Relationships are being torn apart by COVID conspiracies — once it passes, will our loved ones come back?

If it’s true that you are only ever as happy as your unhappiest child, then Tony was close to misery.

His “ordinary” teenage son had been changing over the years into someone he barely recognised — and COVID had now completed the transformation.

His son was angry and disaffected. He believed the moon landing was faked. He believed Michelle Obama was a man. He believed 5G caused COVID-19 — and he most certainly did not believe in vaccination.

Tony’s son was prepared to completely abandon the life he once loved: the young man would no longer travel, he would give up his job, he wouldn’t see people if that’s what it took to stick to his guns that the vaccine is a fraud.

I love my son, Tony told me on the radio this week, and I think our relationship is still good. But if anyone can tell me how I can reach him, how I can pull him back from these crazy theories, I would love to know.

The rise of conspiracy

I’ve spent more hours on my show over the past 18 months than I care to remember trying, calmly and respectfully, to dispatch regenerating conspiracy theories. I haven’t always succeeded.

Sometimes I know I sounded more exasperated than I should. Sometimes I may have defaulted into horrified laughter.

Once I know I was rude when I cut off a caller who was just about to take us deep into that ineradicable “tunnels under the city” theory. (A challenge to those who believe that story: stop wasting your time with your street protests — if you really do believe there are kids down there, go get them out.)

The ABC’s FactCheck has spent a year debunking COVID conspiracy theories.

But despite close investigation and the careful engagement, they just never go away.

The moment Tony told his story, the phone lines jammed with calls from one end of the city to another, chronicling fragile, frayed and sometimes even broken relationships between siblings, between parents and children, between friends and in one case between two sisters and their mother. The sisters felt they had to cut their mother out of their lives right now — she was angry and the COVID “hoax” was all she wanted to talk about. They did not. And they were missing her.

What the callers described reminded me of images of Welsh miners’ wives, standing grim-faced and silent at the edge of the pits, waiting to see if their menfolk would return from the abyss.

None of us know yet how many of our loved ones are coming back.

Can we heal?

Australia’s take-up of the vaccine is accelerating, and it could see us becoming one of the most vaccinated countries in the world: but that may also end up obscuring the small, personal tragedies of families who have divided in a time of faithlessness, ignorance, and much-encouraged distrust.

Over time, and after the infection crisis passes, many of these relationships will, I am sure, repair in the mysterious way that so many family rifts do. But the ones that don’t will endure as a powerful testament to those who have worked very hard for a very long time to foment the kind of distrust and alienation that now breaks the heart of Tony and so many others.

The chasm that should exist between understandable vaccine hesitancy, or valid scepticism about the influence of big pharmaceutical companies; or the reasonable need to see peer-reviewed evidence on one side and the wildest of conspiracy theories over on the other has become compressed. For some it is indistinguishable. That breathless narrow space is no place for a trusting relationship to thrive.

It’s not just the rabbit-holes of social media that are to blame: Facebook is getting a well-deserved comeuppance this week, but blaming the new digital behemoths is too convenient.

Loud, persistent and powerful voices in the mainstream media have for several decades now operated a business model based on creating fear and mistrust of the key institutions of a modern democracy — independent science, the judiciary, governments, public servants, teachers among others.

It was a pandemic of mistrust in the making and it was a careful preparation of the ground from which anxious, defensive, and increasingly divisive theories have grown.

The waiting game

I have a friend, an intelligent, thoughtful, and quite visionary friend — a leader in their field — who seemed to fall into conspiracy black holes right from the start.They were the only person who sent me, with urgent seriousness, a now-notorious text message from 2020 apparently revealing the plan for the Governor-General to dissolve the Victorian state government and replace Daniel Andrews with a military leader.

Various impediments to a plan remarkable for both its constitutional flaws and unbounded credulity were not elaborated.

By the time I get to some of the material they send it’s already been removed from its platform for being dangerously wrong.

I’m repeatedly asked why I don’t report the truth: but this truth is never described, and I have never found it.

My love for our friendship has not died. But I do not know how to talk to my friend. Like the miners’ wives, I’ll wait. I hope I don’t have to dig us out.

This weekend we have a fascinating collection of essays for you: you can learn a little from bears about the challenges of coming out of hibernation and you can indulge your Squid Game crush just a little bit longer with the micro-battle being fought over the show’s translation challenges.

What to read this weekend 

Have a safe and happy weekend and now that I’ve got you in your post-Squid funk (that Ted Lasso mood didn’t last long, did it?) let me turn your attention to crimes of a far more refined kind: I have a strong recommendation for a quite breathtaking documentary on the art forgery case that brought down the venerable New York art gallery Knoedler in 2011.

Why is it that the moment a conman sits down in front of a camera you can tell what he is, but in real life that divination seems so hard? 

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And thanks to my friend Zan Rowe for introducing me, via this glorious Take 5, to an epic 18 minute performance by Nina Simone of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord for black soldiers at Fort Dix in 1971.

She mingled the song with the David Nelson poem Today is a Killer, and hearing it for the first time on a fine spring morning, alone in open parkland as my happy dog raced beside me, it felt like a revelation and a deliverance.

Take your time with this. Go well

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Virginia Trioli is a presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne and the former co-host of ABC News Breakfast.

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