Authorities Crack Down on Neo-Nazis as Prominent Figure Openly Threatens Terrorism

Neo-Nazis have not only been mobilising for the little white guy against the onset of global capital that’s evidently taking all the jobs away from “white men” in the NSW regional town of Cowra, but a key member of the National Socialist Network (NSN) has said that if the government and the courts remove his children then he’s going to get “terrorist” on them and “start killing people”.

These statements made by prominent NSN figure Thomas Sewell, during a neo-Nazi podcast on 20 June this year, are all the more confronting as he based his comments on the UK’s “home affairs internal political police force”  practice of snatching the kids of imprisoned white supremacist fathers, which British authorities have confirmed isn’t happening, and it’s not happening here either.

The ABC’s 7.30 Report aired these details during a 13 November report on the rise of neo-Nazis, of which Sydney Criminal Lawyers has been tracking too. Yet, the last time this publication chimed-in in mid-October, the question was, why are far-right actors becoming so prevalent on the streets without any response from the authorities? Yet, it now appears this neglect has come to an end.

Five search warrants were executed across the Melbourne region on 7 November, with 31-year-old Sewell being charged with three counts of intimidating a police officer in relation to an online threat to dox, or publicly reveal the identity of, a Victoria police officer, and three men in their early twenties were questioned over allegedly harassing two women in Port Melbourne on Halloween.

“White man fight back”

Sewell’s charges relate to some more comments he made online following a group of NSN members having turned up to confront a 21 October rally calling for the extension of permanent protection to long-term refugees in Naarm-Melbourne, which saw Victoria police chase the Nazis away, as they liberally applied pepper spray in the questionable manner that was seen during Disrupt Land Forces.

Two nights later and Sewell was conducting the same weekly podcast he hosts with fellow NSN members Blair Cottrell and Jacob Hersant, and this time he referred to a “cop who was taking the masks off” far-right actors during the 21 October incident. And Sewell was then arrested over having stated that he’d identified the specific officer and was planning to dox him online.

Hersant appeared in court the day following the raids, 8 November, to be sentenced after he became the first person to be convicted over illegally performing the Nazi salute in Victoria, and this further provided a sense that authorities are cracking down. Victorian parliament banned the Nazi salute in October 2023. And now out on bail pending appeal, Hersant has been sentenced to a month inside.

The National Socialist Network members commenced publicly protesting specifically as adherents to Nazism on the steps of Victorian parliament in March last year. And since this time, far-right actors have become ever more emboldened, as they now regularly rally in Naarm, and they’ve also staged racist protests in Ballarat, on Gadigal land in Sydney, in Meanjin-Brisbane and Yerta-Adeliade.

And the network also carried out a demonstration at the Melbourne Chinese consulate in late October, sporting a particularly racist banner.

A rising terrorism threat

As home affairs minister Tony Burke reminded the ABC during its Nazi report, the Albanese government rose the National Terrorism Threat Level up from possible to probable in August this year, and while it appeared that federal Labor was having another swipe at the local Free Palestine protest movement, it soon became apparent that it was far-right nationalists being targeted.

This announcement came after a week of far-right protests and rioting had been occurring in the UK, as well as three incidents in NSW that involved young far-right actors attempting to perpetrate or actually carrying out violent acts, with the initial arrest involving a man entering a Labor MP’s office, armed with a knife and planning to behead the politician before he backed out.

ASIO director Mike Burgess has long been warning about the rise of the far right in this country. During October 2020 Senate estimates, the top spy explained that far-right online networking during the COVID lockdown had led to 30 percent of his agencies counterterrorism work having a focus on white supremacists, which was a figure that rose to 50 percent by February last year.

A tale of two terrorisms

“I’ve made it very clear to ASIO, and I’ve made it clear to the general public that is when I become a terrorist,” Sewell said in regard to child removals involving Nazi fathers. “That’s when I’m going to start killing people. That’s just a fact – that’s not a threat.”

“If you take my child off me, I’m going to start killing people. And I’m going to encourage every single person that I know to also start killing people that are responsible,” the NSN member continued, and went on to clarify that means “starting with probably the police and the judges that ordered for a child to come off one of us.”

“That is the fucking line in the sand, and everyone needs to fucking know that.”

These comments from the prominent neo-Nazi figure are likely in breach of federal terror laws, which are contained in the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). Specifically, section 101.6 of the Code contains the offence of planning a terror act, which carries life imprisonment, while section 80.2C of the Code outlaws advocating terrorism: a crime that can see a person put away for up to 7 years.

The easy comparison to make here is that Australian authorities would likely have these white men inside a prison on remand after making these comments if they were Muslim men. Following the 15 April Wakeley church stabbing, the Joint Counter Terrorism Team carried out a series of 24 April raids, which saw five Muslim teenagers charged with various terrorism offences and then remanded.

Despite Australia having passed over 100 pieces of national security and counterterrorism legislation following a global trend after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, white Australians have hardly ever been charged with these laws. Indeed, only one white Australian man has ever been convicted of terrorism. So, it’s not too farfetched to consider Australian terror laws target Muslim people.

And the clearly dangerous aspect to Sewell’s terror threat is that one of the worst cases of terrorism in recent years, the Christchurch massacre, involved an Anglo-Australian white supremacist shooting and killing 51 Muslim people at two different mosques in the New Zealand city completely at random and within 15 minutes, and this killer grew up in the NSW Northern Rivers town of Grafton.