Alexander Reid Ross, the author of   Against the Fascist Creep,   told HuffPost that “by inviting McInnes to their event, the Republicans are not only endorsing but encouraging his usage of extreme violence and facilitating associations between fascists and the radical right within the party.”  

A   list of speakers  at the Metropolitan Republican Club over the past three years shows both established Republican politicians (including Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas), alongside extremist figures (including anti-immigrant fearmonger   Ann Coulter , anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist   Pamela Geller  and James O’Keefe, the self-described “guerrilla journalist” behind the fraudulent far-right media outfit  Project Veritas ). Also on the club’s list:   Nazis’ favorite Fox News host , Tucker Carlson.

The club didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on why it has routinely hosted such extremist figures. On Sunday — reacting to outrage over Proud Boys   assaulting leftist protesters  after the McInnes event ended — the club issued a   statement defending its decision  to invite McInnes.

“We want to foster civil discussion, but never endorse violence,” club officials said. “Gavin’s talk on Friday night, while at times was politically incorrect and a bit edgy, was certainly not inciting violence.”

But McInnes started his speech at the club Friday by re-enacting the 1960 political assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, a leader of the Japanese Socialist Party, who was sliced open with a samurai sword on live television by a far-right ultranationalist. (In an Instagram post before the event, McInnes called the assassination an “inspiring moment.”)

According to the news site   Bedford and Bowery , McInnes wore “glasses with caricatured Asian eyes drawn on the front” during the performance. In the audience, his Proud Boy acolytes — many of them in the group’s uniform of  Fred Perry black shirts   and red “Make America great again” hats — laughed and cheered.

A short time later, video footage shows dozens of those Proud Boys descending upon a much smaller group of anti-fascist protesters on a nearby sidewalk, punching and kicking them as they lay on the ground. They screamed “faggots” during the assault. One of the Proud Boys later boasted of beating up a “foreigner.”

The next day Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon, joined with another violent far-right gang, Patriot Prayer, to   assault leftist protesters  there. On Oct. 6, Proud Boys in Providence, Rhode Island,  attacked counterprotesters  at a   Resist Marxism  demonstration. 

Shane Burley, the author of   Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It,   said the Proud Boys are best understood as a   part of the violent, racist skinhead movement   “that extends back into the 1980s, taking white male rage and turning it against the most marginalized communities.” (Among those at McInnes’ speech Friday night were at least three members of   local skinhead gangs  to which Proud Boys have long been linked.)

Whereas past skinhead movements mostly failed to establish connections to a major political party, the Proud Boys have found success.

Politicians like Rep.   Devin Nunes   (R-Calif.), Rep.   Mario Diaz-Balart   (R-Fla.), and former Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone have posed in photos with Proud Boys. In March, Stone   asked Proud Boys to be his security detail  at a Republican conference in Oregon. Ian Reilly, the Metropolitan Republican Club member who reportedly invited McInnes to speak there on Friday, is a   campaign manager   for Republican New York state Sen. Marty Golden.

Right-wing media outlets have been equally friendly. McInnes was a   frequent guest   on the Fox News show of Trump’s favorite conservative pundit, Sean Hannity. Fox News’  Carlson posed   with the Proud Boys in a photo. 

The Proud Boys were able to ingratiate themselves with the GOP, in part, by confusing traditional American notions of a hate group. McInnes, for example, publicly rejected the racist “alt-right” after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — where one person was killed after someone rammed a car into a group of counterprotesters — despite his  closeness with rally speaker Richard Spencer  and although a Proud Boy, Jason Kessler, organized the rally. 

The Proud Boy’s public rejection of the “alt-right,” however tenuous, has allowed Proud Boys to   attract men of color  — a fact it loudly advertises to fend off accusations of extremism. But there are still white nationalist Proud Boys, and the group as a whole is still decidedly anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender and anti-leftist. Mostly, it’s pro-Trump.

To join the Proud Boys, a man must declare, “I am a Western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” To become a fourth-degree Proud Boy, the highest level, McInnes said, members must “get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa.”

David Neiwert, the author of   Alt America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump,  said the GOP’s embrace of the Proud Boys is reflective of the party’s “increasing spiral into the grip of far-right extremists, a process that has actually been taking place for more than a decade now but has increased dramatically since the GOP became the party of Donald Trump.”

“Trump has given all of these people permission, through word and deed, to be as hateful and violent and ugly as they want to be,” he said.

And it could get very ugly.

Historian Robert Paxton, the author of the seminal 2004 book   Anatomy of Fascism,  wrote that skinheads could “ become functional equivalents of Hitler’s SA   and Mussolini’s   squadristi   only if they aroused support instead of revulsion.”

Paxton, of course, was writing in 2004, long before it was imaginable that a founder of Vice would be speaking at the Metropolitan Republican Club as the leader of a gang called the Proud Boys, praising a President Donald Trump.

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• This article originally appeared on   HuffPost .