News of former United Patriots Front founder Shermon “The Great Aussie Patriot” Burgess’s conversion to Islam has broken. Crikey announced that he has taken his Shahada, or Islamic oath. Cooee.

For the majority of Burgess’s public career (sic), he styled himself as the great opponent of Islam in Australia. Now, following so long out of the social media limelight, he has turned Benedict Arnold (or is that Yusef Islam) and thrown in his lot with the “enemy.” Has he changed, or has what he was—what he is—been right in front of us the whole time?

          To a large extent, Burgess’s story is that of a generation, what we call the “Class of 2015,” that group of bandit patriots that swung in on a social media vine, and set the cause of nationalism back ever since. He is a man of his times, lost, confused, and seeking an identity in the endless subcultures that futurist Alvin Toffler predicted would become our lot.

          In a fractured society under assault, he has lost his head—he is so confused about his “identity” that he takes whatever he can. It’s like a revised line from the 1953 biker-rebel classic The Wild One. When asked what’s his identity, like a pensive Marlon Brando he responds, “What have you got?”

Nothing so beautifully illustrates the insincerity and narcissism of the “class of 2015” more so than the conversion of former United Patriots Front (UPF) founder, Shermon Burgess, to Islam.

Firstly, Burgess spent the better part of the previous decade waging war against Islam in Australia. Along with his classmates from “the class of 2015,” he established Islam as the number one problem, repudiating the essential core of “race” as immutable to the Australian problem. Thanks to them, hard-line nationalist Nathan Sykes coined the term “diversity minus Islam,” stressing that the sole demonisation of Islam overlooked the problem of multi-racialism.

The year of our Lord 2015 proved a heady time as the “Patriot” movement arrived. It had gestated a couple of years earlier as Australian conservatives followed in the steps of those like Geert Wilders and Tommy Robinson. AFP splitter and Christian-conservative Darrin Hodges already embraced anti-Islam as the cornerstone of the Australian Protectionist Party (APP), from which a grubby stoner named Nicholas Folkes emerged.

          When Hodges disappeared for good, Folkes formed Party for Freedom (after Geert Wilders’ political organisation), while back in 2009, Ralph Cerminara and Nathan Abela established the Australian Defence League (ADL). They were imitating Tommy Robinson and Alan Lake’s English Defence League (EDL) which was founded that same year.

          The ADL was a hot news item for a moment, as both Abela and Cerminara provoked confrontations with the Muslim community culminating in unknown persons shooting up 24-year-old Abela’s Greystanes home in western Sydney in April 2014. Slightly wounded in the shooting, Abela decided he’d had enough and wound up the group (consisting of him, Cerminara and a trickle of uncommitted supporters). Noteworthy, at the time, Shermon Burgess made a video encouraging his viewers to “grab a membership form” and “support the ADL.”

          By 2015, the anti-Islam “patriot” movement exploded after the Lindt Café Siege by Iranian refugee and incurable dingbat Man Haron Monis, 50, was shot dead by police following the lone-gunman siege in a bungled rescue effort in which two hostages were killed. That occurred between December 15-16 2014 and was the catalyst for the anti-Islam backlash.

          Several groups sprung up, the most prominent being Burgess’s UPF. There was also the Q Society, a pro-Zionist micro party, the True Blue Crew, Soldiers of Odin, the Australian Liberty Alliance (ALA), whom pint-sized rocker Angry Anderson represented for a while, and most importantly, Reclaim Australia. There was also a Sri Lankan Christian who ran ‘Catch the Fire ministries,’ named Danny Nalliah. He later created the Rise Up Australia party just to further split the anti-Islam vote, for whom Pauline Hanson was by far the greatest beneficiary.

          The importance of Reclaim Australia rested in its mainstream accessibility. The “movement” was conceived by three ordinary Australians: Wanda Marsh, John Oliver and Liz Shepherd. Hitherto, without any political involvement, the three felt the issue of the incompatibility of Islam with so-called “Australian values” needed to be expressed by the “concerned mums and dads,” ignored by the mainstream parties. In essence, it was a movement for “normies” and not radicals.

          Left-wing historian Troy Whitford screwed up again when he described Reclaim Australia as a “shortlived radical nationalist group.” The ‘history lecturer’ failed to understand it was neither radical nor nationalist, but a reactionary civic construct concerned primarily with the doomed idea of “assimilationism.” RA went to great lengths to exclude the radical and extreme element, something that Shermon Burgess was only too happy to oblige with; momentarily anyway.

          Whitford, if he knew his business, would only need to recognise who had spoken at these rallies to identify RA’s correct typology. The likes of Hanson and George Christensen and brown-skinned Nalliah are pretty far from nationalist, which doesn’t stop at Islam but includes all non-whites in its inventory of undesirable races and cultures.

          Likewise, he’d have to have researched those who were barred from joining RA rallies, such as AFP President Dr Jim Saleam, famously removed (briefly) by Nick Folkes’s people at the Martin Place rally in 2015*, and Squadron 88’s Mark McDonald along with Ross “the Skull” May, who in August 2015 got ejected from a hired coach at Gundagai en route to a Melbourne rally and in a staged publicity stunt conceived to signal the UPF’s “non-Nazi” credentials. Similarly, a great theatre was made of the expulsion from Melbourne rallies of Nationalist Alternative (NA) members and wannabe national socialist, the heavily tattooed Glenn Anderson, whom the media had a fondness for snapping at these events.

*As an interesting side note, in 2014, Neil Erikson arranged a meeting between Shermon Burgess and Dr Jim Saleam explaining that he was organising “rallies” and inviting him to speak. Later, he would freeze Dr Saleam out from the RA rallies, leaving it an entirely civic-patriot construct.

However, the key players were Reclaim Australia and the UPF. If memory serves, Burgess made claims on Social Media that he “started” Reclaim Australia, and maybe he had involvement but there are no transcripts to be sure, and Burgess is a natural-born liar. Although, he has been recorded as sharing a connection with RA’s “brand advisor” and businesswoman, Monika Evers, at the time.

Nevertheless, before RA, Burgess was fronting a noisy and ramshackle metal band named Eureka Brigade. They (didn’t have) a hit with their rousing crowd favourite, Shit On A Mosque. He claims the UPF came about because Reclaim Australia was being “hijacked” although he didn’t say by whom. But he intimated it was undergoing a softening. This was the time of the relentless Facebook video, and Sherm was always in front of his phone, recording one. He is noted as telling his audience, “We are more hardline nationalist (sic) compared to some other groups that are more democratic anti-Islam.”

Commenting further, he added, “The problem with democratic anti-Islam is a lot of these movements, without even realising it, can be diluted, watered down and become politically correct themselves.”

That was cute, considering he just described the entire strategy of the UPF and their anti-Islam affiliates; as their movement was a watered-down form of nationalism that they could never grasp. Moreover, it was an indication Burgess was stealing ideas from nationalist pages.

Due to the presence of antiracists at the RA rallies, the UPF was conceived as muscle for the safe passage of the “concerned mums and dads”. But their increasingly aggro confrontations with the lanky Antifa warriors that opposed them turned RA’s mums and dads away from rallies. The concentration of testosterone preoccupied itself with Antifa and lost sight of the rallying cause. Although, once again, few could truthfully account for what that was. Whom were they petitioning? Was it the government? Good luck there. What did they hope to achieve? The RA placard wavers never had a plan, just a grievance and scapegoat. They sought “diversity” minus Islam without comprehending that diversity equals Islam.

In a blinding flash, those who “united” were soon at each other’s throats. In a smattering of months, egos jostled with personal agendas and the scope of the social media behemoth that constituted the primary “movement”.

The key voices of those days were Shermon Burgess, Ralph Cerminara (who joined but was quickly kicked out of the UPF), Blair Cottrell, Dan Evans, Nick Folkes, Pauline Hanson, Dennis Huts (Qld UPF), Mike Holt, Kane Miller, Scott Moerland, Danny Nalliah, Kris Richardson, Tom Sewell, Christopher Shortis, Kirralie Smith, Kim Vuga and Linden Watson. Boiling out of this stew came XYZ and The Unshackled, both stridently civic, with the former now betting the board, ideologically speaking.

Tom Sewell, however, was pro-White from the get-go and Cottrell repeatedly skirted around the issue in typical entryist/mainstreaming fashion. He wouldn’t be told that it was doomed, and as such, the UPF, keen to distance itself from accusations of “racism” placed an Asian ahead of a rally and was once photographed with Africans.

As such, both Sewell and Shortis had their videos censored by Cottrell who wrestled the role of leadership from Burgess. It appears that jealousy was stoked by Cottrell’s arrival on the scene, as his undeniable charisma immediately sidelined the yobbish prattle of both Burgess and Erikson. This led the pair to ultimately leave the UPF, but attack their former comrades ceaselessly. In a space of a handful of months, the infighting had begun, while Cottrell, Sewell and Shortis attempted to diverge into mainstream politics with the ill-fated Fortitude, which was nothing but an ad hoc formation of conservative talking points supposedly designed to lull in members to what would thereafter (in the fullness of time) tear away the mask and reveal itself as a full-blown nationalist party.

Fortitude was quickly dead and monies gathered from its members and a large deposit by Christopher Shortis were never retrieved. The account created by Shortis was drained. Early the following year, Shortis, who was by now disenchanted with the drama, and Cottrell’s increasing ego-mania, defected to the Australia First Party.

Facebook PMs exchanged between Tom Sewell and Nathan Sykes over roughly nine months between 2015-16 reveal the drama and are reproduced here. These messages, discovered in a trove that the latter kept for the accuracy of his writing (and forgot about), disclose much more about those days and the “movement” than just Burgess’s involvement, which is covered. They are therefore of historical significance as well placing Burgess and Erikson in context as to how the UPF’s leadership viewed them. The final message presages the arrival of the Antipodean Resistance in 2016.

Former buddies, Burgess and Cerminara turned against each other, primarily over Facebook spats. Everyone was hacking on everyone. The True Blue Crew (sic) and its leader, Kane Miller, were facing off with Soldiers of Odin and their head honcho, Jay B Moore.

          UPF peripherals broke away, such as the awful Indie Norris, the UPF’s “financial handler”, in a hubris-addled social media storm. It was all coming apart, even though Blair was finally in control. Both Erikson and Burgess did all they could to undermine Cottrell, going so far as to seize control of the UPF Facebook page and shut him and Sewell out.

          By October 2015, less than a year after the UPF began, Burgess made a video announcing his exit from the group, which he officially handed over to Blair. What he claimed was his weariness at being mocked, was no doubt a face-saving excuse to cover the fact that Blair had thrown him out. Burgess told his followers, “It’s because of media, it’s not because of death threats from Islam, even though I’ve received many of those, it’s because of dumb fuck patriots out there.”

          Burgess went on to whine, “I lost my job because of being involved in this movement. I nearly lost my vehicle because of being involved in this movement. I almost ended up in jail because of this fucking movement.” Yet days later, he announced he was back. As to the messages between Sewell and Sykes show, that was news to the UPF.

          At some point in 2015/16, Sykes became aware of a video in which Burgess accused him and Blair Cottrell of creating a fake “Luke McMahon” account and calling his father a paedophile. Sykes chuckled when he heard, not knowing what to make of it, but guessing it was just more nonsense. Years later it became apparent that his stalker, Luke McMahon, was playing games involving Burgess and Erikson.

The accusations were astounding: Sykes paid so little mind to Burgess (other than commenting on his public shenanigans) that he hadn’t considered the Cooma Clown even had a father, much less that he was a kiddie fiddler. Moreover, there was no connection between him and Cottrell, they’d only met once. It was so bizarre he just laughed it off. Plus, Sykes kept a relatively low profile, so it seemed like a crude attempt to draw him into the open. But why? What was Sherm the Germ up to? The two had never so much as exchanged comments on a Facebook page. They were strangers to one another.

It was Sherm against the [patriot] world, and Sherm was too proud to examine his behaviour. Why should he? In his mind, the whole “movement” owed him so much. He had created it, just as God made the world. Although it took God only seven days whereas Sherm had to put in serious hours, the comparison was apt. Sherm was a social media god and he insisted on being respected as such. It was more important than driving Muslims out of Australia.

Licking their wounds, he and Erikson turned once again to Facebook, which was the kingmaker of heroic patriots. They decided to maintain their connection to the UPF but as its originators, naming their page, UPF Originals. Whoever devotedly followed them would buy into the soap opera in which they accused Cottrell of being a “Nazi” and “abusing steroids,” and mocked him jealously. Maybe they had a legitimate axe to grind, but witnessing how the two comported themselves it seems that Cottrell sensibly decided to sever the cancerous growth.

It was well known that Erikson and Burgess both abused alcohol and marijuana. But Burgess also had a penchant for Ice, and, legend has it, a girl gave him head while he made a video one time. We can’t verify that but it’s what we heard at the time and the general scuttlebutt was fairly accurate.

Meanwhile, Islam kept growing in Australia; along with Chinese, Africans, Indians, Nepalese and all the rest.

*

At the end of 2015, Burgess teamed up with Nick Folkes, the comedian responsible for Party for Freedom. PfF, which we referred to as “Peanuts for Freedom,” was heavily invested in a battle against the AFP. However, their big mistake was not to surrender, and Folkes was driven near insane by our persistent and unrelenting ridicule.

          Be that as it may, Folkes was as eager for publicity as Burgess and Erikson. This is why he made national headlines by seeking to cash in on the 10^th anniversary of the Cronulla Uprising. We mean literally, cash in because he created a line of T-shirts with the catchphrase, “Cronulla, it’s a riot,” and other shlocky merchandise. As Nathan Sykes wrote in The Australian Nationalist White Book:

SHERM THE GERM-AN

For all his condemnation of Blair Cottrell and the AFP for being “Nazis (and they were the only ones who weren’t it seems),” as anti-Islam went on the wane and the alt-right rose in its place, Sherm went full-on Nazi. He’d always worn a Mjölnir (Thor hammer) necklace and even when lambasting the “Nazis” he accused of infiltrating the “movement.” This upset those who identified as Nazis.

          But not only did Burgess embrace “the fuhrer,” Nick Folkes, who long maligned Jim Saleam on the bogus pretext he was a “Nazi” and therefore a “Muslim sympathiser” was off Facebook, onto Russian social media site VK, and posing with a copy of the Bible and Mein Kampf. By then, Folkes had cancer, and so he’d retired from “public life.” Moreover, his Liberal Party handlers no doubt insisted on it. Folkes was over; done for. But who were these people without the strength of conviction? Who were Burgess and Folkes that could “turn on a dime”?

          At some point—and it’s a testament to our lack of interest—Sherm endeavoured to revive his glory days by donning an Abkubra hat and leading a patriots’ march through Canberra. This was after the UPF was long dead, Tom Sewell was busy with the Lads Society, and Sherm didn’t matter a jot. And it showed, with the paltry turnout of supporters. It was so unremarkable it was never covered by the media and not even the anti-fascists seem to have kept a record (that we can find).

          And until today, that’s all she wrote for ‘Sherm the Germ.’ He was passé, an anachronism. Nobody took his revamped “Nazi” image seriously and his double-fold efforts to undo all the work he’d done for the Zionists by submerging himself in the central cliché of national socialism (German style) by becoming a rabid anti-Semite was as convincing as a $5 Rolex. However, this chestnut has enabled him to rationalise his galvanic swing from white-pride neo-Nazi to devout fundamentalist Muslim via his noted admiration for grifting ex-kickboxer and mixed-race Islam-convert, Andrew Tate.

          Mixed martial arts form a large chunk of Sherm’s identity now, and he’s particularly fond of arm wrestling. He is into Bruce Lee’s martial art Jeet Kune Do and practises in his mum’s backyard on a wooden Wing Chun practice dummy.

          However, his “conversion” is hipper than it seems to those still grappling with his epochal hypocrisy: it’s part of a derangement that the far-right is experiencing as a response to the hyper-degeneration of western morality.

Formerly identifying as a Christian, it seems that the religion of his forebears isn’t enough to sustain the image that Burgess has of himself as an ultra-moralist (sic). And this is something he picked up off social media as members of the far-right convert to Islam a-la Andrew Tate because, they reason, it insists on strict traditional values. But these are not Australian “values” and once again Burgess is lost in a confusing tailspin of abstracts that he can’t grasp.

          Having overlooked race as an imperative in any form other than as a cultish concern via his short-lived national socialism, Burgess has overlooked the Australian race. They all do.

          Initially, as an anti-Islam warrior, he was blind to the Australian race because that struggle was concerned with intangibles about values, and not the Australian people ourselves. As a neo-Nazi, he viewed “race” through the lens of cultism, which refracted reality and reduced it to chauvinism. He waved flags, appropriated the “kitsch” of Australianness, and embraced the jingoistic tropes. However, he never ventured to understand what an Australian truly is. If he had, then he’d have become a proper nationalist and fought to preserve our inherent uniqueness as the newest peoples spawned from the European race. As it stands, he’ll have to be banished as a traitor when the time comes for him to be held to account.

What was always missing from the Class of 2015 was the essential concern for Australians; genuine patriotism. They waved flags, and they articulated nationalistic platitudes but it was, at all times, about them. These were personal crusades for status as well as a striving for tribal belonging. In their case, the idea that their fellow Australians were their tribe was less attractive than finding peers to whom they could relate.

The one glaring thing about that generation is the self-interest dressed up as community concern—a false collective conscience compelled by selfish, naked and uncultivated ambition, which was vague about purpose. Theirs was a hunger for attention no different to the drag queens who preen and prance publicly while privately enjoying being at the centre of the furore over Drag Queen Story Hours.

Burgess’s story is a clamour for identity and meaning; it is an ongoing journey unattached to any actual political principle because he never got that far. That is the point at which most abandon their odyssey and turn inward.

Others experience all their growth solely in the environs of political organisational structures. Our prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has never held a job in his life. From school to university and onwards he only existed in the cloister of the Australian Labor Party—he doesn’t recognize Australia, the people, or our heritage. He knows policy, and he is experienced in the ways of hypocrisy and compromise, but after that, he’s a facsimile of a leader; he will never be a John Curtin; he will never be a genuine Australian. None of them is “real” people in the soulful sense—they will never be a mensch.

Burgess believes that his “journey” is rich in meaning, no matter what strange curls it has taken. He has found “wisdom,” and like all in the social media age, their experiences are paramount. They know, and they will share. Everything becomes a show-and-tell, from what jewellery he fancies, to what protein supplements he buys—it’s all for show.

Take, for instance, this post of his on Facebook on September 11, 2022, “Living a rough lifestyle is the best way to truly awaken spiritually and better understand yourself. The harder your past was, the stronger you are in the present.”

Empty phrases like this are unproven, and the reality is, we’re talking about a man who is still young and obsessed with his personal growth. Even back in his anti-Islam guise, was he ever concerned about the cultural invasion of Australia or the existential threat Islam posed to his identity? That’s not too hard to answer given, like one stricken with Stockholm Syndrome, he has embraced that which once terrified him. Therefore, it was never the enemy; the foe was inside of him. Far from being the “great Aussie patriot” he is the “great Aussie hypocrite.”

His life has been one of throwing himself into fads which he quickly abandons when they can no longer afford the attention he sought by adopting them. Now, from being marginalised and terrified, he has joined those that terrify; he has found another powerful “tribe.”

          We cannot overlook the fantasist here, either. From larping (Live Action Role Playing) as a Viking to his ‘radical’ conversion to Islam; none of it is reality. He has no reality, and so he sifts through the labyrinthine layers of the subcultures that comprise our digital reality to choose one that sits with his notion of values; which are paradoxical since they’re the antithesis of what instinctually drives him—the reverse of that to which he is drawn. Burgess is a degenerate, so he compensates for his ersatz guilt by rubbing his followers’ faces in his newfound hard-line “values.”

Missing is the patriot, as it has all along been absent. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson said, meaning, those who cloak themselves in patriotism often do so to disguise its absence with them.

We await his celebration of the next terrorist outrage committed in the name of Islam on our shores, which, whatever the impetus, will be unacceptable no matter what sort of statement against US-Zionist hegemony is implied in the action. And we look forward to his joining ISIS, or whatever US-fabricated guise the militant Islamics adopt hereafter. Just how serious is the boy, after all? In for a penny, in for a pound, as they once said.

Be it Christianity, or Islam, Burgess has bought into the fatality of millennialism; that great day of reckoning. Only, he’s chosen a foreign god, and turned his back on the west instead of fighting for it. But then, that’d be asking too much of a self-parody.

Burgess is nothing, he never was, and never will be.

That Burgess never left Facebook is quite telling; he’s like a kid who couldn’t hold down a place of his own and so returned to his parents’ nest. So far as we can tell, he’s never left that either—he’s still at his mum’s place in Cooma making videos of himself in his backyard; the iconic suburban clothes hoist visible in the background.

          For a man who’s done nothing with his life, who has authored no achievement that can be pointed to, and who has mastered nothing much less himself, he’s pretty quick to dole out the life lessons. If anything, he is social media—he is its organic spasm; its narcissism in corporeal form.

The most obscene thing about this is that certain Muslim groups are legitimising this twerp, and sharing memes of his utterances as if they were ineffable pearls of wisdom. Then again, Joe Biden is the leader of the free world, and Putin’s losing the war in Ukraine; men can have babies, and there’s no such thing as a woman. Why shouldn’t he become a prophet? ■

About Author

Wayne Clough

See author's posts