Part IV — Reigniting Democracy.
‘Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.’
- Franklin D Roosevelt
The Reignite Democracy Facebook page was created on July 26 2020.
Interesting that the related pages are Victoria Forward, David Limbrick from the Liberal Democrats and Michael O'Brien, former leader of the Victorian Liberals.
The first upload on their YouTube account was on the 5th of August with a message promoting the ‘first ever’ live stream protest.
The Speakers at this first ever livestream protest were:
Coincidently, this was the same week that Real Rukshan started his Youtube page. He talks about a previous video but there is no trace of a previous video across all his socials.
The following week Digital Warfare was created. Most traces of them have been wiped from the internet at this point, but we can still see their original event that formed their little group as it was created by the face of the operation, Mel Ann. A call to arms for all Keyboard Warriors.
‘Keep yourself unblocked from these pages so you will be ready to be part of a much bigger wave’
There is still remnants of their antics scattered online, a nice little collage of some comments in their group was put together by the Facebook page ‘This isn’t where I parked my car’
Beth on the right still runs the Instagram page.
Reignitedemocracy.com.au was registered by Monica Smit under the company name ‘im outta here pty ltd’ on the 29/7/2020. The company ‘Im Outta Here’ was registered on the 17/07/2020 in Tynong, Monicas home suburb.
What started out as a website intended to facilitate communication between the public and politicians slowly morphed over time. As did their point and their ethics.
First it was stop the state of emergency. Of course the only reason we had to have the state of emergency extended every month is because in Victoria that is put in place to ensure we don’t just have an indefinite, arbitrary state of Emergency. In other states it’s a different story but forget that little detail it’s not important.
Obviously it didn’t have much of an impact. Purely because YOU didn’t contribute. They will not forget.
A couple of weeks later the website became much more professional looking.
Alongside her activism, Monica had started a live stream current affairs program on Facebook, initially called ‘Not the Project’ and then later changed to ‘The Peoples Project’
Their first guest was David Limbrick MP from the Liberal Democrats.
Monica’s co-host on this show is Matthew Wong. This program was short lived, after a month or so they gave up on the project and Monica left to concentrate on her “Journalism” (AKA excuse to be promote and attend protests) and Matthew Wong merged this with what I presume was a thing he was doing before this called Discernable, basically the same thing in a different room.
Replacing Monica as a regular guest on the show was Topher Field.
Along with the woman who runs ‘Voice For Victoria’ whose name I can’t immediately find and can’t be bothered digging for.
And hey, surprise surprise, look at what date Voice for Victoria was started.
August 5, 2020. The day between Real Rukshan and Reignite Democracies YouTube channel.
Let’s take a second to explore Matthew Wong because he doesn’t really explain his background or relevance to this whole thing in any of these clips.
For that we need to check his LinkedIn page.
Australian Institute of Business. Ok. He was there from 2018–2020.
But as we read on there’s some more interesting stuff.
2015–2017 he was a Migration Agent.
And much like Monica Smit having close ties to SSPX, he also appears to have volunteered to work for a religious organization at the same time.
Then from August 2019 to May 2020 he worked for Echobox A.I managing the Asia Pacific rollout of ‘machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions for the world’s largest publishers (Fairfax, Singapore Press Holdings, the BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde, Vogue, Bauer Media…)’
But what I find most interesting is his current role alongside Discernable.
‘artificial intelligence based computer vision technology’.
Novus Intelligence was founded by this guy.
Interestingly he co-founded Novus in July but Matthew Wong started working for them in June. We can see on the Opengov website that it was created on the 10th of July.
It is pretty confusing really as there is an American business intelligence company run by a whole host of former CIA people called Novus Intelligence, but it doesn’t appear to be connected. Not ruling it out at this point though.
This is the crew from our Novus.
Matt Wong bringing his strategic and operational experience to Novus and not even a month after the company was founded he starts a current affairs program alongside Monica Smit. Nothing suss.
They appear to be based around some kind of AI tech that generates analytics from video footage.
I don’t fully understand the significance of this but it sure is intriguing.
Then we have this description of the company.
Fairly ambiguous, so basically all we know is that it’s a Business Intelligence company that was launched in July 2020 and gathers the data through AI that can pick up data points from video footage.
Like another Data Analytics company we have looked at it probably does more than what is advertised.
We’ll leave that there for now but I feel like this is important to the story.
Maybe they have some other source of data they pull from as well.
This is the October 2020 version of what Reignite Democracy Australia is.
Not sure why it was important to add the date in to that, makes them look even more silly as they were already promoting them by then.
This one is good. Monica Smit, warrior for the ‘pro-choice’ movement.
Lets see some posts from Monica Smits previous journalism page, posted only 7 months before this.
She actually didn’t even post that much.
Ok let’s do the math. Her last post was on the 13th of July 2020. Between the 1st of Jan and the 13th of July she made 18 posts. 4 of those were anti-abortion. That means that 22% of her posts in 2020 were anti-abortion.
She couldn’t even help herself when posing as a freedom of choice advocate..
Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. The risk of children dying from Covid is 99.995%!? That’s very alarming. I think she means surviving Covid.
I'm not sure how it is related but I guess because vaccinating children is the most insane thing we’ve seen in our lifetimes apparently and when you take that fact and that other fact that abortion is now legal in all stages of pregnancy including after birth the only logical explanation is that the world is turning evil!
We must stand up and put a stop to this. Where do I sign?
Also I might grab the details of an abortion doctor as I'm having second thoughts about my 2 year old.
In October we saw the whole crew of ‘independent’ activists, journalists, data collectors, lobbyists and digital warfare specialists come together in a beautiful display of ‘grass roots’ activism.
It started with Harry of ‘Harrys Clothing’ in Berwick, who opened his shop despite lockdown orders and in return was given mass exposure by all these ‘Journalists’. (He was also fined $10,000 but I'm sure there was a gofundme set up to cover that).
I hear from a decent source (I'm from Berwick and everyone knows each other) that Harry here is allegedly friends with Jason Wood MP, the federal Liberal whose electorate covers Berwick. He also sits on the board of the Akoonah Market, where Reignite Democracy occasionally set up a stall to push their bullshit.
Inspired by Harry, a salon in Hughesdale called Adam and Weave Barber Shop, feeling the pinch under the pressure of lockdown, decided to also open their doors. Always on the ball for cutting edge journalism Avi Yemini was first on the scene for Rebel News.
He had also been at Harrys, but this one was different.
To quote the video
‘We just decided that we’re gonna open our doors tomorrow because we just are gonna go bankrupt’
She then goes on to talk about how she knows some of her customers aren’t going to like it but she hopes that maybe it brings in some new ones. She mentions her husband is new to Australia, bit strange but ok. She explains that they only opened the salon a few months ago so they need to bring in some money to stay afloat.
Turns out they opened in July. So she opened her salon when we were in lockdown. No wonder they were struggling, couldn’t even cut any hair. Her regulars wouldn’t have liked that.
She then goes on to explain how her husband had opened a salon overseas but had to shut it due to war
‘and then he comes here and we have to shut it down again, I know this isn’t a war, well it is a war, an invisible war. A psychological war’.
Weird choice of words.
We need to look into this woman. Off to Linkdin we go.
Interesting.
Middle East Scholarship co-ordinator 2007–2009. Wasn’t Avi in the Middle East at that time too? Maybe drawing a long bow there, she was based in Lebanon and from the looks of her Youtube page is a god fearing Christian.
As we look a bit further into this woman it becomes clear that she was actually covering the protests up until Monica and Avi came along, with the most recent one only a month before this.
On her Facebook profile we see this stuff.
The pic above in the middle I find interesting because this video about some kind of conspiracy happening in Victoria was uploaded on July 31st. This person who uploaded it lives on the Gold Coast and appears to be central to the protests up there and not only sharing Reignite Democracy posts but promoting the same stunts we have seen down here.
Bit more digging around on Jomana..
From 2019
2016
2015
So here we have, yet another, F grade extra actor.
Is the salon legit? Without actually seeing it in person it seems like it, but she mostly uses the business page to push the same old rhetoric as the rest of these pages and does FB lives nearly every day.
Very, very conveniently in another one of our amazing coincidences, this was the same week Reignite Democracy did their Omnibus stunt.
Sky News was all over it.
We saw a whole bunch of the core crew coming together for this stunt.
This was all filmed and put together in a very polished, cinematic package with multiple camera angles and drone footage for Reignite Democracy by Rukshan.
Over at Adam and Weave a couple days later there was a strong police presence and media was on the scene. So was a whole bunch of the extended disinformation crew.
This is from a FB live by a bloke named Peter Little, (a series of 4 videos in a row) a lawyer turned anti-vax advocate and literal mental patient from Brighton who attends every rally and spreads a lot of stuff through various Facebook groups.
First frame we have the flag guy. You’ll recognize him from any footage of a freedom rally from the last year he is always there with his flags, if someone is making a speech usually he is behind them on the stage. Pic on the right for reference.
Then we have the cops out the front of the store and real media ready for the cross.
Someone is arrested, he says after filming the arrest ‘is that the staged one you recon? Usually there’s one staged arrest before anyone really gets arrested’.
Speaking of staged, just as he finishes saying that look what arrives to a round of applause.
While there they did a live stream. I captured it at the time and I don’t know why but I’m glad I did. I think it gives a great snapshot of these people compared to the more refined, camera friendly version you see today.
Also we get to meet Mel Ann.
Plenty to unpack from that 2 minute clip.
First, here we have Mel Ann working the camera and she even jumps in first with ‘OK guys, we just had some..’ before Monica jumps in with a ‘shhh’ and starts talking to another camera.
Something to note here is that this is Mel Ann going live on her phone, through the Reignite Democracy account. What is she doing with access to the Reignite Democracy account? Isn’t that Monica’s thing?
In the brief moment that the camera turns around we can see a bloke filming.
Also, how about the related videos at the end.
Avi from the Australian Liberty Alliance page, RDA calling for members and the (former) Victorian Liberal Leader pushing a vote of no confidence which actually failed dismally.
Anyway, those cops should really have thanked Monica for what she is doing. What they are doing. What hundreds of people are doing every day.
Far out.
All this happened just a couple of days after this stunt.
This isn’t the last time this crew pulls the ol’ mobile billboard stunt. Digital Warfare proceeds to run a whole series of these with a smaller billboard truck to spread their fear mongering. Documented, of course, by Real Rukshan.
Another one, this time promoting the Freedom Rally.
As I mentioned earlier the girls from Digital Warfare have made an effort to remove most of their social media pages from the internet so we can only find traces on other pages. A Youtube account that I have no doubt is part of this whole web is called ‘The Socialist Republic of Victoria’ and there is some footage there plus there is plenty of documenting from Real Rukshan.
Another outlet that is part of this without saying it is People of Victoria, created on the 11th of October, the same week as this stunt.
So the Omnibus driver we know is a constituent of Bernie Finn, he said as much in Parliament, but who runs the billboard truck?
It has been used quite a bit, surely it would be expensive (It’s $1200 per day) and unlike the rest of them Digital Warfare doesn’t ask for donations all the time.
Well the Liberal Party themselves appears to have a guy who does this and we can see they used him recently to promote their whole ‘slug gate’ beat up on Brett Sutton.
Gee he looks familiar..
As time moved on Reignite Democracy changed shape, by November with lockdowns nearly over there was a clearer point to RDA, they had become a data-collecting service and a lobby group. They are also journalist.
‘RDA is primarily a data-collecting service helping its members contribute their opinions and voices knowing they’ll be used to make real changes.
Later on, I plan to use this site for information that will help my audience know how to incite change using the law. I will also have all the MP’s contact information readily available for my members enabling them to easily contact the right people at a click of a button.’
’RDA has evolved quickly into becoming a lobby group that acts on behalf of its 25,000 members. We are also journalist. How can we act on behalf of the people if we can’t hear them? This is why we have ventured into journalism and media.’
The fact that she has been trying to be a journalist for years aside, they ventured into journalism and media so that she could freely attend and promote the protests, she has admitted as much multiple times and also stops being a journalist when it is convenient.
Then by March they had reverted to a much simpler, all encompassing description.
And what is that honest, timely and truthful information they provide?
You get the picture.
So over time they morphed again and briefly became a political party called ‘Team Australia’.
They had this grand idea to unite all the independent parties together but no independent party wanted to be a part of it.
So that fizzled out and they took the next step in the Cambridge Analytica playbook. Time to splinter into smaller groups. But also lets keep the political aspirations alive by launching another political party at the same time. Let’s be honest, nobody wants to vote Liberal and probably not enough people want to vote for the UAP either so we need another party in the vote flow.
It started off by splitting in to state groups.
They organized into ‘teams’ and these teams get together around protests and distribute propaganda to the public.
They stared another political party called the RDA party and they started this activist program called RDA Active where they have splintered into community groups.
You might have noticed the stickers everywhere all over town.
These groups are more than just propaganda outlets though, they are serious business. This is the document you receive on joining. This comes with a non-disclosure agreement
The Grift
During this time they have passed around the hat on a number of occasions. They have also sold merch and stuff like that but seeing as we can’t really tell how many are sold let’s just look at donations. This isn’t the lot of them, there has been many more but let’s see what we’ve got.
So firstly there is the memberships to their political party. 900 is the number that’s been thrown around. $40 each member = $36,000
There was this call for donations for a class action that never happened. No total amount received is disclosed.
There was this round of funding to cover this guys legal fees.
That takes us to $52,046
Recently Monica Smit was arrested for incitement. She refused her bail conditions which involved her not inciting any more protests and she also refused a covid test, so they held her for a few weeks.
Now that she is out and we can see the transcript of her bail hearing where she was clearly given the option to leave jail and still contest her bail conditions from the outside but declined to do that and chose to stay locked up until the hearing.
She was lauded as a ‘political prisoner’ for speaking out against the Andrews regime and the hat was passed around yet again.
There has been no talk of a refund.
That takes us to $355,810
This is a fundraiser to ‘support the owner’ of the bus and do an Omnibus round 2. It is still open for donations.
Now we’re at $385,197
Lastly, they call for rounds of funding to cover ‘The Truth Truck’. Same truck that Digital Warfare was using but since they tapped out Reignite has taken over the truck,
This was just one of several Truth Truck funding rounds, but I don’t have those totals so let’s just count this.
That takes us to a grand total of $388,007, not including the fundraisers we missed or that don’t show a total and there has been no proof any of these rounds of funding have gone to the cause, aside from the Truth Truck.
That’s a lot of money to have come from a bunch of people angry that Daniel Andrews has sent them broke and destroyed their business or jobs or whatever else they say.
So let’s talk about the truth truck.
This was picked up by Tom Tanuki and he made a clip about it on Youtube.
Monica live streamed her journey following the billboard truck plastered with anti-vax messages around town starting in her home suburb of Pakenham with what I presume is her nephew in the car with her. Blasting the national anthem and ‘We Are Australian’ from her speakers, of course.
Eventually they park up on the side of the road and the driver of the truck gets out to speak with Monica. Tom Tanuki has subtitled it so let’s just read it straight from the clip.
Of course, the middle class suburbs of Caulfield, Brighton and Toorak.
That’s where the money is coming from.
That’s the same area that Donald Blake is from.
Tim Wilson and Brad Rowswells electorate.
Toorak though. Well, speaking of people from Toorak..
Running at the same time as the Omnibus stunt was a campaign called Victoria — Let’s Be Open.
Nothing on their website discloses what they actually did in that campaign and nothing in the mission statement set out (which you can find copied on Reddit) was actually done. They have a website sosbiz.com.au and it shows the campaign is run by Small Business Australia. Small Business Australia regularly features on Sky News and was launched by Newscorp and others
Their website now days is completely different, but thanks to the Wayback Machine we can get a snapshot of what it said in October last year.
Sounds like they are looking to Reignite Democracy, but let’s not speculate.
The man running this campaign was Andrew Abercrombie, Melbourne's richest man. On the 15th of October at the end of the week long parade of stunts we have already gone over, channel 7 aired a segment where he appeared, calling for Andrews to open back up.
What they failed to mention in that report is that he is the former Treasurer of the Victorian Liberal Party and remains a Liberal Party powerbroker, most recently holding a $10,000 a head ‘special dinner’ for Scott Morrison in 2019.
But the craziest thing about his situation is that this Liberal Party powerbroker / business leader that is on Channel 7 as the spokesperson for the campaign he is running to open up Victoria, urging Daniel Andrews to open up the same week as a giant astroturfed fear mongering campaign is the same guy who held a party in Aspen in March 2020 whose guests came back to Melbourne with Covid, did not isolate and ended up leading to the outbreaks in Toorak and Portsea which were the vast majority of all the Covid cases in the 1st wave.
Definitely information to take into into consideration.
Let’s also take in to consideration The Ruby Princess, which at the time was described as one of the worst health failures in NSW history. The timeline of events is laid out in detail here and it shows that not only had the ship declared that there were 140 people on board with active covid infections but that the federal run Border Force had knowingly allowed the passengers on the ship to just freely leave and go about their lives spreading the virus around Sydney. To quote the Sydney Morning Herald:
‘The officer expressed concern about passengers disembarking after being made aware that as many as 140 passengers aboard were in isolation due to health concerns.
So serious were the concerns flagged, the harbourmaster offered to stop the ship at Bradley’s Head to prevent it docking at Sydney Harbour.
According to the sources, the harbourmaster was told by the Border Force officer that they needed to check with a supervisor and 15 minutes later, the officer called back and said the ship could dock.’
Not a good look, how did they manage to take the heat off all that? Just luck I guess.
Don’t forget, Daniel Andrews KILLED 800 PEOPLE HIMSELF WITH HIS BARE HANDS.
Yes. The deaths.
680 of those deaths were in private run aged care homes which are overseen by the Federal government, in shocking condition and out of State governments control. Kerry Stokes, who owns channel 7, has a $100 million stake in one of the companies at the center of the outbreak.
Let’s also take into consideration that Australia's leading Qanon figure is a friend of the Prime Minister whose wife lived with them at Kiribily house and who literally created his Qanon spreading twitter account on the same day as Scott Morrison became Prime Minister.
Also we can’t forget that Craig Kelly being part of the Liberal party was a captains call by Scott Morrison.
And that much of the outrage regarding Victoria's second wave was based on the false pretense that badly behaved security guards hired by Dan Andrews were to blame.
Or that the ADF was not on offer in the way that they were portrayed, in fact every state has security guards doing the role that it was suggested the ADF were on offer to do.
So with all that in mind
Let’s recap and see what the timeline looks like now.
So at the same time as all that was going on we have a movement that started with Victoria Forward, a Political Action Group funded by undisclosed donors with ties to the Liberals who shares a branding with astroturfed organizations set up by the Political Warfare company Cambridge Analytica, who then birthed this offshoot organization Reignite Democracy that also shares a branding with past organizations set up by Cambridge Analytica.
At the same time Reignite Democracy was created Avi Yemini stops the regular posts on his website. A Facebook user based in the Bayside area who appears to be associated with business leaders and the media adopts the pseudonym Donald Blake, creates a Facebook page to post his anti-Dan Andrews memes, creates and/or joins a whole series of similarly themed Facebook groups to distribute the memes along with an abundance of content from Victoria Forward, Advance Australia and the Liberal Party plus a range of smaller meme pages that sprung up at the same time. A quick poke around on these pages, many of which were never used past October 2020 and all recommended as related pages shows a pretty extensive amount of pages, as Danger, Dan Andrews, Dan Andrews Should Resign, 500,000 to end the Vic lockdown, Sack Dan Andrews, Lockdown Skeptics AU, Australia’s Justice System is Pathetic, just to name a few.
The groups included breadcrumbs deliberately laid out leading people to ready made conspiracy theories about the police and the government and then constant messaging to re-enforce these ideas and re-enforce the underlying unspoken message throughout this entire campaign which is that politically speaking, the Right is the position of the working class.
Then through this network of groups the core group of personalities that sprung up over the month of August were pushed through to their intended audience, all centered around Reignite Democracy and all working together initially. They gather a large following through capitalizing on peoples anger and fear about lockdowns and the pandemic at a time when the information was still being figured out, leading people into their echo chambers and surrounding them with their people and media all repeating the same mistruths, which starts with a current affairs show on Facebook called ‘Not The Project’ co-hosted by Monica Smit and the Executive Director of Novus Intelligence, a Business Intelligence agency, who is also affiliated with Hillsong Church.
Once it was all established and in full swing we saw a week long period of expensive stunts by the group, helped along by a friend of Jason Wood MP opening his business in lockdown and then another business that was set up in lockdown and run by an F grade actor who was doing Monica Smits role and covering the protests up until this new group took over. At the end of the week Channel 7 airs an interview with a ‘business leader’ who urges Daniel Andrews to open the state up, who they neglect to mention was not only the former treasurer of the Victorian Liberals but also held the party that was responsible for the bulk of the first wave of Covid infections. He was also head of a campaign by the Small Business Council called Open Up Victoria that appears to have been running the entire time but is very scarce on details outside of asking people to do the same things Reignite Democracy was initially asking people to do.
As time goes on they follow the next tactic of radicalization used by Cambridge Analytica and splinter off into localized groups, first by State and then by Local Area where people involved were made to sign a non disclosure statement.
They proceed to run the same disinformation campaign we have been seeing online but through letterbox drops and stickers with QR codes.
They also start a business directory where people can look to find businesses that will accept them without being vaccinated and their very own private social media platform.
It needs to be said that many of these people appear to be deeply religious and belong to fringe, more extreme type Christian denominations. It also needs to be said that Cambridge Analytica developed their tactics through observing how ISIS operated. In fact, Cambridge Analytica data scientist Chris Wylie is quoted as saying ‘Steve Bannon wants to create his own ISIS’.
