HOPE not hate has identified an anonymised Telegram account belonging to the GB News presenter Leo Kearse. For the first time, we can reveal his shameful posts celebrating terrorism and promoting overt racism and vile misogyny.
Using the pseudonym “Neo Glaive”, Kearse’s posts on the messaging app Telegram suggest that he holds even more extreme views than those he reveals via his public platforms.
Kearse’s Telegram posts show that he:
At around 5pm on Friday, news broke of a terror attack taking place at the Crocus City Hall theatre in Moscow, and multiple videos quickly emerged showing a group of armed men at the venue shooting civilians at point-blank range.
Before ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, a Telegram channel run by the far-right activist Michael Brooks (AKA Michael De La Broc) suggested that an Islamic terrorist group would be found responsible, with a post from Brooks saying:
“Until actual proof emerges, Ockham’s Razor on the claims of false flags, or CIA/Ukrainian attack. This almost certainly was the ever reliable Muslims doing muslim things to non muslims”
Telegram post from Michael Brooks, 22 March 2024
To which Kearse replied, five hours after the attack had begun, and just one hour before he would go on air to present his live show on GB News, Kearse replied to Brooks’s post:
“I knew those guys would come good eventually”
Telegram post from Leo Kearse, 22 March 2024
Kearse’s response to the massacre should be viewed in the context of his often-stated and extreme hatred of Russian people. In other posts to Telegram, he has condemned them in the most extreme terms as “pathetic slugs”, “orc peasants” and much more.
“What an ass backwards shithole country full of street shitting sister fucking peasants”
Kearse talking about Russia, Telegram post, 30 Apr 2022
Like many people in the UK, Kearse is a strong supporter of Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion. However, his stance on the conflict appears to be framed by a far more niche and extreme view that sees it as a battle between “white Christian nationalist” Ukraine against “multiculti Islamified Russia”.
Kearse has publicly advertised that he uses Telegram channels to keep up with news from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and many of the groups he posts in are fractious debate forums between various extremist ideologies including neo-Nazis and white supremacists supporting both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict .
In one surprising exchange from March 15 this year, Kearse – who describes himself as a Zionist – responded to an antisemitic post which claimed that the war was the result of a pro-Ukraine Jewish conspiracy by offering an antisemitic counterpoint against Russia, rather than rejecting the premise:
Aside from his extreme framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kearse’s Telegram posts show a man who constantly resorts to degrading people on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, gender, and sexuality.
In another post from 18 March 2024, Kearse compared racial groups of humans to different breeds of dog. He also used a pseudoscientific “race science” theory to suggest that people who live in northern latitudes had a “genetic trend towards increased intelligence”:
The targets of Kearse’s racist abuse are many and varied. He is an enthusiastic user of the phrase “street-shitter”, a racial slur usually aimed at people from the Indian subcontinent but applied by Kearse at various points to Kazakh, Chechen, Syrian, Belarusian, Indian, Chinese and Sri Lankan people. Examples of his racist rants include referring to Chinese people as “Tiny cocked submissive cunts” or claiming that Chechnya is “full of backwards street shitting goat fuckers”.
Kearse frequently applies the word “peasants” to foreign populations but also occasionally to working class Brits. Despite GB News’s claim to represent the interests of ordinary British people, Kearse regularly disparages British people in international Telegram chats and has mocked those struggling with the cost of living crisis while boasting of his own income:
“I haven’t noticed any difference to my life except energy and petrol costs a bit more, but it’s the cost of a few drinks. Maybe it’s tougher on peasants.”
Telegram post, 18 Apr 2022
“I’ve got kids and we’re gonna live in America or Australia in a few years in a massive house coz I’m rich as fuck”
Telegram post, 10 May 2022
Kearse is also harsh on his native Scotland, telling members of Michael Brook’s’ Telegram channel that “you would not believe what a shit hole Scotland is” and another chat that Scotland is “full of fat feminine socialist gimps”:
Much of Kearse’s Telegram activity is bizarrely immature and misogynistic from a married 47-year-old. In one ill-tempered late-night exchange that began on 15 March this year and continued the following evening, Kearse derided a woman as a “bog monster”, boasted of getting “loads of pussy” and described another user as a “gay cunt”:
Leo Kearse is a passionate supporter of the right of comedians to use offensive and provocative language in their acts, but it is far harder to cite comedic licence as an excuse for the shocking and anonymous Telegram activity shown above.
His endorsement of race science, abuse of ethnic groups and working class Brits and celebration of the Moscow attack should be a red line for GB News and the advertisers who pay their bills.
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