The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Byron Clark, who continues the focus on conspiracy theories with a particular focus on New Zealand. His interest is in discourses of climate change on Reality Check Radio, a station operated by the group Voices for Freedom, which takes an explicitly anti-mainstream perspective.
The station appears to ‘common sense’ and ‘normalcy’, in the process superseding rational discourse and bypassing factual information; instead, it pushes climate change disinformation by engaging in norm-setting and norm-entrenchment that seeks to define key actor groups such as ‘the community’, ‘the media’, ‘politicians’, and others in ways that support its worldviews.
This is also done through distinctions between ‘community groups’ (good) and ‘lobby groups’ (bad), and between (anti-climate action) ‘scientists’ (good) and (pro-climate action) ‘alarmists’ (bad). Concerns about ‘Marxists’, ‘globalists’, and other nebulous enemies are also liberally sprinkled through this.
All of this relies heavily on presupposition, relying on an anticipation of the community’s ‘commonsense’ views.
