Why Does Shane Gillis Keep Promoting These Holocaust Deniers?

When Saturday Night Live introduces host Shane Gillis—the comedian who was hired and quickly fired from the cast in 2019 over his history of racist, homophobic, and transphobic comments—on Feb. 24, some viewers will inevitably find their way back to his podcast. Those who keep listening will eventually meet Bill McCusker, the brother of Gillis’ co-host Matt McCusker, and Andrew Pacella, their longtime friend. The two have appeared nearly 20 times since 2019 on Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, currently Patreon’s top-ranked podcast with more than 80,000 paid subscribers. They have hosted a podcast of their own, War Mode, since 2020. Thanks in part to the exposure they received on Gillis’s platform, Pacella and McCusker have grown their audience to more than 12,800 Patreon subscribers, generating more than $32,000 in monthly income. Also, they’re Holocaust deniers.

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. “Do I want Hillary Clinton to be eating fucking children with Huma Abedin, her lover, ’cause she’s a lesbian?” McCusker asks in one of these episodes. “No. But this is where it’s brought us.”

Even more concerning than their embrace of Pizzagate is their Holocaust denial. In the very second episode of War Mode from March 2020, about 26 minutes into their conversation, Pacella tells McCusker that he’s been watching “sick YouTubes” about Robert David Steele, a Holocaust denier, recurring Alex Jones guest, and 2020 election truther. “He’s talking about the evil Zionists in the government,” Pacella says. “Jews are good, Zionists bad. Jews are good.”

Then, with no transition, he starts talking about the Holocaust. “Prove to me that it happened,” he says. “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?”

This was just the beginning for McCusker and Pacella, who have also both expressed admiration for antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke. In a War Mode episode released the following May, they worry that the younger generation is getting screwed over by masking and ADHD medicine. “They’re trying to make sure that they grow up some kind of trans, afraid of germs,” Pacella says, launching into an argument that “maybe we should have, like, a movement” focusing on youth fitness, classic literature, uniform haircuts, and nice clothes. As he talks, McCusker repeatedly tells him to “chill,” eventually interjecting that this is one of their first episodes and they “need to stay afloat for a bit.” (Holocaust denial falls under the “hate speech” section of Patreon’s community guidelines.)

Pacella keeps going, questioning whether “we were the bad guys” in World War II. “Why do they keep making movies where, like, oh, dude, we saved Private Ryan?” he asks. McCusker continues telling Pacella to calm down as he mocks historical narratives about World War II: “We were totally so good that whole time. We were definitely the good guys. We weren’t bad at all. The Soviets definitely didn’t rape and pillage Poland.”

The exchange underlines Pacella’s ongoing fascination with Nazis as well as the pair’s seeming shared belief that consensus narratives around WWII are wrong. In another episode released in May 2020, as McCusker explains why he started “looking at all the post-WWII stuff,” he refers to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews were expelled from 109 countries. “Imagine if I got kicked out of 190 bars and then everyone just—I’m telling everyone they’re assholes… It’d be crazy,” he says. Pacella corrects him: “It’s 109.” (“Once someone from Patreon Inc. comes and listens to this, they’ll probably shut it down,” McCusker reflects.)

In a similar exchange released the next month, the duo agrees that they’ve been “programmed” by mainstream media. “I watch it, but I know that it’s lies,” Pacella says. “It’s all fiction category, dude. You want to read a book? I got some books coming in the mail: Elie Wiesel’s Night—fiction. We have The Destruction of the European Jews—fiction. We have a book from Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry—nonfiction.” (“Patreon probably won’t last that much longer,” McCusker quips again. “But you know, we’re gonna get some things off our chest, whether you guys like it or not.”)

A few weeks later, the two discuss the mythical Hollow Earth kingdom of Agartha, which Pacella claims was of particular interest to Adolf Hitler. “The Nazis had a lot of cool fucking ideas,” he says.

“Some good, some bad,” McCusker replies. “Cutting-edge science.”

“Cutting-edge science and stuff,” Pacella agrees. “And, like, handing out, giving people houses and stuff like that. It’s pretty cool.” (It’s unclear if he knows where the Third Reich obtained the property it so generously gave away.)

As War Mode has expanded its listenership, the hosts have not become any more enlightened. In an episode released in June 2023, after Unabomber Ted Kaczynski died, McCusker says he doesn’t understand why there weren’t any Unabomber-like reactions to COVID health restrictions, when “people were taking away all your rights.” Pacella claims that unspecified parties are pushing for a world government, to which McCusker responds:

“I mean, personally, it seems like if we really—if the Nazis were really fucking horrible, we wouldn’t have taken ’em all in. From my perspective. I think it was the old world that they just tried to completely [demolish]—like that shit in Germany. All the architecture, all the old churches. GOAT shit. Firebomb the whole fucking thing. Like, ‘You are the worst people in the fucking world. We took all of your scientists and fake went to space.’”

McCusker and Pacella have even brought their Holocaust denial to Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast. In one of their earliest appearances, in March 2020, Gillis tells his friends that he’s concerned about associating with them. Bill McCusker assures him that they know to keep a lid on certain attitudes. “Like: ‘[We] love Jewish people,’” he says. “‘They’re the shit. They’re strong. We love them. Hate has no home here.’”

“OK, see, this is what I’m worried about,” Gillis replies. “The genuine antisemitism.” He tells the duo that they have a problem, and that he believes Pacella is behind it. “I’m not behind it,” Pacella says, again appearing to bring up the Holocaust. “We just, we collectively one day were like, ‘Let’s figure out if this actually happened.’”

“Stop, stop, stop,” Gillis responds. “I’m doing the audio on this. There’s no pauses, there’s no take-backs.”

“We just look into shit, dude,” Bill McCusker insists. “It’s not the end of the world. Why can’t we just say, ‘Oh, well, that’s kind of weird. Why is everyone shushing this? That’s weird.’ ’Cause a lot of stuff is starting to be fake.” (Later, he complains about people “shitting” on Q, of QAnon, because “all of his shit is coming true.”)

The duo’s Holocaust denial did not dissuade Gillis from welcoming them back to his podcast many more times after that, as recently as November 2023. While his warning may have convinced McCusker and Pacella to keep their most extreme beliefs under wraps, it certainly didn’t stop them from ranting about “fucking Black t–––––” (Pacella, July 2020), claiming that antifa is “making people get the fucking vaccine” (McCusker, October 2021), or arguing that “girls that have had abortions are fucked in the head because they’re constantly dealing with what they did” (Pacella, September 2021).

Gillis, of course, has his own history of antisemitism. In recent years, he’s used what Joe Rogan described as “the best Jewish voice ever;” contemplated supposed Jewish influence over the media; used the term “Jays” as a shorthand for Jewish people; described someone as “k–-faced” on a right-wing podcast network; and laughed about “retarded Jews” at baseball games. Perhaps this is why he has only loosely moderated his friends’ antisemitism, leading to predictable outcomes.

Consider a March 2021 episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, in which Bill McCusker argues that New York’s Orthodox Jewish community orchestrated the sexual harassment allegations that led to former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation. “The only reason this is happening is ’cause he fucked with the Jays,” he says. “He fucked with the Orthodox boys, with their funerals and their fucking weddings.”

Matt McCusker pushes back, arguing that Cuomo had “nine million other political rivals.” Gillis interjects with a joke—“six million,” a reference to the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust—to which Bill McCusker can’t help but respond with Holocaust denial: “Already revised to five, but that doesn’t matter. Public, that’s public knowledge. Public knowledge. Public knowledge. Look it up. You can look it up. Don’t get mad at me.”

“Chill, dude,” Gillis says. “We’re not talking about it. We’re talking about—listen, listen to this. You come in here, you fight your brother about who's more jacked, you talk about COVID being fake right away, now we’re on to step three, where this always ends.”

Neither Gillis, the McCuskers, nor Pacella responded to requests for comment.

Longtime fans of Gillis are certainly aware of his association with antisemites. In 2020, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast released a Patreon-exclusive episode with Sam Hyde, whose Adult Swim series Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace was canceled in 2016 amidst controversy over his links to the alt-right. In 2017, Hyde pledged $5,000 to a legal fund for neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin. “We’re both huge fans,” Gillis says to Hyde early in the episode. “Me and Matt have been watching your stuff since day one.”

Last year, Gillis also appeared on Perfect Guy Life, the podcast Hyde hosts with fellow Million Dollar Extreme creator Nick Rochefort. At one point in the episode, Rochefort angrily asks why SNL producer Lorne Michaels has Israeli citizenship—an unsourced claim—to which Hyde responds with a comment that’s censored from the recording. Later, Gillis reacts with amused disbelief as Rochefort recalls the time KKK leader David Duke emailed Hyde to praise his work. If the information fazes him, he keeps it to himself.

In the comedy world, there’s a popular argument that it does not matter what comedians say or do, because they are just comedians: It’s all a joke, and no one takes them seriously. But Shane Gillis—who has stood by the racist comments that led to his firing in 2019—illustrates that comedians actually have all the same powers as anyone else with a public platform. When a popular, mainstream stand-up comedian like Gillis sits down with Holocaust deniers and alt-right provocateurs on his podcast—which currently has nearly 50,000 more paying subscribers than the highly influential, long-running "dirtbag leftist" show Chapo Trap House—the Holocaust deniers and alt-right provocateurs walk away with a bigger audience, and their beliefs take deeper root in our society.

It may be that Bill McCusker and Andrew Pacella are fringe figures, but anyone who’s ever had a large audience had a small one first. Take Gillis: Five years ago he was telling bigoted jokes on the internet; now he’s telling bigoted jokes on the internet and hosting SNL. Alex Jones launched InfoWars in 1999, operating under the radar for years before he levied untold psychic damage on humanity. Joe Rogan used to be a minor TV actor, now he’s one of the foremost purveyors of transphobia, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, and white nationalism, who incidentally played a major role in Gillis’s rise from disgraced podcaster to respected stand-up comedian.

Unfortunately, the appropriate time to start caring about extremists is while they’re on the fringe. Gillis can still use his power to steer people away from his friends’ beliefs, or even better, to steer his friends away from those beliefs entirely—that is, if their “genuine antisemitism” indeed concerns him. If it doesn’t, then sooner or later we’ll all reap the consequences.

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