Lucian Wintrich, a White House reporter for The Gateway Pundit, and Ali Akbar, who are both political activists among the self-described “New Right” movement, split from prior efforts to sanitize and distance their movement from its affiliations with the racist alt-right movement and featured alt-right troll Matt Colligan on their podcast.
On last night’s episode of their livestream podcast, “Wintrich Report,” which drew many viewers after it was shared by New Right activists such as Mike Cernovich, featured a conversation with Matt Colligan—known online as “Millennial Matt”—in which they discussed differences between the two movements, framing the conversation as a civil exchange of ideas. But in this supposed effort to draw a hard line between the two movements, Akbar, Wintrich and Colligan identified a number of shared beliefs, including that white men have been caricatured as evil by “white fat bitches,” according to Akbar, in the media.
“I have a deep fondness for anyone I think is funny,” Wintrich said, expressing his affinity for Colligan and Tim Gionet, a Twitter personality known as “Baked Alaska” who has repeatedly shared Nazi memes online and also appeared at the racist Unite the Right rally.
In a since-deleted Periscope promoting Colligan's appearance, Akbar described Colligan as “a little bit racist” but “so funny.” Akbar said he didn’t care if the conversation meant some people among the New Right “public” left the conversation sympathizing with the alt-right.
Colligan has been identified as one of the members of the tiki-torch protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, that preceded the murder of liberal counter-protester Heather Heyer. During the livestream, Colligan described white nationalist Richard Spencer as a “good guy.” While Colligan claimed that he does not personally identify as alt-right, he could not identify a point where he disagreed with the institutional leaders of the alt-right movement.
Nazi flags, “Hitler did nothing wrong” memes, and attacks on mainstream media were displayed by Colligan during the livestream, but Akbar insisted that the conversation was “not a debate” and that “there's no winner, there's no loser” in the duo's friendly discussion with Colligan.
By featuring Colligan, Wintrich and Akbar demonstrated that some factions of the New Right are still willing to associate themselves with figures who espouse alt-right ideas. Wintrich and Akbar proved that they don’t mind sharing their growing platform with someone who thinks racism and anti-Semitism is a joke.
As one caller put it, “If you two associate with this man and anybody on the alt-right, you two have lost me.”
