Part II — A Series of Coincidences.
“Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.”
— Douglas Coupland
Before we start I just want to say I’ve written this whole thing from start to the current day before I started this page and a bunch of stuff has played out as predicted already, I will make an effort to update it but if I miss something or if it seems like i’m not taking recent developments in to consideration, this is why.
Concerning the news this week that Monica Smit has joined the United Australia Party, i’ll just paste a post I made on my Facebook page here.
Pete Evans might be a stretch, George Christensen will either become an ‘alternate media’ personality to support the party or just join, he is in a fairly safe seat after all, but I am certain the other parties mentioned will become part of the UAP. There’s a fair list of parties related to this in one way or another as well, we’ll get into them at a later date but if they do all band together it is a serious concern.
I also want to just make the point of how the situation is framed in the eyes of pretty much everyone. Yesterday, The Age posted this.
You can find the article here and the one with a different view here.
Not to say either of these articles aren’t making legitimate points, though I resonate much more with the latter article, I don’t know what to make of the first one it seems like a call to arms and also completely misses the point. At this point, we are used to that around here. But this isn’t an analysis of the media, I just wanted to point out how the whole past 18 or so months has been framed and over analyzed again and again, by people who didn’t experience it themselves. I’m not just talking about people from another state, I’m talking about people living in a different information bubble, like for example a journalist. I have no doubt that there were many journalists knowingly participating in this whole campaign, this article from The Age could even be an example, but there were many more who would have been oblivious to the whole thing.
Such is the nature of online targeting.
Personally, it was a case of curiosity after seeing the odd shared posts here and there, getting curious and following the page I didn’t actually see much of it initially, but once I followed 3 or so pages along the same themes it opened up a whole world of recommended videos and groups.
There is no doubt that the conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy would have been there with or without this network of people, but Victoria vs Other States is all the proof you need that without them the whole last 18 months would have been much smoother for us all. The outrage these journalists acknowledge is the peripherals of this whole campaign and I will lay out for you best I can.
Anyway, back to July 2020.
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Watching the torrents of misinformation infect the minds of the public in the long winter lockdown of 2020 and finding the ties to the LNP too much to ignore, I poured over every available resource regarding Cambridge Analytica, the company at the heart of Donald Trumps 2016 election campaign, who on paper claim to be a ‘data analytics’ company but in reality are an American offshoot of a British psychological warfare company called SCL, a contractor to the Ministry Of Defense. You could more accurately call them a ‘Political Warfare’ company. Once I learned that 2 of the total of 3 names I could dig up of the fake grass roots organizations they set up in their campaigns, that of Nigeria Forward and Reignite Britain, lined up with the two main groups that sprung up seemingly out of nowhere in 2020, Victoria Forward and Reignite Democracy, I went back and started taking notes.
Cambridge Analytica, in a official capacity, never divulged specific tactics just boasted about data and profiling. Articles written about them focus just on the data and the profiling but rarely do they go any further outside of showing some memes. But after several books, hours on hours of audio interviews and way too much internet searching for one person I was able to get an idea of what they were about and put together a list of tactics mentioned in first hand accounts either from people at the company or governments investigating work done in their elections.
There’s two sides to their campaigns, online and offline. The online stuff is the bulk of it and we’ll go into detail on that next time but this online data deception is affirmed by a bunch of stunts in the real world. Initially I thought the whistleblowers were being tight lipped with the tactics but after watching things play out I think maybe they just stick to what they know works. As i’ve said elsewhere before, conservatives as a general rule of thumb aren’t very creative so if you want to see what their tactics are you just have to look at what others have done.
So let’s have a look at each tactic I found mention of and see if we can match it to anything that’s happened here over the last 18 months.
The first, most obvious tactic is the first one mentioned in the expose done on the company by channel 4 in the UK. Find a dodgy member of the party, spy on them for a while, work out some kind of deal, get it all on camera and boom instant evidence of corruption. Then they can use their contacts in the media to find someone to pick up the story and you sit back and watch the damage done.
Well we can’t ignore the 60 minutes expose in June last year involving Adem Somyurek, where “The Age and 60 minutes obtained more than one hundred audio and video surveillance files”. It was a big news and resulted in Somyurek and 2 other affiliates being expelled from the Labor Party.
Was the sting and the repercussions valid? Certainly. Was it an isolated coincidence that has nothing to do with anything that proceeded it? Has to have been, even the mere suggestion that that was part of a web of carefully laid out tactics as part of some kind of political campaign seems laughable, right? Maybe we’ll revisit this question at the end.
Only a month later 60 minutes did another expose, the one we touched on already involving Marcus Bastian, husband of Victoria Forward field journalist / admin Stephanie Bastian and some federal MPs. This did not get the same media coverage. At the time I took some screenshots of a google search for ‘corruption in the Labor party’ vs ‘corruption in the Liberal party’ to illustrate that point.
Perhaps Labor should have hired Sukkars former law firm to investigate, but I digress.
We had entered a 6 week stage 3 lockdown on the 30th of June. It didn’t take long for the resistance to find it’s voice. By the start of August Reignite Democracy was up and running and were boasting of a Facebook page tens of thousands of followers strong within a matter of weeks plus we had a whole host of anti-lockdown, anti-Labor Facebook groups and pages spring up and an entire city confined to their news feeds, their confusion and anger being taken advantage of and directed in one specific direction.
Looking back to Cambridge Analytica, what supported their online campaign was the alternative media network that was funded by a host of billionaire Republican donors already in place and already pushing their own narratives to an established Audience.
This network is part of what has been dubbed ‘The Kochtopus’, which is a network of thinktanks, institutes, academies and alternative media outlets funded by Republican mega-donors The Koch Brothers amongst other fossil fuel and religious interests.
There is plenty of information out there about this network, again The Dirt Unit podcast has all the relevant information about the network and their media arms in the one spot.
This network is generally used to push agendas that align with the financial interests of their backers, most notably this network has been used to seed doubt about climate science but proved a useful tool in the lead up to the 2016 election.
The most prominent outlets used in 2016 were Breitbart News, Rebel News and Project Veritas. Alternative media outlets largely funded by Republican mega donor Robert Mercer, who also provided the funding for Cambridge Analytica. Breitbart news, a more traditional media outlet that mostly publishes articles, was being run by Steve Bannon who went on to sit on the board of Cambridge Analytica along with Robert Mercer. He also went on to work as Donald Trumps chief strategist for the first year of his presidency. Breitbart is responsible for conservative personalities like Milo Yiannopoulos.
Rebel News is more focused on video format, best known for viral clips interviewing people attending protests in an attempt to make their cause seem stupid and is responsible for bringing many far-right personalities to prominence, notably Sky News’ own Lauren Southern.
Fox News was also complicit in this, more so as the presidency went on but much like their related outlets in this country they allude to this stuff in a very careful way that sounds innocent enough but speaks on another level to somebody who exists in this echo chamber.
Back home it was / is The Herald Sun and Sky News leading the charge initially throughout the month of July. From lies about misbehaving security guards and non existent BLM Covid spreading and more, some retracted, most not, but even if it was called out it didn’t matter because it had been quoted, slapped on an image and memed several times over by then.
The skewed reporting from Sky and the Herald Sun then flowed on through to a range of highly dubious alternative media outlets, where quotes and statistics were taken and recontexted to suit the common narrative flowing through these info-connected websites. These range from blogs like this one to conservative alternative media like the white supremacy tinged XYZ.net.au, The Unshackled and Caldron Pool, conspiracy ‘news’ sites like Cairnsnews.org, their Victorian counterpart Australianloyalresistance.org and the very similar themed Clown World through to the CIA funded cold-war era Australian publication Quadrant and plenty more.
All questioning the legitimacy of the virus, the legitimacy of the governments actions while trying to contain the virus, the legitimacy of the police, the legitimacy of the lockdowns, the legitimacy of the media and all fiercely anti-China.
Perhaps it was just a bout of bad luck or perhaps it was due to a large segment of the people in lockdown engaging with politics and the news for the first time with zero media literacy and being fed constant messaging in the form of Newscorp articles and Sky News clips questioning the severity of the virus, the use of masks and the need for lockdowns, but we found ourselves in lockdown for a second time. This time it was just Victoria.
Note some of the language used there by Mr Bolt. Specifically the terms ‘Clown Show’ and ‘The Socialist Republic of Victoria’.
As our restrictions got tighter and despite little change in the official opinion polling the online noise ramped up. #GiveDanTheBoot was the brainchild of Victoria Forward, encouraging people to put their boots out for Dan. It wasn’t a wild hit, but the relatively insignificant number of photos of boots out made their way around online through all the different groups and forums and no doubt shared to the news feeds of potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
There was a hashtag war on twitter between #dictatordan #danliedpeopledied and #istandwithdan. A study of these trends reveals that the pro-dan hashtag received 2.5x the activity of #dictatordan and 13x the activity of #danliedpeopledied. It also revealed the #dictatordan hashtag appears to have originated from Tim Smith back in May but was picked up and run with by Avi Yemini around the end of August/start of September. Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology, who ran the study, wrote in The Conversation.
“Many of the anti-Andrews accounts were created more recently than those posting pro-Andrews hashtags. The imbalance between new accounts posting pro- and anti-Andrews hashtags probably isn’t by chance
It’s more likely anti-Andrews activists deliberately created sockpuppet accounts to give the impression of greater support for their agenda than actually exists among the public.
The aim would be to use these fake accounts to fool Twitter’s algorithms into giving certain hashtags greater visibility.”
Media watch reported at the time that a some of these fake accounts spreading these hashtags had also been spreading #arsonemergency over the summer.
This all coincided with Avi Yemeni joining Rebel News as their Australian correspondent.
Coincidences, right?
At the start of September we also saw #arsonemergency trending again on Twitter. This time it was in relation to the Californian wildfires. Strange.
But it wasn’t just Avi, of course you have your staple right-wing commentators on Sky News but they are bound by annoying things like ‘facts’ and needing ‘reliable sources’ (though that doesn’t actually seem to matter nor does it have any consequence) but a group of various ‘independent’ commentators and personalities rose to prominence around this time and became the central figures to this anti-lockdown movement.
Morgan C Jonas has his website The MCJ Report which has been ongoing since 2019. He also used to write for TR News with Avi Yemini but went on to be central to the Anti-Lockdown movement through his FB live news type program of the same name which is kind of part of Reignite Democracy (or RDA as they call themselves now) but without being branded as such. He is Monica Smits boyfriend. He is very anti-China and in his reports he frequently cites the Epoch Times, which is owned by the Falun Gong.
On the surface he appears to have an existing relationship with the Falun Gong community in Melbourne, appearing along side them at demonstrations and holding anti-China and anti-Dan Andrews rallies along side them since 2019.
Very early on in the pandemic saw the rise of Fanos Panayides
Much like Monica Smit he has had a tilt at reality TV, being a one time contestant on Family Food Fight.
What is it with these reality TV people and being involved in this movement? Coincidences I guess. The image above this one on the right is of Fanos with a fellow former cooking themed reality TV star turned rabid conspiracy theorist, Pete Evans. I’ve seen the guy in the background appear a few times with Fanos as well. His name is Neil Pascoe.
Fanos shot to ‘fame’ after a series of viral videos, most notably of him losing his shit in a donut shop. I can’t locate that clip but here’s a clip of him losing it trying to stir outrage on the eve of the first protest in our second lockdown.
Unfortunately for Fanos he is banned from Facebook and Youtube, but has been very active on Telegram and more recently on Rumble. Fanos was involved in organizing the early ‘Freedom Rally’ protests and he was more interested in the conspiracy theories surrounding Covid, lockdowns and pedophiles in the deep state. He is also very anti 5g and brings guests on his podcast to talk about these subjects. He gets very biblical sometimes in his rants, starts quoting bible verses and stuff. Entertaining though, in a ‘laughing at you’ kind of way.
Helping Fanos organize the protests early on was Raph Fernandez.
He markets himself as some kind of spiritual life coach but appears to be a conspiracy theorist Christian in his 20s. He recently moved to NSW and went on to give plenty of exposure to the cafe in Sydney that was fined for refusing to wear masks and not shutting for lockdown. I’ve tried to listen to a bunch of his stuff to learn more about him but I just can’t sit through it. Seems like he thinks he knows everything about everything.
Speaking with Raph above is Zac Galloway. His podcast ‘Running from Comfort’ was just a normal podcast with a broad range of interesting people that came out a couple of times a month, not many views but enough to keep him going, then in August he interviewed Joel Jammal, host of the very conservative NSW based podcast called ‘The Arc’ with Riccardo Bosi. Bosi was a Lt Col of the Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq who, much like his American peer Michael Flynn, has gone all in on Qanon.
Michael Flynn was an advisor to Cambridge Analytica and runs his own consultancy firm. These two carry Trump hats and talk about taking down the deep state pedophiles.
Zac then went full conspiracy theorist and continues to do live streams daily on Facebook, mostly talking about a New World Order looking to take over the world with a deadly vaccine and all that. Now that he is on his last warning from Facebook he can’t talk about that stuff as much so he has gone all in on his other passion. The passion for Christ, or ‘Spiritual Warfare’ as he calls it. He holds live stream prayer sessions and stuff with this equally as out-there guy who I think is a priest.
He’s safe from Covid though.
Nick Patterson is another key player, though not so much anymore due to a court order after assaulting police.
He is a former professional fighter and was a part of the podcast/live stream show ‘The Uncuckables” with the people behind The XYZ and The Unshackled. In April 2021 he started ‘The Peacemakers’. Presumably as an Aussie equivalent of the Oathkeepers. They work as security at the protests. He appeals to the crowd that lands further to the right than Avi and Morgan.
Another piece of this mindfuck is Mel Ann and Digital Warfare. Outraged at the very selfish idea of lockdowns and social distancing to keep others safe because it effected her, she started a telegram group called Digital Warfare along with a few friends and amassed a large group of soldiers to fight her war very quickly. Maybe due to appearing in early fb live streams with Monica Smit and Reignite Democracy or her Facebook page ‘Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction’ or maybe the girls here are just modern covert warfare buffs and saw an opportunity to pay homage, who knows.
It had a simple goal, she links a Facebook post from a politician or a news outlet that enrages her, lists the talking points and sets the troops loose on the comment section. Oh and memes. Lots of angry, angry memes. Unfortunately I don’t have any of the memes, Mel wiped their telegram page clean in June when Digital Warfare disbanded. All that remains is an Instagram page which is run by one of the girls, Beth.
This tactic, not pioneered by Cambridge Analyitica, was first used in Israel to bombard the comments section of articles from the New York Times that they saw as not giving a balanced view of the Palestine / Israel conflict. I can’t link a source, I have no idea where I read that, but it’s true.
You can best sum up the vibe of Mel (who ran the telegram page) as angry, conspiratorial, religious-right Libertarian. By flooding every comment section of an article they didn’t like with their version of reality this added a pivotal extra piece to this manufactured outrage as well as public perception and mood.
These guys were behind the barrage of outrage directed at Fiona Patten, but mostly they just made sure everyone knows DAN ANDREWS KILLED 800 PEOPLE WITH HIS BARE HANDS.
Last but definitely not least (for now) we have Rukshan. The Real Rukshan, not one of those fake Rukshans that you always get.
He’s a wedding photographer turned political commentator / media analyst / ”Independent Journalist”. He is positioned as an outsider these days but is very much in this core group. He produces all the fancy promotional material for Reignite Democracy and Morgan Jonas as well as filming and editing every stunt of theirs and live streaming every protest.
His live streaming of protests have been the gateway for much of the movement since it took off. He appeared, with no previous work doing anything like this, on Youtube on the 1st of August, the same week as Reignite Democracy.
We’ll look more at his role in this at a later date but for now I just want to highlight a curiosity with him.
This is his production company ‘Ferndara’
On their Linkedin page it states the following:
‘we have regularly provided our photography services to BMW Australia and the State Government of Victoria’
Curious, right? Considering that according to his Twitter account he appears to be a rabid Trump fan and staunchly conservative it seems weird that he would happily work for the current state government
If we have a look at Ferndaras Instagram portfolio it looks like this
Hundred of images, looks like every single project from Ferndara is on here. It’s all weddings though? Nothing from the State Government. It’s on his Linkedin, so you’d think they would show the pictures on their Instagram along with seemingly every single other thing they have done since the first upload on the page.
Maybe he is ashamed of working for Dan Andrews?
If we go back through the the page this is the first upload to Ferndaras Instagram.
October 23, 2014 was their first post.
That’s one month before Daniel Andrews and Labor booted the Liberals out of government.
But Ferndara has been around since 2009.
Was Rukshan working for the Liberals when they were last in government in Victoria?
There is many more people involved but we’ll get into them as they come up.
This group was the group that sprung up as a unit, capitalized on the confusion and fear around Covid, stirred up the anger and kept it pointing in one specific direction.
Also special mention goes out to the Discernable crew which consists of Matthew Wong, Topher Field and the woman who runs Voice for Victoria whose name I do not know. Wong was Monica Smits co host on their short lived current affairs program ‘The Peoples Project’ which changed its name to ‘Not The Project’. Monica parted ways after only like a month or so and the show underwent a makeover and became what is now ‘Discernable’. More on them another time.
So now, over the month of August we have a core group of people all catering to a different niche, though it has to be said they are all quite religious, all claiming to be ‘independent media’ plus a whole host of alternative media, Facebook pages, groups, etc to support it, with the newer outlets being more prominent and the ones that have been around a while seem to have serious white supremacy undertones and links to Reclaim Australia, which also shares a branding with organizations set up by Cambridge Analytica.
Coincidences? We’re just warming up.
Another tactic used by Cambridge Analytica in their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago was to appeal to non-politically engaged youths by running a covert graffiti campaign.
On a rare drive out of my area in lockdown I personally saw the same style of messaging saying ‘Stop NWO Takeover’ and things of that nature in every suburb I passed through from Mt Eliza on the Mornington Peninsula all the way to Daniel Andrews office in Noble Park.
What I would consider ‘the iconic’ tactic of Cambridge Analytica is to cover a bus in signage and drive it around town
Well, who could forget the Omnibus.
Looks expensive.
There was many other similar things from sky writing and planes towing signage to smaller buses and just an array of expensive stunts done by people unhappy that Daniel Andrews has sent them broke. Carefully timed to fuel outrage for another protest.
One of many elephants in the room here is the other Cambridge Analytica namesake — Reclaim Australia. Is there any overlap between the two?
Absolutely not.
They have made that perfectly clear.
No more questions.
So far here we have:
A movement that at it’s creation both the sentiment around it and the figures involved all have clear ties to the Liberal party. Specifically the Victorian hard right faction and the ‘National Right’ faction but even more specifically on a federal level the ‘Frydenberg Ambition (sub)Faction’. As time goes on we see these people start to use various tactics to spread their messaging and create the illusion of more support for their cause than exists in reality. They fear monger and spread conspiracy theories with fake news, ‘proven’ by a mix of the abundant disinformation circulating online, false reporting in the Herald Sun and the opinions of Sky News commentators. Over time they drag more and more people into their echo chamber where they are bombarded with the same messaging constantly in many different forms. They do this through a network of alternate media outlets, Youtube pages, podcasts, Facebook groups and telegram. A core group of personalities emerge seemingly from nowhere, all at the same time, all filling different aspects of the media spectrum, repeating the same lies as fact while constantly reminding people that the media is lying to them. They pull a range of expensive stunts, apparently fueled by donations from people angry because they are broke.
The messaging is -
Dan Andrews and the ALP are corrupt. China is bad. Dan Andrews and the left = China. Everyone who wears a mask is a scared, Chinese, Communist, Nazi enabling, snowflake sheep that lives beneath you and your lion-esque peers and spends their days living in terror awaiting their Lord Andrews to tell them what they can do while also shilling for the Rothschilds online. Daniel Andrews has become a tyrannical dictator who, along with Brett Sutton, is a full blown Nazi-Zionist. Covid is fake. Getting tested means China is harvesting your DNA. If anyone makes the movement look bad they were a Labor plant because Labor is really into psychological warfare but Trump will save you and Covid, although fake, has a tiny death rate anyway and is no worse than the flu but the vaccine will kill you because mainstream media is all in bed with each other and wants you dead with lies except Peta Credlin, Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt and Rowan Dean.
Seems legit.
In fact, Newscorp featured quite prominently throughout this campaign. Looking back on it, this whole thing was kind of a continuation of their rhetoric leading up to it.
Including the fabrication of stories to support their narrative.
There was the poll by The Age on Twitter that was hijacked by bots, this was pointed out and the poll was taken offline. That didn’t stop a screenshot of the poll flowing through the network and being shared into thousands of news feeds, followed up by Chris Kenny reporting it as fact on Sky News the next day.
‘But business owners were outraged! It was all over the news’ you might say. Seems it, I hear jobkeeper was tough to work with.
One café owner in Mornington decided enough was enough. She decided to go out on behalf of all small business owners and launch a class action lawsuit against the Andrews government.
She was a champion of the echo chamber at the time. She was also a member of the Liberal party aspiring to run for her local seat. This was mentioned as a foot note. Unfortunately it didn’t make it on to the screenshots that made its way to the people that don’t read the mainstream media.
Ms Loielo’s lawyers were provided by the Liberal Party.
This inspired a few others to join in and launch their own class actions. Which might seem like a lot of people but there was definitely more fundraisers for lawsuits than actual lawsuits. Including from Avi Yemeni, who ran multiple fundraising campaigns raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for challenges yet to be filed.
By the time the remaining few made it all the way to court most of the cases were thrown out pretty much straight away on the basis of them being bogus lawsuits, but that didn’t matter.
Jim Penman was not happy. He funded a lawsuit on behalf of a Jims Mowing franchisee and his frustrations were picked up by the media. He also wrote an open letter to the government of Victoria which was picked up by the media. He did the rounds on the morning shows to chat about it and of course Reignite Democracies short lived nightly current affairs program on Facebook. In fact they were created initially at the start of August off the back of holding a live stream protest and then 2 weeks later they were advertising an interview with Jim.
Come to think of it, the protest that was organized for the week of the Omnibus stunt had people wearing ‘Let Victoria Work’ T-Shirts with Jim’s branding on it and well, if this wasn’t all just a coincidence then that would appear to be some serious dog whistle marketing happening right there.
You used to be able to buy these shirts in the Reignite Democracy merch store, they’ve sold heaps of stuff. They even sold these cool stickers that you could slap around town and help raise awareness about the people that are trying to scare everybody.
If we look at their videos, we can see all the initial people that helped give them exposure at the start by coming on their Facebook page for an interview.
If their Facebook page is down again by the time you read this you can find some of these on their Youtube Channel.
They are:
David Limbrick (Liberal Democrats)
Brad Rowswell MP (member for Sandringham, Victorian Liberal)
David Hodgett MP (Former Deputy Leader of the Victorian Liberals)
Bernie Finn MP (Victorian Liberals)
Catherine Cumming MP (Independent)
Bev Mcarthur (Victorian Liberals)
All appearing multiple times. The first interview was with Brad Rowswell MP, State Liberal member for Sandringham.
These state based politicians only seem to be around these guys during the second wave lockdown, with only brief cameos since. However, that’s when George Christensen and Craig Kelly started to make appearances.
It’s not surprising that Christensen got involved considering what Gizmoto wrote about his fb page last year.
This group has been the centerpiece of this whole movement. Initially backed by the state Liberals and the Liberal Democrats, then by Federal Liberals. They promote, attend, speak at and report on every protest and pull little stunts in between to fuel the outrage needed to get people to attend.
All of this was fueled online through a vast network of groups, combined with an onslaught of messaging in the form of memes, clips and posts from dubious accounts.
More on this next time. For now, here is a cross section of memes collected from these groups that really sums up the vibes.
