i called 4 elections in the 2010s

Gavin McInnes spoke at a GOP club, then his followers violently attacked leftist protesters. Modern American fascism finds its foot soldiers.

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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 “nigger” and “faggot,” once described transgender people as “gender niggers” 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.

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