“One of my brothers knew I was faking,and I hated him for it,” Yemini tells me when I meet him for lunch at Laffa Bar,a kosher restaurant in Melbourne. “He leaned over to me one time,and goes,‘Just stop it. You’re worrying everyone.’ And I thought,‘You piece of shit – you know!’ ” (Only years later did Yemini tell his father he was faking,“and I still don’t think he believed me”.)
Yemini is short and compact,with a thick beard,dancing eyebrows and a head of springy black hair which he wears pulled back into a bun,high on his head,like a pompom. He is 37 years old,but seems possessed by the spirit of a 15-year-old boy,propelled by manic impatience from one moment to the next,as if on some critical mission,which,as far as he and his audience goes,he is.
In 2020,Yemini became the Australian correspondent for the Canadian far-right online media outlet,RebelNews,where he’s built a substantial following by “telling the other side of the story Down Under”,delivering his hyper-partisan reporting and commentary to a cumulative audience of 4 million across Twitter,YouTube,TikTok,Instagram and other social media platforms. A born performer and compulsive opportunist,he’s emerged as one of the most virulent – and controversial – critics not only of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews,but of what he considers to be the entire middle-class,soft-left orthodoxy,an unspoken consensus he believes exists between “woke elites”,an entitled political class and a compliant mainstream media.
Yemini has plenty of critics. Some regard him as a misinformation super-spreader and indeed,a danger to democracy;others,like his older brother Manny,suspect he doesn’t even believe much of what he says.
In 2015,he started his own Avi Yemini Facebook page. He says he was “mainly talking shit” but he liked “the idea that people were sharing my mind and listening to me”. He understood instinctively that the best way to build a profile was to create controversy.
“The more confrontational posts were the ones that were successful. And so that’s what I did.”
In 2016,he invited One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts to an open forum in Melbourne to discuss the “dangers” of Muslim migration. (The event was cancelled after opposition from Jews Against Fascism.) When commentator Waleed Aly criticised then immigration minister Peter Dutton’s comments that Lebanese immigrants should never have been let into Australia in the 1970s and ’80s,Yemini took to Facebook,calling Aly a “POS” (“piece of shit”) adding that it was “time to send him home”. (Aly was born in Melbourne.)
In 2017,Yemini headed up a Trump-esque “Make Victoria Safe Again” rally,claiming that break-ins and carjackings by “gangs” – code for African youths – were out of control. (Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that from 2008 to 2016,most crime rates in Victoria decreased.)
Living off the money he made from his gyms,Yemini set about becoming a “brand”,much in the mould of Alex Jones,the American alt-right radio host and conspiracist (who was last year ordered to pay more than $US1.4 billion to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting for spreading lies about the killings). Then,in 2017,he got a job as a content creator for the far-right fringe party,the Australian Liberty Alliance,then led byKirralie Smith (latterly of Binary). In 2018,he ran for the ALA as an upper house candidate in the Victorian state elections but received just 0.48 per cent of the vote.
By this time,Yemini was posting increasingly merciless material on social media. In 2018,when Invasion Day activistTarneen Onus Williams said she hoped Australia “burns to the ground”,Yemini demanded on Facebook that she be stripped of her Australian citizenship and given “a little piece of land in the bush – with none of the Western luxuries. Let her work the land and hunt for her grub.” When journalist Osman Faruqi complained about Australians not being able to comply with the plastic bag ban,Yemini published his phone number on Facebook,and encouraged his 150,000
followers to give Faruqi a piece of their mind. (The post remained up for 18 hours,during which time Faruqi received multiple death threats and abusive messages.) Within a week,Facebook had permanently deleted Yemini’s page.
Not that it mattered. By 2019,Yemini was a fixture in the far-right media,with a thriving social media presence and regular guest slots onThe Bolt Report and Mark Latham’s TV program,Outsiders. When I ask about his style back then – the trolling,the abuse,the doxxing – he shrugs. “I wouldn’t do it again,” he says. But back then,“the more confrontational posts were the ones that were successful. And so that’s what I did.”
We’re driving through the city in Yemini’s Honda Civic,heading to North Melbourne. We’re going to meet Rukshan Fernando,aka the Real Rukshan,a fellow YouTuber with whom Yemini had attempted to travel to New Zealand a week before. Yemini often works with Fernando,who became well known during the pandemic for live-streaming anti-lockdown protests and what he saw as a heavy-handed response from Victorian police. Fernando’s sympathetic coverage of the protests and his coded anti-vax talk made him a folk hero among COVID denialists and anti-lockdowners,who would chant his name whenever he showed up at rallies,and even offer him cash. When we pull up outside Fernando’s place,Yemini turns to me,and says,only half joking:“Now remember,your story is about me,not him.”
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Fernando’s office is studiously nondescript;a chipped red-brick facade,windows blocked out with reflective coating,and a door that’s hidden down a side entrance. Inside,however,is a state-of-the-art production facility,with great stacks of sound and editing equipment and expensive-looking cameras and hard drives,and the biggest,widest wide-screen computer terminals I’ve ever seen. The son of Sri Lankan migrants,Fernando has a successful business in wedding videography but now spends most of his time producing YouTube videos imploring supporters to feed the “fire of freedom” and comparing public health officials to Hitler. He has 270,000 Facebook followers and 37,800 YouTube subscribers,but insists he doesn’t make a cent from social media. “My wedding business is going good,and that’s how I support myself.”
As Yemini and Fernando discuss their next video,I wander about the studio,eventually coming to a shelf full of Trump memorabilia,including Trump playing cards,a carved wooden Trump doll,and a beer stein shaped like The Donald’s head. “I’m a big fan,” Fernando tells me. “He puts his country first. In Asia,we don’t look down on people who put their country first. There’s nothing remarkable about that.”
But what about the Capitol riot? “The police let people into the Capitol. There’s plenty of videos of that. All they were doing was walking around and they got arrested.” Okay,so what about how Trump ignored climate change? “It’s all down to interpretation,” says Fernando. “We’ve seen with COVID how science can be interpreted in different ways.” Yemini (who is vaccinated) sniggers. “Get Pfizer to create a vaccine for climate change.”
After a time,Yemini and Fernando get talking about their recent trip to New Zealand. Yemini had been blocked at Australian customs from entering but Fernando had got in,and filmed a glowing tribute to an anti-government rally led by Chantelle Baker,a COVID conspiracist who ran NZ Testimonials,one of New Zealand’s largest anti-vax Facebook groups,before it got shut down in 2021. Yemini insists that being banned was a bonus. “They did me a favour,” he says. “I didn’t have anything in New Zealand,now my[NZ social media] audience has quadrupled.”
Plenty of publications crowdfund their operations,but Yemini has made it an art form.
It was also a nifty fundraising opportunity. Immediately after being banned,Yemini urged his followers to donate to a legal challenge,“so Avi can provide real,on-the-ground reporting and ask the questions NZ media refuse to ask”. It soon emerged that his donations page had been registered the day before his flight,fuelling speculation he always intended to get turned back. Yemini concedes the page was set up before his trip,but says it was done as a “precaution”,to prepare for the possibility of a ban. (When I ask later how much was raised,he refers me toRebel News CEO Ezra Levant,who tells me in an email,“the exact sum is private for competitive reasons.” )
Plenty of publications crowdfund their operations,but Yemini has made it an art form. Indeed,his reportorial approach – YouTube celebrity meets paranoid-tabloid – is perfectly tailored to the attention economy,where social-media algorithms reward confrontation. He often attends protests,where he will pester police and/or protesters until he gets arrested or assaulted. This will all be filmed. He then posts this footage to his YouTube channel,where his duly enraged fans are invited to “contribute” so that he can be free to attend the next protest … where he will repeat the entire process.
This could be mistaken for a business model. But Ezra Levant sees it differently. “We do not work for an oligarch like Rupert Murdoch or a large corporate conglomerate like Nine[publisher ofGood Weekend]. Crowd-funding is an important way for a little outfit like ours to level the playing field with mighty competitors and opponents.”
Yemini says he needs the money for his legal bills,which can be “f---ing expensive,like $1 million a year”,some of which is spent on a seemingly endless schedule of court actions,including one in 2020,in which he took Victoria Police to court for false arrest and won. He adds that he doesn’t get any cash from the donations,and is paid a salary byRebel.
The problem with profiling Avi Yemini is that there are so many Avi Yeminis. There’s Avi the “freedom fighter”. Avi the “independent journalist”. Avi the propagandist. It can get confusing,even for Avi. He wonders aloud why people don’t take him seriously,then admits that much of what he does is “putting out a persona”. He says he hates “victims” but whinges for 20 minutes straight about howThe Age[one ofGood Weekend’s host mastheads] only “wants to make me look bad” and “pretends that I don’t exist” and how it didn’t report on his successful legal action against Victoria Police. “I won! The cops had to apologise to me! But didThe Age write that? NO!”
We’re driving from Fernando’s office to Berwick,in Melbourne’s south-east,where Yemini lives with his wife,Rhonda,a hairdresser he met at a coffee shop in 2018,and their cavoodle,Winnie (after Winnie-the-Pooh). The traffic is terrible and it’s raining and his Google Maps is playing up,but none of that matters because he’s triggered himself aboutThe Age.
“The guys atThe Age,they’re so morally superior,” he says,talking at the windscreen. “They think of Avi Yemini as a lower breed. They look down at me. They’re academics,right,but they’re just jealous. They studied all their lives and toed the line and did everything they’d been taught and then they see me and I’ve skipped all that and gone and done it[journalism],and not only am I doing it but I’m doing it better than they are.” He takes a breath. “During COVID lockdown,A Current Affair began copying my tactics.”
There may be another reason mainstream media have been wary of Yemini:namely,his affiliation with neo-Nazis. There’s always been a degree of crossover between Australia’s white-supremacist fringe and Yemini’s Islamophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric. Neo-Nazis groups have attended his public events and promoted them on their websites. In return,Yemini has spruiked their events,including a charity “homeless feed”,in 2017,held in Melbourne by the Soldiers of Odin,a self-proclaimed vigilante,white nationalist group.
When the government threatened to deport Swiss man and Soldiers of Odin member,Jan Herweijer,in 2017,for posting anti-Islamic material and links to terrorism on his Facebook page,Yemini started a change.org petition to have him remain in Australia. (Herweijer denied any wrongdoing;the government won’t tell me if he was ultimately deported,citing privacy concerns.)
In 2017,when Melbourne man Chris Shortis was convicted of racial vilification for helping stage a mock beheading in Bendigo to protest the construction of a mosque there,Yemini showed up at court and shook his hand. He now regrets the handshake. “I misjudged it,” Yemini tells me. “It was just a natural human reaction. But now,if I met a person like him,I wouldn’t shake his hand,because he is a Jew-hater.”
There have been similar misjudgments. In 2017,he appeared on stage at an event in Sydney with Milo Yiannopoulos,the British alt-right political commentator who has been accused of promoting violence and hate towards Muslims,and who has justified having sex with young boys. Yemini insists he doesn’t advocate sex with young boys;he just believes “everyone has a right to free speech.”
A year later,Yemini appeared at a rally in London in support of Tommy Robinson,another British alt-right Islamophobe,where he told the crowd he was the “world’s proudest Jewish Nazi”. Yemini now says this was an “obvious joke. I was saying it ironically,making a point about not accepting the labels that other people put on you.” I ask if the “joke” could be regarded as dangerous. “No. What’s dangerous is the weaponisation of language,so that the use of the word Nazi by the left doesn’t mean anything any more.” (The Executive Council of Australian Jewry tells me in a statement that Yemini doesn’t “in any way represent the Australian Jewish community or mainstream Jewish thought”.)
“He’s exploiting people who are genuinely scared about COVID and the lockdowns. They are already vulnerable,and he makes them feel legitimised in taking extreme action.”
Yemini’s bromance with neo-Nazis is “all transactional”,according to Andy Meddick,from the Victorian Animal Justice Party,who has spoken out in state parliament about far-right extremism. “Avi takes advantage of that anti-vax freedom-fighter movement,and then the white supremacists see him reporting on these protests in a sympathetic way,and they look at the comments that people make on his stories,and they would have thought,‘Okay,look at all these potential recruits.’ Meanwhile,Avi also gets some of their audience.”
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Meddick,who was sent death threats in 2021 when he helped pass Premier Andrews’ pandemic legislation,believes Yemini is dangerous. “He’s exploiting people who are genuinely scared about COVID and the lockdowns. They are already vulnerable,and he makes them feel legitimised in taking extreme action.”
Yemini’s brother Manny Waks joins us for lunch at Laffa Bar. Waks and Yemini have a complicated history:in 2016,Waks sued Yemini for defamation after Yemini accused Waks and their parents of harbouring a known paedophile in their home. For Waks,who was abused as a 13-year-old by a security guard at the Chabad Yeshivah Centre in Melbourne,this was particularly offensive. The case became big news in the city’s Jewish community. A couple of months later,Yemini apologised and Waks dropped it.
“We’re reconciled now,” says Waks,an advocate for Jewish abuse victims. “Our politics are very different. I’m centre-left and pro-human rights,and people view Avi as a thug and anti-human rights. But I still love him.”
Waks,who is 10 years older than Yemini,is tall,lanky and refreshingly unfiltered. He and Yemini order meat skewers,and I get a vegetarian sinia,with layers of cauliflower smothered in warm tahini. When it arrives,I offer Waks some. He rejects it politely,stating that the tahini resembles ejaculatory fluid. “Seriously. No tahini. No hummus. No mayo. I’m a very fussy eater.”
He is similarly candid about his brother,whom he begins discussing fondly,but at a certain remove,as if he’s not with us at the table. “Avi’s an agitator,a provocateur. That’s what he does. I’m actually surprised he’s so articulate because he couldn’t string a sentence together when he was young. But I’m yet to be convinced that he believes a lot of what he does.”
“Really?” says Yemini.
“He jumps on bandwagons,” Waks continues,looking at me. “He jumped on the anti-Muslim bandwagon,and it worked for him. Then he moved on to crime and COVID. And it motivated hordes of supporters,and so,you know,good for him.”
I mention the neo-Nazi stuff. “I went to their court cases,” says Yemini,“but it was about free speech.“
“But the impression was that you were courting neo-Nazis,” Waks says. “You went to the court cases because you thought it was a high-publicity event and you wanted to capitalise on that.” Waks goes on:“You pick and choose your human rights,who they apply to,whose human rights you choose to fight for.” Yemini sighs. But Waks hasn’t finished. “Also,you’re seen as instigating stories. Like you become the story,rather than reporting on it.”
“What do you want me to do? If I become the story,I still report the story.”
We eat some more. Waks leans back in his seat. “I think once Avi progresses in life he’ll realise what’s important to him. And hopefully he’ll start doing something that’s less opportunistic,and succeed there.”
Yemini stares at his brother,but says nothing. Talk then turns to their family;what this or that sibling is up to. Within 10 minutes,we’ve finished our meals. As we get up to leave,a cop car drives past,lights flashing,sirens blaring. “Oh,look,Avi,” I say. “It must be an African gang!”
Yemini looks sheepish. “You can joke,but it was true. Every night there were home invasions.”
Waks just laughs.
Support is available from theNational Sexual Assault,Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).
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