Apr 15, 2023
One of the organisers of a “Straight Pride” parade has been indicted for his alleged participation in the 6 January Capitol insurrection.
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One of the organisers of a “Straight Pride” parade has been indicted for his alleged participation in the 6 January Capitol insurrection.
"We thought this was a good time to stick it to the collectivist, idealist identitarian left."
Ryan Broderick at BuzzFeed News (09.01.2019):
BOSTON, Massachusetts — This city was never going to be ready for the straight pride parade.
On Saturday afternoon, a collection of self-described free speech advocates brought the own-the-libs internet into the real world, marching through historic Boston. Purportedly intended as parody of an LGBTQ Pride Parade, the march featured Pepe the Frog cosplayers, members of the far-right street gang the Proud Boys, and alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos as grand marshal riding atop a Trump 2020 float. It ended with a confrontation between attendees and counter-protesters and law enforcement armed with batons and pepper spray.
Orchestrated by a group called Super Happy Fun America, the straight pride parade was touted as a playful exercise in free speech and came with all the trappings: far-right rhetoric blasted from megaphones, white nationalist paraphernalia, and signs celebrating Trump’s border wall. This wasn’t political pot stirring, or an orchestrated political confrontation between the left and the right, the group insisted. It was just a parade with floats and costumes. “It’s just making fun of the left and identity politics,” one attendee wearing a Left Shark meme costume said. "No one here is a hater."
But lurking behind the cheery branding was some troubling context. Progressive public advocacy organization and website ThinkProgress recently uncovered ties between Super Happy Fun America and the violent white nationalist group Resist Marxism. SHFA vice president Mark Sahady has been photographed marching with far-right group Patriot Prayer. He also was seen alongside members of the Proud Boys at rally in Providence, Rhode Island, in October 2018. In January, Sahady was filmed attacking a trans woman at the Boston Women’s March. Sahady’s partner Samson Racioppi, who has been working with him since 2017, has also been photographed with Resist Marxism members.
While the straight parade's organizers may have facetiously cast the event as just poking a little fun, it was something more than that — an attempt to push a certain ideology further into the mainstream. And its success could herald more such events. Activists in Modesto, California, held one — albeit a small one — last month.
“We heard the outrage online," said Clayton Cresswell, a grown man who dressed as Pepe the Frog in a clown wig for the event. "We thought this was a good time to stick it to the collectivist, idealist identitarian left.”
Cresswell drove to Boston from Pennsylvania just for the parade, along with his friend Carl Hoover, who sported a Kekistan shirt and a pillow featuring an anime-style drawing of the far-right YouTuber and failed United Kingdom political candidate Carl Benjamin, or Sargon Of Akkad.
“There’s a comment [on Facebook] from my ex-girlfriend saying, ‘Wow were you just a homophobe the entire time we were dating and you just hid it?’ It’s hilarious,” Hoover said. “Half my friend group called me a bigot.”
Cresswell and Hoover were part of a parade crowd of 300 or so that seemed evenly split between pro-Trump baby boomers, some who claimed that they didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about, and extremely online millennials excitedly wondering if they'd come across antifascists.
They did, of course. As the march passed Boston Common, it turned a corner onto a street lined with protesters in face masks and goggles. There were many — enough that they immediately drowned out a marcher in a spandex American flag shirt shouting at them through a megaphone.
"Don’t forget, it is open season on straight white men in this country and y’all aren’t allowed to celebrate your straightness!" Lahren exclaimed.
Justin Baragona at The Daily Beast:
Tomi Lahren’s back with a brand new over-the-top aggrieved rant against political correctness and the liberal agenda. And hoo boy, was this one is a doozy.
In her latest “First Thoughts” video essay posted Wednesday to Fox News’ online streaming service Fox Nation, Lahren came to the defense of a group of far-right extremists who are attempting to hold a “Straight Pride Parade” in Boston later this summer.
Noting at the start that June is Gay Pride Month, Lahren insisted she has “no issue with LGBT people being proud of who they are” before snarking that she “can do without men in speedos and buttless chaps parading through the streets.”
She then pivoted to the possibility that Boston may shut down the straight pride event, claiming “straight people aren’t allowed to parade their heterosexuality for all to see.”
Highlighting that the group calls itself “Super Happy Fun America,” the Fox Nation host touted the organization’s “mission statement,” which purports to embrace straight people’s diversity and identity to “promote engagement with the community.”
Lahren, meanwhile, took issue with the backlash the event has received, claiming white men are the real victims. “Now, you wouldn’t think that would be a problem, right? Wrong,” she exclaimed. “Don’t forget, it is open season on straight white men in this country and y’all aren’t allowed to celebrate your straightness! It’s 2019—don’t you know that’s been off limits for the last ten years!”
She would go on to attack the “social-justice warriors” who mocked the parade and its organizers, sneering that it was “funny” that the “so-called loving and tolerant leftists and members of the LGBT community” demand respect for their events but demonize those they disagree with.
She concluded her tirade in standard fashion, railing against anti-conservative bias before declaring: “I’m not afraid to say it. I’m straight and proud. There, deal with it!”
Nowhere in her monologue, however, was any mention that the “Straight Pride Parade” is “a front for a far-right group founded by notorious right-wing brawler Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman.”
As The Daily Beast reported this week, event organizer Mark Sahady is also an organizer of extremist group Resist Marxism, a group founded by Chapman, who gained fame on the far-right for attacking anti-fascists with a stick. Resist Marxism, whose members were exposed for making anti-Semitic jokes and slurs in leaked chats, has also used a white-nationalist hate group to run security during at least one event.
Far-right paint huffer Tomi Lahren defends the bigoted farce of a Straight Pride Parade set to be held in Boston, wrongly asserts that there's a war on "straight white men."