If you’re copping heavy flak, it means you’re over the target. How else to explain the recent flurry of unhinged hit pieces from the mainstream media furiously attacking independent journalists?
For instance, mainstream media in the US have been in meltdown mode for two days, after independent journalist Tim Pool was invited to the new media press seat in the White House press room. That Pool used the occasion to call out the MSM’s litany of lies over a deported MS-13 gang member no doubt explains the heavy flak.
Similarly, the taxpayer-funded far-left propaganda wing ABC recently dedicated thousands of words to attacking The Noticer. While the ABC correctly pointed out that The Noticer is a neo-Nazi sympathetic site, their Jeremiad missed the real point: literal neo-Nazis are doing a better job of reporting the facts than a billion-dollar taxpayer-funded media behemoth. That ought to have us all worried.
Now, dying lefty rag the Age is gunning for the conservative activist group Advance Australia. True to form, it’s the standard farrago of smears, hypocrisy and lunatic ad hominem attacks.
The group’s mission, [executive director Matthew Sheahan] said, was “to fight for principles and policies that promote freedom, security and prosperity”, and, in doing so, put the interests of everyday Australians “front and centre of the national debate”.
Sheahan described how, since its launch in 2018, Advance had built, from the ground up, a sophisticated, permanent campaign infrastructure comprising communications strategists, digital platforms and field operations, together with a supporter base of some 275,000 people. The organisation didn’t depend on big corporations or business, Sheahan said, but an army of 23,000 ordinary Australians giving “grassroots contributions”.
The Age tries to paint this as ‘patently false’, yet it’s reasons for alleging such – that it receives money from groups linked to the Liberal Party – are exactly the same as those it dismissed against left-wing GetUp, whom the Age soft-soaps as merely ‘activists’, “best known for its campaigns on progressive issues, catalysing community activism”. Yet, GetUp was funded with massive donations from unions and the Labor Party, with former ALP leader Bill Shorten sitting on its board. GetUp has only ever targeted coalition politicians – never Labor or the Greens.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Age.
The smears don’t stop there.
Good Oil readers could almost certainly predict, to a tee, the Age’s: all ‘far-right’ this, ‘climate denier’ that. And, of course, the trusty ol’ ‘disinformation’. Not to mention a heapin’ helpin’ of ‘racist’ and ‘TRUMP!’
Another desperate smear is linking Advance to Heather Wilson, co-founder of GiveSendGo, ‘a Christian crowdfunding network which has helped raise money for neo-Nazis and anti-vaxxers’. GiveSendGo has also been used to raise a small fortune for Karmelo Anthony, the black teenager who recently stabbed a white teenager to death. The Anthony family have used the money to buy new houses and cars. GiveSendGo has also been used to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the far-left assassin Luigi Mangione.
That might have borne mentioning, Age.
What really seems to have riled up the Age is that Advance is taking on the Greens, and was successful in opposing the Voice referendum.
There was also a handbook, One Together, not Two Divided, which warned that the Voice would divide Australians by race, and Christians for Equality, which claimed the Voice would “embed Indigenous spirituality” in the constitution. As the vote approached, Advance’s phone campaigners called thousands of households, suggesting that, among other things, the organisers behind the Voice wanted to abolish Australia Day.
According to Advance’s website, the referendum was “just the first step”: next would come a “treaty that will redistribute land, money and power to indigenous activists”, a change to the Australian flag and national anthem, and even, perhaps, “the removal of every statue of Captain James Cook”.
Disinformation! shrieks the Age. Except that all of that is true.
The Voice proposal literally divided Australians by race: only one race would even be mentioned in the Constitution, and have special Constitutional powers. This was a simple fact. So was embedding Aboriginal mythology: the whole Voice proposal was predicated on a so-called “unique spiritual connection to the land”, to which, it says, Aborigines “must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors”.
The “Uluru Statement”, the document setting out the aims of the referendum, is absolutely clear that the Voice would indeed be just the first step. A so-called ‘Treaty’ and even more so-called ‘Truth-Telling’ would be next. This is not some ‘far-right’ fiction, it’s what was written, in black and white, in the Voice proposal.
Organisers behind the Voice did want to abolish Australia Day. Some of them openly called for the abolition of the Commonwealth of Australia altogether.
The Age is lying through its teeth, even as it accuses others of ‘disinformation’.
After its success with the Voice, Advance declared war on the Greens. In July 2024, they released their Greens Truth campaign, with the tag line “The Greens are not who they used to be”. “They are not about saving the trees,” says the press material. “They are not about caring for animals … They want to pull down our borders, defund our defence forces, increase taxes on working Australians and side with terrorists like Hamas.”
“The Greens are extremists,” Advance’s spokesperson, Sandra Bourke, tells me on the phone. They are driven by “ideology rather than facts”, she says, especially when it comes to renewables, which are being “recklessly rolled out” across regional Australia.
All of which is undeniably true.
And the truth is guaranteed to really, really, upset the mainstream media.
