Prominent Australian nationalist Blair Cottrell has been banned from YouTube after posting a non-political travel vlog which included a visit to a Queensland gym where he trained with a local active club.
That video, titled “Staying in the tallest tower on the Gold Coast”, had only been viewed about 4,000 times since it was posted in late June when the whole channel was removed in the early hours of Wednesday.
In a message to Mr Cottrell, who has never been banned by YouTube before, the US tech giant cited “severe or repeated violations” of community guidelines in permanently removing his channel and informing him he would not be able to access or create any others.
He filed an appeal, which was rejected early on Thursday morning.
But Mr Cottrell told Noticer News he did not receive a single strike or a warning on the premium $14.99-month account, which he had been using to post workout advice, cooking videos, and other fun, non-political content, like the vlog documenting his trip from Melbourne to visit Australia’s tallest building.
“I just wanted to make some new content doing normal stuff, like eating, exploring and training. Stuff that wasn’t even political at all,” he said.
“I’ve been vilified by the media in a really vicious way, a lot of guys in the nationalist community have, so I thought why not combat this slander with some footage of what my life is actually like and what guys in the community really get up to.
“I consider myself to be a normal, reasonable person and most of the guys I know and network with are the same. Obviously, someone has a problem with me putting this out there. We’re supposed to be seen only as an ‘extremist threat’ and my very first effort to break that perception was quickly shut down, which is really eye opening.”
Mr Cottrell said YouTube may have acted on instructions from the Australian government because the video included footage of a workout with an active club, since a submission to an ongoing Senate inquiry into “right-wing extremist movements” claimed earlier this year without evidence that such groups were fronts for violent organisations.
“‘Counter extremism experts’ suggest ‘active clubs’ (read: guys working out together) are an ‘evasion tactic’ for extremist groups hoping to build ‘shadow militias’, citing examples of groups from America and speaking of organised violence, but they never provide any examples or precedents of this ‘shadow militia violence’ they’ve dreamt up,” he said.
“Many of my friends are in active clubs. I’m not a group member, I just train with them sometimes and there’s no ‘extremist militias’ or ‘evasion tactics’ going on. All these guys actually do is train and eat together, and occasionally host a protest.
“It’s all completely legal and above board. They’re normal people with jobs and families and I was just censored hard for trying to show that.
“I think ‘counter-extremism’ bureaucrats are paid to make the simplest of group activities seem disingenuous or threatening, just to nip any group of ethnically conscious White guys in the bud and stamp out dissent.
“It’s completely undemocratic, probably illegal and actually contributes to a negative radicalisation of young men, who end up feeling as though they can’t even workout together or use YouTube.”
Mr Cottrell said that the ongoing persecution and censorship of nationalists recommended by unelected “counter-extremism” experts working for global think tanks was “ironically feeding extremism”, and questioned whether this was deliberate.
“There are plenty of young men in Australia who are already sceptical of popular social life and government policy, “counter-extremism” finds these guys and targets them with hate-speech crimes and brutal censorship,” he said.
“This doesn’t make these guys disappear, it just makes them more disenfranchised and more radical.
“It’s a worrying trend.”
Critics have warned that the Senate’s inquiry into “right-wing extremist movements” may be incompatible with United Nations international human rights norms, and risks being weaponised by the far-left to silence their political opposition.
The Australian Christian Lobby said in a submission in April: “The Terms of Reference for this inquiry should be of major concern because they concern activities involving no violence, not even appropriately connected to violence. Submissions are invited on whether there even exists the ‘capacity for violence of extremist groups and individuals holding such views’.”
Another submission by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a New York-based “international” NGO set up by former US government officials, written by Joshua Fisher-Birch and Alexander Ritzmann, based in the US and Germany respectively, warned about the so-called “active club strategy”.
The CEP recommended online censorship of nationalist activists, the shutting down of crowdfunding efforts, and the closure of bank accounts. Less than two months later Melbourne activist Michael Nelson was debanked due to his political views.
The group also urged the government to monitor “changes in strategy of organisational models of right-wing extremist groups due to the proximity of Australian key extremist individuals to the transnational Active Club network” which it claimed was “specifically developed to evade law enforcement monitoring and intervention”.
