"Volk", in the original ideology of Hitler's Nazism, referred to not just the German nation or population, but to the racially defined and idealised "master race".
Sewell used the word on Sunday deliberately, and more than once. Then he urged the marchers to organise - to come to the next rally "as communities, as churches, as footy teams, as workplaces and as political organisations" because they were more powerful that way.
For the dentist Lomax, words like these have resonance. Lomax initially played down his NSN leanings when confronted by this masthead this week and then offered an explanation when told this paper's investigation had spotted him at multiple neo-Nazi events.
Lomax said he supported the NSN because "I would like a future for our country" controlled by "the founding stock of Australia: Anglo-Celtic Australians". Pressed further, Lomax hung up.
Another recruit, spotted at NSN training camps but not at the Sunday rally, is known publicly as Stirling Cooper (real name Nigel Clifford).
He's a former porn star who is now "retired and repenting" and teaching Andrew Tate-style tactics to dominate and subdue women. He calls himself the "World's #1 sex coach for men".
Cooper did not answer requests for contact, but posted on X on Thursday saying: "Should I put on a charity boxing match between members of ANTIFA and members of NSN?," attracting a response from other Nazi accounts.
Sewell is the national leader of a group of affiliates who, according to Deakin University's Josh Roose, are networked globally and locally, and who meet regularly through various organisations and chapters. Sewell is also pushing to form his own political party.
"They are directly inspired by Adolf Hitler," says Roose, "his writings in [autobiography and propaganda piece] Mein Kampf, the trajectory of the national socialists in Germany in power - and they draw lessons from that.
"Tom Sewell effectively views himself, right down to his little moustache, as a Hitler-like figure."
Hitler won power in Germany initially at the ballot box, becoming the country's political leader in 1933 after years of street violence in the context of mass unemployment and economic misery caused by the Great Depression.
In his speech on Sunday, Sewell referred to migrants, and the politicians who support migration as "the people that are hurting this country, the people that are destroying it, the people that have caused your suffering, the people pushing us out of housing, the people pushing us out of our neighbourhoods".
Roose says Sewell's organisation views the current moment as one that suits its narrative and purpose. Like Hitler's Nazis they also have "a very clearly defined set of enemies ... the Jewish population, the political left, LGBTQ+ communities, and migrants".
Some in power are suspicious of the focus on the NSN. Liberal senator Alex Antic leaned heavily into a false online meme this week to suggest the appearance of the neo-Nazis at rallies and other events during the week was part of a conspiracy to discredit the broader anti-immigration movement.
"There's no doubt how useful they've been for the government, the media and the establishment that's hellbent on trying to subdue dissent growing in mainstream Australia about a country in decline," Antic said in a speech in parliament. "And I think that's odd."
But the NSN has antecedents that go back to the Reclaim Australia marches in 2015, which brought thousands onto the streets to protest against the cause of the day - Muslim immigration in the wake of the war on ISIS and the Lindt cafe siege.
That sentiment morphed into an online-only group, the United Patriots Front, that disintegrated when its guru, Shermon Burgess, was overthrown in an internal putsch by Sewell acolyte and avowed Nazi Blair Cottrell.
Then came the Lads Society.
The alternative stream of far-right extremism - the sovereign-citizen-style anti-vaccine, anti-authority freedom protests - emerged as a result of COVID, and the extraordinary actions of state and federal governments to impose vaccine mandates and lockdowns.
These people are inherently anti-authority, making them strange and probably unstable bedfellows with the explicitly authoritarian neo-Nazis.
All of it, however, is founded on a bedrock of Australian anti-immigration sentiment that has, over the years, shifted its target from Muslims to African "gangs" and now, increasingly, to Indian migrants, who were accused at the weekend rallies of taking "our" housing and jobs, and who were also singled out by another Liberal senator, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, before she retracted her comments.
According to Roose, though, what happened over the weekend and what followed - including Sewell's direct challenge to Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan at a suburban press conference - was a significant shift in the group's tactics.
It also prompted swift action against Sewell, and his key acolytes, who were arrested the following day and charged with dozens of offences including violent disorder, affray, unlawful assault and discharging a missile over the weekend's outing. On Friday, he was refused bail.
"Until now they've been quite careful. But over the weekend we saw them cross that threshold into violent extremism, which is ... not only deeply concerning, but speaks to them thinking it's time to escalate," says Roose.
Roose said the violence - at the rally, and afterwards - did not contradict their efforts to take their rhetoric mainstream. It served to gain them more attention.
"The attempt to escalate through violence could also be an attempt to catalyse a deeper engagement with them among this mass [anti-immigration] movement that they see as ripe for the picking."
And even a stint in jail might not perturb Sewell. It was, after all, during a stint in Germany's Landsberg prison that Sewell's hero, Adolf Hitler, wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) - the work that serves as Sewell's inspiration.
Despite years of dedicated recruiting, the numbers of hardcore members of the NSN remains relatively small, says Roose - 100 to 150 people nationally in a country which "generally has a pretty strong dislike of Nazis".
In that context, open violence might be counterproductive.
On Thursday, this masthead tracked down a young NSW man who had donated more than $1000 to the NSN days earlier and attended the Sunday rally and an earlier neo-Nazi meet-up.
The 23-year-old man comes from an extremely privileged private school background and a tight-knit family that supports refugees.
When confronted about his NSN support, the man sheepishly explained he was looking for "community" and was horrified at the violence displayed on Sunday.
"I'm not with them on the Nazi stuff. I don't plan on joining them. My sole concern is ending mass immigration," he explained, conceding his research on this issue was mostly limited to his social media echo chamber.
This masthead is not naming the NSN donor after a plea from his mother. But one young man's toe-dipping exercise can be another's descent to terrorism.
Among those seeking online inspiration or guidance from the NSN are people in Australia and the US who counter-terror authorities fear may be a step away from an act of violent extremism. When police searched the encrypted chat logs of Nikita Casap, a US teen and Adolf Hitler fan arrested by the FBI in April for murdering his parents to finance a plot to kill US President Donald Trump, they found communications between Casap and a senior NSN member.
The conversations reveal Casap was following Sewell's online propaganda and sought occasional advice from the NSN on esoteric extremist topics.
As with the Christchurch terrorist's interactions with the Lads Society on his path to realising the neo-Nazi world's online fantasies of extreme violence, the contact between Casap and the NSN highlights the group's potential to act as a stepping stone for those who go on to maim or murder.
The more Australians the NSN recruits, the greater the risk that one of them will turn nasty. Understanding how that recruitment works and how it can be countered - by law enforcement, security agencies, educators, online regulators - is key to combatting a growing threat.
In his 2025 threat assessment, ASIO chief Mike Burgess warned that, in an environment where social cohesion was eroding and trust in institutions declining, politically motivated violence is second only to foreign interference and espionage as a threat.
It was fuelled by "grievance narratives, conspiracies and online echo chambers", and made acts of terrorism more likely. Most potential terrorist matters investigated last year involved "mixed ideologies or nationalist and racist ideologies", and almost all involved minors who were either working alone, or acting in small groups.
The vast majority are male and Australian-born.
"We expect nationalist and racist violent extremists to continue their efforts to 'mainstream' and expand their movement. They will undertake provocative, offensive and increasingly high-profile acts to generate publicity and recruit," Burgess warned.
"The greatest threat of violence comes from individuals on the periphery of these organised groups ... the most likely perpetrator of a terrorist attack is a lone actor from a family previously unconnected to extremism ... using an easily obtained weapon."
He didn't name names. But given events this week the ASIO boss could have been referring to anyone in, or on the edges, of those black-clad gatherings marching so boldly through the streets.