Maslow's hierarchy of needs also explains left wing cyber-bullying:
The Atlas Society Asks Topher Field Transcript
TF: "There's a lot of good people who are fantastic in lots of other areas and domains of life who really got the COVID response really quite wrong.
It is a difficult thing for them to admit and it's a difficult thing for people like me to really shove down their throats...
It's worth thinking about the psychology of this for a moment because for the people that went along with the government narrative that this was a once in 100 year pandemic, this was a life and death situation, they bought into the rhetoric. Being in the US you may not be aware of some of the rhetoric that happened here in Australia. I'm sure it'll be familiar to you, but it was extremely intense. Things like “staying apart keeps us together”—Orwellian newspeak... they bought into that narrative that we're saving grandma. This is a 1 in 100 year pandemic and we're on the team and this is a really important thing. They were on the team that was doing the right thing. This was the rhetoric going on.
Now what happens in a normal society is everyone is somewhere on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You remember the hierarchy of needs, sort of that triangular thing. Up at the top is self-actualization, living your ultimate life. Down at the very bottom is desperate-for-survival, can't even get by. Everyone's somewhere inside that spectrum. Most of us in Western society are somewhere around the middle. Yes, some people are worse off, some people are better off, but overall we’re very wealthy as a society. What happened when COVID came along was it split everybody in two and it pushed a bunch of people down towards the very bottom, especially here in Australia, where there were harsh lockdowns, people couldn't work, people couldn't run their businesses, they couldn't earn money, they couldn't pay bills. People were pushed into a very, very desperate situation very, very suddenly and through no fault of their own. But there was another class of people that were laptop workers or welfare recipients or these sorts of people who could work from home. They weren't just left alone. They were given the opportunity to rise to the very top of Maslow's hierarchy.
The reason is this. Most of us lack purpose in life. At the top of Maslow's hierarchy is this thing called self-actualization, where everything is aligned in your life towards purpose. You have a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of achievement, a sense that you're doing good in the world and by whatever means you define that. Daniel Andrews, the Victorian premier, our equivalent of a governor, was on television every single day at 11 o' clock in the morning using these kinds of Orwellian phrases to suck people in psychologically and say, you've got purpose, you're part of the team, you belong, you're one of the good people who's saving the world—and it couldn't have been easier. Save the world by sitting on the couch? Come on, who doesn't want to do that? But what he did was he actually helped to lift people closer to the top of Maslow's hierarchy than they'd ever been before. Here's the thing, they will never be back there and they know it. They will never again have that same sense of belonging, the sense of achievement, with such ease. Sitting on the couch is achieving something amazing.
So, what we've got now, I regret to say, JAG, is that when we talk to these people, we're not talking to them about policy and whether the COVID response was right. We're talking to them about the best years of their lives, the years where they felt the most fulfilled, the most connected, the most purposeful in their entire life, I regret to say. So, when we challenge the policy, we're actually challenging the best years of their lives. That's why they don't want to let it go...
There's an expression that I think the world needs to know about Australia and I regret to say this because I am Australian and I do still love Australia, despite everything that's happened. But the problem with Australia—this is the expression—the problem with Australia is not that it is populated by convicts, but rather that it is populated by the jailers... There is within Australian culture a very strong bias towards rules, towards regulations, towards doing what you're told and towards this sort of authoritarian streak. So, these two things coexist side by side.
Unfortunately, what I think has happened is in the early days of Australia, you rewind 150-odd years ago when they were just getting out into the inland, Australia was built off the back of the sheep wool trade, etc. The wheat trade is what built Australia. When Australia was rugged and difficult and life was hard then it was more the convict mindset, it was more of that mindset that actually won out because the realities were so harsh. Then as life got more comfortable, we began to become more luxury-focused and more comfort-focused, and we began to become much more petty towards each other. That's where the authoritarian streak has really started to come out, I would say, particularly in the last 40 years. So, unfortunately, JAG, I'm sorry to say that this idea of the rugged Australian is now very much a minority. Unfortunately, we are moving in the direction of this much more authoritarian streak. That was so clear during COVID. I come from a state called Victoria. It's one of the more southern states in Australia, and of course, in our hemisphere, that makes it one of the colder states out of all of them. It's also the state I call the California of Australia. It is the state that votes most consistently to the hard left...
Medical care was only available for COVID. People died of other illnesses and other preventable issues. So, many people went without testing for cancers and various other things because you couldn't get any other medical care except for COVID medical care. We weren't allowed to go more than five kilometers, let's say it's about three miles roughly from our homes. They had the police out there with number plate scanners, and they would scan your number plates, and if your address wasn't close enough to their location, where they scanned it, they would pull you over and they would demand to see paperwork so that you could prove that you were allowed to be more than 5km from your home...
There was an 8pm curfew that was violently enforced by the police. People got arrested for taking their bins out to the curb. Old ladies got arrested for the crime of being out of their house. They'd walked to a park as part of their one hour of exercise and they sat down on a park bench. Because they sat down, the police said, you're no longer exercising, you're no longer complying with the chief health officer's orders. We're going to arrest you.
In amongst all of that were people like me who were screaming from the rooftops, these are human rights violations. This is a complete overreach reaction. There is no medical justification and there is certainly no moral justification. People like me got out there and started to protest. We became public enemy number one. The media lined up to demonize us. Celebrities couldn't wait. They were falling all over themselves to do viral videos talking about how evil I was. Other people were at the Premier in his daily press conferences. I mean, talk about an Orwellian sort of world. Every single day at 11am our Premier comes on and speaks, usually for over an hour, giving us updates about exactly how many people are sick and how many cases there are in Victoria and the little tweaks that he's made to the rules for today. The rules were ever changing. It was a moving target that you had to chase and that was on purpose. It was part of the psychology. You had to sit there and hang on his every word because otherwise you'd be out of date. You wouldn't know what the rules were today. So, all of this was going on. It's a truly terrifying thought when I think back on what it was. But, at the time, I was simply focused on trying to be one of the very few voices that was calling it out and saying, hey, this is wrong...
Someone organized a protest on April 25, 2020. Now, April 25 is a very significant day for Australians. That is our Veterans Day. It's what we call Anzac Day, Australian New Zealand Army Corps Day. That's when we celebrate and we honor our fallen and the veterans that have served, and so forth... I realized that what we were watching was the trashing of the very freedoms that our Anzacs had fought for. As much as I don't want to politicize Anzac Day, we don't honor our Anzacs by lining up in a parade and saying, “Yay for you, for fighting for freedom overseas,” whilst we're simultaneously trashing those freedoms back at home. You can't do that. So, I decided, you know what, I'm going to step out, I'm going to do this.
I get in the car that day; I drive. This is not a valid reason to leave home. I'm exiting the five-kilometer radius around my home and the protest and the public gathering are very much illegal. We go out to a park to the southeast of Melbourne and we gather there and the police, of course, they know about the event and so they're waiting for us. There were about six police cars there when I got out. I will admit to having a very large internal struggle. I knew that this was not going to end well. The thought of, hey, I could just get back in the car and drive home and no one needs to know, no one needs to be any the wiser. What I actually did was I pulled my phone out of my pocket and I started a live stream to my Facebook page, which had a few tens of thousands of people on it at the time. That forced me to actually have to follow through because otherwise I would be outing myself as a coward. Of course, none of us know whether we're cowards or not. Really none of us wants to believe that we're cowards. But until we get tested, we don't actually know. In reality, that was such a privilege of my life. I've had a very, very good life. That was really one of the first main tests of courage that I've ever really faced. So, I used that phone and that live stream to force myself to do what I knew to be right. But everything in my body was rebelling against doing that. My psyche and my upbringing and all of that came back and wanted me to not do that. Well, I did it.
In the end, the police didn't know what to do, so they left. They told us, we're coming back here in one hour and if anyone's still here, you're all getting arrested. What we heard was, you can carry on for one hour. So, we did that and we gave our speeches and we held our protest and I live streamed that. Then I drove home looking in my mirrors all the way, paranoid that the police were going to come and chase me. Of course, they didn't. I got home and discovered that the live stream had over a hundred thousand views on it. Now let's remember in Australia, you've got to multiply that by about 13 to compare it with American numbers...
JAG: Let's dive into your book, Good People Break Bad Laws: Civil Disobedience in the Modern Age. You have many examples of brave individuals who engaged in civil disobedience. One of whom I had not heard of before, that's Claudette Colvin. Tell us about her.
TF: She is such an underrated hero and I'm so glad you brought her up. I loved when I came across her story; I thought, I need to help the world know about this. Having the opportunity to put her story into my book was really wonderful. Think of her as Rosa Parks. Before Rosa Parks was Rosa Parks, she was in the same era in the segregated south and before there was any real movement to participate in. Nine months before Rosa Parks took her stand, or should I say took her seat on the bus and refused to move to the back, Claudette Colvin did exactly the same thing. Now Claudette, you could argue, is the reason why Rosa Parks did what she did. The reason why I say that is number one, Rosa Parks credits Claudette. She was aware of what Claudette did and she credits Claudette with inspiring her. But also Rosa Parks was actually working with a human rights organization, an equal rights organization at the time. They were actually looking for an opportunity to say, well, how do we wage this campaign? How do we push this campaign forward? The idea came up of her doing what she ultimately did. It's questionable as to whether that idea would have ever come up had Claudette Colvin nine months earlier not done what she did.
Now interestingly enough, her particular story, she was a 15-year-old girl. She refused to move to the back of the bus. She got arrested. She was charged with a crime because obviously she touched police officers and what have you. A 15-year-old girl assaulting police officers; I don't think so. Especially if you've seen photos of her. She was not a tall or powerful young girl. So, they threw the book at her. The civil rights organizations at the time were going to defend her, were going to include her in their court cases going forward until it was discovered that she was pregnant out of wedlock as a young girl, which obviously even now carries a lot of shame with it. But certainly back then that was complete shame. So, she found herself both, for political reasons, because she had defied the authorities and there were a lot of people even resenting that, “Oh, you're bringing trouble down on us. Why are you causing trouble? Can't you just be a good girl like the rest of us?” but also with the social shame of being pregnant out of wedlock, ending up having to leave her family home where her family had been for generations. Then she moved to New York.
Now what's interesting with her was that the criminal charges stuck and she wore that label of a criminal until she was in her 80s... She had a beautiful quote. She was asked about whether it was worth it. She said, “I was a spark. The spark caught on.”...
JAG: What about the argument that if each of us starts to decide which laws to obey and which laws to break, doesn't that kind of start us down the road of anarchy?
TF: Well, it's a funny thing, because civil disobedience and the righteousness of a given action is much easier to see in hindsight than what it was at the time. That's simply because by definition, at the time, they are in the minority, they are defying the authorities. If that wasn't true, then civil disobedience wouldn't be necessary. It wouldn't be happening. So, if we're a part of the culture, then by definition, the civil disobedience is defying the culture that we're a part of. So, we automatically condemn the people at the time. But then when we look back in history, the people that won have now become part of the culture. We look back on Rosa Parks, we look back on Martin Luther King Jr. We look back on so many of these people, and we say, oh, well, obviously they were right. But we're only saying that because what they said became a part of our culture later on, right? We're still actually boxed in with our own cultural frame of reference. That's what we're looking at.
That's why when someone does civil disobedience, at the time, it's very difficult to accept because they're defying our culture. We look back and say, well, you're not like those heroes of the past. You can't compare yourself to them. Well, no. But what I'm doing is the same thing. Your cultural frame of reference accepts them and rejects me. That's what's actually going on here. Your question's a very valid one. I mean, we've got people, I'm sure you have the same thing in the US. We've got people running around doing nonsense things like gluing their hands in the middle of intersections and calling it civil disobedience, hanging themselves from wires over train lines so that coal trains can't carry the coal out to port and these sorts of things and making themselves a nuisance. They apply the label of civil disobedience to themselves and claim protection essentially under this concept of, well, this is righteous civil disobedience. No, nothing could be further from the truth.
I go into detail about this in the book Good People Break Bad Laws; I apply two specific tests. There have to be two tests in order for a law to be considered bad and civil disobedience to be considered good. Even then, we have to be very careful how we go about civil disobedience. I dedicate an enormous number of chapters to this whole problem. The first test is a principles-based test, and it's simply this: Would obeying this law or enforcing this law do more harm than not obeying it or not enforcing it? In Psalm 94, in the Bible, there's a verse there that says, wicked rulers cannot be allied with you; they use the law to cause injustice. All right, so there's this idea that the law can actually be a source of injustice itself. When that's the case, we have an obligation not to be allied with them, not to obey them. That's the first test. Does obeying or enforcing this law do more damage than breaking this law would? If that's the case, well, then you've got a potential candidate for civil disobedience. But then, that's a very pragmatic test.
Utilitarianism can be twisted a little bit. I never make a decision on purely utilitarian grounds. I also refer back to a principles-based test as a libertarian, and I ask myself, does the government have the authority to do this in the first place, irrespective of whether the outcome is good or bad? Put aside utilitarianism just at a principled level, is this something the government has the authority to do. In order to answer that, we have to ask ourselves, where does the government get its authority from? Again, I dedicate another bunch of chapters to exactly that question.
In a society that says the government gets its power from the people, the delegation of authority from the people, well, what does that mean? We can't delegate something that we don't already have. So, we can begin to calculate what the limits of government power might be, if that is, in fact, where they get their power from. Again, that's something that I spend a number of chapters on. When you put the two of these together, that's when you have a candidate for civil disobedience, when obeying that law or that rule is worse than disobeying it, it would do more harm. It's not something the government has the right to do in the first place. Now you have a candidate for civil disobedience.
I would say the COVID restrictions well and truly met both of those criteria. But we still have to go further, because just because the government has written a law that is evil, that doesn't eliminate everyone else's property rights, that doesn't eliminate everyone else's human rights. Saying, “Oh, well, the government is putting CO2 into the atmosphere, and that's bad for us, because I believe in climate change and it's going to kill us all. I'm going to go and glue my hand to the middle of an intersection and deprive everyone of their ability to travel and go to work.” Whoa—hold on! Okay, so you're going to now deprive everyone else of their property rights, their right to life, liberty for the freedom of movement, the ability to use that public roadway by gluing your hand to it? Because government is bad? Well, hang on. One of these things does not follow the other. Just because government is bad doesn't abrogate everyone else's human rights, doesn't abrogate everyone else's property rights. What we have is a disconnect.
What's going on psychologically for these people—it's particularly the Greens movement that seems to do it—is there is a virtuous corruption that comes in where they say, I'm so virtuous because I'm fighting for the future of humanity. I'm so virtuous that I can now do anything. It's justified in that virtuous goal, the pursuit of that virtuous goal. That's a deeply dangerous fallacy to fall into. Coming back to your question, it's a simple matter of asking is this still civil disobedience or has this just become vandalism? Has this just become a public nuisance? Has this just become depriving other people of their rights? Because what we did, for example, in protest against the lockdowns was we would go shopping. Initially, my first ever protest was very, very timid. ISorry, not first ever protest. After that protest that I spoke at, I organized a protest where we would all go to the supermarket with messages written on our masks. I wasn't even advocating for people to not have masks. I was saying go there with messages on your shirts and on your masks.
Then over time things escalated as the police brutality got worse and the gloves came off. But we never, never went out there for the purpose of depriving people of access to roads or parks, or etc. I mean when you've got 10,000 people walking down a street, yes, okay, the cars can't move until you've passed by. But we're not blockading roads, we're not gluing ourselves to things. We never engaged in vandalism with the exception of a handful of just hot-headed, idiot individuals that we pushed out of our group and handed over to the cops very, very quickly because we didn't want them and we didn't want to be associated with them. Civil disobedience is the choice not to obey the rules that the government has made because obeying them will do harm and because the government doesn't have the authority to make those rules. But it does not give you permission to go and become a vandal, a wastrel, a public nuisance. The human rights of the people that you live amongst still exist and are still enforceable even if the government is doing the wrong thing...
JAG: As an American, I've heard about the authoritarian measures taken in Australia. Out of curiosity, what rights/ liberties do you think are the most ignored in Australia and which are the most protected?
>TF: We have almost no protections here in Australia. We inherited from the British their common law system. If you've read the Federalist Papers, in the US there was a big debate about whether they should enumerate their human rights or whether they should not. Ultimately with the argy-bargy back and forth, I'm sure you all know the history. They ended up creating the amendments to the Constitution and articulating and enumerating a number of human rights, the First Amendment, Second Amendment, etc. In Australia, we had a similar debate, but we went the other way because the argument was we have all of these rights already in common law...
We should have done the same thing because in practice, we have no rights here in Australia. All of the rights that we should have inherited through the English common law system have now been all but eradicated.
COVID really was a bit of a last nail in the coffin for that, where they actually were explicitly violating our human rights, our enumerated human rights under the UN Charter of Human Rights and under various Australian legislation. But all they had to do was simply say, yes, “but we're doing it to save lives.” At that point, our Australian Human Rights Commission, our Victorian Ombudsman, and others pretty much just rolled over and said, “Oh, okay, well, you can do what you like then.” So, what we have now in Australia is a situation where our rights that were contained in English common law are no longer really enforceable in our courts. I mean, there are people who try. There are many people who go in there and they fight the good fight. But increasingly the system just railroads them, runs straight over the top of them. They can sit there and say, “Well, that's unjust and that's not how it should have gone.” They can do that all they like. But in the end, the courts have access to the police and the police have guns and the rest of us don't. So, they win.
We're in a bit of a tricky situation here and we've made it worse for ourselves by reelecting our Labor government just last weekend here in Australia. This is like the Canadians reelecting their party under the new leader, Mark Carney. We've done a similar thing here in Australia and it's pretty ugly. It certainly concerns people like myself because freedom of speech, for example, to name one, is central to what I do. I've been doing this for 16 years. I'm an outspoken social commentator, political commentator, and Christian. All of those things are being criminalized gradually here in Australia. It's literally true in Australia. Just to cite one example, if someone were to come to you with thoughts of gender confusion and you were simply to say to them, “Hey, listen, can I pray with you that you come to terms with your body as it is, and maybe we can work through this and I'll support you through this, and maybe we'll get to the point where you could accept that you've been made the way you are and that's a good thing.” You're now a criminal in Australia. You cannot say or do anything that might cause someone to not proceed with a gender transition. Just to give you one example.
What we've got now is a situation in Australia where not only is our freedom of speech dead, but so many normal conversations, healthy conversations, have been completely criminalized...
JAG: Did Australia have their version of an Anthony Fauci and are there still powers like emergency measures granted to the government that still have not yet been withdrawn?
TF: Yes. Our version of Anthony Fauci was a guy called Anthony Fauci. He was all over our television as well, not just yours. He really became God worldwide, certainly in the English speaking world. We did also obviously have our own local authorities. But they were largely just parroting and repeating whatever it was that Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization were saying. Do we have those individuals? Yes, but they really were just sock puppets. They were saying whatever the Premiers and the Prime Minister here in Australia wanted them to say. They were saying whatever they were told to say by Anthony Fauci and by the World Health Organization in Victoria, because that's where I know best. I've moved out of Victoria now. I fled California. I fled our version of California, JAG. It's been a wonderful change, but I am still in Australia.
In Victoria, they introduced a thing called permanent pandemic powers. You'd be familiar, I'm sure, with the World Health Organization and the pandemic treaty that they've been negotiating and trying to ram through. It's a pretty terrifying, draconian piece of work. We've already passed something largely similar in Victoria. What it allows the premier of Victoria to do is to unilaterally declare a pandemic. Including, by the way, terms of reference that are so broad. If there is the potential for a pandemic anywhere in the world, he or she can trigger these powers. These powers allow him to declare entire groups of people to be illegal on the basis of what they believe. So, for example, it was targeted at people like me for believing that COVID wasn't that bad and we shouldn't be locked down. He can then send out the police to mass arrest and incarcerate those people for up to two years. They do not get a lawyer, they do not get a phone call, they have no rights. They do not get a trial. They can be held without trial, without charge and without a lawyer, and without contact with their family or anyone else for up to two years under these powers. Now, he hasn't exercised those powers, but he was obviously putting them in place in preparation for using them against people like me. That's what we saw coming and we kept protesting regardless. If you watch the documentary Battleground Melbourne, you'll see a lot about that.
They were escalating their violence and they were moving towards essentially concentration camps. That's what the legislative pathway was being laid for. They were physically building facilities where they could mass incarcerate large numbers of people. Those facilities still exist, the laws are still on the books, but we managed to stop the political momentum for it. We broke the will of the Victoria police essentially by just continuing to come back and come back and come back until they escalated their violence up to the point where there was nothing left for them to do but start killing people on the streets. There was a question of whether they would actually go that far. Such was the hysteria, the mania that had taken over my state. Thankfully they didn't. But yes, those camps still exist. Those laws are still on the books in Victoria. I don't expect they're going to get used anytime soon. They could sit dormant for 20, 30, 40 years, but they're there. At any moment in time a future government could turn around and say, ah, those are useful laws. We're going to make use of those for our own political purposes...
Here in Australia we had a Communist Party through the 1980s and obviously in ’89, the Berlin Wall fell. In ’91, the USSR broke up and the Australian Communist Party disbanded. But they funded, they provided a few million dollars in seed funding into a thing called the Search Foundation here in Australia that has basically carried on the communist ideals. Their members have gone one of two ways. A number of them went into the Greens Party. The Greens Party was a fledgling movement at the time in Australia.
The idea of a dedicated environmental political party actually comes out of Australia. Sorry about that, guys. But it came out of Tasmania in Australia and then went federal right around the same time that the Communist Party had to delist because the USSR had broken up and they were no longer politically viable. Where do their members go? Well, a bunch of them flocked across to the Greens Party, which is why we call them watermelons, they're green on the outside and red in the middle. But also a number of them saw the Labor Party as their opportunity to infiltrate and they've done that very, very effectively. For example, our prime minister, Anthony Albanese, his office, the people that he's surrounded by and works with on a day-to-day basis, includes a number of prominent public members of the Search Foundation. These are avowed communists. Our former prime minister, Julia Gillard, was herself in her younger years an avowed communist and she wrote for a communist masthead essentially while she was in university. She went on to become our prime minister.
We have, for example, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, now ironically, our Ambassador to the United States of America. Talk about someone who is completely unfit for the role that they've been given. He is very much pro-China and he's been trying to align Australia with China the whole way through while he was prime minister as well as since then. The former premier of Victoria, the man who committed the human rights abuses against me and so many others, a man by the name of Daniel Andrews, he was signing up to China's Belt and Road Initiative. Now this is a money-based program where China is basically throwing billions of dollars at infrastructure all over the world, giving out loans essentially for the purpose of getting control, for the purpose of getting their claws into various jurisdictions. The Victorian government under Daniel Andrews was very keen to sign up and take the money. Daniel Andrews himself, while he was premier and also since no longer being premier, has been traveling to and from China and has very deep Chinese business ties over there and clearly very deep sympathies for them ideologically as well.
Are we infiltrated by China? Yes, but it's not as though we have a bunch of Chinese spies running around. What we have is a bunch of useful idiots running around. Unfortunately, thanks to the Labor Party and the Greens, quite a lot of those useful idiots have their hands on power...
The people who we look back on and say they were right at the time—we talked about Claudette Colvin and that whole movement at the time—they were regarded as being wrong, as being evil, as being criminal. They were marginalized. That was the cultural response at the time. But we look back on them, at them, and say, oh, well, these people were absolutely right...
[Ignaz] Semmelweis... discovered germs... they tricked him into going into an insane asylum, supposedly because there was a patient there that needed to be treated. They closed the door behind him, locked him in, and less than two weeks later, he was dead. He got beaten by the guards and ironically, an infection from his injuries was ultimately what killed him.
He died alone in poverty in an insane asylum. But it was only a few decades later that they discovered germs and all of a sudden they understood the mechanism that he'd already touched on in the intervening decades before. They finally then started introducing hand washing. Tens of thousands of women, if not possibly hundreds of thousands of women across Europe died of a preventable disease that he had correctly discovered and found a solution for in the form of that caustic hand-washing protocol that he had... One of the chapters in my book is in defense of assholes because sometimes we need that person who doesn't care about your feelings, who is a so-and-so who is going to be outspoken regardless of what you think. Because sometimes those people are the ones who go first. They're the ones who were willing to defy the cultural norm and the zeitgeist of the time. They're people like me who were willing to step out and protest on Anzac Day when everyone else is locking down and obeying and doing exactly what they're told to do. Sometimes you don't need a hero, sometimes you need an asshole. We need to actually accept that that can be true and celebrate these people and try and shift how we think so that we can identify and celebrate them at the time rather than only ever in hindsight...
[Monica Smith] was willing to be publicly organizing protests and encouraging people to go to them. That was very much forbidden at the time. They harassed her, they arrested her multiple times at different protests. Then eventually they came to her and they arrested her in her car. This was kind of it. This wasn't catch and release anymore. They were arresting her and they slapped her with bail conditions. Bail basically allows you to not stay in prison. But you have to abide by the rules that apply to that bail condition. The bail condition they tried to give her was that she had to shut down her political party. She was the president of a fledgling political party at the time. She had to erase her website. She had to never speak in opposition to the government or the COVID restrictions ever again. She had to shut down her bank accounts and basically wipe the slate clean and become an absolute nobody, disappear from public life completely.
She said, no, I'm not going to do that. They said, well, if you don't sign the bail conditions, you go to prison. This was the leverage they were using. They were trying to shut people down and destroy them, not by keeping them in prison, but by applying these bail conditions to them where they effectively were in prison, even if they were still out on the street. She said, fine, throw me in prison. So, she went to prison and she was in solitary confinement for most of it because of all of the COVID protocols. Oh, we can't let you mix with the wider community. She spent most of her time in solitary confinement for 22 days in prison before they finally agreed to much more reasonable bail conditions that weren't a human rights violation. I mean, imagine arresting somebody and saying, you can't get out of prison unless you shut down your political party. This is happening in a so-called free country, in a so-called free, democratic country. She showed phenomenal courage. Then when she got out, she went right back to doing her work with changes so that she didn't just make herself jail bait to go straight back in again...
We had a moment in Australia where the police in Victoria lined up with rubber bullets like a firing squad and just started shooting at protesters. Unarmed, nonviolent, they weren't burning things down. When I say a protest, what I'm talking about in American terms is probably more like what you would think of as a rally. We weren't, this wasn't, BLM that burned things down, mostly peaceful-style nonsense, right? Peaceful, nonviolent people being lined up and shot with rubber bullets by Victoria police. That was very nearly the end of the movement because we're not an armed population here in Australia. When the government is willing to go to that length, well, the next thing is live ammunition. That's the only thing they haven't done yet. They had armored vehicles on the streets and militarized police firing rubber bullets at people.
There was this moment in time where everything hung in the balance. What's going to happen next, the day after that happens? Well, if we don't get out on the streets and protest, well, then it's over and Daniel Andrews has won and the tyrant has won. But if we do get out on the streets, we're going to get shot again, and that's not pleasant. There was this moment, and what happened was so beautiful because there were teachers and nurses who put on their uniforms, their white uniforms or white clothing, and they wrote on them how long they'd been a teacher, how long they'd been a nurse. They stood silently with masks on in a park. This is the day after the shooting, and socially distanced, doing all the right things with masks on. The police showed up with all their riot police and their horses and their armored vehicles and all the violence ready to go. They looked at these women, mostly women standing there in this park, and they went, well, we can't shoot them. If we can't use violence, we don't know what to do, because violence is the language of the state. Then they had to back down. That was the beginning of the end of the violence for them. It was only about two weeks after that that Victoria police publicly declared they were no longer cracking down on protests. That began because of that moment. That was the fracture. That was the moment where they almost had a mirror held up to their faces, and they saw what they'd become.
I saw that moment unfold. I wasn't there in person, but I saw that moment unfold. I said, someone needs to talk about this courage. Someone needs to tell the story of what these women have just done and what this whole protest movement has done over the last 18 months. I looked around thinking, well, someone needs to do this. I thought, well, I have to be the someone. I have experience in the film industry. I have connections to all the right people. I can get all the equipment in a studio to film in. I know the stories because I've been there from the very beginning. I've lived it. I know these people. They trust me. They will say yes to an interview with me, and I have an audience that I can ask to help raise the funds to be able to financially make it possible.
I put out the call for funds, and a week later, I was arrested. I'd managed to avoid arrest up to that point in time, but they came for me a week after I announced that I was making this documentary. It was amazing. I won't go into detail on that particular story, but I was out on bail later that same day, and I carefully looked at the bail conditions, and I said, okay, I can work with this. I can. I can obey the bail conditions and still get this documentary done. I said, yes, to the bail conditions. I was back out later the same day. But because of the publicity as a result of my arrest, because I am something of a public figure in Australia, there were a whole bunch of other public figures that, when I got arrested, they amplified the message. All of a sudden people began donating to the documentary in large numbers. I raised my budget within about 48 hours of being arrested by Victoria police. I actually have a thank you in the booklet of the DVD to Victoria police for helping me to raise the funds for the documentary to tell the story...
You have to go through the valley of the shadow of death to actually understand what a good day feels like. For 18 months, my home state of Victoria and myself personally, we walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Because I was a public figure, people were reaching out to me, telling their stories, looking for hope, looking for help. I would spend my nights on my laptop responding to people's emails, emails of despair, emails of people getting divorced, people thinking about ending it all, watching their children fall into depression and despair, experiencing bankruptcy and poverty and so much suffering. There were some really horrific stories. People got in their cars and ended their lives by setting their cars on fire. People ended their lives in public ways, jumping off buildings and things like that. The media wouldn't talk about it, but it was all in my inbox.
I began to drink very, very heavily in order to try and cope with the weight of the world, so to speak, on my shoulders. I began a downward spiral into a very, very dark place myself. Every weekend I'd be going out to protest again, playing dodge the cops, trying to avoid being arrested. My wife and I had to make a plan for what would happen if I was arrested. We made an actions-on document that involved who she needed to contact and why she was contacting them, what she needed to say and what she needed from them. A four-page branching document of different scenarios. What if I'm hospitalized? What if I'm just missing and she doesn't know where I am? We basically had to make plans. I had to make off-site backups of my phone and my computer. I had to live like I was a drug lord. It pushed me into a really, really dark place. I would sit up until 2 or 3 in the morning responding to people's messages. Because when you're getting those sorts of messages, those people need an answer, and they need an answer tonight because they may not have long. I would sit up until 2 or 3 in the morning responding to these people. Then at 5 or 6 in the morning, the minute a car door closed on the street outside, I would get woken up with a start, because is that the police coming for me? Is that them? I'd wait for an engine to start. Is that someone leaving and going to work, is an essential worker going to work, or is that the police coming for me? I lived like that for a number of months. Then, as I said, I finally got arrested. I made the documentary. Making the documentary was amazing. It was an illegal documentary. It's the definition of an underground documentary. We could have been raided by the police, and I would have gone to prison for a long time if that had happened. Thankfully, that never did.
During that time was when the police finally backed off; the nurses and the teachers shamed them, like I told you before. The police said, you know what? We're not doing the violence anymore. So, the size of the protests exploded. Hundreds of thousands of people. All of a sudden, where we'd had 70 people at the start, and for 18 months, we'd been showing up and getting our butts kicked by the cops because there were only a few hundred of us and at times, there were thousands of police, the numbers exploded.
I went to one of those protests, and I literally watched a dream come true, because for 18 months, I had been showing up over and over and over again, waiting and hoping and praying for the day when people showed up en masse. Finally, it happened. I had the privilege of speaking at the biggest of the protests. Now, by some reports, there were up to 400,000 people there. I don't think it was that many, but there were certainly over a hundred thousand people there at this protest. Because I'd been a face of this movement all the way through, I was invited to speak. I had the absolute privilege of standing up there and delivering a message that I'm proud of to this day, and stepping off to the side, and because the violence had stopped, my wife could come with me. We stood there side by side in front of over a hundred thousand people, watching a dream come true, watching people rise in a meaningful way after 18 months of hell."