As a person sensitive to accusations that the Rebel appeals to Nazis, this was probably a frustrating weekend for Ezra Levant.
It can’t be fun to arrange a “fact-finding mission” to Israel for yourself and your colleagues, only to find that one of them has used the opportunity to shoot a video meriting praise from both David Duke and Richard Spencer.
Gavin McInnes is one of those characters you sometimes find on the far right, whose pseudo-comic riffing just barely conceals the casualness of his bigotry. The Rebel traffics in such personalities, who appear to be heartily welcomed so long as they primarily direct their anger toward Muslims. But every now and then, it turns out that — surprise! — someone who makes broad, sweeping generalizations about members of one religious group also has theories about others.
In addition to his Rebel gig, McInnes does four weekly episodes of The Gavin McInnes Show, normally locked behind the paywall of Compound Media’s website. He continued taping it during the Israel trip with the Rebel’s evident blessing: Monday’s edition depicts 74 minutes of McInnes and Levant chatting at the front of a tour bus; Thursday’s featured McInnes talking Middle Eastern affairs with the Rebel’s Faith Goldy and Sheila Gunn Reid, accompanied by four gradually emptying bottles of wine.
And so on Saturday, a three-minute, 56-second excerpt from the March 8th instalment popped up on YouTube.
In it, McInnes reflected on…
• how the trip has affected his attitudes: “I’m becoming anti-Semitic.”
• his desire to clarify the beliefs of Holocaust deniers: “Like at one point, the [Yad Vashem] tour guide goes, ‘You know, and there are people who think that this didn’t happen.’ And I felt myself defending the super-far-right Nazis, just because I was sick of so much brainwashing. And I felt like going, ‘Well, they never said it didn’t happen. What they’re saying is that it was much less than six million and that they starved to death and they weren’t gassed.'”
• the Holodomor: “That was by Jews. That was by Marxist, Stalinist, left-wing, commie, socialist Jews.”
• ultimate responsibility for WWII: “Wasn’t the Treaty of Versailles, wasn’t that disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals?”
• Jews in general: “God, they’re so obsessed with the Holocaust. … I don’t know if it’s healthy to dwell.”
That was sufficient to earn approving citations from the former head of the KKK and the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-right:
“Holodomor was Ukrainians. I think it was ten million Ukrainians who were killed. That was by Jews.” – Gavin McInneshttps://t.co/ZhuPsfLnll pic.twitter.com/5tShTMIJGr
— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) March 12, 2017
Gavin’s a straight shooter, fam. https://t.co/4FfLtHfepD
— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) March 11, 2017
This apparently occurred while McInnes was flying back. Upon landing in Toronto Sunday evening, he promptly lashed out at the pair, claiming the clip was taken out of context — a message repeated in a Rebel video he shot in the international arrivals area of Pearson’s Terminal 1.
“No offence, Nazis — I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but — I don’t like you,” he affirmed. “I like Jews.
“This all started because a clip from my show, The Gavin McInnes Show on the Compound Media, was taken out of context — a clip wherein I say, ‘Don’t take this out of context.'”
It’s true that the video in question included him saying “Please don’t take that clip out of context.” But the plea was in specific reference to his explanation of the neo-Nazi claim that it “wasn’t gassing” that killed the Jews.
There’s no indication elsewhere in the video that the other views, such as those blaming Jews for the Holodomor, were not his own.
McInnes didn’t respond to CANADALAND’s request to tell us what we were missing that supposedly distanced him from his statements. And asked if he had any issues with the remarks in the clip, Levant simply pointed us back to the response video.
So in order to definitively state that McInnes is an anti-Semite, we at CANADALAND shelled out $6.95 U.S. for a glimpse behind Compound’s paywall. And now having watched the entire 55-minute video mostly recorded in the lounge of Jerusalem’s Harmony Hotel, we can say: McInnes has a lot of theories about the hierarchies of races. And, if anything, his remarks are worse in context.
Here are transcripts of the other hateful and wildly ahistorical views about Jews and others that Gavin McInnes shares in just that one paywalled video:
I’m in the [Holocaust] museum, and [the guide] says, “The Jewish peoples, they killed six million of us, and who came to save us? You know?”
And I’m like, “Uh, me. You’re welcome.”
So yeah, I just thought, how about at the Holocaust museum: a thank-you to Britain and… We’re in Israel! “Hey Britain, thanks for creating Israel! Thanks for drawin’ it up.”
Drawin’ up them borders that were pretty generous, by the way. In fact, it shrunk down and then there was massive wars that built it back up to the borders they got in ’48. So I think that was kinda nice? And I think killing the Nazis was kinda cool?
I mean, I have an aversion to this whole mentality, too, ’cause it’s more of the white-males-ruin-the-world. Yeah, white males were Nazis. But white males killed the Nazis. Yeah, Americans had slavery. But America ended slavery.
By the way, I’ve said this theory on the show before, but I think one of the reasons [General Douglas MacArthur] stayed in Asia for so long and was so determined to help them is ’cause his fuckin’ concubine, his little — not concubine, his mistress — whose name was… Cookies? Or Bubbles? She was a Filipina, I think he was fucking. He brought her to the White House once. And I think she was one of those rice balls that had a fat ass. And speaking from experience, I know those are hard to quit. I would want to stay at war to keep those things alive. <laughs>
And the Jews have this real hatred for white males. Me, basically. And you see that with Trump.
Palestinians are stupid Rottweilers. And I had a Rottweiler before. And the way we would discipline him is we’d punch him in the face really hard. And it wasn’t animal abuse. If I did that to my daughter’s dog right now, he would just die instantly. But this dog, a Rottweiler, you go *bfff* in the face, and it’s like flicking his nose or something. He goes, “Oh. Okay. Cool. ‘Don’t piss on the carpet anymore,’ I got it.” And that’s what the Palestinians think when they see this wall [that Israel built around the West Bank]. They go, “Oh, you’ve established yourself as the alpha. I’m a pussy. I appreciate it.”
Palestinians are stupid. Muslims are stupid. And the only thing they really respect is violence and being tough.
Why don’t we take back Bethlehem? Why don’t we take back Northern Iraq? Why don’t we start our own Crusades? That’s what the Crusades were. They weren’t just someone picking on Muslims for no reason — they were a reaction to Muslim tyranny. We finally fought back.
I don’t like that Jews don’t see themselves as white. They don’t see themselves as our guys, and therefore the Nazis who killed them aren’t that dissimilar from the Americans who saved them. It’s just goyim. “Those bad guys, they were mean to us, and we can never trust anyone again!”
No, the Muslims are the bad guys. Westerners are the nice guys. Judeo-Christians are the nice guys. Stop farting on my parade.
[after telling a story about him and some friends who were wearing “Make American Great Again” hats getting kicked out of Pharmacy Bar in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood]
So we left, and I was like: We’re the new n****rs. MAGA is the new Black. Like John Lennon said, “Women are the n****rs of the world.” MAGA is the new Black people. If you like Trump, you are a Black man in 1945 trying to have water at a liberal fountain.
[With Israel and Jews,] there’s this bizarre phenomenon where they go, “All right, Nazis are the worst thing in the world. My life is dedicated to making sure Nazis never happen again.” (“Never again,” in fact, is a motto.) “What were Nazis into? Oh, they were into eugenics and racial purity, they were white males who were blond. All right, I hate that forever.”
That’s why they hate Trump. I’m convinced. Because he fits that paradigm; he fits that description.
And you see this with American liberals, who arguably are heavily influenced by their Jewish Marxist professors: they have this same aversion to the white male in this, in the letterman sweater.
So, Jews, stop fighting us. We’re your friends. Stop being scared of these blond — gorgeous blond <points to himself> — jocks. We’re not starting a Nazi party. And by the way, multiculturalism is way more your enemy than this myth of racial purity. We’re not pushing racial purity. Seven guys are, okay, and they’d happily fuck a hot Indian. They always do. Um, or a rice ball.
These are just selections. We couldn’t bring ourselves to type up the full digressions into John Hughes movies (part of the Jewish cultural hegemony) or his hemorrhoid (“really painful stuff”). He expands on the latter in today’s episode.
