In October 2018, McInnes gave a talk at the Metropolitan Republican Club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He stepped out of his car wearing glasses with Asian eyes drawn on the front and pulled a samurai sword out of its sheath. Police forced him inside. Later, inside the event, McInnes and an Asian member of the Proud Boys re-enacted the 1960 assassination of Inejirō Asanuma, the leader of the Japanese Socialist Party; a captioned photograph of the actual assassination had become a meme in alt-right social media. The audience for the event was described by "The New York Times" as "a cross-section of New York’s far-right subculture: libertarians, conspiracy theorists and nationalists who have coalesced around their opposition to Islam, feminism and liberal politics."