Anger, Hatred and Conspiracy Theories: The rise of One Nation.

A few days ago, I watched Tony Fauci being eviscerated at a US Senate committee hearing, watched him being accused of the most terrible things, as if, for instance, the way he had run the public health response to the Covid epidemic in America amounted to mass murder. The fury, the contempt of him, was hard to watch.

And it was hard to watch the way he was rendered speechless by all this hatred and all these accusations, watch as he shrunk further and further down into his chair, as if he wanted to disappear. Tony Fauci who at the height of the covid pandemic, was America’s doctor/scientist who held the lives of millions of Americans in his hands.

This Senate Committee hearing was like something out of a Kafka story, because for all the fury and hatred― take a look sometime at the eyes of Senator Rand Paul when he was questioning Fauci― it was impossible to know what were the crimes Fauci had committed that rendered him a mass murderer.

Tony Fauci was a revered scientist before the Covid epidemic. He was in charge of the response to the AIDS virus, a virus that was killing thousands of young men across the developed world and thousands of men and women in Africa and Asia. Now Fauci has become a hated figure in the MAGA movement in America. Robert Kennedy, Trump’s Health Secretary, a man full of conspiracies, is the embodiment of this hatred of Fauci.

One afternoon a couple of days after the Senate Committee hearing, I read an article in the Atlantic magazine by a 93-year-old writer who wrote that America was heading back to the America of her childhood, when infectious diseases —measles, whooping cough, polio— killed many tens of thousands of children and ruined the lives of millions of others.

It made me think about that time when I lived for two months in the Infectious Diseases Hospital in inner suburban Melbourne. The hospital was shut down some years ago, in large part because the infectious diseases that made it necessary—the wards at one time were overflowing with patients—had been controlled or even wiped out by vaccines.

I had some sort of infection which caused my eyes to swell and my throat to swell. One morning, the family friend who practised medicine on his friends but was not a doctor, said I needed to go to hospital, the Infectious Diseases Hospital. I think my eldest sister took me there. We caught two trams.

I was 14 in 1961. It was not long after oral polio vaccines had become widely available. I think children received the vaccine at school, administered by a nurse. Small Pox had been eradicated by vaccines—I still have a small pox vaccine scar on my left arm. I don’t think there was a measles vaccine or a whooping cough vaccine or a tetanus vaccine back then.

I was put in a small room for a month and given penicillin injections every four hours. When my sisters and my father came to visit, they had to wear gowns and masks. I mostly could not see. No-one would tell my sisters what infection I had. Perhaps they did not know.

After a month, I was transferred to a large ward. I could see by then. Nurses still wore masks when they came to look after me. The ward was full of iron lungs. Rows of iron lungs. The whooshing sound they made could be heard day and night. Young men and women were inside those iron lungs. When I was allowed out of bed, I would walk down the rows of iron lungs, and I would stop and talk to people. You had to put a finger on a hole in their throat so that they could talk. Only heads protruded from the lung. They could see me through a mirror above their head. I would talk to my neighbours when the nurses opened the lung to wash the young man or young woman inside twice a day.

Who cares, you might ask. That was a different time, an ancient time, and it is true that I am becoming an ancient man. But you know history does not always remain history, another long-vanished place. Things that you think are in the past can simply be lying dormant. Nothing is so ancient that it is gone forever, that it cannot return, slightly altered, but just as devastating in its effect.

Vaccination rates of children for the most common infectious diseases—measles and tetanus and whooping cough―have been falling in Australia for three years, so that the rates are now below the level which is required for mass immunity. They have fallen even further in the United States. Outbreaks of measles infections have become commonplace. Children have died.

The iron lung sits there in my mind, a great foreboding on this cold winter morning, as we stand there, the little brown dog and I, at the entrance to Acland Street. I look down the street past the empty tables outside the cafes and bars. There are few people on the footpaths. On this bitterly cold morning, in every sheltered spot along the street, in the doorways of shops, in the small arcades, lie the homeless people of Acland Street, some of whom have considered this street their home for many years.

Standing there, I wonder how many of the homeless here and across Melbourne, died of Covid. Some did, I know that because some of the homeless in Acland Street disappeared and never returned. And I remember that day, March 29, 2020, when Dan Andrews announced that Melbourne was to go into lockdown two days later. I walked with Rocky that morning—I think it was on a Saturday―and on Acland Street, the outdoor tables of the cafes were crowded with people who, it seemed to me, were laughing and shouting and drinking and eating as if there was no tomorrow. And in a sense, there was no tomorrow.

They were young, much younger than me. It struck me then that they were going to be forced into lockdown in the main, to save old people. It was clear even back then that Covid was a threat to old people and a much lesser threat to children and young adults.

The first lockdown lasted 43 days. It changed the lives of most Victorians and most certainly the lives of people who lived in Melbourne. Marvelous Melbourne, once the world’s most liveable city, was a dark-feeling, menacing ghost town.

Looking back, after the many lockdowns that followed, it is clear to me that Melbourne—and Victoria― has not recovered from the pandemic. Too many Victorians were deeply wounded by the lockdowns. Forced into unbearable lives. Too many went crazy with conspiracy theories that often involved the Jews.

There was great anger and great hatred. And looking back and looking at where we are now, that anger and hatred has not dissipated. It is there in our politics, in the rise of One Nation, in the hatred, the vicious, scary hatred of Dan Andrews, who has become a sort of metaphor for the politicians who destroyed the lives of millions of people for no good reason during the pandemic. Dan Andrews who was once regarded by many Victorians as a saviour, a literal life saver and who won a landslide election, in Victoria in 2020, that nearly wiped out the Liberal Party.

I know, I know, the Victorian Government is on the nose in Victoria. It has been in power for 12 years. It has been gripped by corruption scandals involving Victorian unions. It has been captured by woke madness in the public service and in semi government institutions and even in the courts. And it has left us with an eyewatering level of debt.

All this is true, but none of this accounts for the hatred and the anger that pervades Australian politics and Australian civic life, especially—but not only—in Victoria. It’s not just that there are many people who are angry with the failures of governments—and there have been many―and want to throw them out. It’s the widespread belief that governments are run by secret groups of powerful, evil people who run the world to benefit themselves and their allies at the expense of the lives of ordinary decent Australians.

At the centre of this hatred and anger lies this: a large number of people have come to believe—or believed from the start, many of them—that the covid pandemic, far from being a serious, unprecedented, threat to humanity, was a fiction created by malign actors—including scientists like Tony Fauci and politicians like Dan Andrews―acting in the interests of shadowy groups of powerful people out to control the world.

The covid pandemic may be over but the number of people who feel like their lives were devastated during those pandemic years for no good reason, is not declining, it is growing. It is growing among the people who are turning away from the major political parties and turning instead to One Nation. Pauline Hanson understands how they have suffered and are still suffering at the hands of these evil people, these shadowy controllers of our world. She too has suffered at their hands.

One Nation announced its new Victorian leader on Wednesday. According to the polls, One Nation is at around 22 per cent support in Victoria, with the state election just a few months away. It is not far behind Labor which is a few points behind the coalition. One nation could well hold the balance of power after the election.

So who is the party’s new Victorian leader? His name is Warren Pickering. He grew up in Gippsland and according to The Age, worked as a bricklayer before serving in the army. His service included a period in the Middle East. He is a self-described conspiracy theorist who believes the Australian Government is controlled by a cabal of `foreign globalists.’ More often than not the term globalist has been used as a euphemism for Jews and there is significant evidence that there was a rise of Jew Hatred during the pandemic.

He has been opposed to vaccines since 2017—long before the pandemic―and was heavily involved in the anti-lockdown anti-vaccination freedom movement. Pickering, after the November election, could be the leader of a party that could decide the composition of Victoria’s new government.

There is significant evidence that there was a rise of Jew hatred during the pandemic. That’s the state we are in.