Extract from The Guardian
I spent a year undercover in QAnon. Don’t let the ridiculousness distract from the threat.
Convoy to Canberra protest outside Australia’s Parliament House.
“Freedom” protests similar in form and simultaneously nebulous in broadly anti-vax/anti-mandate political goals have materialised in Britain, France and New Zealand. A convoy claiming to originate from across Europe is making its way towards Brussels. An ongoing gathering that locals alternately describe as “Spring Break for QAnon” or “Camp Covid” is encamped outside Australian Parliament House in Canberra.
Across these countries, protestors appear as a wild herd of “sovcit”, anti-vaxxer, QAnonner and more nefarious fellow travellers, alongside some more ordinary people. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether social media content about these events has been gathered by extremism monitors, or comedians.
Participants unwilling to be injected with a free vaccine safely used on hundreds of millions of people further advise each other that drinking one’s own wee is curative and somehow “camel urine deals with cancer”. Monitors observe attendees costumed as paramedics, pilots and deceased Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Someone really wears a tinfoil hat.
In New Zealand, the monitors themselves hijacked the Telegram and Zello channels the protestors use to organise. They’ve sown chaos and crammed the convoy’s Spotify playlist with songs like Redneck Piece of White Trash, Why Don’t You Get a Job and Dumb Fuck.
In Canada, protestors have used their vehicles to blockade entire Ottawa neighbourhoods, erecting jumping castles and even saunas. Participants stiffly stage ceremonies to anoint one another faux powers of police. Amid the carnival of crank it all reads like character-based black comedy … but this investment in a parallel reality is not satire. It’s not performance. It’s complete. It’s terrifying.
The threat to democracy comes from the size of damage they are willing to do
Wherever this “freedom movement” manifests, a similar cast of characters emerges. Light-in-the-eyes zealots holler conspiracy theories. Grifters solicit to camera like a roll of tabloid clickbait. Burly, closed-mouth types appear to be handling secretive logistics. Around them are impassioned, often inarticulate – and poorly-costumed – clowns.
Don’t let the ridiculousness distract from the threat.
I spent a year undercover in the broadly QAnon movement researching a book; I understand well why democratic citizens may struggle to take seriously the crossed streams of alien lizard aficionados, drink-your-own-wee health enthusiasts and those people who believe democrats eat children’s faces. Even while besieged in his capital and struggling to contain the protests, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau hasn’t yet called in the army; he’s made the point that in more than 80%-vaxxed Canada, those protesting vaccine mandates are indeed a “fringe” – the truckers aren’t backed by their unions, more than 90% of their industry is vaccinated. The tomfoolery in Canberra could not be considered a representative movement of Australians either. Like New Zealanders and the Europeans, we’re a country with a high vaccination rate too.
But the relevant historical lesson is that the threat to democracy doesn’t come from the proportion of the people these groups can claim to represent. It’s about the size of the damage they are willing to do. Writing off Canberra’s buffoon insurgency just as a loud thing blocking the carpark is a mistake.
What was learned from last year’s United States Capitol attack of 6 January and Melbourne’s violent anti-lockdown protests was that people don’t have to be able to comprehend the politics of the movement they’re in to be weaponised by them. The swastikas, confederate flags and other sly hate symbols that appeared at protests go wilfully unheeded by the wellness-influenced anti-vaxxers and others literally marching beside them. William Saletan recently made the frightening point that those Americans who have become the greatest threat to their republic are those who’ve been convinced by propaganda lies that they’re saving it.
Canadian researchers claim what’s now happening in Ottowa is both driven by the cultural narratives of the American right and simultaneously serving a propaganda function as a proxy battlefront for it. The “trucker protest” has been sustained by American money pouring into it by the millions. The likes of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are making positive talking points of the actions as “standing up for freedom”, perpetuating the same kind of myths Cruz and others made last year insisting pro-vax Australia had descended into some sort of totalitarian dictatorship.
Different countries’ protests may claim they’re just “inspired” by one another, but a chilling tactical similarity to the protests suggests a deeper level of international coordination. Last year, the Logically group revealed Melbourne’s protests occurred among worldwide action devised and organised by extremists from Germany. Supposedly local organisers in Canada and Australia have been tracked to foreign servers, operating hacked accounts. Observe now how the same behaviours – from shared language, icons and slogans to their direct organising tactics on the ground – are common across the protests. Note that their political targets are consistently the apparatus of democratic government itself.
The street-level participants of these protests don’t have to be slick, admirable or coherent to be useful to this movement – just credulous, unquestioning and willing to be mobilised. Where the protest presence grows, so do arson attacks and warnings of escalating violence.
The Museum of Australian Democracy was recently set on fire; it’s time to face we are in the era of Brownshirts Without Borders. Unless we can formulate international tactics for dealing with them, it’s not just Ottawa that’s under siege. It’s democracy in the west.
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