Blair Cottrell is a smart guy.
He's well presented, articulate and all the more dangerous because of it.
Dumb guys who think Adolf Hitler's picture should be hung in classrooms usually cover themselves in tattoos of swastikas and Iron Crosses.
They're not well presented. They're far from articulate. And they don't often get a reach-around from national TV news programs.
Cottrell, who's done prison time but doesn't look it, is the United Patriots Front leader described in the mildest terms by Channel Seven as a "right wing activist".
Young Liberals are right wing activists. The Institute of Public Affairs are right wing activists.Blair Cottrell is something else, a man who happily claims to have used violence and terror to manipulate women and who apparently thinks the Maximum Nazi is an excellent role model for schoolchildren to contemplate.
But he lifts weights, he dresses well and so he got to appear in a news story on Seven about "activists" in Melbourne "hoping to harness the power of social media to protect them and their families" to "create a kind of neigbourhood watch" to dispatch "locals" to incidents and attacks as they are reported.
Watching the story on Seven, listening to Blair Cottrell, viewers were left in no doubt that there was a crisis, suburban Melbourne was terrified, the state government was paralysed and it was all the fault of African gangs.
None of this is true.
This was not just a disgraceful episode of racist fear-mongering of the sort attempted by Peter Dutton last week. It was much worse. This gullible cheerleading gave succour and support to the vilest bottom-feeders who emerged in the wake of Dutton's stirring. It treated the thugs and pocket Nazis in attendance at that so-called community meeting as though they were concerned Rotarians or anxious pensioners.
They weren't.
Seven's reporter Jodi Lee, flushed with her "exclusive" access to the meeting, actually touched on its nature, describing "right wing activists", helpfully rebadged as self-described "patriots" gathering from all over the state at a United Patriot's venue to discuss how they might help out.
It wasn't a thousand miles removed from describing an early Brown Shirt rally in 1930s Berlin as a meeting of good Germans deeply concerned about the recent upsurge in Jewish violence.
Groups like this are not currently as big a threat as they would dearly love to imagine themselves. But treated as legitimate players in the political system, rather than a clear and present danger to it, they could one day be very dangerous, not just to some lone migrant, but to everybody who disagrees with them.
Men like Cottrell, smart enough to present as reasonable citizens with genuine alternatives to a failing system, are infinitely more dangerous than all the bellowing idiots with death's head tattoos.
In one of the bizarre ironies of modern politics, Dutton, who is empowering Cottrell and his ilk every time he gives voice to his dark fantasies, would once upon a time have been professionally interested in him merely as a minor criminal. They are now politically entwined as two men seeking the same end, power through fear.
