XYZ dot net dot au (‘The XYZ’) is one of a small number of Australian ‘AltRight’ blogs/websites/podcasts that have sprung up in the last few years … but admittedly not one that I’ve paid much attention to.*
Collectively, these sites have dedicated themselves to battling ‘Cultural Marxism’, which in the case of ‘The XYZ’ finds its chief expression in ‘The ABC’. Of course, along with ‘The ABC’, ‘The XYZ’ regularly denounces The ALP, The Feminists, The Greens, The Leftists, The Muslims, The Queers, The Unions, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘political correctness’ and sundry other un-Australian forces. As such, it’s not unlike one of Uncle Rupert’s tabloids, and its ideological obsessions are typical of the Tory yoof who appear to be its chief market. Recently, however, the blog (‘online newspaper’) has been becoming increasingly batshit, seemingly under the influence of the US Alt-Right and following the triumph of God Emperor Trump.
Above : David Hiscox. ‘When I am not worrying about the fate of Western civilisation, I play the piano’ (‘Felix Mendelssohn and Germany’s proud Christmas heritage’, December 20, 2016).
‘The XYZ’ is the bRaneschild of David Hiscox, a local musician and music teacher. As editor, David is the most frequent contributor to the site, publishing around a third of its output, followed by Ryan Fletcher. (David Hilton, previously known as ‘Moses Apostaticus’, is another contributor.) Whether or not Ryan has pulled one too many cones, or perhaps simply received one too many knocks to the head, over the course of the last year or so he’s become increasingly open in his espousal of anti-Semitism and White nationalism. Further, the content on the site more generally has increasingly adopted more frank expressions of commitment to the AltRight than was present when David first began publishing it.
Previously content to describe itself as a ‘classical liberal’ platform committed to celebrating ‘free speech’, ‘free markets’ and ‘Western Civilisation’, the site has recently extended its mission to the defence of ‘cultural libertarianism’ from ‘cultural authoritarians’: ‘We also stand in opposition to cultural Marxism, which seeks to bring about socialism by attacking political, cultural, social, and religious norms and institutions – dismantling our national identity and the foundations of Western civilisation’. Shortly after launching its crusade in mid-2015, ‘The XYZ’ had also joined the fight against Islam which, like Cultural Marxism, allegedly poses an ‘existential threat’ to ‘Western Civilisation’.
In summary, David and ‘The XYZ’ have adopted wholesale the talking-points of the US AltRight and recent postings suggest that they’re finally beginning to (more openly) address ‘The JQ’. This is particularly in evidence in Ryan Fletcher and David Hilton’s contributions to the site but is also reflected in the commentary, which is increasingly beginning to resemble threads on ‘The Daily Stormer’. Below is just a few examples of the hundreds of barking-mad, anti-Semitic, and increasingly violent commentary by Mr Fletcher and others (the last being a reference to the murder of Heather Heyer and serious injury to others by a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville last year):
Still, in fairness to David, the laissez-faire comments policy which allowed for racist and anti-Semitic creeps to infest the site has recently been ended. Not because of the grotesque racism and misogyny, of course, but because two keyboard warriors were sniping at one another: ‘The line for me came when I saw two contributors engaged in what had degenerated from rugged debate into open civil war’ (‘A few comments on comments’, February 4, 2018).
Next Monday, December 4, professional troll and Trump fanboy Milo Yiannopoulos is coming to Melbourne to talk shit. Milo’s tour is being sponsored by Penthouse magazine, with fellow trollumnists Andrew Bolt and Mark Latham lending their support as MCs. While writer Roxane Gay memorably described Milo as being responsible for propagating ‘racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies … transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’, publisher Damien Costas has even compared Milo to ‘Martin Luther King Jnr and the freedom riders in the 1960s’. (True story!) The media troll has also been invited by another (proprietarian) troll, David Leyonhjelm, to speak at federal parliament — which is about par for the course.
While promotional material for the tour cites Forbes (in 2012, Milo was ‘digital media’s Citizen Kane‘ according to Jennifer Kite-Powell), as Richard Cooke writes, ‘In so many ways, Milo Yiannopoulos is unremarkable. He is just one of a long line of conservative grifters making hay in Australia.’
Obviously, neither Milo’s endorsement of man-boy ‘love’ (child rape), nor his role as errand boy for neo-Nazis and fascists, has prevented him from being adopted as a mascot by local trollumnists and the AltRight; a fact which, given that they operate according to a very similar modus operandi, is perhaps not that surprising. Certainly, the Buzzfeed article by Joseph Bernstein (Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled [sic] Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream, October 6, 2017), which documents Milo’s function as a useful idiot for the AltRight, has been ignored by local fanboys. The dox charts the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.
January 20, 2017: Alt-Right Violence at the University of Washington in Seattle
A University of Washington talk by Milo Yiannopoulos—the notorious Twitter troll, ardent Trump supporter and former Breitbart editor credited with mainstreaming the alt-right—draws a large protest. A married couple, Marc and Elizabeth Hokoana, come to the event armed with pepper spray and a handgun to antagonize opponents. After protester Joshua Dukes confronts Marc about using the pepper spray, Elizabeth allegedly fires a single round into his stomach.
Yeah well anyway, I thought I might just note in passing some of Avi Yemini’s fanbase among the extreme-right.
To begin with, unhappy with the media reportage of his hate rally on Sunday, Avi instead recommends everybody read the report on the ‘altright’ website ‘The Unshackled’ (2016–) by Tom Pirrone. According to Tom, ‘hundreds’ attended Avi’s shindig — which is about as accurate as most of the reportage on the site, which otherwise reflects the preoccupations of the Tory yoof which constitutes its audience.
The Unhinged editors of The Unshackled are Tim Wilms and Sukith Fernando (above). Like many other #altright yoof, Sukith is a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party, and it was while campaigning for student elections that Sukith got into some hot water at the University of Sydney last week. Thus according to Honi Soit (Holocaust denying student confronted on campus, Kishor Napier-Raman and Aidan Molins, September 15, 2017): ‘Fernando was confronted on Eastern Avenue by members of both Stand Up (Labor) and Switch (Grassroots/independents) who questioned him about his beliefs. Fernando repeatedly claimed that he “didn’t know” whether the Holocaust happened.’ He is also reportedly a member of multiple right-wing Facebook groups, including one called ‘Holocaust Revisionism’.
As was the case with University of Queensland student David Hilton (‘Moses Apostaticus’), being an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier is no barrier to being adopted by more mainstream publications, including The Spectator. Thus in July Sukith contributed a sterling essay to the site (Goodbye Yassmin and #PrayForLondon, July 13, 2017) celebrating Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s decision to leave Australia for London, while also deriding her for her alleged apostasy and racism. For its part, the Liberal yoof who’ve assembled behind the ‘Vanguard’ banner to contest the election have denounced Sukith for his public expressions of racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and informed the world that, if elected, Sukith will not hold office. On the other hand, Sukith’s brave stand against The Jew at his university did at least win the approval of neo-Nazi and former Grand Poobah of the KKK, David Duke, so that’s something eh.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Leaving aside Sukith, as noted previously, the main body of supporters at Avi’s rally on Sunday were drawn from pre-existing extreme-right street gangs, especially the Soldiers of Odin and True Blue Crew. Funnily enough, apart from ignoring actually-existing laws and legal processes, the implementation of the rally’s demands — minimum sentencing for violent offenders (including minors), no bail for persons charged with violent offences, no parole for those convicted for violent offences, minors to be incarcerated in adult jails and the deportation of immigrants convicted of violent offences — would actually decimate his support base.
Last weekend, a small group of neo-Nazi geeks, White supremacist nerds, and extreme-right yoof met-up in Sydney to talk shop. Called ‘DingoCon’ and organised under the auspices of #DingoTwitter, the only person to have publicly confessed to having paid their $88 (fnarr fnarr) entrance fee is Melbourne-based neo-Nazi Blair Cottrell, the putative leader of the now defunct Facebook page ‘United Patriots Front’ (UPF). One person who definitely did not attend — and whose presence would apparently have been unwelcome — was Dr Jim Saleam of the Australia First Party: Everyone Wants To Be Fuehrer, but it would seem that the nü gen of Fashy Goys are keen to keep some distance from the fascists in cardigans.
Above : George Christensen poses with Kane Miller, lvl boss of the ‘True Blue Crew’.
The Dingoes
While Buzzfeed buzzed about The Dingoes back in October, to date the most publicity The Dingoes mob has received has likely come courtesy of Federal MP George Christensen, who was a guest on their podcast in February. A few months later — after having made the Columbus-like discovery that he’d been chatting to neo-Nazi yoof — Christensen declared that he’d stumbled onto the podcast entirely by mistake, was really sorry about the whole thing, and vowed to stop US neo-Nazi Mike Peinovich from coming to Australia in order to address the conference his erstwhile kameraden had organised for July. (Christensen’s sudden rise and very slow fall from Dingo grace is most-usefully examined by Richard Cooke in the July, 2017 edition of The Monthly.)*
Christensen’s decision to consort with anti-Semites angered some at the time, and Jenna Price may be correct to claim that ‘[o]nly Buzzfeed’s Mark di Stefano thought it wasn’t the best use of a politician’s time’, but as Jason Wilson wrote in February, Christensen is not the only political figure to have embraced The Dingoes:
Last week, for the second time, former Labor leader Mark Latham appeared on The Convict Report, aka The Dingoes, an Australian “alt-right” podcast. It’s part of the network of podcasts hosted by The Right Stuff, a major international far right hub. That’s the same website whose major players have been recently doxxed by the left, and whose unmasking as promoters of fascist ideology has, in some cases, brought suitably ruinous consequences.
After taking note of the fact that both Christensen and former Liberal turned Conservative Federal MP Bernardi were to be guests of The Q Society function in Melbourne in February (LOL), Wilson further writes that:
Bernardi also has other, perhaps even stranger connections. In particular, he has a long relationship with a group called the Sydney Traditionalist Forum. They describe themselves as “the first explicitly paleoconservative-leaning association in Australia”, and “the only local group that embraces the political currents of contemporary dissident reaction”. Their purpose is to provide “a forum where ideas once understood to be common sense can be exchanged, debated and discussed, unfettered and ungagged by modern liberal thought-control”.
The Sydney Traditionalists, as it happens, are also comrades of The Dingoes; which fact — together with their rejection of Dr Saleam — has apparently irked the authors of the United Nationalists of Australia (UNA) blog.
The Dingoes, Klub Naziya, Sydney Traditionalists, Liberals, United Nationalists and Australia First Party
Functioning largely as a forum for (Jewish?!) neo-Nazi and AFP member Nathan Sykes, but also occasionally featuring the musings of former UPF leader turned AFP member Chris Shortis, the UNA blog replaced the similarly batshit ‘Whitelaw Towers’, and frequently takes potshots at the various enemies and rivals of Saleam and the AFP. In keeping with this role, the blog has recently published an account of DingoCon and the nefarious forces allegedly pulling its strings.
According to UNA (‘DINGOES CONNED?’, July 6, 2017), Liberal and Leo Strauss aficionado David McBryde is ‘the man behind the curtain of DingoCon’. The logic governing the proposal is fairly convoluted but whatever its sketchy merits, it does reveal something of the fractious nature of the extreme-right in Sydney. Thus, in another post on the UNA blog authored by Saleam, McBryde is nominated as being one of a number of individuals — along with Steven Moore, Mark Pavic, Jason Rafty and Andrew Wilson — comprising the shadowy Klub Nation (AKA Klub Naziya), a bizarre group which, inter alia, organised meetings at Humanist House in Chippendale in the period 2005–2009 before staging an unsuccessful attempt to seize control of the group which owns it, the Humanist Society of NSW. KN is also alleged to have been involved in some dingbat investment scheme — the purchase of gold and silver — in which several investors allegedly lost some small sums of money. (For more on KN and Humanist House, see : Fascist infiltration of the ‘Humanist Society of New South Wales’ (Inc.), November 25, 2009.)
Above : Andrew Wilson with fellow members of (defunct) neo-Nazi skinhead gang Volksfront.
According to another source, Andrew Wilson is in fact one of the regular hosts of The Convict Report, where he podcasts under the name of ‘Aussie Tory’; certainly, Wilson once put the yoof in the Patriotik Yoof League (PYL) — the ill-fated attempt by Saleam’s Australia First Party to develop a yoof wing in the early noughties — and was one of the volk in the similarly short-lived neo-Nazi grouplet Volksfront. Since then, after various twists and turns, the PYL has been replaced by the imaginatively titled ‘Eureka Youth League’, AKA Canberra boy Matthew Grant. (You may remember Grant from such rallies as the UPF anti-Muslim rally in Bendigo in October, 2015.)
Other individuals nominated as being in some way complicit in McBryde’s plotting to undo the (White) nationalist content of The Dingoes and to bring its handful of followers (back) into the Liberal fold are: Sydney Traditionalist, DingoCon organiser, aspiring academic and self-described ‘paleo-conservative’ Luke Torrisi; fellow Traditionalist, sometime Humanist and USYD activist Morgan Qasabian and finally; Clifford Jennings, described by Saleam as an ‘Alt-Right leader and the organizer of Dingo activity’ and a former Liberal: also an aspiring USYD student politician, and organiser of a ‘Pro-Trump Counter Protest’ in Sydney in January (‘Communists, Marxists, Globalists and Cucks are going to be protesting against the inauguration of the God Emperor Trump to the Presidency of the United States of America, please join me in a very merry counter protest. Please invite those who are truly pro-Trump.’).
In summary, it’s not without reason that Jason Wilson wrote that ‘The Dingoes attempt to produce the same edgy fare as The Right Stuff flagships like The Daily Shoah, but they sound a little too much like chinless Young Liberal nerds to bring any real menace’. Beyond that, while much media reportage on the ‘AltRight’ has been obsessed with the bells and whistles (haircuts and memes) attached to it, as a general rule it’s just the old anti-Semitic and fascist whine in new bottles.
* Conservative MPs accidentally-stumbling-into-fascist-and-anti-Semitic-groups has a long, colourful, and generally comedic history Down Under. STRAYA has also often been a safe space for Nazi war criminals, some few recruited by the intelligence agencies to better battle Communism while others, most notoriously Slovenian Nazi propagandist Ljenko Urbančič (1922–2006), pursuing careers within the Conservative parties themselves. Urbančič, who joined the NSW Liberal Party and exercised considerable influence upon it during the 1960s and 1970s via the ‘Uglies’ faction, also enjoyed Australian hospitality by organising campaigns in support of apartheid, White rule in Rhodesia, and against the influence of liberals within the Liberals. The political legacy of the ‘Little Goebbels’ of Ljubljana continues to be exercised and/or exorcised via his #BFF and NSW state MP David Clarke and Clarke’s former acolyte, federal MP Alex Hawke. For more infos on STRAYA as a safe space for Nazis and war criminals, see : Mark Aarons, War Criminals Welcome (Black Inc., 2001).
Sadly, Mike Peinovich (‘Mike Enoch’) did not attend DingoCon, instead electing to goto the Scandza Forum in Oslo, Norway on July 1. Erik Olson (Searchlight) writes: ‘Recently a small “volkisch” far-right group called Scandza Forum started making its presence felt publicly with calls for more international activity. Some minor events took place and then we learned from our inside sources that a major event was to take place in Oslo on 1 July 2017 under the Scandza banner heavily supported by Greg Johnson’s Counter-Currents.’ Note that Johnson was a guest of The Dingoes in September last year.
Above : David Hiscox. ‘When I am not worrying about the fate of Western civilisation, I play the piano’ (‘Felix Mendelssohn and Germany’s proud Christmas heritage’, December 20, 2016).
