspiracy theory mindsets across the West, including Australia.
“Covid turbocharged all that,” she says. “People found the state heavily involved in their lives for the first time. A lot of middle-class Australians were very unfamiliar with this. Some were very uncomfortable with it.”
Khalil’s analysis is acute and her book an important contribution. The rise of the conspiracy theory mindset I think has invaded our culture across an astonishing range of areas. Most conspiracy theories are strikingly similar in their psychology and often even a great deal of their content.
A conspiracy can be considered a secret action by a group of people designed to produce a malignant result that is at odds with how things appear on the surface. A conspiracy theory is typically a belief in such a scenario that is simply not true. Obvious examples include the idea that Princess Diana faked her own death to avoid public scrutiny and escape the royal family, or the opposite idea that the British secret services assassinated her.
Some conspiracy theories are widely believed but still untrue. Some polls suggest most Americans believe the CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy.
Some conspiracy theories are non-political. Before the Open era in tennis, when for a time the game was divided between official amateur events and paid professional events, many tennis fans, especially in Australia, were so devoted to the amateur ideal that they thought the games were all rigged in professional tennis. So Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver, two of the finest sportsmen and best people we’ve ever produced, battled furiously and for hours in epic matches that, with a knowing wink, those in the know could tell you were fixed.
But we are moving into much more dangerous social territory now. Our whole culture has become objectively pro-conspiracy theory. That’s extremely troubling for the health of our politics and society.
Academics often cite three main psychological reasons people succumb to conspiracy theories. The first is epistemic, which means simply the desperate need to know what’s going on. The world is complex and grey. Conspiracy theories are simple, black and white. Why are interest rates rising? A complex interaction of government debt and supply chain interruptions fuelling inflation etc. Much easier to believe classic, foul, anti-Semitic nonsense: the Jews control the international financial system and make money from high interest rates.
The second reason for conspiracy belief is existential. The world is very big and it’s easy to feel you don’t have control of your destiny. Instead of doing the things that actually give you control, working hard at a job, cultivating good family and social relationships, participating positively in civic life and democracy, it’s much easier to believe you know the real, underlying reason you don’t have control – because of the conspiracy you’re fighting – and then to believe you’re gaining back some control by fighting the conspiracy.
The third motivation is social. You can feel heroic, special, cool, in a way historically important, through your special knowledge of the conspiracy. And you can get close with your fellow conspiracy theory believers.
Take QAnon. It’s a vile, hateful, anti-Semitic, far right movement that embodies a crazy set of conspiracy theories, including some from the political left. QAnon believes, among other things, that the US government is run by a network of secret pedophiles. Khalil points out that the Covid pandemic led to a spike in QAnon believers and QAnon traffic on the internet.
QAnon has become ultra dangerous partly because some mainstream political figures have consciously used conspiracy memes and movements to garner support. Thus the bizarre Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has not only claimed that Democrats were running a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza store but that the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was faked and did not involve a plane. She once argued that no children were killed at the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, that Israeli intelligence agency Mossad killed Kennedy and that Jewish space lasers were a threat to America.
She suffered a huge swing against her at the most recent US election, but she was re-elected. Her ally, broadcaster Alex Jones, has been successfully sued for claiming the Sandy Hook massacre was a fake and the grieving parents were paid actors. This madness not only upset parents but caused them to be harassed and sometimes attacked by gullible fools who believed Jones’s nonsense.
The most senior figure to give occasional nods to QAnon is Donald Trump. Although QAnon is extreme and hateful, it also engages its followers in a kind of game, with the challenge of endlessly deciphering the clues of Trump and the like.
Now it’s true that Trump’s enemies tell almost as many lies as he does. The social media companies at the last presidential election censored stories about the laptop of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Some 50 former senior US intelligence officials signed a letter saying they thought the laptop was Russian disinformation. It turned out the laptop was authentic, so its information about Hunter Biden’s business dealings while his dad was vice-president should have been public.
In so grievously trashing the credibility and impartiality of the intelligence agencies they were associated with, these former officials contributed hugely to the growth of conspiracy theories.
So the Biden camp assisted conspiracy theory growth by telling lies and thereby diminishing trust in institutions and democracy, while Trump consciously courts conspiracy theory forces, having several times in the past praised Jones, giving all his too-cute signs to QAnon. Just recently Trump had dinner with Kanye West and a notorious white supremacist. Trump’s excuse was he didn’t know the white supremacist was coming along. But West himself has recently made a stream of grotesque anti-Semitic remarks, even on one occasion arguing that Hitler was not all bad and criticism of the Nazis was exaggerated.
Trump certainly knew all about that. Trump is the most cynical of all politicians because he knows all the conspiracy stuff is nonsense at best, and mostly vile nonsense, but he wants the active support of its legions of believers. He thus validates those believers even as he claims, rightly no doubt, not to share their views.
But our culture has now moved decisively towards validating conspiracy theory. Let’s consider just four forces: Hollywood, foreign governments, the digital universe, academic fashion.
A vast number of Hollywood movies now celebrate some kind of conspiracy theory. In The Da Vinci Code, the whole of Christianity is presented as a conspiracy in a film based on a book that is laughably inaccurate about everything but believed by millions to represent reality. The Matrix, Khalil points out, not only has a typical conspiracy theory plot but breaks down the idea that reality itself is reliable. The term “red pill” has taken on a life of its own in conspiracy theory land as the main character in The Matrix gets a choice – blue pill and have an easy life knowing nothing of the underlying reality, or the red pill, after which you can go behind the matrix and see the true nature of things. Conspiracy theory believers all think they’ve taken the red pill.
Foreign governments. The Russians have encouraged farright groups. Before the Ukraine war Vladimir Putin had a ludicrous following among many Western right-wingers who combined gullibility with plain ignorance to an astonishing degree. The Russians do their best to promote social division in the West via social media. This is not all by aiding far-right groups. Russian internet activists also worked hard to amplify the Black Lives Matter movement.
The digital universe. Not only does social media viciously polarise society but it allows industrial quantities of absolutely false information to be “published” every minute of every day. If a million eyes see a concocted video that is a lie, 10,000 people might actually believe it and 1000 of those might become active in some way.
Academic fashion. Postmodernism is the left-wing version of right-wing conspiracy theory. Postmodernism holds there is no absolute truth, no possibility of an agreed grand narrative, no reliable reality beyond the text. It also holds that the true purpose of every expression is to uphold the unjust and exploitative power structures that lie beneath our seemingly democratic society.
And finally, we must confront the source material of so much conspiracy theory. That is anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, the oldest and foulest conspiracy theory of all. Judaism predates Christianity and Islam, and of course modern liberalism. Jews have always been a small, creative and distinctive minority in every society they’ve lived in except Israel. So they’ve often been cast as “the other”. It may be that humanity has never forgiven them for introducing the moral code of the Ten Commandments.
Because anti-Semitism is so old and so extensive, every other conspiracy theory tends to adopt a version of anti-Semitism for itself. More particularly, the key source document for virtually all modern conspiracy theory is the all-time classic of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This was a forgery by the tsarist secret police of Russia, first published in 1903. It recounts (fictional) Jewish involvement in depravity, but more particularly sketches a plan for a secret world government run by Jews.
It’s the Ur-document of all modern conspiracy theory – the secret group, the evil intent, the worldwide plot. And this grotesque parody is why, even today, Jewish day schools and community halls in Sydney and Melbourne need to engage security guards.
Of course, conspiracies do sometimes occur in the real world. It’s perfectly fair and reasonable to hold and debate all kinds of views about the efficacy of vaccines or anything else, so long as it’s based on evidence and reason and a willingness to disagree peacefully. But every political conspiracy theory carries within it the germ of hatred and violence. Two innocent police officers and a kindly neighbour are now dead because, in part at least, the conspiracy theory runs on.
Four young police constables drove out on Monday afternoon to the most straightforward of jobs. A welfare check, a missing person’s inquiry. No special danger. No bulletproof vests (though vests wouldn’t have helped against high-powered ammunition). No back-up needed. Just another job.