Shortcut: How Serious Are Australia's Neo-Nazis?

**Meshel Laurie** (0:03)
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie. What does it mean to be a Nazi in 2026? As extremist groups adapt to the digital age, crime reporter at the age, Sherryn Groch, 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?

**Sherryn Groch** (0:53)
I guess it means exactly how it sounds. These are Hitlisher worshipping, swastika waving out and proud Nazis. They hate Jews, they want to deport people of color and build their own white only societies, run by men, of course. And 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 laughing 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 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, 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. 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, they might do a tactical retreat. But with every wave of this, they're, they're eshing 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.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:45)
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. 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.

**Sherryn Groch** (3:03)
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, a lot of them seem to be more concerned with nosh sort of denouncing the Nazis than separating themselves from them. They've done very well at kind of eating the short, like charging through is all out Nazi sort of mask off and dragging the right further to the extreme.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:31)
Well, in that way, they're definitely taking one out of the original Nazis handbook, aren't they? 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 Porsche 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?
If he was, he's not, but let's say he was into the Manosphere, or into looks maxing, or any of those things. I mean, do they sort of meet anywhere?

**Sherryn Groch** (4:05)
Well, 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 Taysh, 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 on the private jet of the Tates. 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 Taysh blew up online, not because his content was incredible, but because he paid 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 grassroots movement of people posting Andrew Taysh videos.