The anti-vaccine movement presents a list of usual suspects ranging from politicians to social media attention seekers, writes David Goldman.
FOR THE PAST 18 months, we have been assailed by so-called “freedom marches” that have taken over our capital cities.
Primarily made up of a collection of very loud and sometimes violent conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccines, extreme homeopaths, and “nationalists,” along with an assortment of right-wing crackpots, they were recently best described by Jack the Insider as the australian how to be:
‘…a human medley of grievances based on the gamut of conspiracy theories, Woodstock for Q-cooked middle-aged saddos who spent much of Monday afternoon in the nation’s capital, yelling at an empty building.’
But that only describes the participants of these rallies or their parasites. But who are the organizers behind this army of Q-loving Bogan Deplorables?
The following portraits are of many (but not all) of the leaders of this motley crew of would-be suburban “revolutionaries,” some of whom are scary, to say the least. Others, however, are simply clowns looking for a circus.
MP Craig Kelly is an Australian politician who has served as the leader of the United Australia Party since August 2021. Kelly is also a right-wing agitator who left the L-NP last year, considering it not conservative enough.
Since then, he has immersed himself in a variety of conspiracy theories including climate denial, COVID-19 falsehoods, AstraZeneca scaremongering, and false claims about fraud in the 2020 US presidential election.
In November 2021, Kelly received the Australian Skeptics Bent Spoon Award for spreading misinformation about COVID-19. In many ways, Kelly is both a buffoon and a beacon for these “freedom march” assholes, many of whom see him as some kind of godfather to his crazy ideas.
Monica Smit is the managing director of Reignite Democracy Australia, who recently described as “heroic” an incident in which a woman attempted to self-immolate in Melbourne, allegedly holding a poster protesting vaccination mandates.
Victoria Police alleged that Ms Smit incited people on social media to attend two anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne last month, including the violent event on August 21 that saw some 4,000 people demonstrate and the least nine police officers were injured.
In 2017, the 33-year-old from Pakenham, in Melbourne’s southeastern outer suburbs, auditioned for Survivor after a ten-year career in sales, design, and home sales. She couldn’t make it to the show. She has now found a kind of success on a different reality show: as the leader of a conspiracy theory group seeking political power.
Simeon Boykov is from the First Party of Australia, whose president is the godfather of Australian Nazism and attempted assassination, Jim Saleam. As the self-styled leader of the “Australian Cossacks,” Boykov is a one-man pro-Vladimir Putin propaganda organization known to have trained at a Spetznaz training camp in Russia and is rumored to have seen limited action in the United States. fighting in eastern Ukraine. for the Russians.
It has ties to Serbian extremist groups, the Greek neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn, and supports Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Last February, Boykov told ABC Four corners that Russia’s main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, should be “settled”. He was also filmed harassing Ukrainian grandmothers leaving church.
Former One Nation Senator Rodney Culleton is the leader of the Great Australia Party, which recently received a $300,000 donation from Anthony Pratt’s Pratt Holdings. In 2019, Cullerton was referred to police over concerns that he should not run in the next federal election because he was bankrupt without being discharged. In August 2021, he lost his bid to get rid of a conviction for failing to report his bankruptcy.
The former Gosnells town councilor is the national director of Advance Australia, a right-wing group set up to champion conservative causes. she is also one sky news collaborator who accused Grace Tame of “rudeness” for his snub to Prime Minister Scott Morrison at this year’s Australia Day morning tea at The Lodge. Storer says that she has taken care of “end the radical left”.
Former New South Wales Christian Democrats candidate Milan Maksimovic is now the leader of the “Freedom Called Party”. A supporter of the Serbian extremist group Chetniks Australia and of the Srebrenica genocide denier Milorad Dodik and his Republika Srpska in Bosnia, his Facebook profile contains numerous links to various Nazi collaborator groups and various local right-wing media personalities.
Maksimovic is also a supporter of WWII Serb Chetniks, who, while allowed to march on ANZAC Day, are classified as Nazi collaborators and quislings, a connection he shares with the “freedom march” organizer, Avi Yemeni.
According to Brag Media’s Jessica Lynch, “Ozraeli” Avi Yemini is a far-right social media personality and gym owner known for his far-right ideology and controversial comments, including calling Islam a “barbaric ideology” and say that Muslim countries are “Islamic shit”.
Yemini, who served as a sniper in the Israel Defense Forces and is a proud Zionist, was sued in 2016 by his brother and Yeshiva Center child sex abuse whistleblower Manny Waks after he publicly accused his family of harboring to a pedophile.
It has been called more than once “the proudest Jewish Nazi in the world”.
So if you weren’t scared before you read this, then you should be now, as this is the full range of RWNJ “diversity” on display. Calling these people “fraudsters” would not do justice to their status as community disruptors and threats to civil order, a badge I’m sure many of them would really enjoy.
David Goldman is a writer, political analyst and sports fan based in NSW.
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