The Proud Boys got a lot of free publicity this last week due to Donald Trump giving them a shout out during the first presidential debate. But actor George Takei tweeted an idea the other day, hoping to change the narrative.
Whether Takei was the first to float the idea isn’t confirmed, but what is clear is the hashtag #ProudBoys is now more associated with gay men, than white supremacy.
The official Twitter account of the Canadian Armed Forces in the United States took part, too, tweeting a picture of two men kissing—one a corporal named Brent Kenny—with #proudboys. “Love is love,” the group wrote in a reply tweet. (It was perhaps not a surprising piece of activism from an institution that describes itself in its Twitter bio as: “Nice people. Maple syrup.”) The Canadian Navy’s Twitter account later retweeted the image, as did the account for the ship that Kenny sailed on, the Winnipeg.
While the Proud Boys have been banned from Twitter, they are responded elsewhere. The Washington Post reports:
The Proud Boys have not responded kindly to the hashtag takeover. On Parler, a conservative social media app, followers of the Proud Boys group expressed outrage, with many commenting on images of the tweets with homophobic slurs, according to Forbes. One member created a meme of Takei making a white-supremacist gesture and another replied using Nazi terms like “final solution.”
