Students at Penn State are outraged that the founder of the far-right group the Proud Boys is coming to speak at their college today, The Guardian reports.
The Proud Boys is an often violent extremist group, and have even been labelled as a terrorist organization by Canada and New Zealand.
Many members of the Proud Boys align with white supremacist, antisemitic or Islamophobic ideologies.
Five members of the Proud Boys were charged for their actions during the January 6, 2021 violent insurrection on the Capitol.
Penn State is a prestigious university located in Pennsylvania.
Students have condemned the invitation to Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys.
The speech was organized by Uncensored America, a conservative student-led group. The speech cost roughly $7,000.
The university is holding out against pleas to cancel or ban the event.
“As a public university, we are unalterably obligated under the U.S. constitution’s first amendment to protect various expressive rights,” the school said in a statement.
The statement also both acknowledged and criticized the hateful rhetoric that speakers like McInnes are known to espouse.
This is not the first time Penn State has seen controversy over invited far-right speakers. Last year, British “alt-right” political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos was hosted by Uncensored America at a talk on campus.
Yiannopoulos told a crowd at the University of Massachusetts a few years ago that “feminism is cancer”. He is known for playing off his offensive remarks as ironic jokes. “Pray the Gay Away” was printed on a red poster advertising his talk in Penn State’s student union hall.
Students were also opposed to the Yiannopoulos speech, but the tension around the Proud Boy speech is more intense, and palpable.
Experts on extremism and the far-right said that while Yiannopoulos is offensive, McInnes is really dangerous.
Experts said the event is deliberately provocative, and is not a free speech issue if it endangers the student community.
McInnes established the Proud Boys during the 2016 presidential elections. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, white nationalists and neo-Nazis cite him as a gateway to the far right.
Since then, members of his organization have been regulars at Make America Great Again rallies, recognizable for wearing black and yellow clothing, and they are frequent participants in street riots across the country.
“We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you,” McInnes said during his Compound Media show in 2016.
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