The Proud Boys, The GOP and 'Fascist Creep'

NEW YORK – Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent neo-fascist gang Proud Boys, sent a troubling message to the Republican party last Friday. "At the very least, right-wing people," he told the crowd in the Metropolitan Republican Club's ballroom, "let us moan."

Of course, it was a disconcerting thing, because McInnes had been invited to speak in front of the club, a legendary and stifling traditional conservative institution on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The Metropolitan Republican Club has historically been a place for the traditional elite. Over the past century, presidents, senators, governors and mayors have stepped through, including club members Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Michael Bloomberg. Friday night, it was a hipster nationalist activist behind the club's podium: McInnes, a loathsome and vulgar Canadian vlogger who loves play with his buttocks on camera.

McInnes, who co-founded Vice before leaving the media company in 2008, is now famous for his strange antics and his bigotry he plays as an online talk show host. he uses insults like "negro" and "fagot", once transgender people described as "sex niggers" and "stupid fools" and despised Muslims as "stupid" and consanguineous. He was photo wearing the t-shirt of a neo-Nazi group, has a tattoo associated with this group, is friends with white supremacists, writes for websites about white supremacists and likes to throw up Nazi salute. He also regularly encourages his faithful Proud Boy to commit acts of violence. "The fight solves everything," he said.

In 2018, under President Donald Trump, a person like McInnes is invited to speak at a popular republican institution, not in spite of his extremism, but because of it. His invitation to the Metropolitan Republican Club, according to specialists in fascism, shows that Republicans are becoming more comfortable with what is essentially the militant and fascist wing of their party – a particularly disconcerting development, given Proud Boys' penchant for violence.

Alexander Reid Ross, the author of Against the fascist slide, HuffPost told HuffPost that "by inviting McInnes to their event, Republicans not only endorse but encourage his use of extreme violence and facilitate associations between fascists and the radical right within the party."

A list of speakers at the Metropolitan Republican Club over the last three years shows the two established Republican politicians (including Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas), as well as extremist personalities (including the announcer anti-immigrant Ann Coulter, The conspiracy theorist Pamela Geller and James O 'Keefe, the "guerrilla journalist" who describes himself behind the far-right fraudulent press group Veritas Project). Also on the club's list: Tucker Carlson, the favorite Fox News host for the Nazis.

The club did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why it regularly hosts such extreme personalities. Sunday – in reaction to the indignation provoked by the assassination of Proud Boys against leftist protesters after the end of the McInnes event – the club issued a statement defending its decision invite McInnes.

"We want to encourage civil discussion, but never endorse violence," said the club's leaders. "Gavin's remarks on Friday night, even though they were sometimes politically incorrect and a bit nervous, certainly did not incite violence."

Mr. McInnes began his speech Friday at the club by restoring the political assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, leader of the Japanese Socialist Party, killed in 1960 on television by an ultranationalist. (In an Instagram post prior to the event, McInnes described the assassination as "inspiring moment.")

According to the Bedford and Bowery information site, McInnes wore "glasses with caricatured Asian eyes drawn on the front" during the performance. In the audience, his henchmen, Proud Boy, most of whom wore the band's uniform, Fred Perry black shirts and red hats "Make America great again" – laughs and applauds.

Shortly after, a video clip shows dozens of these Proud Boys who fall on a much smaller group of anti-fascist protesters on a nearby sidewalk, punching and kicking them while they are standing. on the ground. They shouted "fagots" during the assault. One of the Proud Boys later boasted of having beaten a "stranger."

The next day, Proud Boys of Portland, Oregon, partnered with another far-right gang, Patriot Prayer, to attack the leftist protesters. On October 6, Proud Boys, in Providence, Rhode Island, attacked counter-partners at a demonstration of Resist Marxism.

Shane Burley, the author of Fascism today: what is it and how to end it says that proud boys are best understood as a part of the racist and violent skinhead movement "It goes back to the 1980s, taking the rage of white men and scolding them against the most marginalized communities." (Of those who delivered McInnes' speech on Friday night, there were at least three local skinhead gangs which proud boys have long been linked to.)

While past skinhead movements were largely unable to connect with a large political party, the Proud Boys were successful.

Politicians like Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), And Donald Trump's former advisor, Roger Stone, posed in photos with Proud Boys. In March, Stone asked Proud Boys to be his security agent at a Republican conference in Oregon. Ian Reilly, a member of the Metropolitan Republican Club who would have invited McInnes to speak on Friday, is campaigning director for Republican Senator Marty Golden of the State of New York.

The right-wing media were just as friendly. McInnes was a frequent guest on Trump's favorite TV show, Fox News, Sean Hannity. Fox News' Carlson posed with the Proud Boys on a photo.

The Proud Boys were able to interfere in the GOP, in part, by confusing the traditional American notions of a hate group. McInnes, for example, publicly rejected the racist "rac-alt-right" after the white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – where a person was killed after someone hit a car in a group of counter-demonstrators – despite his proximity to the rally's president, Richard Spencer. a proud boy, Jason Kessler, organized the rally.

The public rejection of the Proud Boy's "all right" has allowed Proud Boys to attract men of color – a fact he strongly announces to fend off accusations of extremism. But there are still white nationalist Proud Boys, and the group as a whole is still resolutely anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender and anti-left. Most of the time, it's pro-trump.

To join the Proud Boys, a man must declare, "I am a Western chauvinist and I refuse to apologize for having created the modern world." To become a proud fourth-degree boy, the highest level, said Mr. McInnes, members must fight, drop the crap of an antifa.

David Neiwert, the author of Alt America: The rise of radical right in the era of Trump, The fact that the GOP adheres to the Proud Boys testifies to the "growing spiral of the party in the extraction of right-wing extremists", a process that has been going on for more than a decade but that It's increased significantly since the GOP became Donald Trump's party. "

"Trump has given all these people permission, by word and deed, to be as odious, violent and ugly as they want," he said.

And it could become very ugly.

Historian Robert Paxton, author of the 2004 Flagship Book Anatomy of fascism, They wrote that skinheads could "become functional equivalents of Hitler's SA and Mussolini's society. squadristi only if they aroused support instead of repulsion. "

Of course, Paxton wrote in 2004, long before it was imaginable that a Vice founder is speaking at the Metropolitan Republican Club as a leader of a gang called the Proud Boys, praising President Donald Trump. .

America does not do a good job of tracking incidents of hate and bias. We need your help to create a database of such incidents across the country so that we all know what's going on. Tell us your story.