Far-right extremists are under watch in Australia alongside potential terrorists

FASCISM is on the march in Australia. Call them neo-Nazis, white supremacists, nationalists, or sexist racists. But they’d prefer you call them the alt-right, as Tory Shepherd reports.

• Posters carrying neo-Nazi slogans erected around Adelaide

ADELAIDE was plastered with “It’s OK to be white” posters on Thursday.

Fifteen members of The National Party have resigned amid an investigation into neo-Nazis infiltrating the party.

Our spooks are monitoring far-right extremists alongside potential Islamic terrorists.

And a conga line of right-wing provocateurs have added Australia to their touring list.

The next one due to whip up racial tensions is Gavin McInnes. A Canadian who heads up the “Proud Boys”. He’s a “proud Western chauvinist” who likes to hit people and promise extreme violence.

“We will kill you – that’s The Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you,” Mr McInnes says in a video posted online.

“We look nice, we seem soft, we have ‘boys’ in the name, but we will assassinate you.”

The alt-right is getting a foothold in Australia.

We don’t know who put up those posters, but we do know their inspiration.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation put a motion to the Senate recently asking it to vote for or against a motion that it was “OK to be white”.

ON TOUR: Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right Proud Boys group, brandishes a sword after giving a speech in New York City.

The phrase came from bewildered white supremacists who think that their whiteness is under attack. Then the Federal Government flubbed the vote, voted “yes”, and accidentally endorsed the neo-Nazi slogan. And now it’s ended up on Adelaide’s Stobie poles.

Meanwhile a series of reports detailed how neo-Nazis were creeping into the Nationals party, trying to use it as a Trojan horse to get their despicable views to a broader audience. While 15 resigned, up to 35 members in NSW alone are being investigated.

One suspended member, Clifford Jennings, said white Australians saw a “grim future for themselves and their children, of becoming a minority in their own country”.

And ASIO, the Australian Secret (sorry, Security) Intelligence Organisation, has publicly confirmed that it is worried about extremist right-wing groups in Australia.

What is going on? Australians are starting to mimic their US brothers. There’s an upwelling of anger from white men who feel disenfranchised. Who feel as though the world has moved on without them.

Some of them are channelling their rage and frustration into what is being called the alt-right (alternative right) movement.

That’s the term they prefer, as they know the bad PR that comes with being called “Nazis”. The alt-right, a loose term for a broad range of groups, is a growing canker on the side of a very real problem. Men – specifically white men – used to being in power and being obeyed, are losing their grip.

THEY’RE losing their jobs; the world is shifting around them, and they’re now getting in trouble when they sexually harass women or racially abuse people.

This is why they rail against political correctness. The PC movement is telling them that it’s no longer acceptable to behave as though they’re in 1950s America.

Our new Race Discrimination Commissioner, Chin Tan, used his first speech to talk about the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Robert Bowers killed 11 people while raging against Jews.

Mr Tan said there were more and more hate crimes committed against minority groups, and not just in the US. “We have seen, far too often, the manifestations of emboldened racial supremacy movements and agitation, the language and messaging of which has spilt over even into mainstream public and political debate,” he said.

The alt-right, and those aligned with the alt-right view that white men are the new victims in society, have been described as “broflakes”. As in, precious (white) snowflakes who can’t take the heat.

Urban Dictionary, an online, crowdsourced resource to define words and concepts, describes a broflake as “a commonly seen stereotype of the quintessentially conservative, heterosexual, white male, who despite all his privileges and advantages in life, is easily sensitive to any criticism or mockery”.

“Usually denies or ignores reality and the very real struggles of other genders, races, sexual identities, etc,” it says, in a characteristically scathing assessment.

But while most in power – with the notable exception of Pauline Hanson and her ilk – can agree that racism and sexist and Nazism are bad, there’s no agreed way to tackle the alt-right. Every time someone like McInnes (or other famous-on-the-internet alt-righters like Milo Yiannopoulos or Lauren Southern) comes here to tour, there are calls for them to be banned, then protests (that inevitably give them more publicity).

There are loud condemnations of racism in Parliament.

But no way to take them on. Although there is a growing agreement about why they’re rising. Mr Tan’s predecessor, Tim Soutphommasane, put it well when he pointed to the 1970s film, Network, where the news anchor goes mad, screaming from a window: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”.

It’s a rage stemming from impotent resentment. “There are some in our society who do feel anger and resentment, who feel left behind by social change, whether that’s economic or cultural,” he said.

“The temper is one of anger and resentment, and a sense some have that they may have once been in a certain position in society, that they are now losing that position, that they don’t have a voice and are being stifled and suffocated.

“Think of the phrases that flow out in our public debate at the moment: this idea that political correctness has ‘gone mad’ that we cannot say what we think any more, that minorities are getting special treatment and privileges that traditional Australians are not enjoying. Listen to that – you can hear the resentment, you can hear the anger.”

Just because the victimhood is imagined, doesn’t mean it’s not real to these men. And the anger is undeniably real. As is the potential for extremism, and violence.

In Australia, the alt-right might be mostly broflakes, but authorities including ASIO are worried that there could eventually be an avalanche.