Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has compared so-called “social justice warriors” to Maoists and the Ku Klux Klan in an interview with radio host Alex Jones. Corgan called the activists a “propaganda control arm” who are “here to control us” as Jones chimed in: “It’s classic tyranny.”

“They’re Maoists. They have the Little Red Book in their hand. You’re not gonna get them back.” Corgan said. “The only thing that’s going to adjust their ideological fixation is reality.”

Corgan said the “hashtag generation” of activists use peer pressure, shaming and mocking to force their way on forums like Twitter, which Corgan quit last year. “If you think someone is dumb or uneducated or a bigot or something, mocking them is not usually the best way to get through to them,” Corgan said.

Jones, the outspoken radio host and conspiracy theorist, responded by describing the same activists as “little arrogant 20-year-olds spitting in [people’s] faces, screaming at them: ‘You hate me because I’m a tranny’, and it’s just this made-up thing in their head.” The host added: “And I personally get mad and want to punch them in the nose.”

Corgan began his Klan analogy by conceding that America has a “racist bent”.

“If you could go back to Selma, 1932 and the Klan member spitting in some person of color’s face, don’t you think that guy thought he was right too? OK. So how is this any different?”

Corgan has been an outspoken fan of Jones’s for years and even credits the radio host as the inspiration for the song United States on Smashing Pumpkins’ 2007 album Zeitgeist. On the Tuesday appearance Corgan also said he was a regular user of Jones’s line of herbal supplements. This was the 49-year-old singer’s third time on the broadcast.

Social justice warriors, according to Corgan, have “weaponized anti-free speech” and that this “horrified” him as an artist “because those people are gonna be coming for me. It may not be tomorrow, but it’s soon enough because I said the wrong thing on the wrong day.”

Corgan said he remembered growing up in “a liberal Democratically leaning Chicago that was about tolerance”, and not “shut it down because it’s unpleasant”, citing a 1978 Klan march in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Skokie, Illinois, near where he grew up.

“We may not like it,” he said, “but it’s better to have an America where these idiots get to walk down the street and spout their hate.”

The march Corgan was probably referring to, which was actually planned by neo-Nazis, not Klansmen, initiated a protracted legal battle that went all the way to the state supreme court, but wasn’t much of a march at all. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, about 20 neo-Nazis appeared for about 10 minutes before being shouted down by counter-protesters and going home.