Gavin McInnes
Gavin Miles McInnes is a Canadian writer, podcaster, far-right commentator and founder of the Proud Boys. He is the host of Get Off My Lawn with Gavin McInnes on his website, Compound Censored. He co-founded Vice magazine in 1996 and relocated to the United States in 2001. In 2016 he founded the Proud Boys, an American far-right militant organization which was designated a terrorist group in Canada and New Zealand after he left the group. McInnes has been described as promoting violence against political opponents but has argued that he has only supported political violence in self-defense and that he is not far-right or a supporter of fascism, instead identifying as "a fiscal conservative and libertarian."
Born to Scottish parents in Hertfordshire, England, McInnes emigrated to Canada as a child. He graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa before moving to Montreal and co-founding Vice with Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith. He relocated with Vice Media to New York City in 2001. During his time at Vice, McInnes was called a leading figure in the New York hipster subculture. He holds both Canadian and British citizenship and lives in Larchmont, New York.
In 2018, McInnes was fired from Blaze Media and was banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for violating terms of use related to promoting violent extremist groups and hate speech. In June 2020, McInnes's account was suspended from YouTube for violating YouTube's policies concerning hate speech by posting content that was "glorifying inciting violence against another person or group of people."
Early life
Gavin Miles McInnes was born on 17 July 1970 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England, the son of Scottish parents James McInnes, who later became the Vice-President of Operations at Gallium Visual Systems Inc. – a Canadian defence company – and Loraine McInnes, a retired business teacher. His family migrated to Canada when McInnes was four, settling in Ottawa, Ontario. He attended Ottawa's Earl of March Secondary School. As a teen, McInnes played in an Ottawa punk band called Anal Chinook. He graduated from Carleton University.Career
''Vice Media'' (1994–2007)
McInnes joined Voice magazine in 1994 as assistant editor and cartoonist, under editor Suroosh Alvi. The magazine was established by Interimages Communications under a job creation program of the Quebec government to allow social welfare recipients to gain work experience. It focused on Montreal's alternative cultural scene, including music, art, trends and drug culture, to compete with the already established Montreal Mirror. Alvi, McInnes and Shane Smith bought the magazine from the publisher and changed the magazine's name to Vice in 1996.Richard Szalwinski, a Canadian software millionaire, acquired the magazine and relocated the operation to New York City in the late 1990s.
During McInnes's tenure he was described as the "godfather" of hipsterdom by WNBC and as "one of hipsterdom's primary architects" by AdBusters. He occasionally contributed articles to Vice, including "The VICE Guide to Happiness" and "The VICE Guide to Picking Up Chicks", and co-authored two Vice books: The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and Vice Dos and Don'ts: 10 Years of VICE Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques.
In an interview in the New York Press in 2002, McInnes said that he was pleased that most Williamsburg hipsters were white. McInnes later wrote in a letter to Gawker that the interview was done as a prank intended to ridicule "baby boomer media like The Times". After he became the focus of a letter-writing campaign by a black reader, Vice apologized for McInnes's comments. McInnes was featured in a 2003 New York Times article about Vice magazine; McInnes' political views were described by the Times as "closer to a white supremacist's."
In 2006, he was featured in The Vice Guide to Travel with actor and comedian David Cross in China. He left Vice in 2008 due to what he described as "creative differences". In a 2013 interview with The New Yorker, McInnes said his split with Vice was about the increasing influence of corporate advertising on Vice's content, stating that "Marketing and editorial being enemies had been the business plan".
After ''Vice'' (2008–2018)
After leaving Vice in 2008, McInnes became increasingly known for far-right political views.In 2008, McInnes created the website StreetCarnage.com. He also co-founded an advertising agency called Rooster where he served as creative director.
McInnes was featured in season 3 of the Canadian reality TV show Kenny vs. Spenny, as a judge in the "Who is Cooler?" episode. In 2010, McInnes was approached by Adult Swim and asked to play the part of Mick, an anthropomorphic Scottish soccer ball, in the short-lived Aqua Teen Hunger Force spin-off Soul Quest Overdrive. After losing a 2010 pilot contest to Cheyenne Cinnamon and the Fantabulous Unicorn of Sugar Town Candy Fudge, six episodes of Soul Quest Overdrive were ordered, with four airing in Adult Swim's 4 AM DVR Theater block on 25 May 2011 before quickly being cancelled. McInnes jokingly blamed the show's cancellation on the other cast members not being "as funny" as him.
McInnes wrote a column for Taki's Magazine, beginning around 2011, that made casual use of racial and anti-gay slurs, as described by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
McInnes has also written columns for American Renaissance, a white supremacist magazine.
In 2012, McInnes wrote a memoir book called How to Piss in Public. In 2013 he directed The Brotherhood of the Traveling Rants, a documentary on his tour as an occasional standup comedian. For the film, he faked a serious car accident. Also that year, McInnes starred in the independent film How to Be a Man, which premiered at Sundance Next Weekend. He has also played supporting roles in other films including Creative Control and One More Time.
In August 2014, McInnes was asked to take an indefinite leave of absence as chief creative officer of Rooster, following online publication at Thought Catalog of an essay about transphobia titled "Transphobia is Perfectly Natural" that sparked a call to boycott the company. In response, Rooster issued a statement, saying in part: "We are extremely disappointed with his actions and have asked that he take a leave of absence while we determine the most appropriate course of action."
In June 2015, broadcaster Anthony Cumia announced that McInnes would be hosting a show on his network, therefore retiring the Free Speech podcast that he had started in March. The Gavin McInnes Show premiered on Compound Media on 15 June. McInnes is a former contributor to Canadian far-right portal The Rebel Media and a regular on conspiracy theorist media platform Infowars' The Alex Jones Show, and Fox News' Red Eye, The Greg Gutfeld Show, and The Sean Hannity Show.
In 2016, he founded the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist, men's rights and male-only organisation classified as a "general hate" organization by the SPLC. He has rejected this classification, claiming that the group is "not an extremist group and not have ties with white nationalists".
McInnes left Rebel News in August 2017, declaring that he was going to be "a multi-media Howard Stern-meets-Tucker Carlson". He later joined CRTV, an online television network launched by Conservative Review. The debut episode of his new show Get Off My Lawn aired on 22 September 2017.
Events in 2018
On 10 August 2018, McInnes' Twitter account, as well as the account for the Proud Boys, was permanently suspended by Twitter due to their rules against violent extremist groups. The suspension was ahead of the first anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the small Unite the Right 2 Washington protest in August 2018 in which the Proud Boys participated.On 12 October 2018, at the Metropolitan Republican Club, McInnes participated in a reenactment of the 1960 assassination of socialist politician Inejiro Asanuma by 17-year-old right-wing ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi during a televised debate. After the event, a contingent of Proud Boys were caught on tape beating a protester outside the venue, after a leftist protester threw a plastic bottle at them.
On 21 November 2018, shortly after news broke that the FBI had reportedly classified the Proud Boys as an extremist group with ties to white nationalists, McInnes said that his lawyers had advised him that quitting might help the nine members being prosecuted for the incidents in October and he said "this is 100% a legal gesture, and it is 100% about alleviating sentencing", and said it was a "'stepping down gesture', in quotation marks". Two weeks later the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Oregon office said that it had not been their intent to label the entire group as "extremist", only to characterize the possible threat from certain members of the group that way.
Later that month, McInnes was planning on travelling to Australia for a speaking tour with Milo Yiannopoulos and Tommy Robinson, but was informed by Australian immigration authorities that "he was judged to be of bad character" and would be denied a visa to enter the country. Issuing a visa to McInnes was opposed by an online campaign called "#BanGavin", which collected 81,000 signatures.
On 3 December 2018, Conservative Review Television, on which McInnes had hosted the Get Off My Lawn program, merged with BlazeTV, the television arm of Glenn Beck's TheBlaze, to become Blaze Media. McInnes was expected to host his program for the new company, whose co-president called McInnes "a comedian and provocateur, one of the many varied voices and viewpoints on Blaze Media platforms." Less than a week later, on 8 December, it was announced that McInnes was no longer associated with Blaze Media, with no details given as to why.
Two days later, on 10 December, McInnes, who had previously been banned by Amazon, PayPal, Twitter, and Facebook, was banned from YouTube for "multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement." Asked to comment about his firing and bannings, McInnes said that he had been victimized by "lies and propaganda", and that "there has been a concerted effort to de-platform me." In his e-mail to Huffington Post, McInnes stated that "Someone very powerful decided long ago that I shouldn't have a voice... I'm finally out of platforms and unable to defend myself.... We are no longer living in a free country." McInnes also indicated some personal responsibility for the situation in an interview on the ABC News program Nightline, saying. "I'm not guilt free in this. There's culpability there. I shouldn't have said, you know, violence solves everything or something like that without making the context clear and I regret saying things like that." McInnes stopped short of apologizing or actually retracting his past statements, saying, "That ship has sailed."