It’s unlikely anyone would pick up Kindness and be persuaded to adopt the author's worldview. But for someone who already harbours the many conservative anxieties the book extrapolates to ludicrous conclusions, it will serve to reinforce them.

And so, the aesthetic of rebellion overtakes unpleasant conversations about accountability and material change. In lieu of the vast and sweeping efforts needed to satisfy an anarchist utopia, we are offered lads and larks and playful disobedience. There are punk bands that want to eat the rich, and there are punk bands that want to eat ‘shrooms. What is often misunderstood is that the former is a false equivalent of the latter.

It’s into this toxic political environment that the far- and extreme-right attempts to insert themselves, simultaneously denouncing unions for their presumed complicity in the denial of the right of workers to sell their labour in the ‘free’ market and presenting themselves as the workers’ champions against tyrannical government control. Insofar as unions such as the CFMEU are understood to be in the pockets of a Labor government responsible for implementing some of the most severe and longest lockdowns in the world, they will become a lightning rod of dissent.

The news last week that a film chronicling the week following the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch – to be titled They are Us and starring Australian actress Rose Byrne as Jacinda Ardern – was being shopped around to international buyers was quickly met with widespread disdain. But what might a truthful film about the event look like?

When a self-proclaimed ‘eco-fascist’ committed mass murder in Christchurch in March 2019, it drew attention to the influence on the far-right of ecological thought ¬– an ideological tendency most often understood to be of ‘leftist’ derivation.

Galea's recent alleged embrace of Christianity and nonviolence may be a healthier response to his incarceration than might otherwise be expected, but the rampant paranoia and resentment that fuelled his actions remains widespread among his ilk on the outside. The constant platforming of racist and xenophobic propagandists, both on the fringe and in the mainstream, will only reinforce these reactionary tendencies. As such, and if US politics is anything to go by, it seems likely that there will be more Galeas in future.

Groyperism represents a new strategy, one that harks back to the original breakthrough of the alt-right.

Just a few months ago, it looked extremely unlikely that Jock Palfreeman, the Australian serving a twenty-year sentence for murder in Bulgaria, would ever be paroled. Originally convicted in December 2009 of the murder of law student Andrei Monov (and of the attempted murder of his friend Antoan Zahariev) during a street fight in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in December 2007, Jock lost appeals against his conviction and sentence in 2010 and again in 2011. Now, in 2019, he’s won his parole.

Most people beyond New Zealand don’t know that Christchurch’s famed rugby team is named the Crusaders and carries the symbols of crusading armies, including swords and armours. To this day, the team’s website proudly describes these regalia.

While anti-racists and progressives would not shed a tear for any far-right personality who has had their visa denied or revoked, it is problematic to rely on the discretion of the Immigration Minister to regulate who is allowed into the country based on their politics.

This might come across as if I’m trying to exonerate myself: ‘You weren’t paying attention, but I was.’ But I’m as culpable as anyone – and especially culpable as a trade unionist, an activist, and a writer – for laughing off the local white supremacists as nothing more than a rabble.

Even as the country was grieving with its Muslim community, a quiet process of revision began.

We are in shock and mourning, so I’ll keep this brief as I can. On Friday we learned, in the most horrific way, that we live in a country where a man can walk down the street in broad daylight fully armed and livestream his massacre of Muslims at our place of worship.

You don’t need to look for #MAGAbomber Cesar Sayoc’s inspiration. Spend some time online, and the sources for his explosive campaign against George Soros, Hillary Clinton and CNN will find you. You can’t escape versions of the memes he plastered all over his van, manifesting in tweets from angry Twitter eggs, in viral articles from Infowars and Breitbart, in Fox News clips and in, of course, speeches by Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States.

Brazil has been lobotomised twice in the last two months. In the first lobotomy on 2 September, the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro was burnt down, in a catastrophe directly attributable to the austerity policies of current president Michel Temer.

There is no amount of legalese at one’s disposal that could possibly obscure the coded messages that so often come rising to the surface in the Australian Parliament.