Introduction

In January of 2022, the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy (TFC) emerged in Canada. Known also as the Freedom Convoy, or the freedom movement, participants coalesced in the name of freedom to protest Covid-19 countermeasures, including lockdowns, movement restrictions, vaccines, and mask mandates. The protests cohered around a range of chants and slogans, including: ‘My Freedom Doesn’t End Where Your Fears Begin’, ‘Your Fear Doesn’t Take Away My Freedom’, ‘Freedom Over Fear’, and ‘Fear is the Real Virus’. United by these chants, the movement traversed and occupied several major cities, arterials, and border crossings in performative defiance of what they called ‘Medical Apartheid’, and the freedom-inhibiting ‘Medical Tyranny’ of Covid-19 countermeasures. The Convoy received widespread media attention and support from notable conservative figures, including former American President Donald Trump, who formally endorsed the Convoy, which he praised for ‘doing more to defend American freedom than our own leaders by far’ (cited in Klassen 2022).

Soon after the Convoy entered the political scene, it became clear that the chants and narratives around which it revolved—each of which articulate an image of freedom under attack—had resonated globally. Within days of the Convoy emerging, similar freedom movements arose across the West, including prominently in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. These movements were composed largely of supporters of far-right groups, including ethnic nationalists, white supremacists, and adherents to various Covid-related conspiracy theories. Protestors converged on capital cities, where they picketed government buildings and created temporary protest occupations. Among these was a tent embassy set up in Wellington, New Zealand, by far-right anti-vaccine group, Voices for Freedom. A protest occupation called ‘Camp Freedom’ was also set up in Canberra, Australia, by the far-right Australian Freedom Rally (Gillespie 2023).

At each of these locations, the TFC’s freedom-related motifs and slogans circulated and were proclaimed, including via chants and banners held aloft, and messages spray painted on prominent statues and government buildings. At all these events, participants denounced freedom lost to ‘Medical Apartheid’ and ‘Medical Tyranny’, while appropriating affirmations of personal (bodily) freedom, such as by chanting ‘My Body, My Choice’ in reference to vaccine requirements.

At first glance, these scenes of protest link the other’s fear of Covid-19 to the subject’s own perceived loss, or potential loss, of freedom. This can be discerned, for example, in the link repeatedly made between ‘Your Fear’ and the loss of ‘My Freedom’. It is also evident in the articulation of fear itself as ‘the real virus’, as well as in denouncements of conspiracies of ‘Medical Apartheid’ and ‘Medical Tyranny’, in which fear is depicted as being deliberately used to justify impingements upon freedom.

In this article, we contend there was a racist element to these articulations of lost freedom. We argue existing preoccupations with the racialised other were refracted in the conspiratorial discourses that emerged via the freedom movement, which framed Covid-19 countermeasures as a continuation of a perceived conspiracy towards the surreptitious erosion of liberalism’s contract with the white citizen. We argue that like existing racial conspiracy theories that articulate this concern—such as The Great Replacement and White Genocide—that so too, the Covid-19 conspiracy theories that underpinned the freedom movement depicted both the body and body politic in crisis, threatened by racial contamination and erosion. Ironically, this contamination was not that of the virus itself, but instead that of an external, plotting other, who was allegedly conspiring to take away the subject’s freedom, which functions as an index of their privileged position within the nation.

We maintain that through the freedom movement’s discourse, an ‘other’ emerged in the split between fear and freedom. Indeed, the structure of the discourse indicates that for the freedom movement, it is the other’s fear of Covid-19—and their correlative obedience to pandemic regulations—that in and of itself constitutes a threat to (fantasies of) freedom as cultivated by liberalism. By structuring the subject’s identification and desire around freedom, liberalism simultaneously structures the racialised other as an-other that would transgress the subject’s freedom, or who might enjoy freedom differently. To this end, the motif that the pandemic was really a ‘plandemic’ (Kearney et al. 2020) is informative. This is because according to the dominant freedom movement narrative, the rise of Covid-19 and its freedom-inhibiting countermeasures was a deliberate step towards an already occurring conspiracy: that of diminishing the freedom of the ideal rights bearers to whom ‘racial liberalism’ awards privilege through the domination of others (Mills 2008). These are the citizens Sunera Thobani calls the ‘exalted subjects’ of the nation (2007).

A refrain repeated throughout the freedom movement was the idea that the other’s fear of Covid-19 had rendered them ‘sheeple’. This term—a portmanteau of the words ‘sheep’ and ‘people’—was employed to signify the herd-like mentality supposedly exhibited by those who supported Covid-19 countermeasures. Sheeple were said to be in such fear of the virus that they had become docile and lacking the freedom required for individual thought. In this state, sheeple qua the public had become amenable to further freedom-inhibiting countermeasures, like lockdowns and mask mandates. Accordingly, they—rather than the virus—were perceived to constitute a threat to the nation and the freedom of its subjects. The term also motions to histories of racial practices that animalised Black people, Indigenous communities, Asians, and Muslims (Fanon 2008; Césaire 2000; Mbembe 2017; Kim 2015) to justify intervention and policing. Here, sheeple again threaten the integrity of the nation by succumbing to irrational fear, and failing to understand the value of freedom which is at stake.

Reflecting on liberalism’s fantasy of freedom, Juliet Rogers observes how:

Freedom lost is devastating, in the liberal world, in a world of human rights, in the Free World, although it is hard to name what is actually thought to be lost. What we can say is that the negative of freedom might be the experience of…the loss of what we have come to call autonomy or agency. But this condition of loss…resonates with the fears of a liberal subject before law; fear, in Giorgio Agamben’s idiom, of political abandonment. (2014, p. 8)

The centrality the TFC and freedom movement placed upon freedom as a master signifier—which is empty of any positive content, but nevertheless organises discourse and desire—invites a deeper reading of modern liberal subjectivity. This includes an interrogation of its affective structures, fantasies of freedom, and anxieties of loss, as they relate to racialised others.

While the TFC and broader freedom movement seemed to revolve primarily around discourses of fear and freedom, they were also a breeding ground for pronounced manifestations of racism and racist conspiracy theories, many of which have come to be associated with Covid-19 and its countermeasures (Tazamal 2020; Berecz 2020). This included manifestations of anti-Asian and anti-black racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism, all of which attempted to frame freedom as being lost as a result of racialised others who plotted against the nation. For example, as Mobashra Tazamal (2020) observed, many of the false claims about the virus ‘incorporated Islamophobia, alleging that Muslims were responsible for the spread of Covid-19’ through a combination of migration; a failure to close Mosques and gathering for religious observance; and having larger families (a notion that echoes the Great Replacement Theory (GRT), as discussed below, which claims white people are being replaced by ‘high breeding’ migrants). Similarly, supporters of the QAnon conspiracy movement, which had a strong presence at the TFC, claimed there was a ‘secret plan orchestrated by Muslims’ to steal freedom by ‘[bringing] Sharia law to the United States by way of coronavirus restrictions’ (Khalel 2020). These claims circulated throughout the TFC, and were also endorsed and repeated by Trump, whom the convoy embraced. Although Trump downplayed the severity of Covid-19, he also simultaneously worked to racialise it, naming it ‘the China virus’, and citing it as justification for racially discriminatory and Islamophobic immigration controls (Tazamal 2020). These examples illustrate how Covid-19 restrictions were read as an embodiment of the threat of the racialised Other as articulated through signifiers such as Muslims, Islam, Sharia, immigration, and ‘the China virus’.

Such representations of the racialised other as a threat that conspires to ‘take’ the white subject’s freedom are not new. Indeed, racialised conspiracies have a long tradition in what is sometimes called ‘modernity’ (Mondon and Winter 2020; Mudde 2019). This is evidenced by longstanding antisemitic conspiracy theories, as well as in more recent conspiracy theories such as those related to the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ (of white people) and ‘White Genocide’ (Mudde 2019, p. 37). So too, it comes across in the ‘birther conspiracy’, which claims America’s first Black president, Barrack Obama, was born in Kenya, and is therefore an agent working against national security and the freedom of white citizens (Mondon and Winter 2020, p. 125). It was not simply Obama’s foreign birth that drove the birther conspiracy however, but the idea that he was possibly Muslim that amplified his foreignness and the paranoia of replacement.

Racialised articulations of lost freedom work to consolidate whiteness and white identity by constructing it as something that must be defended (Mudde 2019; Gillespie 2020a, 2020b; Mondon and Winter 2020; Stovall 2021). Indeed, paranoid expressions of liberalism have facilitated an elision between preserving freedom and preserving whiteness itself, such that in effect, ‘white freedom’ becomes the object of preservation (Stovall 2021). This dynamic articulates with Losurdo's (2011) observation that liberalism is intimately tied to practices of inclusion and exclusion, while speaking also to the phenomenon Charles W. Mills calls ‘racial liberalism’ (Mills 2008, 2017).

Racial liberalism—and its efforts to defend freedom as ‘white freedom’—can be discerned in longer histories of modernity, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, Civil Rights, mass incarceration, and policing (Du Bois 1903; Losurdo 2011; Alexander 2012; Browne 2015; Mills 2017). They can also be recognised in paranoid liberal efforts towards ‘counterterrorism’, which have depicted Islam as a cultural menace that ‘hates our freedom’ (Bush 2011), and works as a contagion that corrupts the nation from within via ‘radicalisation’ (Mamdani 2005; Norton 2013; Kundnani 2014; Morsi 2017; Al-Arian et al. 2021). Here, concerns about ‘our freedoms’ and ‘way of life’ collapsed into—or were made interchangeable with—concerns about geopolitics and ‘national security’, highlighting the way ‘freedom’, as an ultimately empty signifier, is dynamic, and can be mobilised towards a range of contradictory ends (if not desires). In this context, Islamophobia re-surfaced as a form of governmentality (Kaya 2011; Medovoi 2012), and conspiracy theories about freedom being lost to ‘Sharia law’ and the ‘covert Islamisation’ of the nation ran rampant. This was perhaps best encapsulated in the Trojan Horse conspiracy theory, which maintained that ‘Islam’ was being smuggled into state schools in the UK in order to indoctrinate the vulnerable minds of the nation’s children (Syed and Reed 2022). Such conspiracies articulated strongly with mainstream reactionary interpretations of the then-contemporary ‘geopolitical moment’, which put forward an image of the nation beset by a contagion of migrants. As prominent British commentator Katie Hopkins surmised: ‘Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches’, ‘spreading like norovirus on a cruise ship’ (cited in Plunkett 2015), while in the Australian context, far-right politician Pauline Hanson claimed: ‘Islam is a disease, and we need to vaccinate ourselves from the disease’ (cited in Remeikis 2017).

This article first maps the intersecting political agendas and social configurations of the freedom movement, situating them within the wider racial politics outlined above. We then move to examine how the repetition and reproduction of the TFC’s chants and discourses—both within the TFC and abroad—reveal deep anxieties about freedom, even as fear is (supposedly) evacuated in its name. We argue that the relationship between fear and freedom is sustained within an affective economy (Ahmed 2004) of conspiracy of an impending crisis to obtain freedom as it is made vulnerable by and to the other. Whereas the war on terror—which was often framed as a war for the defence of freedom—found political sustenance and cultural preservation by actively sustaining a collective fear of the terrorist other, by contrast, for TFC protestors and members of the freedom movement, fear represents the cultural extinction of ‘our way of life’. To this end, the movement’s prominent chants each encapsulate the central tension and fantasy upon which the freedom movement itself was predicated.

In reference to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, we extend this line of inquiry by tracing the freedom movement’s psychic investment in safeguarding ‘freedom’ as an ultimately empty, floating signifier, by flaunting Covid-19 restrictions as a form of racist fantasy. We identify in the refusal to exchange freedom for fear a perverse ‘masked’ enjoyment of performatively resisting Covid-19 restrictions—such as by refusing to wear marks, encroaching the body-space of others wearing masks, or even pulling masks off others. This, we argue, provides insight not only into racialised, conspiratorial politics, but so too, the workings of the ideologies of liberalism itself.

A Conspiracy Against ‘Freedom’

When the Convoy arose in the early months of 2022, it was initially depicted as a working-class movement of truck drivers who had come together in solidarity to protest changes to working conditions as a result of Covid-19 countermeasures. Such measures included the implementation of vaccine requirements to cross borders, as well as additional quarantine times for goods being delivered, both of which affected run-times and turnarounds. From the outset however, the action was used as an opportunity for other groups to coalesce around the notion of ‘freedom’. From its inception, the Convoy had a visible presence of far right and other networks on the fringes of the right who attempted to portray the protest as a much broader ‘pro-freedom’ movement. Included among these groups were Donald Trump supporters; self-identifying members of the Canadian and American ‘alt-right’; persons identifying as Sovereign Citizens or ‘SovCits’; white supremacists; supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory; and people identifying as ‘Christian nationalists’.

The way these interlinked groups and conspiracy theories overlapped was reflected in their deployment of symbolism and iconography. Many who participated in the TFC adorned themselves with clothing and paraphernalia drawn from the groups and conspiracies described above. Some protestors wore Donald Trump caps emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, or its acronym, ‘MAGA’. Others wore QAnon conspiracy theory t-shirts, with Q’s rallying call, ‘where we go one, we go all’. Many of these same participants flew flags associated with the Canadian and American alt-right and/or Sovereign Citizen movements, such as the Canadian Red Ensign flag, and Confederate flags, which in recent times have become symbols of Canadian and American white supremacy (Hamilton 2017; Gillespie 2023). These racial emblems were often flown upside-down, in support of the alt-right practice of presenting the nation and the West as being in distress and under attack (such as via GRT). Such defensive gestures are often performed with the national flag, converting it into a signifier of white supremacy. Through this practice, the banal presence of the national flag becomes a veneer that both ‘softens’ white supremacy, while working to overcome potential bans of white supremacist symbols, effectively allowing it to ‘hide in plain sight’.

Though different ideological motives were at play, the defence of freedom found dominant racial expression. These seemingly disparate groups were united not only through their common ideological commitment to defend ‘freedom’, but in their adherence to the notion it had to be defended from others conspiring against it, such as through the ‘plandemic’ (Kearney et al. 2020). By so doing, participants cast themselves as being on the ‘right side’ of history by opposing the new oppressive forces of ‘Medical Apartheid’ and ‘Medical Tyranny’.

The bringing of protesting bodies and iconographies into public space constituted not only the mobilisation of a reactionary agenda, but so too the mobilisation of a politics of conspiracy. Writing twenty years earlier, Jodi Dean (2002) observes that conspiracy theories are founded on the belief in a truth that has been withheld and needs to be uncovered. Drawing curious links with Enlightenment practices and critical theory traditions, Dean identifies conspiracist ideation as a way to understanding the workings of power and political agency: one that imagines itself as a mode of rationality, causality, suspicion, critique, interrogation, and the disclosure of truth (2002, p. 49). Most importantly, conspiracy theories reflect a ‘compulsive will to know within the ideal of publiclity’ (Dean 2002, p. 53). We can discern this power and political agency at work in the conspiracy theories that were proliferated by and within the freedom movement. Theories like QAnon and pizzagate purport to reveal a sinister plot of world domination: that of a global cabal of Satan-worshipping Jewish paedophiles, who control world politics through the media (Nagle 2017; Woods and Hahner 2019).

The notion that a racialised, plotting other exists behind the visual field of the ‘public’ is supported by a range of additional racialised conspiracy theories. According to QAnon and Pizzagate, for example, the cabal’s main strategy for gaining control is via The Great Replacement, where elites conspire to dilute the ‘racial purity’—and thereby unity—of Western nations is to be diluted through ‘eugenic’ policies of immigration and multiculturalism (Bhatt 2021; Bracke and Aguilar 2020; Feola 2021; Ghumkhor 2023). In this racialised conspiracy, ‘high breeding’, non-white populations, often identified as Muslims, are brought into the nation so that in time, white people will become a ‘minority’. To realise this conspiracy, non-white populations will supposedly vote in unison as a ‘bloc’—that is, they will unite through a further racial conspiracy—such that they will control the outcome of every election, imposing their own policies and advancing their own interests. It is said that as a result, white freedom will be forever lost.

The rise of Covid-19 was quickly incorporated into this extant conspiracy theory, and cast as yet another sign of something amiss. Indeed, the origins of Covid-19 were characterised as a secret withheld from the public, being used as a pretence for further erosions of freedom, such as via movement restrictions and lockdowns. If, following Dean, conspiracy theories and conspiracisation are more than a paranoid style, plot, or pathology, but are instead, a way of doing politics, then it becomes important to ask: what (political) agency is at play in conspiracy theory? In the coming sections, we pursue this question by examining how the shared symbolism that characterised the freedom movement was itself representative of a deeper, affective politics of fear and freedom. We argue this politics reveals the enjoyment exalted subjects of the nation derive from racialised liberalism, even as they simultaneously depict that status, qua freedom itself, as being threatened.

Affective Economies of Fear and Freedom

The freedom movement saw bodies coming together, stirred to action by a conspiracy that there are greater things to fear than that which seems apparent. Writing about the power of emotions, Ahmed observes that they ‘play a crucial role in the “surfacing” of individual and collective bodies through the way in which emotions circulate between bodies and signs’ (Ahmed 2004, p. 117). The circulatory effects of emotions can do important political work, organising individuals, communities, spaces, bodies, and symbols by forming ‘sticky’ attachments and relations among them. In this vein, emotions can be economic, such that in ‘exchange’ for experiencing emotion, one can belong or claim to belong to a community or space. However, one can only belong if one experiences the right emotion in the right way. In the context of the freedom movement, for example, to belong, one could not experience fear of the pandemic, as this would imply one had accepted the public narrative, rendering them ‘sheeple’. Instead, one had to fear the restriction of one’s freedom, as this fear was interpreted as disclosing knowledge of a secret conspiracy to erode freedom.

The freedom movement itself can thus be understood as both producing yet being produced by an affective economy. Within this economy, fear circulated and attached itself to signs, bodies, speech acts, and notions of freedom, such that meaning was given to their assemblage as a moving body: that of the convoy and protest. This fear was not fear of Covid-19, but rather, fear of lost freedom read as an intrusion upon the exalted (white) subjects of the nation.

Unlike fear of the pandemic, which disappeared bodies into the private sphere—such as with lockdowns, travel restrictions, and vaccines that entered and became invisible within the body—by contrast, fear of lost freedom had an amassing effect, enthusing ‘bodies of the nation’ (Ahmed 2004, 2014), and visibly assembling them into action against conspiracy.

The freedom movement formed through a collective interpretation of fear. Put simply, it is not that one fears, but how one fears that counts. Members of the freedom movement identified those who experienced fear of Covid-19 as trading their freedom for feelings of safety. By contrast, those who protested Covid-19 countermeasures claimed that freedom-inhibiting health mandates were a symptom of the nation’s demise, and by extension, so too of their exalted position within it. Members of the freedom movement—whose exalted status is articulated through freedom as a signifier for racialised liberalism—did not want their freedom to be exchanged for fear. Perhaps more to the point, they did not want their freedom exchanged as a result of fear that belonged to an-other—hence the already-cited refrain, ‘My Freedom Doesn’t End Where Your Fears Begin’. This affective orientation reached its zenith in the freedom movement’s emblematic claim that ‘Fear is the Real Virus’. That is, fear of the virus brings freedom into question, and thus, is the true contagion to be feared.

For Ahmed, a significant component of fear as an affect is its anticipatory and temporal orientation to objects that approach (2014, p. 65). Fear, Ahmed elaborates, ‘involves the anticipation of hurt or injury’ (2014, p. 65). That is, fear relates to an absence that will imminently and immanently become present; or alternatively, to a presence—such as an object one possesses—that could become absent, should it be taken away or lost in the future. For participants of the freedom movement, the approaching object of fear was lost freedom. Within the affective economy, this potential loss was invited by the fear already possessed by others. This is because in endorsing and supporting freedom-limiting Covid-19 countermeasures, ‘sheeple’, those in pliable fear of Covid-19, had compromised the integrity and values of the nation, thereby limiting the freedom of those who saw themselves as its privileged subjects. In response, the freedom movement provided a new collective body whose contours were shaped by a shared orientation towards freedom in fear, that nevertheless ran contrary to the other’s fear.

It is here that psychoanalytic theory can provide another layer of understanding to the empowering possibilities of fear. For psychoanalysis, fear of any particular object should not be treated at surface level. Indeed, fear of an object may mask unconscious fear. As Ahmed reminds us, ‘We might remember that in Freud’s model of unconscious emotions, the affect itself is not repressed: rather what is repressed is the idea to which the affect was attached’ (2014, p. 66, our emphasis). For the freedom movement, fear of an impossible freedom is repressed and displaced by accusations against the other, whose fear on behalf of the ‘public’ is experienced as a theft of freedom, rather than the limit of freedom itself. That is, the other’s freedom-inhibiting fear explains the limit of the subject’s freedom, thereby masking its impossibility.

Racialising Fear: Impossible Freedom made Possible

Ardent freedom defenders can be located within, and seen as extensions of, a much longer history of white anxiety over the social, political, and economic status of whiteness, and anxiety that this might be taken away. As such, those who imagine themselves as the ‘exalted subjects’ of the nation seem to increasingly assume the role of defending the ideals of the nation qua their status within it. Debates on stronger immigration measures, border policing practices, detention centres, and even walls, are symptomatic of the imagined precarity of the status of whiteness within the nation (Hage 1999). A racial anxiety persists in this precarity and can be discerned in contemporary ‘culture wars’ with respect to calls for ‘muscular liberalism’ (Cameron 2011), or declarations that liberal multiculturalism itself has failed entirely (Lentin and Titley 2011).

We read the freedom movement’s fear of lost freedom as a symptom of the same anxieties that sit beneath these ongoing debates about liberal multiculturalism. For members of the movement, freedom-limiting tendencies had long been encroaching upon the nation. This is because prior to Covid-19 emerging, anxieties about racialised others who conspire to steal white freedom had already taken hold. These anxieties around freedom are shaped by longer histories of progress as a practice of racial exclusion that required protections—including violence by the state—as preventative measures (Mills 2008, 2017; Losurdo 2011; Stovall 2021). Such anxieties around freedom are evinced in ‘mainstream’ conservative discourses, which lament freedoms increasingly lost to so-called ‘woke’ politics and ‘social justice’. Examples of this include efforts towards anti-racism, such as attempts to curb racist speech or remove confederate flags and statues, which are framed as impingements upon freedom of speech and/or private property. Similar anxieties appear in a conspiratorial form, be it via the QAnon, Great Replacement or White Genocide conspiracies—among others.

When Covid-19 emerged, these extant anxieties and narratives about lost freedom were quickly used as a frame to conceptualise the countermeasures devised against it. Like restrictions on speech, guns, or flag flying, these new restrictions on bodily movements and uses of public space were conceptualised as another part of, or further steps towards, anti-white conspiratorial aims.

The crisis of freedom in these instances depicts the state as colluding with others by offering them (white) freedom. In this paranoid racial imagination, efforts to extend freedom to others—such as via multiculturalism, immigration, tolerance of difference, and racial justice—are ultimately part of a greater plot to dilute if not replace white freedom. Such anxieties are a leitmotif of white supremacist networks today; indeed, they are sometimes a defining idea around which entire networks and movements are formed. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, for example, the alt-right revolves around the central anxiety that: ‘“White identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilisation’ (Southern Poverty Law Centre, n.d.).

Like the potential collapsing of racial boundaries in growing recognition of diversity and the expansion of formal freedoms, the pandemic as a public health crisis had an ‘equalising’ effect that appeared to flatten differences between citizens via state public health orders. This flattening in and of itself articulated with white anxieties and backlash seen in relation to concerns about multiculturalism, immigration, Islam, Black Lives Matter (BLM), and Critical Race Theory, each of which has been perceived as a threat to whiteness and its privileged place within the nation. The TFC amalgamated these already-existing anxieties and fears of replacement and cathected them toward Covid-19 countermeasures. Indeed, to this end, backlash against fear of Covid-19 and its countermeasures mirrored the backlash against both the Civil Rights movement—where Black freedom is imagined as lost white freedom—and backlash against BLM, where the counter ‘White Lives Matter’ movement emerged to recapture white freedom lost to Black subjectivity. Beneath each of these reactionary movements lies the same white liberal paranoia.

In response to these reactionary anxieties, a fundamentalist commitment to a freedom without limit emerged that refused compromise, even when recognised within liberal traditions. In their call to defend freedom, protestors conflated the fantasy of pure freedom without constraint—i.e. sovereign freedom, reserved for the state—with ‘individual’ freedom, as articulated by rights and liberties upon which others supposedly cannot intrude. This entitled claim to pure freedom functioned as a perversion of the Kantian imperative: argue and believe what you want, but obey (Kant 2004, p. 1781). What was advocated here, however, was to disbelieve and disobey in the service of liberalism’s ultimate telos: freedom. Put differently, in effect, the protests advocated a paradoxical ‘return’ to lawlessness—what Hobbes famously calls the State of Nature—in the name of freedom. Or, as the White Sovereign Citizen movement would have it, to repeal law to become free: a law unto one’s radically free self.

The defence of a brutish freedom—encapsulated in proclamations such as ‘Freedom Over Fear’—departs from Hobbes’ well-known account of sovereignty, whereby fearing the anarchy of lawless violence, the masses give up their individual sovereign freedoms to the state, a Leviathan, who then retains a monopoly over legitimate violence for the greater good. In this Hobbesian account of the social contract of political community, law emerges to constrain freedom in the name of preserving life and alleviating fear. As Ahmed elucidates:

In this model, fear works as an imperative for the formation of government: fear would be the ‘cost’ of anarchy and the promise of civil society is the elimination of fear. As such, subjects consent to being governed: they give up freedom in order to be free from fear (2014, p. 71)

By contrast, members of the TFC and freedom movement refused to yield any aspect of freedom. To them, mitigating fear of the virus by responding with robust public health measures was tantamount to the abolition of freedom itself.

Lacanian psychoanalysis gives us some possible ways of understanding these paranoid logics and attachments to the lost object by linking it to the fundamental fantasy of freedom that underpins liberalism. In psychoanalytic theory, fantasy screens the trauma of not knowing the Other’s desire—a question that lies at the heart of all subjectivity, and is posed to the Other as: ‘Che vuoi?’ [‘who are you, and what am I to you?’] (Lacan 2006, p. 690). It is an unconscious defence against the impossibility of one’s imagined sense of security. Here, it is discerned as the fantasy of an impossible freedom made possible. A security in freedom imagined retrievable. The collapsing of the liberal symbolic world wherein multiple crises of freedom—unfettered global capitalism, the erosion of the welfare state, environmental calamities, a global pandemic, and the perceived challenge to the power of white citizens in liberal democracies—has meant the fantasy of liberalism has left those citizens with only the empty signifier of freedom. Freedom is cast as a last defence from material fragmentation, and a confrontation with the psychosocial limits of the liberal subject as an autonomous being. In this sense, protest functions as a hysterical demand for the truth of liberal fantasy to deliver upon its promise: to return the freedom that once secured the ontological boundaries of the liberal subject.

The affective politics that charge such demands for promised freedom cannot be decontextualised from the mobilisation of others during the pandemic (and earlier). In 2020 and 2021, people were forced to retreat into private spaces as Covid-19 spread. This invited a unique moment in which social injustice was radically witnessed, enthusing some bodies—not just Black and brown, but younger and whiter—to return to public spaces in protest, such as after the killing of African American George Floyd. Although these public assemblages defied public health orders, they did not do so to diminish the threat of Covid-19. Rather, they mobilised in the name of urgency, calling for the extension of equality and freedom across racial lines. By contrast, the freedom movement defied regulations in the name of a freedom they claimed to already possess (inalienably). In Moreton-Robinson’s (2015) terms, this freedom was a ‘white possession’ to be jealously guarded and defended from efforts to re-configure public space for all bodies. Those who mobilised to protectively hoard freedom participated in an affective politics to defend whiteness from an imagined decline. The anxieties associated with this decline run contrary to white modes of being that have historically been constructed as an ontological occupation of freedom, space, bodies, and nationhood: that is, sovereignty as such (Moreton-Robinson et al. 2008; Moreton-Robinson 2015).

Liberal Jouissance

As outlined above, the freedom movement was sustained by an affective economy that both mobilised and disavowed fear in relation to ‘freedom’. In this section however, we complicate the politics of affect by considering further the link between the defence of freedom during the pandemic and racial politics. By drawing on psychoanalytic theory we argue that by refusing to fear the virus, and supplanting it instead with fear of lost freedom, members of the freedom movement extracted more from the affective economy than may first appear. What they extracted, we argue, is what Jacques Lacan referred to as ‘jouissance’—an unconscious enjoyment that ‘comes from the Other’ (Lacan 2006, p. 853) and ‘strangely’ repeats (Verhaeghe 2006, p. 30). Jouissance is more than an effect of affect. Indeed, it refers to an ‘excess of affect, a mode of intensity produced by pursuing drive impulses’ (Hook 2017, p. 10). This excess places the body in protest in a liminal position of both pain and pleasure, and yet simultaneously, neither. It is an excess that sustains the racist fantasy of the exalted subject of freedom but challenges its assumptions of liberalism’s ‘buffered’ self (Taylor 2007, p. 39), whose shield of rationality and conspiracy-laden scepticism cultivates an absence of fear.

Bodies in protest embody the ritual of democratic liberal freedom qua the rights to free speech and freedom of assembly. During the pandemic, these ideals became dangerous to the security of the nation and were either banned or discouraged. The freedom movement tested these symbolic ideals as they came under more restricted conditions, revealing an attachment to the right to desire even when it put the self at risk, via a death drive that endangers life itself. It is here we take Derek Hook’s reminder seriously of the link between the super ego—the laws of the symbolic world in which we are constituted and regulated—and jouissance (Hook 2017, 2018). As Hook elaborates, jouissance is ‘parasitic’ and ‘feeds off’ the symbolic law (2017, p. 7). To this end, Hook’s reading of racism is also instructive, emphasising the ‘moral dimension’ or racism that often gets overlooked. Racism, Hook continues, ‘is also a type of indignation; an impetus to blame and punish; it involves a sense of laws, social (if racist) norms and ideals that have been violated’ (Hook 2017, p. 21). In this instance, the conspiracy of law splitting from liberal ideals transposes the superego to give instructions on maintaining the integrity of a deeper law that exceeds the state.

Resistance to putative inhibitions to freedom reveal how racial liberalism—and the nations predicated upon it—hail subjects as subjects of freedom: that is, as subjects whose freedom cannot be transgressed. The protests highlight a psychic and political split in this relationship. In shaping subjects as ‘exalted subjects’, who are the natural embodiment of the nation’s values, liberalism simultaneously shapes the subject’s pathway to jouissance as one that revolves around the signifier of ‘freedom’ (Hook 2017, p. 7). Those who transgressed public health measures paradoxically embodied the nation's ideals while simultaneously putting themselves at risk of law's sanction (in addition to risk of the virus itself). That they sought to cleanse the nation of those who would violate its freedom, by themselves violating its public health measures, indicates liberal jouissance at work.

Following Lacan’s theory of the subject however, ‘freedom’ of any sort, including as conceptualised as one of liberalism’s central ideological categories, is constitutively impossible. This is because for Lacan, the subject is not a ‘whole’, stable individual (qua the rational individual subject of liberalism), but rather, is a site of lack and contradiction (Lacan 2006; Fink 1995). As Lacan elaborates, the subject and its emergence therefore is not and cannot be free, but rather, is and always will be fundamentally constrained by language and the Symbolic Order, upon which the subject is primordially dependent to articulate itself (Lacan 2006). This dependency is embodied in the ontological question at the heart of subjectivity which both locates lack and desire within the subject’s attempt to address and fulfil itself. Subjectivity therefore is divided, split, and haunted by the failure of knowledge.

For Lacan, the lack that constitutes the subject is primordial in a dual sense. It is primordial first because it is the most ‘important’ psychic feature that structures psychic life (Butler 1997), and second because lack comes first. That is, for Lacan, the subject is not originally whole such that it comes to lack through loss. On the contrary, for Lacan the subject is always-already lacking (Frosh 2016, p. 7). As Stephen Frosh elaborates, that which is lost, ‘must once have been owned’, whereas by contrast, that which is lacking ‘is so from the start’ (2016, p. 7). This is precisely why Lacan’s analysis of lack and loss, and its relationship to subjectivity, is informative if not integral to analysing both liberalism and contemporary conspiracy theories, and importantly, the intimacies between them. It is relevant for interrogating liberalism insofar as liberalism articulates an image of the subject as whole, private, and enclosed upon itself, such that it possesses its own rights, freedom, and will (Douzinas 2000; Rogers 2014). It is relevant for analysing the freedom movement, which, through its conspiracy theories, revolves around the idea that the liberal subject is at risk of losing, or having already lost, its purported freedom(s).

Read on Lacanian terms, however, when members of the freedom movement claim they have lost or are at risk of losing ‘freedom’, they are performing a fundamental misrecognition. They are claiming to have lost or be at risking of losing that which they have never, and constitutively could never, possess. This is because, for Lacan, lack is inexorable and intractable. Indeed, by purporting to have freedom(s) taken away, lack is supplanted by loss. While this psychic sleight of hand is easily overlooked, it is nevertheless powerful and does significant political work. This is because by standing in for lack, loss creates or enlivens the possibility that one could have again that which one imagines one lost. Contrary to lack, loss allows the liberal subject’s fear, devastation, and abandonment—as articulated above by Rogers (2014, p. 8)—to be seen as a mere temporary condition that could be overcome.

To understand further how the unconscious substitution of lack for loss functions, it is necessary to understand Lacan’s concept of fantasy in more detail. This is because for Lacan, fantasy links lack to jouissance and the imagined possibility of wholeness (McGowan 2022, p. 22). As Todd McGowan elaborates, fantasy is defensive and ultimately functions to provide the subject with a pathway towards enjoyment. However, this pathway never operates in a ‘straightforward’ way. This is because in attempting to overcome that which constitutively cannot be overcome—lack—fantasy works by providing a plausible explanation for the subject’s failure to be ‘whole’ by constructing a particular object as the barrier (McGowan 2022, p. 19).

The dynamics of subject and object in fantasy are compounded in racist fantasies. As McGowan writes, ‘what characterises the racist fantasy and differentiates it from other forms of fantasy is that the obstacle to the object—what bars the subject’s access to unrestrained or “right” to enjoyment—is the racial other’ (McGowan 2022, p. 23). Racism works—as a fantasy—by ‘[keeping] the image of an unlimited satisfaction alive by erecting the racial other as a barrier to it’ (McGowan 2022, p. 21). While liberalism’s progressive narrative extolls the virtues of freedom and its expansion to others, it also weaponises it against others as a racial practice, by determining loyalty and the capacity to adopt its values in reference to race, ultimately denying those freedoms accordingly (Asad 2003; Losurdo 2011; Massad 2015; Mills 2008, 2017; Seth 2001). These colonial impulses within liberalism rely on the fantasy of the ideal ‘human’ subject in possession of a freedom that can fend off fragmentation with the shield of rights (Douzinas 2000). This ideal image is policed, surveilled, and organised around a racist fantasy that promises pure or whole freedom if only the obstacle—the racialised other—is expunged.

Accordingly, subjects who subscribe to racist fantasies direct aggression towards the racialised other, whose fear both threatens and enables the liberal enjoyment of freedom. It is here, paradoxically, that jouissance, and the ‘delivery system’ that is fantasy, enters the frame. The impossibility of attaining security through freedom is overcome by an attempt to remove all obstacles and engage with perceived aggression, which then become the sites of enjoyment. This enjoyment of (and in) aggression speaks to the contradictions of jouissance as a liminal non-affect: not purely pleasure or pain; enjoyment or aggression; nor freedom or fear. Because security in freedom cannot be possessed or guaranteed such that one could enjoy it without limits, the subject settles instead for enjoyment in the anticipation of freedom’s arrival and the aggression required to secure it. To this end, the affective economy of the freedom movement is itself enjoyable for participants insofar as it provides them with a social body through which aggression can be performed towards racialised others, albeit in an impossible movement towards pure freedom.

There is however one aspect missing in the analysis provided thus far, which is that the freedom movement was not only a protest movement against racialised others, but so too a movement against those who supposedly conspired with racialised others. Thus, we are not just dealing with a racist fantasy, but with a fantasy of conspiracy: one in which racialised others colluded with elites who govern the state, as well as those who followed or failed to oppose them. The impediment for the freedom movement is therefore not only the racialised other, who functions as the ‘obstacle’ that explains the subject’s lost freedom: so too, those who conspired with the racialised other are to blame.

This conspiratorial dimension mirrors that of other prominent racist conspiracy theories, including the idea that multiculturalism and immigration have been pursued by elites to deliberately ‘take over’ the nation by ‘diluting’ its purity and eroding its freedom (such as via GRT and White Genocide). Writing about the evolving faces of contemporary demographic-related conspiracies, Bracke and Aguilar (2020) contend that conspiracy is a ‘discursive palimpsest’ that accommodates to cultural settings, responds to political climates, and embeds itself in new paranoias. It is in this vein racist fantasies and conspiracies overlap with, or were transposed into, the conspiracy theories that emerged and proliferated in relation to Covid-19. Just as ‘liberal elites’—and in some versions such as QAnon, a global cabal of Jews—are said to have tricked the masses into supporting multiculturalism and giving their freedom away to the other, so too, through fear of Covid-19, they had been made ‘sheeple’ such that they have willingly consented to giving away even more freedom.

As a form of entitlement, whiteness functions by imagining that the exalted status it bestows cannot be challenged. This expectation—which racial liberalism cultivates—can be seen in the contemporary backlash towards calls for social justice, such as Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, which are interpreted by reactionary forces as calls for white extinction. Whereas communities that call for social justice do not do so from a position of entitlement—having experienced the violence of the criminal justice system and securitisation—the intense mobilisation against Covid-19 measures by predominantly ‘exalted’ citizens points to an expectation that the law does not, and should not, apply to all citizens the same. The experience of having one’s body and movement regulated by the state was thus interpreted through a conspiratorial lens, through which the nation’s exalted, but supposedly under siege subjects saw travel restrictions, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates as an attempt to take freedom away from them through a medical tyranny that erodes the white nation.

Conclusion

In Covid-19 and race conspiracy, freedom is imagined in peril and corporeal boundaries become hazard zones of contamination. What is imagined as contaminated, intruded upon, and violated, informs us of the histories of nation-building, liberalism, and racial policing that set boundaries between freedom and unfreedom. In these conspiracies, Covid-19—the actual virus—is not the feared contaminant. Instead, it is the racialised other who supposedly continues to menace the nation and seeks to steal the freedom qua jouissance of its exalted subjects. We have argued that the TFC and broader freedom movement were organised via an affective economy that worked to blame lost freedom on fear possessed by others. Racial liberalism, we have argued, resurfaced in this affective economy to shed light on the racialising practices that underpin liberalism, and indeed, that conspire against its own offering of universality. The affect of racial liberalism persists as a racist fantasy that mobilises white citizens to continue to desire freedom by projecting its conspiracy onto others. As an antidote to ‘loss’, the freedom movement provided a pathway towards enjoyment by furnishing its subjects with a mechanism for performatively refusing fear while increasing that of others: namely, the ‘sheeple’—that is, the people in fear—whom they derided. By contrast, those who mobilised to defend freedom constructed and enjoyed an image of themselves as the sheeple’s opposite: brave and lacking fear, rational, and in the process of collectively securing an impossible freedom qua wholeness for themselves. By flaunting Covid-19 countermeasures and causing fear to others—such as by congregating, not socially distancing, refusing vaccines, and mask pulling—members of the freedom movement (re)constituted themselves as exalted liberal subjects. Through their protest, they purported to exceed the state by embodying the nation’s will.