Who is more extreme? Blair Cottrell or the Greens?
So somebody was silly enough to commit the ultimate crime of giving Blair Cottrell an interview again.
As a result the sky fell out of the heavens onto the earth, shattering the ground, drying the oceans and killing all the first born children.
Wait that didn’t happen?
Well you’d be hard pressed to know that considering the response from Australia’s journalistic class. Apparently the interviewer Adam Giles (the first indigenous Australian to head a government) is now some sort of crypto-Nazi white supremacist. In the wake of the interview there was copious weeping, wailing and rending of garments across the entirety of the Australian fourth estate.
Which was of course entertaining to watch in and of itself.
The interview and some of the hilariously over the top reactions from the fainting couches of the elite have been covered comprehensively in detail here at The Unshackled by Tim Wilms and over at XYZ by David Hiscox so I won’t rehash the hilarity here.
No my takeaway from the night was far less funny.
You see immediately after the interview in the middle of the feeding frenzy Greens MLC for NSW David Shoebridge made the announcement on Twitter that he would be boycotting Sky news and would be urging all other elected politicians to do likewise until proper grovelling from the network was in evidence.
I will refuse all offers to go on Sky until it gives a full apology and clear commitment to never again air this man’s hateful views. I hope my Greens colleagues, and all MPs who care about decency, will join me. pic.twitter.com/JHDVSL240S
— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) August 5, 2018
David you see didn’t want to be associated with the extremism of the dastardly Mr Cottrell. He even made a complaint to ACMA asking for Sky news to be officially censured.
And who can blame him? After all Cottrell advocates for the violent overthrow of the Australian government, the cancelling of the constitution, the abolition of the police, armed forces and judiciary, the state confiscation of all private property and the implementation of a totalitarian one party state.
Wait, Cottrell doesn’t advocate for any of those things?
I just assumed he must have since on August 19th of this month David “I don’t want to be associated with extremism” Shoebridge will be speaking to a conference full of people who advocate for all those things and many more.
You See David is to be a keynote speaker at the “Keep Left” conference, the yearly symposium of the Trotskyist “Solidarity” group.
For those who don’t know “Solidarity” is a Revolutionary Marxist group founded and led by Ian Rintoul, one of the most prominent Communist activists to grace Australian soil in the last half century.
Rintoul began his career in extremism in the mid-1970s Ipswich with the International Socialists and has boasted of being arrested almost one hundred times across a long and career of division, destruction and hate.
Rintoul was instrumental in organising the violent anti-Pauline Hanson protests in the mid-90s as well as being a key figure in the planning of the S11 riots in 2000 where police, ambulance workers and even the West Australian premier came under attack in an orgy of violence and vandalism.
Since 1999 Rintoul has been primarily involved in the Refugee movement as the founder and major spokesman of the Refugee Action Coalition. In this capacity he has been quoted and interviewed hundreds times by the ABC without his continuing extremist associations being mentioned once.
Imagine that.
Ian has also been instrumental in supporting the Anarcho-communist Left Renewal faction of the NSW Greens.
Ian and his band of fanatics have been vital helping to prop up the struggles of “former” Stalinist and soon to be Ex-Senator Lee Rhiannon as well as good old David Shoebridge himself in their factional struggles with the slightly-less-extreme “tree-tories” faction led by Richard Di Natale.
This struggle has been going badly for David so pandering to his extremist base by speaking at their conference is probably something along the lines of a quid pro quo.
I’m not a fan of Mr Cottrell. Anyone who knows me could describe my decided ambivalence regarding the big blonde man and his brand of activism.
But no fair minded observer could possibly compare the “extremism” of Cottrell (which mostly seems to consist of old facebook posts) and that of the Marxist extremists that journalists interview without comment every week.
You can’t seriously posit an equivalence between an old social media post praising Hitler (which Cottrell says came from a fake account) and an organised conspiracy to overthrow the government and institute a totalitarian state.
Especially when the former is a pariah and the latter clearly has friends in multiple parliaments and sympathetic ears in the media.
No journalist will lose their job over the media’s promotion of extremists like Rintoul. No show will be canned, no producer or presenter dropped from a great height.
No official apology will be demanded of Shoebridge for making a speech on policing and racism to a room full of people so extreme that they seriously believe that police are a racist social construct created by capitalism to oppress brown people and must be abolished.
Despite his pretentions Cottrell and his “extremism” aren’t a threat to the system. The fashion in which almost every establishment figure is currently lining up to crap on him and his tiny band of followers from a great height should illustrate that. If anything his clumsy attempts to distance himself from the smears thrown at him are an aid to those in power.
The threat to our society comes from the extremists who don’t get attacked, or even named by the media. These extremists are in our universities, our schools, our public service and our fourth estate.
Don’t be scared of Blair Cottrell. Be scared of the fact that this article will be the first time you’ve heard of David Shoebridge’s little speaking arrangement this month.
A member of the NSW parliament is making a speech at the annual convention of one of the most radical extremist groups active in Australia today. At the same time all Australian journalists seem interested in talking about is whether a low rating pay news channel should have shown an interview with a relatively irrelevant blonde carpenter from Melbourne.
Our establishment is slowly going insane. The fox is already inside the henhouse and the guard dogs are furiously barking at a rock.
And that’s something that should scare all of us.