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Student groups, the NAACP and others are criticizing the University of South Carolina for hosting an event featuring Gavin McInnes, who founded the far-right Proud Boys group, and Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor who recently worked for Ye (formerly known as Kanye West). The two will be “roastmasters” at what a group called Uncensored America is calling “The Roast of Cumala Harris.”
A roast, however, is commonly understood to be a kind of tribute; it is defined as “a banquet honoring a person who is subjected to humorous tongue-in-cheek ridicule by friends.”
In a joint statement, university president Michael Amiridis and board chair Thad Westbrook said, “We condemn the vile and juvenile rhetoric used to promote this event,” but that “censoring even the most hateful individuals and groups does not solve the problems we face in our society and instead provides them with a platform to win more publicity and support.”
McInnes is a podcaster who co-founded Vice Media and founded the Proud Boys, a group that—after McInnes said he left it—became involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Four leaders of the group have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their actions that day. Yiannopoulos, from 2015 to 2017, hosted the controversial “Dangerous Faggot” tour across college campuses. His planned February 2017 appearance at the University of California, Berkeley, spurred violence and the cancellation of his speech. Later that month, he resigned from the conservative Breitbart News after he appeared to endorse pedophilia.
The so-called roast is to be held today in the university’s student union. Beyond first-come, first-served free general admission, there are tickets on sale—including $299 “royalty” tickets that include a dinner with McInnes and Yiannopoulos.
Uncensored America is a Baltimore-based nonprofit. The Internal Revenue Service sent it a letter in July saying it was exempt from paying federal income tax, but the group hasn’t yet posted IRS Form 990s online showing its revenue sources. “Normal, everyday Americans fund our group,” founder and president Sean Semanko wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “The people calling to cancel our event clearly can’t take a joke.”
The Association of African American Students, in a statement co-signed by 20 other groups at the university, wrote, “We are disheartened by the university’s consent in allowing a platform for individuals who peddle hate speech and conspiracies that promote violence against our communities.” The presidents of the national NAACP and its South Carolina State Conference have written to Amiridis and board members urging cancellation of the event, saying they “feel compelled to write this letter because of the blatant sexist and racist nature of the event, the advertisement for it, and the potential for violence on campus because of the proposed event.”
But the South Carolina Democratic Party, in a news release, condemned the event’s content while defending free speech. “We recognize the trap being set by these organizers, who thrive on provoking outrage and leveraging their constitutional rights to engage in offensive speech,” said Christale Spain, the party chair, in the release. “However, we must remind ourselves that the best response to hate speech is not censorship, which only feeds their narrative, but more speech—more condemnation of their hateful ideology.” Democratic state representative Leon Howard and a group called Carolina for All are hosting a counterrally Wednesday.
