“Is that your best example?”
Do you have a better one?
“He isn’t Ashkenazi”
He is.
“what he practices is what he believes was practiced before the exile”
That is somewhat accurate, although that is not his reason for permitting kitnios. His reason is as Charlie said “Because we picked up a stupid minhag centuries ago, and Rabbi Yaakov Emden couldn’t convince us to stop holding by it” and as I said “it was already called a stupid minhag by rishonim”.