Over the weekend, anti-Covid vaccine protestors in Melbourne decided they’d block entry areas to a succession of city hospitals, including the Royal Children’s hospital.
Protestors carried placards with slogans such as: “Vaxxing our kids is child abuse”, “WHO Chief accused of genocide” and “They say it’s covid, it’s just the flu.”
Parents and doctors were not shy condemning the demonstrations as imperilling patients. One doctor has demanded “safe access zone” laws to apply to medical facilities in order to head off similarly “dangerous” protests in the future.
In Australia, “safe access zone” laws more commonly exist to protect those seeking reproductive healthcare services from the kind of self-appointed “sidewalk counsellors” who attempt to bully women out of abortions.
A rump of anti-vaxxers obstructing the families of child cancer patients on the Melbourne streets may seem a world away from the outcome of Donald Trump’s latest problems with the law in Florida. This is unless you are on the internet monitoring these groups of people, in which case parallels may be conspicuous.
Trump may have powered his way to the US presidency on the back of reality television fame, but the legacy of his presidency appears to be the transformation of TV-style drama into reality.
Last week, FBI agents searched the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago resort to retrieve highest-confidentiality documents in his apparently unlawful possession.
The response from Trump’s supporters has been outrage, enmity, physical mobilisations and an unprecedented spike in threats targeting the FBI and law enforcement.
Some insist the search – allegedly to retrieve actual nuclear secrets – only enhances his political claim on the presidency.
“I reckon we might see Trump get elected,” said one fan in a group conversation.
“Hopefully, but I’m scared scared for his safety,” responded another.
“Assassination attempts on his life are many,” added a third, untruthfully. (There have been no assassination attempts on Trump’s life.) And yet, “He has protectors, god bless them,” they added.
These “protectors” are not just the armed mob that appeared outside an FBI office in Arizona this week. They are these very participants in the group chat from which these quotes are sourced – an Australian one, formed around the anti-lockdown/anti-vax movement that staged the very anti-hospital actions over this past weekend in Melbourne.
I’ve written before about the far-right disinformation pipeline that now spans the globe, in which local incidents are conceived, art directed and repackaged to fill a 24-hour fake news cycle with aggravating, terrifying propaganda.
Trumper Dan Bongino was last week’s Fox News panelist, claiming the FBI search of on Trump’s property was “some third world bullshit”.
It was the same Bongino who claimed previously on his Facebook page that footage of some teenagers hauled out of a Melbourne shopping centre for antisocial behaviour was incontrovertible evidence that Australia during Covid restrictions had become totalitarian state.
Politely, his knowledge of foreign affairs should be considered quite thin. Of course tangible knowledge, hard facts and rigorous interrogation of claims is the very opposite of why anti-vax types are still rallying in Melbourne months after the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines have been proven on an unprecedented global scale.
Similarly, facts are not the reason that mobs are still rallying to Trump’s banner despite his contradictor attempts at self-exculpations, and the demonstrable, tangible, calculable verdict of his 2020 election loss.
The Atlantic last week featured an interview with scholar of America’s Tea party movement, Theda Skocpol. Skocpol analysed the persistent “birther” campaign that insisted former US president Barack Obama wasn’t really, truly born in the US (yes, he was) and concluded that “proof of this theory was never a requirement for subscribing to it”.
To Skocpol, “Stop the Steal is a metaphor” for the shared grievance of this community – a belief that their status is under threat from Obama-like interlopers, by a liberal media, by those movements demanding visible equality in the culture. That they are losing control.
Observing the equivalent far-right movements in Australia, I’ve come to see the repeated performance of the insistent mythologies – online and in the streets – as both a signal flare and badge of membership that marks the mutation of a western political subculture into something more like a globalised far-right para-culture.
With repetition and affirmation, the entertaining narratives of the far-right’s internal discourses have become such a powerful social reality to these people that they are making dire material decisions within that reality.
In the United States, one man is already dead in a cornfield, having launched a stochastic terror attack on an FBI facility in Cincinnati in revenge for the Mar-a-Lago search.
In Australia, our extremist minority are consuming the same media informing the same framework of values as the Americans – they are contributing to it, they are enhancing its reach.
The local imperative now is to consider where this could lead. A movement of people willing to impede the access of families to child cancer treatment is one that no longer shares a morality with the rest of us.
