In October 2018, a crew of Proud Boys violently attacked anti-fascist, or “antifa” activists on the streets of Manhattan. The occasion for the melee was a speech by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, leading to ten arrests and jail sentences for two of the Proud Boys. A street fight between fascists and anti-fascists may not have been so newsworthy were it not for its location on the tony Upper East Side, whose denizens tend to prefer the pastel hues of Ralph Lauren polos to black-and-gold Fred Perry.

Before the fight, McInnes rallied his troops at the Metropolitan Republican Club, formerly a “chummy watering hole for the city’s GOP elite” that’s been taken over by the radical right. These days, their website’s “About” page features a terribly lit photo of Tucker Carlson giving a speech to club members, situated above an all-caps declaration insisting, perhaps too insistently, “WE ARE SERIOUS PEOPLE.”

This is not the only New York Republican Party institution that the radical right has claimed. Since 2016, the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) has become a hub for local, national, and even international reactionaries. When former president Donald Trump was arraigned in lower Manhattan last April, the club organized a rally outside the courthouse that attracted the likes of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and far-right activist Jack Posobiec. Four months earlier, the NYYRC annual gala brought radical right-wingers from across the United States together with guests from European extremist parties like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) and Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party). Gavin Wax, the club’s president, gave a speech that can only be described as fascistic: