| No Images? Click here   By Samantha Storey and Nick BaumannChris Mathias, a Huffpost reporter who covers extremism in America, recently investigated a white supremacist podcaster who works as an emergency medical technician in southern Virginia.Alex 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.McNabb recently came under investigation, but he is still working, though there is no evidence of his mistreating patients. Still, his continued employment as an EMT 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. Here is Mathias on how he got the story.What was the seed of this story?Earlier this year the website Angry White Men, which monitors white supremacist figures, noted that Alex McNabb was "hiding in plain sight." Unlike other white nationalists, he never hid his identity, and bragged online about working as an EMT. He was "undoxxable," as he put it. For me, this raised the question of whether an avowed and public racist should be allowed to work as a medical professional. And it made me wonder if there was any evidence he had mistreated patients based on their race, religion or sexual orientation.Talk about the verification process.One of the photos McNabb posted to Facebook showed the inside of an ambulance. On a box in the ambulance were the words "LifeCare Medical Transports." I called that company, which is based in Virginia, and was able to determine that McNabb had worked there at one point.A few more phone calls and I figured out McNabb was now working in Patrick County. I emailed some officials in Patrick County to confirm his employment but never heard back. Then, a couple of months later, McNabb posted a long thread to Twitter, which included a screenshot of an email I'd sent to a county official. (Someone had forwarded it to him.) It turned out the Virginia Deptartment of Health had received an anonymous complaint about McNabb, and he was now accusing me of submitting the complaint. (I did not submit a complaint.)By doing this, however, McNabb confirmed two things for me: that he was employed as an EMT in Patrick County, and that he was under investigation by the state. I may have never heard of the investigation had it not been for McNabb himself!What was most surprising about the reporting?I listened to a few hours of The Daily Shoah, one of the most popular neo-Nazi podcasts, for this story, and was shocked at how emboldened McNabb felt. How comfortable he felt referring to patients as racist slurs and comparing black patients to animals, and knowing that he very well may face no consequences.
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