Opinion: Throw all White Supremacists Away, and LA Magazine Too

Welcome to Snapper Fridays, a new column at L.A. Taco suggested by L.A. Taco member Julio Trejo. In this emerging column, we make an exception to our generally positive posts and call things out for the greater good. For our second installment, our contributor snaps back at the Los Angeles Magazine profile of Gavin McInnes, the founder of the “anti-white guilt” group: Proud Boys.

[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]’m not just coming for the writer of this vile article that attempts to humanize the alt-right trash bag, Gavin McInnes. I’m coming after the whole publication and every editor and higher up that looked at this dumpster fire and thought: “Hmm, this is fine and acceptable.” Hell, I might even be coming for the social media editor that tweeted this ratioed tweet.

It is irresponsible to have a writer say that she laughed at McInnes’s jokes and almost wanted him to like her. My community and countless others that have been attacked, dehumanized, and denigrated by McInnes, are not jokes. The sheer amount of uncensored racial and transphobic slurs—the n-word is used in full four times—shows just how little LA Magazine cares about marginalized communities. We weren’t surprised when the magazine changed the headline and its metadata to “How Gavin McInnes Went from Vice to the Far Right.” (The original headline was “Gavin McInnes, Founder of Vice and the Proud Boys, Bares His Soul.”) Take your screenshots now, before the article is removed entirely. 

This should be the graph where I say “news outlets have a responsibility to the public and should blah blah” but that is so 2016 and we’re over that. Everyone should just unfollow LA Mag until they stop giving neo-nazis a platform and give some cold hard cash to anti-hate groups or civil rights defenders because normalizing white supremacy creates more white supremacists ... surprise, surprise.  Advertisers, do you want to be affiliated with a publication that promotes white supremacy?  

I know I’ll hear the inevitable: “But what about the editorial staff with families?” Frankly, after seeing horrific reports of what’s happening in detention centers, pictures of bodies, countless reports of white supremacist violence across the nation, I don’t give a single fuck.