The fourth speaker in this session the AANZCA 2025 conference is Milica Stilinovic, whose focus is also on conspiracy theories, and especially on how people are drawn from more mundane spaces into far-right conspiracist ideation. This is often described as falling down the rabbit-hole, but the linear descent into alternative thinking that this image describes is not an accurate description of contemporary dynamics. Instead, there are any number of conspiracy theories available for users to explore, from which they may pick and choose their own worldviews.
This may involve drawing a demarcation line between those theories that users are willing to believe in, and those go too far for them; alternatively, we may understand this as navigating a conspiratorial multiverse of potential conspiracist narratives. This multiverse enables users to hold various contradictory beliefs at once; through it, conspiracy theories become malleable cultural artefacts.
The far right has hijacked this cultural manoeuvring, and uses it to embed its own views as cultural politics. Milica has analysed two far-right, white supremacist communities that represent as churches; they originated in the USA but also operate in Australia, and have been linked to violent insurrection, bombings, mass poisonings, and other acts or terror. She has analysed their communicative practices, drawn from their publicly accessible fora, in the context of two crises: COVID-19 and the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
Such communication has semantic, hybrid, and discursive levels: at the semantic level, for instance, COVID-19 was presented as a hoax; at the hybrid level, it was described paradoxically as both bioweapon and hoax; and at the discursive level tropes of Jewish conspiracies a against white populations in pursuit of a New World Order were prominent. Within this multiverse, conspiracy theories are just cultural artefacts embedded within a broader far-right ideological worldview.
