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Alt-right political activist Lauren Southern

Lauren Southern (centre)

Sky News has been dragged over the coals on social media for its Sunday interview with bulging fascist Blair Cottrell, with news director Greg Byrne saying the interview was “wrong”. But is programming aggressive nationalist views really a departure compared to some recent Sky offerings? 

Cottrell is not an activist, as he was described on the network. He has been convicted of arson, stalking, making threats to kill and breaching intervention orders and has served time. He has said Adolf Hitler’s picture should be hung in every classroom.

He has bragged of using  “violence and terror” to manipulate women and said Jews are “as small physically as they are degenerate in character… the white races are coming for you.” He spent much of 2015 filling Facebook with (now deleted) pseudo-intellectual musings (collected by anti-fascist blogger Slack Bastard) about the “abstract ideals hidden within a mendacious global (yes Jewish) agenda” and praising the canny intellect behind Mein Kampf (which he believes ought to be issued to every student in Australia): “just read the book. If you can’t understand the book, or if you can’t summon the mental energy to try, stay out of politics, you were not made for it.”  

Sky News director Greg Byrne’s walk-back and the promise that they would investigate the circumstances in which Cottrell appeared on the channel (perhaps someone left a door unlocked?) carries the the implication the engaging white supremacists (and those adjacent to white supremacy) is a one-off, innocent misstep. This is a claim that simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, looking at Sky’s recent history.

Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux

Aryan catalogue model Lauren Southern sauntered from her airport “It’s ok to be white” T-shirt modeling session into the Sky Studios with Rita Panahi. So rapt were the pair by media and government cowering from robust free speech and debate, they didn’t get a chance to broach other interests of Southern’s, like, say, the time she was detained in Italy for attempting to block a ship that rescues stranded refugees in the Mediterranean, run by SOS Mediterranée with support from Médecins Sans Frontières.

Since then, she has taken time out from her beer hall putsch to tell Sky’s Paul Murray about the failures of multiculturalism and join her co-conspirator Stefan Molyneux on Andrew Bolt’s Sky News show to talk about ethnic IQ differences and so-called “white genocide” in South Africa. 

Milo Yiannopoulos

Sparkly bully Yiannopoulos has been besties with commentator Andrew Bolt for quite some time, along with his obsession with “virtue signalling” and “feminism is a cancer” and all that. He also, through his work with Breitbart News, laundered the voices of neo-Nazi groups into the mainstream. This lusty embrace from Sky reached a fever pitch during his tour of the country last year, re-uniting in person with his dear Andrew along with other Sky hosts. Here’s the glimmering-eyed intro from Ross Cameron: 

I have to confess to you, the word ‘fawn’ comes from ‘faunen’, old English, which means rejoice, extol, exalt. And there are little bambis bouncing around the studio because we have gone the full fawn. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Milo Yiannopoulos.

Kirralie Smith

Speaking of Cameron, he caused something of a stir with his quite remarkable anti-comedy stand-up set at a fundraiser for the Q Society’s Kirralie Smith — she was being sued by a halal certifier for allegedly portraying him as “part of a conspiracy to destroy Western civilisation from within” and “reasonably suspected of providing financial support to terrorist organisations”. 

The event also featured VIP guest Larry Pickering delivering the following: “Let’s be honest, I can’t stand Muslims, if they are in the same street as me, I start shaking… They are not all bad, they do chuck pillow-biters off buildings.” Smith distanced herself  from the statement, but with the following caveat:  

What disappoints me the most is that the media are on a witch hunt over Larry and Ross BUT completely ignore the fact that there are Muslims that actually do throw gays off buildings! Where is the same level of outrage directed at the Islamic practice that inspired Larry’s comment?

Sky has had Smith on several times, including when she called for a 10-year moratorium on visas being issued to people from the 57 member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation.