Independent federal MP Craig Kelly has been working with a couple of young YouTubers who’ve previously promoted conspiracy and fringe theories — including accusing Australian politicians of running a paedophile ring and calling COVID-19 a “scamdemic”.
Since the maverick MP left the Liberal Party room, he has begun dabbling in more video content that he shares to social media with video production help from Dougal Cameron and Joel Jammal, who each produce fringe video content on YouTube and Facebook.
Kelly tells Crikey both men have assisted him at times — including when he signed them into Parliament House on the morning of the federal budget for a stunt where Kelly printed a pallet of trillion dollar notes to represent Australia’s government debt — but says they are not employed staff.
Kelly has long embraced fringe ideas and sources of misinformation, but what both Cameron and Jammal do online goes far beyond this.
World of conspiracy and far-right ideas
Both Jammal and Cameron produce online video content where they interview conspiracy theorists. Jammal’s YouTube channel mostly consists of sympathetic interviews with Riccardo Bosi, a former Australian army officer, motivational speaker and frequent candidate for federal parliament.
He’s also a conspiracy theorist who tells Jammal about lists of Australian politicians accused of being paedophiles, that vaccines and masks don’t work, that COVID-19 is not a real threat, and about the “great reset“.
Cameron, son of former Liberal MP and Obama birther Ross Cameron, is a major force behind a similar YouTube channel called Carnage House Productions. His channel also promotes similar extreme ideas. As well as interviewing Bosi and Jammal, Cameron interviewed Pete Evans, self-proclaimed “far-right YouTuber” Dia Beltran (who hosts figures like far-right extremists Blair Cottrell and Neil Erikson, and former senator Fraser Anning on her own channel), and Proud Boy and far-right YouTuber Tim Wilms.
Neither Cameron nor Jammal have found much success online. Both have only a few thousand YouTube subscribers and most of their videos get a couple of hundred views at best.
But they have links to broader conservative politics in Australia. Both are listed as helping with last year’s Australian Conservative Political Action Conference. Cameron also makes content for the (surprisingly conservative) Australian Penthouse magazine, and Jammal is a contributor to The Spectator Australia.
What Kelly’s link means
There is nothing to suggest that Kelly has embraced these specific extreme views — he, of course, has spent the latter part of his parliamentary career spouting unproven and disproven beliefs of his own.
But it is significant that Kelly, without the support of a party apparatus, is surrounding himself with individuals espousing theories that are even further from the mainstream than his own.
With his back to the wall, Kelly is leaning on two young men who are both digitally savvy and happy to spread conspiracies to help him fight for his political survival.
This article originally said that Jammal was a contributor to the publication Caldron Pool. Jammal has not written for them, but had claimed he had.
What does Craig Kelly’s flirtation with fringe YouTubers mean for Parliament? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
can we stop calling these reactionary wingnuts, “conservatives”?
No surprise about Australian Penthouse being conservative – Murdoch rag.
(domesticated naked mammalian primate )Pet of the year says it all really ..you couldn’t get any more status quo conservative than that..
Feel a sudden desire to report these channels to YouTube. Not that they’ll do anything, but at least they’ll have a complaint on record.
Done.
There is already too much censorship on Zoo Tube.
Censorship is everywhere in Social Media & the MSM. The truth is kept well hidden & it’s 1984 but most don’t see it as they’re living in their own little bubble.
The author of this pile of nonsense Cam Wilson is I’m glad to see listed as an Author at Crikey. Glad to see he wasn’t mislabelled as a Journalist. This whole article is a stupid beatup with no facts given – it relies on tribalism & labeling to judge someones comments. Kelly has the guts to say what he thinks & I admire that.
How Woke to label Kelly as a conspiracy theorist –with NO proof given that he’s wrong! Believe what you want but it’s healthy to have a choice. Scribblers like Cam Wilson don’t want you to have that choice!
At 76 I’ve lived through a plethora of False & misleading MSM lies — sometimes acknowledged much later but mostly never admitted in print. Your future depends on your abilty to choose wisely from the info available.Only a mere handful of enormously rich and powerful banking families in London control what the world reads! They ensure that their mainstream media editorial slaves and journalistic goons concentrate on day to day trivialities and irrelevant news items so that rarely, if ever, the more important issues about what is truly transpiring is ever discussed, or the real truth about what is really happening ever gets out.
In short, all the mainstream newspapers are only good for lighting fires or for bird-cage liners – if that!
Interesting that a putative 76yr old writes like a Valley Girl on Ritalin.
These “young YouSpuds” didn’t have toys when they were kids?
Some of them obviously had stupid parents.
Think one important and quite influential North American import who has presented with Kelly et al. in the same eco-system, and immigrated to Australia, is Lauren Southern, accused of allegedly promoting alt/far right and white nativist agitprop in North America.
She has been associated with Fox, Rebel News which pretends to be ‘right on’ for youth but promotes old white nativist tropes e.g. Herman Daly’s ‘steady-state economy’ or national socialism based upon the debunked ‘Limits to Growth’ masquerading as environmental, Breitbart (Bannon et al. channeling John Tanton); and related and behind the Oz CPAC is ‘Liberty Works’.
Jason Wilson of TG wrote about her nine months ago in ‘Lauren Southern is on the comeback trail, and Australian conservatives are all too happy to help’ (9/8/20):
‘Far-right e-celeb Lauren Southern is on the comeback trail. And Australian conservatives are more than happy to offer her a helping hand. Her bid to be taken seriously as a journalist and commentator was given a small boost recently with a slot on Sky’s Fox News mini-me culture war platform, Outsiders.’
Amazing how most if not all Australian media avert their gazes from such gaming and manipulation of voter attitudes and perceptions….