It’s not even worth starting up the hypothetical hypocrisy-spotting whatabout machine on this. Friday night, Gavin McInnes spoke at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City, after which the Proud Boys, the right-wing chauvinist gang he founded, went out and committed violence in the streets of Manhattan. Can you imagine if the Democra—no, like, just, no; it… There’s not even an absurd counter-scenario to appeal to. The mainstream political party that controls all three branches of the federal government is cooperating with a goon squad, for lulz and also to beat its designated enemies to a pulp. The formal part of the program, before the thugs went out, was McInnes—at the Metropolitan Republican Club—reenacting the public assassination of the Japanese socialist leader Inejiro Asanuma in 1960 by a sword-wielding 17-year-old. Are you triggered by this? By a roving band of hipster brutes laughing about the time a fanatical teenager murdered a politician? It’s all a joke, like the Klan was a joke, or like the Nazis were a joke. Gavin McInnes is a failed comedian and a successful marketer and scam artist; he’s not even an American, but his phoniness makes him more, not less, genuinely dangerous. If his shtick were about any politics other than right-wing power, he’d have been deported back to Canada years ago, if not caged. (Whoops, there’s one of those hypothetical counterfactuals.) Instead, he’s a guest of the president’s party, which is complaining about the vandalism that happened to their headquarters building in between the time they invited a violent clown to speak and the time his followers delivered the violence. “We’re the victims here,” the state Republican Party leader told the press. And the Monday after the beatdown, the news cycle is debating Elizabeth Warren’s blood quantum.
