This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Gavin McInnes, the founder of the far-right Proud Boys group, has reportedly been denied a visa to enter Australia.

Australia’s ABC News reported on Thursday night that McInnes was informed some weeks ago that he “he was judged to be of bad character” by immigration authorities, and had then missed a deadline to appeal the decision.

Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes quits 'extremist' far-right group Read more

McInnes had planned to travel to Australia for an already twice-postponed speaking tour with fellow far-right figures Milo Yiannopolous and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson. The planned visit had been opposed by a #BanGavin campaign, led by the lawyer and writer Nyadol Nyuon.

Nyuon collected 81,000 signatures on an online petition which she presented to the immigration minister, David Coleman, with the support of Green and Labor MPs.

Nyuon thanked supporters on the website on Thursday night, writing that the campaign had never been about free speech but “violent, extremist incitement by Gavin McInnes and the well-recorded history of criminal activity by his Proud Boys”.

The campaign followed an opinion piece in the Guardian – written by this reporter – which argued that the government should prevent McInnes from visiting Australia.

ABC also reported that Yaxley-Lennon, who has been refused entry to the US, had not yet applied for an Australian visa.

Earlier on Thursday, the Proud Boys announced that McInnes’s replacement as leader had left the organization. A statement on the group’s website read: “Jason Lee Van Dyke is no longer a member of the Proud Boys fraternity, and will no longer be representing the fraternity in any legal capacity.”

Van Dyke, a lawyer from Texas, was announced as the chairman of the Proud Boys in the wake of McInnes’s departure, which followed the Guardian’s revelation that the FBI described the Proud Boys as an extremist group.

Van Dyke has been banned from Twitter for using racial slurs and has a history of posting death threats online. He was arrested after he allegedly faked a gun theft in September and is suing a Texan man for $100m, after the man reported his online activities to an employer and the Texas state bar.

During and after his brief tenure as Proud Boys chairman, Van Dyke issued more threats and slurs to critics. In an email sent on Thursday to Nathan Bernard, editor of the rightwing-monitoring website Bernard Media, Van Dyke wrote: “Would you like to be first, faggot?”

The subject line was “your tweet”. Bernard took this to be a reference to a tweet in which he posted screenshots of Van Dyke’s text-message interactions with other Twitter users, in which Van Dyke appeared to send pictures of firearms. Bernard posted: “If you needed anymore evidence Van Dyke is going to kill someone, here it is.”

Bernard told the Guardian: “Jason seems totally unhinged and it’s unbelievable to me that he isn’t in a federal penitentiary, let alone allowed to practice law.”

Van Dyke declined to comment on his departure from the Proud Boys. Regarding his communication with Bernard, he alleged that by retweeting accounts which had posted screenshots of texts to him, Bernard had “participated” in harassment.

“If he thinks the people doing this are ‘patriots’, then perhaps its time someone taught him some manners,” he wrote.

Bernard denied any involvement in texts to Van Dyke, writing: “I had nothing to do with organising those texts and the number for his ‘personal cellular device’ can be found with a simple Google search.”

A spokesperson for the Proud Boys said of Van Dyke: “He was placed as temporary chair to help litigate and establish our national by laws and code of conduct. Van Dyke left on his own accord.”

Through his law firm, Van Dyke is still the registered holder of Proud Boys trademarks and the registered agent of two Proud Boys LLCs in Texas.

Asked about this, the spokesperson for the Proud Boys wrote: “We are currently in the process of transferring the trademarks and LLC ownership over to the new leadership.”