Despite being infamously fired from Saturday Night Live after a series of racist and homophobic jokes were unearthed shortly after he was announced as a cast member, Shane Gillis will inexplicably host the next episode of the show on February 24.
Gillis’ controversial remarks were made on his podcast, which to the surprise of no one, has not improved in the five years since Gillis was ousted at SNL. In fact, according to a new report from Seth Simons, Gillis has routinely featured two guests, Matt McCusker and Andrew Pacella, who have a documented history of denying the Holocaust. And their controversial views don’t stop there.
Via The Daily Beast:
McCusker and Pacella have dedicated their podcasting career to exploring conspiracy theories, of which they subscribe to quite a few. They are Sandy Hook truthers, arguing in two separate episodes of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast that the slaughter never happened. They are 9/11 truthers who believe, per Pacella, that “the Israelis” knew about the attacks in advance and may have orchestrated them “to take over our media and destroy our country.” They believe in Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that inspired a gunman to fire three shots at Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizza shop. In 2021, Pacella and McCusker walked their listeners through a lengthy document that argues Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis—who they said may be “a bastard Rothschild”—trafficked and perhaps even murdered children.
While they’re clearly no strangers to every wacko conspiracy theory under the sun, denying the Holocaust appears to be McCusker and Pacella’s main wheelhouse on their WarMode podcast.
“Prove to me that it happened,” Pacella said on a March 2020 episode. “Show me, historians. Why are they lying, dude? Why are all these so-called survivors making up stories, then? It was a hallucination. OK, man. How about the actual footage of the showers, bro?”
As Simons argues for The Daily Beast, Gillis is about to boost his public profile by hosting SNL this weekend, which will undoubtedly lead people to his Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast where McCusker and Pacella are routine guests even after Gillis told them to pull back on their antisemitism. They did not.
(Via The Daily Beast)