It seemed I might be washed away. It was mid December, three weeks before rioters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. I was driving through the Northern Rivers region, just south of the Queensland border, and listening to podcasts by Pete Evans, Australia’s most prominent proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories.

The rain was like an assault. I had come here because this is Australia’s heartland of alternative thinking. I had come to try to understand people who, to paraphrase Alice in Wonderland, believe six impossible things before breakfast. But now the vegetation loomed at me through walls of water and fogged-up windows. The hills and the rivers made this a journey in obscurity.