EMT Under Investigation After Racist History Discovered
Alex McNabb, a white supremacist podcaster who works as an emergency medical technician in southern Virginia, is under investigation by the state’s Department of Health, a spokesperson for the department confirmed to HuffPost.
McNabb, 35, is a frequent co-host of “The Daily Shoah,” a popular neo-Nazi podcast. On the show he regularly tells stories about being an EMT, often referring to patients by racist slurs and comparing black patients to animals.
An anonymous complaint was made on Nov. 26 against McNabb, who works as an EMT in Patrick County, according to Marian Hunter, public relations coordinator for the Virginia Department of Health’s Office of Emergency Medical Services. Because it’s an “open and active investigation,” Hunter did not describe the nature of the complaint.
His continued employment as an EMT, however, raises ethical and legal questions about whether an avowed racist and white nationalist can objectively make life-and-death decisions for patients of color, Jewish patients and other minorities, experts say.
“Anyone who is espousing this type of vitriolic racism on a regular basis — it casts serious doubts on their ability to provide emergency medical treatment for someone who does not fit their criteria for an ethnostate,” Keegan Hankes, senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told HuffPost.
McNabb has not been charged with a crime and will not be suspended from his job during the state’s investigation, which could last up to 60 days.
McNabb didn’t respond to a HuffPost request Friday for comment about the investigation.
In a recurring segment on “The Daily Shoah,” McNabb assumes a persona he calls Dr. Narcan. In these segments, he tells his co-hosts stories about being an EMT. He regularly refers to black patients as “dindus,” a deeply racist slur common among the alt-right.
During a Nov. 8, 2016, episode, McNabb compared black patients to animals. “The heat brings out the wild in the dindu,” he said, adding that, “as winter approaches, the animals go into hibernation and the ridiculousness of the [911] calls goes down.”
In an Oct. 4, 2016, episode, during a Dr. Narcan segment, McNabb referenced an apartment complex that houses people from “all over Africa and West Africa.” He said emergency workers called it “Ebola Alley.” He then called a black woman a “Dinduisha” and compared her to a shaved “Harambe,” referring to the famous gorilla.
“It’s hard to find a dindu vein anyway, because they’re black,” he said during the episode.
He then told another story of an “unruly young African-American male child running around” an emergency room.
As it turned out, this young African-American male was there to get blood drawn, so guess who volunteered to take his blood?” he told his co-hosts, who laughed in response. “Dr. Narcan enjoyed great, immense satisfaction as he terrorized this youngster with a needle and stabbed him thusly in the arm with a large-gauge IV catheter.”
Vickie Gendraw, pediatric phlebotomy coordinator at Tufts Medical Center, told HuffPost she was “appalled” at McNabb’s story. Medical professionals, she said, should “never, ever” use large-gauge needles on a pediatric patient.
Typically only small-gauge needles are used for children. Large-gauge needles, Gendraw said, “tend to hurt, because the needle is large, and it bruises the pediatric patient.”
McNabb, who attended the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, has appeared on over 130 episodes of “The Daily Shoah” (“shoah” is a Hebrew word for “calamity” and is used most commonly to refer to the Holocaust), according to research from Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies the far right. Titles of these episodes include “J.E.W.s Always Lie,” “Are You Ready For Some RaceWar?” and “BLACK ALERT! BLACK ALERT!”
McNabb is an administrator of a Facebook group called The Final Solution to the Optics Problem, which features a Nazi flag as its banner image. The “Final Solution” is a reference to the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews during World War II. “The Optics Problem” refers to an ongoing debate in alt-right circles on how best to expand their movement.
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