Graham Philip: A true believer who planned in public
Thursday, 1 December 2022
ANALYSIS: One evening last year, convicted saboteur Graham Philip was speaking on a radio show.
“It would be perfectly legitimate to dismantle part of the power grid, to dismantle the national microwave circuits, and to break the national fibre optic ring to get out of this brainwashing that we’ve got,” he said, according to an audio recording obtained by Stuff.
“It’s something I’ve been exploring as a civil rights protest,” he continued. “Not as an act of terrorism – as a civil rights protest.”
The audio, which Stuff can describe in full now that Philip has been sentenced for his attacks on the national power grid, reveals that he was not keeping his plans secret. The show was publicly accessible on a channel where extreme comments were commonplace. (You can listen to it above).
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In another audio recording, Philip and several others can be heard assembling a list of people to be tried for crimes against humanity, akin to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officials. They include politicians, journalists, and health bureaucrats, dozens of whom are listed by name.
On one of his many social media accounts, Philip shared details that cause societal disruption. Several were posted one week before he tried to bring down the national grid, and one was posted in the period between his multiple attacks.
In some posts, Philip fantasised about violent retribution against those responsible for the roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines – in one, he offered to man the firing squad himself; another invoked Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern alongside a picture of a noose.
This all occurred on publicly accessible forums, under accounts with Philip’s own name, before his arrest in December last year.
It’s rare for criminals to foreshadow their actions so openly. It’s reasonable to question why Philip was able to commit the crime he all but announced he was planning to undertake: If a teenager so brazenly revealed their intent to commit a ramraid, for example, would there be a similar non-intervention?
But it’s also easy to see why Philip wasn’t stopped.
The rhetoric has become so extreme in the online spaces he occupied that once horrifying threats are now unremarkable, and it has become impossible to distinguish between an idle threat and a statement of intent.
Journalists and analysts who report on these communities have become so inured to threats – often from people who in any other context would seem harmless – that reporting them seems redundant.
It speaks to a strange dynamic within the modern conspiracism movement: It’s impossible to know in advance who truly, deeply believes what they’re saying.
Someone may talk in apocalyptic terms about evil forces enslaving humanity, but their response is to post on obscure online forums alongside people who read all the same things they do. The gap between the seriousness of their claims, and the passivity of their actions in response, cannot be rationalised.
Graham Philip is dangerous because he closed that gap. He is a true believer. He acted rationally in accordance with his worldview – albeit one that was built on grossly distorted and often provably false information. As he told police after his arrest, he believed he was a political prisoner who had been stripped of his rights, and thus was no longer bound by the law.
Such is the difficulty in stopping people like Philip. How can you tell if the next person openly fantasising about Nuremberg trials, or placing citizens’ arrests on public figures, is signalling their true intent? It’s a policy problem that is difficult to solve.
Thus far, authorities and the courts have not taken the hardest line available to them.
It’s significant the Crown opted to charge Philip under the archaic and never-before-used sabotage law. His crimes arguably meet the criteria of a “terrorist act” under the Terrorism Suppression Act, even if such a case would be harder to prosecute. The possibility was no doubt explored and rejected.
Given the range of possible consequences if Philip had been successful – which almost certainly include the deaths of people medically reliant on electricity – his sentence of three years, one of which he’s already served, is far short of a book-throwing. When he gets out before Christmas 2024, will he no longer harbour violent fantasies about the state that imprisoned him?
Richard Sivell, a so-called sovereign citizen who was charged with threatening to kill Ardern, was bailed after his first hearing and promptly ran away. He has not been found eight months later, and it’s not clear how hard authorities are looking for him, if they are at all.
With the public health response to the pandemic over, at least in New Zealand, gone too is the energy of the conspiracism movement in mainstream society.
Attempts by Voices for Freedom to get candidates into local government failed miserably, and the prospect of success at the national election next year appears doomed, even as Winston Peters – the person many of these people hold singularly responsible for making Ardern prime minister – makes an apparent bid for the support of those still suspicious of the Covid vaccine.
The less formal section of the movement, from which Philip himself emerged, still exists and is waiting to be activated.
That happened briefly this week when news emerged of two parents rejecting “vaccinated blood” for their child who requires life-saving surgery.
When the parents appeared outside court this week, a supporter could be seen with a sign invoking the Nuremberg trials. Another sign likened the Starship children’s hospital to the Stasi, the East German secret police.
Are these people true believers? We can only hope not.
This story initially called the Stasi the state police of the Nazi regime. The Stasi was formed in the 1950s and was the East German secret police force.