Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally Was Even Worse Than You Think

In his book “Unhumans: The Secret History Of Communist Revolutions (And How To Crush Them),” MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec argues that Americans with left-wing beliefs are subhuman and praises the murderous right-wing regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile for going after the “unhumans” of their respective eras.

“President Donald J. Trump is waiting in the wings,” Posobiec said earlier this year while promoting the book at the National Conservatism Conference. “And when he assumes office again, let me tell you, the globalists and their entire regime will be smashed to pieces and scattered to the winds.”

He then added: “We don’t negotiate with unhumans because that’s the stakes of this — humanity versus unhuman; populist nationalist versus atheistic Marxist; strength, beauty and genius versus weakness, ugliness and stupidity; civilization versus barbarism; crime and chaos versus law.”

We don’t negotiate with unhumans. It is explicitly fascistic language depicting a wide swath of the American electorate as deserving of redemptive violence. (JD Vance, the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president, praised Posobiec’s “Unhumans” in a blurb, or editorial review.)

On Sunday evening, just nine days before the presidential election, Posobiec took a seat in Madison Square Garden and watched as former President Donald Trump lashed out at various political opponents from the stage. As he has throughout the campaign, Trump called Democrats “the enemies from within,” labeled journalists “enemies of the people,” and falsely depicted Latino immigrants as immutably criminal before doubling down on his pledge to mass-deport millions of them when in office.

“Best rally Trump has ever done,” Posobiec tweeted after posting a video of himself inside the arena.

Much attention has rightfully been paid to the speakers at Sunday’s rally — the opening speakers who called Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris the “anti-Christ” and who said “her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.” The comedian who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and made a racist joke about Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins for Halloween. Many of the articles about the event noted how its fascist rhetoric and pageantry bore an unnerving resemblance to a swastika-adorned “Pro-America” rally in 1939 at the same arena celebrating the Nazi regime in Germany.

Trump later called the event “an absolute lovefest.”

But less attention was paid to some of the prominent conservative figures sitting in the audience or among the overflow crowd outside in midtown Manhattan, people whose continued relevance in the MAGA universe underscores just how extreme the Republican Party has become.

Posobiec’s account on X — the social media platform that billionaire Elon Musk, a featured speaker at Sunday’s rally, has transformed into a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign — offers a look at the murderers’ row of grifters, unapologetic bigots and other far-right figures in attendance.

Posobiec has nearly 3 million followers on X. During the rally Sunday, he retweeted a photo of himself and his companions for the evening. Among the people in the photo was Michael Knowles, the Daily Wire host who last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference argued that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

There was Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official turned right-wing crusader against what he argued was tech platforms’ censorship of conservative voices. According to NBC, Benz used a pseudonym for years to push racist conspiracy theories about “white genocide.” He also claimed to be a member of the neo-fascist gang the Proud Boys.

“It is impossible to be here right now and not feel the love,” Benz tweeted from the rally.

Posobiec also retweeted a video from Ben Braddock showing all the Trump supporters who couldn’t get into Madison Square Garden watching the rally on a big screen outside the arena.

Braddock is an editor-at-large at IM–1776, a far-right online magazine that praises authoritarians and dictators and expresses white nationalist sentiments. The magazine is funded, in part, by the Claremont Institute, a prominent MAGA think tank. In 2022, as the Guardian reported, Braddock published a sympathetic interview with Renaud Camus, the French fascist writer best known for coining the phrase “the great replacement” to describe the white supremacist conspiracy theory that brown immigrants are “invading” Europe and America, often at the behest of Jews, to “replace” white people. The theory has inspired multiple mass shootings, including a massacre of Muslims in New Zealand and a massacre of Black people in Buffalo, New York.

“Walking around Manhattan with a MAGA hat, only positive reactions,” Braddock boasted in a post on X on Sunday. “Everything has changed.”

Posobiec also retweeted a post from Patrick Casey, the former leader of the white supremacist group Identity Evropa. “Trump calls for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American. The crowd cheers and applauds—the loudest all night,” Casey tweeted.

“This was easily the loudest of all night,” Posobiec concurred when he reposted Casey. “Even more than Elon and Trump’s intros.”

Casey, who tweeted a selfie of himself from Madison Square Garden on Sunday, marched with neo-Nazis at the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where his fellow marchers terrorized the town, carrying tiki torches and chanting “You will not replace us!” One of his fellow marchers also deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others.

Casey later took charge of Identity Evropa, the since-disbanded white supremacist group that advocated the “remigration” of nonwhite immigrants out of the U.S. — a well-known euphemism for ethnic cleansing that Trump himself adopted earlier this year.

At 1:23 a.m., after the rally concluded, Posobiec retweeted an X account called TrebelWoe, which belongs to Ryan Dumperth, a neo-Nazi podcaster from Vermont.

“The energy on the righteous side of this battle isn’t rhetorical heat from the impending election,” Dumperth tweeted about the Madison Square Garden rally (which it doesn’t appear he attended). “This is a declaration of war against everyone responsible for the conditions we now suffer. This energy will rapidly become concrete action that changes the map, forever.”

“Soon,” Posobiec concurred.

News coverage of Posobiec, who rose to online prominence through his blogs about “Game of Thrones,” often leaves out his extremism. Posobiec claimed on his resume that he worked for CBS News and in intelligence for the Navy. An investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center, however, found that Posobiec never worked at CBS News, and although he worked in Navy intelligence, the military later revoked his security clearance.

Later, he became one of the biggest promoters of “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy theory claiming Democrats were running a pedophile ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. Per a HuffPost investigation, he collaborated with a pair of neo-Nazis to produce a documentary about Seth Rich, a Democratic strategist whose unsolved murder Posobiec and others falsely blamed on Bill and Hillary Clinton. Throughout this period, he maintained deep ties with other white supremacists and routinely posted racist and antisemitic memes on Twitter.

And just after Trump won the presidential election in 2016, Posobiec brought a “Rape Melania” sign to an anti-Trump protest in New York in an attempt to depict Trump’s detractors as belligerent enough to condone the sexual assault of his wife.

In the ensuing years, he emerged as one of the foremost MAGA propagandists, working for various far-right news outlets, being invited onto the main stage of CPAC, appearing during prime time on Fox News — all while publishing books including “Unhumans.”

On Sunday, Posobiec posted photos of himself with fans he met at Madison Square Garden, all of whom held up copies of his latest book: “Bulletproof: The Truth About the Assassination Attempts of Donald Trump.”

The book has already earned at least one big endorsement. On Oct. 25, Posobiec tweeted a video of him standing with Trump himself.

“Jack’s a great guy,” Trump says. “He’s written a fantastic book. Everybody’s talking about it. Go get it. And he’s been my friend right from the beginning of this whole beautiful event, and we’re gonna turn it around and make our country great again.”

“Amen,” Posobiec responded, shaking Trump’s hand. “Thank you, Mr. President.”