HATERS gotta hate!
NEW YORK — Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent neo-fascist gang the Proud Boys, had a perplexing message for the Republican Party last Friday. “At the very least, people of the right,”
he told a crowd inside the Metropolitan Republican Club ballroom, “let us scum in.”
It was a baffling thing to say, of course, because McInnes had been invited to speak at the club, a storied and stuffy mainstream conservative institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The Metropolitan Republican Club has historically been a
place for the traditional elite. Over the past century, presidents, senators, governors and mayors have walked through its doors, including club members Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Michael Bloomberg. But on Friday night, it was a hipster nationalist militant behind the club’s podium: McInnes, a hateful and vulgar vlogger from Canada who likes to
play with his butt on camera.
McInnes, who co-founded Vice before leaving the media company in 2008, is now famous for the outlandish antics and
bigotry he performs as an online talk show host. He
uses slurs like “$#@!” and “$#@!,” once
described transgender people as “gender $#@!s” and “stupid lunatics” and
maligned Muslims as “stupid” and inbred. He has been
pictured wearing a neo-Nazi band’s T-shirt, has a
tattoo associated with that band, is
chummy with white supremacists,
writes for white supremacist websites and likes to throw up
Nazi salutes. He also regularly
incites his Proud Boy followers to commit violence. “Fighting solves everything,” he has said.
In 2018, under President Donald Trump, a person like McInnes is invited to speak at a popular Republican institution not despite his extremism but because of it. His invitation to the Metropolitan Republican Club, scholars of fascism said, shows Republicans’ increasing ease with what is essentially the militant, fascist wing of their party — an especially unnerving development, given Proud Boys’ penchant for violence.
You going to follow this guy?
NEW YORK — Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent neo-fascist gang the Proud Boys, had a perplexing message for the Republican Party last Friday. “At the very least, people of the right,”
he told a crowd inside the Metropolitan Republican Club ballroom, “let us scum in.”
It was a baffling thing to say, of course, because McInnes had been invited to speak at the club, a storied and stuffy mainstream conservative institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The Metropolitan Republican Club has historically been a
place for the traditional elite. Over the past century, presidents, senators, governors and mayors have walked through its doors, including club members Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Michael Bloomberg. But on Friday night, it was a hipster nationalist militant behind the club’s podium: McInnes, a hateful and vulgar vlogger from Canada who likes to
play with his butt on camera.
McInnes, who co-founded Vice before leaving the media company in 2008, is now famous for the outlandish antics and
bigotry he performs as an online talk show host. He
uses slurs like “$#@!” and “$#@!,” once
described transgender people as “gender $#@!s” and “stupid lunatics” and
maligned Muslims as “stupid” and inbred. He has been
pictured wearing a neo-Nazi band’s T-shirt, has a
tattoo associated with that band, is
chummy with white supremacists,
writes for white supremacist websites and likes to throw up
Nazi salutes. He also regularly
incites his Proud Boy followers to commit violence. “Fighting solves everything,” he has said.
In 2018, under President Donald Trump, a person like McInnes is invited to speak at a popular Republican institution not despite his extremism but because of it. His invitation to the Metropolitan Republican Club, scholars of fascism said, shows Republicans’ increasing ease with what is essentially the militant, fascist wing of their party — an especially unnerving development, given Proud Boys’ penchant for violence.