The recent killing of two police officers (and wounding of a third) in Porepunkah, Australia has highlighted the dangers of sovereign citizen-style conspiratorial beliefs. The alleged shooter is still at large, but his social media footprint shows anti-vaccine, COVID-contrarian, and even QAnon-aligned beliefs, as well as a long history of violent threats against police.
Julian talks to journalists Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson, co-authors of an excellent new book, Conspiracy Nation: Exposing The Dangerous World of Australian Conspiracy Theories. As with everywhere else in the world, the pandemic poured gasoline on what would become a familiar set of incendiary false beliefs—but the sociopolitical and historical context down under has its own unique details.
The conversation spans claims of government false-flag operations, real legacies of institutional abuse, and Australia’s most famous conspiracy export and celebrity chef, Pete Evans.
Show Notes
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker and today on this brief titled Conspiracies Down Under, I have a very special interview.
It's with the authors of a new book called Conspiracy Nation Exposing the Dangerous World of Australian Conspiracy Theories.
The authors of the book, Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson, are both accomplished and decorated journalists who have published in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and other places they've been nominated for and have won awards.
Ariel Bogle is a reporter with a focus on technology, law, and the internet.
Cam Wilson's work covers the intersection between internet culture, online extremism, and politics.
This is my interview with them.
So welcome, Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson.
Hi, great to be here.
Yeah, really lovely to have you.
You're journalists who've collaborated on this just published book about a month ago.
It's on Ultimo Press titled Conspiracy Nation Exposing the Dangerous World of Australian Conspiracy Theories.
I read it over this past weekend.
I couldn't put it down.
It's fantastically written and researched, so congratulations to you both.
Yeah, really, really enjoyed it.
Your main focus is on Australia.
But over here in the US and Canada, there was a moment there.
There was a lot of chatter and conspiracy circles about how Australia had fallen.
It had become this authoritarian regime, a prison camp of lockdowns and government repression.
What was the real story of what happened in Australia during COVID?
Yeah, it was so fascinating being here.
You know, walking outside, seeing the like clear blue skies, the perfect temperature, and then looking online and seeing Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis saying that we're all locked down in open air prison camps.
But um it was a it was a bizarre thing because Australia did have some of the stricter lockdowns and COVID-19 public health restrictions in the world.
Um, you know, your definition may vary, but there was you know, major cities in Australia that were locked down for hundreds of days.
Um but at the same time, you know, that was very um you know, that that was kind of uh uh permissible in part because of uh Australian like Australia's national character and our culture where there was quite a lot of support for this thing.
So compared to you know the the US and many other countries um where there is maybe a bit more of like an individualist kind of streak.
So yeah, that it was definitely happening here and and fascinating to see the way that you know it was being perceived overseas.
And then also we had our own conspiracy um theory communities who did have many of those kind of anti lockdown, anti-COVID vaccine, anti-mask um uh desires who were validated by sometimes people they thought of as their global heroes telling them that actually, you know, they weren't the crazy ones, that they were actually telling the truth.
It was the politicians in charge who were who were the crazy ones.
Yeah, it's got to be a little bit intoxicating, right?
To be told by your heroes that you're on the front lines.
You're the ones really fighting the good fight.
All right.
So glad we could clear that up just a little bit.
I know you you both must be exhausted.
You've just come off a heavy round of media requests because of a recent deadly shooting, allegedly by a sovereign citizen with very strong conspiratorial beliefs.
That's what it looks like.
Tell us about what happened with that.
So a few weeks ago in late August, there started to be news trickling out of Paul Ponka, which is a small, like a regional town in the Alpine area of Northern Victoria state here.
And at the beginning, there was the news that two policemen had been shot, one injured, but there wasn't much more information.
When it started trickling out, and the name of the suspect, Desi Freeman, was shared publicly by police.
We started to discover an online footprint that hinted pretty heavily at some what we kind of call pseudo-law beliefs.
Um I think your listeners might be more familiar with the term sovereign citizen, but because of the kind of difference we probably want to draw between the American version of that kind of thinking and the Australian, we use this term pseudo-law.
So Desi Freeman, um, original name, Desmond Philby has a pretty extensive online footprint.
He's appeared in news footage from back during the pandemic, actually.
Uh he was detained outside a regional courtroom in Victoria when there was a private prosecution brought against the Premier of Victoria at the time, Daniel Andrews for treason.
And that was about the lockdowns, just to go back to that you know, discussion of the COVID era restrictions in Australia.
The anti-lockdown freedom movement here was like highly kind of uh court-centric, very litigious, trying to bring actions to undermine the uh pandemic restrictions and Daniel Andrews became a particular target because Melbourne, uh the city in Victoria was under some of the longest lockdowns in the world, in fact.
So he was part of this attempt to bring a private prosecution for treason against Daniel Andrews.
Um you can see in court records that he's attempted sort of pseudo-law, unreal law arguments in court back in 2019.
He instructed police in a courtroom to arrest a magistrate.
Obviously, that didn't happen.
Um, he's been on the podcast and some like I would call them pseudo-law influences here.
And Cam also got a look at a kind of uh the the inside, I suppose, of some of his more private social media channels where he espoused a pretty long-term hatred of police.
I don't know if you want to talk about that, Cam.
Yeah, I got my hands on his private um Facebook posts going back seven or eight years.
And it was just fascinating to see the way that his posting had changed and I what appears to be a pretty clear insight into how his focus has changed.
He clearly, you know, already had some fringe beliefs, but the tone and the frequency of them totally changed.
His his Facebook feed went from, like I said, still a kind of like, you know, representation of who he was as a person, the life that he lived outside of um, you know, his time online, into entirely about, you know, conspiratorial posts about the pandemic, about courts, about and and and really really violent stuff towards um beliefs.
He appears to have a um an interest in and belief in Christianity as well.
And he also kind of started really getting some more um, I would say like conservative Christian um kind of content about uh gender, abortions and and that kind of thing as well.
So, you know, his own religious beliefs um, you know, I I don't know if you could say fueled, but clearly have been um aligned with this increasingly conspiratorial bent that he took.
And so, you know, we talk about like there are heaps of people out there who publicly sound very, very similar to to this guy.
And so, you know, the fact that you see like violent rhetoric in these communities is actually pretty common.
So it's you know, in one sense, it's like hard to be like we you don't know which of those people are really gonna do Something and which people are just like laping because most of them do.
But also the I mean the thing is in retrospect, you look back at it, and there were like literally years of vivid posts about violence towards police.
And you you kind of say, like, are we really surprised that allegedly he decided to carry out an act of violence against them?
And we should say too, he hasn't been found.
So it's been almost weeks now that he's been ostensibly on the run, the police are still looking for him.
So for now he remains a suspect, and we'll we'll have to see what happens.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah.
So you're right that our listeners are probably more familiar, if at all, with the idea of a sovereign citizen, and you and you're referring to it as being part of like the pseudo-law kind of community or a movement where you know it really strikes me that a lot of it is this, it's almost like word magic.
It's like if you can, if you can learn the secret language of what is underneath reality and underneath the government and underneath the legal system, in a way that's actually quite similar to people who quote scripture and and who believe that there's a sort of prophetic magic that if you if you know how to say the right words at the right moment as an incantation, then you will have decoded the universe, so to speak, right?
And so it doesn't surprise me that there is often that sort of overlap.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that word incantation is right.
Uh, some other people have said a kind, yeah, it's a spell to sort of unlock the power of the law and sort of dissolve it before your eyes.
I actually spoke it for the book too.
Uh former pseudo-law believer.
Um, he was, you know, wrapped in these beliefs, took them to court.
Um, excuse me, he was wrapped in these beliefs, he took them to court uh and was kind of disabused of the notion and began researching what pseudo-law is.
And he told me too, he thought he was kind of predisposed to be attracted to some of these ideas because of his religious background as a um Jehovah's Witness.
So perhaps there is something there to that dedication to word magic, to prophecy.
Um, yeah, to these ideas of subtextual meaning.
Now, this case, uh tragic and and still unfolding, ties back to a story that really weaves through your book, which is this 2022.
You're gonna have to help me with the pronunciation.
William Biller.
Wimbiler.
So these shootings in 2022, I'm, you know, I'm I'm laughing at my lack of pronunciation, but it's a it's a very serious story, very tragic.
And and those shootings are related in in a way to these, but then they in turn seem to resonate back to the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which sounds to me like it gets used a bit like Sandy Hook is in the US as a sort of watershed false flag moment in conspiracy lore, like this thing happened and we don't believe it's really real.
And here's the alternative explanations.
And then based on that, I'm going to have a lot of sort of pseudo-skepticism for everything else in the world.
Yeah.
William Biller was in 2022, it's a regional part of Queensland, a state in Australia, that very similar had a handful of people with conspiratorial beliefs who ambushed and killed um uh two police officers and and also a neighbor.
Um, but yes, the the one of the trio and kind of or you might say the ringleader, at least the kind of primary in them, he had a long-running obsession with Port Arthur and the massacre and this belief that it was concocted or that the main person involved in it, that the shooter was somehow, you know, either bamboozled or even like brainwashed into doing it.
Port Arthur actually holds uh the Port Arthur massacre where Mun Bryant killed 35 people, holds actually quite a big cultural place in Australia because um it was our biggest mass shooting ever.
But also it was this almost like uncommon thing in Australian political culture where people reflect quite fondly on the fact that politicians did something quite significant.
Um, after that shooting, uh, the prime minister and the heads of the states got together and passed some pretty um strong gun reforms that you know has meant that Australia has not had many mass shootings since then, and and obviously has even a reputation of like taking that action.
It's something that like Australian people are quite proud of.
It's like a it's like an I almost something is uh as part of our identity, and you often hear it come up in response to unfortunately what happens in the US.
And so this conspiracy theory around that, um, this idea that you know, for whatever reason, all is not as it seems, fundamentally is a challenge to this narrative.
And it Says, you know, this thing that happened that then they took away your guns.
Well, actually, it wasn't as you as you were told.
It was set up, it was manufactured.
Maybe it was didn't happen at all.
And actually, there were actors involved.
And as a result, like what really happened is they use that as an excuse to take away your guns to disarm you to make you docile.
It's a lie.
And if they could lie to you about this, imagine what else they're lying to you about.
Yeah.
And I'm just sitting here thinking, imagine that.
Imagine if we had a mass shooting and we changed the gun laws so that there never was another one again.
And you know, I I would I'd be happy to take, you know, all of the conspiracy theorizing and right-wing, you know, unhappiness about that to just not have shootings anymore.
It's just absolutely awful.
Moving on here, there's a significant Australian figure that emerged as a vocal contrarian.
His name is Pete Evans.
Many people, if they do know him, will know him as a celebrity chef from a television show.
Tell us a bit about Pete Evans and then Cam.
I know you had the absolute good fortune to go on one of his very expensive private retreats.
Uh I think he even gave you a little uh massage on the shoulder at one point.
Tell me about this experience.
Yeah, so Pete Evans, I'm trying to think, maybe like Dr. Oz would be the kind of American parallel.
He was a popular figure in culture.
He was actually Australia's best-selling author through the 2010s.
And he was on a flagship um reality television show called My Kitchen Rules, which was the one of the most popular in Australia about cooking.
And so he was in Australians' living rooms, you know, every night um on TV.
He was a really um popular brand ambassador.
And it was all around this idea of, you know, he was a he was a cook.
He actually had a um professional training background, but he managed to kind of um combined like this idea of of cooking good, tasty meals that were also healthy.
And, you know, he's a handsome guy, like born, you know, good-looking guy who like surfs and stuff.
So he really fit into this, you know, ideal of like the Australian dad who could cook something beautiful in the barbecue that was also like good for you as well.
Um but and be a real kind of down-to-earth, you know, uh guy you could have have a beer with, right?
Exactly.
Not hoiti, like he was more of a um casual dining kind of uh approach to it.
But through throughout the 2010s, when he was really this this looming figure in Australian culture, he for a lot of it had always embraced kind of pseudoscience and conspiratorial beliefs.
Early on, that started as um he was uh uh like really committed and kind of introduced the paleo diet to Australia, the caveman diet, this idea that you um avoid certain um processed foods and in lieu of you know just meats and and vegetables and this idea that that will kind of fix all your ills and got in fights with like you know,
um, national associations representing doctors and dietitians who were saying, wait a second, like this can't do all these things, or he was also kind of promoting more like uh uh obscure things like alkaline water, eventually became comfortable with like anti-fluoride and anti-vaccine views.
Um, but despite that, for a long time he was on Australian mainstream television.
He was such a such a moneymaker for the networks and for the publishers and all these people that they kind of put up with it.
But then off air on Facebook, he was an early adopter of Facebook and build up like a massive audience early.
He would then be more like open about these these beliefs during the the pandemic.
Um he started just being openly anti, like spreading COVID-19 conspiracies, anti-vaccines, and even like QAnony stuff where he's posting about like you know, satanic rituals and aliens and like stuff like that.
Um and the the final the final straw was that um he actually shared a comic that had some neo-Nazi imagery on it, ended his relationship with a lot of his sponsors.
He his show got canceled, and then he kind of retreated from public life.
And then there's there's another piece in here too, right?
Which is that he got in some trouble for for selling a very expensive medical device that he claimed could could cure COVID, amongst other things, right?
It had like all these like fun colors and stuff.
And so he was promoting it, saying it could help treat COVID-19 and in a rare um circumstance, our medical regulator actually fined him some some money for for promoting that.
He was still on our radar, like we were following what he's doing.
He was banned from Facebook and Instagram, but he was still on Telegram.
And we kept an eye on him, and we knew that he was running, he bought this um this retreat in uh uh outside of Byron Bay, which I'm trying to think of the US parallel, but like uh is kind of like a a bit whooshoe area um that uh you know is famous for like influencers living and and it's famous for its alternative lifestyle.
He was charging several thousand dollars for people to attend, you know, small numbers of people.
So we decided that we should go, and I drew the uh short straw, and and it was it was it was me who was decided uh that we would go.
And so I went so hold on, hold on.
You went undercover.
Yes.
As if you were someone who wanted to be on this sort of whatever, a contrarian spiritual food-based retreat with Pete Evans, yeah.
Yes.
So the rule that we came up with was I was gonna change my name.
I'd and also my occupation when I spoke to him.
I'd send him a lot of media requests in the past.
So I was like, maybe he knows who I am, but I'm not sure.
Um, but other than that, the idea was I'm not gonna egg people on.
I'm not gonna say things I don't believe.
I'm just gonna try and observe as much as I can to see um, you know, what he was telling people, how he was acting, what kind of people were going there along with him to understand what this meant, what he was doing, what he was trying to get out of it.
And and at one point he uh you had that sort of moment where he it seems like it gets pretty familiar and very friendly and and very much about people sort of kicking back together.
It's in the book, it sounded like he sort of clicks over into holding court and really starting to unpack a lot of his conspiratorial beliefs.
Yeah, that's a great way of explaining it.
Like when we went there, we weren't exactly sure what was going to happen because the retreat is not sold, I would say, explicitly on a conspiratorial basis.
And so I guess the I could have gone there and he could have just said, I'm gonna cook you some paleo food and you can do uh like you know, a salt plunge bath or whatever, and you know, some wellness stuff and then you know, be on your way.
But as it went on, both he and the other attendees became more and more comfortable.
I got the sense it was almost like testing, you know, pushing the boundaries a little bit more.
People would joke about like vaccines and he would kind of slyly joke about them too, until one night when we're all around the campfire, he just kind of, you know, I don't know if it was the great meal that we just had, if it was the intimacy, the the fact that we're in a beautiful location.
But people just started peppering him with questions about you know Bitcoin, aliens, parenting, like all these kinds of things.
And he was really open about a whole variety of beliefs, including like, you know, he's a heavy, he says he's a heavy user of a um what he calls what he calls toad medicine, which is like uh a hallucinogen.
Um, you know, he's talked about his he told us he was pretty much in like a raw meat diet, like all kinds of things like that.
He doesn't even really say that much, even on his like Telegram channel.
Um, but I think the most fascinating thing was at the end, you know, just before we're about to leave this two-day retreat.
Um I was kind of sitting alone and he came over and just had a chat to me.
And he just started kind of telling me about what he thought about his kind of place in the world was now.
And he said, you know, I used to be on TV and I used to, that used to be my way of reaching people.
Essentially, he was like, I've always been good at kind of like subtly nudging people towards beliefs.
And so, you know, if he gave the example while we were at the retreat, he yes, he'd fed us all paleo.
He'd also fed us in a kind of like intermittent fasting routine.
And he's like, I didn't tell you guys I was doing this, I just did this.
So, you know, he kind of believes in like, you know, surreptitiously, covertly kind of shifting people towards this.
And he kind of said, you know, I know that I don't have this reach to millions of Australians anymore.
People come here, I get to talk to them, I get to teach them.
And without even them knowing, they kind of become, you know, they go out into the world and they share my beliefs and almost become, you know, apostles for me.
I'm curious, uh, both of you, what kinds of similarities or differences have you found between the types of conspiracies that can really take hold of people's minds and their lives in Australia versus places like the US or or even elsewhere, if you if you've looked into that.
There is definitely this sort of wash back and forth between countries like Australia, the US, Canada, the UK, even when it comes to these pseudo-law concepts where people are denying the authority of certain laws or claiming that the government is corrupt and thus all the laws it passes are um you know uh pick and choose which ones you want to abide by there are national characteristics that sort of become part of the fabric of that belief system so when I was speaking to pseudo-law adherents in Australia
they cite you know moments in Australian history where something shifted and what was once a good just government became tyrannical so that might be the m uh the law that was passed in the early 20th century that separated Australia's legal system from the UK.
So you could no longer appeal to the Privy Council in the UK, the high court became our highest um point of law.
Or moments like the 1999 referendum where Australia voted on whether or not to become a republic.
So these are these sort of key moments I think are really part of the fabric, despite the fact that we send our gurus back and forth.
There's a guy called David Wynne Miller from North America who came out to Australia in the early 2010s.
He was teaching what he called quantum grammar.
Again this idea of the incantation it was like certain words, certain vowels in certain orders, you know, unlocking the power of the state but where it became very tricky is he directly targeted um Aboriginal Australian communities, First Nations communities here with some of those teachings.
And we do explore that in the book too, the way that uh white sort of pseudo-law gurus are targeting um legal actions around um indigenous sovereignty here in Australia.
We have this concept called land rights where um indigenous groups if they can sort of prove an unbroken connection to the land where they live they can uh take court action to reclaim that land so that they can again control it.
I mean I won't go into the whole legal history of Australia's very complex relationship with its First Nations people, but the way that pseudo-law threads through that community is having really damaging effects.
And it was interesting too because of course QAnon, you know, we've read a lot of the great work from American journalists on QAnon, you know, Anna Merlin, um many others and we were looking at that here.
We do have our own sort of ideas about pedophile cabals to be honest that precede QAnon.
Um just to give a short history, um in 2015 Australia was beginning its Royal Commission into the institutional abuse of children in churches, scouts, you know, children's homes, et cetera but there was a moment where a senator stood up in our par in our parliament and talked about the fact that he had this list of high profile pedophiles, including a former prime minister.
This particular senator had a long history for stunts so people sort of side eyed it at the time I guess and it's so not much it's so similar to to Joe McCarthy in the 50s here.
I've got this list.
Is it is it the list of 38 or so what's the number?
Well for us it's 28.
Okay 28, okay.
So this list you know it becomes because it you know it never was like publicly investigated, people that told me they've seen it said it's like got names of it people that are long, long dead.
It's just a list of names and no one even knows who wrote it.
Um but it's become a kind of um what's the word a sort of a key a a key belief of Australian conspiratorial communities because it again kind of like Port Arthur symbolizes the crimes that the government has pulled over without our knowledge.
And it primed the ground I think for QAnon because it preceded QAnon but a lot of the key influencers who have been talking about the list of 28 on Facebook since 2015, they became our sort of key QAnon influences too.
So there's that connection.
Although I think Cam, you did speculate right that our political system in that we don't vote directly for our prime minister like you like the Americans vote for the president.
We vote for parties.
And perhaps that does shield us in a way from this kind of hero worship of politicians and the way that they get folded into conspiracies in America because even when we had the QAnon based communities in Australia, it was still Trump for them.
It wasn't Scott Morrison who was our prime minister at the time um there was no one who became the Australian QAnon hero, which is an interesting thing to think about.
Yeah really really interesting I I I appreciated that observation, right?
That you don't have as much of a cult of personality around a charismatic presidential figure who's coming to save the day.
It's much more vote for these parties and then and then within the party they'll decide who the leader is kind of thing.
But but what you were saying Ariel I feel like it resonates much more with Canada than with the US, right?
With all of that all of that history and and And maybe in some ways it resonates because both Australia and Canada have tried to do something about it.
And so you have these commissions and you have the uncovering all of all the institutional abuse, and you have this attempt to do some kind of reparations to those First Nations people.
And how tragic that that not only gets exploited by these white conspiracy theorists, but there's also a little bit of um of uh appropriation that happens where oh, we're gonna come in and claim that we're also like these these people who've been oppressed, essentially.
You know, ultimately conspiracy theories are about making you the hero of your own world fighting against evil.
And one way to do that is to be like, I'm actually, I have a direct connection to this land.
And you're like, well, you're like a you're a white guy whose parents arrived here like 25 years ago.
Yeah.
But like but by doing this, you kind of it's giving yourself uh an authority.
And you can see why they're really drawn to that.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think the version that we had of it in the US was there was a brief moment there, right?
When the vaccines had were really out, and and some companies were requiring that employees be vaccinated in order to be in the in the building in the corporate office.
And there was this moment where the conspiracy theorists here really got into identifying as we are like the Jews.
We are like the Jews under the Nazis.
And when all of this is over, there's going to be Nuremberg trials, and you know, this is it's gonna be exactly the same.
And we're and we're we're just as you're you're making us wear a star by demanding that we have some kind of you know, vaccine passport, finding a way to have both or to have a kind of authority that's based in victimhood that you haven't really earned.
It's really it's really gross.
All right.
So to finish here on it on actually a quite different note, because there's there's something I noticed about your approach in the book that I really appreciated.
And it's and it's something, you know, in our book we tried to do as well.
It doesn't come that naturally to me because I tend to I tend to want to skewer people.
But you you have this very thoughtful approach to the subject, and especially to the people who get caught up in it.
And you cite as we've just been doing socio-political vulnerabilities and historical injustices and how they sort of feed into creating the fertile ground on which these pretty destructive conspiracy theories can take root.
And you also share some helpful perspectives on how to potentially reach people who've fallen down these rabbit holes.
So uh, by way of closing here, what are what kind of thoughts do you have on this?
What would you like people to take away from the book and maybe from this interview today?
We definitely wanted to kind of draw a line between people we thought had kind of got caught up in these ideas, uh, whether out of uh moment of crisis, a desire for certainty and uncertain world, especially during the pandemic, you know, that type of point of view and differentiate there that from the people that are exploiting these ideas, whether it is for political purposes to make money, and for that reason, we really did want to emphasize in the book the way that these conspiratorial tropes get used by those with power.
Again, to come back to that idea of victimhood, it sometimes serves those in politics, those with political economic power to frame themselves as the victim and conspiratorial tropes really help them do that because it has that us versus them framing little old little old us, you know, being acted upon by evil outside forces, whoever that might be.
And I I suppose in the book, we didn't pretend that we could give anyone like the five-step guide to like change someone's mind on conspiratorial ideas, but we did want to see what people were doing.
So some of the stories that have stuck with me are this guy, Robert Sooty, who's a former pseudo-law believer himself, who now runs this website, essentially gathering all the pseudo-law court cases and ideas and sort of different theories that have turned up in Australia as a resource, he hopes for people who might be stumbling into these ideas when they're at a crisis point, when they're looking for help, trying to get ahead of some of the gurus that'll sell you a $500 court and how to get out of traffic fines, hopefully.
You might find his website there too.
So that's like one person we spoke to for the book in this solutions-oriented um chapter.
And then I guess too like in the United States, we had this pivot after the pandemic or in the sort of waning months of the pandemic in Around 2023, etc., when the Search for an Enemy stumbled back on anti-LGBTQ plus communities.
So especially trans communities, it was a lot of targeting of drag queen story hours as sites of so-called child brainwashing, etc.
And so we spent some time in the communities that are pushing back or were pushing back at that time against that.
So there were kind of positive protests outside public libraries where these events were taking place with like music and games for kids and a kind of festival atmosphere to counter what they saw as the hate on the other side of the street.
In some cases, there were literally not uh Australian neo-Nazi groups showing up on the other side of the street.
So direct counter to hate where these communities were putting themselves, their sort of bodies on the line to confront conspiratorial ideas.
And that seemed, you know, in some ways you might say that was a failure of government to step in there, but at the same time, people told me that the solutions, the best solutions will come from the community as they always have.
So that's a perspective that stuck with me as well.
You know, the the real inciting incident for us to write this book was this idea that people looked at the protests during COVID of people marching through the street and kind of said those people aren't like us.
It seems American, it seems unAustralian.
And we were just like, no, we think this is distinctively Australian.
And the whole book is about how the conspiracy theories that take hold in Australia that started in Australia actually say something about us.
They reflect Australian identity.
It's not just, you know, we didn't just get infected by the US bug.
But the other thing that I think really has become more and more apparent to me as we've thought about it, talked about it, written about it, is that we all like like conspiracy theories as a belief aren't that different to many other beliefs because many of us believe things that aren't actually grounded in evidence, you know, old wives' tales, maybe just something that someone else has told us and we never really fact-checked.
Obviously, conspiracy theories feel distinct, and maybe they're sometimes more extreme or or or more visible for the same reason that I believe things that probably aren't true about like, you know, uh washing my hair and and not going to bed with wet hair or you know, staying out in the rain will give you a cold.
It's not impossible to believe that I could also get ensnared in a kind of conspiracy theory.
And so, you know, understanding that actually these aren't different kinds of unique people who there's something really wrong with.
They're actually very similar to you for whatever reason it's gone a different way for them, but to be understanding and empathetic because once you realize that they're not others that are actually like you, it makes you realize that actually we do need to do something about this.
In the book, there is a judge that I think I remember you uh talking to at length, who had had a lot of experiences with these pseudo-law people in his courtroom.
And I loved what he had to say about it.
He did not have enough time to engage with people that brought these ideas to his courtroom in the way that he'd want.
So in one case, when he did have enough time, he was able to reach out and get to the person on the either side of the courtroom who was sharing pseudo-like pseudo-lore ideas in court.
But you know, he kept this sort of underpinning of the legal system in that, you know, giving people a fair hearing, trying to find the through line in their ideas to, you know, get to the truth of what they were bringing to court that day.
But you know, again, with Paul Punker in mind and we and Biller as well, um, Justice Halpern, uh, magistrate, sorry, um, David Halpern, who's now a legal academic.
You know, he did say though that some of these ideas for him had the most dangerous edge of all the conspiracy theories he'd encountered.
Well, thank you so much, both of you for for taking the time today and uh really recommend that everyone grab the book.
It's a fantastic read.
And yeah, best of luck with uh with everything that's going on.
