Topic: WorldNetDaily
Last month, WorldNetDaily touted a frivolous defamation lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center by a man who's mad the SPLC exposed his support and legal work for a neo-Nazi group. Now it's found another guy suing the SPLC because it exposed him:
Gavin McInnes, the conservative commentator and host of the internet-based program “Get Off My Lawn,” is suing the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center for designating him a “hate” figure, charging the group’s “concerted, obsessive and malicious actions” were designed to harm him.
“SPLC’s defamatory, false, and misleading designation of Mr. McInnes as a ‘hate’ figure is purposefully deceitful and intended to tarnish Mr. McInnes’s reputation, disparage Mr. McInnes’s good name and work, inflict harm and financial damage, reduce Mr. McInnes’s goodwill and standing in the community, expose Mr. MicInnes, his family and anyone else associated with him to public scorn, harassment, intimidation, and potential violence, and to denigrate, malign, and ridicule Mr. McInnes to countless individuals and potential employers and partners around the world,” Monday’s lawsuit by McInnes explains.
[...]
McInnes’ complaint contends that while he is an “avowed and vocal opponent of discrimination based on race, religion or sexual preference, and of ideologies and movements espousing extremism, nationalism and white supremacy,” SPLC still gave him its “hate designation.”
In the lawsuit, McInnes says SPLC is “defaming him by use of the SPLC Hate Designations, and publishing other false, damaging and defamatory statements about him.”
The case was filed in Alabama District Court.
McInnes alleges SPLC “harassed” him, his family and friends, and lied about him.
Tellingly, WND does not link to the SPLC page on McInnes and the Proud Boys -- the only reference to which in the WND is a bland note that it was founded by McInnes but that he "left it in 2018" -- and WND does not identify specific claims by the SPLC about McInnes beyond being a "hate" figure. In fact, the SPLC documents McInnes' ties to racism and hate and the Proud Boys' descent into violence:
McInnes himself has ties to the racist right and has contributed to hate sites like VDare.com and American Renaissance, both of which publish the work of white supremacists and so-called “race realists.” He even used Taki’s Magazine — a far-right publication whose contributors include Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor — to announce the founding of the Proud Boys. McInnes plays a duplicitous rhetorical game: rejecting white nationalism and, in particular, the term “alt-right” while espousing some of its central tenets.
[...]
Despite the pains they’ve taken to distance themselves from open white nationalists and antisemites, Proud Boys have been present at high-profile alt-right events, including the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “[J]ust don’t fucking wear your Fred Perry, or decide to belt: ‘Proud of Your Boy,’” McInnes limply warned followers before the event. “[I]f you decide to rub elbows with those people [while] in colors, you very well could find yourself disavowed.”
But they did show up, which McInnes evidently expected. In the first episode of his Compound Media show after the August rally, McInnes said he had been “just combing through all the media reports going, ‘Don’t say Proud Boys, don’t say Proud Boys, don’t say Proud Boys,’” hoping the “lunatic Nazi” who allegedly killed Heather Heyer wasn’t a member of his group. He wasn’t, but the white nationalist Jason Kessler — who has been filmed undergoing his second-degree Proud Boy initiation — was the rally’s principal organizer. Less than two months earlier, Kessler had been a guest on “The Gavin McInnes Show,” where he promoted Unite the Right and, in a chummy interview, laid out the ideological overlap he and McInnes shared. “What’s really under attack is if you say, ‘I want to stand up for white people. I want to stand up for western civilization. I want to stand up for men. I want to stand up for Christians,’” to which McInnes nodded in agreement and added other examples: “I’m against immigration…I’m against jihadis. I’m against radical Islam."
[...]
Around the same time, Proud Boys member Kyle Chapman announced he was forming a new “tactical defense arm” of the Proud Boys — with McInnes’ “full approval” — called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK). The paramilitary wing positions itself as a defensive organization formed to protect right-wing activists at political demonstrations. Chapman, who has an extensive criminal history, first gained renown within the alt-right when he was photographed hitting a counter-protestor over the head with a stick at a March 4, 2017, pro-Trump rally in Berkeley, California.
Now referring to himself as “Based Stick Man,” Chapman has been making the rounds of far-right rallies around the country, doing little to create rhetorical distance between the Proud Boys and outright white nationalism.
[...]
A number of journalists who’ve written about the group have received cease-and-desist orders from Proud Boys’ lawyer Jason Van Dyke insisting they “do not now, nor have they ever, espoused white nationalist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic, or alt-right views.”
The statement is especially remarkable coming from Van Dyke, a member of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter and known neo-Confederate. Van Dyke’s affair with far right extremism stretches back until at least his college days, when Michigan State University police searching his dorm found extremist literature, including The Turner Diaries and Protocols of the Elders of Zion.In 2000, the university suspended Van Dyke for several semesters after he was arrested for domestic violence, possession of a banned weapon and firearm safety violations.
Van Dyke's penchant for violence appears on his Twitter page, where in 2014 he made death threats against another user. Alongside a picture of a noose, he wrote, “Look good and hard at this picture you fucking nigger. It’s where I am going to put your neck.”
(That's who McInnes pals around with. He quit the organization he founded only a few months ago, shortly after the FBI reportedly tagged the Proud Boys as an "extremist group with ties to white nationalism."
(We've previously noted some of this stuff about McInnes.)
WND doesn't want to tell you that -- so averse is to telling the full story that it didn't bother to contact the SPLC for a response. And it references the earlier frivolous lawsuit that was filed without mentioning the fact that the guy's mad the SPLC exposed him as a "neo-Nazi lawyer."
