the white rose society

Neighbours star and conspiracist leader Damien Richardson was recently found guilty of performing a salute indistinguishable from a Nazi salute in Victoria. The salute was performed at a gathering organised by the neo-fascist group the National Workers Alliance and attended by several neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Network, who actively engaged in friendly discussion with both Richardson and event organiser Matt Trihey.

In pre-sentencing hearings, we've particularly made note of two claims made by Richardson's defence: that he has suffered due to being associated publicly with Nazism, and that his salute had no underlying fascist motive – it was merely mocking the characterisation of him as having fascist leanings made in a recent article in The Age. In fact, Richardson's own grandfather fought the Nazis, so he couldn't possibly be sympathetic.

In much of the reporting on this matter, not much attention has been paid to what Richardson actually said.

Richardson's salute came in the context of describing an event he had attended in the Latrobe Valley.

The Age's reporting gives an idea of how this went:

After hitting the headlines for attending a self-declared “cooker” event in Rowville on Friday night, CBD can report the upper house member for Eastern Victoria then spoke at a rally held by Freedom Party candidate and former Neighbours actor Damien Richardson.

Heath stuck to the ostensible cause in her speech in Traralgon on Monday afternoon – the closure of the native logging industry and its impact on eastern Victoria.

But before welcoming her to the microphone, host Richardson warmed up the crowd with some racist conspiracies.

Saving the native logging, he reckoned, was a chance to fight back against “globalists” without scaring off potential allies with “all these ideas of the New World Order”.

“I’ll tell you who it’s a real war on – it’s a war on white working-class men,” he said to applause.

“That’s who they want to destroy, because they know, ultimately, they are the boys with the power ... to stand up to the process of deracinating who we are as Australians.”

If that word is new to you, Merriam-Webster tells us “deracinate” is to “remove the racial or ethnic characteristics or influences” from a place.

Richardson said: “God forbid you talk about it because they call you a racist. Well, call me it. I’m beyond caring.”

He also riffed about one day working out exactly what antisemitic conspiracist David Icke “meant by lizards” in his theory about a group of shape-shifting reptiles who secretly control the world. It’s been widely interpreted by the likes of the Anti-Defamation Commission that Icke is talking about Jews.

Richardson said he would go “much further” into such topics at an upcoming event which had been scheduled to take place on Thursday night in Sale, but had recently been postponed until September.

An early flyer for that event obtained by CBD said it would be “featuring guest speaker Renee Heath”, but her name was scrubbed out of later versions circulated online.

At the National Workers Alliance event, Richardson gives his own account of the Traralgon protest. He describes how he started talking about the logging industry, but while looking out into the crowd he realised there were larger issues he needed to address.

Richardson said:

Now I'm getting into dangerous territory because if I keep talking now. I'm going to say something that I potentially will regret, but I'm also thinking: this community seemed pretty fired up to win back their livelihood. It's actually an attack on – it's an existential attack on who they are. And you cannot have a timber industry that's unsustainable – because you grow some more trees if it's unsustainable, and you hold them back from logging and give it a certain amount, I mean, it just made it doesn't make any rational sense whatsoever. So I do get into this deeper territory, and I actually call out the collective identity of the people that have gathered before me, and I call them by who they are. That's basically a collective of white people. It's an attack on your white heritage and what you've done since you've arrived in this particular country. And they loved it. The crowd loved it. They went: Finally, someone's actually said it. They stopped pissing around, talking about Western culture, etc, they've actually nailed it to the wall, nailed it to the mast. And there's a girl there called Renee Heath, and she's the local Liberal member, and she's very happy I said it as well. You can see the smile on her face from ear to ear. She was also happy that she didn't say it. She was happy that someone else said it, but she was still reveling in it, in it actually having occurred.

We make no suggestion that far-Right Liberal MP Renee Heath actually reveled in Richardson's speech, merely that this was Richardson's perception.

Richardson then goes on to describe The Age's reporting (which we would note didn't actually liken him to Adolf Hitler, but simply described him sharing racist conspiracy theories):

Okay, so the next day The Age get involved. You know that lovely periodical you can get if you really are desperate for nothing else to do, The Age newspaper, get involved. They ring me up. They asked me for comment about the rally down in Traralgon. I have no comment, of course, I've got nothing to say them, because I know they're going to print whatever they want to print anyway. Even though I don't give them any comment, they still print what they were going to print anyway. And they liken me to Adolf Hitler. So if you want to have a look at it, it's an article. It's in last year's Age, about August last year. (Richardson does a Nazi salute) Yep, that guy. Am I allowed to do that? Am I gonna be fined now? I'm gonna go to jail for five years. Richardson did the salute. I mean, really? I mean, this is absurd. This is insane. It's crazy. It's so crazy you can't believe it's even happening, but you know what it does. You know what it does. It capitulates the support of the people in that group. It capitulates them. They're suddenly worried about being associated with Damien, knowing full well that Damien's got nothing to do with Adolf Hitler, but just the slur alone is enough to do the damage, and then the people start bitching about me and why I'm there in the first place, and how I'm making it about myself and blah-de-blah-de-blah.

And now their native timber industry is gone, because they actually had some traction. Were actually starting to fight back. We had a system. We're going to turn up at the Maribyrnong City Council at their very next meeting and we were going to come down with one logger who had apparently tried to take his own life, because that's the reality of what they're trying to do – actually kill us. So he's going to take his own life. We're going to go down with one log on his truck and his daughter next to him in the cabin, and we're going to video it. And we just need about 100 and 150 people there to make our own propaganda back at them. And that's why they want a misinformation, disinformation act as well. So the people no longer have the power to do that. We have to buy the corporate Main Street narrative. And it never happens. It never happens. I'm explaining it to these people in that last speech. That's what we're going to do. Then we're also going to turn up at the municipal councils next meeting. They were going to have in a, you know, in a in a hotel room. They were going to have it at the top of of Collins Street, and that day, we wanted to call on all the loggers from throughout the state to all turn up and park their trucks in Collins Street and become an absolute pain in the ass. So the people that are walking past are so pissed off, they actually say, why doesn't the government just do something about these people? Let them log or whatever? Because I want to go do my banking or go to work, whatever else they want to do pick their kids up from school. So that's the only way to win.

The only way to win is actually do something that is disruptive – of a disruptive nature, if we haven't learned that from our, you know, our Islamic brethren, I don't know when we'll ever learn it, but it's gone. The reality is it was defeated. It was defeated because of the 6 million, the 6 million, you know, the 6 million I'm talking about, that narrative that my grandfather fought in the Second 33rd – thought he was fighting against. Now his heir, the heir, his offspring, is being accused of that narrative, that narrative... I don't even know what necessarily happened in 1940s Germany. I don't need to know. That narrative needs to be destroyed, because that narrative is destroying us from having any political representation. (Neo-Nazis in the audience cheer) Whilst that narrative continues to exist, it stops us from getting any support from the system that we created. Make no mistake about it.

And you know what? All your parliamentarians know it. They all know it, and that's why they'll never mention it, because they will be, they'll be lost. Because Renee Heath got in touch with me the next day as well, and I'd done an interview with her two days hence that I was going to put on [Damien's website]. And she said, Damien, please don't print that. Please don't print it. Because instead of coming to my aid and saying, You've been vilified, and now let's make a stand here, because you've been vilified, and let's take these bastards from The Age to court because they have no right to say it about you, because you have done nothing to suggest that you are Adolf Hitler. No, she runs a mile like the coward she is, because the whole system is inhabited by cowards.

I had another point I was going to make, but I forgot because I got too excited. That's the point. Oh, this is the one I'll finish on. And this what happens is now, about a year later, Renee and the rest of the opposition benches of the Victorian State Parliament go to Israel. They go on a junket to Israel, a paid, expenses paid trip to Israel. Why is the local member for Gippsland being paid to go to Israel? But she can't stand up for me, and she comes back from Israel. She comes back from Israel, basically spruiking how terrible it was, October 7, how horrible it was, what happened to those people, and how we couldn't begin to understand what good and wonderful people they are. Now, they may well be good and wonderful people, but I want to know why the representative, why the representative of Gippsland cannot offer me any support, but can offer support for a group of people that live in a totally different jurisdiction in another part of the World, something is foul in Denmark, to quote The Bard, something stinks. Something stinks really badly. And it's ultimately that narrative that underpins everything, whatever you do, wherever you move, whatever you say.

We leave it to the reader to decide whether it's actually anti-Nazi to make the suggestion that white people can't organise because of a narrative that something happened to six million people (and it may or may not have happened). We spend a bit of time talking to anti-fascists and it's not an argument we've heard before.