In light of the Proud Boys newfound notoriety, courtesy of Donald Trump, we’re re-upping this 2018 Frank profile of the PB founder, Ottawa’s own Gavin McInnes.
From faux punkster growing up in the cow fields of Kanata to leader of a white nationalist hate group targeted by the FBI, it’s been a long strange trip for Gavin McInnes.
The co-founder of Vice Media, former Fox News contributor, and onetime alt.right personality with Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media, McInnes has at last gained the notoriety he always craved: The FBI has placed his Proud Boys on their shit list as far right extremists who have helped escalate “violence at political rallies held on college campuses, and in cities like Charlottesville, Portland and Seattle.”
How did this failed Johnny Knoxville imitator get from Ottawa to international thug stardom?
Let’s let him tell us, shall we?
From his podcast studio in the rec room of his Larchmont, N. Y. home, the punk poseur recently explained how his future was shaped at Earl of March High School in Kanata. (Spoiler alert: Gavin’s Ottawa childhood was one long fart joke.)
“The New York City of our lives was Ottawa, Canada. A government town. It attracts bureaucrats. Unadventurous people. It’s like a cruise. You’re going to be around the least adventurous people, where you get supplied with your buffet and you don’t have to think.
“Ottawa’s a dull city. With a government-funded opera house, a big huge cement building where they listen to opera, classical music and pretend they’re aristocrats.
“We were all middle class, upper middle class kids of engineers and stuff. There was a burgeoning tech industry in Ottawa. The government wanted to create a Canadian silicon valley so they imported all these British people with educations so they could build them computers. (Gavin’s father is a Brit techie.)
“Kanata Ontario is worse than the ‘burbs and it’s worse than the country burbs. It’s manufactured rural suburbs. They bought farmland and put up these cookie cutter homes that all looked the same. If you walked out your back door you just walked through cow fields.
“I would just stay home Friday night. Do bottle tokes and drink beer and watch all three Mad Max movies and then walk around with a blanket around our shoulders through the suburbs and cow fields.”
“We invented traditions that made high school super fun.
“We were legends. We just made up our own rules. For example if someone farts…or burps and doesn’t say ‘safety’ and you say ‘slut,’ then you get to beat the crap out of them until they can name five breakfast cereals.” (Proud Boys initiation includes being punched by members until the punchee names five cereals.)
“We had all this anger and frustration. If we were in Papua, New Guinea and we were tribesmen, we would have been out eviscerating people and eating their bowels…and raping their women.
“But you can’t do that. [These rituals] are very healthy. By outlawing these rituals they’re destroying people. And it’s got to come out somewhere.
“You notice by the way, a lot of poo stuff here. Hey ladies, trans people, genderless, binary, non-binary girls, if you’re coming over to the dark side and becoming a man, it’s not all Don Draper, martinis at lunch. It’s mostly shit jokes. We talk about sex a lot but we talk about diarrhea a lot.
Mamas, don’t let your incels grow up to be Proud Boys.
Update: In a sudden change of heart, McInnes announced today that he has decided to “quit” the Proud Boys. No one is suggesting his lawyers urged him to get out ahead of the imminent legal shit storm, nor should they, but there is the little matter of Gav’s green card. To be cont’d…
He makes Jian Ghomeshi seem like a well adjusted success story. Rule Britannia!
“….relive your childhood”? You never left it Gavin. Your kids will reach adulthood before you do.
‘Mammas, don’t let your incels grow up to be proudboys.’ My wife doubled over laughing when I read this to her.
And heaven help us the man has procreated.
“Natural selection”? Yeah, right. Explain that one, Galapagos boy.
Yeah, Proud Boys. Not men. Ever notice how these wannabe autocrats are eternally stuck at age 12?
Seems his tony NY Democrat neighbours have him figured out. His wife, a supposed Democrat, seems wildly clueless.
“Hello neighbor,” she began. “I want to make sure some misinformation about my family is not being spread. The media has recently accused my husband of being an alt-right hate group leader. This is simply not true.”
“She described the Proud Boys as multiracial and blamed the media for implying otherwise.
“The club that is affiliated with my husband is multi-ethnic and it explicitly states it does not endorse these sentiments in any way,” she wrote.”
https://outline.com/hzGXKw
Among the 1660 words of the TWO YEAR old (November 13, 2018) Daily Beast article about his move in 2016, “he began a new chapter in life: founding the Proud Boys—a violent, ultranationalist men’s club—and selling his $2.5 million Brooklyn penthouse to buy a home in Larchmont, a tony Westchester County town 20 miles north of the city.”
…”The evening after local news site LoHud ran a story on [Amy] Siskind’s [Facebook announcement of an anti-hate vigil ] announcement, the McInnes family showed up on Siskind’s doorstep. Siskind, alarmed, called the police. McInnes later told LoHud that Siskind shouldn’t have been alarmed about the unannounced visit.
Of the people gathered outside, “three of them are little kids and one was holding his teddy bear,” he [Craig McInnes] said. “The pipe dream was that she opened the door and my wife would say, ‘Look, let’s talk about this. I’m a Hillary supporter. Why are you putting my beautiful children in danger?’ This was not about intimidation and I was very open with everyone.” “
Just another git discovering the market for proto-fascist buffoons is way more competitive than he expected.