Great new article by Chris Mathias over at Huffington Post on the recent Proud Boys gang beating in NYC. He also interviews Shane Burley and David Neiwert, who are both doing great research as well.
Check out his article here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/proud-boys-republican-party-fascist-creep_us_5bc7b37de4b055bc947d2a8c
This is the full comment that I sent him, fyi:
“the invitation extended to McInnes by the Republican Club is similar to the College Republicans inviting Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at liberal campuses. While Milo was developing his own commentary in direct correspondence with white nationalists experienced in campus organizing, McInnes’s PBs have engaged in violent street protests with neo-Nazis as recently as October 6, and fascists are known to openly associate with PBs at events and protests.
By inviting McInnes to their event, the Republicans are not only endorsing but encouraging his usage of extreme violence and facilitating associations between fascists and the radical right within the Party. While this does not necessarily make the Republican Party a fascist party, per se, it certainly broadens the scope of opinions not only held within the Party but accepted by the Party..
It is important to note the contradiction here. While the right is often wont to insist that the embrace of violent coercion as a political strategy is debilitating to a democracy, they appear to be endorsing such tactics and advancing coalitions with fascists. Yet where antifa attempts to prevent hate groups from oppressing marginalized people, PBs organize often explicitly to oppose that form of organizing, thus defending oppression in the name of the freedom to oppress.
The excuse is often a resort to self-victimization of white males as a group oppressed by non-whites, which flies in the face of available social, economic, and political statistics. Since antifa often consists of marginalized people attempting to defend their own communities, PBs often relish being able to assault leftists and the marginalized at the same time as a form of liberation from some mythical anti-white matriarchy.
Inviting McInnes to their event sends a clear message that Republicans believe it more enjoyable to physically assault leftists than it is to compromise with dissenting groups by reasoning through social, economic, and political problems. This tendency is the result of an ongoing political polarization that achieved immense intensity with the election of Obama, crystalized with the Bundy and Malheur standoffs, and reached political articulation through the populist far-right politics of Bannon and Trump.”
Alexander Reid Ross 