Co-opting terror

The conflation of anti-mandate protests with terrorism has consequences. By Nick Cater.

Vaccine mandate opponents come in a range of shapes and sizes. They include truckies, conservative history professors, wellness influencers and health professionals. WA Premier Mark McGowan prefers to portray a stereotype, describing them as demented, deranged, outrageous and selfish. “Some of this extremist behaviour is verging on urban terrorism,” he said late last year. No journalist, as far as we can tell, was brave enough to challenge his burst of semantic inflation.

Last week, Canada’s Justin Trudeau showed where playing the terrorist card can lead by freezing the bank accounts of freedom convoy leaders and imposing emergency power to ban public protests and allow the army to be called up if necessary to clear the streets. Legislation put in place by his father, Pierre Trudeau, in 1988 to counter what was arguably a genuine terrorist threat from Quebec separatists was requisitioned for a different purpose. Justice Minister David Lametti told the CTV News Channel: “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried.”

The ease with which fundamental freedoms can be cancelled by government edict even among the inheritors of the Westminster system is one of the more chilling discoveries in the past two years. It can happen with barely a whisper once a sufficient level of fear has been reached. As fear of the virus itself subsides, a new fear has taken its place, a primitive fear of unclean things. It stems not just from fear of infection, but the impurities that may be introduced to the body politic by challenging conventional wisdom.

A narrative has taken hold in the minds of progressives ever fearful of the rise of populist movements. “The pandemic is essentially serving as a gateway drug for violent extremists to dabble in new ideologies and conspiracies,” wrote Colin C. Clarke in the LA Times last month. “The anti-vaxxer movement could end up serving as a conveyor belt that delivers new members to other extremist groups.”

The conflation of mere protests with terrorism has consequences. It dulls our appreciation of the threat from genuine terrorism and opens the way to apply anti-terrorist laws against people simply exercising free speech.

In September, Senator Pat Dodson claimed the dissemination of false information by “fringe” Christian groups was to blame for low vaccination rates in Indigenous communities in some parts of WA. He suggested the government should “proscribe these people as some kind of terrorist group”. Those spreading false information “should be prosecuted, removed or held in detention”, he told NITV.

The woke defenders of coercive public health measures have been muttering for months about nefarious bands of extremist infiltrators trying to hijack the cause of health freedom. When the freedom convoy set up camp in Canberra earlier this month, the Canberra Times showed its colours by asserting that it consisted of “loosely affiliated groups, such as sovereign citizens, anti-vaccine conspiracists and evangelicals”. Yet little evidence emerged to support this sweeping claim, which, like so much that appears in print these days, appears to have been written from the office.

Journalists such as Nine News’ Chris Uhlmann who remain burdened by the obligation to wear out shoe leather in pursuit of truth found it less easy to resort to stereotypes. Uhlmann reported the presence of a handful of mask-wearing Proud Boys and recalled a previous March4Justice protest at which a woman in a black balaclava yelled that he was “a c..t”. Most of the crowd, however, “looked like they had just wandered out of Bunnings”, he wrote. “If anything defined them, it was that most didn’t appear to work in jobs they could easily do from home. Once we would have called them working class.”

Any radical tendencies lurking in what Uhlmann described as the biggest crowd he could remember in 30 years of covering protests in the capital would surely have been splashed across the Canberra Times. Yet the worst the paper found it could blame on the crowd was the cancellation of a charity book fair and a growers’ market. The police charge sheet was thin, with a single charge of firearm possession, which is contested, and a handful of minor offences. Dr Bruce Paix, a trauma specialist with 32 years’ service as a rescue doctor and anaesthesiologist, was accused of breaking through a police roadblock and was held in solitary confinement for six days. Yet Paix contends he was driving around what he thought to be a vehicle accident at a sedate 10km/h.

In Australia, as in Canada, there are consequences for the “othering” of citizens wedded neither to the left nor right who for a variety of reasons feel aggrieved by the handling of the Covid crisis. In the short term, it may lead to a rise in the vote for parties such as One Nation that have opposed vaccine mandates from the start.

The long-term erosion of the civic fabric is more serious. Trust in officialdom has been badly shaken and will not easily be restored. Officials who don’t trust the public to do the right thing will discover the feeling is mutual.

For now, majoritarianism prevails and the rights of the minority are curtailed. Yet casting out the vaccine-hesitant is not only counter-productive, but also runs counter to the evidence, which suggests vaccination does not reduce the risk of transmission. Fundamentally, it is a betrayal of Australian values that deem everyone worthy of equal respect.

In closing, like many aspiring writers, I acknowledge my debt to the late PJ O’Rourke, who passed away this month. O’Rourke showed it was possible to write about serious things while observing the writer’s obligation to entertain. He warned more than 30 years ago of “the Safety Nazis shouting ‘Sieg Health’ and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties”. The result, he predicted, would be “a disarmed, exhausted, half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind”.