Twitter Has Banned the Proud Boys and Islamophobic, Transphobic Founder Gavin McInnes
Today, “white civil rights activists” (also known as “white supremacists” and “racist trash”) are marching on Washington D.C. in a Unite the Right 2 rally commemorating the time one year ago when their bigoted brethren shouted racist, anti-Semitic slogans while carrying tiki torches at a nighttime rally and killed an anti-fascist protestor by hitting her with a car. Last year’s Unite the Right rally was organized by Jason Kessler, a member of Proud Boys, the alt-right “Western chauvinism” group founded by Islamophobic transphobe Gavin McInnes. At today’s Unite the Right 2 rally, two speakers are also Proud Boys. Thankfully, Twitter recently reduced the group’s reach by banning the Proud Boys Twitter accounts and the Gavin McInnes Twitter account two days ago. Wow, Twitter finally did something right.
On Friday, Twitter took down the Proud Boys Twitter account (@ProudBoysUSA), the Gavin McInnes Twitter account (@Gavin_McInnes) as well as several accounts belonging to regional chapters of the Proud Boys, all for violating Twitter’s policy on “violent extremist groups.”
In response, McInnes said he’s considering suing Twitter and added, “All this stuff is part of the conservative purge, getting the right off social media, to try to stop Trump from getting reelected. He’s already won; the ship has sailed. I think it will have zero effect on my reach or on the Proud Boys. We’ll always come back.”
Twitter’s banning of the Gavin McInnes Twitter account and Proud Boys Twitter accounts comes barely a week after the platform refused to ban right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars.
Twitter initially said that Jones and Infowars hadn’t violated any of Twitter’s user policies. But when the news network CNN revealed that this was an outright lie, Jones and Infowars deleted their past tweets violating Twitter’s rules and Twitter has since allowed them to remain on their platform.
McInnes likes to style himself as a “get off my lawn” hipster crank who refuses to conform to politically correct speech, but he has published articles on far-right websites alongside other white supremacists and neo-Nazis, has referred to trans people as “gender niggers” and “mentally ill gays” and has called Muslims a bunch of interbreeding rapists.
As such, he and his group’s ideology isn’t so different from other far-right groups through America and Europe.
