As Australians discovered after a shooting in Queensland this week, as Germany found in its network of princely houses last week, and as New Zealand found in the Christchurch shooting of 2019, it looks like a major American export now is conspiracy theories.
They are delivered through a sophisticated process of amplification and distribution. They are politically mainstreamed through the US Republican Party, laundered through right-wing media voices such as Fox, and powered by social media.
Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 and quickly became the standard-bearer of his party’s conspiracist faction, it’s been hiding in plain sight. It peaked last week when the world’s erstwhile richest man Elon Musk used his own platform to tweet “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” to the virtual applause of 1.2 million likes.
Conspiracies once evolved into cults — now they power the political right.
It’s just another episode in the “those crazy Americans” drama so popular around the world. Except now viral speed rushes these made-in-the-USA conspiracies across oceans to be translated out of context into local circumstances, before bouncing to-and-fro around the world, turning the conspiracy global.
Police are investigating the online activity of Gareth and Nathaniel Train, the two gunmen who killed three people, including two police officers, on a remote property in Queensland on Monday. An account with the name “Gareth Train” posted about the Port Arthur massacre conspiracy — that the 1996 mass killings in Tasmania were a false flag to provide political cover for gun control.
It’s a theory previously dabbled in by “just asking questions” Pauline Hanson. Now it’s woven into the US right’s conspiracy that children caught in mass-school shootings are “crisis actors” in the “government wants our guns” movement. (It was conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ over-eager embrace of the “crisis actors” meme that bankrupted him in multimillion-dollar defamation payouts to parents of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.)
The “sovereign citizen” theory originated with an over-interpretation of the US constitution. It’s been adapted in Australia (again, apparently, by one of the Train brothers), stripped of its very American constitutional mooring. The German version of the theory — the “Reichsbürger” movement — inspired the coup-curious group arrested last week.
The 2019 manifesto of the Australian-born Christchurch killer drew on past manifestos in the US and Norway and inspired others in return. (Six months later, a killer in El Paso started his own manifesto with: “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.”)
We saw the cross-Pacific back-and-forth in the reporting of News Corps’ Walkley Award-winning reporter Sharri Markson on the “lab-leak conspiracy”. Her book What Really Happened in Wuhan constructed the narrative for the “lab-leak theory”, a theory that has culminated in turning US President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci into the scapegoat for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now we understand better how conspiracies spread, it’s time to answer two harder questions. Where do they come from? And why do they find such an enthusiastic market?
Sometimes we can see back to a theory’s origin moment — like the 2017 posts of the anonymous “Q” on 4chan’s message boards that have inspired the twists and turns of the QAnon right. But even those had roots in the “deep state” conspiracy, and even further back in the notoriously anti-Semitic child blood libel.
We’ve known since the 1920s that the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion was forged by imperial Russia’s secret police (although that knowledge hasn’t stopped its spread). But again, the protocols only supplied documentation for an already widespread anti-Semitism.
This week, we saw the reemergence of the most popular take on why conspiracies are embraced: some people are just plain nuts. As an Occam’s razor response, it’s easy to understand its attraction.
A bit too easy. When conspiracists get dangerously out of hand, it’s a way of blaming the theorist while protecting the theory. It’s made “mental health” the go-to waive-off by the pro-gun crowd in response to the all-too-regular US shootings. Same in Australia this week when a News Corp tabloid manoeuvred to explain how Nathaniel Train’s “sudden spiral from respected primary school principal to cold-blooded killer started with a heart attack that struck as he battled an exams cheating scandal”.
Much safer than trying to look at how he was radicalised by right-wing conspiracy theories — and a lot safer than looking at how those theories come to be spread.
There’s no shortage of people looking. Some point to the surge in uncertainty driven by the big technological and economic shifts of the past two decades leaving people vulnerable to authoritarianism and extremist impulses. Psychologists look to the desire for significance or for the offerings of community that conspiracy groups offer. Cultural theorists point to “the paranoid style of late capitalism” (Fredric Jameson) or the attraction of pseudo-rationality for the “semi-erudite” (Theodor Adorno).
For journalism, it’s the hardest of calls: how to get the right mix of reporting, analysis and, yes, mockery of the conspiracy noise without lending the credibility of the craft to the amplification of the political signal that noise is trying to send.
