In the Shadow of Christchurch…
Disclaimer: Much of this was originally written in May 2019, later updated for publication here in June 2020. All details and quotes have been taken from the words of those involved, witness statements or through other means where verification has been secured.
“I mean we don’t want to necessarily just be meatheads, we want to be intellectual. We want to be able to handle ourselves in a debate or be able to express our ideas passionately and in a very well-constructed manner,” Western Australian ‘John’ tells YouTuber Millennial Woes in a December 2018 video, “Which I think you need to find a balance between the two and that’s really what we’re aiming towards with the cultured thug.”
This idea — this ‘cultured thug’ — owes its origins to British far-right political commentator Jonathan Bowden who himself stated, in a nod to 19th Century poet Lord Byron, “Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: ‘the cultured thug’.”
“We want to be able to deal with the issues of our society physically, if need be, but we also want to be able to deal with it intellectually and honestly and I think that’s one of the things that Lad’s Society has done fantastically.”
Bowden’s twist on Byron’s concept lies at the heart of the ideology of one of Australia’s more active White Nationalist groups, encouraging within their ranks the masking of connections to Neo-Nazi groups in both Australia and abroad, as well as tenuous links to Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant.
“Make no mistake, the system we’re up against is out to destroy us. It’s really no secret at this point. I mean they mock us about our demographics constantly whilst saying that there’s no replacement whatsoever so ultimately we do need to break off from that at some point and I think the only way that’s going to happen is by becoming stronger and stronger than the system that we’re up against either by capita or by absolute force,” Another Western Australian, ‘Lachlan’, tells Millennial Woes in December 2018, “So obviously we’re not at that point yet but we have to plant the seed somewhere and really start building something up. And I think the best foundation for that is to ultimately have a cohesive movement that is more than just a bunch of atomised people that don’t really like foreigners too much.”
“The cultured thug is ultimately intrinsic to Lad’s Society,” ‘John’ continues, “It’s something that we strive towards being members of Lad’s and that really does reflect with our physical infrastructure as well. The headquarters that exist now for Lad’s Society provide both a gym so that members can improve themselves physically but also a library to compliment that.”
Originally founded in 2017, the White Nationalist fraternity Lad’s Society owes its conception to key figures and personnel from the infamous United Patriots Front (UPF), a now-defunct Nationalist group once led by far-right figure Blair Cottrell. Indeed, Cottrell’s own former deputy during his time at the helm of the UPF, New-Zealand born Thomas Sewell, is considered to have been one of the fraternity’s co-founders and its current leader, conceptualising the group allegedly alongside the former leader and founder of another group, Firearms Owners United.
Cottrell, too, has been a leading voice among the group’s members and the man reportedly referred to as ‘emperor’ by Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant has held a prominent role at various times in the Lad’s Society’s original Melbourne fraternity since its inception.
“There is no relationship, I didn’t know who he was. And you won’t find any evidence to the contrary,” Cottrell reportedly told the ABC regarding Tarrant, before allegedly acknowledging that Tarrant was understood to have contributed donations to the United Patriots Front some years previous. Still, Cottrell maintains he had no direct connection with Tarrant and refutes any suggestion that he or his compatriots were responsible for radicalising the man now known as Australia’s worst mass-murderer.
Yet, the parallels between Cottrell’s beliefs, that of his fellow Lad’s Society fraternity members and Tarrant are difficult to ignore.
“My family was always Australian Liberal, but thanks to 4Chan and ‘/pol/‘ I found my way into the extreme right wing,” Internet pseudonym ‘HalArts’ posted to the fascist forum board Iron March in 2016, before the forum’s demise the following year, “As of current I’m not entirely sure where my politics lie in name, but I’m aligning myself with fascism and I do not want non-whites in my country, period.”
The user has since been linked to the Lad’s Society, in addition to a handful of other individuals who frequented the Iron March forum board, and also boasts connections to the more overtly fascist group Antipodean Resistance.
To the Australian public, Antipodean Resistance is arguably best known for its campaigns posting Swastikas, anti-Semitic and homophobic propaganda in various locations around Australia, including the defacing of a Caulfield Jewish aged-care home in early January 2019.
The group itself has also been known to utilise symbols and images now familiar for having also been adopted by the Christchurch terrorist in his 74-page manifesto, such as that of the ‘Black Sun’. A symbol dating back to Heinrich Himmler, one of Nazi Germany’s most powerful figures, the ‘Black Sun’ symbol is believed to have originated from architectural plans developed by Himmler in the lead up to World War II for a castle he then owned.
The castle, known as Wewelsburg, was acquired in 1933 and planned by Himmler to be converted in to a centre for members of Nazi Germany’s SS as the regime built upon its hold and influence within the country in the years immediately preceding the Second World War.
The ‘Black Sun’ has also been seen to have been utilised by various other White-Supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups around the world, including that of Vanguard America during the infamous ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, as well as the Ukrainian neo-fascist military regiment Azov Battalion since its formation in 2014.
Further connections between Antipodean Resistance and the Lad’s Society are also found elsewhere on the now-defunct Iron March forum, as IronMarch user and Antipodean Resistance member ‘Kehlsteinhaus’ openly insists that Blair Cottrell and Lad’s Society co-founder Thomas Sewell are both “full 14/88” and responsible for allegedly converting fellow Australian white nationalist and former UPF member Christopher Shortis to similar beliefs.
This term ’14/88’ is yet another thinly veiled reference to White Supremacism and Nazism, with 14 being representative of the ‘fourteen words’, itself a reference to the fourteen word slogan “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” coined by white power terrorist David Lane and subsequently adopted by white supremacist movements worldwide. ’88’, meanwhile, is an oft-used abbreviation utilised by far-right extremist groups to represent ‘Heil Hitler’ — ‘H’ being the eighth letter of the English alphabet — a hark to the infamous catch-cry of Nazi Germany itself in ode to the regime’s powerful and murderous leader Adolf Hitler.
The cumulative term ’14/88’ may also be familiar to some for having emerged in the manifesto of Charleston, South Carolina mass-murderer Dylann Roof. Roof was himself mentioned by name in both the Christchurch terrorist Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto and with his name written on the man’s firearms, with Tarrant appearing to have lionised Roof for his role in the shooting deaths of nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church in June 2015.
With storied links to Neo-Nazism, White Supremacy and White Nationalism primarily online, Roof was sentenced to death in 2017 for his deadly attack and has, since the 2015 mass-murder in Charleston, garnered a considerable level of infamy and adoration in White Nationalism communities worldwide.
These links, however, are far from the only ones suggesting the true ideology permeating through the heart of the nationwide clubhouses of the Lad’s Society.
“If we’re talking about groups that we would compare ourselves to, I think first and foremost Golden Dawn and CasaPound really come to mind. Particularly CasaPound, their model is, I think, very much echoed in ours. Although of course they’re a lot further along,” Lad’s Society Sydney representative ‘Bruce’ tells YouTuber Millennial Woes in December 2018, “I’m a personal believer, and I think many people in Lad’s are, that before you can create a mass movement you have to have something to offer the public that is greater than and exterior to the system itself. And it’s in that regard that we want to emulate and hopefully exceed CasaPound.”
While Golden Dawn, the ultranationalist, neo-fascist political party based in Greece, might be a familiar name to many, the Italian far-right political organisation CasaPound is almost sure to be less so. Nonetheless, this organisation, too, has been linked to instances of far-right extremist violence with a similar frequency across its native Italy, including tangible links to far-right extremist Luca Traini who, in 2017, shot and wounded six Africans in Italy during a coordinated attack. Traini was also another name personally mentioned in the manifesto of the alleged Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant, in addition to, like Roof, having had his name printed on the firearms Tarrant allegedly used during his attack in March 2019, which killed 51 and injured a further 49.
Still, despite their ongoing links to Neo-Nazi groups both domestic and abroad, the Lad’s Society continue to plan a meteoric rise to prominence in Australia, marketing themselves as a forward-thinking community concerned primarily with the wellbeing of the young men making up its membership base.
“The purpose of this organisation was to build a community of young Australian men, to provide job networking, mental and physical health as well as an open space for communication. As we know, Australia might not be going in the direction we want it to and there’s very little that we can do at a political level,” Lad’s Society co-founder Tom Sewell states in a video released via the Lad’s Society Facebook page in August 2018, “And this community, this club that we’re building, this network of like-minded Australian men, is not so much a political organisation but a community initiative. Our idea is solving problems with community by making sure that we’re all self-improving, we’ve all got good physical fitness, mental health [and] job security. And basically the whole idea of this is reinvigorating the Australian culture.”
“Lad’s Society ultimately is a branch of Australian Nationalists that seeks to create a greater community and a fraternity of like-minded individuals — young Australian men — and ultimately build a community of individuals who are physically able, intellectually capable and with the goal of creating a community going forward in to the future that helps young men find employment as well as create social structures that can help them deal with the issues that a lot of us face in the world as it is today,” Lad’s Society’s Perth representative ‘John’ states in his December 2018 YouTube appearance, “Lad’s Society is really the best thing going in Australia at the moment for Nationalism.”
His compatriot ‘Lachlan’ concurs, “I think having a genuine sense of trust, loyalty and friendship between the members of Lad’s Society and their respective chapters, and across the nation, is absolutely essential to fighting this inter-generational battle that we’re all taking part in. Because ultimately if we’re going to be able to succeed, we need to look long term because we’re against massive, massive forces here. And if we can’t create the communities where we’re able to raise children in a healthy environment and at the same time support each other socially and economically we’re not going to be capable of achieving victory.”
“It’s not enough to just attack our enemies, we also have to be capable of generating something and building our own people up. And I think we’ve had too much of an outward focus and it’s time to look inwards and seek to improve ourselves in every facet because we’re really going to have to aim for perfection if we’re going to have a hope of overcoming the odds we’re up against.”
Sure enough, the fraternity has continued to actively recruit on 4Chan forum boards such as that of /pol/ and during far-right political rallies, including that of January 5, 2019’s now-infamous St Kilda rally where group co-founder Tom Sewell was witnessed encouraging members to approach and recruit a man clutching a motorcycle helmet emblazoned with SS insignia. This is in addition to the group already “getting kids out of high school” as Sewell tells far-right YouTuber Matthew Roebuck in a January 2019 interview.
“We have a lot of young guys that want to get involved because they can see how bad society’s getting and they don’t see a future for themselves in the society. And so we need to give them hope,” Sewell goes on to say in the same video appearance, “The biggest part of our organisation is providing hope for the future. There is an alternative.”
“So in the future we are going to have our own school, we are going to have our own trade institutions, we are going to have our own businesses, we’re going to have our own gas station, our own food supply, our own farming network, our own everything. We’re going to control everything that we can at every level that we are.”
This idea itself, ostensibly a picture of the Lad’s Society’s desire for a ‘white ethnostate’, is not dissimilar to a series of plans which first emerged among American White Supremacists in the 1970s to formulate an area of the United States which would, itself, become a “White homeland” where all non-Whites would be expelled from the territory. Identifying an area of the Northwestern United States as their ideal territory, the plans — known as the Northwest Territorial Imperative, or simply Northwest Front — were originally promoted by White Supremacists Richard Butler and Robert E. Miles and later taken on by Neo-Nazi Harold Covington, a ‘pioneer’ of early Neo-Nazi presences on the Internet, via his formation of the group Northwest Front to encourage migration to this planned ethnostate.
While the Lad’s Society’s plans may not be to such a scale, they remain nonetheless staunch proponents of an exclusionary, hateful ideology. And when addressing moderate Australians who don’t (yet) subscribe to the ideals of Lad’s founder Tom Sewell’s White Nationalism, and that of his fraternity, their intentions are laid further bare, “When they see what we’ll create, they’ll join us.”
But for his detractors, both potential and actual, Sewell is somewhat more abstract in his warning. As Sewell concluded in a Facebook statement in the wake of the Christchurch attack, and an alleged visit to the Lad’s Society compound by members of Australia’s leading intelligence agency ASIO, “Attempting in any way to break apart or prevent our lawful and moral objectives will only result in other alternatives.”
Days later, on March 26, the Lad’s Society Facebook page was quietly removed from the platform, even as the group’s Twitter profile at that time remained online.
For his part, Sewell’s former leader and comrade Blair Cottrell was less subtle in his issuing warnings to ideological opponents, releasing a statement via his verified Gab social media account on March 21, 2019 — less than a week after Brenton Tarrant enacted his mass-murder in Christchurch — saying, “We told you that your equality idea was a pipe-dream. We told you that your immigration model would inevitably result in cultural & racial clashes. You ignored or vilified us and so we rallied against you. You sent out your brainwashed attack-dogs from the universities, to assault us, vandalise surrounds [sic], then you blamed the violence and vandalism on us. But through social media, we exposed what you were doing and our numbers grew.”
“So you censored us, you deleted and banned our speakers. In conjunction with this you charged our speakers with “hate-speech”. Now you are blaming us and our speakers for the same violence, terrorism and cultural conflict that we foresaw and rallied against in the first place. But we are still here.”
“We have not forgotten and you will be held accountable.”
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