Towards the end of 2021, a white supremacist Twitter account fired off a flurry of posts about how the introduction of electric cars was a conspiracy to control the public.
“They want you to drive electric cars. Why? Because that gives them more control over driving, one of the last bastions of freedom,” tweeted @patrickbasedmn.
Almost a year later, a strikingly similar article appeared on the Daily Mail Australia website headlined: “Another vehicle of control: There’s a dark side to the rise of electric cars that could rob us of the freedom and pleasure of driving forever.”
The article was written by Sam Duncan. Crikey can reveal that he is also the person behind the @patrickbasedmn account, the handle of which is wordplay that combines the name of the sociopathic central character of American Psycho character Patrick Bateman and an alt-right internet slang term “based”. He joins a number of far-right individuals exposed by Crikey as writing in mainstream publications such as Spectator Australia.
The @patrickbasedmn account regularly tweeted racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigration and anti-vaccine content to its 32,000 followers. This includes criticising people for their “Naziphobia” and commending countries for expelling Muslims and Jewish residents.
It has collaborated with a group called Anti-White Watch, which was called a “sinister new effort from white nationalists to co-opt the language of social justice”. One of its posts was even featured in an investigation revealing a Fox News producer’s history of liking racist and sexist tweets. The account was deleted last week after Crikey sent a request for comment.
Duncan denies he is responsible for this content. He said that the account — which until October 2020 used the username @samuelrduncan and was linked to his Daily Mail Australia author profile — was taken over by a US-based friend. This person, in Duncan’s telling, subsequently changed the Twitter name and started tweeting content that Duncan does “not endorse or condone”.
Duncan promised to contact the individual who could clear things up. Crikey did not receive any more correspondence and Duncan did not provide any way to contact this individual, nor any proof that he had handed over his account.
There are many links between Duncan and the tweets of @patrickbasedmn made after the supposed account handover that undermine the claim that he is not responsible for the account.
These include:
- A shared email account between @patrickbasedmn and Duncan up until the account was deleted;
- The account’s movements appear to match Duncan’s travels through Europe, the Middle East and South Africa. For example, @patrickbasedmn complained that his hotel “has three Ukrainian flags hanging over the door” in May last year. Duncan left a Google review at the same time for a Spanish hotel that had three Ukrainian flags at the time;
- Duncan also seems to share his taste and viewing pattern of films with @patrickbasedmn. On New Year’s Eve 2022, @patrickbasedmn tweeted that the film Power of the Dog was “awful, do not watch”. A few weeks later, an IMDb profile belonging to Duncan gave the movie one star.
- Duncan shares a strong familiarity with Korean culture with @patrickbasedmn. Duncan used to teach English in Korea, has posted online about having a Korean wife and has reviewed a lot of Korean films. @patrickbasedmn tweeted about Korea, including sharing an anecdote from being there around the same time as Duncan and liking a movie that Duncan gave nine stars, New World;
- @patrickbasedmn’s strong interest in Australian far-right figures and groups despite supposedly living in the US. The account regularly tweeted about Blair Cottrell and National Socialist Network Thomas Sewell.
Duncan did not respond to questions about the myriad similarities between himself and @patrickbasedmn’s tweets.
The transformation of @patrickbasedmn’s conspiratorial tweet thread into a Daily Mail article shows how Duncan’s beliefs appear to have influenced his work on a website read by hundreds of millions of people.
Once one publication in a field of competing British tabloid magazines, the Daily Mail’s digital transformation has solidified it as an influential media behemoth and the world’s most visited English-language news website. Its sensationalist reporting has been accused of fuelling prejudice, including in Australia. Duncan wrote hundreds of articles for Daily Mail between 2017 and 2018. In the subsequent years, he irregularly published a handful of articles, including the 2022 electric car comment piece.
Beyond seemingly workshopping content on his Twitter account before publishing it in the Daily Mail, Duncan’s story selection has fuelled the spread of extreme and hateful views espoused by him privately online. One example is an article he wrote called “PICTURED: Paedophile African refugee who had sex with a 12-year-old girl and got her pregnant was allowed to stay in Australia for SEVEN YEARS — before being deported back to Africa”. It was widely shared by far-right Facebook pages including Drain the Swamp Australia, Respect Australia Rally and the Islamic Resistance Party.
Duncan confirmed he had worked for the Daily Mail but denied his views guided his story selection at the publication. Neither Daily Mail Australia nor its editor Barclay Crawford responded to requests for comment. However, Crawford did view this journalist’s LinkedIn after receiving the message.
Duncan also made an ill-fated foray into politics. He ran as an upper house candidate for the Liberal Democratic Party in the 2019 election and picked up 56 votes.
University of Sydney far-right and populism researcher Dr Kurt Sengul said the far-right has aimed to introduce its extreme ideas into public consciousness by using the media: “We’re seeing typically fringe discourses (e.g. the Great Replacement theory) being repeated in relatively mainstream outlets.”
Sengul said the acceptance of these extreme ideas into mainstream publications such as the Daily Mail has been crucial to the movement’s growing prominence: “We see the media as perhaps the most important driver of the mainstreaming and normalisation of the contemporary far-right.”
