When Mothers Become Mouthpieces: The Idiocy of One Nation Propaganda and the Fracturing of Family
What kind of idiocy is it when a migrant mother begins reposting Pauline Hanson’s propaganda on her Facebook wall? Not just idiocy in the sense of intellectual failure, but idiocy in its older, etymological meaning: the idiōtēs, the privatized mind turned inward, cut off from the civic, the rational, the communal. This is not just embarrassing family drama. It is the very visible sign of ideological capture on top of psychological meltdown—the moment when algorithmic propaganda, far-right manipulation, and interpersonal coercion converge to turn a mother into a megaphone for her own oppression as her mind completely unravels .
This is the tragedy of Mitra’s Facebook wall. Each One Nation meme she shares is not simply bad politics; it is a betrayal of memory, a hollowing out of identity, a public performance of loyalty to those who would happily discard her the moment she ceases to be useful.
The Algorithmic Idiot Factory
Facebook is not a neutral window. It is an idiot factory. Its algorithms reward the shrill, the fear-driven, the simplistic. Outrage becomes currency, and the users become addicts. A single click on a Hanson clip or a “mass migration” video is enough to reroute the feed into a self-reinforcing loop.
Look at Mitra’s wall: it is textbook algorithmic radicalization. A clip of Australians chanting against migration. A meme equating immigration with “invasion.” A nostalgic poster of the Shah, as though feudal monarchy is a serious answer to modern crisis. This is not the product of reasoned reflection— it is the sludge that the algorithm pours into the heads of the vulnerable. Facebook does not simply deliver propaganda; it rewires perception until propaganda feels like common sense.
The Propaganda Itself: Fear and Belonging
One Nation’s propaganda is engineered for people like Mitra. It weaponizes fear while dangling belonging. “No more mass immigration”—a slogan designed to transform migrants into border guards of their own trauma. “Protect Australia”—a phrase that flatters the user into imagining themselves as defenders of a homeland that, in reality, regards them as expendable.
By reposting such material, Mitra is not engaging in debate. She is performing allegiance. Each meme is a tribal tattoo: I am with them now. I belong to this mob. The propaganda is successful not because it is true, but because it offers clarity: a world of simple binaries, a seductive relief from the messiness of reality.
The Contradiction of the Captured Migrant
Here is the grotesque irony: a migrant woman parroting an anti-immigrant party’s rhetoric. It would be comic if it were not tragic. But this is precisely how far-right movements recruit. They flatter the assimilated migrant as a “good one,” a model of obedience, a weapon to be wielded against the “bad newcomers.” In exchange for this conditional acceptance, the captured migrant must erase their own past, disown their own kin, and participate in the policing of borders that would once have excluded them.
Mitra’s case is exemplary. In her attempt to secure belonging, she betrays the very history that brought her here. In her attempt to be the defender of Australia, she becomes the jailer of her own memory. This is not assimilation—it is annihilation masquerading as loyalty.
The Hand of Muscat: Reinforcement from Without
Yet let us not imagine that Mitra’s capture is the result of algorithms alone. Stephan Muscat’s shadow is never far. After all, he is the self-confessed step-son of a Romanian Ironguard Nazi collaborator and war criminal (whose portrait he displays on Mitra's mantle)—among the rats that fled to Australia during the late 1940s-early 1950s who Stalin failed to capture and hang by their short and curlies. This fascist scumbag provides the ideological scaffolding, the interpretive lens, the constant reinforcement that makes One Nation’s memes cohere into a worldview. He is the evil whisperer (waswās) behind the feed, the human counterpart to the algorithm.
In this hybrid system of mind control, digital propaganda and interpersonal coercion feed each other. Facebook delivers the slogans, Muscat supplies the commentary, and Mitra becomes the conduit. The result is not mere political preference but full-spectrum ideological capture: a restructuring of her identity from the inside out.
Family Betrayed: Identity Substitution
The deepest wound is not political but personal. When a mother fills her wall with xenophobic propaganda, she is not just “voicing an opinion.” She is substituting identities. She ceases to be a mother, a migrant, a bearer of memory, and becomes instead a generic foot soldier of the tribe. Her loyalty is no longer to family or history, but to the imagined “nation” that demands she prove her worth by repudiating her own.
For her children, this is experienced as betrayal. To see one’s mother repost the very propaganda that demonizes one’s community is to realize that the bond of kinship has been sacrificed on the altar of tribal belonging. It is not just disagreement; it is dispossession. The family itself is reconstituted as a battlefield, and the mother becomes a weapon aimed against her own blood.
Expansion as Decline
From a wider lens, this case is not aberration but symptom. One Nation’s propaganda, Facebook’s algorithmic machinery, and Muscat’s manipulation are all examples of what capitalism in its late stage does best: it expands by cannibalizing. Just as it commodifies sexuality and spirituality, it commodifies fear and belonging. It recruits migrants to campaign against migration, mothers to betray children, families to fracture themselves.
But this expansion is also decline. A society that devours its own social cohesion to feed its propaganda markets is a society already in collapse. Mitra’s wall is thus not merely a private embarrassment. It is a public mirror of civilizational decay: the family hollowed out, the migrant turned border guard, the mother converted into mouthpiece.
Conclusion: The Idiocy of Betrayal
What then are we left with? The idiocy of a mother who has been captured by Pauline Hanson memes is not the idiocy of stupidity, but of betrayal. It is the idiocy of someone who abandons history, kinship, and solidarity for the cheap belonging offered by propaganda. It is the idiocy of someone who confuses servitude for loyalty, and fear for wisdom.
We should not laugh at this, though laughter is tempting. We should grieve. Because each One Nation meme on Mitra’s wall is a funeral notice for another fragment of family, another tie severed, another memory erased. And in that sense, her Facebook feed is not just her wall—it is the wall of an entire civilization, plastered with posters of its own decline.
Nevertheless, what I do is to document and bear witness—and this, in itself, is Antifascist Action. Siempre!
