Anatomy of a Hit Piece

A slightly different version of this piece was recently published in Online Opinion. Although the particulars of the essay will likely date soon, there are lessons to be had when it comes to critically evaluating media claims.

The team behind the ABC’s Four Corners program has been described as an “elite investigative unit”. The phrase conjures images of intrepid reporters battling vested interests as they unearth the truth about corporate and institutional malfeasance. Think Spotlight – which recounted the Boston Globe’s dogged efforts to expose paedophilia in that city’s Catholic archdiocese – and you get the idea.

I don’t know whether previous episodes of Four Corners are sufficient to justify this kind of esteem. But what is clear is that “The Great Awakening”, the program’s recent probe into the friendship between Scott Morrison and QAnon devotee, Tim Stewart, falls far short of these exalted journalistic standards. Regardless of your opinion of the Prime Minister, I think it’s true to say that he’s the victim of what the industry calls a “hit piece” – a scurrilous example of televisual muckraking, masquerading as sober reportage.

The whole episode reeks of a desperate attempt to subvert Morrison’s reputation – not for incompetence, nor for corruption, but for his long-standing association with Stewart. Reporter Louise Milligan and her colleagues have tried assiduously to cast aspersions over the PM, speaking ominously about potential security threats and Stewart’s possible influence upon his friend. Trying to compensate for a near-total lack of credible evidence, “The Great Awakening” presents a web of insinuations and tendentious claims designed to overwhelm the viewer’s critical faculties. Punctuating these segments are poignant testimonies from Stewart’s distraught family, as they grieve the son and brother believed lost to the fevered world of QAnon.

One of the first things that strikes informed viewers is how much of the information supposedly uncovered by Four Corners has actually been in the public domain for some time. No new documents were unearthed, and any damning testimony proving, say, Stewart’s sway over the PM was conspicuously absent. While Milligan and her associates have supplemented the narrative with more recent events (including senatorial inquiries into the matter), they have failed to add anything of substance.

Journalists Christopher Knaus and Josh Taylor, writing for the Guardian Australia, reported on the connection two years ago, in 2019. They revealed the PM’s enduring friendship with Stewart, pre-dating the emergence of QAnon by many years. Knaus and Taylor also divulged details concerning Stewart’s wife and her (former) position on the Morrison family’s staff. But nothing in that article implied an improper relationship between the two men, nor that the employment of Stewart’s wife at Kirribilli House was inappropriate. The Guardian article didn’t so much as hint at any kind of impropriety, and quoted Stewart categorically denying any conversations about QAnon – or public policy generally – with Morrison. True, Stewart seems to have boasted about intimate access to the PM to like-minded individuals. But while that may be somewhat embarrassing for Morrison, such behaviour is more plausibly explained as an all-too-human instance of braggadocio and horn-tooting. The PM, for his part, has simply repudiated QAnon as a “dangerous” movement with which he has no relationship.

In 50 minutes of innuendo and solemn warnings, “The Great Awakening” does little to contradict this basic picture. Milligan and her producers strain themselves as they try and weave a scandal out of otherwise ordinary relationships, dangling a series of dark possibilities before unwary viewers. At one point they draw a link between Morrison’s ill-advised trip to Hawaii in late-2019 and his friendship with Stewart, although it’s difficult to discern their aim. Was this another (contrived) example of Stewart’s svengali-like power over Morrison? It must be said that a holiday between friends and a few personal photos do not a conspiracy make.

A somewhat esoteric connection is drawn between Morrison’s use of the term “ritual sexual abuse” – uttered during a 2018 parliamentary apology to the victims of sexual molestation within various institutions – and the predilections of QAnon disciples. This is about as close as Four Corners get to anything resembling a connection between the PM and the constellation of beliefs to which Stewart adheres. Reproducing a text message Stewart sent to his wife at the time, Milligan alleges that he sought to persuade Morrison to include the phrase in his speech because of its status within QAnon networks; that the PM used it is cited as evidence that he offered a coded signal to Stewart and his allies, indicating sympathy with their cause.

Activist zeal has again run ahead of logic and facts. It’s certainly true that members of QAnon talk incessantly about sexual abuse, especially of a ritualised nature. Indeed, their entire theology is founded on the belief that an international cabal of Satanic paedophiles, manipulating events from the shadows, has engineered the great crises of our age for the purpose of global domination. But a single text message, expressing one man’s hope that his powerful friend would use a phrase of his choosing, is a very thin reed on which to hang the theory that Morrison may well be a fellow-traveller.

More importantly, Four Corners failed to mention that tales of ritual sexual abuse are hardly confined to the benighted margins of the extreme Right. The feminist Brisbane Rape and Incest Survivors Support Centre (BRISSC) freely uses the term on its website. Similarly, the Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse (now known as the Blue Knot Foundation) explored the concept of ritual abuse, sexual and otherwise, in a comprehensive report produced some 11 years before the first appearance of Q. And what about survivor testimonies given at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses Child Sexual Abuse? Many of them go into harrowing detail, as brave souls disclosed memories of sexual violence during ceremonies that can aptly be described as “rituals” (monstrously perverse though they were).

All these statements are in the public realm, a mere click away for the curious – or simply competent – reporter. Having found its way into a royal commission, the use of “ritual” to describe certain types of sexual abuse is hardly uncommon. A subsequent statement released by the ABC has, of course, tried to claim a semantic distinction between “ritual” (which devotees of Q supposedly favour) and “ritualistic”. This is spurious: aside from the fact that various bodies – entirely unrelated to QAnon – have used the former word in their advocacy, the difference is likely to be lost on the uninitiated. And in the relevant sense, Morrison is one of the uninitiated. While it’s not impossible that he used “ritual” at the behest of Stewart and his allies, there’s every reason to believe that he uttered the word – like so many others – while remaining ignorant of its allegedly menacing connotations.

Aside from watching the evident distress of Tim Stewart’s family, perhaps the saddest part of “The Great Awakening” was the implied suggestion that Morrison should cut his friend adrift. Stewart’s sister even evinces incredulity that the PM would want to be “seen” with someone holding such bizarre convictions. But shunning people merely for embracing strange beliefs is a notion that should appeal only to those whose lives remain untouched by tolerance or sympathy. More to the point, heeding such counsel is bound to reinforce a person’s conspiratorial thinking. As many voices have suggested – including those at the ABC – isolation acts as a breeding ground for the cult-like fervour that acolytes of Q routinely exhibit.

Numerous stories of immense public interest are waiting to be found in the wreckage created by QAnon. Although “The Great Awakening”gestured in this direction, the program’s efforts were largely inhibited by the overriding attempt to discredit Morrison. While this episode will soon fade from popular consciousness, it provides a salutary lesson on the way that bias and partisanship can corrupt the journalistic enterprise, often under the guise of fearless inquiry. All media outlets remain vulnerable to this scourge – even the nation’s trusted public broadcaster.

The Capitol Insurrection and the Right’s Cosmic War

Like so many, I was appalled by the now-infamous events in Washington, D.C. two weeks’ ago. A bedraggled mob of amateur insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building in defence of Donald Trump, briefly – though violently – occupying it before authorities managed to bring the siege to an end. Tragically, five people died as the heart of the American political system was ‘engulfed in chaos’. A sense of relative order may have returned to the Capitol, now affirmed by President Biden’s uneventful inauguration. However, the trauma caused by such a brazen assault on this citadel of democracy is likely to linger for some time. 

People will draw any number of urgent lessons from such a searing experience. However, it occurs to me that we are witnessing the emergence – or perhaps the consolidation – of a new phase in American politics. While moral responsibility for the assault on Congress must be laid at Trump’s feet, it’s apparent that broader forces, which now elude the control of any one person, are also at work.

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Put simply, a window has been opened onto the potent religious dynamic driving both a broad swathe of the rioters and the wider movement that inspired them. Indeed, the disturbing, almost cult-like behaviour of Trump’s acolytes since November – draping him in near-religious acclamation, repeating his fanciful claims of electoral fraud as revealed truth, extirpating alleged apostates from the tribe, or fomenting seditious behaviour through apocalyptic, blood-soaked language – has unveiled a surfeit of fervour running through the American populist Right, impervious to all reason.

As Jeffrey Goldberg has recently noted, a merely political prism is insufficient to properly comprehend this latest eruption; his own conversations with marchers around the Capitol just prior to the assault on January 6 suggested to him a deeply ‘theological’ undercurrent to the movement. We are not looking at politics as a mundane occupation, subject to a spirit of compromise and cooperation. For many people occupying both extremes of the political spectrum, the whole enterprise has been transcendentalized, taking on the sacred, absolute quality that was once the exclusive domain of traditional religion.

Commentators have already written about the way last year’s BLM protests embodied quasi-religious characteristics. Far from being a rejection of humanity’s instinct for the religious, they expressed, however unconsciously, a desire for the transcendent (albeit in a progressive, secular key). Some of those features are mirrored in the activity of the far-right. But the differences may be even more telling. Where the anti-racist movement has been a leaderless, largely anarchic phenomenon, those challenging the election have advertised their fealty to Trump – messianic avatar of the populist Right – without reserve. Where progressives last year condemned the past as a tableau of unyielding depravity, right-wing populists have enthusiastically ransacked iconography and symbolism of America’s martial history as a way of framing and justifying their actions. And where BLM activists were animated by a merely inchoate religiosity, many Capitol insurrectionists (like the recent Jericho Marchers) consciously fused a crude, misshapen version of Christianity with an abrasive nationalism.

My point is that although the ‘spiritual’ energy running through these campaigns may seem similar, it is channelled according to very different schemas. For members of the Right (including those at the margins), religion exerts its influence in a far more overt and systematic manner. Moreover, in their language and goals, the current crop of right-wing partisans reflects the all-too-frequent union of faith and bellicosity. Understanding what could lead a rancorous mob to besiege the Capitol requires, therefore, an alternative analytical lens. I submit that the concept of cosmic war provides a measure of clarity.

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First developed by the political scientist Mark Jurgensmeyer, cosmic war captures a religiously-inflected ideology that has emerged on the world stage over the past four decades. As Jurgensmeyer has recently argued, the idea ‘touch[es] on a transcendent sense of moral and spiritual war’. It suggests an existential struggle: no longer the bargaining and moderation of everyday political discourse, but an elemental conflict between good and evil. While most religions contain such elements in their traditions, certain sub-cultures – battered by social exclusion or the loss of status – are more amenable to the notion of cosmic war as an all-encompassing worldview. For them, it is a vehicle of resistance against forces perceived as fundamentally oppressive. The battle against one’s adversaries is invested with religious significance, elevating it to the realm of the sacred. Cosmic war thinking offers the initiated an overarching template of meaning; seemingly disparate events are interlaced as episodes of a broader saga, enduing adherents with a sense of order and destiny in what may seem a chaotic, suffocating world.

A deep moral duality is thus woven into the worldview of cosmic war: the forces of light are divine agents, while their adversaries are possessed of near-universal malevolence. Cosmic warriors often imagine themselves to be a beleaguered minority, fighting for their survival against unremitting – even suprapersonal – hostility. Concrete demands for desired change are either non-existent or have been eclipsed by the tendency towards the absolute. Sixty years ago, Palestinian activists were motivated by mostly secular demands for an independent state; decades of radicalism have seen the current cadre of militants in the occupied territories embrace a hardened Islamism – demonizing Israel as evil’s embodiment and source – that can neither yield nor compromise.

The basic myth of a sacred, spiritual battle naturally creates a militaristic atmosphere; movements in the grip of this worldview invariably exhibit violent tendencies. Aggression is oftentimes confined to the realm of the rhetorical, although the past three decades have shown how easily words can mutate into action. Violence is doubly justified by the logic of this basic scheme. First, the unabating corruption of the enemy, coupled with its alleged omnipotence, means that force is considered one’s only recourse; at times it may even be explained as a defensive measure against the threat of the enemy’s magnified perfidy. Second, participants in the conflict may appeal to the divine will to legitimate their deeds: by grounding their conduct in the very paradigm of the good, they absolve themselves from things they would otherwise condemn. The introduction of God (however conceived) also means that loss in the struggle is, for many cosmic warriors, unthinkable. Where defeat may be on the horizon, the conflict is often re-located to a trans-historical plane, in which the prospect of victory lies in the hands of the divine. Of course, making that move doesn’t entail human passivity; the elect may still engage in battle, but ultimate success does not depend on them.

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The spasms of violence at the Capitol on January 6 were in part a concrete expression of this ideology. As an interpretive grid, the notion of cosmic war explains both the explicitly religious character of many of Trump’s defenders and the movement’s growing militancy. Taking account of the wider universe many of the rioters inhabit only seems to confirm that view. True, some people who stormed Congress weren’t driven by such apocalyptic concerns (at least consciously). Nor would it be right to say that every individual who has denounced the electoral results would condone the assault. But all the caveats in the world cannot obscure the guiding role of an ecosystem of beliefs, in which lumpen Christianity, nativism, conspiracy theory, and belligerency-cum-violence are often deeply intertwined. If Trump’s speech was the match that sparked the blaze on January 6, then this bizarre conglomeration was the fuel.

Consider some of the campaign’s major players. For instance, several Christian figures have thrown their weight behind Trump’s allegations, asserting prophetic insight into the inner workings of what they describe as a spiritual war. Standing in the dubious tradition of Christian nationalism, these leaders traffic in what writer David French has dubbed ‘enabling lies’ – consistently portraying themselves and their followers as the last line against a campaign of unrelieved hostility, with the country’s very survival at stake. So great is their perceived authority in some circles that a wide variety of believers are willing to credit their solemn claims.

Eric Metaxas, one of the key organizers of the Jericho March and a major evangelical leader, exemplifies many of these convergences. With his views now increasingly divorced from reality, Metaxas’ fidelity to Trump has entered a new and disturbing phase: he refuses to countenance the idea that the former President was defeated, and continues to cling to the ‘stolen election’ narrative. Fusing a kind of dime-store charismatic spirituality with hyper-partisanship, Metaxas has gladly admitted that he has no evidence on which to base these claims, preferring instead to rely on heavenly visions that allegedly confirm Trump’s victory. For him, the only response is to ‘fight to the death, to the last drop of blood,’ since anything else risks the future of the entire nation. Anyone who demurs is, in his opinion, under the sway of Satan.

Metaxas and others like him didn’t call for the violent overthrow of Congress. But it’s a mere step from his bellicose rhetoric to the events of that fateful day. More to the point, his fanatical views closely track the cosmic war script. All the familiar elements are present: vast schemes of malevolence; a fear of systemic or near-apocalyptic collapse; a call to arms; and an overriding desire to endow events with religious significance.

Then there’s the foetid domain of conspiracy theories. Chief among them is QAnon, which has been instrumental in mobilizing pro-Trump protesters. Since emerging on the internet a few years’ ago, this tapestry of the macabre has developed a cult-like following, and now encroaches upon the political and cultural mainstream. Adherents ardently believe that Donald Trump has been selected to resist, and ultimately defeat, a global cabal of Satanic child molesters. His opponents, from Hollywood to the Democratic Party, will allegedly stop at nothing to thwart him – a conviction that naturally feeds into the narrative that Joe Biden fraudulently won the election.

Some academics have formally categorised QAnon a new religious movement, with its own cosmology, founding myths, saviour-figure, and moral strictures. So-called ‘Qdrops’ regularly demonize alleged enemies, elevating the conspiracy to the cosmic realm. There is also a growing body of evidence indicating enmeshment between evangelical churches and QAnon networks. Whole denominations have been established that revolve around the ‘teachings’ of Q – immersing themselves in a protean mixture of end-times predictions, current conspiracy theories, and militaristic language. Whether functioning alone or in conversation with fringe Christianity, QAnon paints a stark, Manichean picture of the world, whose tribulation will only cease when the initiated – led by Trump himself – cleanse it of evil.

This ideological cocktail has been well-represented on the ground recently, often mingling with the backwash of various far-right and anti-government ideologies. Several commentators noted that both the Jericho March and the protests on January 6 were liberally garnished with a variety of Christian and other religious paraphernalia. The ubiquity of religious practices and iconography before and during the insurrection was plain: flags declaring ‘Jesus Saves!’, a giant wooden cross, and participants urging the throbbing masses to shout their support of Christianity’s central figure. ‘Conflati[ng]…Trump and Jesus was a common theme’ throughout the day of the assault, with several people claimed that unfolding events were prophesied in Scripture. Some protesters proudly wore religious symbols on their clothing; others carried Bibles in plain view, almost like shields in battle. The blood of Christ was pled over the riotous proceedings, while one man reported that he consulted God before entering the Capitol – indication that some insurrectionists experienced the comfort of divine permission.

Nor have ordinary participants been reticent in combining their religious devotion with key military campaigns in biblical or American history. This, too, reflects the kind of bellicose spirituality lying at the heart of the cosmic war narrative. At the Jericho March a month before the Capitol assault, some marchers followed a woman around Congress as she carried a flag emblazoned with the slogan, ‘An Appeal to Heaven’ (a nod to John Locke’s argument that individuals retain the right to ‘appeal to heaven’ as justification for revolution against an oppressive government). This kind of revolutionary image dovetails with what one QAnon insurrectionist later said when he declared that the assault on the Capitol was ‘our 1776’. And who could miss the militaristic echoes of the name, ‘Jericho March’ – an obvious reference to the Old Testament story, where the army of God marched around the city of Jericho as a prelude to war?

QAnon posters and banners, like Christian symbols, have dotted recent pro-Trump and ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies. Moreover, some of the more tragic stories to have emerged from the Capitol siege involved people in thrall to the conspiracy theory. Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed during the insurrection, had become a zealous acolyte of Q. One also thinks of Christine Priola, who resigned from her position as a school therapist on January 7 to ‘expose the global evil of human trafficking and paedophilia, including in our government and children’s services agencies’. Like the now-notorious QAnon ‘shaman’, she was captured on Capitol building cameras in the speakers’ chamber, and is now being investigated by police for her role in the assault. For dutiful foot soldiers like Babbitt and Priola, the Capitol insurrection was a chance to strike a blow against their oppressors and liberate their country.

Vignettes like these suggest that many people who agitate for Trump are now convinced they are embroiled in a totalizing conflict against a vast program of near-demonic malfeasance. Embattled and fearful, they have turned to religion – not merely as a form of solace, but as a strategic blueprint. From rhetoric to action, from the internet to the streets, the notion of cosmic war has thoroughly permeated large sections of the pro-Trump and extremist Right. The Capitol siege was but the latest scene in this grim and paranoid drama.

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Where do we go from here? While predictions are always subject to revision, it’s quite possible that what we witnessed in Washington, D.C. will further open the door for the use of politicized violence in American society, as armed factions employ brutal methods to advance their interests and highlight their grievances. This isn’t a new phenomenon, either: the growing militarization of U.S. politics (especially on the extreme and anti-government Right) has been documented by more than one seasoned analyst. The advent of Trump has only encouraged such groups. Moreover, we saw how violence infected many BLM rallies across the country last year, as urban zones in places like Portland, Minneapolis, and Atlanta were overwhelmed by crime-ridden mayhem. It’s difficult to dismiss the argument that the destructive activism unleashed by many such protesters has lowered the threshold for the legitimate use of violence as a socio-political tool. Far from being an isolated incident, then, the Capitol insurrection may be another step in a spiraling cycle of violence between the reactionary Right and the radical Left. The sad paradox is that these forces are locked in a kind of perverse symbiosis – each sustaining the fears of the other, even as they both seek total victory.

Recognizing that American politics has been largely transcendentalized for those on the ideological margins only intensifies these concerns. The baleful power of cosmic war thinking has convinced many on the extreme Right that their actions – however bloody or seditious they may be – enjoy the imprimatur of divine approval. Successfully challenging that worldview is likely to be a long and arduous task. If someone fervently believes that his religious duty requires him to purify his country and wage an existential war against evil, then arguments about the integrity of voting systems, or the dangers of idolizing morally brittle men, are bound to seem petty and jejune. Who, after all, can gainsay the Almighty? And what are contingent historical details in the face of the absolute struggle?

We may be thankful that inauguration day marked a peaceful transition of power. But the dark currents the swelled over January 6 have not ebbed, despite Donald Trump’s departure from the White House. The pessimistic conclusion from all this is that outbreaks of sanctified violence may well be a feature of American political life for some time – and with it, the subversion of the country’s cherished democratic culture. That is a sobering thought.

NB: at around the time this essay was being completed, I discovered that Professor Jurgensmeyer himself had drawn similar parallels between his theory and the events of Jan. 6 in an article for Religion Dispatches. I have included an embedded link to that piece in my post.