Conspiracy theories have leached into public life. Is it scepticism towards power or a complete worldview?

The Guardian

4 days ago

On the edge of George Street in Sydney, a woman is wrapped in an upside-down Australian flag. She holds one side of a large banner that reads 'GROOM DOGS NOT KIDS', showing pictures of poodles with ears dyed rainbow and pink.
There are young people, people in their sixties and seventies, parents with children in prams. There are t-shirts imploring you to 'think while it's still legal'. Another person holds a sign declaring their staunch opposition to a town planning initiative that's been erroneously linked to the rollout of a new surveillance regime, 'Aussies SAY NO to 15 minute cities. FREEDOM'.
It is May 2023 and almost everyone has a smartphone in hand. They are live streaming, posting on the messaging app Telegram and waiting for the start of what is alternatively called the We Are Ready march or the Worldwide Rally for Freedom. What the crowd shares is a belief that something is very wrong. The sorry state of the world has an explanation both attractively simple and entirely complex: there are powerful and nefarious forces working secretly against us. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected.
Did Australian prime minister Harold Holt drown at sea or was he kidnapped and taken away in a Chinese or Soviet submarine? Are Masonic symbols hidden among landmarks in Canberra? Is the government hiding UFOs at Pine Gap?
These aren't just questions that interest people at events like the Worldwide Rally. We're all primed to dabble in these kinds of stories, the clues and coincidences that add up to something altogether fascinating. They can simply be a fun group activity on the internet. For most people they won't become an all-consuming worldview or a call to action – for others, they do.
There isn't a great deal of available research about who believes in conspiracy theories in Australia and why – it's a difficult concept to measure. Based on our reporting, believers defy a neat categorisation of interest or class, even as members of these groups fear 'elites' who are conspiring against them, or categories of 'outsiders' taking what they deserve. It's hard to say whether one country's population is more conspiratorial than another but there are conditions that often correlate with conspiracy belief, including perceptions of inequality and corruption.
Some research suggests Australians aren't more conspiracy theory-prone compared with other countries. A 2019 survey found a majority of the Australians surveyed endorsed at least one of the conspiracy theories included by the researchers, ranging from Holt being kidnapped by a Chinese submarine to the claim the Australian racehorse Phar Lap was poisoned by American gangsters. Others were more sinister. There were those who believed the Port Arthur massacre was orchestrated by the government as a cover to disarm the nation. Or that fluoride in the water is part of a plot to make Australians docile and easier to control.
What did people mean when they said they agreed with these ideas? Was it a playful scepticism towards power or a complete worldview? Should we call them all conspiracy theorists? Clearly not.
Conspiracy theories are not just for the 'fringe dwellers of society', the study concluded. 'Our results suggest that basic human motives may give rise to extraordinary beliefs for many ordinary people.'
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Many people are suspicious about how power works, and they are right to be. In the United States, it's been argued that conspiracy theories about the 'deep state' – claims that there is a 'shadow government' in control no matter who is voted in – partly emerged from 'excessive state secrecy and official deception'. Australia's institutions, too, are notoriously secretive and insular. The revolving door between politics and lobbying is well known. Anyone with even the most passing familiarity with our history knows how cruel the state can be, how it was built on violence and displacement, and how it can organise itself against the interests of the people it claims to protect.
But when this suspicion tips into an unyielding dedication to stories that can rationally be disproven, when grievance is nursed and monetised, when fear becomes an end in itself, common ground rapidly disappears, and any evidence that does not align with these beliefs, no matter how compelling, is rejected. Conspiracy theories point the finger at groups operating in secret against the people. They operate as 'accusatory and suspect, rather than as accepted knowledge', as author Joseph Uscinski writes. As we and others have found, conspiracy theories are often as much about creating enemies as unveiling some hidden truth.
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Whatever their prevalence or how deeply these beliefs are held, there's something disturbing at work here. We've watched closely as once-fringe ideas and the language of conspiracy have become increasingly part of Australian public life, egged on by politicians and influencers in search of an audience, and by irresponsible journalism and new ways of communicating online. Terms such as 'QAnon' and 'sovereign citizens' have gone from internet jargon to common parlance. They are monetised and made into elaborate cover for racism. Believers harass nurses and election workers, clog up the courts, infiltrate councils and even get elected to parliament. In some cases, we see them take up weapons.
Certainly, there are those whose experiences of living in Australia – a nation with a documented history of profound brutality to First Nations people, immigrants and other vulnerable groups – have created justifiable suspicion of those in power. Many of those we've spoken to have turned to these ideas after moments of profound disruption and tragedy, after they've fallen through the cracks. For others, it goes beyond scepticism into fantasy that does not lead anywhere useful.
As the march crosses the Pyrmont Bridge, the crowd spots a drone filming the protests. 'How long before they put an AK-47 on it?' one man jokes.
The march reaches a small stage near the Google offices. A grey-haired man materialises and tells the crowd to put aside their differences. 'Doesn't matter if you're . . . anti-vaccine or even, God forbid, pro-vaccine . . . as long as you're for freedom,' he says.
It seems increasingly as though conspiracy theories are not about a singular event but an overarching interpretation of how the world works. They can create a sense of identity and group membership. At the Worldwide Rally for Freedom in 2023, like so many of the events we attended, no one seemed as if they were a single-issue protester – it was vaccines and child-predator cabals and a one-world government that would take all our freedoms one by one. If they hadn't personally lost something, they were about to.
This is a feeling ripe for exploitation. Despite the appearance of standing up in the face of power, conspiratorial tropes are also useful to those with political, economic and social status because they are typically about something happening to 'us' because of an elusive 'them' – 'a virtuous group under threat from a nefarious enemy'. You can take on the position of victim without losing much of anything, and direct the vitriol in another direction.
We're living in an era where conspiratorial ideas have leached into public life thanks to politicians and the media. They help make them mainstream for political purposes, from fake claims about climate science, to raising doubts about the safety of vaccines. Rather than reflecting a diffuse style of political paranoia, as historian Richard Hofstadter famously wrote about the United States in 1964, contemporary conspiracy theories in Australia are often used by those with power as a political weapon against vulnerable groups – a cynical inversion of the power structure they supposedly reveal.
This is an edited extract from Conspiracy Nation by Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson, out now through Ultimo Press (A$36.99).