Proud Boys

Gavin McInnes

PROUD BOYS on SPLC

“Established in the midst of the 2016 presidential election by VICE Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys are self-described “western chauvinists” who adamantly deny any connection to the racist “alt-right,” insisting they are simply a fraternal group spreading an “anti-political correctness” and “anti-white guilt” agenda.

“McInnes himself has ties to the racist right and has contributed to hate sites like VDare.com and American Renaissance, both of which publish the work of white supremacists and so-called “race realists.” He even used Taki’s Magazine — a far-right publication whose contributors include Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor — to announce the founding of the Proud Boys. McInnes plays a duplicitous rhetorical game: rejecting white nationalism and, in particular, the term “alt-right” while espousing some of its central tenets. For example, McInnes has himself said it is fair to call him Islamophobic.

In its own words

“It’s such a rape culture with these immigrants, I don’t even think these women see it as rape. They see it as just like having a teeth [sic] pulled. ‘It’s a Monday. I don’t really enjoy it,’ but that’s what you do. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t have the same trauma as it would for a middle-class white girl in the suburbs because it’s so entrenched into their culture.” — Gavin McInnes, Get Off My Lawn, June 19, 2018

“Muslims have a problem with inbreeding. They tend to marry their first cousins…and that is a major problem here because when you have mentally damaged inbreds — which not all Muslims are, but a disproportionate number are — and you have a hate book called the Koran…you end up with a perfect recipe for mass murder.” — Gavin McInnes, Get Off My Lawn, April 24, 2018

“We brought roads and infrastructure to India and they are still using them as toilets. Our criminals built nice roads in Australia but aboriginals keep using them as a bed. The next time someone bitches about colonization, the correct response is ‘You’re welcome.’”
—Gavin McInnes, “10 Things I like About White Guys,” Taki’s Magazine, March 2, 2017″

The Proud Boys, the bizarre far-right street fighters behind violence in New York, explained Vox  They hate Muslims and refuse to masturbate: Meet the shock troops of the weirdo right. Vox By Jane Coastonjane On Friday night on the streets of Manhattan, members of a far-right organization kicked and punched counterprotesters they believed to be members of Antifa — and weren’t arrested.

The brawl between the “Proud Boys” and counterprotesters started outside the Metropolitical Republican Club, where the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, was reenacting the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, the leader of the Japanese Socialist Party, in 1960.

Now Gov. Andrew Cuomo has ordered the New York state police to join the NYPD in investigating what happened, while the NYPD continues to look for “persons of interest” who were involved in the fighting. Reportedly, the NYPD will charge nine members of the Proud Boys with rioting or attempted assault. Three counterprotesters were charged on Friday night.

So who are the Proud Boys and their banned-from-Twitter leader? Created by McInnes, a “provocateur” and one of the original co-founders of Vice Media, who has described himself as “an old punk from Canada” and turned right in 2008 (the same year he left Vice over “creative differences”), the Proud Boys are a strange amalgamation of a men’s rights organization, a fight club and what some may see as a hate group — one that loves Donald Trump, hates Muslims (and Jews and trans people), but permits nonwhite membership.

The group has a magazine where members who win fights are celebrated with the slogan, “They fucked around. They found out.” And in the age of concerns about “civility” and worries about political violence surrounding the upcoming midterms, the Proud Boys — and McInnes, who believes violence is “a really effective way to solve problems” — are more interested in punching “faggots.”

As Jared Holt at Right Wing Watch told me, “The Proud Boys have been the right wing’s enforcers in the streets against those who dissent against them.”

From Vice Media to “cuckmercials”

In 1994, McInnes, alongside Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, launched Voice of Montreal, which later became Vice Media. McInnes was already the voice of a particular strain of right-wingerdom within the company, telling the New York Times, ‘’I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of.”

In what would become a standard McInnes move, he later attempted to couch his remarks as ironic humor in a letter to Gawker, telling the website that his remarks were a joke and adding, “It’s unfortunate that people in the know like Gawker are taking it all so seriously. I thought we were on the same page: baby boomer media like The Times is a laughingstock and we should do whatever we can to ridicule it.”

McInnes left Vice Media in 2008. Since then, he has moved to what he calls the “New Right,” which he seems to define as a combination of “Western chauvinism” and social and political libertarianism or perhaps libertinism (for example, he has written extensively on how women want to be “downright abused” and that he had to stop “playing nice” and begin “totally defiling the women I slept with” to get more women to have sex with him).

His shift to the far right also included espousing anti-Muslim sentiments (“the Muslim world is filled with shoeless, toothless, inbred, hill-dwelling, rifle-toting, sodomy-prone men”) and an embrace of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments, including a video he made for the far-right Canadian outlet Rebel Media initially called “10 Things I Hate about Jews” (or as he would later tweet, “10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT THE GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING JEWS!”). He’s also argued that historically, perhaps Jews “were ostracized for a good reason.”

These videos, and some of his others, earned him a host of new fans, including David Duke. And though McInnes has attempted to push aside accusations of racism (which he argues doesn’t exist), he has written for both VDare and American Renaissance, the latter the publication of the “race-realist, white advocacy organization” New Century Foundation.

From former KKK grand wizard David Duke’s Twitter feed. March 11, 2017.

Much of McInnes’s work, and that of a large swath of what he would call the New Right, is focused on what he views as the “feminization” of culture and politics, from commercials or “cuckmercials” that show “emasculated men” (or too many mixed-race couples) to politics. In an interview last year with Metro, he said, “There is a real war on masculinity.”

And it’s that search for the renewal of a very specific kind of masculinity — and McInnes’s belief that Western culture is in trouble because of “social justice warriors” and the mainstream media “belittling” white men — that resulted in the Proud Boys.”Vox

But two months later, as prosecutors move ahead with charges, the all-male Proud Boys group is in disarray. Ten members have been arrested in connection with the violence, charged with riot and attempted assault as part of an investigation into their activities.

The Proud Boys have been widely condemned as a hate group. Facebook and Instagram have banned the group. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it a “hate group.” An organization called New York City Antifa, whose members describe themselves as “anti-fascists,” has named the Proud Boys who were involved in the violence and has posted details about their lives on Twitter.

Even the founder, Gavin McInnes, has distanced himself, announcing on YouTube in late November that he was quitting the group “in all capacities, forever.” His departure left the Proud Boys without a figurehead, though the group has since said in an online message that, “We’re not going anywhere.” NY Times

New York GOP’s Trumpification is complete Manhattan Republicans and state GOP give hate group a pass.City & State NY By BEN ADLER OCTOBER 15, 2018 “New York’s Republican Party has endorsed misogyny and white nationalism – or, at minimum, declared them to be scourges less worrisome than vandalism. And so the genteel tradition of the New York GOP is apparently no more; its Trumpification is complete.

On Friday, in a turn of events that would have seemed remarkable just a few years ago, the Metropolitan Republican Club – of which New York City Mayors Fiorello LaGuardia and Mike Bloomberg and governors Nelson Rockefeller and George Pataki were members – hosted Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, a self-described “Western chauvinist” collective identifiedas a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group’s members have helped to organize and participated in white nationalist demonstrations such as the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. McInnes also has attracted controversy for statements such as “Muslims are stupid,” and “Maybe the reason I’m sexist is because women are dumb.

The Metropolitan Republican Club, however, is a Republican organization whose building Molinaro identified as one of his campaign headquarters. Later on Friday, state Republican Party spokeswoman Jessica Proud offered this explanation for why Cox’s first statement on the vandalism did not disavow a Republican club hosting an openly racist, sexist provocateur: “He didn’t even know who (McInnes) was and we don’t agree with his views,” she said. “It was organized by the Met Club, not the NYGOP, just to be clear. But there is a way to peacefully protest if you don’t agree, you don’t have a right to commit crimes and threaten people’s safety. And we are deeply disturbed by it and the rhetoric saying not to be civil and that’s what the note said: We won’t be civil, we won’t apologize and this attack is merely the beginning.”

One would think from that statement that McInnes was merely a person who holds extreme opinions and his opponents were the only ones being uncivil. The NYGOP would also say it disagrees with Bill de Blasio’s views. The statement makes no distinction between normal political disagreement – what should tax rates be, should climate pollution be regulated – and bigotry. In fact, McIness is also prone to extremely uncivil statements, including calling Jada Pinkett Smith a “monkey actress.” While criminal vandalism is certainly an uncivil response, hosting a speech by McInnes – in which he reenacted the gruesome murder of a Japanese socialist – is itself uncivil.

When violence broke out between McInnes supporters and anti-fascist protesters on Friday evening, the NYPD arrested three of the protesters but none of the Proud Boys who were documented beating a man and shouting homophobic slurs at him. In response, Cox took a stand for civility and decency by placing blame where it clearly lies: on … Cuomo. “The governor does not condemn it, the governor does not say anything,” Cox said, regarding the vandalism. ‘But then when there is later violence, he then says that it’s all Donald Trump’s fault. What kind of governor is that?’” City & State NY