Liberal Shills and Dissident Thrills
A Nationalist Investigation of the Australian ‘Dissident’ Ecosystem
Introduction
If the glut of sensationalist headlines are to be believed, young men are turning rightward in droves. According to articles examining the returns from recent elections, Gen Z men are disillusioned and frustrated with their place in the world and see the appeal of ‘far-right’ rhetoric to a degree that their fathers and grandfathers never did. To look at early breakdowns from the 2025 election, where a third of Australians gave 1st preference to a party other than Labor or Liberal, we may expect to see a similar trend amongst young Australian men. For nationalists, the cause is obvious. The lived reality of ‘woke’ politics and demographic changes visible to them on a daily basis in school and at university is clearly encouraging them to seek out new ideas and find answers that better accord with their life experiences in the multiracial era.
This presents the forces of political conservatism with a problem. If young men are abandoning the established forms of right-wing thought, how do you keep them on the Republican or Liberal Party plantation? Over the last few years, the answer has been the launching of the latest generation of conservative publications and intellectual gatekeepers into Australian political discourse. Needless to say, we know the history of Liberals engaging with the ‘far-right’ in order to draw them into the fold and neutralise whatever genuine radicalism may have existed. The faces change but the tactics do not.
Look closely and you will see parallel operations amongst the ‘Freedom’ crowd or within Christian politics, though we are concerned here only with the ones who work closer to the nationalist space. Many of them pilfer the nationalist label for their own ends, but we true nationalists see them for who they really are. These so-called ‘dissidents’ skirt the line on political taboos (especially on the topic of race and immigration, and occasionally on the nature of Jews) and come armed with polished talking-points, but always remain wedded to the symbols and legal institutions of the State, thereby funneling impressionable young readers away from radicalism and back into the clutches of the ‘safe and approved’ politics.
The groups profiled by us below do not exist in isolation to one another. The connections and confluences between them are so intertwined that a large chart is needed to truly map it all out. Across their respective X, Tiktok, Substack and Telegrams channels, all these characters can be found promoting and re-posting each other, congregating on comment threads and generally maintaining friendly relations across what you would think should be clear political demarcations. Thus one frequently chances across The Noticer promoting the accounts of John Lawson and Jack Brady, the Sydney Traditionalist Forum re-posting Jordan Knight, or John Macgowan nominating Joel Davis and Hugo Lennon for the sham title of “Dissident Right Australian of the Year.” Spend any amount of time observing them and you will quickly see that when it comes to building internet clout on the dissident right, ideological cohesion takes a back seat to amassing as many views and clicks as possible.
From all this clustering and networking there is one standpoint that they are unwilling to promote, one type of political party that remains off-limits so to speak. It is of course Australian nationalism, defined not by means of possessing a conservative moral ethic or being a racialist one step removed from the Liberal Party, but radical third-position commitment to the Australian nation, liberalism and conservatism be damned. The Liberal Party and the conservative reactionaries are the nationalist enemy; they occupy the political space so that nationalists cannot.
We hereby issue a warning to all honest Australians on the following political groups, presenting you the incontrovertible facts that may have so far escaped your notice. Appearances can be deceiving, but they all know where the winds are blowing and keenly recognise that the reputation of the Liberal Party - the undeniable progenitors of mass non-White immigration - has become trash for anyone under the age of thirty. They take what they can from the nationalist position, lest they be left behind with no audience at all.
NCIA (aka, the Nebbish Compradors for Israel in Australia)
New kids on the block, and the first grouping to receive our attention, is the National Conservative Institute of Australia (NCIA), set up in early 2023. The NCIA operates as the local arm of the Zionist intellectual movement spawned by Yoram Hazony, known as ‘National Conservatism’. Hazony, an Orthodox Jew and an Israeli citizen, leads the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute and non-profit. Now operating out of Washington, D.C., the Edmund Burke Foundation began out of an office building in Jerusalem and shares many of the same staff as another Hazony-founded association, the Herzl Institute (Rafi Eis as CEO and David Brog of the anti-BDS group Maccabee Task Force).
In describing its mission to “revitalise” the Jewish people and the State of Israel, the Herzl Institute tells us that it:
“...welcomes the participation of Christian and other non-Jewish scholars and students who see the sources of Judaism as offering an opportunity for foundational renewal within the context of their own nations and faith traditions. The Herzl Institute will conduct an array of intensive outreach activities, including public events, publications, and new media platforms aimed at bringing the fruits of its work to a broad public in Israel and abroad.”
Hazony’s concept of National Conservatism – encapsulated in his books The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022) – follows from this mission statement, presenting the latest version of a vetted form of conservatism for gentiles, one with slavish devotion to the Zionist entity and containing all the necessary guard-rails in place against racialism and other forms of political thought deemed hostile to Jewry. Seasoned nationalists will note the near indistinguishability between it and the older Zionist concoction - neoconservatism.
Through the Edmund Burke Foundation, Hazony organises the grandiose National Conservatism conferences, which rose from obscurity to attract politicians and thinkers from across the political right, up to the level of US Vice President J.D. Vance. The inaugural NatCon conference in 2016 was held under the conference title Christian-Jewish Alliance: Reclaiming and Building Conservatism speaking to the true intent of Hazony’s work. Hazony recently spilled the beans on X, telling us: “The *only* way to “fight anti-semitism” is by making friends and building political alliances in the service of Jewish interests wherever there’s a shot at making it work.”
Whilst the name Yoram Hazony appears only once on the NCIA’s website (buried in one of Ryan’s essays originally published in The Spectator) they make no attempt to hide their debt to Hazony’s intellectual construction. The NCIA openly takes as its ideological grounding the statement of principles issued by the Edmund Burke Foundation. Alongside motherhood statements on national sovereignty and immigration cuts, hostility towards Russia and China, and support for the “Anglo-American tradition of free enterprise”, we find included the principle of race denialism:
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race.
When it comes to Israel, Hazony and the wider National Conservative movement predictably make an exception to this principle for the Jewish people, telling us of the vital necessity of Israel remaining an exclusively Jewish state by means of the exclusion and racial slaughter of Palestinians.
Founder and executive director of the NCIA is Dan Ryan, a director of the Australian Institute for Progress, a Brisbane-based think tank founded by members of the Queensland Liberal Party. Ryan was selected for the LNP’s Federal senate ticket in Queensland in 2016 and networked his way around the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a UK-based Tory think tank most prominently associated with Jordan Peterson that claims Liberal Party alumni Tony Abbott, John Anderson and John Howard amongst its advisory board members.
Ryan founded the NCIA with Anthony Capello of Connor Court Publishing (a Liberal Party-aligned publishing company) and Jordan Knight, a former One Nation staffer and founder of Migration Watch Australia, a one-man show inspired by the Tory version in the UK. Ryan hosts the NCIA’s podcast, platforming the expected rotation of kosher-right guests from Quadrant, Never Again is Now, the Institute for Public Affairs and the Heritage Foundation. Knight tackles the youth audience through his TikTok account. Capello appears to be the silent partner in the operation; he is attributed only as member of the NCIA team on the home page, with no further contributions on the website or podcast.
Knight’s nauseatingly monotone ‘Stop Mass Immigration’ and ‘Multiculturalism Has Failed’ rhetoric is instantly recognizable as a Tory product by its feebleness, stopping short of the necessary radicalism required to oust the multicultural consensus that exists across the entire political spectrum, and punctuated with the usual caveat that anti-immigration sentiment must be race blind and pay no attention to the future racial makeup of Australia. Should anyone still doubt the Zionist alignment of the NCIA, look no further than Knight’s recent blessing as a 2025 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Past Publius Fellows of the Claremont Institute, a Straussian think-tank bankrolled by Zionist megadonor Thomas D. Klingenstein, include Ben Shapiro and Dinesh D’Souza.
Image 1: Jordan Knight proudly posing for his Claremont Institute fellowship portrait
Sidestream Press (aka, the Paleo-cronies)
Sidestream Press is the latest offering from Sydney-based paleo-conservative Edwin Dyga. Dyga is convenor of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, a contributor to Quadrant and former Australian editor of the Quarterly Review in the UK. He previously worked as staffer for NSW Liberal MP Greg Smith, a hard-right figure around David Clarke’s ‘Uglies’ faction and later became chief of staff for Rev. Fred Nile of the Christian Democrats. The Sydney Traditionalist Forum was a strong promoter of outspoken conservative senator Corey Bernardi prior to his defection from the Liberal Party.
As managing director of Sidestream Press (in the vocabulary of the traditionalist, the ‘Sidestream’ are those thinkers who stand in contrast to mainstream thought) Dyga also writes as editor of The Observer & Review (O&R), a semiannual print journal published by Sidestream since 2023 that has gained traction amongst the other characters surveyed. Taking submissions from across the Australian conservative and traditionalist scene, a brief listing of prominent contributors thus far published in issues of O&R suffices to show the intended positioning and indeed their Liberal Party adjacency:
Paul Gottfried, prominent Jewish paleo-con scholar and headline contributor at past Sydney Traditionalist Forum symposia. Gottfried co-signed the original Edmund Burke Foundation statement of principles and has attended NatCon conferences as a speaker;
Barry Spurr, literary editor of Quadrant who consulted for the Abbott Government’s 2014 review of the National School Curriculum;
R.J. Stove, author and conservative scribbler at The Spectator, Quadrant and The American Conservative;
Mike Maxwell, owner of Imperium Press (and previous collaborator with Joel Davis);
Dr. Jonathon Cole, host of The Political Animals podcast and expert in Christian political theology at Charles Sturt University. In his contributions across conservative media, Cole tells us that Australia “…is not really a “white” country in any meaningful sense. It is a multicultural country”;
Frank Salter, of the British Australian Community; and
James Kalb, Catholic scholar and contributor to Crisis Magazine.
Investigating Sidestream’s funding brings us to its connections with the English-Speaking Union – Victorian Branch (ESU), a cash-rich charity based out of Ascot Vale in Victoria. In 2024, the ESU reported a net income of $398,524 and net assets worth $15,715,398. The ESU sponsored the inauguration of O&R with a major projects grant (with a value of up to $10,000). Charitable status prevents any overt political positioning; the anglophile ESU aims only to promote “...friendship and closer ties between the peoples of English-speaking democracies through our common heritage and language.”
The ESU began over a century ago as an Australia chapter of the UK organisation founded by Evelyn Wrench, at the time editor of The Spectator. State chapters exist in Queensland and NSW (run by monarchist and regular guest on the conservative media circuit Prof. David Flint) though unlike the Victorian chapter, these appear to be moribund, the latter with revenue too small to require reporting on the charity register. A disturbing find is the president of the ACT branch, Martin Hess, a retired member of the Australian Federal Police who has hosted events for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute(ASPI), a defence policy think-tank that targets the far-right.
Its UK-based parent body is a global-facing multi-racial association that promotes the use of the English language irrespective of ancestry (note how racially diverse the ESU website appears). The local variant on the other hand is coded for the ethnically ‘British-Australian’. The ESU has a longstanding relationship with the British Australian Community - including crossover leadership in the form of Robert Furlan (Treasurer of the BAC) and now-deceased Alan James (Editor of the BAC’s magazine) - and funded its annual Literary Award. Frank Salter personally received an ESU minor projects grant back in 2023.
The international connections of Sidestream Press can be found when their social media pages are examined. The presence of Maxwell of Imperium Press, an NRx outfit with suspected priors in the Peter Thiel ecosystem, is well established (Marc Andreessen has promoted books by Imperium Press) and the Sydney Traditionalist Forum has long recommended the works of Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin). The X page of O&R promotes an American book publisher by the name of Passage Publishing. Passage Publishing returns the favour with re-posts of O&R.
The founder of Passage Publishing, the imprint for Curtis Yarvin and Steve Sailer, was recently revealed as Jewish academic Jonathan Keeperman, another member of the Thiel patronage network who posts under the prominent X account @L0m3z. Of course, the tactic of ‘canceling’ someone via an exposé doesn’t work if the person targeted has had a bar mitzvah; since being outed by The Guardian, Keeperman makes appearances at National Conservatism conferences and has been basking in the friendly attention given to himself and Yarvin by Sulzberger’s New York Times.
Image 2: Edwin Dyga at the rostrum, introducing Corey Bernardi at a 2014 Quadrant dinner
The National Observer (aka, the Young Uglies)
A more subtle grouping has come in the form of the National Observer (NO), a substack-based publication run seemingly by a small group of anonymous collaborators that appeared on the scene in 2022. The National Observer has been steadily building rapport across the dissident right scene and amassing an impressive roster of podcast guests, even dredging up Zionist vagrants from the Patriot era (Nick Folkes) that nationalists have long since vanquished.
The name alone makes it plain to us that the National Observer exists as resurrection of the identically named B.A. Santamaria publication that existed under the auspices of the Council for the National Interest and wrapped up operations in 2012. A number of essays that appeared in the original NO have so far made their way onto the new substack. Santamaria’s historical collaborations with the LNP need not be repeated here any further than to point out that the DLP were opponents of the White Australia Policy before even the Liberals got around to badmouthing it. Leader John Lawson and his other contributors give themselves the title ‘nationalist’ (in its first year of operation, NO more accurately took the name conservative) but a closer inspection of their relationships and body of work belies this description.
On the surface, some of the necessary elements of nationalism are present: opposition to the demographic erasure of White Australians, occasional appeals to protectionist economics, and a hostile positioning towards Zionism and the enmeshment of Australia in foreign wars. So far so good. Only we quickly arrive at the essays telling us that the “roadmap to victory” is through infiltration of the Coalition or by voting for a Senator who only yesterday walked the halls of the Liberal Party. Lawson’s Substack offerings wink at being ‘in the know’ about the Jewish Question but echo “fuck both sides” à la Joel Davis, announcing immediately after October 7 that he is “...neither pro-Israel or pro-Palestine.”
Despite taking guest essays from members of the Australian Natives Association, Lawson maintains strong links to the anglophiles at the BAC, peppering his writings and rhetoric with references to the supposed ‘Anglo-Celtic’ makeup of Australian identity. Indeed Frank Salter and other BAC members have appeared multiple times as guests on the podcast. The linkage becomes more obvious when we find out that the National Observer were recipients of a financial grant from the ESU in late 2024. Furthermore, their social media accounts cross-promote Observer & Review. Again the contribution crossovers that can be found between the original National Observer and the contemporary O&R tells us where this is all coming from.
To turn to the National Observer’s podcast, the Liberal Party insiders come almost every other week. Not in order of appearance, we so far have seen: Jonathan Pietszch (president of the South Australian Nationals), John Ruddick (former NSW LNP member turned Libertarian) and members of the Young Liberals, followed by a trail of other minor party figures from the satellite right in One Nation, the Libertarian Party and Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots. The latest podcast guest (his 2nd appearance so far) is Barclay McGain, exiled member of the Young Liberals. Since helping to launch the Australian version of Turning Point USA, McGain has continued to crop up across the Liberal ecosystem, most recently on the campaign trail for Liberal MP Phillip Thompson.
A particular favourite of Lawson and Co. is John Macgowan, who has made three separate appearances; the first of these was an occasion to commemorate the good name of Lyenko Urbanchich, founder of the Liberal Party ‘Uglies.’ This wily Liberal Party trickster is the alleged owner of the online newspaper The Noticer. The National Observer dutifully promotes The Noticer on its social media channels, despite the obvious link it has to the National Socialist Network. Certainly no random group of twenty-somethings appears out of nowhere with such ready-made connections to political figures and we go on the record to speculate that some other organisational structure is at play.
Figure 3: The Liberal Ethnic Council in 1979. Hero of the National Observer Urbanchich is seated second from right; David Clarke standing first from left.
Finally, the appearance of the UK’s Homeland Party on the roster of NO podcast guests should send warning signs to all and sundry. Wrecker and doxxer of the British National Party and splitter from Patriotic Alternative Kenny Smith was given a loving welcome by Lawson. Homeland sent not only its Chairman for interviews, but also its spokesman Alec Cave and one of Homeland’s electoral prospects, Andrew Piper, a man who graduated to nationalism from UFO and vaccine conspiracy theories. The predictable bait-and-switch of the fake nationalist party reached its climax only last week when Homeland cast out hard-line activist Steve Laws in favour of adding ‘Gay and Lesbian Spaces’ to the party. Homeland recently celebrated a meta-political victory when they defied the UK’s border control regime by broadcasting a speech from Zionist homosexual Renaud Camus. Are these the kinds of victories the National Observer celebrates? It’s no victory for nationalism, that we are sure of.
Libertarianism & Rennickism
Libertarianism rates a mention for the astroturfed nature of the recent revival of libertarian parties in Australia (and internationally), an endeavor that has been supported by many of the above-mentioned dissidents. The Liberal Democratic Party re-branded itself the Libertarian Party in 2024 and has set out on a promotional campaign, engaging with anonymous accounts on X and dropping hints that they are willing to collaborate in some form with members of the dissident right.
Libertarians comprehend that their economic policies find little purchase amongst the financially struggling youth of Australia (where they have even bothered to understand the decrepit works of Von Mises, Rand or Rothbard that is). In response they have made immigration cuts, a hard-line position on free speech and other associated culture war issues the meat of their appeal. Some candidates even appear with the phrase “Australia First” on their X posts. The theft of nationalist policies by the Libertarians can only go so far in convincing voters and it is here that the dissidents have stepped in to give their ‘seal of approval.’
The stooges at the National Observer made hay with the prospect of ‘tactical libertarianism’, giving them “conditional support”, and were spellbound by a potential ‘Libertarian & Nationalist alliance’, bringing on a string of Libertarian Party candidates as podcast guests. Even the NSN’s Joel Davis (a former libertarian mind you) could not help but react positively to the upswing of libertarian prospects. Davis told us on Telegram of the pragmatic benefits of using the Libertarian Party as a tool for nationalist politics, describing them as the “least worst option on the table.”
Libertarianism as a flavour of liberal-adjacency is however not beloved by all members of the dissident right. The man who can cover all the bases is Senator Gerard Rennick and his People First Party. Every political figure covered thus far either directly endorsed Rennick in the lead up to the 2025 federal election or went out of their way to make glowingly positive statements about the ‘based Queensland Senator.’ A decade of Liberal Party membership, half of which came as an elected Senator, is simply swept aside by these dissidents when presented with a new minor party and a few crumbs of policy thrown their way. Nationalists recognise Rennick as a Liberal man through and through, corralling the dissidents in much the same way Pauline Hanson once used to.
(Dis)Honourable Mentions
Everyone with an internet connection now has the means to re-invent themselves as a political actor – skill or intellectual ability aside. Nationalists have observed new performers cropping up on the Australian stage every year; keeping tabs on them all is an arduous task. In this manner, Elon Musk’s X – a bot and slop infested platform almost unusable for nationalists seeking genuine political commentary – has become the premier breeding ground for Australia’s perpetually online rightoids. For our concluding (dis)honourable mentions, we present only the more prominent of these characters, ones whom we adjudicate will have a greater staying power than your average X account bearing a Pepe the Frog avatar with a few hundred followers.
Elijah Schaffer: An American political commentator with strong links to Australia. Schaffer is married to an Australian woman and for a time being set up a studio in Tweed Heads to broadcast his show Slightly Offensive before moving operations back to Florida. Schaffer allegedly fled to Australia to avoid the backlash for his involvement in the January 6th Capitol Riot in 2021. Under the cover of being a journalist, Schaffer broke into the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but unlike other protesters crushed with heavy prison sentences for simply walking into the building, Schaffer escaped free from punishment.
Schaffer’s career began at Glen Beck’s conservative media company The Blaze, thereafter fired for being a sex pest. Since striking it out on his own, Schaffer has made headlines for his recurrent racist and anti-semitic statements, comments ultimately devoid of any ideological consistency and uttered more for shock value and drawing in an audience than anything else. An attendee of the Australian CPAC in August 2023 (organisers later claimed they did not properly vet Schaffer’s views), Schaffer has platformed Joel Davis thrice and previously broadcast with an Australian co-host, YouTuber and former Sky News commentator Sydney Watson. Online posters hint at Schaffer possessing some Jewish ancestry, though this is unproven.
Jack Brady: Another newcomer, this time from Queensland. Brady has ‘face-doxxed’ himself, but the unnatural, plastic doll-like features of his visage points to him disguising his identity by means of a filter. Brady posts admittedly higher-quality political commentary on YouTube and Rumble under the titles ‘The White Angle’ and ‘Student of Power’, with a focus on German history and politics. A contemporary of Drew Pavlou at the University of Queensland, his associations have seen him jump across the dissident scene, appearing on the National Observer’s podcast and live-streaming with Joel Davis. A recent post on Telegram announced his retirement from front-facing politics in lieu of behind-the-scenes activism, boasting of his connections with the Homeland Party, the BAC and AfD in Germany.
Hugo Lennon (@auspill): An anti-immigration Tiktok influencer from Melbourne who claims to have wandered into Australian far-right politics by accident when he discovered that posting political commentary yields him more attention than fitness videos. Lennon has so far showed up on the NCIA podcast and often interacts with Jordan Knight and Migration Watch Australia. Lennon makes use of headlines from The Noticer for generating content; elsewhere he has appeared on Elijah Schaffer’s show and promoted O&R. Antifa doxxers have already dug into his personal life, exposing the silver spoon child of a wealthy property developer who worked for the Australian Signals Directorate.
Diogo Correa Coelho (aka, Diogo Cohea): A product of the COVID anti-lockdown protests, Diogo Cohea is an Andrew Tate-style political grifter who loves his Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts. With a background in marketing, his YouTube videos are uploaded with sponsorships from loanoptions.ai, a bank loan comparison website, and ancestralnutrition.com.au an online shop that sells bull testicle supplements. Diogo moved into conservative spaces when the freedom movement lost its raison d'être, augmenting his uninspired podcast with commentary about demographics and defending cristy-enn[sic] values. As well as appearing alongside fellow Freedom Movement veteran Joel Jamal of Turning Point Australia, Cohea has been interviewed by the National Observer, mingled with the NSN on Telegram and briefly hosted a video news program in association with The Noticer on his Rumble account.
Zero Seats!
In the aftermath of the election, the dissidents have adapted the battle cry of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, who are on the verge of vanquishing the Tories and enthroning the latest iteration of zio-conservative electoral politics in the UK. If Rennick falls through, these dissidents will presumbaly sell Australians a fresh political party designed to ‘smash the Liberals’, one with a new face but containing the same old names and the same old ideological priors. But nationalists say otherwise. We say ‘Zero Liberals! Zero Conservatives!’ and most importantly, Australia First!