With some prominent Democrats and other critics raising concerns, the New York Young Republican Club is holding its annual gala on Saturday, featuring Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump Jr., former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The guest list also includes far-right operative Jack Posobiec, members of an Austrian political party founded by a Nazi SS officer, and a number of U.S. and European right-wing activists, commentators and politicians.
Ten members of the far-right Proud Boys group were arrested in Manhattan in 2018 following an attack on protestors outside the Metropolitan Republican Club. Wax was in attendance that night and witnessed the violence, later writing an article for a conservative website titled “We Are All Proud Boys Now.”
Greene and Posobiec are headlining the event, which Wax says will be held in Midtown. Organizers are not revealing the precise location out of security concerns. The club’s invitation describes Greene as “a wife, mother and Christian nationalist patriot.” Posobiec, a former Navy officer-turned-conspiracy theorist, is one of the most prolific spreaders of misinformation in the country, critics said.
“I think you can safely argue that no single person is more responsible for spreading politically charged disinformation during the Trump era than Jack Posobiec,” Southern Poverty Law Center senior investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden told NY1. “He is unequivocally an extremist who has demonstrable ties to neo-Nazis, white nationalists and anti-government extremists.”
An alliance with a party founded by Nazis
At least half a dozen European political figures will be in attendance, including two leading members of the Freedom Party of Austria, a far-right party founded by an SS officer in the aftermath of World War II as a political home for Austrian Nazis after the Nazi Party was banned.