Kevin J. Johnston may be facing criminal charges for promoting hatred against Muslims in Canada, but that, apparently, hasn’t stopped him from travelling to Myanmar to comment on the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority, who the UN says are facing ethnic cleansing.

The bizarre saga comes as the the Myanmese government faces pressure from the international community to stop the violence against its Rohingya population, and to allow the safe return of thousands who have fled to neighbouring countries.

Yet the government has been less than cooperative, and operating in the northern Rakhine state where much of the violence has occurred has been difficult for journalists and human rights monitors. Two award-winning Reuters journalists are currently sitting in a jail cell, facing jail time for their work uncovering human rights abuses.

And yet Johnston, who runs a small radio and YouTube channel — where he usually obsesses over the presence of Muslims and mosques in his native Canada — has been welcomed by the Myanmar government.

Johnston’s videos have no more than a few hundred views each, and he remains a relatively marginal figure, but he has nevertheless been invited on as a guest for alt-right conspiracy sites like InfoWars and the Rebel.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Johnston insisted that he covered the expenses himself, and that, while he met with various government and military officials while in the country, it was an independent trip.

Johnston said the state military provided him with access to the country’s ravaged north, and also told him where not to go. “Because the army generals there were familiar with our work, they let us in there,” he said.

Johnston rejected the idea that he was used to spread state propaganda, insisting that the government allowed him to the closed-off part of the country because he was the only person willing to tell the truth in the region. He insisted that the United Nations, Reuters, and a variety of other independent actors in the region were beholden to Saudi Arabia, Islam, or were otherwise invested in discrediting the Myanmar government.

The consensus among all credible international observers is that the state military has led a brutal crackdown in the northern Rakhine province in recent months. Medicins Sans Frontieres estimated at the end of 2017 that the death toll had climbed to as high as 13,000 in just a matter of months.

“We are the only journalists allowed into Burma, and we’re going to get to the bottom of this Rohingya story once and for all,” Johnston said in one video. “We have been treated like gold everywhere we have gone,” he says in another.

Johnston headed to Myanmar, accompanied by San Francisco–based musician Rick Heizman. The Daily Beast reported on their visit Wednesday, looking more closely at Heizman’s background as a de facto spokesperson for the troubled nation’s government.