1) Patriot Blue

For those of you coming in late, ‘Patriot Blue’ is the name under which local (Melbourne) racist Neil Erikson (& Co) currently performs political stunts — principally in order to film them and upload them to his various Facebook pages. The boys’ latest stunt took place on Wednesday, when they harassed and racially-abused federal Labor Senator Sam Dastyari at his book launch at Victoria University, inter alia calling him a ‘monkey’ and a ‘terrorist’.

As a moniker, ‘Patriot Blue’ was adopted by Erikson almost immediately upon the announcement several months ago that, 25 years since its release as a film, Romper Stomper would be returning to Australian television screens with ‘Patriot Blue’ being the name given to the fictional right-wing group in the series. Prior to the racial abuse of Dastyari on Wednesday evening — which stoopid was preceded by the boys harassing a small ‘Teachers for Refugees’ rally in the city — ‘Patriot Blue’ had been content to harass old people at council meetings: at Yarra Council in September and Moreland Council in October. Note that the disruption of the Yarra meeting in September came on the same day Erikson, along with Blair Cottrell and Chris Shortis, was convicted of inciting serious contempt for Muslims. Again, notwithstanding Erikson’s criminal conviction for harrasing a rabbi (2014), Patriot Blue also teamed up with aspiring politician and fellow Facebook personality and Pauline Hanson fanboy Avi Yemini in August in order to complain about criminal African yoof.

Unlike the United Patriots Front (UPF), of which Erikson was formerly a member — and notwithstanding his criminal conviction for inciting hatred in September — Erikson’s numerous Facebook pages have not been removed by the tech juggernaut, even though they’re jampacked with racist, sexist and homophobic abuse and stoopid. For the record, previous political vehicles, almost all centred on Facebook, have included: ‘Nationalist Uprising’; ‘Australian Settlers Rebellion’; ‘Aussie Patriot Army’; ‘Ban Islam Party’; ‘European Australian Civil Rights League’; ‘Generation Identity Australia’; ‘Nationalist Republican Guard’; ‘Neil Erikson Media’; ‘NRG Media’; ‘OzConspiracy’; ‘Pauline Hanson’s Guardian Angels’; ‘Reclaim Australia’; ‘United Patriots Front’ and ‘United Patriots Front — Originals’.

Of course, scaring OAPs at Council meetings is one thing — and a far cry from beating a Vietnamese student half-to-death, as Erikson’s chums the ‘Crazy White Boys’ done in 2012, or from fantasising about mass murder and collecting child pr0n and guns as his mate Michael Holt was sentenced for in September — but filming himself racially-abusing a Senator in public is probably not the smartest thing Erikson has ever done. Thus, while it did result in him being again invited on to 3AW and a number of other media platforms in order to express his views, it’s also meant that Stan and Roadshow have applied to take legal action against Erikson. Aja Styles (Stan takes legal action against Senator Sam Dastyari’s abusers, Patriot Blue, over trademark infringement, The Age, November 10, 2017): ‘Stan, which is partly owned by this masthead, and Roadshow Productions, has issued a statement condemning the men’s actions and instructed law firm Gilbert and Tobin to seek legal action against the men over the infringement of the Patriot Blue trademark, and use of the Stan name on Facebook.’

See also : Australian Rightists in Pub Slur Iranian-Born Senator As A Racist, Isabella Kwai, The New York Times, November 9, 2017 | Far-right abuse of Sam Dastyari ‘dangerous’, human rights chief says, Michael McGowan, The Guardian, November 9, 2017 | Patriot Blue and other far right groups are ambushing politicians in search of the spotlight, Danny Tran, ABC, November 9, 2017 /// Far Right Harassment of Senator Sam Dastyari, OHPI, November 8, 2017 | Sacked forklift driver at the centre of racist Dastyari video, Nick Grimm, The World Today (ABC), November 9, 2017 /// Dastyari’s harasser doesn’t work for Toll, SBS, November 9, 2017 | Note that Erikson was joined by Ricky/Rikki Turner and Lachlan/Logan Spalding on the day; Logan’s mother was not. happy. on learning that Erikson had dragged her son into the stoopid (while Logan himself has no. regrets).

2) Phill Galea

Erikson’s mate Phill Galea was in court again on Wednesday; only AAP bothered to attend the court hearing and filed this report:

A pre-trial court hearing has been derailed by concerns about a far-right anti-Islam extremist’s fitness to stand trial over allegations he planned to bomb left-wing groups in Melbourne. Phillip Galea, 32, is charged with making preparations for terrorist attacks against properties occupied by Melbourne anarchist groups between November 2015 and August 2016. Victorian Supreme Court justice Lex Lasry on Wednesday ordered a psychologist’s report on Galea’s fitness to be tried, before a committal hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates Court can proceed. It’s understood the report will take six weeks to complete. The pre-trial hearing was originally set down for May, but was delayed until August after the defence asked for more time to go through the evidence. In August Galea’s two-day committal hearing was again delayed while Victoria Legal Aid secured legal counsel to act for him. The 32-year-old is charged with collecting or making documents to prepare for terrorist acts between November 2015 and August 2016. The anti-Islamist is also charged with acts in preparation for a terrorist act between September 2015 and August last year. Police have accused Galea of preparing to target various locations inhabited by the Melbourne Anarchist Club and Melbourne Resistance Centre. He allegedly ordered potassium nitrate for smoke bombs, aligned himself with right-wing and neo-Nazi groups, and researched how to make improvised explosive devices. Arson and explosive experts raided Galea’s home in November 2015 and seized five cattle prods and 362.1 grams of mercury. Computer equipment was also seized, and it’s alleged Galea researched homemade bombs, ballistic armour and guns. The defence and prosecution will return to the Victorian Supreme Court on November 29 for a further directions hearing about Galea’s fitness to be tried. Galea will remain in custody.

While Erikson will remain a wanker.

In the video below (January 14, 2016), Erikson briefly interviews Galea after he got arrest for being naughty. Note that fellow UPF fanboy ‘Farma john’ Wilkinson was alleged at the time to have ‘bought up to 22 stun guns [for use on political opponents on public demonstrations], and that police were still searching for seven of these’ (Police on the hunt for missing stun guns amid fears of use by extremists, Angus Thompson, Herald Sun, January 13, 2016); ‘Farma john’ was still promoting the UPF as recently as February.

3) Neo-Nazis & The Media

Richard J. Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial (Verso, 2002, pp.242–245):

What was wrong about the media’s reaction to the verdict was not that they interviewed Irving, but that they failed to prepare properly for doing so. This contrasted strongly with the hard work and dedication of the lawyers involved in the case. Small wonder, then, that Irving thought he could make capital out of his media appearances after the verdict. For Irving himself, the ‘feeding frenzy’ of the media after the verdict prompted a reaction like that of an attention-seeking child:

I do ITN, Australian ABC live, Today, Radio 4, Radio 5 . . . BBC World TV . . . Breakfast TV . . . Newsnight . . . The phone rings all morning every thirty seconds . . . BBC Radio 3 . . . Italian radio . . . Los Angeles Radio . . . Radio Teheran phones for an interview. Radio Qatar want to interview me . . . How very satisfying it has all been.

Thus a week after the verdict, Irving was claiming ‘I have managed to win’, because ‘two days after the judgment, name recognition becomes enormous, and gradually the plus or minus in front of the name fades’. The cartoons which had him denying the trial had ever taken place, or the verdict ever delivered, were not far from the truth.

The historian Andrew Roberts agreed with Irving’s assessment of the defense’s triumph as a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ because the trial had brought his views to the attention of a worldwide audience. ‘The free publicity that this trial has generated for him and his views has been worth far more than could ever have been bought for the amount of the costs,’ he wrote after the trial. It was Irving, not Lipstadt, who was being interviewed on virtually every television channel. The law had let him propagate ‘his repulsive political message’. It had been a public relations triumph, and all at the expense of Penguin. Nevertheless, Irving’s boast that even if he had lost the courtroom battle, he had won the media war was a vain boast. Reports about him in the press were overwhelmingly critical. Stories on the verdict outnumbered those printed during the trial by a factor of three to one. At sea for much of the courtroom battle, journalists now had some solid ground on which to base their assessments. Analysis of fifty-five newspaper articles published from 12 to 17 April 2000 revealed that while fewer than fifteen had described Irving as a ‘gifted researcher’, forty had emphasized his activities as a Holocaust denier, thirty-seven had stressed the fact that he was a racist, and thirty-five had declared that he had falsified history. ‘As post-verdict television interviews showed,’ thought one commentator, ‘he has no idea how loathsome and isolated he is.’ Irving’s frantic attempts on the afternoon after the verdict to find a legal pretext for preventing television stations from showing video footage of some of the more repulsive moments from his speeches failed completely, and millions of viewers were treated to the spectacle of Irving describing Holocaust survivors as ‘ASSHOLES’. This cannot have done him much good. Lord Weidenfeld, publisher and pundit on matters Central European, noted too how only a few hours after the verdict, television viewers could see

how this man, crafty, evasive, sometimes crude and even primitive, then once more skilled and almost artful, struggled again and again to piece together the fragments of his reputation. Master of innuendo and of ambiguous formulations that he is, he repeatedly tried to assemble truth, half-truths and fiction into conclusive arguments.

Weidenfeld gave the impression that few took him seriously any more.

On 29 April 2000, two and a half weeks after the verdict, Channel 4 television broadcast a lengthy documentary, lasting the best part of two hours, at prime time, successfully juxtaposing well-chosen dramatized extracts from the trial transcripts with historical analyses and archive footage of the events to which they referred. Well before that, however, Irving had more or less disappeared from the airwaves once more, as the media circus moved rapidly on to other things. Meanwhile, Penguin reprinted Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust in a paperback edition and rushed out the judgment in an inexpensive book format. Piles of both volumes could soon be seen in all good bookshops, and more were to follow in the shape of revised versions of the experts’ reports and two comprehensive accounts of the trial by journalists who had been present in court throughout. Irving might have cruised the airwaves with virtual impunity in the first flush of defeat, but over the long haul, his prospects of continuing but neutralized media fame did not look good.

Irving’s reputation was damaged even in his own chosen milieu of right-wing extremists and Holocaust deniers. He had clearly let them down badly, and in more ways than one. To begin with, he had lost. This did not go down well on the far right. The views of other Holocaust deniers on the verdict ranged from incomprehension to defiance. Many were incoherent and abusive. Some of those which Irving put up on his own website were rabidly antisemitic, some more measured in tone. One report claiming to be from an eyewitness of the court proceedings was mostly pure invention (it put Richard Rampton’s age at seventy, had him surrounded by twenty assistants telling him ‘Stop Irving. Stop Irving now’, and so on). More significant however was the fact that Irving lost a good deal of credit among hard-line Holocaust deniers by the concessions he was forced to make in court. British National Party leader Nick Griffin criticized Irving as ‘too soft’ on the Holocaust issue. Ernst Zündel reported numerous telephone calls from supporters ‘anxious and upset, even angry’, about ‘some far-reaching and off-the-wall concession David Irving is said to have made’. Somewhat patronizingly, Zündel recalled his own experience of court proceedings and lamented the fact that: ‘It is a pity for the cause of Truth in History and for Historical Revisionism that David Irving does not have that experience of how to fight a political trial to draw upon or to fall back on.’ Zündel claimed that there was resentment among Holocaust deniers that Irving had not called them as expert witnesses, and incomprehension that he did not want to be known as one of them. One of them, the gas chamber denier ‘Germar Rudolf’, thought that ‘Justice Gray made it pretty clear that refusing to present me as a witness forced him to reject Irving’s law suit’. Irving, concluded Zündel, was being dragged into the world of the Holocaust. Robert Faurisson indeed thought he had always been there, despite having been ‘subject, intermittently, to promising bursts of revisionism’. Since Irving had not properly studied the Holocaust, Faurisson thought he was on weak ground in court. It was easy to trip him up. In any case, concluded the Frenchman, ‘he cannot be considered a spokesman for historical revisionism’.

Irving was going to have a lot of bridge-building to do if he was to have any friends left at all after the trial ended. At the end of May he flew to California to address an audience of 140 people at a meeting organized by the Institute for Historical Review. The location was kept secret. Characteristically he gave yet another figure, plucked as usual out of thin air, for the money he thought the defense had spent on the action – this time it was 6 million dollars, or about 4 million pounds. One local Jewish organization described him as a ‘freak in a sideshow’. Others objected. Meanwhile Irving’s announcement that he was organizing a so-called historical congress in Cincinnati suggested that the search for funds was going to take priority over mending fences with the Institute for Historical Review.