On the second day of the militia occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, one of the occupiers, Blaine Cooper noticed my accent and asked its origin.

“Originally I’m from Australia,” I explained. “Australia!” he replied cheerily. “I’m in touch with a lot of people out there! Reclaim Australia – love those guys!”

When it comes to insurrection, Cooper and his comrades have advantages that the growing Australian far right does not. The second amendment gives them easy access to assault weapons and sidearms; the first allows Cooper to pull stunts like wrapping pieces of bacon with pages of the Koran and setting them alight.

Australia has heavily restricted access to the weapons these men can buy with ease in the US. And Cooper’s YouTube follies would perhaps attract legal attention in line with the federal anti-discrimination act or state-based vilification laws in Australia – provisions that ostensibly more respectable quarters of the right have long worked to have repealed.

Nevertheless, Cooper’s fondness for and contact with groups like Reclaim Australia should puncture any complacency Australians might retain about the growth of rightwing militancy.

Rhetorically the militants of Malheur are mostly addressing local and national issues. It’s far more difficult to carry out armed insurrection in Australia. The sights and sounds streaming from the wildlife refuge match easy stereotypes about the nature of rural America.

But the far right is a movement which is increasingly international and eclectic in its scope, proselytisation and recruitment.

The greatest gift to the far right has been the internet. Progressives imagine that they own the leading edge of communications, and think this offers a way in which to outflank conservatives and those further afield.

There is a strong tendency to imagine that liberalism and new technologies are inextricably bound up together – witness the retrospectives of Barack Obama’s data-driven victory in 2012.

But the far right see precisely the same opportunity in the internet as other activists – bypassing centrist media outlets and creating their own alternative public sphere.



They’ve been doing this for a very long time. Way back in 1995, the veteran researcher of the far right Chip Berlet wrote of the 90s version of the militia movement that “it is arguably the first US social movement to be organised primarily through nontraditional electronic media, such as the internet”.

Even when he made the remark, neo-Nazis had been using bulletin board systems for more than a decade – George Deitz set up the first one in 1983. As the militia movement gathered pace in the early 1990s, its members used whatever electronic devices they could to spread the word, recruit new members and organise themselves internally.

Now that patchwork of fax trees, newsgroups, talk radio stations and CB channels has been replaced with YouTube accounts, private Facebook groups, forums and encrypted messaging services of our own era.

Just as American rightwing actors build their movements by using everyday tools such as Facebook, so do groups like Reclaim Australia.

The scale and breadth of content being produced on the far right in 2016 is staggering. While the left also too-fondly imagines its own superiority in cultural production, these actors daily reinforce their messages on high-traffic websites, Twitter hashtags, podcasts and parody videos.

The motley crew at the wildlife refuge – mixing anti-Islamic ideologues, armed men from the patriot movement and religious conservatives – mirrors the way that different strands of far-right ideology have found common cause online.

One of the things that has brought them together in recent months is the candidacy of Donald Trump. The advocacy for his candidacy on Twitter includes large swathes of the far right.

But the biggest international issue that is powering their organising – from the internet to the streets – is the refugee crisis brought about by the Syrian war, and the opportunity that has presented itself to mobilise people on the basis of fear of foreigners and Islam.

Reclaim Australia, European groups such as Pegida and the US right up to and including the Trump candidacy are both stoking and benefiting from a fear of the consequences of a large influx of refugees.



Groups such as Reclaim Australia are promoting similar ideas to European and American groups – fantasies about halal foods, and cultural and racial dilution. They are also drawing on a long history of Australian political racism, and capitalising on forms of xenophobia which have come to frame the mainstream policy response to refugee arrivals.

It’s true that other causes unite this international network of far-right groups – antifeminism and an addiction to battling “social justice warriors” in endless culture wars are also prominent.

But the refugee crisis – which has no end in sight – offers the most important opportunity for a sprawling, self-reinforcing, international far-right movement to gain in strength.

Making the picture even bleaker is looming economic instability which, if it arrives, will worsen the plight of those Europeans and Americans who have still not recovered from the 2008 recession, and may give Australia its first taste of real economic hardship in decades.

In bad economic times, the right finds it much easier to ignite its emotional propellant – resentment.

It’s often said by liberals that groups such as Reclaim Australia thrive on attention and that if we just ignored them they would go away.

But the Malheur situation – where internet activists Cooper and John Ritzenheimer are suddenly toting guns in defiance of federal law – provides a counterexample.



Not resisting, studying and criticising these groups can simply encourage them to push the line further. Segments of the left and researchers on the far right have been ringing the alarm bell on international rightwing groups for years.

After Malheur, will we listen?