Abstract
Australia’s sociopolitical environment has entered a phase of rapid transformation defined by economic dislocation, digital disinformation, and ideological fragmentation. Within this environment, far-right mobilisation, pseudolegal subcultures, and spiritualised conspiracy movements have converged into a complex ecosystem of distrust and performative defiance. This report synthesises interdisciplinary scholarship and empirical data (2012–2025) to explain how cultic structures, conspirituality, and sovereign-citizen pseudolaw co-evolve within broader crises of legitimacy, masculinity, and governance.
Integrating political science, criminology, cultic studies, psychology, and social work theory, it situates Australian extremism within the global post-truth condition while emphasising the unique dynamics of settler identity, colonial anxiety, and neoliberal precarity. The report demonstrates that pseudolegal and conspiratorial systems offer adherents both epistemic certainty and moral purpose, functioning as secular theologies in an era of perceived institutional betrayal. It further incorporates the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) ethical frameworks (2020, 2023) to articulate applied professional responses grounded in trauma-informed, gender-responsive, and digitally literate practice.
The concluding sections outline a governance blueprint for resilience: prebunking misinformation, rebuilding epistemic trust, reforming legal education, and re-establishing collective civic ethics across institutional, community, and professional domains.
Introduction
Context and Significance
Liberal democracies are undergoing what Habermas (2022) terms a “post-democratic drift,” where trust in institutions declines amid widening inequality, digital disinformation, and polarised moral economies. Australia, once buffered by geographic isolation and relatively high institutional legitimacy, now mirrors global trends: populist movements exploit social fragmentation, alt-tech ecosystems incubate conspiracism, and pseudolegal activism translates ideological grievance into performative rebellion (Blackbourn, 2021; Sarteschi, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic intensified these dynamics, catalysing networks that fused health scepticism, anti-government populism, and New Age spiritualism into a distinctly Australian variant of what Ward and Voas (2011) defined as conspirituality: the hybrid belief system combining apocalyptic distrust of institutions with spiritual narratives of awakening.
The convergence of far-right ideology, cultic control, and pseudolaw represents not a set of discrete phenomena but a unified ecosystem of cognitive and emotional strategies for reclaiming meaning in conditions of disruption. This synthesis aligns with the AASW Code of Ethics (2020) principle of critical reflection, which mandates practitioners to understand systemic contexts of harm, misinformation, and psychological manipulation. Social workers, policy-makers, and justice professionals thus require integrative frameworks capable of addressing extremism not solely as a security issue but as a psychosocial and epistemological crisis rooted in trauma, alienation, and loss of trust.
Research Aims
This report aims to:
- Analyse the structural, psychological, and communicative factors enabling far-right mobilisation and cultic convergence in Australia.
- Examine the gendered and affective foundations of conspiratorial and authoritarian identity formation.
- Evaluate digital ecologies and algorithmic architectures facilitating radicalisation and pseudolaw proliferation.
- Integrate cultic studies and social-work ethics to propose trauma-informed, gender-literate, and prebunking-based intervention models.
- Present a comprehensive governance strategy that aligns national security, social policy, and professional practice in countering extremist world-building.
Methodological Approach
An interdisciplinary meta-synthesis was employed, triangulating peer-reviewed literature (2012–2025) from political science, social psychology, criminology, cultic studies, gender research, and media theory. Sources were coded thematically through a constant-comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), with data aligned to Australian institutional and policy contexts. Grey literature, including government reviews (e.g., Productivity Commission, 2024), AASW standards (2020, 2023), and reports from law enforcement and academic centres (Baldino & Lucas, 2019), were integrated to ensure translational relevance. Findings were cross-referenced with forensic case studies of Australian extremist incidents, including the Wieambilla shootings (2022), the “Freedom Summit” network, and the Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA) nexus, which exemplify the convergence of conspiratorial spirituality, pseudolegal rhetoric, and settler populism.
The Australian Specificity
While Australia shares with other liberal democracies the dynamics of digital radicalisation and populist grievance, its distinct history of settler colonialism, federated governance, and neoliberal restructuring produces unique modalities of extremism. The mythology of self-reliance, combined with masculine frontier narratives, underpins both libertarian pseudolaw discourse and cultic performances of sovereignty. Moreover, the uneven recognition of Indigenous sovereignty introduces a symbolic field where white-settler grievance can masquerade as spiritual indigeneity, producing hybrid forms of “eco-nationalism” and “sovereign spirituality” that blend conspiracism with environmental or cultural appropriation (Cooke, 2025; Richards et al., 2025).
Within this cultural matrix, conspiritual movements—ranging from New Age healing networks to pseudolegal collectives—act as incubators for far-right worldviews framed in the language of wellness, ecology, and divine law. These groups mobilise affect rather than ideology, forming what Papacharissi (2015) calls affective publics: digital collectives bound by emotion and narrative rather than fact. Understanding this dynamic is essential for practitioners in both social and security sectors, since effective intervention requires recognition of how meaning-making, identity, and belonging are produced within networked cultic ecologies rather than traditional political organisations.
Theoretical Framework
1. Social Identity, Threat, and Collective Anxiety
Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) remains foundational for explaining the psychosocial architecture of extremism. Perceived intergroup threat, whether material or symbolic, heightens in-group cohesion and out-group hostility. In the Australian context, economic inequality amplifies this dynamic by undermining perceived status fairness (Jay et al., 2019). Far-right populism, cultic groups, and pseudolegal movements all exploit this grievance structure through moral narratives of betrayal and redemption. These narratives convert diffuse anxiety into identity work, offering adherents a coherent moral hierarchy where they are both victims and heroes.
Cultic psychology deepens this analysis. Lalich and Tobias (2006) conceptualise cultic commitment as bounded choice, where the need for belonging overrides critical autonomy. In conspiratorial or sovereign-citizen communities, this manifests through recursive language systems that both isolate adherents and provide epistemic certainty. The “in-group” becomes a moral refuge from the perceived corruption of the “matrix” or “corporate government.” This dynamic mirrors what Adorno et al. (1950) identified as the authoritarian personality: a compensatory structure that transforms personal insecurity into collective moral aggression.
For social workers, recognising the intersection of identity threat and epistemic manipulation is crucial. The AASW Practice Standards (2023) require practitioners to assess the “socio-structural contributors to distress,” which include misinformation and ideological grooming. By reframing extremist affiliation as a psychosocial coping mechanism under conditions of uncertainty, interventions can shift from punitive to restorative, aligning with trauma-informed principles.
2. Authoritarian Personality, Gender, and the Masculinity Crisis
Adorno’s (1950) authoritarian-personality construct, reinterpreted through gender theory (Connell, 2005; Kimmel, 2017), highlights the affective nexus between patriarchal insecurity and political extremism. Contemporary far-right and pseudolegal movements translate this insecurity into moral discourse: the “family,” “freedom,” and “natural law” become sanctified symbols of masculine control. Cochrane et al. (2024) document how Australian far-right fitness subcultures sacralise physical discipline and patriarchal order, constructing “warrior” identities that echo both New Age self-mastery and fascist aesthetics.
This gendered dimension extends into the conspiritual sphere, where male influencers appropriate spiritual lexicons to assert moral authority, often combining wellness rhetoric with misogynistic resentment. The manosphere, as Pearson (2023) argues, operates as a gateway ideology, connecting online male-supremacist discourse to broader extremist mobilisation. Within pseudolaw communities, the “sovereign man” archetype performs legal domination as proof of masculine virtue, mirroring both cultic guruism and patriarchal religious authority.
Embedding gender analysis in social-work and governance frameworks is therefore essential. The AASW Code of Ethics (2020) principle of social justice obliges practitioners to challenge gender inequality as a systemic harm. Prevention strategies must address masculine grievance as a public health concern, integrating psychoeducation and community dialogues on gender literacy (Roose & Cook, 2025). Cultic rehabilitation programs should incorporate relational therapy models that reframe control and dominance as maladaptive responses to vulnerability.
3. Communication Ecologies and Affective Publics
Digital-media scholarship reframes radicalisation as participatory rather than purely persuasive (Papacharissi, 2015; Bliuc et al., 2020). Online conspiratorial and cultic spaces function as affective infrastructures where emotion substitutes for truth, and identity is co-created through performance. The aesthetics of awakening, exposure, and resistance dominate these ecologies, producing what Dowling (2023) calls algorithmic outrage economies. These systems reward spectacle over substance, reinforcing binary worldviews and punishing doubt.
Within these digital ecologies, conspiritual and pseudolaw movements perform parallel mythologies: both claim access to hidden truth through initiation rituals. The dissemination of “templates,” “notices,” and “affidavits” in sovereign networks mirrors esoteric initiation texts in cultic groups. This performativity constitutes what Matheson (2018) identifies as psychotic discourse: a re-enactment of authority that rejects the state’s symbolic legitimacy while mimicking its form.
Prebunking interventions grounded in inoculation theory (McGuire, 1964; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2022) are critical for countering this process. Educational programs that simulate misinformation tactics—demonstrating emotional manipulation, logical fallacies, and algorithmic amplification—can cultivate cognitive resilience. Within social work, prebunking aligns with the AASW commitment to evidence-based practice, enabling practitioners to empower clients with critical media literacy and epistemic humility rather than reactive fact correction.
4. Cultic Systems, Sovereign Law, and the Myth of Mastery
Cultic and pseudolegal ideologies share a structural homology: both promise mastery over complexity through symbolic control. Lifton’s (1989) eight criteria of thought reform—milieu control, sacred science, demand for purity, confession, sacred language, doctrine over person, dispensing of existence, and mystical manipulation—map precisely onto the rhetorical structures of sovereign-citizen and conspiritual networks. Adherents reframe bureaucratic procedures as spiritual warfare, transforming legal documents into talismans of self-liberation.
The psychological function is compensatory. As Sarteschi (2020) notes, sovereign adherents often experience cognitive rigidity and moral narcissism, interpreting state authority as personal violation. Pseudolaw provides ritualised defiance, allowing participants to reclaim agency through linguistic theatre. This aligns with Lalich’s (2004) concept of bounded reality, where closed epistemic systems substitute certainty for truth.
Understanding this mechanism has direct implications for social-work and governance practice. Engagement strategies must prioritise containment over confrontation. The AASW Practice Standards (2023) advise practitioners to “engage respectfully with belief systems while maintaining professional boundaries.” De-escalation in encounters with pseudolaw adherents requires acknowledging emotional needs for control and recognition, while redirecting focus to shared civic values and relational accountability.
Economic Inequality, Moral Anger, and Cultic Mobilisation
Material Insecurity and Moral Displacement
Economic restructuring has produced polarised labour markets and precarious identities that erode collective belonging. Jay et al. (2019) demonstrated that perceived inequality, rather than absolute deprivation, drives punitive nationalism and authoritarian sentiment. Within cultic and pseudolaw movements, this moral displacement is re-coded through spiritual or legal metaphors: participants are taught that systemic injustice is not structural but conspiratorial.
Lifton (2019) and Lalich (2004) show that cultic recruitment thrives under existential insecurity. In Australia, neoliberal reforms since the 1990s intensified individualised responsibility, framing unemployment or debt as personal failure. This aligns with Menzel and Green (2013), who argue that neoliberal choice ideology transforms regulation into moral injury. Sovereign citizens and conspiritual activists internalise this injury, then externalise blame toward the state, “global elites,” or imagined corrupt systems.
For social workers, recognising economic precarity as a radicalisation risk is consistent with AASW (2020) commitments to structural advocacy. Intervention must combine psychosocial support with systemic advocacy for fair housing, labour protection, and income stability. Economic inclusion interrupts grievance cycles before they are spiritualised into cultic cosmologies of persecution.
Consumer Sovereignty and the Illusion of Control
Menzel and Green (2013) describe how the neoliberal fantasy of limitless autonomy creates a cognitive schema that cannot tolerate constraint. When environmental or public-health policies impose limits, these are experienced as moral violation. Conspirituality translates this grievance into metaphysics: “divine sovereignty” becomes a theological rationalisation for deregulated individualism.
Within Australian contexts, sovereign-citizen communities adapt this mythology into legal literalism, insisting that statutes or mandates violate “natural law.” Matheson (2018) defines this as psychotic discourse—a symbolic refusal of complexity through ritualised literalism. Economic stress and bureaucratic frustration thus feed directly into epistemic rebellion.
AASW Practice Standards (2023) emphasise critical analysis of macro structures; practitioners should interpret such belief systems not as irrationality but as distorted attempts to reclaim control. Psychoeducation and reflective practice models that frame regulation as social cooperation rather than domination can recalibrate moral perception.
Gender, Masculinity, and Authoritarian Identity
Masculine Crisis as Political Resource
Cochrane et al. (2024) identified Australian far-right enclaves that glorify discipline, hierarchy, and physical dominance as responses to perceived emasculation. These “salad bars of hate” blend global hegemonic masculinity with local anti-elite narratives. Roose and Cook (2025) demonstrated parallels between jihadist and far-right masculinities, where humiliation and status threat become transmuted into protective violence.
Cultic formations replicate this gender script. Male leaders perform patriarchal authority through “divine” or “sovereign” status; female adherents are idealised as moral anchors yet subordinated to purity codes. Pearson (2023) argues that male-supremacist ideology operates as connective tissue between online grievance cultures and offline violence.
Social-work practice must therefore embed gender literacy across prevention frameworks. The AASW (2020) social-justice principle mandates advocacy against patriarchal harm. Programs integrating respectful-relationships education, narrative therapy, and trauma-informed men’s groups address the emotional deficits that extremist recruiters exploit. Gendered prevention is central to counter-extremism.
Intersection of Race, Gender, and Nation
The politics of “restoring order” fuses racial nostalgia with gendered fear. Kimmel (2017) termed this the “angry white men” syndrome, where status anxiety becomes ethnicised and sexualised. In Australia, this manifests in eco-nationalist fantasies of protecting “Mother Earth” from multicultural corruption, a theme visible in CEA propaganda and eco-fascist online forums (Richards et al., 2025).
Cultural analysis shows that such narratives sacralise whiteness as stewardship. Cultic spirituality reframes racial hierarchy as cosmic balance. Professional responses must thus confront racialised mythology without pathologising spirituality per se. AASW (2023) requires culturally responsive yet critically aware engagement, differentiating genuine Indigenous cosmology from its settler appropriations.
Conspiracy, Culture-War Narratives, and Digital Disinformation
The Affective Infrastructure of Conspiracism
Busbridge, Moffitt, and Thorburn (2020) traced the Australian mutation of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy, a master narrative absorbing diverse anxieties into a single explanatory myth. Within conspirituality, similar mechanisms translate emotional discomfort into metaphysical dualism: light versus darkness, truth versus deception.
Papacharissi (2015) conceptualised such movements as affective publics. Participation is emotional rather than epistemic; belonging is sustained through shared outrage. Bliuc et al. (2020) found that local crises, such as bushfires or vaccine mandates, heighten this affective cohesion.
For practitioners, prebunking approaches grounded in McGuire (1964) and Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2022) are essential. Training clients and communities to recognise emotional manipulation before exposure fosters psychological immunity. This aligns with the AASW (2023) standard on evidence-informed education and community capacity-building.
Media Ecosystems and Algorithmic Amplification
Dowling (2023) and Selvanathan et al. (2025) demonstrate how alt-tech platforms reward outrage and polarisation, producing self-reinforcing radicalisation loops. Australian populist influencers migrate between Telegram, Rumble, and Gab, maintaining parasocial intimacy that simulates pastoral care. These “digital shepherds” parallel cultic gurus, offering certainty amid chaos.
Jones et al. (2024) found increased normalisation of racist and sexist content within far-right outlets after 2020, coinciding with algorithmic amplification. Digital literacy must therefore be treated as a public-health priority. Social workers, educators, and community leaders can integrate critical-media curricula modelled on prebunking research, emphasising emotional regulation and fact-checking as civic virtues.
Cultic and Pseudolegal Convergence: Case Analyses
The Wieambilla Shootings and the Pathology of Sovereign Faith
The December 2022 Wieambilla killings represent the most catastrophic manifestation of conspiratorial religiosity in Australian history. Investigations (ABC News, 2023; ISD Global, 2024) revealed that the Train family fused evangelical millenarianism, sovereign-citizen ideology, and anti-government paranoia into a totalising belief system. The incident illustrates what Lifton (2019) called totalism: a closed cognitive environment where sacred violence becomes justified as purification.
Psychiatric analysis post-incident noted traits of moral absolutism and persecution delusion consistent with cultic mind control. Online traces indicated immersion in pseudolegal discourse, framing police as “agents of Babylon.” This hybrid theology transformed legal defiance into martyrdom.
From a social-work perspective, early intervention might have been possible through multidisciplinary collaboration between mental-health, policing, and community services. The AASW (2023) framework for risk assessment recommends attention to ideological rigidity, isolation, and escalating distrust as clinical warning signs. Cross-sector referral pathways could translate such observations into preventative outreach without criminalisation.
The Coast Environmental Alliance and Settler Conspirituality
The Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA), active on the NSW Central Coast, exemplifies “green conspirituality.” Ostensibly an environmental movement, it fuses New Age spirituality, sovereign rhetoric, and far-right populism. Ethnographic monitoring (Cooke, 2025) shows that CEA events operate as recruitment hubs linking wellness influencers, anti-mandate activists, and pseudolaw adherents.
Their ideology reframes environmentalism as divine warfare against “globalist” control. Leaders such as Jake Cassar utilise Indigenous symbolism and ritual to claim moral authenticity while rejecting institutional governance—a process identified by Asprem and Dyrendal (2021) as spiritual mimicry. This settler appropriation functions as identity laundering, enabling extremist networks to evade scrutiny through ecological and cultural rhetoric.
Policy implications are substantial. Counter-extremism frameworks must integrate cultural-competence training that distinguishes legitimate Indigenous activism from settler-spiritual imposture. The AASW Code of Ethics (2020) ethical value of integrity requires professionals to confront cultural fraud as a form of epistemic violence.
Psychological and Criminological Mechanisms of Pseudolaw
Cognitive Rigidity and Symbolic Rebellion
Sarteschi (2020) and Matheson (2018) describe pseudolaw as compensatory cognition—a linguistic ritual granting illusory mastery over legal complexity. In Australia, case studies reveal escalation from “paper terrorism” to armed confrontation, confirming Baldino and Lucas’s (2019) classification of sovereign activism as ideologically motivated violent extremism (IMVE).
Psychologically, adherents display moral narcissism and externalisation of blame. Their defiance is theatrical, enacting what Agamben (2005) termed a “state of exception,” wherein the self declares exemption from civic obligation. The same structure operates within cultic obedience, where the leader becomes law incarnate.
For social-work and law-enforcement professionals, de-escalation depends on understanding pseudolaw as emotional regulation rather than legal argument. Training should combine motivational interviewing with cognitive-behavioural insight to reduce threat perception while maintaining procedural clarity.
Gendered Dimensions of Pseudolegal Identity
The sovereign-citizen archetype is predominantly male, middle-aged, and disillusioned. His rebellion is framed as chivalric protection of family against bureaucratic tyranny. This “protector” identity links sovereign rhetoric to domestic authoritarianism, explaining overlap with family-violence perpetrators who invoke “natural law” to justify control (Cooke, 2024).
Integrating gendered risk assessment into police and social-work protocols is critical. The AASW (2023) standard on human-rights promotion mandates advocacy for victims of coercive control, including those trapped in pseudolegal domestic regimes. Judicial education should highlight how pseudolaw rationalises abuse through misapplied sovereignty.
Cross-Sector Implications
Institutional Recognition and Legislative Gaps
Blackbourn (2021) observed that Australia’s counter-terrorism frameworks historically under-classified far-right and pseudolaw extremism. Fragmented jurisdictional data hinder trend analysis. Sarteschi (2020) recommends unified national classification and inter-agency intelligence sharing.
From a governance perspective, the Productivity Commission (2024) findings on Closing the Gap reveal how fragmented accountability also undermines Indigenous policy; similar structural incoherence afflicts extremism prevention. Whole-of-government coordination, with social-work expertise embedded, would enhance early-intervention capacity.
Professional Education and Epistemic Resilience
Embedding prebunking and critical-thinking pedagogy across professional education is essential. The AASW (2023) standard on continuing professional development provides an implementation pathway: mandatory training on digital literacy, cultic psychology, and conspiracy recognition for social workers, teachers, and health practitioners.
Educational modules should utilise simulation exercises demonstrating misinformation tactics, fostering what Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2022) call “cognitive antibodies.” This pedagogical inoculation supports democratic resilience by restoring epistemic trust in evidence-based institutions.
Summary of Empirical Patterns
- Structural Drivers: Economic precarity, gendered insecurity, and institutional distrust underpin recruitment into both cultic and pseudolaw systems.
- Psychological Mechanisms: Authoritarian personality traits, bounded choice, and cognitive rigidity create susceptibility to totalising ideologies.
- Digital Amplifiers: Algorithmic bias transforms grievance into identity, forming affective publics that reward outrage.
- Cultural Adaptations: Australian settler mythology and ecological anxiety localise global conspiratorial tropes.
- Professional Imperatives: Trauma-informed, gender-responsive, and prebunking-based interventions align with AASW ethical mandates and governance reform.
JD Cooke
Proud Marramarra Carigal/Garigal.
A Long Con, Gone on Too Long. 
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