Vandals hit GOP
Warning & graffiti at Upper E. Side office
A vandal sprayed graffiti on the GOP’s Manhattan clubhouse and left a warning note “to put the Republican Party on notice” ahead of a speech by the founder of the “Western chauvinist” group Proud Boys.
Two bright orange anarchy symbols were painted on the doors of the Metropolitan Republican Club on the Upper East Side on Thursday night, state party officials said. The vandal or vandals also broke a window and left behind the angry note.
The missive railed against Republican and U.S. government policies — including what it called “concentration camps around the country for Latino people,” the killings of black and Muslim people and mass incarceration.
‘While these atrocities persist unabated, the Metropolitan Republican Club chose to invite a hipster-fascist clown to dance for them, content to revel in their treachery against humanity,” it said.
The screed was apparently aimed at Gavin McInnes, who spoke at the club Friday evening and who is touted on its web page as the “Godfather of the Hipster Movement” who “has taken on and exposed the Deep State Socialists and stood up for Western Values.”
McInnes, a Canadian, is a co-founder of Vice Media and leads the far-right group “Proud Boys,” whose members have been involved in several physical conflicts with left-wing and anti-fascist protesters. The group, which insists it is not part of the socalled “alt-right,” is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
About 80 protesters showed up at the club on Friday night chanting, “No racists, no KKK, no fascist USA” and holding signs and banners, including some opposing white supremacy.
Protester Kelly Murphy, 29, of Astoria, called McInnes a “white supremacist” who “despises people of color.”
Murphy downplayed the anarchist graffiti sprayed on the Republican clubhouse. “There’s no way that what they did could have paralleled Gavin McInnes’ calls for violence,” she said.
Around 50 people attended McInnes’ 7 p.m. talk. Some mocked the protesters as they waited to get in, dancing along to their chants.
Aside from a fight after the event between a protester and a Proud Boy and a flare-up before the talk between a man recording the protest and a demonstrator, the evening was peaceful.
The note left by the vandals at the historic Republican clubhouse also ripped Democrats as “spineless” partnersin-crime.
“Our attack is merely a beginning. We are not passive, we are not civil, and we will not apologize,” the note reads.
“This is an act of political violence done by cowards in the middle of the night,” state Republican Chairman Ed Cox said Friday.