Australias far-right wasnt just marching on 31 August the National Socialist Network hijacked rallies nationwide, using them as displays of intimidation.Tom Tanukireports.

I HAVE SCOURED OVER video footage from all of the nationalistMarch for Australiarallies that were held nationwide on Sunday, 31 August.

What I found was a coordinated pattern of crowd and media manipulation by the National Socialist Network (NSN) that was conducted via stacking speakers at rallies and rally coordinators, cladding small cells of uniformed NSNmemberswith a larger plain-clothes supporter base to promote surrounding crowd support, deploying supplied, scripted chants and leading marches.

I found that Sydneys rally was the primeexampleof stacking the deck, with all of the abovenamed strategies deployed to full effect. The original nationwide coordinator of the rallies,Bec Freedom, can be seen speaking to rally marshal and NSN memberOscar Tuckfield. (She helped appoint other NSN members to coordination roles on the day, too.) They helped arrange NSN members at the very frontline of the rally, where they held a banner about mass immigration and abused a woman holding an Aboriginal flag.

They marched, with racist chants promoting mass deportations the same used by NSN members in both uniform and plain clothes across the country heard on their megaphones. Then they stacked the speakers at the end, with three NSN members speaking alongsideThomas Sewells lawyer. Speakers who rejected their white supremacist messaging were interrupted by racist chants from the NSN-heavy crowd stacked at the front, near the cameras. Asuggestionby a Libertarian Party MP to pause immigration for five years was drowned out by NSN chants promoting mass deportation. It was, in the end, a national socialist-led rally.

This tactic was deployed to various degrees of success nationwide. In the enormous rally at Perth, NSN members got into conflict with One NationsRod Caddies, who refused to speak on their megaphones and wanted the crowd to reject them. Some did, some didnt; many didnt hear or even understand what they were witnessing due to the speaker system issues Caddies was facing. Many cameras nonetheless captured an NSN contingent leading racist crowd-wide chants.

In Adelaide, the NSN contingent waspushedoff the microphone, with the cord ripped out of a speaker system to prevent them from speaking. Afightensued, broken up by the police. NSN members were abused and confronted.

Brisbanes rally, as large as Perths, managed to fend off any would-be NSN speakers due to conflicts the state organiser had with the neo-Nazis. But a contingent led by Victorian NSN memberJacob Hersantstill managed to manipulate the crowd around them, in the tight park amphitheatre environment they were wedged into for their rally. Their racist chants led to an Indian speaker being forced off the microphone. They dominated the march with the same scripted chants that NSN nationwide were supplied with.

Queensland MPBob Katterhad no idea who he was surrounded by in Townsville; he let NSN members hand him their rune-design microphone for his speech, which is somewhat similar in aesthetic to the gunBrenton Tarrantwielded. Another Katter Australian Party (KAP) MP,Nick Dametto, was warned by the crowd to expel NSN members but didnt do it. Later, he issued astatementsaying they made him and the crowd feel "uneasy".

Bob Katter is right immigrationischanging Australia and it'skeeping our clinics, businessesand small towns alive.

Its true they made crowds nationwide feel uneasy. But they were often too intimidating to stand up to, marching in formation and becoming immediately aggressive in response to hostile reactions.

Nowhere was this more true than in Melbourne, whereThomas Sewells NSN contingent doled out, in my view, the most political violence Ive ever seen enacted by a group at a political rally in Australia. Some of it is less known about such as the group of antifascists who tried to stop them from entering the CBD but were outnumbered by the neo-Nazis marching into the city.

But much of it was documented by countless cameras, and has become almost uniformly reviled by the public in the wake of 31 August. Particularly the brutalattackon bystanders at cultural gathering placeCamp Sovereignty, where NSN members attacked a small group of mostly women and elderly people, including with weapons.

Its important to note that women experienced much of the NSN violence that I saw on the day. Its in the nature of neo-Nazis to target groups that they see as more vulnerable. But we are all vulnerable given the nature of militant neo-Nazism, when fascists are allowed to grow to this extent relatively unopposed.

I consider that this problem was, first and foremost, on that day, one for the right-wing, including the "civic nationalists"in attendance at those marches who ascribe to flag-waving but not, as they repeatedly attest, to racism or white supremacy. Streamers and partisan media figures such asAvi YeminiandRukshan Fernandoinsist that7NEWSfell for neo-Nazi media and rally manipulation techniques, misapprehending that many of the old "patriots" whod shown up werent there to support the NSNs white supremacist agenda. Theyre too busy propagandising.

This might be useful for their content mill, with an audience base that likes to be told again and again that it isnt racist; it isnt, however, going to solve the problem that led to Yemini and Fernando being violently ejected from their own rally by violent neo-Nazis who dont want non-whites in the crowd. This is their problem to handle.

But it grows into a problem for all of us, in the end. Its a problem for the victims of NSN violence on that day, again; many women, many elderly, and many Indigenous. Its a problem for the vulnerable communities that the NSN target; as they grow bolder, they grow more likely to enact opportunist violence against their stated targets, as we saw at Camp Sovereignty.

And its a problem for the left, who need to re-learn the integral importance of anti-fascism and showing up. So we will need more people next time.

Tom Tanukiis an IA columnist, writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear onYouTube. You can follow him/X@tom_tanuki.

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