Review: Conspiracy nation: Inside Australia's far right

Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson, Conspiracy Nation: Exposing the Dangerous World of Australian Conspiracy Theories, Ultimo Press, 2025.

Journalists Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson spent years conducting research for Conspiracy Nation. They interviewed participants of anti-lockdown rallies, travelled to alternative lifestyle communities on New South Wales’ Northern Rivers, spoke with families torn apart because loved ones descended into QAnon mania, and even went undercover at a “wellness” retreat hosted by former My Kitchen Rules judge Peter Evans. The result is a disturbing portrait of Australia’s modern far right.

Conspiratorial thinking is integral to far-right politics. The “great replacement” panic, for example, conceives of a plot orchestrated by the “elite”, Muslims, Jews, the left, and pro-choice women to eliminate the white race. Anti-vaxxers view public health measures as mechanisms by which the government, in conjunction with Big Pharma, restrict individual rights or inject the population with microchips. Sovereign Citizens believe the legal system is illegitimate and does not apply to those aware of this truth.

The take-home message of Conspiracy Nation is that conspiratorial thinking comprises a general worldview for the far right. Believing in conspiracy is more than a preoccupation with a single issue. Different conspiracies cross-pollinate the far-right ecosystem, all rooted in what Bogle and Wilson describe as “an explanation of events that places at its heart a secret arrangement by a small but powerful group of people to take control, to violate our rights, and otherwise undermine the common good” (p.7).

This is an insight into one element of far-right ideology and its recent development, however Bogle and Wilson’s focus on conspiracy, and how individuals can be consumed by irrational worldviews, does not give a full picture of the contemporary far right. Firstly, Conspiracy Nation does not account for the influence of international developments upon the Australian far right, in particular the inspiration given by Trump’s second term in power. Nationalism, economic protectionism, authoritarianism, militarism and anti-immigration are all central to far-right politics today and none of these are rooted in conspiracist politics – though they can easily intersect with it. In this way, Conspiracy Nation is somewhat stuck in the Covid era and does not fully account for key aspects of far right ideology, nor its political agenda. This makes the book limiting in terms of understanding the far-right phenomenon in its global and historical context. Nonetheless, it provides an interesting account of how far-right circles in Australia operate today.

Bogle and Wilson do stress that the far-right conspiracism is a threat, regularly accompanied by the potential for violence. Anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests emerging during the pandemic expressed this potential, with threats of murder repeatedly directed towards then-Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Conspiracy thinking implicitly and explicitly calls for individuals to take protective action to safeguard their rights against perceived threats. Such a worldview also lays the basis for lone wolf violence, which Conspiracy Nation explores by looking at the Train family and the 2022 Wieambilla shootings.

While it may be tempting to dismiss conspiracy theories and their adherents as belonging to the lunatic fringe of society, these ideas are connected to and sometimes bolstered by the mainstream of politics and the media. The interplay between centre and fringe is particularly acute when it comes to racism. For several decades, both major parties in Australia have deliberately spread Islamophobia through persistent policies targeting refugees and Muslims in the name of national security; a perspective eagerly adopted by the mainstream media in their reporting on domestic and international affairs. This atmosphere, Bogle and Wilson contend, nurtured the politics of Australian-born fascist Brenton Tarrant, responsible for the 2019 Christchurch massacre.

Tarrant’s white supremacist manifesto betrayed the influence of conspiracy theories – that he was fighting the “great replacement” – as well as a racism not dissimilar to the suspicion of Muslims cultivated by the political mainstream. As Bogle and Wilson argue, “the line between conspiracy theory – the idea that elites or Jews or some other group are secretly behind so-called floods of immigration – and Islamophobia, antisemitism or forms of nativism can feel blurred” (p.73).

The establishment right, in particular that embedded within the media, can also lend legitimacy to conspiracy theories. Bogle and Wilson trace the conspiratorial undertones of conservative attacks on the Safe Schools program, an anti-bullying initiative aimed at LGBTI inclusion, that was a major culture war of 2016. The far right combined several tropes in a paranoid frenzy: Safe Schools was a scheme of the Labor Party to enable Marxists to turn children gay or trans. (Bogle and Wilson note that children are a recurrent preoccupation of the far right, as an empty signifier of innocence perverted by any chosen enemy, whether Muslims, trans people, or vaccines). Despite multiple reviews by lawyers and academics commending Safe Schools as essentially moderate and certainly benign, the Federal Liberal and State Labor governments agreed to gut the program, thus providing an ideological victory for conspiracy theorists and conservatives such as those in the Australian Christian Lobby.

Bogle and Wilson share further examples of mainstream politicians and the far right mingling in environments of free-flowing conspiracism. Former Liberal, and later United Australia Party, federal MP Craig Kelly is quoted as speaking at a 2022 anti-lockdown “Freedom Summit” in Sydney, a conference of some hundreds from various anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown outfits. After mocking the Acknowledgement of Country, Kelly spoke about “…everything from vaccines and the 5G mobile network to wireless AirPods and central banks…the horrors of communism and renewable energy” (p.104). The leap from right to far right is not so great.

Conspiracy Nation also explores the normalisation of conspiracy theories in the “wellness” universe, in its consumerist realm and the communities built around “alternative living”. The wellness universe is the domain of scammers and hustlers selling health, lifestyle and beauty fixes based on disbelief in and hostility towards modern medicine, science and state-provided healthcare and education. Emblematic is anti-vaccine sentiment. Bogle and Wilson cite that in 2020, Byron Bay, Australia’s most popular alternative living destination, had fully vaccinated only 63.6 percent of two-year-old children, compared to 91.4 percent in the rest of New South Wales (p.130).

Diet and exercise are a common entry point for individuals into the wellness universe and a large consumer culture has been built capitalising on “natural” alternatives to those that are mass produced. But these grifters and their corporate backers regularly promote conceptions of naturalness, health and well-being that are fraudulent, dangerous and sometimes deadly. This world is based on conspiracist politics and has increasingly blended with more “traditional” far-right conspiracies. At the same time, its supposedly apolitical “healthy living” agenda has meant it has seeped into the mainstream.

Bogle and Wilson use former celebrity chef Pete Evans as a case study for the intersection of mainstream media, far-right politics and the wellness universe. He was retained as a judge on My Kitchen Rules even while promoting increasingly outlandish diets, such as “alkalised” water claimed to have filtered out fluoride. Evans was a major proponent of the “Paleo” diet, based on “the idea that modern life is making people sick and that returning to the habits of our ancient ancestors is the secret to regaining lost vitality” (p.189). Even after publishing a recipe for an alternative “baby formula” made of liver and bone broth that was condemned by then-President of the Public Health Association of Australia for being potentially deadly if fed to babies, Channel 7 allowed Evans to continue as one of the most familiar faces on Australian television. Evans was acceptable so long as his conspiracies were marketable, in the form of recipe books and branded ingredients. It was only when Evans shared a meme associated with Nazis on Facebook that he was quietly dumped from television.

Health and wellness, conspiracy, and far-right ideas dovetail around paranoia of contamination with the “unnatural”. In the first instance, that might be unnaturalness associated with the body; in different iterations, the unnatural contaminant to be removed may be immigration impinging on racial purity, or left-wing ideas eroding traditional gender values. These ideas are transferable and interlinked.

Conspiracy Nation is an interesting product of good journalism. Bogle and Wilson break down the irrational ideologies embedded in the constituent elements of Australia’s contemporary far right. The book’s main argument is important: that far-right views, which may seem detached entirely from reality, are often sanitised or bolstered by mainstream politics and media. But because Bogle and Wilson limit their study to describing the conspiracist far right today, they cannot provide answers to the most important questions those disturbed by the far right have: where do these politics come from, and how can they be fought? Instead they offer by way of conclusion the valid but pessimistic observation: “After years of reporting, it’s clear to us the narrative frames and the flow of these beliefs aren’t new and aren’t going anywhere, even as we can be disturbed by the pain that they can cause and condemn those who make money off them” (p.194).

Far-right politics are rooted in the inequality of capitalism, often presenting a radical version of the system’s oppressive norms. These radical politics have gained currency internationally as the system has become increasingly unstable, with the state and ruling class in major centres of world capitalism grappling with sluggish economies, rising imperial tensions and social instability. But the instability and polarisation that can create space for the far right to grow also lays the basis for a renewed interest in socialist ideas and left-wing mass struggles – of which there have been many in 2025, from revolutions in Nepal to mass general strikes in Italy. This is our hope for defeating the far right: socialist, working-class struggle against capitalism, the system which breeds fascism and its attendant horrors.

When read with a Marxist framework to fill in the gaps, Bogle and Wilson’s account of how the Australian far right thinks and acts is useful for left-wing people who want to fight these dangerous politics.

Priya De is a long-term socialist activist based in Brisbane.