The Future Of

Anti-vaxxers, Incels and QAnon | Drs Ben Rich and Eva Bujalka

Episode Summary

The last few years have seen dramatic growth in the popularity of these extremist groups. How will they affect society in the future?

Episode Notes

The last few years have seen dramatic growth in the popularity of these extremist groups. How will they affect society in the future?

In this episode, Jessica is joined by Doctors Ben Rich and Eva Bujalka, Co-directors of the Curtin Extremism Research Network (CERN). 

Together, they explain how these three different groups share some commonalities, as they are emblematic of growth in social media use, salad bar ideologies and red pill philosophy. They also address why it is problematic to brand people from these groups as “violent” when most are nonviolent and predict whether these groups are here to stay or if new extremist groups will take their place.

CERN is a new research network based in Western Australia that is investigating extremism-related challenges in the developed world. 

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Connect with our guests

Dr Ben Rich is a senior lecturer in Curtin University’s School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry (MCASI) and a Co-director of CERN, alongside Drs Eva Bujalka and Francis Russell.

His research focuses on the rise of the Western Far Right, non-terrorist extremist ideologies in Australia and the West, and the role of ontological (state of being) insecurity in forming politically extreme views. 

Dr Eva Bujalka is an academic and creative writer who works within Curtin University’s School of MCASI and is a Co-director of CERN.

Her research focuses on incels, the growth of anti-feminist discourse and the ‘Manosphere’ – a collective of online groups that wish to rebuild the patriarchy, improve men’s capacity for self-improvement and solve today’s masculinity ‘crisis’.

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Transcript

https://thefutureof.simplecast.com/episodes/anti-vaxxers-incels-and-qanon/transcript  

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Episode Transcription

Jessica Morrison:          00:00
This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.

Sarah Taillier:                00:09
I’m Sarah Taillier. Over the past few years, three new extremist groups have taken a foothold in Western countries: the COVID anti-vax movement, the incel or “involuntary celibate” movement, and cosmic right organisation QAnon. In this episode, The Future Of welcomed returning guest Dr Ben Rich and Dr Eva Bujalka – two of the Co-directors behind the Curtin Extremism Research Network – to learn more about these groups and how they will affect society in the future. The researchers talked about how these groups are emblematic of a growth in social media use, salad bar ideologies and red pill philosophy. They also addressed why it is problematic to brand people from these groups as “violent” when most are nonviolent and discussed what’s next for their new network. The episode was hosted by Jessica Morrison, in her last remote recording before she went on maternity leave. Now, over to Jess …

Jessica Morrison:          01:10
Ben, what are the recent anti-vax, incel and cosmic right movements like QAnon, and where have they come from?

Dr Ben Rich:                  01:18
So, these are three roughly movements, centred on three ideological projects. In the case of the cosmic right and specifically QAnon, this is a conspiracy theory that has emerged really with the rise of Donald Trump that is focused on this idea that liberal, Western democracies in particular are run by this shadowy cabal of elite paedophiles that are in the form of what's called the Deep State that are secretly pulling the levers behind all the decisions of political power, and are effectively rendering liberal democracies authoritarian in real practise. And they cite things like the fact that they view Donald Trump as the real president of the United States, that his presidency was stolen.

Dr Ben Rich:                  02:10
And this has been a theory that seems to have really started off as almost an in joke on a particular forum on the internet, but gained the potency and power of its own to the fact that it's now influencing significant political projects in the United States and even washing up to an extent on our shores here, down in the antipodes.

Dr Ben Rich:                  02:34
In the case of incels, incels are a subgroup of what's termed the "manosphere", which is a broad collection of groups, websites, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels that are based around this idea that masculinity is in crisis because of essentially third wave feminism, and that men need to take their agency back and embrace a traditional masculine way that puts women back in their place and restores the balance, as they see it.

Dr Ben Rich:                  03:25
Incels have emerged from this, and they essentially see themselves as the losers, the real losers in the, what they view as the sexual marketplace, whereby they ... they don't have, whether it's the confidence to get a girlfriend, or they are physically unable to get a girlfriend because of some kind of evolutionary feature in their morphology. They're very interested in things like phrenology and skull shape, and they are essentially incredibly disenfranchised with the modern dating scene and feel like the world's not fair to them, and essentially see the world in terms of what they view as the Chad/Virgin binary, whereby there's a group of men out there who, roughly 20% of the population that get most of the sex, most of the romantic interest at the expense of a larger 80% of men who don't fall into this elite level of status; whether that's because of their physical build, whether that's because of their acquisition of wealth and confidence.

Dr Ben Rich:                  04:15
And then we have the anti-vax movement. Now anti-vax is ... has been around for a long time. Emerges, I think, in the early ... the late 1980s, early 1990s with concerns around the way in which certain vaccines can be linked to autism, which came out of a series of very scientifically dubious papers, but has really exploded under the conditions of COVID where we've seen vaccine mandates emerge across many parts of the world, and the view that this is a form of governmental tyranny. That your bodily autonomy, your bodily sovereignty is being taken away from you, again, for nefarious purposes.

Dr Ben Rich:                  04:54
And oftentimes you see intersections between these various groups. So, QAnoners have a large tendency or a large likelihood to also be anti-vaxxers because the sources of those belief both come from this general distrust of the State, the government and society.

Jessica Morrison:          05:14
Eva, while these beliefs are quite different, there is some intersection. Could you maybe talk about the rise of red pill philosophy and salad bar ideologies?

Dr Eva Bujalka:              05:24
Yeah, for sure. So, red pill philosophy, I mean, I suspect probably as your listeners would be able to gather by now, is very much, at least for its namesake, connected to The Matrix films. So, as in The Matrix films, the red pill is this magical pill that you swallow. And if you take it, you wake up to the hidden truths of the world that you live in. Versus the blue pill, which if you take, keeps you in dreamland, complicit and unawares.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              05:54
And so, red pill really sprung up on the internet in the early 2000s, I think, especially on Reddit, but then it was very much taken up by the manosphere. But then more increasingly being taken up by QAnon, and even it's been taken up in certain anti-mandate, anti-vax rhetoric to suggest that people are being maybe lied to about things like the ... you know, about COVID, the vaccines and things like that.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              06:27
Salad bar ideologies are really, really fascinating actually, because I think that you could probably argue that something like the red pill is a progenitor of this salad bar of ideology. So, salad bar ideologies is a term ... I believe it was probably coined around 2020, I think by the FBI Director Chris Wray. In the sense that we maybe use it in a more sort of general parlance, I think you could probably say that salad bar ideologies is where a group, say again something like QAnon, the manosphere; draw on a number of different beliefs that are non-uniform, very piecemeal aspects of, a variety, a plurality, of ideologies that maybe are very non-uniform and somewhat incoherent.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              07:19
Particularly with something like the anti-mandate protests, you're witnessing groups of people identifying a lot of things online that they find fascinating, but then actually going offline, coming to these rallies and having such disparate ideas. Protesting for things like "freedom", but the curiosity that strikes me here is that freedom means something distinct for each and every one of the people that is at the protest.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              07:45
So, with a question like, "Can I talk about the rise of red pill philosophy and salad bar ideologies?" I think so much of the rise of these phenomena is really that we are seeing more people atomised, isolated by themselves, attempting, struggling to make sense of something as traumatic as a global crisis, a global pandemic. And so, I think that people perhaps turn to ... try to find some community, look for that online. But of course, if people fall into echo chambers or only find sympathetic responses, if people are maybe not so savvy to the fact that a lot of people curate a particular kind of identity online and try to get greater engagement from a viewership; this might weigh in on the sorts of channels that they visit and revisit and go back to again and again and again, and draw out this misinformation from.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              08:41
I think there's a reason why we're more and more seeing people use language like "internet brain poisoning".

Dr Ben Rich:                  08:47
[Chuckles.]

Dr Eva Bujalka:              08:48
Or seeing memes like "go outside, touch grass." There's, I think, a growing awareness that we can and should, if we can, get offline occasionally.

Jessica Morrison:          09:01
Look, Ben, some experts have stated that the actions of governments during the pandemic have only helped to further radicalise people with anti-vaccination sentiments and anti-mandate sentiments. What do you think about this, and what can we learn to better navigate future crisis events?

Dr Ben Rich:                  09:17
Well, I mean, I think ... for instance, the McGowan Government [in Western Australia] made a call. They basically said, "There's a trade off here. We can push this through. We can add a punitive element to it, or we can try and do the empathy thing. We can try and figure out what has pushed people down these pathways." And I think it opted for that former condition, that formal policy change.

Dr Ben Rich:                  09:40
And look, I think we're still in the midst of getting through COVID. We've got the very high vaccination rates, but I think that the challenge, as you've intimated is, what happens in the middle to long-term? Most people are vaccinated at this point, but you've also shown that the government has lived up to some of the criticisms that they've been making against it. That it can act in this quite authoritarian manner. That it can basically force people to get the jab, or lose their livelihood in many cases.

Dr Ben Rich:                  10:12
And I think while this might solve the problem in the short term, the longer term issue is a question of legitimacy. That people increasingly come to view the State in an antagonistic way. What that does in the middle to long-term, as I said, is during times of crisis when we need our societies to come together, when we need to work together, when we need to have a shared reality about a particular threat environment, is you basically burn those bridges to a greater extent. And then further on down the line, there is even the threat of potential political violence, although I'm very hesitant to drop the "T" word simply because it's so politicised now, but that is always a challenge that potentially lurks in the backlogs.

Dr Ben Rich:                  11:54
But I think really it's about, again, building community resilience, building community cohesion. I think we've all experienced someone who is vaccine-hesitant in our life, and it is a challenging issue to deal with. But giving them ... trying to figure out why they feel that way, show them a degree of empathy. Not necessarily sympathy, but understand what the thought process has led them there, and trying to give them off-ramps to come back in.

Dr Ben Rich:                  11:21
And I think in the long-term, that's a much more healthy way than slapping mandates in which, while they might act as a bandaid solution in the short-term ... because, let's be realistic. Even with the mandates, it was only a small number of people in the grand total of the population that were actually going to resist all the way till the end. I think it's much better to try and put social pressure on people to adopt these things.

Dr Ben Rich:                  11:46
And we saw examples of this in the United States with Black communities that initially were often quite resistant to vaccines, but as one or two members in those communities went off and got those vaccines and then they were empowered to basically talk to those communities, to disabuse them of their concerns around the vaccines, you saw gradually that those communities would adopt and have vaccines in a greater degree or greater numbers. And I think that's a much more effective way, in the long-term, that doesn't damage the credibility of the State and its authority in that process.

Jessica Morrison:          12:23
Eva, switching here a little. Incels and QAnoners in particular are often seen as violent by the public. How does this make it difficult to, say, treat these extremist views, and what should we be doing instead?

Dr Eva Bujalka:              12:37
I think that this particular narrative is something that we need to be a little bit cautious about. This obviously isn't to say that there hasn't been violence associated with these groups, there certainly has been. We know, of course, the very troubling, horrible events of the Isla Vista shootings in 2014. We know of course about the awful Toronto van attack, I think, in 2018. So, of course these groups have been connected to violence, but I don't think that presenting them unanimously as a violent group is going to be particularly helpful.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              13:14
There's a number of reasons for this. First and foremost, I think that there's perhaps a tendency to simplify what is otherwise a very heterogeneous collection of understandings that persist within these groups. I'm reminded as well that, I think it was in 2020; one the police, I think it was an assistant police commissioner, referred to people in anti-mandate, anti-vax rallies as, I'll paraphrase slightly as, "bat poop crazy," which again, it's positioning groups of people as crazy, as infinitely unreasonable. And I just, I don't think that these are necessarily very helpful narratives to be presenting a public with.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              13:59
The reason for this is, there are obviously a number of efforts to try to reach out and help these people and to help deescalate people who are on incel forums. In the UK for instance, there are current efforts to try to address misogyny in schooling systems as one part of an effort to deal with what might be called the "incel problem".

Dr Eva Bujalka:              14:25
So, my last point would really be that in trying to help people at an interpersonal level, be it if you've got a kid who is on these forums, or if you've got parents who are maybe going down QAnon rabbit holes; I think we're going to have to walk a tight rope in trying to find a bit of a common ground with them to begin some kind of meaningful communication with them, and then just working to actually unpack some very abstract ideas that they may be beholden to. It's not going to be a one size fits all job. I don't think you can have a 12-point plan to try to solve it, but I think we need to persist.

Dr Ben Rich:                  15:03                
I think the other thing to mention too here is to not repeat the mistakes of the past. And one of the things that we see, particularly with the incel community, is a process of what we term in international relations securitisation. That is, the construction of a social issue as a security issue. And one of the things I've been very cognisant of in studying the manosphere is the way in which you see a portrayal of people who fall into these communities as defined by their potential to commit terrorism, just as we did against Muslims a generation ago after 9/11, and ever since then, really. I mean, it hasn't stopped.

Dr Ben Rich:                  15:45
But what you see is that because of the actions of an extreme minority of people in these communities and yeah, it's not even 0.1% of people in these communities that are actually going off and engaging in violence because of their beliefs; you see that the entire community becomes tarnished as a result of that. And I think the problem is at the end of the day, incels' biggest threat is to themselves. It's from social isolation, it's from feeling either from their own perception of self, from their own feelings of inferiority, or from some pretty harsh realities that we live into society where aesthetics are a thing that factor into someone's success about finding romantic love in many cases.

Dr Ben Rich:                  16:29
And I think, again, emphasising the importance of empathy around this is really key to resolving it, because I think otherwise ... there's a term in the community. Just as there's a "red pill", there's a "black pill", and the black pill refers to essentially embracing a sense of hopelessness. That there is no way out of this, that you just sink down into the mire and the muck and accept your lot in life. And I think that, in and of itself, in the way in which people become susceptible to embracing that is really a failing of society, and we need to be far more proactive in addressing that.

Jessica Morrison:          17:07
You've both spoken about proactive measures and addressing these societal issues. Is it grassroots work that we need to be doing in our communities to nip all of these movements essentially, and to help these people? Is that what needs to be done in the future?

Dr Ben Rich:                  17:23
What I would say is, and this is a big part of what we are doing in the research network, is promoting this idea of building community resilience, building community cohesion around these issues, being able to identify them proactively. I mean, we've talked about already the alienating effects of modern technology. I think we will look back in 10, 20, 30 years on the current state of social media and the way we engage in social media, much like we today look back on cigarettes and smoking. That we knew this was doing a huge amount of harm, but the vested parties, the churn of capital that surrounded it allowed these issues to go unaddressed for a very long time and cause a huge amount of damage to generations.

Dr Ben Rich:                  18:10
And I think just like that, we will have to start becoming more proactive in addressing these issues, in anticipating these issues, in creating alternatives. And I think it'll come from grassroots organisations, it'll come from civil society, it'll come from government organisations. It has to be a networked and whole of society response, and a big part of that is public education. And that's a big part of what we're focusing on in our group is trying to go out there and identify people, particularly in the WA space, and engage in education, engage in giving teachers, family members, community leaders, political leaders, business leaders the tools to both recognise when someone might become vulnerable to this set of issues, and also how to perhaps bring back into the comfortable light.

Dr Ben Rich:                  19:00
A good example ... I mean, we've been talking in very broad terms here, in very general terms, how something like this could look like. Let's go back to someone who's considered by many scholars to be the first incel mass killer. A gentleman by the name of Elliot Rodger who committed the 20 ... was it '11?

Dr Eva Bujalka:              19:19
2014.

Dr Ben Rich:                  19:20
2014 Isla Vista shootings. Now, Elliot didn't engage in this spontaneously. He actually went through a long process of social alienation, and you can read about this. He has a manifesto out there. I think it was called My Twisted World or something to that effect. And you can tell just from ... he details his slow dissent into this hateful world view, this hateful view on women.

Dr Ben Rich:                  19:49
And you read it, and this is a guy who was a young man, I think pretty isolated. He was quite estranged from his father. And you read it and you just think, if someone had really been looking out for this guy. If someone had reached out maybe at a crucial juncture, put their hand on his arm and had a chat with him and maybe given him some support; that might have been averted.

Dr Ben Rich:                  20:14
Now, it's not going to happen every single time. There will always be failures in such a system, but I still think it's incredibly important that we push towards that and we mobilise resources around that, instead of turning a blind eye to it or trying to put it into the space of, for instance, just policing "the pointy end", as it's called. It needs to be a much broader social awareness of this and an awareness that there is a responsibility that society has for this. It's not just a crazy person going off and doing something and we couldn't have done anything about it. In many cases we could have, if we had been more aware.

Jessica Morrison:          20:51
Where do you both think these movements are heading? Do you think more people will drop them over time, or will more people run towards them and have a greater impact on society? Or do you just think new extremist ideologies are going to take their place in the future?

Dr Ben Rich:                  21:04
I think unfortunately as the world gets more chaotic, as we see increasing pressures on things like supply chains, things like climate change, I think the salience of these ideologies will continue to grow. At the end of the day, they are offering an alternative to the current status quo in an environment where I think people are feeling very frustrated, very alienated. They're feeling like things aren't working. And suddenly, you have a group or movement that has an answer to these things, and I think we have to accept that is the trajectory we are going. And it doesn't mean we're hopeless. It doesn't mean that we can't do anything about it, but we have to not turn a blind eye to it in the way that I think we really have.

Dr Ben Rich:                  21:54
I think fortunately, from a number of conversations I've had with various organisations in and around Perth over the past six months, there is a growing awareness of this, both at the top and at the bottom. And I think the real trick here to try and come up with effective solutions is it is to really create very proactive and creative networks that can get out there and use data and evidence and analysis and philosophy and all these things that are perhaps sometimes less tangible, but nevertheless have a really important role here to come up with creative ways to deal with it. Because, I think what we've seen is that the status quo of dealing with these issues just as a purely, in brackets, counter-terrorism issue is not going to work.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              22:42
I think Ben has made a really important point here that these groups present something of a seeming counter narrative and something of an alternative to a mainstream. And I think my feeling with these groups and thinking about the impact that they may have in the future, or their potential movement into the future; I don't think that these ideas in and of themselves necessarily have a lot of draw or necessarily have a lot of pull. I don't think that they're necessarily appealing, but I think that in so far as they act as an alternative, that is, in many ways their appeal. To have perhaps an edgy counter narrative.

Dr Ben Rich:                  23:25
I mean, I might interject here. I mean, I think that the other thing to talk about, and this is ... the term "the cosmic right", I think this is something we're also dealing with in our modern world, which is this dearth of ... I don't want to use the term mystical, but the "meaning side of things". A lot of these movements draw on things that are exciting, things that are edgy. As Eva says, they pull on these mystical, occluded narratives, occluded knowledge that you are a small elite–

Dr Eva Bujalka:              23:57
Digital soldiers–

Dr Ben Rich:                  23:58
Yeah, digital soldiers in a holy conflict or some kind of greater cause, and that you have access to hidden knowledge that none of these "normies" do. That you are part of this exciting fight, this battle against evil in a world where, what is evil? We live in ambiguous times where meaning is unfixed, where what a good life is really hasn't paid out.

Dr Ben Rich:                  24:23
I mean, if you look at the double barrel that young people across the world, but in Australia, are staring down at the moment: a declining Australian dream. It's hard to buy even a house at the moment. So, a sense of general decline and a sense in which there's nothing really exciting in the world anymore, that what you define your life as in many ways is about your patterns of consumption. And suddenly, an ideology comes along that tells you about these hidden knowledges and these hidden evil individuals behind closed doors. And for someone who's particularly young looking for meaning, looking for a cause to throw themselves into, that can be incredibly seductive.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              25:09
And even to build on that, I think the thing that is just genuinely fascinating is that it is an articulation of a crisis. I don't think that it is anything less than that. Because if you believe that you, by taking the red pill, are being let in on some hidden covert truth that has just been hidden away from you; then presumably there is some force or agency or group or what have you that is trying to lie to you.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              25:39
Even people going down the rabbit hole online with something, becoming sceptical or hesitant about vaccines, for instance; I think a lot of it does start from people's genuine uncertainty and anxiety around something like maybe putting something into their bodies or putting something into their children's bodies. Going online, finding maybe what looks like a reputable source that's maybe presents a dissenting position, that says, "Well, oh yes, vaccines are here, but did you know that ivermectin is also an alternative that, according to all of this data in these papers and these statistics has remarkable qualities?" But then of course pursuing that rabbit hole, falling down further with it, the discussion then going onto, "Well, if the mass media is trying to hide the wonders of something like ivermectin, what else are they trying to hide from you? Is this Big Pharma just pushing profits, and is this a concern with politicians bound up with Big Pharma trying to push for profits?" So, just continuing this this chain of this escalating anxiety that just pushes the conspiracy and the fear further.

Dr Ben Rich:                  26:48
And I think this all comes down to, in many ways, a quote that I'm going to butcher, but it is something to the effect of "rather an evil God than no God at all." And I think when you are able to identify a group or an individual that is responsible for all of your life's banalities, your anxieties, your senses of unfulfilled desire; it's comforting to at least have an explanation for that rather than, well, "Shit happens in a modern complex world."

Jessica Morrison:          27:36
Whether you’re optimising energy consumption or exploring the depths of the oceans, we invite you to work with us to find realistic solutions for your business or industry. Curtin University can provide assistance from product testing and benchmarking, to investing in new technologies. You’ll have access to specialised facilities and expertise backed by groundbreaking research. To find out more, visit curtin.edu/workwithus.

Jessica Morrison:          27:56
How is the Curtin Extremism Research Network different to other research groups in this space?

Dr Ben Rich:                  28:02
Well, I think one of the ways we have tried to position the network is, we try to basically approach the questions from a non-security focus. So, we look at them in terms of how they represent social issues, political economic class; and we tend to deprioritise the terrorism, the door kicking, the black balaclava stuff, because there's a zillion people out there working on that with hot takes on Twitter. You can log in and find it all the time.

Dr Ben Rich:                  28:33
Another, I think, unique element that we've carved out is just, as I alluded to earlier, the diversity of the network. So, we have people from education, we have people from psychology, we have people from business and law, we have linguists, we have all sorts of individuals. And our view is that by leveraging these various individuals and their specific skillsets and talents and interests, it just gives you a higher likelihood of coming up with new and novel, interesting things around these issues that, again, tackle them for the multi-discipline area issues that they are.

Dr Ben Rich:                  29:12
We've been quite active. We had our launch at the start of the year where we had Dr. Anne Aly ... it was almost a past the torch moment where she ushered us into existence, gave the keynote, wished us well in our endeavours. I mean, since then we've been getting a lot of traction with a lot of organisations around Perth interested in seeing how they can cooperate with us. Our focus is not primarily on the ivory tower side of things. Our view, I think, is generally that research needs to have real-world application in this space. And I think being both on the West Coast in Australia, but also on the face of the Indian Ocean and finding those broader networks regionally, I think will also be really important.

Jessica Morrison:          29:59
Well, I think you've answered my next question. In terms of what's next for the network, it's really just broadening the network itself and spreading into the community. Is that really what you are focused on in the next sort of 12 months?

Dr Ben Rich:                  30:12
Yeah. I mean, we've got a few research projects we're working on at the moment. So, one of our junior members in the network, Lachlan, we've tasked him with ingesting a disgusting amount of Twitch content, watching a particular influencer and how this individual devises grassroots responses to extreme right ideology.

Dr Ben Rich:                  30:36
The classic "refer someone who's a potential bad person to an established psychology network or counselling network", that maybe works in some cases, but far more often than not, it's about finding someone who someone else respects and basically having that person tell them, or walk with them through why maybe that ... those set of ideas maybe aren't as healthy for them as they think they are. Maybe it's not good for them.

Dr Ben Rich:                  31:02
So, we're trying to figure out, how can you identify these people who are in these positions? What are the kind of techniques they're using? Is that something that we can actually proactively do rather than just waiting for it to emerge organically? We also have a book project that we're working on, looking at the intersection between fascistic ideas and the incel community. And is there a connection there, or is it more again of this salad bar ideology thing, how do we identify this?

Dr Eva Bujalka:              31:34
I think even with that book in mind as well, one of the things that we're going to be investigating in it is the way by which a group like incels is written about the mainstream media. So the ways, for instance, that incels are presented either through a mad/bad binary. Either pathologised as mentally unstable, mentally ill. Did they commit their acts in part, at least, because of bad brain chemistry, or is it just that there are bad people out there that need to be punitively addressed and locked up or what have you?

Dr Ben Rich:                  32:09
And just to plug our other podcast. We just arranged with RTRFM to have a five-episode series looking at the contemporary online far right from various aspects. And again, engaging in that public education around that to try and help people understand these things a bit more effectively and how it relates to them in their lives. So, lot of things going on.

Jessica Morrison:          32:34
Yeah. I was about to say, you've got a lot going on in the next little while, and we wish you all the luck with that. It sounds really exciting. Thank you both, Ben and Eva, for coming in today. Really, really fascinating discussion, lots to digest there, and it sounds like the research network is doing a fabulous job.

Dr Ben Rich:                  32:52
Thank you.

Dr Eva Bujalka:              32:53
Thank you very much for having us.

Sarah Taillier:                32:55
You've been listening to The Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University. As always, if you've enjoyed this episode, please share it. And don’t forget to subscribe to The Future Of on your favourite podcast app. Bye for now.