The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Don’t Mess With the Grand Poobah

Posted on | February 8, 2019 | Comments Off on Don’t Mess With the Grand Poobah

 

What’s the first thing you notice about that photo? Yeah, there’s Gavin McInnes looking like a Kentucky colonel on Derby Day in his white suit, but there in the background is noted First Amendment lawyer Ron Coleman, looking like the third Blues Brother in his shades.

After it was announced Monday that McInnes was suing the SPLC, I arranged an interview with the plaintiff, and this is the result:

When he decided in 2016 to create a club for his supporters, Gavin McInnes says he had in mind something fun — like the “Loyal Order of Water Buffalo” lodge to which Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble belonged in the old cartoon series. A humorist-turned-political commentator whose YouTube channel has nearly 270,000 subscribers, McInnes certainly didn’t intend the Proud Boys to be a “hate group,” but that’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled them, and a federal lawsuit McInnes filed this week accuses the Alabama-based SPLC of “tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, defamation, and false light invasion of privacy.”
The 61-page complaint in the case details how the SPLC began targeting McInnes in 2017 and continued upping its characterization of him as an “extremist” and labeling the Proud Boys a dangerous “white nationalist” group until they succeeded in getting McInnes banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram last year. Citing numerous articles on the SPLC website as “false and defamatory,” the complaint accuses the tax-exempt left-wing group of using the “hate” label in a deliberate campaign to “destroy” its chosen ideological enemies. It seems the SPLC considers more or less anyone who supports President Trump to be a “far-right” extremist.
“I made it fun to love Trump, and I’m effective — that scares the Left,” McInnes said in a telephone interview this week, explaining his opinion of how a comedian ended up being branded with what he calls the “Scarlet Letter” of the SPLC’s hate label. Employing a metaphor made popular by the 1999 film The Matrix, McInnes says, “I’m red-pilling an entire generation.” . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

 

Category: Constitution

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