Photo: Courtesy of Gavin McInnes.Gavin McInnes, otherwise known as a former cofounder of VICE and current controversial right-wing writer, appeared on FOX News this week, attacking Neil deGrasse Tyson. Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld opened with a clip of deGrasse Tyson discussing the possibility of contact with alien life, noting that we've been sending signals to space long before we intended to. The joke being: Uh-oh, what if there's intelligent life out there and they're judging us only by Happy Days reruns.
Gutfeld threw it to McInnes for comment, and that's when this happened:
"I hate this guy! I remember hearing Chris Hardwick on a podcast talk about Neil deGrasse Tyson and he was just salivating. White liberal nerds love this guy so much, he could defecate on them like Martin Bashir's fantasies and they would dance in the streets. All he does is, he's drunk with adulation. And he talks about things like 'when I was young in New York I would get racially profiled when I'd go into stores.' Back then he looked like he was in The Warriors. He had a huge afro and a cutoff shirt and New York was a war zone. Sorry, you fit the profile!"
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At this, even Gutfeld seemed thrown. "How did we get into this? I wanna talk about aliens!"
Fair enough, Gutfeld. McInnes may have been referring to a panel discussion at the Center for Inquiry where deGrasse Tyson told a story about exiting a store security system at the same time as a white male when the alarm went off. The white male (who had the stolen goods) continued on knowing that the security guards would stop deGrasse Tyson, which they did. The story was a part of a longer conversation about the barriers and expectations he overcame on the path to becoming a respected astrophysicist.
Media Matters reports that Gavin McInnes has used obscene sexist and racist terms many times before (in myriad publications), and currently writes for Taki's Magazine, which publishes overtly racist material. His comments in this scenario are, of course, heinous, but not entirely unexpected. (Media Matters)