Will the Bondi massacre result in a new wave of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism? Australia’s right-wing politicians certainly hope so. The murders took place on a Sunday evening. The right-wing response was clear within hours. 
By Monday, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie had published a short video manifesto: “The prime minister has failed this country ... What we need to talk about is immigration”. The same day, Pauline Hanson claimed on Sky News that her decades-long attack on “multiculturalism” had been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm6fyDoy98s">vindicated</a>, demanding a “hard look at our immigration”. On Tuesday, she and her new party comrade Barnaby Joyce toured the crime scene like Winston Churchill inspecting wreckage of the blitz. They, two of Australia’s most brazen professional racists, were welcomed as heroes.
Bondi has not been Australia’s Charlie Hebdo, its Bataclan or its Manchester arena. The traditional response to a terror attack—the stifling atmosphere of national unity, in which all dissent is smothered and some kind of patriotic liberalism becomes mandatory—has not been in evidence. Instead, Australia’s broad right-wing political networks have seized the opportunity to supercharge anti-immigrant sentiment and turn it against the Labor government.
The ground was already shifting. Polling indicates a surge in anti-migrant sentiment in Australia in the last five years. For much of the 2000s, only about a third of Australians thought there were too many migrants, but that number is <a href="https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/12/immigration-panic-comes-in-waves-data-shows-who-worries-most-and-when">now more than 50 percent</a>, with a steep climb since COVID.
When it comes to racism, Australia is in a peculiar position. Despite the deep roots of racism in official Australian politics, the country has not yet seen the full development of a Trumpian, supposedly “anti-establishment” nativism on a mass scale. For years, Australia’s right-wing politicians have struggled to find a way to initiate a shift like it, and ride it to electoral success.
The lag is sometimes attributed to Australia’s unusual electoral system, which does tend to prop up unpopular but broadly tolerable centre parties. The fact that both major parties, Labor and Liberal, tended to uncritically adopt extreme anti-refugee policies also meant that far-right challenges sometimes seemed superfluous. Trump himself has a strange impact: his success in the USA inspires right-wing co-thinkers around the world, while his conduct in office exposes the disturbing reality behind his demagoguery, as Peter Dutton found out to his disappointment when his Trumpian campaign fizzled after Trump’s second inauguration.
But the biggest factor was likely economic. Australia, almost uniquely in the wealthy capitalist countries, was never seriously affected by the financial crisis. Around the world, the centre-left and centre-right parties alike faced a rising tide of genuine hatred. Australia’s politicians have never faced the same rage that ultimately consumed the Clintons, Bushes and Blairs of the world. Left- and right-wing populism rose throughout Europe and the USA in 2015-16; in Australia, these were the years of Malcolm Turnbull. Australia had neither a Sanders nor a Trump. The neoliberal consensus had a reprieve.
But the logic of capitalism has caught up. The grinding impact of decades of neoliberalism, combined with post-COVID inflation, have created a crisis-like sense of unsustainable pressure on living standards. 
Even before Bondi, right-wingers sensed an opportunity. In early December, polling by the Nine media empire indicated that an astonishing 64 percent of Australians would support a complete ban on all immigration “until our housing situation has caught up”. That poll was, in effect, political research on behalf of the Liberals: the question itself is an anti-immigration slogan, suggesting that housing would “catch up” if migration were stopped. But it proves that a majority might assent to even the most extreme anti-migrant position if they’re told it will improve the housing situation. Around the same time, <a href="https://archive.is/N3EMC">poll</a> after poll showed support for the far-right One Nation surging. At the time of the Bondi massacre, the Liberals were preparing to unveil a new immigration policy focused on “<a href="https://archive.is/EtfiQ">turbocharging deportations</a>”.
Little surprise, then, at the spring in One Nation’s step and the open opportunism of the Liberals in the post-Bondi days. It is a disgrace and a warning that Pauline Hanson, the most consistent extreme racist in the Australian parliament, could claim to be the defender of Australia’s Jewish population when she attended the site of the massacre. Barnaby Joyce—never a model of restraint—felt bold enough to call an anti-migrant rally in defiance of the inevitable calls for calm and national unity.
How far can they go? Joyce’s racist rally, like others called on the same day, was small. It’s less than a year since Dutton’s Trumpian election campaign failed. You don’t need to be a seasoned politico to know that Hanson, Joyce and their gang of creeps are not to be taken seriously.
But whether or not their immediate campaign succeeds, the future is clear. Australia’s conservative politicians want the new brand of ultra-extreme, violent, “populist” racism to dominate political life here, as it does elsewhere. They think the time is near, and they’ll stoop to any low, seize on any tragedy, if it helps them build that project. Whether it’s Hanson, Hastie or some unknown figure who emerges as its leader, the conditions for a hardened racist movement are falling into place.
Around the world, centre-left political forces have collapsed in the face of this onslaught. Yet the Trumpian argument is not hard to beat. Living standards have been run down thanks to decades of policies favouring the wealthy, employers and big corporations. Scapegoating migrants and racial minorities serves those same interests. Anti-immigrant populism can be defeated, but not by mealy-mouthed neoliberal “multiculturalism”: it takes a real attack on the capitalists who make all our lives harder while turning us against each other.
And that is not exactly the Labor Party’s speciality.

D. Taylor

Australia’s right-wingers want a post-Bondi racist movement

It’s a great time to be a neo-Nazi. For fans of the Third Reich, 2025 was probably one of the best years since the battle of Stalingrad. Hitlerian podcaster Nick Fuentes could take to Tucker Carlson’s massive online platform to denounce “organised Jewry” and receive the backing of an august conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Elon Musk unveiled the world’s first automated global fascist propaganda publication, Grokipedia, where modern theorists of antisemitism and white nationalism like Kevin Macdonald, David Irving and Jared Taylor are praised in glowing terms. In Australia, underground Nazi organisations led mass marches against immigration, with the enthusiastic support of right-wing media outlets and mainstream politicians. The sects and gurus of the Nazi fringe can now influence, and sometimes even lead, the mainstream right.
For most of the last 80 years, that has seemed pretty unlikely. Hitler’s empire was blown to smithereens, and Mussolini was lynched by his compatriots. The world seemed to move on comprehensively. By the 1970s, biological racism, medieval sexual politics and antisemitism were viewed by many as historical relics that could never be revived in the Western mainstream. 
The programs, methods and doctrines of first-generation fascism seem strictly bound to a particular time and place: a Europe of mass political parties, nascent revolutions and colonial empires challenging one another in open conflict. Fascism’s particular combination of those political elements—building a mass party to repress the revolution and rearm the empire—seemed irrelevant for much of the intervening period.
The ditching of so many distinctive elements of fascism led scholars like Enzo Traverso to use terms like “post-fascism” to describe far-right movements that emerged after the 1950s. Until fairly recently, describing right-wing governments as “fascist” could generate a cringe of embarrassment among liberals (afraid of seeming like overexcited socialists) and among socialists (afraid of seeming like scaremongering liberals). But now even neo-Nazi sects recognise, if not an identity, then a certain common project with the president of the United States. There are no great conceptual gaps in the chain of world views linking Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell to Tommy Robinson, to Musk, to Farage, to Le Pen, and to Trump, the great peacemaker and leader of Western democracy.
The fascist and conservative movements, today merged as a nebulous “far right”, have grown towards each other. Fascist activists have spent decades finding creative, entrepreneurial ways to recast their doctrines and forms of organisation to suit new political periods, and conservative parties have been open to imitating, absorbing and, at times, exceeding those innovations.
Fascism was hardly eradicated after the Second World War. Right-wing dictatorships remained or emerged on the European continent throughout the postwar period, and many ex (or not so ex) Nazis found comfortable positions within the postwar political and business elites. Fascist sects continued to operate underground, sometimes as adjuncts of Western intelligence services. But to rehabilitate it as a mass social phenomenon, or to allow it to influence mainstream right-wing thought openly, would require a series of political manoeuvres and programmatic shifts.
The anti-colonial movement and its aftermath provided an opportunity. Colonialism had been an inspiration for the first generation of fascists: acquiring colonies, preserving colonies and applying the open violence of colonial rule against the domestic left. The rise of anti-colonial movements allowed fascists like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen to relate to a broad right-wing fury at the impending loss of overseas possessions, and to the humiliation of defeat at the hands of lowly Algerian Muslims. In 1957, his National Front of Combatants organised a nationwide “Caravan for French Algeria”, a propaganda tour rallying support for the crushing of the Algerian independence movement. It was an early step towards the construction of what would be one of Europe’s most successful and influential postwar far-right parties.
But if colonialist pro-war politics allowed the European far right a platform, it did not give it a long-term future. The powers that had retained colonies soon lost them; independence, whether de jure or de facto, became practically universal. There was little to be gained by arguing for the military reconquest of Indochina, Algeria or the Indian subcontinent. By the late 1960s, the far right turned to the issue that would give them a new life and sustain them to this day: immigration.
Opposition to immigration could unite and grow multiple constituencies for fascist-adjacent politics. For extreme reactionaries in Europe, the presence of migrants from former colonial possessions was an insult and a humiliation. For racists, the mere rumour of African, Caribbean, Arab and Asian populations settling in for good was, and remains, an unthinkable horror. But perhaps most importantly, opposing immigration could seem like a simple nationalist solution to almost any economic problem. 
Two years after Jean-Marie Le Pen led his pro-colonial caravan, British fascist Oswald Mosley campaigned in a by-election in West London. Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists and led their infamous march through the Jewish district of Cable Street. But he was also a former Labour politician and knew precisely how to relate to frustration at wealth inequality; now, he openly directed that anger towards working-class immigrants. In his memoirs, he wrote:
“For nearly two generations, the repeated pledge to rebuild the slums and to house our people properly had been broken. Without lifting a finger to fulfil the forty-year-old promise, the government piled a new population on top of people already suffering from an acute housing shortage and widespread slum conditions ... My proposal was simply to repatriate immigrants to their homeland.”
Mosley was disappointed with the 8 percent he garnered in this election, but he had been one of the pioneers of a strategy that would define far-right politics forevermore. Writing in 1968, Mosley hinted that the full potential of the anti-migrant strategy would become apparent in the future: “An electorate never moves decisively except under severe economic pressure, which is nearly always unemployment”. 
Sure enough, as the postwar boom exhausted itself and unemployment ratcheted up through the 1970s, anti-migrant far-right movements gained momentum. By 1977, Britain’s National Front had become a genuine mass phenomenon, with 15 percent of young men expressing support for it; from Mosley’s 8 percent support in the North Kensington by-election, the National Front polled 8 percent nationwide.
The anti-migrant stance was helped by the economic stagnation of the 1970s. That same stagnation gave rise to the era of neoliberalism: the centre-left parties would more openly embrace privatisation, deregulation and attacks on working-class living standards. The neoliberal era, in turn, supercharged the potential of anti-migrant politics.
It was not only far-right parties that embraced this scapegoating strategy: the right-wing press, mainstream conservatives and even centre-left parties spent the decades since the 1970s directing frustration and resentment towards migrants, even when the targeted immigrant population was so small as to be completely economically irrelevant, like refugees in Australia. 
But for far-right parties, the neoliberal era created a special opportunity to present themselves as the defenders of the redistributive traditions that had been abandoned by the mainstream centre left. The “post-fascists” adopted a stance that became known as “welfare chauvinism”, the 1990 coinage of Danish researchers Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund. The welfare state should be preserved by banning migrants from accessing its generosity. Immigrants were attacked as the parasitic beneficiaries of a marketised, unequal society.
While railing against the new neoliberal consensus, in the same decades many of the fascist-derived parties sought to “mainstream” and shed the last embarrassing vestiges of their associations with Hitler’s traditions. Antisemitism was deprecated and largely replaced with the fashionable Islamophobia of the War on Terror: the “dédiabolisation” of the French National Front culminated with the expulsion of its founder for his open Holocaust denial; the street-fighting British National Front gave birth to the “respectable” British National Party, which by 2008 was being described as having “one of the most Zionist” stances of any British political party. 
Far from Hitler’s revolutionary calls for bloodshed, dictatorship and war, the far right of the 2000s often presented itself as a defender of democracy, liberalism, civilisation and social welfare. Its Muslim-bashing leaders were women like Marine Le Pen, gay men like Pim Fortuyn and self-proclaimed “social democrats” like Jörg Haider.
This was the rehabilitated, sophisticated and relatively popular “post-fascist” right that entered the political maelstrom of the 2010s, when the aftermath of the global financial crisis led to explosive hatred of the established political elites, and the civil war in Syria led to a new focus on immigration. The new politics provided a template by which right-wingers could convert anti-establishment sentiment into reactionary madness. 
In some countries, such as the United States, the mainstream conservative party, after an internal crisis, largely adopted a far-right framework. In other cases, new far-right parties surged and displaced the old conservatives, as in France. In some, both processes unfolded one after the other, as in Britain, where Boris Johnson’s Conservatives rode the tiger of Brexit only to be consumed by it and replaced by Nigel Farage’s Reform. But as that process unfolded, something changed. In the decade after the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, the “post-fascist” far right has become a little less “post”. Right-wing activists with mass followings now sound less like Geert Wilders and more like Goebbels. 
Having surged, the mass far-right subcultures have also radicalised. Right-wing tech giants have rediscovered the traditional capitalist hostility to democracy and interest in social Darwinism, exemplified by Elon Musk’s musing that the vote should be restricted to “high status males”. Biological racism, extreme misogyny and thuggish 1950s-style homophobia have become normalised. Even Nazi-style antisemitism is increasingly welcome in the global conservative community, the natural and logical conclusion of an ultra-nationalist reactionary world view.
When fascism first emerged, the Communist movement’s leaders were thrown back on their heels. It took some time to understand the seriousness of the threat and the novelty of its methods. A degree of complacency existed. “At first, the prevailing view was that fascism was nothing more than violent bourgeois terror”, Clara Zetkin told the Comintern in 1923—an audience intimately familiar with “violent bourgeois terror” and not inclined to underestimate it. But fascism was “quite different”, with its base “in broad social layers, broad masses, reaching even into the working class”. That required new methods of political combat.
But distinguishing too sharply between fascism and “traditional” reactionary politics can be misleading too. Fascism’s first generation pioneered new tactics—mass parties, revolutionary demagoguery and street violence—that could be adopted as needed by pro-capitalist political forces. The next century was marked by open and hidden collaboration, mutual inspiration and competition between fanatical fascists and mainstream conservatives. The fascist activists who swarmed around Trump, and the post-fascist parties he inspires, have helped to create a broad political movement with few clear barriers separating the underground Nazi sects from the tech CEOs and the think tank chairmen.

From Hitler to here: the journey of the far right

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was founded in 1920, with Adolf Hitler not yet a member but a major influence. If, as we all know, they were a fascist party, why did they include the word “socialist” in their name? And how are we to understand that today?
To start with, we must remember that the word socialism has historically been used to represent widely differing political views. Karl Kautsky, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), wrote in 1888 that Thomas More and Thomas Muenzner were two great socialists and that both of them “follow the long line of socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Cataline, Christ ...”
The common concept is some form of collective management of society—that human needs should be met socially rather than just individually. 
At the time the Nazi party was formed, there were probably dozens of organisations and parties in Europe calling themselves socialist. Most had developed during the nineteenth century. Some advocated a form of socialism to be handed down by the state or, like the Fabians in Britain, a society to be designed by an elite. 
But Karl Marx and others proposed something entirely different: a new society to be brought about by the self-activity of the masses, particularly the working class. The Fabians recognised this distinction and talked about “a distinct rupture between the Socialism of the street and the Socialism of the chair”.
So historically, despite the many forms of socialism being argued for and parties being established, there were, and continue to be, two main currents, which Hal Draper called socialism from above and socialism from below.
This is a way of looking at the history of socialist ideas. But in the period immediately following World War One, there was an extremely sharp crisis in what these ideas meant in practice. On the one hand the SPD, the largest and most influential socialist party in Europe for decades, had repudiated its politics of international solidarity in 1914 and supported the German war effort. On the other hand, the revolution in Russia in 1917 overthrew traditional ideas and presented what at the time was an astonishing new idea of what socialism would look like—workers’ councils and the complete overthrow of the ruling class. And they added a new word, “communist”. So the meaning of words like “socialist” were quite fluid at that time, and therefore ripe for exploitation.
This was the situation when German fascists first set up the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP) in 1919. The party changed its name to National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) in 1920. Why? The reason is that fascists have always attempted to gain influence in the working class, as a way of recruiting shock troops. 
The British Brothers League, a short-lived proto-fascist organisation prior to World War One, had a strategic orientation to the working class in the East End of London, where it could mobilise support by rehashing old charges: that Jews were ousting locals from jobs and houses and that they were the cause of crime. 
Formed in 1932, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) did not initially focus on Jews. Its core ideas at the start were nationalism, corporatism (in which social and economic interest groups control the state) and anti-communism—the corporatism gave it a semi-socialist gloss. In 1935, the party turned to building what David Rosenberg called a “belligerent street-level populist movement of agitation and provocation in predominantly working-class areas surrounding Jewish populations”. This strategy reached its peak in 1936, when their attempted march through the East End led to the mass opposition in Cable Street by more than 100,000 Jews and non-Jews.
Mussolini also had an orientation to a corporatist state and used this to try to coopt workers. The Nazi party and Hitler derived their strategy from him—in the early days, while they were still building a base, they used populist and anti-big business rhetoric to appeal to disaffected workers and the lower middle classes. 
But at the same time, the party wanted to appeal to extreme right, racist, anti-communist and militarist traditions. As a result of this dual orientation, the name of the party is a mishmash: they tried to draw upon both left-wing and right-wing sentiments—socialist and workers on the one hand, and national and German on the other. In doing this, the Nazis were continuing a longstanding tradition of the German right—attempts to gain traction among workers, combined with antisemitism.
Otto von Bismarck was the first German chancellor after unification in 1871. His court chaplain, Adolf Stöcker, set up the antisemitic Christian Social Workers’ Party in 1878. He hoped to foment hostility against non-Christians (i.e. Jews) among the SPD-voting working class. But when this failed, the word “worker” was removed from the party’s title and, instead, they targeted the petty bourgeoisie with their antisemitic message.
After the end of World War One, there was rapid growth among nationalist, anti-monarchist and antisemitic currents in Germany, which provided a fruitful recruitment ground for Hitler. Although the Nazis presented themselves as anti-capitalist, this was largely conceived in antisemitic terms. 
Although they initially relied mainly on propaganda, coercive force began with the creation of an extreme right-wing militia in 1918. It comprised discharged soldiers out of which Jews, leftists and workers were screened, though it was fronted by a Social Democrat, Gustav Noske. The Free Corps, or Freikorps, was 400,000 strong and commanded by officers drawn from the nobility. It was dissolved as an organisation in the mid-1920s, as Klaus Fischer explains, but the members went on to form “the vanguard of Nazism and ... produced the Judeophobic mentality that subsequently defined Hitler’s political foot soldiers”.
There were other roots as well. Anton Drexler, for example, was a militant nationalist who opposed Germany’s loss of land in the Treaty of Versailles. Drexler also argued for a form of national corporatism in which profit-sharing would increase welfare for middle-class Aryans and would override class society by creating a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft). It was these sorts of ideas that they could label “socialist”.
It was Drexler who founded the DAP, but this was just one of many “völkisch” parties that flourished during the early Weimar Republic period of economic chaos and political instability (1918-1933). The party announced its 25-point manifesto in 1920, signposting much of Hitler’s later strategy—German expansion, especially to the east, Jew hatred and subordination of class interests to the state. At the same time, the party moved from discussion group to campaigning and agitation, particularly among disaffected young unemployed men. They were very open to the type of “blood and soil” nationalism of the Freikorps and other right-wing organisations. 
In 1923, the party grew rapidly to 20,000 members, cashing in on a rise in nationalist sentiment after France occupied the Ruhr industrial region. Antisemitism turned from propaganda to action in Berlin in November, with a pogrom in the Scheunenviertel, the area inhabited by poor and working-class Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. The trigger was the failure of the unemployment office to pay out entitlements, which rabble-rousers blamed on Jewish speculation. However, the actions were clearly well planned, as local racists were joined by a mob of up to 30,000 people whipped up by inflammatory speeches throughout Berlin. 
Police stood by while they beat up Jews in the streets and attacked Jewish homes and businesses. When the police did move into action, they arrested not the pogromists but hundreds of Jews on charges such as disturbing the peace!
It is not clear who the leaders of the pogrom were, but it demonstrates the atmosphere of the time: rightists attempting to divert working-class attention towards scapegoating Jews. It is likely no accident that Hitler’s failed coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, occurred only a few days later, on 9 November.
The Nazis continued their activities among the working class through their paramilitary Storm Detachment (Sturmabteilung or SA) starting in the early 1920s. One prominent activist was Horst Wessel, a leading participant in the extensive street fighting with Communists and other leftists in “Red Berlin” through the late 1920s. Assassinated by Communists in 1930, he became a martyr for the fascist cause. A song he had written became known as the Horst Wessel Song. Interestingly, the music was taken from a communist songbook. The fighting continued after his death. For instance, Communist Anti-Fascist Action engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Nazi stormtroopers. In Prussia between 1 June and 20 July 1932, street fighting between them killed 30 Communists and 38 Nazis.
The Nazi party never changed its name, but its approach to workers—and bosses—changed completely after it gained power in 1933. Having rammed through enabling legislation to give himself emergency powers, Hitler set about implementing the Volksgemeinschaft. But in no way did this have anything in common with socialism. With his slogan “One People, one Empire, one Leader” (Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer), Hitler attacked and incarcerated communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jews, liberals, queer people and oppositionists of all kinds. He also purged his own Nazi stormtroopers in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
While Hitler was first to last antisemitic, after he gained power, he focused first on the labour movement and only moved against Jews later on. The reason was that he had to destroy the left before advancing his full antisemitic program. He knew he had to destroy the movement that would provide the best defence for his victims. 
Hitler took care to remain securely within the capitalist economic framework, including private property and free competition. This made him very attractive to large sections of the capitalists and the educated classes. In February 1933, Hitler met with 25 leading industrialists, including weapons magnate Krupp and representatives of chemical giant IG Farben, who pledged financial and other support for the Nazis. They were well repaid by Hitler’s suppression of the working class and trade unionism.
By the end of the 1930s, the full name of the Nazi party was less in the public eye than the shortened version—National Socialists. The Nazis themselves only rarely used the term Nazi (an abbreviation of the German pronunciation of the first word in the name). The word was most often used as a term of ridicule by opponents: it already existed as a short form of the name Ignatius, common in Hitler’s home region of Bavaria, and implied a backward peasant.
The NSDAP’s name was therefore a ruse. As historian Ishay Landa says, “The trick was to benefit from the popularity of socialism, which was widely seen as the force of the future, but at the same time to distance themselves as much as possible from its substance”. We should not allow ourselves to fall for the trick.

Janey Stone

Why did the Nazis call themselves socialists?

When Victoria Police Commander Wayne Cheeseman huffed into his media conference on 19 October, armed with a box of rocks allegedly thrown by anti-fascist protesters, he engaged in a piece of theatre intended to malign anti-racists and praise far-right protesters. Cheeseman was also doing his bit for the wider campaign, supported by the Melbourne City Council, the Liberal Party and the mainstream media, to crack down on protests in Melbourne. 
That day, there had been two opposing rallies in the city centre. One was a far-right protest, attended by angry, racist nationalists waving flags and demanding an end to immigration. This protest was led and addressed by Matt Trihey, a member of the National Workers Alliance, a fascistic organisation with links to the Nazi National Socialist Network. A similar protest a few weeks before had ended in violent attacks on Camp Sovereignty, an Indigenous protest camp in a city park.
The other demonstration was an anti-racist counter-march. It involved at least 1,500 people marching against nationalism and white supremacy, the vast, vast majority of whom did so entirely peacefully. The police chose to target their fire on just one of these protests. 
Cheeseman ranted and raved at his press conference, about “issue-motivated groups” (left-wing people who are opposed to racism), and praised the far right who “protested by example”. This celebration of the well-behaved racists gave a predictable boost to the far right, some of whom called on social media for Cheeseman to become mayor. 
The mainstream media amplified the police commander’s calls, building on many months of campaigning about the need to restore “order” in the city. Chip Le Grand, political writer for the Age, quoted beleaguered business owners as part of his argument for scrapping democratic rights: “Prominent restaurant owner Chris Lucas wants the CBD to be declared protest-free for the rest of the year. While this would temporarily impinge on the right to assembly guaranteed by Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, it would protect the countervailing rights of business owners, residents and ordinary visitors to the city”. 
The reality is that this anti-protest campaign was under way well before the anti-racist protest over the weekend. Cheeseman was saying what most of the establishment were already thinking, and some doing. Rock throwing and other counterproductive tactics simply gave the police and their allies more authority to pursue it. 
Their real gripe is the Palestine movement, remarkable in its scope, depth and longevity, and which has organised weekly rallies in Melbourne throughout Israel’s stepped-up genocide. This show of internationalism and solidarity against Western-backed violence is part of what had motivated the far right to organise. And it has been the catalyst for the authorities, in particular the Melbourne City Council, to call for restrictions on the right to protest, such as exist in New South Wales. The permit system there gives police the ability to veto the right to demonstrate, and while activists can sometimes overturn this in court, it requires access to lawyers and costs time and money, which left-wing activists often don’t have. 
Already, the Melbourne City Council has approved a plan to request state and federal governments to restrict protest rights in the city. This would <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-20/city-of-melbourne-councillors-vote-amendment-protest-disruption/105674980">include</a>
altering the routes of protests, moving them to parks or “stronger police intervention to minimise disruption”. 
Brad Battin, the Liberal leader, has likewise called for limits on the right to protest. Battin has pledged to introduce a permit system if the Liberals are elected at the coming state election. A Liberal press statement has Battin saying, “Under a government I lead, law abiding citizens will be prioritised ahead of those who seek to disrupt the activities of Victorians or endanger public safety”. The Liberals sleight of hand includes discussing protests and demonstrations in the same breath as machete crime and gang violence. 
Premier Jacinta Allen has so far resisted calls for a permit system, but her government has introduced other laws restricting protests. These include harsher penalties for people who lock on or glue themselves to surfaces—things that mainly environmental and anti-war activists engage in. 
Whatever happens, we have to defend the right to protest. We can’t let the very forces we are often protesting against take away our ability to challenge them. And we can’t let profit making for city businesses trump democratic rights. The best way to uphold and defend the right to protest is to keep getting out and protesting, and to make it impossible for the authorities to stop us.

Anneke Demanuele

Cops huff and media puff—we need to defend the right to protest in Melbourne

Fascists in Australia are trying to build a movement. We have to stop them. On 19 October, we will be counter-protesting the next round of “march for Australia” demonstrations—protests that are trying to capitalise on fascism’s international success. 
The far right is no longer just small bands of drunken neo-Nazis praising Hitler and organising small marches and pub gigs. Across the globe, fascists have entered the political mainstream, and far-right groups have become ruling parties. They are in government in the United States, India, Italy, Argentina and across Europe. If elections were held in the United Kingdom, Germany or France today, fascists would likely take key ministerial posts in far-right governments. 
In Australia, the far right has organised some of the largest street demonstrations in decades, and One Nation has gained in the polls. Inside the Liberal Party, there is a battle between the right and the hard right—Andrew Hastie quitting the shadow ministry to further campaign against migrants and climate targets and for increased militarism, and to build the far-right brand as the future of Australian conservatism.
The growth of the far right is, in many ways, inevitable under capitalism. The ideas of the far right are the ideas of capitalism taken to their logical extreme. And the program of the far right can suit the needs of the ruling class. That’s why, in the United States, the Trump regime is not meeting much opposition from the capitalists. 
What isn’t inevitable is the nature of the response to this growth of the far right. The Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US offer one path: acquiesce, do nothing, and <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-at-immigration-white-paper-press-conference-12-may-2025">repeat the core messages of the right</a> and by doing so legitimate them. Trump, in <a href="https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-department-of-defense-leaders-quantico-september-30-2025/">a speech</a> to the army top brass, as good as called out the Democrats for their lack of political response to his agenda: “I thought it would be met with fury on the left, but they’re sort of giving up, I must be honest with you. They’ve had it. They’ve had it with Trump”.
Where the centre parties do nothing, we have to stand against the growth of the far right. We need to build mass movements on the streets and take them on in other areas of our society. 
We need to make use of all political arenas that we can. That means organising forums and town hall meetings. It means postering campaigns, painting the town “anti-fascist”. We need left-wing political parties, like the Socialists, to grow everywhere and provide an anti-capitalist alternative to both the status quo and the far right. In 2023, we were able to deny Melbourne neo-Nazis their organising space, a gym in Sunshine, using protests and community pressure. Campaigns like that should be repeated when the far right attempt to set up spaces to build their movements. 
In Australia, we have the chance to push back against the far-right street movement because it still lacks coherent political leadership. 
We have to grow a confident and militant working-class movement. This is central because we cannot defeat the far right without taking on the capitalists. Only by getting rid of the system that breeds fascism can we ensure that this kind of politics cannot rear its head again. We may not be able to defeat the politics of the far right within the framework of capitalism, but we can challenge their current political organisations and build a left-wing alternative.
In Italy, a far-right government is currently in power. Despite this, a mass strike wave has developed against the genocide in Gaza, and crucially against the government’s support for it and its opposition to working-class action. As workers continue to develop their struggles, they can start to create a crisis for the far-right government and hopefully remove it from power. 
This shows us a pathway for defeating the far right. We have a responsibility to build these kinds of movements everywhere. The fight against the far right has to be a fight against this brutal system. 
In Australia, 19 October will be a crucial opportunity to build an anti-fascist movement and build the confidence of our side to take on the whole racist, rotten system.

The far right is organising—we have to resist

The cabinet secretary in charge of public health is an anti-vax crackpot implementing billions in cuts for medical research. The defence secretary is a third-rate TV host who, when he’s not receiving Botox injections, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hegseth-boasts-i-know-exactly-what-i-m-doing-after-stunning-war-plan-leak">must publicly insist</a>: “I know exactly what I’m doing”. 
The administration includes people who openly say that women should be in the home, not the workplace; some even think <a href="https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-voting/">the Nineteenth Amendment,</a> which guaranteed women the right to vote, was a mistake. Energy policy doubles down on fossil fuels and nuclear power, while abandoning successful renewable energy investments. Tariffs are raising consumer prices and hampering domestic firms, while impoverishing swathes of the farm economy.
It all appears to be a leap into irrationalism. Why would the US government destroy the country’s research capability, sabotage its economy, and put crackpots and incompetents in charge of some of its most essential functions? Why does the Trump administration appear to want to turn back the clock to the 1950s, if not the nineteenth century? And why would leading corporate, government and university leaders support all of this?
It's difficult to address these questions with one overarching explanation—unless it’s simply that all these factors historically have been associated with right-wing and authoritarian governments. In The Reactionary Mind, political philosopher Corey Robin defines modern-day conservatism as “that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammelled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth”.
The corollary is the political right’s defence of traditional social and economic hierarchies. In the Trump government, echoes of this defence of “tradition” can be found in support for policies that push women out of the workforce and encourage them to have more babies, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5371718/pronatalist-birth-rate-musk-natal-conference">to take one example</a>. These “neo-natal” ideas are closely connected to other reactionary ideas such as white supremacy and transphobia.
In some cases, Trumpist tropes are easy to explain. The fossil fuel industry is a traditional Republican constituency, and the government is heavily invested in economic and political alliances with petrostates, especially the Gulf monarchies. So it’s no surprise that the administration is stuffed with climate change deniers and is hostile to renewable energy. It appears not to care about the climate crisis’s impact on humans, nor, even from its narrow imperial mindset, 21st-century supremacy in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.html">solar power</a> and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/autos-chinas-electric-vehicle-juggernaut-is-reshaping-the-car-market.html">electric vehicles</a> being forfeited to the Chinese state.
Another reason for the seeming self-destructive irrationality of the Trump administration is that its 2024 electoral coalition, and the government it created, is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate right-wing elements. Analysts have described this shotgun marriage in different ways. <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-three-headed-chimera-of-trumpian-destruction">To liberal Josh Marshall</a>, the “three-headed chimera of Trumpian destruction” is an amalgam of MAGA loyalists, Christian nationalists and “Tech bro” authoritarians. <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/02/trump-seizes-power-in-d-c/">To socialist Ashley Smith</a>, the Trump regime is a combination of “three factions with totally different political programs—traditional conservatives, neoliberal tech bosses and MAGA nationalists”.
Smith is closer to the structural components of the Trump regime, while Marshall is more concerned with its ideological composition. But both emphasise, correctly, the unstable nature of the forces undergirding Trump’s government. These disparate elements are mostly pulling in the same direction because the administration is on the offensive against “enemies” that they share: immigrants, “wokeness”, federal workers and the like. But there are underlying tensions between these groups. And a political payoff to one could undermine another. We’ve already seen a foreshadowing of this in <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/1/16/bannon-vs-musk-how-trumps-u-turn-on-h-1b-visas-has-split-maga">the fight between MAGA nationalists and tech oligarchs</a> over the question of visas for highly skilled migrant workers.
Between 2020 and 2024, Trump expanded his electoral coalition with newly minted constituencies such as RFK Jr’s anti-vax followers. The MAGA right brought these forces inside the Trump tent. To maintain their loyalty, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services and the nation’s public health agencies was handed to Kennedy and other prominent opponents of vaccines and COVID-era policies. Trump knows nothing about health or science, as his ramblings about drinking bleach or linking common painkillers to autism, show. 
But even as his administration’s policies have caused upheaval in the public health infrastructure, Trump has stood by Kennedy. Surely one might think that business and the tech oligarchs would oppose such anti-science thinking. 
We should remember that the likes of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/climate-science-deniers-downplaying-coronavirus-pandemic">Koch network and the fossil-fuel industry</a>—in league with “<a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-elections">lumpencapitalist</a>” <a href="https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/210324-The-Disinformation-Dozen.pdf">supplement peddlers</a> (the online snake oil hawkers of the 21st century)—financed much of the opposition to COVID public health measures. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which focused on individuals’ health and diet choices, <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/make-america-healthy-again-aims-to-make-public-health-your-responsibility/">aligns with neoliberalism’s “blame the victim” approach to cutting social spending</a>. Why should the government spend money on health care for those who make poor lifestyle choices, this Social Darwinist approach asks. 
Finally, the tech oligarchs think that artificial intelligence (AI), on which they are spending hundreds of billions, will be able to replace biomedical researchers, administer social programs and usurp skilled health care personnel. They plan to profit from all of these “innovations”. So, from one perspective, the US destroying its biomedical research enterprise makes no sense. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/business/larry-ellison-oracle-philanthropy.html">But to tech billionaires</a> who plan to use AI to remake that enterprise, it makes perfect sense.
A large proportion of Trump’s mass support—the core of the one-third or so of the electorate that is the “ride or die” MAGA base—holds religious ideas that are <a href="https://prri.org/research/one-leader-under-god-the-connection-between-authoritarianism-and-christian-nationalism-in-america/">highly authoritarian and anti-modern</a>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm">Leon Trotsky’s observation</a> about Germany in the early 1930s comes to mind: 
“A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms ... Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters.”
These are not simply people susceptible to believing the various conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and MAGA influencers; They are an audience for various “culture war” issues the right uses to build support. While the US government has long supported Israel, the Trump administration’s embrace of the Israeli far right coincides with the increased influence in the Republican Party of Christian Zionist organisations, <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/christian-zionism-evangelicals-israel-trump-foreign-policy/">which cite Biblical prophecy in support of the Jewish state</a>.
And then there is the biggest wildcard, and source of chaos, in the administration: Trump himself. The president has longstanding ideological commitments that he refuses to drop, regardless of whether they make much sense economically or politically. Championing a tariff-driven, mercantilist economic policy is at the top of this list. 
Beyond a handful of commitments—mostly revolving around ways to boost his own power and to line his pockets—Trump is completely mercurial. Perhaps this is part of his self-promotion as a “strongman”, but it can also produce a situation in which, among his minions, “the knives are out for everyone”, <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/knives-everyone-author-michael-wolff-021305186.html">as Trump biographer Michael Wolff said earlier this month</a>.
That so much of what Trump and his administration does makes no rational sense doesn’t make them any less dangerous. And liberals who think that the 2026 midterm election or the end of Trump’s term will bring everyone “back to their senses” are deluding themselves.
US imperial decline, societal rot, and corrupt impunity at the highest reaches have paved the way for the confederacy of dunces and malefactors that have taken over the US government. The people who helped pave that path aren’t going to lead us out of it.

Lance Selfa

How did a bunch of crackpots get in charge of the USA?

A wave of censorship and political intimidation is sweeping the United States. Led by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president, the country’s vast far-right movement is pressuring employers to sack or silence left-wing workers and to purge outspoken political progressives from state and state-funded institutions. One of the latest casualties in this war on the left is a history professor in Texas, Tom Alter, who was fired last month for speaking, in his own time, at a socialist conference. 
A judge has since <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/27/judge-rules-for-tom-alter-as-battle-against-university-continues">ordered the university to reinstate Alter</a>, but management has indicated that it will continue investigating him. The following is the original statement and call for solidarity released by his organisation, <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org/">Socialist Horizon</a>.
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Defend free speech! No to fascists! Reinstate Professor Tom Alter Now! 
Beloved tenured history professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on 10 September by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme right-wing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist who tries to monetise exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people “chose to die in the Holocaust”, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s “exposure video” reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy, which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable? 
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed <a href="https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/">here</a>, in no way calls for violence. 
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favour of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organising politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">reflect</a> those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40 percet favour socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive; they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists and capitalists. 
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer, Texas State University, that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom—a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the president of the Texas State University system so easily—who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr Tom Alter to his teaching position. 
The termination of Dr Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in line with that of Donald Trump, who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents. 
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far-right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left. 
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Colour, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole. It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence, condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war, while a handful accumulates ever-growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe. 
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom and equality. We will also continue building the organisation that it will take to win it.
Dr Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organisations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as associate professor of history. 
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organisations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defence of free speech and against fascism.
Follow the <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org">Socialist Horizon website</a> for campaign updates.

Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign

The most glorious moment of this year’s federal election was watching Peter Dutton not only lose his long-desired bid to be prime minister, but lose his own seat in parliament as well. It was almost as satisfying as watching former Prime Minister John Howard suffer the same fate in 2007.
Dutton’s spectacular failure represented a thorough rejection of his right-wing agenda. Buoyed by Donald Trump’s US presidential victory last year, Dutton pivoted to include some soft-MAGA styling in his own campaign—attacking Welcome to Country ceremonies, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, work from home arrangements and, at times, immigration. Voters turned away in droves.
The following leadership battle between Sussan Ley—the more moderate candidate—and Angus Taylor—on the harder right—resolved in Ley’s favour. The commentariat renewed the argument that followed the Coalition’s loss of government in 2022: that for the Liberal Party to regain government, it needed to shave down its harder right-wing edges. It also needed to calm the factional warfare and unite behind a leader.
This is not what is happening. The party’s hard right is asserting itself very publicly to try to shape the party in its own image.
First was Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who shot to the head of Australia’s far-right scene as the leader of Peter Dutton’s No campaign during the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. During this year’s election, she told a campaign rally that she wanted to “make Australia great again”. A few days later, a Christmas snap of Price and her husband in MAGA hats hit the media. Following the fascistic March for Australia demonstrations last month, Price fronted the media to share the rally-goers’ concerns about “mass migration”. She singled out Indian migrants, arguing that Labor allowed higher levels into the country to boost its vote. A week of bitter party infighting ensued, culminating in Price losing her spot in the shadow cabinet after she refused to declare confidence in Ley.
Western Australian Liberal MP Andrew Hastie was the next to break ranks. He threatened to quit the shadow frontbench if the party recommitted to net zero emissions by 2050. Hastie followed this up with a truly MAGA-esque series of posts across social media. In one, he shared a black-and-white picture of a bygone White Australia: mum and dad with their two young sons tending the lawn of a classic 1960s suburban brick home. In the caption, he wrote that the Liberal Party “might even die as a political party” if it doesn’t curb migration, questioning “What is the point of politics, if you’re not willing to fight for something?”. 
In a video titled “Australian First”, Hastie poses with a vintage red 1969 Ford Falcon sedan, bemoaning the loss of domestic manufacturing and “Aussie cars, made by Aussie workers, for the Australian people”. And, of course, there are references to the “evil” and “violent” “radical left”, Christian iconography and the need to fight the decline of the West.
This is all widely understood as Hastie’s first moves in a bid for Liberal Party leadership, a campaign that has been publicly endorsed by Price, Liberal MPs Garth Hamilton and Henry Pike, and backed by a number of other Liberals speaking anonymously to the media. Bear in mind that Ley won the leadership by only four votes: 29 to Taylor’s 25.
There’s some confusion about this posture. If Trump-style politics was so thoroughly rejected by the Australian electorate less than six months ago, why double down on it? Sometimes there’s more to politics than immediate electoral victory. These are ideological people with a vision for society—and that vision fits with a rising hard-right norm across the Western world. Even if that hasn’t yet filtered into Australia, people like Hastie and Price can still feel like this is their movement’s historical moment and their duty to propagate it. Politics isn’t just about tailing mass opinion—it’s about intervening to shape it.
It’s worth comparing this to how the Labor Party responded to its loss of government in 2013 and subsequent near-decade in opposition. Party leaders concluded that public infighting had been electorally detrimental, so they needed to present a united front. In practice, this meant the more left-wing figures inside Labor shutting up and backing whatever the leader said. Think of MPs like Ged Kearney, who publicly supported refugee rights for years but, since entering parliament, has shut her mouth on the question. Or think of how the party treated WA Senator Fatima Payman who crossed the floor to support a Greens motion recognising Palestinian statehood. 
The far right has failed to enter the mainstream here for several reasons. Primarily, Australia has not experienced the same level of economic and political crisis and chaos as the northern hemisphere. The centre has held—albeit with declining support each election. 
But there is a base for harder right politics: in the most recent election, far-right outfits polled a combined 13.6 percent—almost 2 million votes. Recent polling indicates that support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has increased from 6 to 11 percent since the May election and is now at 16 percent in NSW. But the far right has failed to coalesce around a single party or leader, as with the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France or Trump in the US. This hampers its ability to build a movement.
It’s impossible to predict how a more cohered far-right movement could emerge in Australia. But it’s possible that, rather than happening outside the Liberal Party, it could emerge within it, or as a split from it. As the Teal Independents continue to soak up the more moderate Liberal base, this becomes more likely. And people like Hastie are in many ways the more likely candidates. It’s rarely the street thugs who rise to the top. Hastie, with his SAS soldier background and elite Sydney private school education, is far more typical. Trump, after all, is a billionaire born into wealth.
Again, this is not to predict anything. But it should be read as a warning. The far-right threat exists in Australia, not just on the streets but inside the traditional major party of Australian capitalism.

Eleanor Morley

The far-right threat inside the Liberal Party

Dissent and lose your job. That’s the principle of the campaign to turn Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr.
The second Trump administration has always placed a heavy emphasis on the repression of dissent. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he made good on his promise to attack the Palestine solidarity movement, using everything from masked ICE goons to suspension of federal university funding grants. He has campaigned to erase anti-racist ideas from public life under the guise of attacking the hated “DEI”. Even before Kirk’s death, Trump’s second term was the high watermark of the US right’s long war on “cultural Marxism”, which dates back at least to the war on terror, when Kirk’s predecessors like Ann Coulter tried to officially rehabilitate McCarthyism.
Kirk’s death opens a new phase, marked by one Louisiana Republican’s vow to “cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals”. (The phrase “cancel with extreme prejudice” originated during the Vietnam War in US military and spy organisations as a euphemism for murder.) Anyone who uttered a critical remark about Kirk would now be targeted by a campaign to sack them from their job, endorsed from the top by Vice President J.D. Vance: “Call them out. And hell, call their employer”.
This was not just about people in public life—university professors like those Kirk had targeted with his “professor watch-list” or public figures like Jimmy Kimmel. Academics, journalists and entertainers are important scalps in creating a climate of repression: their downfalls can provide a model for bosses to follow, and a threat for workers. 
But the movement to “cancel” aimed at workers with no real public profile: teachers, airline employees and all kinds of white-collar and retail workers have been targeted and suspended or sacked. Dissent has been punished everywhere from the Nasdaq to Freddy’s Frozen Custard &amp; Steakburgers in Quincy, Illinois, which sacked an employee for posting “another one bites the dust”. 
This is repression that goes beyond state power. Trump’s ICE agents rounded up Palestine solidarity protesters for deportation, and his National Guard has been sent on theatrical tours of major cities. But to repress dissent more thoroughly, the US right is turning to the fundamental form of oppression that defines capitalist society: bosses’ power over workers.
That basic power relation of capitalism shapes the production and distribution of ideas. That’s most obvious in the case of massive, privately owned media conglomerates, like those that organised the disciplinary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and are currently lining up to purchase TikTok. But it’s about more than the media. Capitalism represses dissent by making it dangerous to speak your mind if you want to keep your job.
Right-wing political activists know it, and they have always taken advantage of it to repress the left while claiming to be the champions of individual liberty. That’s why, immediately after Kirk’s death, the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” appeared to centralise the reporting and purging of anti-Kirk workers, and that’s why Vance pointed his MAGA followers to use the power of the capitalist class to control their opponents.
The model is familiar. The USA was never a fascist dictatorship, but up to the 1960s, it was an extremely authoritarian society. Figureheads at the top—FBI directors, members of Congress or conservative activists—would send the signal for repression, set the talking points and issue public denunciations. Intellectuals, artists and journalists could serve as public examples, denounced and blacklisted from public life. But whether it was the Red Scare or segregation, the grunt work of authoritarianism in the USA was often carried out by private employers and property owners. For millions of anonymous workers, their livelihood depended on keeping their heads down, fitting in and staying out of trouble.
What kind of authoritarianism is this? Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Then, having lost the election, she just disappeared, unseen until she got a gig at a real estate agents’ conference on the Gold Coast. But the Democrats’ hysteria in the 2024 election, followed by their astonishing passivity, shouldn’t be a cause for complacency. The US state may not experience an overnight transformation into a one-party dictatorship after a Reichstag fire, but Trump’s presidency represents a genuine attempt to establish a less free society.
This is more than a culture war. For socialists, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movement are still missing the key ingredients of working-class leadership and anti-capitalist politics that they need to challenge seriously the oppressions they aim to destroy. But for a conservative, they still look like a serious danger: a growing hostility to US foreign policy in elite institutions, mass hostility to the police in big cities. Trump and his allies are on a mission to wipe out basic ideas of social equality and anti-racism, to make them dangerous, to push them to the margins of society.
The truly odious nature of Charlie Kirk helps in that cause. In the aftermath of his death, the slightest scepticism about his far-right ideas has become the litmus test for the right.
In their new era of ascendancy, conservatives and bosses have gleefully adopted small-l liberal ideas. “Psychosocial safety” has become an excuse to attack trade union activists. “Anti-racism” is a major concern for right-wingers only when it comes to crushing Palestine solidarity. Now the Republicans have embraced “consequence culture”. 
Those liberal ideas mostly sidestepped the question of class. Now class must be absolutely central in the left’s response to clarify the repression that is unfolding. Trump’s war against “woke ideology” is an attack on the living standards and rights of workers. Those early days of Musk’s DOGE delegitimised the very idea that the state could ever regulate capitalists or redistribute wealth, and provided models for how to treat workers with cruelty, deliberately humiliating them before mass sackings. Now the sanctification of Kirk has provided pressure—or an excuse—to identify and purge any troublemaking employee.
The response to Kirk’s death is a bosses’ war on free speech, and it’s part of a broader turn in the West towards the silencing of dissent. Bosses’ power to sack and control employees is becoming a central plank of new right-wing authoritarianism. Workers’ power will be central to resisting and overturning it.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

CHICAGO—Donald Trump and the MAGA right wasted little time in capitalising on the gruesome 10 September murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Before authorities in Utah, where Kirk was killed, had even located a suspect, Trump and the MAGAverse were blaming Kirk’s death on an amorphous “left”. Within days, leading right-wingers—not just MAGA “influencers” but Trump officials up to the vice president—were calling for repression against the left.
Vice President Vance led the charge, encouraging right-wingers to monitor social media and to report to employers anyone who made light of Kirk’s killing. Because so few people really made light of Kirk’s murder, the dragnet changed to sweep in people who were insufficiently deferential to MAGA’s desire to turn Kirk into a martyr. The Washington Post
fired award-winning journalist Karen Attiah when she simply criticised Kirk’s legacy by quoting him in his own words.
The government-orchestrated attack on free speech reached a crescendo when Trumpite Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr suggested that the broadcast network ABC, a subsidiary of the Disney Co., could save itself from regulatory problems by removing late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air. ABC dutifully complied, announcing the “indefinite” suspension of Kimmel’s program on 18 September.
Kimmel’s offence, according to Carr and the MAGA right, was to imply that Kirk’s killer was “one of theirs”. Subsequent information—revealed after Kimmel’s monologue—cast doubt on that assertion. But no matter. Carr had achieved his purpose. It put media corporations on notice that the government would be policing their speech—in direct violation <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/what-the-constitution-says-about-free-speech-on-the-airwaves">of the letter of the law that created the FCC in 1934</a>. The ever oafish Trump then said he’d like other networks to fire their late-night comedians, for whom the president provides an endless supply of comedic material.
What MAGA didn’t anticipate was the pushback the Kimmel cancellation received. Most Democrats and even a few Republicans criticised Carr’s move. Boycotts and cancellations of Disney streaming service subscriptions increased. The unions representing writers, actors and musicians who worked on Kimmel’s show mounted protests. More than 400 well-known actors and performers issued a statement condemning ABC, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an ABC-sponsored event in protest.
Within a few days, Disney reversed itself and announced that Kimmel’s show would return to the air. Now, two networks of local ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, have also backed down. But we shouldn’t think that the battle for free speech is won.
First, the government pressuring private entities to censor speech it doesn’t like has been the Trump administration’s modus operandi
since it returned to office in January. It has cut billions in research grants to universities, leading many to discipline students or faculty who had protested Israel’s war in Gaza, or to scrap university programs that met with administration disapproval. It announced it would deny security clearances to law firms considering representing clients suing the administration. Trump filed frivolous lawsuits against CBS’s and ABC’s news operations—which he certainly would have lost if they had gone to trial—leading their parent companies to make multimillion-dollar settlements.
Second, the success of a wealthy, well-known and nonpolitical entertainer like Kimmel can obscure the larger attack on free speech and the left that MAGA will continue to prosecute. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/18/charlie-kirk-comments-prompt-firings-across-us/86216872007/">More than 100 people have been fired or disciplined</a> for comments made after the Kirk killing. That includes <a href="https://cwa-tseu.org/free-speech/">Dr Tom Alter</a>, a tenured professor at Texas State University, fired after a troll with fascist and antisemitic sympathies reported to Alter’s employer that the professor <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/13/defend-free-speech-no-to-fascists-reinstate-professor-dr-tom-alter-now/">had spoken at a socialist conference</a>.
Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa” (short for “antifascist”) a domestic terrorist organisation. Although no provision in US law permits Trump to do this, his action is a signal to federal law enforcement. Federal agencies like the FBI could conduct investigations, infiltration of organisations and arrests of people on the left—which, in Trump world, means just about anyone who opposes the administration’s policies. Given that “antifa” is not an organisation nor even a coherent ideology, the vagueness of the target is a weapon in the hands of law enforcement. 
Another way that the administration will attack liberal and activist organisations is by weaponising the tax code. US tax law provides educational, charitable, religious and social organisations an exemption from paying federal taxes if they do not engage in partisan politics or electioneering. The administration has also supported legislation that would allow the Treasury<a href="https://www.nonprofitvote.org/whats-the-nonprofit-killer-bill/">
secretary to designate any organisation as “terror-supporting”</a> without any proof or due process. The feds can revoke tax-exempt status and compel organisations to pay millions in fines. Merely the threat of those penalties could lead organisations such as immigrant rights groups, which are mounting opposition to Trump’s deportation regime, to curtail their activities.
One final, but by no means less important, aftershock of the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric since Kirk’s murder is the licence it gives to right-wing elements to wreak violence on their opponents. Trump’s and Vance’s claims that “the left” is a uniquely violent force in US politics is the <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states">exact opposite of the truth</a>, according to the libertarian Cato Institute—hardly a friend to the left. The “permission structure” that Trump, Vance and others in the administration are creating will make right-wing violence like the 2017 murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2020 vigilante murders of Black Lives Matter activists more likely, not less.
Developments since Kirk’s death should clarify some points amid the noise and social media vitriol. They have exposed the lie that conservatives and the far right are somehow champions of “free speech” against a censorious left “cancel culture”. When billionaires like X’s Elon Musk and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch own massive communications platforms from which they spread conservative and far-right ideology into the body politic, it’s hard to take the claim seriously. With few exceptions, the right’s pretensions to “free speech” were always phoney and mostly raised when others used their free speech to criticise the right’s bigotry.
But observing that the right’s free speech rhetoric is disingenuous shouldn’t let mainstream liberals off the hook. The attacks on university activists protesting the war in Gaza didn’t begin with Trump. They started under the Biden administration, with the support of the White House and most Democrats. And the liberal MSNBC network fired commentator Matthew Dowd for comments he made on live TV only a few minutes after Kirk’s killing.
In contrast, championing free speech has always been central to the left. From the abolitionist press in the pre-Civil War era to the Industrial Workers of the World’s free speech fights in the early 1900s to opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964, the best part of the left and workers’ movement has always defended free speech.
Free speech and freedom of organisation and assembly are crucial for defending and extending other rights. The first nine months of the Trump administration have demonstrated that elite institutions like universities and the corporate media are willing to “bend the knee” to an increasingly authoritarian government if they think their profits, endowments or investments will be served. On the other hand, ordinary people, organised to push back on the Trump administration’s predations, have shown a far greater willingness to defend our rights.
The actions of thousands of ordinary people across the country have impeded the administration’s efforts to kidnap our immigrant neighbours off the street. And ordinary people sitting on grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, have refused federal prosecutors’ attempts to criminally indict people arrested for protesting immigration authorities or the administration’s military deployments. The real defenders of democracy in the US are much more likely to be found at street demonstrations or at “know your rights” trainings than in the halls of Congress, the courts or corporate boardrooms.

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