The conspiracy theorist’s daughter

2026-02-15 - 16:09

“Ten years,” Dad would say. “Ten years max until the world goes to shit.” It was a topic of constant discussion: everything we needed to learn and do before we couldn’t learn and do it any more, when society was cashless, vaccines were compulsory, and on-to-it people were being actively targeted and hunted down by the government. By we, Dad meant the four of us, including Aaron and Isaac. Mum wouldn’t be joining us, not because Dad didn’t want her there, but because he had long since ‘lost’ her: lost her to feminism, lost her to the system, lost her to mainstream media. He said it was obvious she was no longer with us because she called the truth ‘beliefs’ and ‘conspiracy theories’. “I mean, I don’t believe that the Manchester Arena bombing was a false flag operation, I know it was a false flag operation,” he would scoff, “there’s an important difference. It’s not a conspiracy theory if it’s true.” Dad rejected any word that seemed to insinuate an absence, or potential absence, of truth. Theories, he would remind us, were suppositions not to be confused with facts, and the term ‘belief’ undermined the term ‘truth’. Dad taught me that whether or not someone chose to believe in something neither made it true, nor stopped it from being true. The truth was the truth whether somebody chose to accept it or not. Dad couldn’t help it if he was willing to embrace that the world was a lie while Mum was too scared to open her eyes. Both of my parents had always been alternative people. For one thing, they had agreed on not vaccinating their children. By the time my brothers and I were 20, 17 and 13, not one of us had had so much as a chicken pox injection. They favoured the idea of natural remedies over conventional medicine, except in more extreme circumstances—like the time Isaac got blood poisoning and needed a round of antibiotics, or when I broke my ankle and needed surgery to screw it back together—but for the most part, cuts and bruises were treated with tea tree oil and arnica cream, shocks with Mum’s dropper of rescue remedy. On school immunisation day, our parents kept us at home and Dad always warned that if, for any reason, a nurse or doctor ever came knocking on the door of our classes to give us a vaccine, we were to kick, spit, punch, do whatever we could to get away and run back home. As time went on, it was growing clearer that my parents’ opinions were diverging and each had very little time for the other’s point of view. Mum was starting to say things that suggested she didn’t think vaccines were the ultimate evil the way Dad did. He thought they were control devices used to alter human DNA, but she simply thought them unnecessary and less effective than natural alternatives. They’d had an explosive argument one evening after Mum said to me and my brothers, “I don’t care if you guys choose to get vaccinated. You can do what you want with your bodies.” Just imagining his children in a doctor’s office with their arms outstretched for a needle was enough to set Dad’s nerves on edge. Afterwards, when the two of us were alone, Dad wept in the kitchen, though not before telling Mum he thought she was completely insane for even suggesting such a thing. “She used to be more on board with this stuff. Can she not see what vaccines have done to your brother?” he asked me, almost pleading, tears streaming down his cheeks. Dad often recounted the story of Aaron’s birth, his voice thick with guilt and regret, and this night was no different. It all happened really quickly, he would say. Dad was a vulnerable new parent and Aaron barely an hour old when the midwife suggested giving him a vitamin K shot. “I tried to stand up against it,” Dad said, “but your mother was really anxious and let herself be talked into it.” He started to choke on his sobs, gasping out the worst and most painful part of the story. “I just remember seeing the needle going into Aaron’s arm and knowing I had made the worst possible mistake.” Even though a vitamin K shot wasn’t technically a vaccine, it was too close for it to be a coincidence that the only child of his to get one was the only child that ended up autistic. Dad had struggled to come to terms with Aaron’s autism, initially dismissing Mum when she first raised her suspicions when he was about seven or eight. There was something different about him, she thought: the way he always had to stop and count the numbers on every letterbox they passed when she took him for walks; the way he became so distressed whenever I mixed up the tenders from his Thomas the Tank Engine train set; the way he violently flapped his hands in the air whenever he was upset. Dad couldn’t accept there was anything ‘wrong’ with Aaron, so to speak, but as time went by, he couldn’t deny there was definitely something different about his son. Aaron never received a formal diagnosis, partially because our parents couldn’t afford it, partially because they were anxious about ‘labels’, but autism eventually became a firm part of his identity and self-understanding: the only difference between him and someone who had been diagnosed was parents with a disposable $2000 dollars or so. By the time Aaron was a teenager, Dad had finally accepted his autism, until he remembered the vitamin K incident and realised what, or who, was to blame for his son’s differences. It was his fault, he thought, that his son was the way he was. If Dad had simply trusted his instincts and refused the shot of vitamin K, Aaron would be ‘normal’. He struggled with both his guilt and Aaron’s autism, feeling like it made him more susceptible to the ‘mainstream’ and less accepting of the reality Dad was trying to make him aware of. “He’s a total spaz, Niamh,” Dad would say to me on the regular. “I want nothing more than to be able to heal him. I don’t want to lose him like I’ve lost your mother.” Mum and Dad couldn’t agree on anything. Not on politics, not on social issues, not on the nature of the world or the fabric of reality. Mum believed the world’s issues were generated by capitalism and systematic oppression, but Dad knew the world’s issues were created by barely humanoid, shadowy elites. While he said we had about ten years before everything fell apart, Dad was still determined we should get away from it all as soon as possible. “I didn’t get the chance to save your mother, but it might not be too late to save Aaron,” he said after one particularly bad fight with Mum. “Niamh, I can’t do it without you. Your mother’s completely insane, Isaac’s too young, and Aaron’s slipping away.” A few months before, the 2017 New Zealand election had taken place, the first election Aaron was old enough to vote in. Dad had been biting his nails down to the quick, stressing that he wouldn’t be able to stop my brother from enrolling to vote. For most of my life, Dad had been completely anti-voting. As he would say, the entire political system was a ‘psy-op’, a psychological operation, an American military term to describe the manipulation of the enemy into a desired outcome. Voting tricked humans into thinking they had agency and electoral roles were used to keep tabs on citizens. After Aaron’s vitamin K shot, Dad’s second biggest regret was voting in the 2008 election, the only election he had ever engaged with. “I somehow let your mother talk me into it,” Dad explained to me. “The polls came out and it looked like National was going to win and she made me go out and get registered and they won anyway. Worse than a waste of time.” Mum had been able to convince Aaron to vote in the first stages of the flag referendum, and there was a good chance she could do it again. But in the end, Dad’s stance was more determined, and when Mum went up the road to Te Aro School to post her papers and collect her little I Voted sticker, Aaron stayed at home. Unlike America, New Zealand elected their female candidate, and Jacinda Ardern was the third woman to be Prime Minister. Even though Mum was a Green party voter to her core, she was pretty happy with the outcome of the election. Dad pretended he couldn’t care less about it all, but he couldn’t resist rolling his eyes whenever Mum’s friends were over and discussing our new prime minister. He couldn’t stand that most of the country referred to her by her first name, Jacinda, or worse, Aunty Cindy, and when she announced her pregnancy at the start of the New Year, his irises practically dIsaacppeared into the back of his skull. Even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to like Jacinda, it was hard to not feel a kind of affinity with her, because after she gave birth, whenever I introduced myself to somebody they would mention the prime minister. The spelling wasn’t quite right, but the essence was there. She had named her daughter Neve. After Aaron proved his loyalty by abstaining from voting in the election, Dad was able to relax and refocus on matters concerning the end of life as we knew it. He and his children needed to start getting prepared for the disintegration of society as soon as possible. We needed to be learning how to make soap from lye and animal fat, how to make tools and hunting weapons from whatever we could find in the bush, downloading every piece of information we could possibly need on the computer and printing it out before the great blackout when all electricity would stop working and the internet would die, all while keeping Dad company at home, because he always said his biggest fear was being alone. A chapter taken with kind permission from The World Reversed by Niamh Vaughan, who was announced late last year as the winner of the 2025 Adam Foundation Prize at the IIML in Wellington. Her memoir was written as part of her Master of Arts in Creative Writing folio. Examiners described it as “an intimate and illuminating memoir on a subject of contemporary importance.” Previous Adam Foundation Prize recipients include Catherine Chidgey, Paula Morris, Eleanor Catton, Paula Morris, Ashleigh Young, Tayi Tibble, Nick Bollinger, William Brandt, Craig Gamble and Rebecca K Reilly.