SIGNING UP
TO FIGHT FOR
FREEDOM

Curious inquiry leads to talk of execution

How does a welcome email become a wave of hate and disinformation within a matter of days? We created an online persona, Susan, and signed up to Voices For Freedom to learn more about the language and techniques of the so-called freedom movement.

Fire and Fury is a Stuff Circuit investigation into disinformation in Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s a confronting watch (content warning: violent language), but we felt compelled to make it.

A Voices For Freedom post suggests the best way to approach newcomers to the movement.

A Voices For Freedom post suggests the best way to approach newcomers to the movement.

Welcome to Voices For Freedom

The welcome email from a local group coordinator is embracing and assumes a lot about why Susan is signing up to Voices For Freedom. The coordinator twice refers to feelings of isolation but not to worry because people will be in touch to support you more fully.

And there is plenty of support to go around - 1500 members in this local area and it keeps on growing as more and more people get fed up with our overreaching “government”

There are instructions to download the Telegram app and join the local group chat, and all the perks offered therein. The warm welcome continues with an invitation the next day to a bush walk, although any updates and future walks will be posted in the group’s Telegram chat.

There’s also a plan to protest masks and mandates by congregating outside local libraries but leave your VFF t-shirts, hats, flags and signs at home.

The sense of joining a community is reinforced in a separate welcome from VFF co-leader Claire Deeks.  

You’re now among friends (many friends)

I’m pretty sure I know why you’re here…

The Government is choking our country with irrational rules and restrictions that are destroying our way of life! 

She says that over the next few days it might feel like you’re drinking from a fire-hose. Voices For Freedom will be sending resources, fact sheets and articles. There’ll be regular content and guerilla marketing resources to help you and others fight back, even under the cover of the night if need be :)  

After an initial welcome, VFF emails flood the inbox.

After an initial welcome, VFF emails flood the inbox.

Information overload and a Police warning

As promised, the inbox is bombarded with emails and links to information on mandates, exemptions and masks. Among the resources is a template letter to fill in if an employer asks for an invasive PCR test. It comes with a list of suggestions: ask a family member or friend to go over the letter before you send it, act in good faith by outlining an alternative method of testing you would undergo, check the current legislation and health orders on the government’s Covid 19 response website. It feels like a lot of steps to avoid what is an admittedly unpleasant but ultimately painless 10 second nasal swab.

Information about mask exemptions explains they are self-regulating and the bar is low, with an accompanying list of possible conditions for not being able to wear one. Interestingly, Voices For Freedom say they have been warned by police about linking to the official government site for mask exemption cards but say anyone who downloaded a card before they were warned can keep using it.

The deluge of documents and resources paint a picture of confusion around the pandemic,

suggest government cover-ups and coercion, while Voices For Freedom will help resist or circumvent the government measures. While it can be a process to follow their suggestions, to some it might sound sensible when they repeatedly tell you that the alternative is tyranny.

Remember knowledge is your best defence against tyranny - March 19 

When our tyrannical leader was asked point-bank in a recent interview … - 21 March 

Help us fight the tyranny now! - 26 March

Freedom TV

Many of the emails flooding in promote Freedom TV. These are mostly webinars that can be watched live with pre-registration, or viewed later on a platform that a Google search shows to be “the new YouTube for the Far Right”.

The talks usually start by waiting for everyone to come online (you’re part of something, there’s a lot of us tuning in for this) and a list of credentials for the person about to speak. The CV can sound quite impressive but doesn’t always align with what’s to come. 

There’s Dr Peter Canaday, a retired radiologist, whose presentation has the hallmarks of a teenager pasting together an assignment by cherry-picking Wikipedia entries and ripping video from YouTube. Canaday’s 90 minute “fireside chat” starts with his take on a study from Sweden which ignores important information. He runs with his presentation uninterrupted for 40 minutes. There is a question afterwards which attempts to cover the glaring omission that the study focussed on the spike protein outside of the vaccine but his answer does nothing to clear up the facts.

Canaday goes on to talk about taking a vitamin supplement to optimise the immune system. What he doesn’t say is that taking them at up to seven times the recommended dosage (as he suggests) could, if continued over a number of months, cause toxicity leading to kidney failure and growth restriction in children. His passing comment that this is ‘not medical advice but that’s what other people are talking about doing’ could be easily missed by a viewer  as he skips into a Soviet history lesson.

At this stage the retired radiologist has been talking for over an hour, so when he starts to conflate 1970s KGB propaganda with government measures on the covid pandemic, throwing in some scripture for good measure, it’s hard for the brain to keep up. Mercifully, after 90 minutes host Libby Jonson ends the presentation by saying there were 2,200 people online tonight.

Another Freedom TV offering, ‘’Courageous Convo’’ with Catherine Austin Fitts, introduces the American financial expert by running through her impressive resume: She worked in the first Bush administration, took on the men of Wall Street and started a successful investment company. 

She speaks pretty much non-stop for most of the hour, discussing not just economics but transhumanism and alarmingly states the world is watching a genocide. She doesn’t have a TV because that’s mind-control.

If you’re going to let their surveillance and mind control mechanisms into your intimate space, you’re not going to make it.

You’re going to feed the beast. 

There’s a lot to take in.

It pays to fact check what is said on Freedom TV.

It pays to fact check what is said on Freedom TV.

Friendships and filth

It has been a couple of weeks since Susan joined the local Voices For Freedom chat group on Telegram and

it’s definitely not all bushwalks and library protests.

Yes, there are gardening tips and talk of swapping seedlings but the people on there — most of them women if their online names are to be believed —  prefer to post about government measures and the Prime Minister. 

A member called Michele Mcnaught (MM) is one of the most prominent and she is very het up. 

Putrid and foul, she is working on Satan’s agenda.

Jabcinder is an impersonator, not original, reads a script by her masters. 

MM is very concerned Bill Gates will send a private jet to Wellington and rescue Jacinda Ardern before there’s a chance to arrest her. 

The local VFF coordinator posts a video of Ardern’s Harvard University address (only the te reo Māori greeting, mind you) which is amateurishly edited with a TV scene where the character is doing eye-rolls. It’s juvenile stuff but ends with the character saying ‘oh just shut the fuck up’. Is she bothered by the Prime Minister, the reo Māori or both? 

MM and the VFF local coordinator who was so welcoming to Susan have an exchange on the day Ashley Bloomfield resigns.

We know where you live you little weasel, you are a targeted lowlife. You can’t run and hide, justice will get you. Vile disgusting creature. - MM

He probably knows his days are numbered. When people start to wake up he will indeed be targeted. I expect he has scurried underground like the (rat emoji) he is. - VFF coordinator.

There are posts about sending politicians to the gallows, sharing of QAnon conspiracies and endless sharing of covid misinformation from sources like Robert F Kennedy Jr’s anti-vaccination Children’s Health Defense.

Gateway to the grotesque 

If the local Voices For Freedom Telegram chat is unpleasant at times, it turns out to be a portal to even more extreme language and views, including the misogyny, vaccine disinformation and conspiracy theories of Damien De Ment.

They want you to take a vaccine which is just tantamount to jabbing yourself with poison and rolling the dice. They also want you in that vaccine to be digitally tracked so that everything about your biometric data, your blood oxygen levels, your blood pressure, everything they can track on you they want to do that and then they want to sell that to companies and countries… 

It’s all one giant big extortion racket. I’ve been saying this for years, so has Counterspin Media so has Voices For Freedom. We’ve all been saying this. There’s many of us in this truth movement, many more people who deserve the notoriety and praise of being on the list of the disinformation dozen.

Get fucked, ok.

A scroll back through the chat history shows that in December 2021, the Voices For Freedom group administrator stepped up to defend De Ment and members still regularly share his posts.

There are hundreds of people online at any given time and the volume of unchecked information is overwhelming. There are references to the Great Reset conspiracy theory and many, many unsubstantiated claims of injuries caused by vaccination. In one post, a member talks about approaching teenage girls at a vaccination centre to tell them about the Telegram group.

The local VFF coordinator also promotes Counterspin Media and a few clicks easily leads to even more grotesque posts, including many calling for executions or spouting extreme violent misogyny about female politicians.

Someone interested in knowing more about what Voices For Freedom stands for might not sign up looking for this, but it doesn’t take long to find it.

  • Voices For Freedom on average sends members an email every few days promoting Freedom TV, updating people about their plans, giving advice or warnings with subject lines such as ‘’What You’re NOT Being Told About The Vaxx…” 
  • The local VFF Telegram chat group joined by Susan has 650 members, of which around 50 are online at any one time. They’re active 24 hours a day with posts regularly made at 12am or 2am but the majority of activity is during the day and evening, around 70 posts a day. The main VFF Telegram group has 36,871 subscribers.
Stuff Circuit would like to thank: FACT Aotearoa @factaotearoa, Paparoa @Paparoa3, Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara @Te_Taipo, Charlie Mitchell @comingupcharlie, Guled Mire @GuledMire, Auckland Transport/Auckland One Rail
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