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The release by the US DOJ of vast numbers of d0x related to good financier, child sex offender, serial rapist, and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has, inter alia, revealed the existence of a much closer relationship between Epstein and Noam Chomsky than was otherwise widely known. The fact that a radical intellectual like Chomsky considered Epstein a good friend, even after his conviction for procuring a child for sex in 2008, has naturally provoked questions.
Chomsky’s initial response to questioning about the relationship in April 2023 was chiefly along the lines of ‘So what? He served his time.’ and ‘I simply got some financial advice’. That it’s subsequently been established that the relationship was much more friendly and intimate than this is not to his credit. Nor is his breezy dismissal of political campaigning against men’s violence towards women; or, in Chomsky’s phraseology: ‘the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder’.
Given his parlous health, Chomsky is unable to address any of these matters even if he wanted to, but his wife Valeria has written a letter addressing the scandal. For my part, I think it’s sad that Unkle Noam would want to associate with somebody like Epstein in the first place. After all:
See also …
• Chomsky and Epstein: What the Evidence Shows, Tim Hjersted, filmsforaction.org (‘A comprehensive look at the evidence, the emails, and what they tell us’), December 21, 2025.
• The Chomsky/Epstein Puzzle, Chris Knight, Counterpunch, February 6, 2026.
• Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s social Ponzi scheme, Paul Caruana Galizia and Kaye Wiggins, The Financial Times, February 6, 2026.
• Dining with the Devil, Kell w Farshéa, Freedom (‘Even if Chomsky knew nothing of Epstein’s sex crimes, being chummy with arch-fascist Steve Bannon is unforgivable’), February 12, 2026.
[I received the following anonymous text today containing some reflections on the police riot in Sydney of February 9 and thought it worth sharing.]
A Statement of Solidarity and Refusal
We stand with those who took to the streets of Sydney against the genocide in Palestine. We stand with those who refused the visit of a representative of a settler-colonial ethno-state. We stand with those met not by dialogue, but by pepper spray, intimidation, and police violence. For many, this repression came as a shock. In Australia, brutality is meant to happen elsewhere. Dissent here is supposed to be polite, fragmented, exhausted. What unfolded was no error. No excess. No failure. It was the state recognising a refusal it could no longer safely ignore. It was power responding to solidarity that no longer asks permission. Fear was shifting sides.
None of us are for violence, but we refuse the official definition. Poverty is violence. Hunger is violence. Precarity is violence. Unemployment is violence. The housing crisis is violence. Borders are violence. Racism is violence. Colonial occupation is violence. These are not slogans: they are the material conditions of everyday life. People do not take to the streets because they enjoy confrontation. They act because life has been organised against them, because dignity, security, and the possibility of a liveable future have been stripped away. And now, because they are forced to witness genocide.
We are subjected not only to repression at home, but to the constant spectacle of mass death elsewhere—death enabled by our governments, funded by our taxes, justified in our name. We are told to watch. To accept. To be silent. To witness genocide, to be made complicit through inaction, to be punished for refusing that complicity—this too is violence. And when people refuse this role, what greets them? An armed force for order and property: clubs, shields, chemicals, guns. Injuries are not accidents. Fear is not collateral. Arrest is not prevention. These are methods. No one risks their body lightly. No one gambles their freedom for fun. We react because we are acted upon.
The obsession with the “violence of protest” is a lie told loudly to hide a deeper truth. If revolt contains violence, it is infinitesimal compared to the permanent violence of the system itself. This system survives by force. Eviction by force. Discipline by force. Education by force. Borders by force. Police by force. The cost-of-living crisis is not a storm—it is engineered. The housing crisis is not a failure—it is policy enforced with law and batons. This is the difference: between the violence that defends domination, and the refusal that interrupts it. Across NSW and Australia, the mask is slipping. Protest is criminalised. Police powers expand. State violence is insulated from consequence. Solidarity is named extremism. Care is reframed as threat. Meanwhile, rents explode, mortgages suffocate, wages collapse, people are pushed further out into endless suburbs, endless commutes, endless exhaustion. This is not disorder. It is management. The police are not outside this system. They are its visible edge.
Our solidarity with Palestine is total. But it is not a call to reproduce the same structures that created this catastrophe in the first place. Genocide does not arrive from nowhere. It grows from borders, sovereignty, exclusion—from states organising life through domination. Palestine exposes this with brutal clarity: settler colonialism, nationalism, militarised order, permanent war. But this is not unique. It is the rule wherever belonging is enforced by force. We speak from stolen land. Australia is built on invasion and maintained through law, police, and prisons. We do not speak for Indigenous peoples. We do not prescribe land, life, or liberation. Those struggles are autonomous and self-determined. Our task is refusal: to undermine the system we benefit from, to weaken the institutions of dispossession, to practice solidarity without domination. To stand with Palestine is not to demand a different flag. It is to reject capitalism and the state form itself—while recognising that liberation takes many paths, chosen by those who live its cost. We affirm liberation without borders, without armies, without police—a liberation lived daily, not administered from above.
We are told: vote. This is your power. This is realism. But what is actually offered? Reactionaries. Conservatives. Or a Labor Party managing the same economy, policing, borders, and obedience to capital and empire. Deep down, most people already know this system does not work for them. They know it in rent notices, in mortgage statements, in the impossibility of living near work, in hours stolen by traffic and fatigue, in fear of being discarded, in the images of mass death scrolling endlessly past, in the isolation manufactured as normal life. They feel it constantly—and are told there is no alternative. Elections do not disrupt this order; they ritualise it. They turn shared anger into private gestures and return power to the structures that created the crisis. The problem is not apathy. It is imagination under occupation. We are made powerless not because change is impossible, but because the idea of another life is systematically erased. And yet—everything could be different. This world is not inevitable. It is enforced.
If elections cannot free us, then the question is how to live otherwise. We expand the struggle by refusing separation. Palestine is not a single issue. Police violence here is not isolated. Borders, housing, war, work—they form a single reality. We respond by creating its opposite: mutual aid, collective care, shared resources, self-organisation. Horizontal forms of life that contradict the present. Structures that do not ask permission. That do not wait for leaders. That allow people to decide, act, and defend each other directly. This is not about replacing one government with another. It is about abolishing domination itself.
The struggle for Palestine is a breach. A crack in the spectacle. A moment where refusal becomes visible. A refusal of a world organised around death. An opening toward one organised around life. The liberation of humanity will be total or it will not be. Against state violence and capital. For mutual aid, self-organisation, and collective liberation.
This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Tom Fowler [Bluesky/X]. Tom is the host of the SpyCops podcast, which is dedicated to documenting the progress of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) in the UK, announced by then Home Secretary Theresa May in March 2015, begun in July of that year, and now in its eleventh year of very slowly exploring 40+ years of undercover police spying on political activists.
Since May 1968, thousands of people have been targeted by the UK secret police in what has been dubbed ‘the spycops scandal’.
Undercover police officers stole the identities of dead children. Infiltrating campaign groups in the name of averting ‘subversion’ and ‘public disorder’. They targeted grieving families of those killed in racist attacks demanding justice – like Stephen Lawrence’s parents, activists opposing war, fascism and inequality, and all kinds of ordinary people campaigning for a better society.
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’, although because the anti-social platform is bloody awful, chances are you’ll never notice it.
Alt-Education looks at the stories the right tells about schools: a fight between an evil, indoctrinating government and a far-right freethinking truth warrior, between a frigid cultural Marxist teacher and a loving Christian mother.
This book explores the link between education, gender, and far-right metapolitics, and offers insights into the ways in which it circulates and is normalized. Through digital ethnography and fieldwork it explores the production, circulation, and interpretation of these discourses and the ideologies they express, tracing their movement across four groups of women in the US and UK – fascists, white nationalist, Christian nationalists, and Republicans. Although often understood to be opposed to education, the far-right is instead opposed to schooling – and offers its own practices of alt-education. Through media, alternative schools and home education, the far-right teaches their ideologies of gender and race, knowledge, and power, as well as transmitting alternative histories, sociologies, and conspiracies. From mom’s groups to digital discourses about the evils of public schools, social media are key arenas in which women not only teach, but are taught, far-right alternative knowledge. Alt-education teaches reactionary ideology as a timeless truth, normalizing it through discourses of home, family and love. At the same time, alt-education borrows and co-opts the language of critique – normalizing racism, sexism and fascism a kind of alternative knowledge, while making it exciting as a countercultural critique of “woke” liberal indoctrination. The book concludes with a look at this attempt to “speak post-truth to power” as a way of normalizing and spreading their ideology – bringing alt-education to a wide audience as their critiques of “woke” politics spreads across the US, UK, and into Europe.
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’, although because the anti-social platform is bloody awful, chances are you’ll never notice it.
Tomorrow on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Christopher Mathias [Bluesky]. Chris is a journalist and the author of To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right (Simon & Schuster, 2026): ‘A searing, provocative investigation into the rise of white nationalist and neo-Nazi movements in the United States, centered on the anti-fascist groups working to expose and stop these hateful factions.’ We spoke to Chris about anti-fascism in the United States in myth and reality, its recent history, the Trumpist war on anTEEfa, and how the lessons of effective anti-fascist action can be and are being applied to resisting the racist depredations of ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’, although because the anti-social platform is bloody awful, chances are you’ll never notice it.
I may update these in coming days, but in the meantime …
Briefly:
The white nationalist ‘March for Australia’ (M4WA) rallies and marches were relatively small, especially considering January 26 is both a public holiday and a holy day of obligation for Australian nationalists. According to the ABC, the largest assembly took place in Brisbane, where as many as 3,000 joined to hear Pauline Hanson whinge and whine, Unkle Cliev Palmer’s One Hundred Million Dollar Man Ralph Babet talk shit, and various other PHONys feed the patriotik chooks. Technically, this event was ‘Australia Marches’, not ‘March for Australia’, a product of a falling-out among the flagwits responsible for previous rallies; the ‘real’ M4WA took place on the Gold Coast, and attracted about half the number (1,500) as did Brisbane.
The next largest rallies were reportedly in Melbourne and Sydney which (again according to the ABC) witnessed around 2,000 attend, and where the neo-Nazis who attended and led the processions did so without their Helly Hansen uniforms. One neo-Nazi in Sydney, a (former) National Socialist Network member called Brandan Koschel, was arrested after he gave an (allegedly) antisemitic speech. It was met with applause by the nazis and the flagwits in the crowd, and rally organiser Jesse ‘QAnon’ Stewart simply Carried On after Koschel’s brief diatribe. Stewart’s willingness to tolerate (allegedly) antisemitic outbursts such as this is an accurate reflection of the organisers’ general acceptance of neo-Nazi participation in the March but moreover the fact that they share much in common politically; especially, of course, a dedication to white nationalism. Smaller M4WA or related events took place at Surfer’s Paradise (300), several hundred braved the heat in Adelaide, a few dozen in Canberra, and small mobs also gathered in Hobart and Perth to have a whinge.
In general, the day was dominated by PHONy types, who were joined by proprietarians, binfluencers and a cast of characters drawn from an array of obscure minor and micro-parties on the right. Little rich kid Hugo ‘auspill’ Lennon was ostensibly the organiser and face of the M4WA in Melbourne/Naarm, the Scotch College graduate and heir to a multi-million dollar property-developer fortune appearing to have hired security to ensure he made it safely back to his Toorak mansion. Given that police were present in great number, their presence was probably unnecessary, although The Age reported some minor incidents: a couple were allegedly abused by some M4WA ANZACs, another patriot allegedly performed a Nazi salute on the steps of the state parliament, and there was a fight in a pub.
Finally, it’s important to note that the white nationalist processions were dwarfed by Indigenous solidemos, which were more numerous, attracted many times more people in support, and were much livelier. Unsurprisingly, they were also much more diverse than the angwy white Boomerwaffen and racist young tradies who have a fetish for displaying their ultra-nationalist cringe in public.
Yes, Cam and I are back for another year — our seventh — of saying yeah nah to fascism. What luck, then, that we begin by discussing, with friend of the show Kaz Ross, the dissolution of Australia’s leading neo-Nazi organisation, Tom Sewell’s National Socialist Network.
The boy from the rough streets of Balwyn has come a long way since he first began making a public nuisance of himself in April 2015 as sidekick to bodybuilder Blair Cottrell, first in Reclaim Australia and then the similarly short-lived United Patriots Front. While Tom the ex-soldier was happy to assume this role beside the hulking nazi (who certainly made a small number of credulous media types swoon), to his credit, it wasn’t long before Sewell cucked Cottrell for control of the nascent movement, first by way of The Lads Society, then the NSN. In January 2026, however, with the passage of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill, Sewell’s Kampf is to avoid going to prison for being:
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A few days ago, Mr. Thomas Sewell — along with Robert Richter and Ramona Koval, one of Balwyn High School’s Most Famous alumni — announced that the groups he founded and for which he functions as fuehrer — the National Socialist Network/European Australian Movement and White Australia Party — would formally dissolve themselves on the stroke of midnight this Sunday, January 18. The Balwyn Gauleiter cited the impending passage of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill as the reason, a piece of legislation which goes before the federal parliament next week, and for which his group — of several hundred budding génocidaires — was one of the principal targets: ‘Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke specifically mentioned the Nazi group National Socialist Network, as well as Hizb ut-Tahrir, who he said had both been careful not to explicitly call for violence themselves.’
If enacted, the dissolution of the NSN would bring to a close a cycle of fascist and neo-Nazi organising that commenced with the establishment of the United Patriots Front as the political vanguard of the Islamophobic Reclaim Australia movement of 2015, which then evolved thru the establishment of The Lads Society and Antipodean Resistance a few years later, and finally the dissolution of these two groups into the NSN/EAM. Of course, neo-Nazis like Mr Sewell are incorrigible liars, so there’s no reason to take Der Fuehrer at his word. That said, given that what amounts to the impending criminalisation of the group is taking place at the same time that he and dozens of his NSN flunkeys are facing serious criminal charges, including for alleged acts of violence, it would certainly be in the neo-Nazis’ own interest to adopt a more modest pose in public.
The nature of these legal difficulties has also begun to change over time, with the courts taking an increasingly dim view of those who advocate murderous antisemitism. Thus, while the Christchurch massacre of March 2019 has been largely forgotten in Australia, the Bondi massacre of December 2025 is very fresh, calls for action in response to the event ongoing, and both the police and the courts have been under some pressure to respond accordingly. In which context, it’s highly unlikely that NSW Police will again approve an application for a neo-Nazi demonstration on the steps of the NSW parliament, or that Victoria Police will be as keen to ensure neo-Nazis can march thru Melbourne unchallenged. And currently, NSN member and Bondi resident Joel Davis, one of the mouthiest of Tom’s flunkeys, is having a rough time of it, being denied bail first once, then twice, and now three times. While I’d mistakenly thought Matthew Hopkins would be defending Mr Davis, instead it was up to Sebastian De Brennan to argue his case. And, rather like NSN member Jacob Hersant was once portrayed in court as a Poet, Joel Davis is apparently something of an Artist:
Arguing for bail, Mr Davis’s lawyer, Sebastian De Brennan, said the alleged comment made by Mr Davis was not a reference to “actual rape” but rather “academic”.
“This term … is a philosophical term of art, connoting robust debate or vigorous discourse,” Mr De Brennan said.
“Mr Davis was not encouraging or inciting for anyone to embark upon what might be construed as real rape at all.
“What he is saying was that against the power structure of government, where there is a disproportionate power dis-balance, that a particular politician needs to be rhetorically raped.”
Like Nazi art, Nazi philosophy is a funny thing, that’s for sure.
Of course, the idly philosophising Mr Davis isn’t the only NSN member in trouble with the law, and it’s possible that the network’s formal dissolution may assist those currently facing charges arising from their participation in Nazi-inspired hijinks. It’s also possible that more NSN members will join the few who’ve left the organisation since it made a splash with the alleged assault on Camp Sovereignty in August: the March for White Australia (M4WA) may have witnessed a peak in their popularity. And while the exact shape of the Combatting Antisemitism Etc. bill remains unclear — and thus too its implications for the neo-Nazi movement in Australia as a whole — of all the submissions to the Committee reviewing the legislation, my favourite is the one from Firearm Owners United, which: a) expresses support for ‘preventing violence and extremism’ and; b) was founded by Tom Sewell’s BFF and Lads Society member James Buckle. I’m also waiting with bated breath for attention to be turned on the white nationalist gun club AKA the Australian Natives Association, in which former UPF fanboy (and sometime ‘esoteric Presbyterian’) ‘Father’ Matthew Grant plays a key role. As for January 26 and the next M4WA, if Bec ‘Freedom’ Walker and Jesse ‘QAnon’ Stewart are again to lead a white supremacist gathering, while ‘Advance’ (a far-right lobby group which, according to The Klaxon, receives funding from Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal and her husband John Roth) is on their side, the NSN, apparently, is in retreat.
So much for Sydney. In Melbourne/Naarm, leadership and organisation of the M4WA will likely be the responsibility of ex-Lad and onetime-Woman Matt Trihey and his Nationalists With Attitude (NWA) grouplet. Joining them will be nep0 baby Hugo Lennon. Lennon, the heir to a property developer fortune who enjoys blaming non-white migrants for the housing crisis, is the Scotch College graduate who spoke alongside Balwyn High’s Tom Sewell at the August M4WA. Since then, the little rich kid racist has been earning his white nationalist stripes in the United States, attending and speaking at Jared Taylor’s AmRen conference in November last year. Along with Taylor and Lennon, another speaker at the gathering in Tennessee was veteran British neo-Nazi Mark Collett of Patriotic Alternative, and PA in the UK are good friends to the NSN in Australia (see also : Affective experiences of nature: Far-right organising in the national landscape, Tim Gentles, ephemera, 2025); Joel Davis’ podcast co-host and convicted arsonist and stalker of women Blair Cottrell is also very good mates with the nazis in Merrie Olde England.
In summary, then, Tom Sewell’s nazi kvlt — or at least this latest iteration of his dream of Aryan supremacy — may conclude on Sunday, but what happens after this point is unclear. Hence, there may be an opportunity for cucked UPF fuehrer Blair Cottrell to re-emerge, possibly in association with the NWA. Or Tom’s Lads may join a revivified far-right in PHONy or a new micro-sect. Presumably, his injunction to his followers to hit PAUSE on the Active Club model will be obeyed by most, but some may not be so persuaded, and seek to give other, less-public expression to their desire for a White Australia cleansed of racial and other enemies. Hopefully, this doesn’t assume especially sociopathic form, but just as one potential recruit to Tom’s crusade chose to set his sights on slaughtering Muslims instead, there’s no guarantees.
Finally …
“Hate.”
The Bill to combat antisemitism and so on will have potentially radical effects, not only upon Sewell’s kvlt but all forms of political activism and organisation. Anne Twomey considers some of the Constitutional and other legal implications here, while Deepcut News writes:
Labor unveiled a draft iteration of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 earlier this week, drawing sharp condemnation from civil liberties groups as “radical and unprecedented reforms to our democratic rights and liberties.”
Among the reforms include:
• extraordinary new powers for the Home Affairs Minister to designate organisations as “hate groups” as they see fit, rendering them illegal without the minister “required to observe any requirements of procedural fairness”
• greatly expands the number of prohibited symbols, gestures, public conduct and online activity
• expands government power to refuse and cancel visas, with potential exclusion based on whether an individual “might” incite discord
The first point, in particular, has anti-genocide groups concerned that the new legislation would be used to target their peaceful activities.
“It is clear the Labor party is moving in the direction of Starmer’s Labour government in the UK, seeking to criminalise the anti-genocide movement and move it underground,” Amal Naser, spokesperson for the Palestine Action Group Sydney (PAG), told Deepcut.
See/hear also : Tom Tanuki takes ‘a look at the omnibus ‘Combatting Antisemitism, Hate & Extremism Bill 2026′, which has NSN and all its associated groups disbanding by midnight on Sunday – for good reason’.
Update (January 13, 2026) : Since the Board told Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah to go forth, ‘Many authors have since announced they will no longer appear at Adelaide Writers’ Week 2026 and it is the Adelaide Festival’s position that the event can no longer go ahead as scheduled for this year. This is a deeply regrettable outcome.’
As ever, I’m a day late and a dollar short. But it’s noteworthy that, in the space of less than a week, South Australian Labor premier (and ex-Shoppie official) Peter Malinauskas has inadvertently engineered the near-total obliteration of Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) — and, in addition, imperiled the continuation of the 2026 Adelaide Festival as a whole.
Given that the Festival is considered a cultural treasure, that’s quite something.
And all because he didn’t want Palestinian-Australian academic and novelist Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah to speak at AWW.
Abdel-Fattah’s removal from the program was announced in a bizarre statement by the Adelaide Festival Corporation Board — then consisting of marketing executive Tracey Whiting (Chair); former politician Leesa Chesser; local councillor/real estate agent Mary Couros; airport manager Brenton Cox; lawyer Nicholas Linke; media consultant Daniela Ritorto; banker and financial analyst Donny Walford; & government observer Jennifer Fuller — on January 8. The statement didn’t specify precisely why Abdel-Fattah had to be removed, but did invoke the Bondi Beach mass shooting and amorphous ‘cultural sensitivities’.
Unsurprisingly, then, ‘Abdel-Fattah has engaged a lawyer to demand clarity on why she has been removed from the Adelaide Writers’ Week line-up’. Also seeking clarification on the matter is historian Henry Reynolds, and no doubt others are keen to give the Board an opportunity to further elaborate on the reasons for its decision.
Well, what’s left of the Board anyway. Since the shit hit the fan, Whiting, Linke, Ritorto and Walford have resigned from the board, leaving Chesser, Couros, Cox and Fuller holding the bag and presiding over an organisation seemingly operating outside of the governance structure spelled out in the Adelaide Festival Corporation Act 1998. For his part, Malinauskas has expressed the view that it’s all good, and there’s nothing to see here.
And today, AWW director Louise Adler has, perhaps inevitably, announced her own resignation.
Finally, Tash from Bendigo has published an open letter to Jarvis Cocker of UK band Pulp. The band is scheduled to play a free concert to open the Festival on February 27, but Tash is hoping that, under the circumstances, they might reconsider.
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
