Patriotic Alternative führer Mark Collett’s latest desperate bid for attention again puts his followers at risk of prosecution, all for the sake of his insatiable greed.
Last weekend on one of his endless video streams Collett hosted Frank DeSilva, an unapologetic former member of the American nazi terrorist gang The Order.
They discussed a recent film about The Order’s crimes, which included bank robberies, forgery, and most infamously the murder of Jewish radio broadcaster Alan Berg.
On 18 June 1984 cowardly members of The Order shot Berg twelve times as he stepped out of his car in Denver, Colorado.
The FBI tracked down the gang, and their leader Robert Jay Mathews burned to death during a confrontation with FBI agents at his home on Whidbey Island, Washington state.
Other leading fanatics from The Order served long prison sentences – its last surviving main member Richard Scutari was released in January this year.
A fringe member of the gang, Frank Silva (who now calls himself Frank DeSilva) was Collett’s guest on last weekend’s show where he made no secret of his pride in what he had been involved.
The PA führer aimed to titillate his audience of frustrated young men, mainly in their teens and twenties. They get a thrill out of listening to a terrorist, and Collett gets their money.
Collett, who says Silva has “always been a great part of the movement” doesn’t care whether any of his listeners are pushed into actual terrorism or other crimes.
Behind bars
He doesn’t care whether they waste their lives, or whether they destroy other lives. All he cares about is that in the meantime he gets their cash.
And for some reason he gets away with it. Many of Collett’s unfortunate associates have ended up behind bars, some of them for terrorist offences, but the führer himself has stayed at liberty, a fact which raises eyebrows elsewhere on the far right.
Since his days as a Leeds University student, Collett has been known for combining personal cowardice with trying to overcome his insecurities by associating with what he thinks are stronger and more violent extremists.
He admitted on film to a Channel 4 journalist that he admired the drug dealer and terrorist murderer Johnny Adair, who did have one thing in common with Collett.
Both of them like to stab (or in Adair’s case shoot) their colleagues in the back, Collett metaphorically and Adair literally.
Irish race gang
More recently Collett has been known for turning his back on Northern Ireland and associating instead (both personally and politically) with extremists from the Irish Republic.
This might be how he got to know Frank Silva, who hit the headlines a few months ago for supposedly “advising” violent Irish racist gangs.
When journalists looked more closely into Silva’s background, they found that he has talked up his importance in The Order so as to sell books and online streams to wannabe killers.
Although he spent twelve years in prison, Silva’s actual role in The Order seems to have been relatively minor, likewise his role in the Ku Klux Klan (though he was convicted on a misdemeanour charge for a Klan cross burning).
Silva seems a perfect fit for Collett. Big talk aimed at gullible young customers, but essentially a money-grabbing fantasist who has achieved nothing even in the tiny and foetid pond of neo-nazism.
Time for a close look
Nevertheless, the crimes that Silva and Collett could inspire with their deliberate glorification of racist violence could be all too real. It’s time for the authorities to take a close look at Collett and PA.
PA’s annual conference will be taking place on 4 October in the Midlands and will undoubtedly be addressed by hardline foreign nazis.
It will be disgraceful if UK Border Security fail in their duty this year as they did last year, when they allowed violent racists Sascha Rossmüller and Blair Cottrell to enter the country and speak at PA’s conference.
