A couple of weeks back, I went to hear Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, two right-wing nationalist speakers who recently finished a tour of Australia and New Zealand, speak at Sydney’s International Convention Centre. My attendance was part study, part curiosity about their audience and influence.

It’s symptomatic of where we’re at in Australia that the appearance of fascist agitator and Hitler-fan Blair Cottrell on Sky News – an interview that briefly turned ‘Nazi’ into a Twitter trending topic – wasn’t the most significant media boost offered to white nationalism in the last week.

In a recent interview with ReCode’s Kara Swisher, Mark Zuckerberg explained that the reason Facebook allows conspiracy theorists and, specifically, Holocaust deniers, to disseminate their views on his website is that, ‘At the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.’

On Friday, Canadian alt-right YouTuber and activist Lauren Southern will host the Melbourne leg of her national speaking tour, alongside fellow alt-right YouTuber and compatriot Stefan Molyneux. Southern’s video announcing her tour really tries to bring the drama: ‘You guys are at a crossroads. Do you want to retain your culture … your borders, family, identity? Or will the boats keep coming, the no-go zones keep growing and will you become another victim of multiculturalism?’

The (mostly) young men who classify themselves as incels do so not merely because they lack romantic or (perhaps more significantly) sexual relationships, but because they accept their celibacy as a permanent and inevitable condition. Incels understand biology as destiny.

If anti-fascist activists had heeded the call to stay at home while Milo was in town, what would the situation have looked like?

It was, in the words of far-right parliamentarian and former minister of youth policy Giorgia Meloni, ‘intimidation at worst’, and nothing compared to the actual violence of far-left demonstrators ‘who destroy entire cities and burn down our cars’.

Before the rally, the hate-group monitoring Southern Poverty Law Centre reported infighting amongst rally organisers, including members of one right-wing group who accused their leader of adultery in an attempt to undercut his authority. At a prior rally in Houston, Texas, a video showed a heated interaction between right-wing groups. It showed white supremacists attack an alt-right member who pleaded with his aggressors for common ground, ‘What about the memes?!’

With Donald Trump all but endorsing the recent fascist rally in Charlottesville, and liberals in the US and Australia suddenly coming around to the importance and legitimacy of antifascism, it’s worth taking a step back to look at what fascism is, where it comes from, and how to stop it.

It’s been almost ten years since 21-year-old Australian Jock Palfreeman found himself alone one night in Sofia, Bulgaria, confronted by a group of fascist football hooligans he’d witnessed attack two Roma men. In the ensuing altercation Jock was injured and one of the gang, a young man called Andrey Monov, was fatally stabbed.

A few years back, News Corp was warning, almost every week, about antisemitism in Australia. Invariably, the claims were bogus: more about slating the Greens and the BDS movement than genuinely exposing bigotry. Today, with a small but significant coterie of genuine antisemites raising their heads, we find News Corps again in the thick of the action: not calling out the racists, mind you, but providing them with political cover.

What is most alarming, and consistent, about these attacks is the focus that white nationalists and right-wing terrorists place on targeting houses of worship, whether mosques, synagogues, prayer rooms, Sikh temples or Black churches. Hate crimes are, of course, opportunistic, but it is worth examining why places of worship are represented more highly than other public spaces.

From late April 1938 through to early August, Attorney General Menzies went on a lengthy tour of Europe. His itinerary included Nazi Germany, where the German Foreign Office was placed at his service. In private, as even his friendly biographers have to admit, Menzies regarded Hitler as a political dreamer, a man with many good ideas. In Germany, Menzies met with many Reich identities, including the President of the Reichsbank, the economic fixer significantly responsible for stitching the deals and links that helped put the Nazis in power.

François Hollande’s five year term as president of France was more than underwhelming, which largely explains why the recent election has seen France’s Socialist Party wiped off the electoral map. During a period of high unemployment, Hollande’s government conducted an aggressive winding back of the country’s labour code, at the same time as slashing funding to hospitals and healthcare. To Australian audiences, this kind of neoliberal renovation probably sounds awfully familiar.

Tempelhof airport sits at the southern tip of Berlin’s city centre. The immense building, 1230 metres in length, curls around the airfield. Tall, narrow windows cascade down its facade, and an almost human-sized metal eagle’s head stands at the main entrance. The airport, which ceased operations in 2008, was largely designed and built under the Nazi regime. Once at the centre of Hilter’s vision of ‘World Capital Germania’, the Nazis’ megalomaniacal project intended Tempelhof to be the gateway to a Europe commanded by the Third Reich.

So here we are: the LGBT community, once marginalised, once anathema to the values of the far right is now told that it’s only within the fold of the far right that we’ll be safe and welcome. Except that rather than the far right shielding us from attack, our rights and our existence are being used to shield groups like the FN from the charge that they’re socially backward.