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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie.
Chapter 2: What does it mean to be a Nazi in 2026?
What does it mean to be a Nazi in 2026? As extremist groups adapt to the digital age, crime reporter at the age Sharon Grotch examines how they attract followers online, who they're targeting and the symbols, language and online communities that help these movements grow. This is Australian True Crime.
We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. All right, so we need you to tell us, please, where are we in 2026? What does it mean to be a Nazi in Australia?
I guess it means exactly how it sounds. These are Hitler-shire worshipping, swastika-waving, out-and-proud Nazis. They hate Jews.
Chapter 3: How do extremist groups attract followers online?
They want to deport people of colour and build their own white-only societies, you know, run by men, of course. People say this to me a lot, like, oh, come on. Yeah. They're not actually Nazis. And it is tempting when you see these guys LARPing around, it is tempting to sort of laugh at them, like aren't they ridiculous?
But the reason I got interested is because these guys are, you know, they're serious dangerous people. A lot of them have got really serious criminal convictions or they've got serious ties to terrorists overseas. I mean, I discovered they're linked to about 30 extremist groups, overseas.
Like, you know, they had dealings with the Christchurch shooter before he went off and did his massacre in New Zealand. So it's sort of we've reached the point where we can't laugh at them anymore. And that is almost it's a strange sort of beast. It's kind of what they want. They think, oh, now people are taking us seriously. But, yes, certainly they are dangerous and they are growing.
Even with this kind of new bit of theatre they've sort of carried out with the government really cracked down quite hard. And so they said, look, oh, you know, we're disbanding formally. Nothing to see here, lads.
Chapter 4: What are the symbols and language used by neo-Nazis?
It's all good. But, of course, they're still there. So it's almost like every few years they crash in hard as Nazis and they might do a tactical retreat. But with every wave of this, they're eating the shore. And that idea of the term Nazi once being unthinkable,
Now, like, you know, back in the day, you'd call a guy and say, hey, mate, you know, what's with the swastika tattoo that you just sort of hid under the bed there? Are you a Nazi? And they'd fall over themselves to say, of course, I'm not a Nazi. How dare you call me that?
But now it's the opposite. That's a really good point. I'm seeing photographs, you know, on socials, people upload them a lot of Australian men mainly wandering around with proper Nazi tattoos.
tattoos that is mind-blowing to me on a calf a swastika on a calf this bloke's from the sydney suburbs what on earth yeah and and it's outlawed in a lot of places now recently because we've seen so much of this but there are still loopholes and people are more they a lot of them seem to be more concerned with nosh sort of denouncing the nut nuts than separating themselves from them.
So they've done very well at kind of eating the shore, like charging through as all-out Nazis sort of mask off and dragging the right further to the extreme.
Well, in that way, they're definitely taking one out of the original Nazis' handbook, aren't they?
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Chapter 5: Why are some individuals tempted to dismiss neo-Nazis as a joke?
I mean, if we look 100 years ago, the same thing was happening in Europe. We'd have the riots, we'd have the big push and then they'd pull back, but really more hearts and minds had been won. If I've got, which I do have, I've got a 16-year-old son, where online might his life intersect?
You know, if he was, he's not, but let's say he was into the manosphere or into man, malooks maxing or any of those things. I mean... Do they sort of meet anywhere?
Oh, absolutely. I did a little experiment actually when I started looking at this and I created a TikTok account because I'm, work are always threatening to make me go on TikTok and I've tried to resist. And I made a little TikTok account and I had no preferences. I had no history. I think I set my gender as male, although I just wanted to see what happened. And I set my age as young.
This is before the social media bans, obviously. Just a quick little experiment. And within a couple of scrolls, I wasn't just looking at questionable content. I was looking at neo-Nazi content that I knew was from the National Socialist Network, which is the main neo-Nazi group, because I'd seen it on Telegram. I couldn't believe how fast that was.
In some of my investigation into this group that I've done over the past year, I discovered that one of their senior members is a close mate of Andrew Tate, the international misogynist influencer accused sex trafficker. This guy is an Australian ex-porn star. He's really wealthy. He jets around the world, sometimes, you know, on the private jet of the Tate's.
And he's there training with these Nazis, giving them cash. And I realized as part of this, I think he gave them the idea for how to artificially inflate some of their content because Andrew Tate blew up online, not because his content was incredible, but because he paid a
like an army of young people and people over in Romania to post and edit his videos from their own accounts so that it confused the algorithms. And it looked like this, you know, grassroots movement of people posting Andrew Tate videos. The Nazis have done the exact same thing.
They've used the exact same style, sometimes even the same music, sometimes the same accounts who had posted for Andrew Tate. I saw them posting NSN content.
That's the National Socialist Network. Is that Australian only or is that international?
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Chapter 6: How are neo-Nazi groups linked to international terrorism?
Yeah.
Other ways that they look to recruit both men and women that I read about in some of your writing, mothers' groups. Tell us about that.
Yes, Nazi trad wives. Tell us about that. That's part of the Venn diagram. Most of the people in this group, they've actually taken themselves offline. They had a fair bit of interest, I think, from the media and they've sort of disappeared when the NSN formally disbanded earlier this year. But they're mostly partners of...
of men in the neo-Nazi group and they'll post pictures and talk about how great it is to have white babies. A really key plank of the neo-Nazi movement here and everywhere is this idea of the white homestead and the white family and men being really firmly in charge. We're seeing, like speaking of the manosphere earlier, Thomas Sewell, he's the leader of the NSN. I mean, you probably know him.
He's bald. He's got a moustache. Is he the New Zealander? He was a New Zealander, right? He was. He was born in New Zealand, now a citizen. There was a bit of talk about what that meant, given their obsession with being Australian.
A lot of talk from me about what that meant, actually, yes. I mean, I was one of the first person to go, hang on a minute, we've got Desi Freeman being a sovereign citizen and saying he hates the government while he lives on on welfare. And we've got Thomas Sewell who's doing protests about immigrants and he's an immigrant. Like it seemed to me a real moment for these guys.
And there's a lot of Nazis on welfare too, actually. So he's kind of, he's the leader. He's really built it up into what it is. And even since they disbanded, he's managed to kind of
maximize on some of this global infamy these stunts they've been pulling have given him to really kind of you know keep spreading his message online now he fancies himself a bit of a man fluencer what about it seems that the government sort of says to us as a community that we need to take responsibility a bit of responsibility if a member of our family appears to be drifting into these groups
Is that fair to say? It seems as though there's a sort of a, like we can't police literally everybody. We don't know what's going on. Everybody, everywhere. If your son, your husband, your brother appears to be drifting into this world, what are we meant to do about that?
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