Christian Violence Comes to Australia

Borne on the wings of the Internet

By the time police constables Matthew Arnold, Rachel McCrow, Randall Kirk and Keely Brough arrived at an isolated property in Wieambilla, a rural locality 270 km northwest of Brisbane on December 12, 2022 to check a missing persons report, the three inhabitants of the compound were so crazy, according to testimony, that they believed the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, the Jesuits, the Israeli spy agency Mossad, the Freemasons, the pharmaceutical industry, arms manufacturer Raytheon, Learjets, military-created bioweapons, Covid-19 vaccinations and chemtrails were out to get them, that children were being removed from their families, and that humans were being turned into non-humans wearing meat suits.

Before the day was out, Constables Arnold and McCrow would be dead along with a neighbor, Alan Dare, ambushed by the shooters, Gareth and Stacey Train, and Gareth’s brother Nathaniel, who would also be dead, killed by police. The shootings have been labeled Australia's first fundamentalist Christian terrorist attack.

The Trains

If their delusions sound as if they emerged from the fever dreams of American conspiracy theorists to trigger the ambush of the police and the subsequent tragedy, they should. Australians don’t often connect security threats with fundamentalist Christian groups living in their own communities. But especially they don’t imagine religious fervor extending to fundamentalist Christian groups firing assault rifles at police, egged on by violent American religious nuts.

What happened in Wieambilla on that December day is currently under review in an ongoing weeks-long Brisbane coroner’s inquest that includes testimony by psychiatrists, law enforcement officials and acquaintances of both the officers and the three dead. But from the outside, it is clear that while this case was horrifyingly extreme, there is a spreading virus of lunacy, with the right wing’s fascination with guns and charismatic Christian fundamentalism.

Mike Burgess, Director-General of Security and head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, (ASIO) on August 5 said Australia’s security environment “is more volatile and more unpredictable. You have heard me say many times that espionage and foreign interference are our principal security concerns. ASIO’s intelligence suggests that is no longer accurate. While threats to our way of life remain elevated, we are seeing an increase in extremism. More Australians are being radicalized, and radicalized more quickly.” 

Politically motivated violence, Burgess said, now joins espionage and foreign interference as principal security concerns, with spikes in political polarization and intolerance, uncivil debate, and unpeaceful protest. Anti-authority beliefs are growing; trust in institutions is eroding; provocative and inflammatory behaviors are being normalized. “This trend increased during COVID, gained further momentum after the terrorist attacks in Israel, and accelerated during Israel’s military response. The dynamics are raising the temperature of the security environment. Individuals are embracing anti-authority ideologies, conspiracy theories, and diverse grievances. Some are combining multiple beliefs to create new hybrid ideologies.” Too many, Burgess said, may still see violence as a legitimate way to effect political or societal change. 

Australian security experts including the Lowy Institute’s Lydia Khalil and Joshua Roose from Deakin University, speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald, warned that extreme conspiracy groups including QAnon have promoted false theories that the Covid-19 pandemic was either a deep-state plot, a hoax or a Chinese bio-weapon. They said the management of disaster and emergency response needs to recognize how the pandemic and the summer bushfires have been exploited to promote social division.

Australia probably has enough conspiracy theorists of its own. But the deaths of two former teachers and two young police officers in this case is a graphic illustration of how craziness can not only bleed across state and national borders but across 12,000 km of open ocean. The Wieambilla shooters were found to have been listening for at least two years to a survivalist and conspiracy theorist in the wilds of Arizona named Donald Day Jr who allegedly commented on a video found after their deaths saying “those bastards will regret that they ever fucked with us.”

“Truly from my core, I so wish that I could be with you to do what I do best,” he wrote. In a subsequent video posted under his username, “Geronimo’s Bones,” Day allegedly said: “The devils come for us, they fucking die. It’s just that simple. We are free people, we are owned by no one.”

Day is now in federal custody in the US and awaiting trial in federal court, having pleaded not guilty to allegations by the FBI that his comments constituted “a threat to injure the person of another, that is any law enforcement individual who comes to Day’s residence.” Day also allegedly uttered threats against Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. He is alleged to have possessed weaponry despite being a convicted felon including four handguns, four rifles including one AK-style assault rifle, a shotgun and three 19-liter gallon plastic buckets of ammunition.

Day’s lawyers said the indictment failed to allege a “true threat” to commit violence and Day was “therefore protected by the first amendment to the United States Constitution,” which covers the right to free speech.

By the time four police officers jumped the gate at the Wieambilla property and shot the Trains, the three completely believed that a day of religious salvation was at hand, according to Dr Andrew Aboud, a Queensland-based forensic psychiatrist who told the coroner’s inquiry he had studied an enormous amount of material including text messages, emails, diary entries, letters, witness statements and more to understand what was going on.

Gareth shot at planes he believed were surveilling them, Aboud said. He was in contact with QAnon-esque Australian conspiracy figure Riccardo Bosi and sovereign citizen Mike Holt. The Trains refused to get vaccinated for fear it was a scheme by the government to control its citizens, according to a report on Aboud’s testimony by Crikey editor Cam Wilson. Nathaniel broke through the state border during Covid lockdowns for similar reasons. The pandemic, and the response to it, Aboud testified, was a “trigger” for the series of events that left six dead, two injured and many more scarred, the inquest heard.

“The Trains believed in Christianity, but not in the way Gareth and father, pastor Ron Train, had taught them,” Aboud testified. “They feared vaccines, government surveillance, and police corruption, but believed these forces were specifically persecuting them as part of a spiritual war. These ideas and beliefs were being fit into delusional thinking, reinforced by their bizarre relationships.” Asked if he believed the trio had committed a terrorist attack, Aboud said he could see no political aim. 

The psychologist suggested the way to stop the next Wieambilla requires significant changes to public policy. “The public sector mental health service in this state and in this country is doing an absolutely sterling job to the best of its ability under very difficult circumstances and with some very challenging patients … in order to be given the best opportunity to succeed, there needs to be some real thought put into whether mental health should become a priority.”

For generations, newspapers and the so-called mainstream media have been constrained by laws and custom from delivering up the unbridled insanity that Donald Day Jr was delivering via the Internet to the Trains from 12,000 km across the Pacific Ocean in the isolated community of Heber-Overgaard, elevation 6,627 feet, population 2,898, settled in 1883 by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

Instead of therapy for Dr Aboud’s “very challenging patients,” perhaps something could be done about the social media platforms allowing Donald Day Jr along with Riccardo Bosi and Mike Holt to falsely shout fire in a crowded theatre, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously wrote in Schenck v. United States in 1919, or that humans were being turned into non-humans wearing meat suits. If so, perhaps the Trains, their neighbor Alan Dare, and the two constables would be alive today.