Who are the real conspiracy theorists, and who represents the real threat to democracy?

Today's Morning Report devoted seven minutes to a promotional plug for a new RNZ podcast called Undercurrent, which promises to expose rampant mis- and disinformation that we are told threatens to contaminate the coming election.

In the news story that introduced the plug, we were informed that Greens co-leader James Shaw was assaulted by a “conspiracy theorist” in 2019.  

That’s interesting. I’d never heard Shaw’s assailant, Paul Harris, described in that way before. RNZ’s own story about Harris’s sentencing said he had wanted to talk to Shaw about the Greens’ stance on abortion – a subject that was evidently on his mind because his wife had just had a miscarriage. That impression was reinforced by his lawyer’s comments in court, and again when Harris interrupted the judge’s sentencing remarks with an interjection about the number of babies being aborted every day.

But it apparently suited RNZ to portray Shaw’s attacker as a conspiracy theorist – a far more sweeping description that implied Harris was influenced by sinister malefactors in social media. That served the purpose of suggesting extremist online platforms were implicated in the assault on Shaw when there was nothing in media coverage to suggest that was the case. 

I suspect RNZ decided to pin the damning label of “conspiracy theorist” on Harris because of his involvement in an unrelated incident connected with the anti-mandate occupation in the grounds of Parliament last year, for which he was convicted of disorderly behaviour. But to conflate his assault on Shaw with online conspiracy theories bordered on dishonesty, which does nothing to encourage confidence in the integrity of the podcast Morning Report was promoting.

The item then neatly segued into an ominous-sounding but unsubstantiated claim from Shaw that his ministerial colleagues are now scared to go out in public for fear of being abused or accosted.

You can see what’s going on here. An assault on a senior politician is attributed to undefined conspiracy theories, for which no evidence is presented. These same nefarious conspiracy theories are then blamed for deterring politicians from going about their business in public – an assertion that we’re expected to believe simply because Shaw said it, although I’ve seen nothing to indicate that it’s true.

The implication is that democracy is imperilled. But wait: Undercurrent will save the day by exposing the shadowy far-Right forces that are manipulating public opinion for their own malignant ends and scaring the hell out of our elected representatives. The podcast is compiled and presented by Susie Ferguson, so we can be assured of its absolute objectivity and dogged pursuit of the truth. In fact we can be doubly confident, since Kate Hannah of the unimpeachably reliable Disinformation Project is involved too. (You can see the two of them stoking each other’s paranoia on the Undercurrent website.)  

Ferguson provided a clue to the ideological tone of the series this morning when she cited the Posie Parker incident in Auckland as an example of supposedly extreme beliefs. It was clear that in Ferguson’s eyes, Parker, whom she described as an anti-trans rights activist, was the problem - not the violent mob that succeeded (with police help) in denying her the right to speak.

The Morning Report item continued with the deliberately muddied voice of someone from an outfit called Fight Against Conspiracy Theories (FACT) Aotearoa revealing some of the offensive content circulating in what Ferguson called the murkier recesses of social media.

That merely tells us there are some seriously disturbed people lurking in cyberspace, which we probably knew already. Anyone who goes hunting for them is bound to find them, just as you might uncover a few unspeakably vile creatures by trawling through a sewage pond.

But knowing these people exist doesn’t tell us how much, if any, traction their views get among the wider public. I’m guessing hardly any at all, since most New Zealanders have more useful and important things to do with their lives than spend their days diving down creepy internet rabbit holes.

In fact it’s likely that by constantly drawing public attention to the supposed threat posed by far-Right platforms such as Telegram, the Disinformation Project is perversely giving them far wider exposure than they might otherwise get and creating the impression that they wield more influence than they do. An own goal, in other words.

In any case, who are the real conspiracy theorists? The label can just as accurately be applied to people like Hannah and her equally tiresome sidekick Sanjana Hattotuwa (who also predictably popped up on Morning Report) as to the people they purport to be protecting us from. They’re all swimming in the same toxic cesspool. The two sides of the disinformation debate feed off each other, ramping up divisive rhetoric that’s alien to most New Zealanders. In the meantime ordinary people just get on with their lives, oblivious to all the shadowy intrigue.

Why we should place our trust in outfits such as the Disinformation Project, which consistently refuses to disclose the source(s) of its funding, or FACT Aotearoa, whose website reveals nothing about the people behind it, isn't clear. (Click on the comically mislabelled “About Us” button on the FACT website and you’ll find not one identifiable individual.)

Why should we believe organisations that are just as shadowy as the people they claim to be guarding us from? If they truly championed the values of an open, democratic society, as they profess to do, they should have nothing to hide.  

Transparency is a core democratic principle. If they genuinely believe in what they’re doing, why can’t they be up-front about who they are and where they get their money? And please spare us the self-serving cant about not wanting to expose themselves to attack by far-Right vigilantes, which was presumably the reason the gutless FACT spokesman had his voice disguised this morning. For all the hysterical fear-mongering, New Zealand is still an open society where people with all shades of political opinion assert their right to free speech every day with no fear of retribution.

Perhaps more to the point, who poses the bigger threat to democracy in New Zealand: outfits like the Disinformation Project and FACT Aotearoa, or the subterranean agitators they claim to be protecting us against?  To answer that question, you have to ask where the real power resides.

The Disinformation Project has the ear of government. Its advice is accepted uncritically in the corridors of power. The mainstream media have similarly been captured. The result is that the authoritarian strictures of the DP go uncontested. It is largely left to Hannah and a coterie of censorious neo-Marxist academics to decide what constitutes “disinformation” – which could be anything that challenges the far-Left consensus of the ruling elite – and therefore supposedly presents a threat to social cohesion.

By way of contrast the extreme far Right, which we are supposed to regard as the real threat, exists in the shadows and on the margins. It wields no power and its existence would probably pass largely unnoticed if it were not, paradoxically, given disproportionate exposure by the anti-conspiracy theory conspiracy theorists (for that’s what they are).