Part 1 — Moving Forward.
As somebody who never generally looked at things as left and right outside of an actual political party I was finding it harder and harder to find common ground with people who identified themselves as Right-wing. So, some time in 2019 I made a deliberate effort to balance my AI generated echo chamber that is the Facebook news feed and start following a bunch of political pages on all sides of the spectrum. Whenever I would see somebody sharing a meme from a Facebook page or a group I was not yet in I would join/follow it and so on.
This led me to some weird corners of the internet and although it became clear to me that many people are trapped in their own echo chambers it was relatively harmless.
Fast Forward to the summer of 2019/20. Half the east coast is on fire (lol remember that) and the loudest voices on my screen are shouting ‘The Greens did it’ from one side of their mouth and ‘arson emergency!’ from the other.
But then I was also seeing this stuff.
I found this strange and the rabid response of some accounts even stranger. This was coupled with the hashtag #arsonemergency trending on Twitter, something that was later shown by Timothy Graham of the Queensland University of Technology to be inauthentic behavior led by bots.
As we crossed in to 2020, fires still raging, up popped a page called Victoria Forward, spearheaded by a young lad named Edward Bourke. He was the male vice-chair of the Sunbury branch of the Liberal Party, which would make his state member Bernie Finn. You might remember him as the 15 year old who independently campaigned for Trump and 2 years into the presidency was left feeling let down because Trump had moved too far to the left. He was this pompous looking kid in a suit talking about politics with this arrogance that, If i’m honest, I thought was blatant satire. How wrong I was.
From News.com.au:
He said the style and structure of “United States political action committees is very effective, and I hope to prove that those strategies also translate well in Victoria”.
“However, the core reason Victoria Forward exists is because I love Victoria and truly care about the Victorian people.
“Victoria is worth fighting for, and Victorians must be advocated for.”
They started out innocent enough.
Providing updates on air quality and asking people what they wanted to hear.
They stayed relatively dormant on their Facebook page once covid hit and through the first lockdown. Then in May, they asked the question
So Victoria Forward heads to the high country, journalists in tow. Not your ‘lamestream’ journalists, real ‘independent’ journalists.
Independent journalist 1 is Stephanie Bastiaan, formerly of the Young Liberals. She has worked in the office of both Michael Sukkar and Kevin Andrews.
She is the wife of Marcus Bastiaan, an aspirational young Victorian Liberal christian-right powerbroker with a penchant for creating companies in random industries that never go anywhere, who left the party last year after serious allegations of branch stacking also linked with Sukkar and Andrews by The Age and 60 Minutes.
While anybody watching the 60 minutes special could easily draw the conclusion that Sukkar was not just passively involved in branch stacking but appeared to have some kind of organisational role in it, this would be naive because the Liberals launched a full independent investigation into the affair which cleared him of any wrongdoing.
This investigation was done by Sukkars former workplace.
Marcus was at one time the Vice President of the Victorian Liberal Party under Michael Kroger, and had planned to succeed him as party president. Kroger, a former federal powerbroker from the Howard years, led his own hard right faction of the Liberal Party until 2012. As of 2011, he is listed as a director of the IPA. Interesting that in 2016, after the ‘distinguished fellow’ of the IPA Tony Abbot was ousted from the leadership, Marcus traveled to NSW to give a speech to Abbot supporters calling for the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull.
Independent journalist 2 is Monica Smit, a Catholic Journalist who once was an aspiring contestant on Australian Survivor and as you can see at this same time she was already growing weary of covid restrictions.
And it seems somebody did help because she gets much better at dramatizing.
We don’t know how Victoria Forward came in contact with these people, however an interesting observation is that Monica Smit traveled to Florida in 2019 to attend the Pascua Florida Pilgrimage. This is put on by St Thomas More Catholic Church who state on their website
St. Thomas More (STM) is a Roman Catholic community of baptized persons in the Archdiocese of Atlanta. STM is sponsored by the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and staffed by Jesuits and their lay colleagues.
It operates under the patronage of the Society of St Pius X which has an interesting page on cultwatch.
Their website shows they have 3 church locations in Victoria, one in Tynong not far from Smits home in Pakenham.
It also shows they have one in Hampton, not far from the Bastians in Brighton.
The third is in Mildura.
They were welcomed to the high country by state Liberal for Western Victoria Bev McArthur in a now deleted Facebook post that still has an imprint on Google.
Those playing along at home might remember Bev McArthur from her recent campaign against the federal government providing financial assistance to Victorians in lockdown. She is a part of Marcus Bastiaans (former) hard right faction of the Victorian Liberals. Marcus resigned from the Liberal Party in December after clinging on for 4 months after the 60 minutes story.
The faction still exists. Who leads it now?
Well we don’t know.
Edward Bourke runs the factional newsletter though, or at least he contributed heavily to the first edition, which launched in December. The newsletter is titled ‘Grassroots’.
Yeah.
So they got the content they needed and headed back home. Stephanie Bastiaan stayed on to help Victoria Forward as an admin and Monica Smit parted ways and went on to start Reignite Democracy and become central to the anti-lockdown protests and general sentiment during Victoria’s second wave of covid and beyond.
These guys were written about in detail by Gizmodo and news.com.au and then later by The Guardian last year if you need to play catch up.
If I could just build on that though.
As you can see, Victoria Forward was very busy during the lockdowns but they seem to have died down since, with only a few little bursts of posts on their Facebook page.
Funny, because nearly all of my local community groups and other random community groups I joined have a member, several members or even an admin that have very suspicious profiles and share fresh Victoria Forward memes whenever anything happens that could be politicized. But it’s not just Victoria Forward, it’s also Advance Australia and The Quiet Australian plus LNP edgelords like Bernie Finn and Tim Smith.
Advance Australia is a ’political lobbying group’ billed as an ‘anti get-up’, chaired by Liz Storer, a former local councilor who worked in the office of Liberal senator Zed Seselja and with strong ties to the IPA and in turn, along with Victoria Forward, receives media coverage and promotion from Sky News.
The Quiet Australian doesn’t claim to be a political action group, it describes itself as
Yes they missed a word in the description.
So what does this mixture everything all-round Australian Australiana for Aussies who are Australian to enjoy in Australia with Australian commonsense look like?
They share posts from Victoria Forward, Advance Australia and also a whole host of less prolific specifically anti-Daniel Andrews pages that popped up over the last year plus cartoons straight from the Herald Sun and a steady stream of memes quoting Sky News, The Herald Sun and The Australian in a format that looks very much like Victoria Forward without the branding that appears to come from the Facebook page of the official ‘winner of Twitter’ Tim Smith, the state Liberal member for Q. Sorry, I mean Kew. You know, the one in Josh Frydenbergs seat of Kooyong.
These pages, promoted by Sky News and through their infiltration of innocuous closed Facebook groups and groups of their own quickly saturated the screens of Melbournians while confined to their homes in the long winter lockdowns of 2020 with their hyperbolic narratives, recontexted quotes and straight made up baloney all coming together in a perfect storm of political disinformation, infecting the minds of the city while they were at their most vulnerable and as a consequence, highly malleable, with politics more central to their lives than it has ever been.
So at this point you may be thinking ‘So what? They’re just shitty memes’. Well putting aside the concept of 4th generational (or memetic) warfare, which i’ll touch on more later, there came a point pretty much as soon as Victoria entered into the second lockdown where this movement kicked in to overdrive. On the surface level this seems to have been sparked by the BLM protests that happened in between the lockdowns.
By BLM I mean Brumby Lives Matter. Obviously.
About 20 people strong, this socially distanced protest happened on the 18th of May and it was such a hit that they decided to ride the momentum and organize a second one for the 1st of June. But restriction had tightened by then and they were threatened with fines if they held the protest so they had to call it off.
So you can imagine their outrage when only a few days after their canceled protest was due to happen a man named George Floyd was murdered by a cop in the USA, reigniting the Black Lives Matter movement and sparking worldwide protests. While it is widely alleged, mostly from right wing media, that these protests were violent affairs led by Marxist revolutionists — and im willing to concede they may well have been — but there is surprisingly little footage of this violence. In fact, the only compelling footage of violence at the black lives matter protests in America that I could find was a compilation of phone camera footage showing what appear to be cops or some kind of private security coming through the protests and smashing things. But I digress.
The Melbourne edition was much calmer.
But this reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement did not go down well with our Brumby warriors at Victoria Forward, in particular Monica Smit, who decided it was democracy that needed reigniting (I presume) and went on to use the injustice of threatening the Brumby Lives Matter protesters with fines if they went ahead and not giving a fine to anybody from the Black Lives Matter protest just a few days later (which isn’t even true) as justification for the countless protests that went on as our restrictions got tighter and beyond. They continue to this day.
This has been aided, in no small part, by a few key members of the state opposition party, namely Tim Smith and Bernie Finn but many others as well. From the word go these two have been easily the least helpful politicians of the entire pandemic, from Smiths call for a cull of all the bats in Melbourne to Bernies constant labeling of the ‘Wuhan Virus’, these two have been the intersection, or perhaps more accurately ‘the doorway’ between politics and this online stream of misinformation. Completely by chance, of course.
And of course on the federal level once the outrage was channeled into a nationally appealing issue you have Craig Kelly and George Christensen.
Watching this happen, also confined to my home, hearing this completely skewed version of reality repeated back to me when speaking with friends or even interacting with random people through work or at the shops, I had questions. I also had time on my hands.
So I started learning about the 2016 Trump campaign, in particular the data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica. I read all there was to read from any official sources reporting on the firm and was a little underwhelmed. I understood psycho-graphic profiling and targeted advertising but I just didn’t fully understand how that translates into something as effective as it was made out to be. Eventually I found my way to the 2 whistle blowers from the company, Chris Wiley and Brittany Kaiser, each with a book they have written about their former workplace. Reading these books and then proceeding to listen to every interview they have ever done I started to get a very different picture of how they worked. As I learned, Cambridge Analytica isn’t just a ‘data analytics’ firm, they are an offshoot of a British psychological warfare firm called Strategic Communications Laboratories, who ran psy ops for the British in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and then turned to private work for political parties.
I encourage you to learn more about these guys
I recommend the book Mindf*ck (also on Audible) by Chris Wiley who was a data scientist who worked on their models for psycho-graphic targeting and helped develop their tactics.
Brittany Kaisers book Targeted is still worth reading and also on Audible
Aussie podcast ‘The Dirt Unit’ has an in depth breakdown
To learn more you can read a more recent article by Brittany Kaiser
and watch the Documentary ‘The Great Hack’
or just, you know, do your own research. (sorry)
t could be easy to write Reignite Democracy and Victoria Forward off as not being related. They don’t share each others posts (on their official pages anyway) and they certainly focus on different aspects of the same issues, you could say they just linked up for a common love of Brumbies and then parted ways and that would be a perfectly reasonable assumption.
However, the first thing of note on Cambridge Analytica is their tactic of setting up ‘grass roots’ activist organizations in order to spread their propaganda and create the impression of a ‘peoples movement’. Not unlike how the Koch brothers and associates created the Tea Party movement or how the CIA worked in Vietnam. The most effective way to do this is find a group of individuals who’s values align with the objectives, already in the process of establishing themselves or simply looking for acting work, strategically catered to different targeted sections of the community and to prop them up. They talk about doing this in their books but rarely do they mention what any of these groups are called. In fact, they only mention 3 names, but gee those names are awfully familiar.
In the Brexit campaign, which they ‘unofficially worked on’, they set up a bunch of these organizations. I note here that the Liberal parties campaigners, CT Group, formerly Crosby-Textor, also unofficially worked on Brexit and also set up ‘grass roots’ Facebook pages urging people to contact their MPs to push for a hard Brexit. Not only is this similar to what Reignite Democracy was initially set up to do, their website was simply a contact form which sent a message to your chosen MP urging them to lift the lockdowns, but the two names they mention of these Cambridge Analytica astroturfed organizations were Reclaim UK and Reignite Britain.
In another conversation they go into detail about working on the Nigerian elections, where they started a similar group called Nigeria Forward.
These are the three names that we know for a fact Cambridge Analytica named their astroturfed organizations.
The similarities don’t stop there. In fact they are barely getting started.
But trust me when I say it’s complicated.
