Gavin McInnes dedicated an episode of his show this week to fearmongering about Muslims in America, during which he frequently cited his beliefs about Islam to make a point that there are no white nationalists in America.
McInnes is the founder of the “Proud Boys” fraternity, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has recognized as a hate group and whose members are often spotted alongside white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and other violent groups. Last weekend, Twitter told BuzzFeed News that it had suspended McInnes and other Proud Boys-affiliated accounts from its platform for violating its policy on “violent extremist groups.”
McInnes launched the Tuesday episode of his CRTV show, “Get Off My Lawn,” with a monologue on his belief that news media focused too much on “Unite the Right 2” last weekend and weren’t paying enough attention to court documents claiming that a man whose father is the imam of a Brooklyn mosque was operating a compound in New Mexico where 11 children were being trained to commit school shootings.
“The news is so disproportionately focused on Bigfoot. Bigfoot doesn’t exist. Nazis are not a thing. Islam is a thing,” McInnes said.
“Can you imagine if there was white nationalist training camps? If there was dozens of white nationalist training camps where they did relays, and they had guns, and there was a woman lashed for disobeying, and you heard that they were planning school shootings? Can you even imagine? I think if one student even drew such a scenario on a piece of paper in class, it would be international news.”
What followed was an entire episode dedicated to Pamela Geller-esque Islamaphobia.
It’s difficult to accept that McInnes doesn’t believe that neo-Nazis exist, considering he’s openly flirted with fascism for years. In 2013, Richard Spencer helped McInnes land a spot in Taki’s Magazine, where he penned columns denying the existence of documented white nationalist groups, and praising such longtime figureheads of the movement as Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow. He also wrote a column for Taki’s glorifying the violent Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was responsible for the death of tens of thousands of his liberal political detractors. Over the years, McInnes has offered his platform to people like Emily Youcis, who is an unabashed white nationalist, Identity Evropa’s Nathan Damigo, who served years in prison for a hate crime and, most recently, Sam Hyde, neo-Nazis’ favorite jokester.
Later on in the program, McInnes was joined by Clarion Project’s Ryan Mauro to further stoke anxieties about “American jihad.”
Mauro told McInnes, “I’ve done a lot of intelligence reporting on these right-wing extremists. I know what they are because I’ve combatted them. You’re not one of them. So, when Twitter says you’re a right-wing extremist and they’re going to ban you from Twitter, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
McInnes went on to lament that too much of the news coverage of the violence at Unite the Right in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year focused on the killing of Heather Heyer.
