When George Mamalis started an Instagram account a decade ago, it was filled with beaches, sunsets, cute dogs and aesthetically pleasing food shots.
Now, the page is dedicated almost entirely to culture war material and Mamalis is a cog in Australia’s rightwing ecosystem.
He is a leader in the Australian branch of Christian firebrand Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point. That branch’s national director, Joel Jammal, says the organisation was set up on the recommendation of Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, with the blessing of Kirk.
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Turning Point Australia says it is expanding, opening chapters across Australia and aiming to move into schools and universities and to sway the outcome of elections.
‘The vision Charlie Kirk trusted us with’
Mamalis worked for former South Australian Liberal leader David Speirs in 2021 and 2022, for independent SA MLC Sarah Game when she was with One Nation, and the Liberal senator Alex Antic – whom former colleagues have described as “Trumpian” – after that.
When Covid struck, Mamalis’s account, The Adelaide Set, started including posts about social distancing and mask-wearing among the restaurant shoutouts and beach shots. Before too long, he was asking questions about vaccine safety.
That account – his main one, although he has multiple accounts on multiple social media platforms – now is dominated by boilerplate rightwing issues including “mass migration”, net zero, trans issues, the persecution of Christians and the fear that western culture will be replaced.
Turning Point Australia says its mission is to “breathe our values into politics” and to unite the minor rightwing parties to restore “conservative leadership” in parliaments.
Jammal has outlined plans to boost minor rightwing parties at South Australia’s election in March, then use that template for future elections.
In a Turning Point Australia podcast released on 7 December, Jammal and Mamalis discuss their plans. Jammal says Turning Point Australia aims to establish chapters across the country, including in high schools and universities.
He says he wants politicians to shut them down, to see them as “the biggest threat in keeping voters informed” and describes the group as “ambassadors” for freedom, free speech, family values and business.
“That’s the vision ultimately Charlie Kirk trusted us with,” he says.
Kirk, known for hosting incendiary debates on US university campuses, was assassinated in September.
Jammal says he “worked on a few tours” with Farage, that “Nigel connected us with Charlie”, and that then Kirk gave him a “branding agreement” for Turning Point.
He claims Turning Point Australia has fought more elections than other third parties but, when asked, Turning Point Australia did not provide any specifics to back up that claim.
Jammal also says that they have a multi-pronged strategy to influence elections, including through handing out how-to-vote cards favouring minor rightwing parties.
In an email to promote the podcast, Jammal says Turning Point Australia is focused on South Australia because it will use strategies honed in the lead-up to the March election – which Labor is expected to win convincingly – as a blueprint for future state and federal elections.
Mamalis refers to Antic as “the King” and “the real leader of the Liberal party” who wants to “eradicate all the moderates” from the party to ensure it is comprised of “ultra-conservative Christians”.
Mamalis endorses Antic’s idea but says the strategy is taking too long and that the Liberal candidates who ended up being selected were weak. “You need 10 Antics to do what he wanted to do,” he says.
In the meantime, he says, thanks to preferencing, votes for the conservative minor parties will flow back to the Liberals.
Asked about Mamalis’s comments, Antic says “10 Antics sounds outstanding in theory but in reality I suspect one can have too much of a good thing”.
Mamalis featured on army veteran Sam Bamford’s Two Worlds Collide podcast in September. He and Bamford rail against immigration numbers, Mamalis refers to climate change as a “religion”, they agree with billionaire Elon Musk’s view that falling fertility rates are the biggest threat to the world and Bamford talks about hearing his views repeated in parliament.
Mamalis – who also talks about the pseudoscientific ancient astronaut theory and intergalactic government – says he got more outspoken during Covid after talking to Adelaide researcher Nikolai Petrovsky, who refused to take approved vaccines in favour of his own vaccine candidate.
He says he then became more vocal again when he stopped working in parliament.
Mamalis and Bamford discuss Australia’s neo-Nazi movement and Mamalis says he fights with neo-Nazis who want to “accelerate” things, saying that they want to get censored so they have “an excuse to get violent”.
He is critical of their strategy and says he tells “all of them” that their mission will fail. “Even their leader who they love, Hitler, is a failed leader who lost the war. So when you idolise a loser, you become a loser,” he says.
He says he also warns them they are “puppets”.
“We’re trying to help them and tell them, hey guys, we’re trying to warn you of what’s happening to you,” Mamalis says.
He says he asked them to study “elite theory”, a political philosophy, and that within that there are swing voters. “If you want to win elections, you’ve got to win those guys over,” he says.
When asked why he was giving the National Socialist Network advice, Mamalis says “the only people promoting the NSN are the media outlets obsessed with writing about them”.
“Turning Point refuses to give extremists oxygen,” he said in an email.
When asked by a follower why he was talking to Nazis, Mamalis replies that “extremists don’t disappear when you ignore them”.
“All humans whatever their politics need to be confronted, challenged and brought back into the light.”
He says he warned fringe groups that their actions help the government and that their ideology has no place in mainstream Australia.
Increasing transnational cooperation
Mamalis is just one of a growing number of influencers who span the political spectrum from left to right.
Experts point particularly to the increase in conservative Christians railing against immigration and net zero targets, often infused with a nationalistic fervour.
They say Australia’s rightwing influencers have been emboldened by Reform’s success in the UK and energised by Kirk’s assassination. Eight of 11 rightwing influencers who briefed the White House on antifascism and helped shape Donald Trump’s distorted views on the issue are current or former Turning Point USA employees.
“There’s an increasing transnational cooperation between groups that are broadly united against the ‘enemies of Western civilisation’,” says Dr Kurt Sengul, a Macquarie University research fellow and an expert in the media and populism.
“There’s an exchange of strategies and tactics, people see what works in one context and try to replicate that. The murder of Charlie Kirk has mobilised people.”
Experts say this web is loosely linked but they boost each other and help promote these ideas into the mainstream via conservative political groups.
For example, Mamalis regularly features controversial anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe, who has worked with Antic, Game, Pauline Hanson and other rightwing politicians to try to restrict abortion access.
Howe also regularly features Game and has posted videos of Hanson at her house.
‘A failure of civic responsibility’
Lise Waldek, a terrorism studies lecturer at Macquarie University, has written extensively about how some rightwing groups particularly used the pandemic to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, leading to a “statistically significant increase in language associated with far-right extremism” and conspiratorial language.
Waldek says with extremism there are “two strains”: one which believes violence is the only way to make change and one which believes it can be done politically, through mainstreaming.
“This tactic is called opening the Overton window but now is called mainstreaming … you co-opt the right, effectively co-opt the left, and suddenly they’re using your terminology.”
She says some of the themes in current Australian rightwing discourse – such as the use of the term “mass migration” or the battle against net zero – are being “mainstreamed”, including by politicians.
Segments of the media, Sengul says, have also helped mainstream fringe ideas.
Lucy Hamilton, a doctoral researcher at the University of Technology Sydney who studies the importation of rightwing tactics from the US, is worried about what she says is a conservative voting bloc that has drawn in more and more groups under its umbrella.
And she says while Australia has some protection from the spread of US-style rightwing tactics, there is also reason to be wary.
“On one level we’ve got a good electoral system which protects us from the fringe things that America has to deal with,” she says.
“On the other hand we have very fragile party branches and structures, which are susceptible to groups with motives they’re not confessing to.
“[And] our information is pretty broken. We have a failure of civic responsibility where people are overwhelmed and not paying attention so they don’t know the conservative they’re voting for is a Pentecostal Christian who wants to take away abortion completely.”
Sengul says the right has not been able to capitalise on the youth vote in Australia as it has overseas, and that Turning Point Australia will struggle to rebrand conservative Christian values for youth as the religious dynamic is not as strong in Australia.
