The Trouble With Proud Boys
Gavin McInnes looks like someone you’d see at an avant-garde art exhibit, or discussing Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy over a craft beer…at a Father John Misty concert. That’s according to conventional reasoning. In reality, McInnes is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or more jcisely, an abrasively parochial nationalist in prototypical hipster attire — certainly not a combination you see every day. As the impresario of the belligerent Proud Boys group, McInnes is a self-proclaimed “Western chauvinist” who “refuses to apologize for creating the modern world”. He denies any harbouring of misogynistic or racist sentiments, and espouses an ideology teeming with contradictions. In fairness, the Proud Boys, a quasi-cultish consortium possessing excess levels of testosterone, doesn’t disavow members from visible minorities. McInnes rightfully points out, on numerous occasions, unfounded journalistic conclusions categorizing the group as neo-Nazi in design. Despite that, it’s his rigid conception of Western identity, and its alleged superiority, that imply the more malignant underpinnings. Just because he’s not a proponent of eugenics doesn’t exonerate him from latent, crude prejudice. After all, McInnes slams the …