![]() The author, Adam Leith Gollner, then a Vice writer and editor, in Montreal, circa 1999.īy 2016, his unseemly pronouncements had become a part of American political discourse. I am turning America inside out from the outside in.” The days of the West are numbered, and I will be the impetus that destroys it. His true intentions were tattooed right on his back-in a tableau depicting a jellyfish with Chiang Kai-shek and Fidel Castro, “two immigrants,” he once proclaimed, “that came into a country, wiped out the previous cultures and started new, prosperous ones…. ![]() But couching his beliefs in humor didn’t hide the deadly serious nature of his politics. When his stance began to grow more blatantly xenophobic, he turned to stand-up, a medium that allowed him to claim he was only “joking around.” Just kidding had long been his default position. In 2003, when Vice was largely an extension of McInnes’s psyche, Jimmy Kimmel told The New York Times that its “brand of humor is what I would do if there were no ‘standards and practices’ on TV.” The whole Vice gestalt was so laced with sarcasm that The Village Voice called it “brilliant hipster self-parody.” McInnes’s early provocations were widely perceived as a commentary on hate rather than hate itself. (Neither agreed to interview requests.) But over time McInnes accelerated his drift to the political fringe. He counted comedians such as David Cross and Sarah Silverman as friends, both of whom contributed articles to Vice. He was a tree-planting vegetarian, a druggy anarchist, and a self-described “dogmatic feminist.” Some people who knew him then still regard him as one of the funniest people they’ve ever met. In the 1990s, McInnes was hardly a far-right menace. In his departure letter from Vice, he’d vowed his ideas would one day “blossom into fruition like a hundred humid vaginas in the presence of God’s boner.” Now, here he was-a legal immigrant from Canada, living in the States on a green card-surrounded by 100 sweaty dudes, some waving cocktail-napkin-size U.S. He’d lost so much in the intervening years: friends, fistfights, the respect of peers, a stake in Vice Media Group’s future profits, presumably countless brain cells. But life hadn’t been so joyous in the eight years since he’d left Vice, the Montreal magazine cum media conglomerate he’d cofounded in 1994 at age 24. Howling men in MAGA caps hoisted an ebullient McInnes into the air, crowd-surfing him across the throng. McInnes had founded what would become, according to the Canadian government, a “terrorist entity.”Īt 2:40 a.m., when Fox News decreed that Donald Trump had won, the crowd in the Gaslight erupted. ![]() ![]() Few back in 2016 realized how far the group would go-soon establishing chapters in 45 states, with members eventually indicted on charges ranging from civil disorder to conspiracy in the Washington, D.C., rampage. We’ll just walk into the White House.” They began chanting “USA! USA! USA!” the same way the Proud Boys would when breaching the Capitol complex in January. “If Donnie wins,” he bellowed into a distorting microphone, the Proud Boys will “own America. But as someone who’d always predicted trends, he could see where this would lead. McInnes had just created his gang months before. ![]() “Tonight we either take back the country or we lose the country to the establishment,” he told the attendees, a mixture of Trumpist trolls, frat bros, and the sort of amped-up nationalist types who call themselves “Western chauvinists.” That November evening, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes-my former boss-summoned his followers to the Gaslight Lounge in New York’s Meatpacking District to watch the returns. O n election night in 2016, four years before the January 6 storming of the U.S. ![]()
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