Four Corners shifts spotlight to Neo-Nazi cult tactics endangering children

A Four Corners program has helped reposition the spotlight away from neo-Nazi cult groups' salacious media stunts and onto their child grooming tactics, writes Tom Tanuki.

A MORE MAINSTREAM discussion of the child grooming, child recruitment and coercive control tactics of the National Socialist Network (NSN) is beginning to happen as a result of ABC’s Four Corners coverage earlier this week.

To date, apart from me, it has felt like only a smattering of other anti-fascist voices with rather small, fringe Left audiences pointing to the mounting danger the NSN is placing children in. The mainstream media, meanwhile, opts instead to help boost their recruitment with breathless, salacious ongoing coverage of all their for-the-media stunts.

But the Four Corners 'Leaving Hate' special somewhat shifted the spotlight to where it ought to be. The show interviewed a handful of the many Australian families coping with losing their children to the cult-like national group or struggling to reintegrate them as they try to leave it behind.

Media, government, spies — collectively they're memory-holing neo-Nazism

Neo-Nazis have risen to organisational prominence in Australia lately. If "authorities" remain this poorly informed, they won't be doing much to stop them.

It's a relief to see this being discussed a little more openly — although this must be only the beginning because it’s worse than it seems.

There are several issues to contemplate regarding the danger in which the National Socialist Network is placing its own.

The Four Corners coverage only alludes to some of these issues:

child recruitment;
coercive control of vulnerable young women and, sometimes, underage girls; and
the views of NSN regarding paedophilia and/or child marriage.

Last year, I was afforded a brief opportunity to ask a question regarding a blend of all of these matters to the leader of neo-Nazi activist group National Socialist Network (NSN), former youth worker Thomas Sewell.

On Twitter/X, NSN members constantly brigade any mention of the group in the hope of stifling discussion about their politics, ideology and, increasingly, their questionable child grooming tactics. So Sewell had responded to something I said.

In response, I asked him the following question:

'How many of your members date underage women?'

I could never have predicted the bizarre answer to that question as Sewell replied:

'What’s AOC in Victoria, Tanuki?'

I stared at the phone, failing to comprehend what he’d said. AOC? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

I Googled AOC Victoria Australia, to try and understand better. The first result I got was the Australian Olympic Committee.

Stumped though I was, it was only as I was about to check in with comrades that I realised what he meant.

What’s the age of consent in Victoria, Tanuki?

I was floored. Why in god’s name would you abbreviate "age of consent" to ‘"AOC", unless you were so intimately familiar with thinking about it that you needed to save yourself the time? Why would you be so intimately familiar with it, as the leader of a group consistently recruiting younger people, unless you had to be keenly aware of it and be across the age of the girls being groomed?

Uncovering the plans of Australian White supremacists

The mainstream media is giving racial extremists such as Tom Sewell a platform to spread his message of hatred to potential recruits.

I want to make clear that the notion of grooming underage girls is not merely a question the NSN dodges on Twitter/X. It’s an actual part of their political platform. That is, several of its members adopt a position of advocating for child marriage.

We’ve said it often to our limited audiences, but I don’t know that many have been paying attention. So it was heartening to see the Adelaide Advertiser recently cover NSN figurehead Joel Davis’ advocacy for marriage with teenage girls.

But the grooming of underage girls isn’t only an item of NSN political advocacy. It is a fact that NSN members are in "relationships" with underage girls. (I am unsure whether these meet the legal threshold of the "AOC" or not and I doubt Sewell would reveal this, even if it is on his mind a lot.)

As the Four Corners special touched on, some young men and boys have been removed from contact with their families and swept up into the cult-like environment of the group. They’re encouraged to leave their families behind and come and secure work with employers sympathetic to the NSN, and relocate to residence in rental properties owned or leased out by NSN members.

So it goes for women – and underage girls – partnered up with NSN members.

The best resource for what’s going on at the NSN remains the White Rose Society.

On the matter of coercive control of women around the group, the White Rose Society wrote last year:

Prominent members and associates of EAM/NSN have advocated marrying girls as young as 14. One has boasted of refusing to “let” his girlfriend wear trousers. Others have boasted about controlling what their partner wears to the gym or even eats.

This is a form of coercive control.

We’re aware that multiple members of EAM/NSN have been the subject of intervention orders, and ex-partners of EAM/NSN members have also told us that after leaving a relationship with an EAM/NSN member, they were subjected to harassment from other members of the group.

On gaming platforms popular with children, such as Roblox and Steam, neo-Nazis – including recruiters from the National Socialist Network – are organising to entice young children to participate in chats with them and, later, participate in actual real-life recruitment pathways.

The Four Corners special included an interview with "Emily", a brave mother of an NSN grooming target. The boy was underage at the time the NSN was convincing him to prepare to leave his family.

Emily shared the difficulties she faces in trying to remove her son even as NSN members fight to draw him back in.

After the airing of the show, the mother’s real identity was doxxed by the NSN on Twitter/X. She continues to face a campaign of harassment from NSN members. They continue to provide more evidence of how dangerously cult-like they are in their harassment of families willing to speak up about them.

We know that in the culmination of a fascist ideology like the NSN’s, it is minorities, non-Whites, the Left and so on that are its ultimate targets. And It reminds us all the time that its ideology remains the same as it was in Nazi Germany — so this is no mere history lesson.

The Christchurch massacre also reminds us that when the wave that sweeps up movements of nationalists and racists crashes and recedes, whoever is left behind and isolated becomes a mortal danger to the people around them. So, when the NSN is finally broken and scattered, what will we be left to deal with? No anti-fascist needs reminding. This is what forces us into opposing grassroots fascist networks.

But when a group targets children as young as the NSN does, I find it impossible to view their youngest members as oppressors. Right now, they’re usually vulnerable victims of grooming. Right now, they’re often children.

So, right now, the people most in danger from the NSN are the people in and around the NSN.

I hope this conversation continues to happen. I hope the families who have experienced this danger for themselves continue to speak up as Emily bravely did. I understand the place of fear that their silence comes from. But that silence only benefits the NSN’s ongoing campaign of child recruitment. It’s endangering children.

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