The Republican Party is increasingly flirting with fascism. The GOP now has its own ready-made Brownshirts, and at least some state Republican Parties are embracing them.
Every organization needs to police its own, and the Proud Boys are violent extremists which should be rejected swiftly and totally. That the GOP hasn’t yet, is a bad sign. It’ll be important to watch carefully if and what Trump does about the new would-be thug wing of the Republican Party, besides issue empty denunciations.
On Friday, members of the Proud Boys assaulted leftist protesters outside New York City’s Metropolitan Republican Club, the state GOP’s home base in the city and a center of Trumpism in Manhattan, following an appearance by their leader, VICE co-founder Gavin McInnes. Joined by prominent members of the city’s racist skinhead scene, they screamed slurs as they stomped on heads; afterwards, they posed for group photographs. Not to be outdone, their compatriots on the West Coast repeated the performance on Saturday, attacking an anti-police violence vigil in Portland. A week earlier, Proud Boys had attacked counter-protesters at a “Resist Marxism” demonstration in Providence, Rhode Island.
The past three years have seen a proliferation of such groups: organized reactionaries of various political tendencies seeking out ideological enemies (mostly, but not exclusively, on the anti-capitalist left) to beat to a bloody pulp. The more hardcore elements of the so-called alt-right—the Nazis, the neo-Confederate KKK affiliates, the esoteric fascists and white separatists—sneer at the Proud Boys as insufficiently radical. In a sense, they’re not wrong: the Proud Boys are closer to the mainstream of American conservatism than Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer. That, however, is what makes them so dangerous. The Proud Boys aren’t just a less overtly racist branch of the alt-right; they’ve become a militant wing of the Republican Party. Anglin and Spencer aren’t getting invited to speak at GOP events, but McInnes is; Atomwaffen Division isn’t running security for Republican candidates for Senate, but the Proud Boys are. McInnes “is part of the right,” Ian Reilly, Executive Committee Chair of the Metropolitan Republican Club, told Gothamist, comparing him to previous guests Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter.“We promote people and ideas of all kinds from the right.” Reilly continued:“We would never invite anyone who would incite violence.”
Except, this is exactly what they had done: McInnes was at the Metropolitan Club to celebrate the fifty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, leader of the Japan Socialist Party, by the ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi, on live television in 1960—an “inspiring moment,” McInnes wrote on Instagram, which he re-enacted with his employee (and fellow Proud Boy) Ryan Katsu Rivera …
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New York Republicans, meanwhile, are doubling down on their decision to welcome McInnes into the fold.“We want to foster civil discussion, but never endorse violence,” Metropolitan Club officials said in a statement on Sunday night. “Gavin’s talk on Friday night, while at times was politically incorrect and a bit edgy, was certainly not inciting violence.” It bears repeating: McInnes was invited to the state party’s headquarters in New York City to celebrate the televised murder of an ideological enemy.
For all the scorn heaped on the Proud Boys by the leading lights of the white nationalist movement, they appear to be doing what people like Andrew Anglin, Richard Spencer, and Matthew Heimbach could not: creeping closer to formal, state power in the form of a political alliance with the GOP. They receive sympathetic media coverage from Fox News while actively recruiting new members not only from the alt-right, but from racist skinhead scenes across the country. A violently reactionary subculture that, left to its own devices, had in recent years remained relatively self-contained, racist skinheads (“boneheads” to leftist skins) under the leadership of charismatic demagogues like McInnes on the East Coast and Joey Gibson of Patriot Prayer on the West Coast are now spilling into the streets of America’s most liberal urban centers.
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Bound together by violent misogyny and ultranationalism, these groups stand for nothing resembling a conventional political program or platform—but that does not mean they are apolitical. Pragmatically sidestepping the question of race, they now make their proto-fascist appeal in the language of patriotic individualism: pro-America, pro-capitalism, and pro-Trump. (Its effectiveness should not be understated: for years, antifascists in New York City’s soccer supporter scene have been working to alienate Antillon, a frequent attendee of New York City Football Club matches at Yankee Stadium, from friends and fellow fans who don’t have Nazi tattoos—with little success.) Around the country, the Proud Boys have replicated this strategy, appealing primarily to people’s class interests—as small business owners, for example, or as the children of families who fled socialist revolutions—as well as traditionalist gender politics, temporarily deferring the white nationalist project in the interest of swelling their ranks. As it happens, this is the strategy that has also allowed them entry into the Republican mainstream.