TPUSA Advisor Who Published Shockingly Racist Newsletter Resigns From Museum Board

This article was co-published with The Informant.

It was once a feather in the cap for Rip McIntosh.

The Florida man sat on the board of trustees for the Buffalo Bill Center of the West with the likes of former governors, a former senator, and even former Vice President Dick Cheney. The role with the Smithsonian-affiliated museum in Cody, Wyoming was a good one for a philanthropist who enjoyed the outdoors and who spent a lot of time in the Rocky Mountain region.

All of that came to an abrupt end on Monday night when McIntosh tendered his resignation from the board following revelations that he was the publisher of a racist newsletter that disparaged Black people and often served as a vehicle for white grievance politics.

News of McIntosh’s resignation was first reported by the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.

“The views represented in Mr. McIntosh’s online and social media content do not represent or reflect the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s core values or its mission,” a spokesperson for the museum told the Star-Tribune.

McIntosh’s resignation came a week after TPM and The Informant revealed in an investigation that he ran a shockingly racist email newsletter and recently published an essay that said Black people have “become socially incompatible with other races” and “American Black culture has evolved into an un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.”

The focus of the investigation was McIntosh’s affiliation with Turning Point USA, a massive pro-Trump group to which he serves as an advisor. McIntosh included the logo and fundraising pitch for the group at the bottom of his newsletter.

There’s no sign Turning Point has taken any action against McIntosh since the investigation was published. His name and photo still appear on the organization’s governance page on its website. A spokesperson for the group didn’t respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

McIntosh has faced additional fallout in the past week, too.

He told the Casper Star-Tribune that his account was terminated by Constant Contact, the email marketing company he used to send out his newsletter.

While the report didn’t say exactly which day McIntosh got the boot, it appears that the most recent email he sent to his list was on Wednesday.

The subject line of the email was “White Privilege — The Left’s Bourgeoisie Bogeyman,” and it contained an essay by Kathleen Brush, who frequently writes about white identity for McIntosh’s newsletter. Brush lamented what she described as the redistribution of “vast amounts of wealth from whites (and privileged self-reliant Asians) to people of color” by way of government benefits.

“White people need to wake up,” the essay said. “Socialism requires drumming up hatred for the rich, or, in this case, the white middle class — the bourgeoisie. It’s a pity to slur and guilt-trips (sic) the descendants of white ethnicities that endured hell to build a country where people of all races and ethnicities could succeed.”

McIntosh told the Star-Tribune that he planned to continue publishing the newsletter just as soon as he could find a new platform that would take him.

“I’m afraid I’ll be dark until I can engage another service that will facilitate my posting articles,” he told the newspaper.

Nick R. Martin is a TPM alum who has also written for The Daily Beast and BuzzFeed News, among other places. These days, he runs The Informant, a publication dedicated to covering hate and extremism in the U.S.