Trigger Warning: This post contains racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, and transphobic language.
Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys may sound like a B-list boy band, but the reality is far more sinister: This group, which McInnes himself has described as "alt-right without the racism," has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit organization that tracks extremist groups, as noted in a recent profile by The New York Times.
McInnes and his followers, who labeled themselves the Proud Boys, recently gained national attention after a group of Proud Boys got into a fight with three protesters, screaming homophobic slurs while beating people, on October 12, outside the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City, where McInnes was giving a speech. Not a week later, the group received what some thought was a practically glowing profile in The New York Times, in which the writer describes McInnes as “a former Brooklyn hipster turned far-right provocateur.”
“Though he has repudiated racism and anti-Semitism in some of his writings and speeches, he has also made statements that have openly denigrated nonwhite cultures,” Alan Feuer wrote in the Times profile on Tuesday, October 16. Feuer pointed out that McInnes describes himself as a fiscal conservative and libertarian and a “champion of Western values.”
McInnes started off as a cofounder of VICE Media but left in 2008, citing creative differences. As reported by The Guardian, an SPLC researcher said that the group has "been open and very consistent about using violence as a tool." McInnes has claimed they only use violence in self-defense. They have been active in the Pacific Northwest for some time, particularly at right-wing events in the Portland and Seattle areas, according to The Guardian. Jason Kessler, who had attended Proud Boys meetings, organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. (Kessler was expelled from the group after the Charlottesville violence.)
The group aggressively denies that they are racists, with McInnes describing it as “alt-right without the racism” on an episode of This American Life from September 22, 2017. McInnes did, however, tell the Times that he may be Islamophobic, called himself an “Archie Bunker sexist,” and has spoken of lesbians with “geriatric crew cuts.” According to the Times, McInnes says the people on the left who approve of political correctness and disapprove of his stance are simply “mentally ill lunatics.”
According to Salon, on The Gavin McInnes Show, which ran at Compound Media from June 2015 through August 2017, he was more vocally alt-right and not shy about spouting racially charged rhetoric.
“We’re the new n***ers. MAGA is the new black,” he said on his show on March 8, 2017, according to Salon. “If you like Trump, you are a black man in 1945 trying to have water at a liberal fountain.” It’s at minimum an aggressively ignorant comparison for anyone who knows the real history of institutionalized racism and segregation in the United States.
McInnes claims that he isn’t leading a hate group, but he's reported to have said some blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic things. For instance:
On his show Get Off My Lawn on April 24, 2018, he said Muslims “have a problem with inbreeding” and accused followers of one of the world’s most well-known religions of being “mentally damaged” due to that practice; he also called the Koran a “hate book,” according to the SPLC.
In an essay he published with Thought Catalog on August 8, 2014, according to the SPLC, he made wildly inaccurate comments about the transgender community, writing: “Buying woman parts from a hospital and calling yourself a broad trivializes what it is to be a woman. Womanhood is not on a shelf next to wigs and makeup." He attacks trans-masculine people in the same essay, saying, "Similarly, being a dude is quite involved… [transitioning] doesn’t mean you are going to start inventing shit and knowing how cement works.”
According to the SPLC, during The Gavin McInnes Show on June 28, 2017, he said he was sexist “because women are dumb. No, I’m just kidding, ladies. But you do tend to not thrive in certain areas — like writing.”
He talked about trying to have sex with Asian-Americans, using a derogatory term in January 2016, according to Salon.
He told Ann Coulter in January 2016, according to Salon, that white men didn’t kill Native Americans “because we’re mean,” but survived “because we’re better.” Despite this, McInnes has also claimed he likes Native Americans because he has three children with his wife, who is of Native descent.
He said black men have larger arms because they’ve “spent more time climbing trees,” in a December 2015 discussion with Milo Yiannopoulos, Salon reported, an apparent play on the old racist trope of comparing black people to apes.
He called Jamaica a “disgusting sh*thole because they kicked the whites out,” on his show in November 2015, according to Salon.
On his show in June 2015, according to Salon, he said the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan was predominately Puerto Rican (it’s actually Dominican) and called the neighborhood “just a giant welfare resort.”
But when McInnes is approached about any of these comments, he tends to justify them.
“You don’t seem to understand that it’s possible to use a racial epithet or a seemingly slanderous term such as, ‘That’s so gay’ as a parody of racism or homophobia,” McInnes told Salon, in an email exchange about some of his racist comments.
But Gavin McInnes isn’t really engaged in parody, in part because parody targets an existing work; McInnes and his supporters might be closer to satire, but only for those interested in debating the framework of his language, which misses the larger impact of his work.
McInnes and the Proud Boys are a violent, far-right extremist group. Their willingness to engage in street violence makes them dangerous, and that should be taken very seriously.
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