Cheers And Jeers

What to do when an extremist group decides to gather at your local bar? Inside a cultural and constitutional quagmire

- Jason Horn

Make Westing, a popular bar in Oakland, California, has a front patio that some patrons refer to as the city’s front porch. “We have a huge crowd, and it’s everything — it’s black, it’s white, it’s old, it’s young,” says a representative of the bar, who asked not to be named. Imagine their surprise last summer when an assistant manager saw a Reddit post claiming that a local chapter of the Proud Boys would be meeting there.

The bar had a choice to make: Let the group in or kick them out. “We were between a rock and a hard place,” the rep says. “If we said, ‘Fine, come,’ we’d get destroyed in a liberal city like Oakland. And if we didn’t let them come, the alt-right would come after us.” (Started during the 2016 presidential campaign by Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys reject the “alt-right” label; the group calls itself a “Western chauvinist” organisation. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies it as a hate group.) After consulting with lawyers and other bars in the neighbourhood, Make Westing decided to “figure out what good we could possibly bring to this.” They created a Facebook post disavowing racism and announcing an event of their own for the day of the planned Proud Boys meeting — one that would raise money for Black Lives Matter, the ACLU and other organisations.

The day before Make Westing’s event, African American teenager Nia Wilson was murdered by a white man at an Oakland train station, and the organisers of a march scheduled for the next day decided it would end at the bar. Suddenly, Make Westing was at the centre of an upheaval: Even the mayor of Oakland tweeted a link to its original Facebook post, which reached more than 100,000 people.