On election night in 2016, four years before the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, the proud boys threw a party. 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. “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.”
McInnes had just created his gang months before. But as someone who’d always predicted trends, he could see where this would lead. “If Donnie wins,” he bellowed into a distorting microphone, the Proud Boys will “own America. 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. 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. McInnes had founded what would become, according to the Canadian government, a “terrorist entity.”
At 2:40 a.m., when Fox News decreed that Donald Trump had won, the crowd in the Gaslight erupted. Howling men in MAGA caps hoisted an ebullient McInnes into the air, crowd-surfing him across the throng. 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. 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. 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. flags.
McInnes didn’t simply feel vindicated; he believed he was at the pinnacle of a new world. “I feel like Clark Kent,” he tweeted. “I’m just a guy in a suit but if you have a problem, I’d be happy to punch through your face.” Interviewed today for this story, he told me that Trump’s victory party was “one of the greatest nights in my life.”
In the 1990s, McInnes was hardly a far-right menace. 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. He counted comedians such as David Cross and Sarah Silverman as friends, both of whom contributed articles to Vice. (Neither agreed to interview requests.) But over time McInnes accelerated his drift to the political fringe.
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. 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. But couching his beliefs in humor didn’t hide the deadly serious nature of his politics. 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…. The days of the West are numbered, and I will be the impetus that destroys it. I am turning America inside out from the outside in.”
The author, Adam Leith Gollner, then a Vice writer and editor, in Montreal, circa 1999.Courtesy of Adam Gollner.
By 2016, his unseemly pronouncements had become a part of American political discourse. He made an overt statement on his webcast: “Can you call for violence generally? ’Cause I am.” He also declared, in a textbook example of hate speech, bordering on incitement: “Fighting solves everything—we need more violence from the Trump people. Trump supporters: Choke a motherfucker”—going on to use derogatory terms about trans people and women—“Get your fingers around the windpipe.” The expletive-laden comment was among the reasons he would ultimately get deplatformed from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. In November 2018, he reluctantly stepped down as leader of the Proud Boys. But by then he’d already lit the match and passed the torch. A peer-reviewed Bard College study this year determined that, based on an analysis of his public statements, “the rhetoric spouted by McInnes is actually fascist political action.”
No longer the make-believe insurgent he’d been in his punk days, the Canadian originator of the Proud Boys had become—at 50, his beard specked with gray—a fever-dream incarnate of the tattoo on his back. Not unlike his “good friend” Roger Stone, the Trump crony—and, not incidentally, pardoned felon—who has Nixon’s face emblazoned between his shoulder blades, McInnes wanted to subvert things. He wanted to cause chaos. He wanted to break America—and remake it in his imaginings.
This account, based on my firsthand observations and interviews with McInnes’s friends and former colleagues—as well as McInnes himself—is the forgotten backstory of how a wisecracking media maverick became a well-known and influential “hatemonger,” to quote the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
I worked alongside McInnes at the start of Vice in 1994, becoming the magazine’s editor shortly after it moved from Montreal to New York in 1999. Though McInnes immediately struck me as someone to avoid outside of work, nothing then indicated he would hatch an organization as vitriolic and violence-prone as the street-brawling Proud Boys. He and I were never friends. Founding editor Suroosh Alvi—who remains at Vice Media with the title of founder—brought me on board as a writer at the same time as McInnes. And when I stepped down in early 2001, it was largely because of McInnes’s toxic attitude. (By then his title was cofounder.)
Vice’s third cofounder, Shane Smith, was integral to the arc of McInnes’s life. He was—before their very public falling out—McInnes’s bandmate, roommate, rival, and best friend. Close since the age of 12, they shared everything from mescaline (then the Canadian name for PCP or horse tranquilizer) to lovers. How tight were they? A 2002 book they coauthored, The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, claims that McInnes once unwittingly squeezed his penis into the same condom as Smith’s during a threesome.
Smith today serves as executive chairman of Vice Media. He is considered an internet-age pioneer, having expanded an indie magazine into a global powerhouse. He is sometimes referred to as “Citizen Shane” among certain ex-colleagues, as much for his Hearst-like legacy as a media baron, huckster, and former purveyor of yellow journalism as for his Xanadu-like home in Santa Monica. In April, Smith’s wife, Tamyka, filed for divorce, and the mansion was sold for $48.7 million—the approximate amount, according to The Wall Street Journal, that Vice Media lost in 2019. Smith declined to be interviewed for this story.
The company provided the following statement to Vanity Fair: “VICE and Gavin parted ways in 2008—many years before Gavin founded the Proud Boys. VICE unequivocally condemns white supremacy, racism and any form of hate, has shone a fearless, bright light of award-winning journalism on extremism, the alt-right and hate groups around the world, and has created one of the most inclusive, diverse and equitable companies in media. Our respective records of the last decade and a half speak for themselves.” Vice News, in fact, has been unflinching in its extensive and clear-eyed coverage of the Proud Boys. (Media executive Nancy Dubuc took up the role of CEO in 2018 after Vice Media began to buckle in the #MeToo era, triggered in part by a New York Times sexual harassment exposé in which the founders apologized for the company’s “detrimental ‘boy’s club’ culture.”)
Though neither Smith nor McInnes typically comment on each other—due to the terms of a separation agreement—the latter recently told CNN that he still haunts Smith’s company “like Banquo’s ghost.” Lies, betrayal, greed: There’s a Macbethian whiff to the entangled narratives of McInnes and Smith. But even though Banquo gets sacrificed to the vaulting ambition of Macbeth, his former brother-in-arms, McInnes would seem to have more in common with Coriolanus, a violence-for-violence’s-sake fame-lord whose opportunism outweighs genuine political convictions. Shakespearean or not, McInnes started both Vice magazine and the Proud Boys, and one metastasized out of the other.
Gavin Miles McInnes was born in England to Scottish parents in 1970. His family immigrated to Ontario when he was five, settling in suburban Ottawa. In high school, he formed a gang called the Monks with guys nicknamed Pig Al and Pukey Stallion. Among the dozen-odd outcasts in the crew were McInnes’s two best friends, Eric Digras and Steve Durand. As kids, they said, McInnes’s predominant characteristic was his recklessness. “A super-radical shit disturber,” Durand told me. “Anything to provoke an extreme reaction.”
Was there any foreshadowing that he would go on to form a group as extreme as the Proud Boys? “Gavin was really into making rules that you had to abide by,” recalled Digras, explaining that one rule McInnes devised as a teenager has since become codified as a Proud Boys bylaw. The clan’s second-degree initiation rite—for “adrenaline control”—involves naming five breakfast cereals while being punched in the arms. The Monks did the same thing: “We’d all beat the shit out of you until you could say five breakfast cereals,” Digras said. “The culture of our gang was that if you were ever earnest or vulnerable, you lost all credibility.”
McInnes and his Monks were stoner freaks, on a different planet entirely than the Carpies, rural farm lads from up Carp River. “Nobody wanted us to show up at their party because we were the guys who started doing drugs and we’d always fuck shit up a little bit,” said Digras, then nicknamed Dogboy. Moving on from bongs, some of the Monks, by age 15, were dropping acid and huffing Pam cooking spray.
In 1986, a police officer came to their school to screen a PSA about the dangers of drunk driving. As McInnes relates in his 2012 autobiography, the students at Earl of March Secondary School watched the sobering account of a young woman paralyzed in an accident. During the Q&A that followed, McInnes took the microphone. “Why do you consider being in a wheelchair so horrible?” he asked the officer. “My mother is in a chair and has been her whole life, and our family certainly doesn’t see her as some kind of tragedy.” This was a lie, but it already revealed his affinity for darkly unfunny identity-based jokes. Even at that early age, he was both a class clown and “a very natural manipulator,” Digras explained.
McInnes, Digras added, would use him and Durand as “the fall guys” for his jokes when girls were around. “We called ourselves ‘the cardboard guys’ because we were just these cutouts that he would use as props for his show.” Later in life, several people who became close with McInnes would come to understand a similar dynamic, most notably his two partners at Vice, Smith and Alvi.
The origins of Vice can be traced to a rehab facility 30 minutes south of Montreal. In 1994, Alvi was 25 and had been shooting heroin for five years. Having OD’d multiple times, he was thieving where he could, pawning gold or cameras to cop his fix. He’d tried getting clean many times. Nothing worked. Blaming Montreal—“It’s too decadent of a city”—he moved away, to Minnesota, Vancouver, even Slovakia. But wherever he went, after the dope sickness wore off, he’d kick, get clean for a little while, and turn to Valium until he could find a dealer; then he’d get strung back out.
That spring, Alvi checked into the Foster Addiction Rehabilitation Centre, a clinic overlooking a cemetery in Saint-Philippe, Quebec. “If you keep using,” they told him, pointing at the tombstones, “that’s where you’ll end up.” Two years ago, I drove out to Foster with Alvi, where, sitting in a grassy ditch at the graveyard’s edge, he recounted the story of Vice’s beginnings.
Days before entering rehab, Alvi had gone with his family to the mosque to celebrate Eid. As a Pakistani-Canadian, Alvi was raised Muslim but had never been observant. On that day in the prayer hall, however, he got down on his knees and begged for mercy: “If there’s an Allah up there,” he prayed, “I need your help now.” He felt a sense of surrender, of submission to Islam.
Everything after that started changing, quickly. During treatment, the therapists asked the inpatients to do a career exercise: Write down their ideal job, imagining a time when they would be sober and try to reintegrate themselves into society. Alvi described himself working for a magazine somehow—even though he couldn’t imagine any media company ever giving him a job.
After rehab, he attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting where a stranger named Walter walked up to him, offering to become his sponsor. Walter asked if he was interested in writing. Alvi nodded, adding that he’d never written before. It didn’t matter; the next day, Walter introduced him to two Haitian publishers who were starting a cultural newspaper called Voice of Montreal. The job was part of a government program that supplemented regular welfare checks. Alvi, already on welfare, was hired on the spot.
The exercise from rehab had come true. “I wrote that, and Allah made it happen,” as he put it. “If I hadn’t been a heroin addict, Vice wouldn’t exist.” He felt that it had all been preordained, that heaven-sent grace was coming his way. He would think things and they would happen, he told me. While vacuuming at his parents’ house one day, he found himself thinking about a song by Hüsker Dü, the first punk band he’d loved. Knocking the remote with the vacuum cleaner, he accidentally turned on the TV and the video for that exact song came on. Hüsker Dü had broken up but the band’s frontman, Bob Mould, would soon be performing live in Montreal. Alvi knew his magazine would cover it. He just needed to find someone to review the concert—which is how I ended up writing for volume one, issue one, of Voice of Montreal.
At university in Ottawa, McInnes took women’s studies courses and got a ♀ tattoo with an E for equality. He started aligning himself with socially conscious groups. “He did it for social currency—as a fashion statement—rather than because he really believed in the ideology,” claimed Digras. Around that time, McInnes started a punk band called Leatherassbuttfuk with his grade school friend Shane Smith. McInnes sang songs like “You Can’t Rape a .38” as Smith, attired in leather chaps, banged away at a flying V guitar. “They had this weird bondage element,” said Durand, who saw them perform live. “There was blood involved…. Their shtick was being half naked, falling-down drunk. It was fucking gnarly.”
After university, both McInnes and Smith bummed around Europe. Smith relocated to Budapest, where he became, as he’s described it, “a criminal” involved in arbitrage (money trading). McInnes stayed in squats and attended a fascist skinhead rally in Germany. “They look great,” he wrote, shortly thereafter, of the skinheads. “Why is it the bad guys always look cool?”
Asked today about that experience, he grew agitated. “Are you implying that I somehow became enamored with Nazi skinheads at that rally?”
“Not enamored,” I replied. “But there was a fascination?”
“That’s a terrible angle,” he argued. “Skinheads have always been the bad guys.” He vehemently denied any links between skinheads and the Proud Boys, even though Fred Perry polo shirts are worn by both groups, and members of 211 Bootboys, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)—the watchdog organization that monitors extremist and hate groups—as “an ultranationalist far-right skinhead crew,” fought alongside members of the Proud Boys after a McInnes speech in New York City in 2018, singling out left-wing protesters and assaulting them. “It’s more of the media’s desperate need for Nazis,” he insisted over the phone. “We don’t allow any Nazis or any kind of racism…. We take in these people and we say, ‘We don’t care what race you are—as long as you think the West is the best.’ ”
He kept saying we instead of they. “Gavin,” I interjected, “are you still part of Proud Boys?”
“No, sorry,” he replied. “They do this. They do this.”
After Europe, McInnes moved to Montreal to become a comics illustrator. The city in 1994 was suffering an economic downturn, and cheap rent led to a thriving arts scene as well as a strong underground comics movement. McInnes started making his own zine—a photocopied mini-comic called Pervert—about some of his life experiences. I tracked down back issues at Arcmtl, a nonprofit that preserves independent Montreal cultural artifacts. (Their archival team was debating what to do with works by McInnes, whom one of them described as “the embodiment of smoldering ratshit.”)
When other publications wrote negatively of Pervert, McInnes sent reviewers threatening letters splattered in his blood. Contemporaries in the comics community tried to reason with him. “You need to learn that there is a fine line between humor and offensiveness,” explained Ariel Bordeaux, of Deep Girl, encouraging him to “grow up.”
Even so, Pervert brought McInnes to Voice of Montreal’s attention. Alvi had started recruiting contributors. Local scenester Rufus Raxlonovitch thought McInnes could help curate a comics page for the paper. “I introduced Suroosh to Gavin, unfortunately,” Raxlonovitch told me from his home in Texas. “I knew people who [Suroosh] bought drugs with.” He emphasized that ’90s McInnes had little in common with the person he’s become: “But even back then, Gavin made an art out of getting on people’s nerves. He got off on it.”
One respected cartoonist from that circle described the Montreal McInnes as already going out of his way to be mean or disruptive: “That’s why he’d always get punched in the face.” He recounted one episode in particular. Standing at a busy intersection at rush hour, the cartoonist noticed McInnes across the boulevard. “All of a sudden, to make his friends laugh, he pulls his jacket completely over his head, hockey-fight style, and runs blindly into the traffic. Cars in both directions go screech, screech! I thought for sure I’m gonna see this guy get hit. Luckily, the drivers braked in time and swerved, honking and screaming. His friends were doubled over laughing.”
“That rings a bell,” McInnes commented when I asked him about it. “You’re not committed to the joke unless you’re willing to die to make people laugh.”
I met Alvi just after turning 18. He was looking for contributors, and when he learned that I wrote for my college paper, he asked me to bring clips to the office. My published output consisted of a political think piece on fascist tendencies in Quebec’s separatist party and music reviews, including a write-up of a new album by Hüsker Dü’s frontman. At our meeting, Alvi asked if I’d cover his upcoming concert. He couldn’t pay for the review—but he could get me in for free, and he offered a token amount to stick around after the show and hand out flyers for Voice of Montreal’s launch party.
On the night of the performance, I filled my backpack with the rocket-shaped leaflets. Outside the auditorium, a friend told me he’d gotten me a gift to celebrate my first writing assignment.
“Close your eyes and open your mouth,” he said. He then placed a tab of LSD on my tongue. I’d never done acid.
I started peaking during the band’s set. The only notes I took were about a made-up song they didn’t play called “A.C.I.D.” During the encore, I felt something land on my head. Looking up, I saw what looked like thousands of starry birds fluttering through the concert hall. I soon realized: The origami sparrows twirling from the rafters were actually the fliers from my backpack. Someone had opened it—the friend who’d dosed me?—and tossed the contents into the air. The fliers got swept up and dispersed over the crowd.
It seemed appropriate; after all, what does a rocket ship do? But as high as I was, I never imagined that Alvi’s zine would one day take off too. Afterward, he said it hadn’t been a bad way to promote the party—as if God had handed out the fliers. He suggested I write about all of this in my review.
It ran in issue one, November 1994, as did a feature on LGBTQ+ cinema; a write-up of a playwright exploring immigrant experiences; and an essay on white privilege which noted that, though advances had been made in multiculturalism, “the potential for more insidious racism is nipping at our collective nose.” The cover story consisted of a Black perspective on the use of the N-word in hip-hop. Over half the issue’s writers were women or people of color. At its inception, this was not the “lad mag” it would one day morph into. Instead, the publication had a clear emphasis on diversity and inclusion. And only one editor was listed on the masthead of the debut issue: Suroosh Alvi. For his part, McInnes contributed cartoons and a record review. “I couldn’t write,” McInnes told me. “I didn’t know what writing was; I’d never done it before.” Still, Alvi soon hired him as assistant editor. To qualify, McInnes too had to be on welfare.
Shane Smith didn’t join the team until 1995, around the time he wrote a screed celebrating the violence of war: “War is the shit; as addictive and consuming as heroin. War is an invitation to the greatest party of all.” The story’s moral seemed to hint at things to come: “You should fear this. This is the heat of a conflict that burns everything it touches.”
He’d come to Montreal at the urging of McInnes—they needed help selling advertising, and “Bullshitter Shane,” as McInnes was known to call him, seemed like a solution. In Ottawa, Smith had been a waiter in a fancy restaurant. “He was always a great hustler,” McInnes told me. “He was either broke or he’d have like 3,000 bucks from tips.”
The night he was introduced to Alvi, at a local dive bar, Smith dropped LSD. He kept trying to tell Alvi that they were “going to take over the world,” but he was tripping so hard that the words would only come out garbled: “I was going, ‘I can’t get it out, I can’t get it out.’ ” On acid, Smith could already see how their magazine would lift off—the vision for global domination was clear—he just couldn’t articulate it yet.
Upon Smith’s arrival, they shortened the magazine’s name to Voice in order to sell ads in other Canadian cities. The masthead soon listed Alvi as editor in chief, McInnes as office manager, and Smith as business manager. The three were running things self-sufficiently, so they decided to cut ties with their Haitian publishers, changing the magazine’s name yet again by dropping the o.
The name Vice didn’t simply mirror its creators’ appetites. It also got them press. The founders made up a tale that they’d been forced to switch names because The Village Voice had threatened to sue. The story got picked up by Canadian media. “We were in every local paper, every national paper,” McInnes has written. “The lie just snowballed…. Lying became part of who we were.” Though they were still essentially a culture zine, Smith brought a focus on “good story-telling ability (i.e., being able to lie through your teeth),” as one early feature story formulated it. “We were all about making up shocking stories,” Smith would later explain.
It’s hard to unravel the truth of Smith’s own backstory. He has said, for example, that he grew up “dirt poor,” but both his and McInnes’s father worked at Computing Devices of Canada, a military engineering firm. Their dads helped design a ballistic computer for the M1 Abrams tank used by the U.S. Army. “The truth of it is I always thought I was going to die, because when I was young I was in a kind of quasi-gang,” Smith remarked in an interview with filmmaker Spike Jonze, then the creative director of Vice. “There [were] 12 of us, and then by the time I was 18, nine had died.”
This much is certain: Smith attended one of Ottawa’s top-ranked high schools, Lisgar Collegiate Institute, as did the late news anchor Peter Jennings and actor Matthew Perry. Smith was already blurring things then: In the school yearbook, he described himself as a “real real rumcullie.” (Rumcully is an arcane pirate word for “a rich fool.”)
Smith started enlisting Alvi and McInnes to help with ad sales. He did the same with me. (Alongside writing pieces and selling space and distributing the magazine, I also played guitar in Smith’s swamp-rock band, Ultraviolet Booze Catastrophe.) An immense amount of work went into producing each issue, but there was a DIY spirit, with everybody pitching in.
In 1997, Vice took on a new editor: Robbie Dillon, a bank robber and loan shark who had just been released from Bordeaux Prison for drug trafficking. He was enrolled in journalism night classes, where he wrote an article called “How to Survive in Prison,” which got him the editor gig. Even Dillon was taken aback by Vice’s journalistic standards, as he told me recently: “Gavin might have been making stuff up, but Shane was making up the rules. I’d say, ‘Shane, you can’t write an article about smuggling guns into Ireland—you were never in Ireland. You can’t say that this guy said this—he’s not even a guy.’ He’d go, ‘Well, can we be sued?’ I’d go, ‘Not if it’s not a real guy.’ And he’d go, ‘Okay, we’ll do it!’ ”
Despite his criminal background, Dillon was a solicitous editor who wanted verifiable stories that took readers inside places they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. In McInnes’s words, Dillon “wrote the only serious content in our magazine for months.” The publication became a blend of outright fabrication and almost confessional sincerity—“Whatever bile oozes from the hissing bag of snakes inside my skull,” as Dillon wrote in one editorial. They started to find their voice by doing, as they often said, stupid stories in a smart way and smart stories in a stupid way. An interview with a piece of pasta, for example, might explore the philosophical realities of inanimate objects; an article purporting to help readers “get laid” would be written in binary code.
While McInnes and a small coterie wrote the lion’s share of the pieces, an array of contributors shaped it, including Amy Kellner, Bruce LaBruce, Lesley Arfin, Derrick Beckles, Lisa Gabriele, Thomas Morton, and photographer Ryan McGinley (who shoots on occasion for Vanity Fair). Their combined voice was a combustible mix. “I thought of it as like a hyperintelligent teenaged Valley Girl from the ’80s who’s read Michel Foucault,” explained Jesse Pearson, a former Vice editor. “There was a lot of, like, barf-me-out kinda slang but also a certain intelligence hiding behind it.”
There was also something else hiding behind it. And that duplicity is what got them to New York when, in 1999, McInnes, Smith, and Alvi pulled off their biggest con to date. During a Montreal newspaper interview, they claimed that a local multimillionaire software entrepreneur named Richard Szalwinski wanted to buy Vice. As they tell it, he read the ensuing article and ended up investing $1 million for 25 percent of the company.
Then came the thunder, McInnes told me. Two years after relocating to Manhattan, he was standing on his roof on the Lower East Side when he saw the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. That moment, he said, changed everything for him: “9/11 made me a nationalist and made me a Western chauvinist.” Until then, he claimed, he hadn’t really cared about politics. But the idea of pinning some newfound chauvinism on 9/11 is inaccurate. He’d already been churning out provocative, race-baiting content before the attacks, even if there was a marked shift in his approach soon after he moved to the U.S.
Looking back on his output from that pre-9/11 period, two articles stand out as harbingers. The first is a photo shoot from the fall of 1999, shortly before I became the editor, that shows a multicultural array of male and female models hugging a man in a KKK robe. The section, which billed itself as “a nine page fashion shoot that single-handedly stops all racism forever,” was intended to troll readers—it “lampooned racism,” McInnes told me—but the concept behind it stemmed from a supposed weakness that McInnes immediately detected in his new homeland: America’s sensitivity around race. Just as he had done with the Monks, he set out to mock what he perceived as a vulnerability, prodding at it in hopes of creating laughs or havoc.
The second piece dropped the following year. Written by McInnes, a recent immigrant, it called for closing the borders of the U.S. With lines like “Everything from deformed frogs to the allergy epidemic can be attributed to overpopulation,” it may have seemed like another one of his freaky jokes—but there was nothing funny about it. (He had inserted it into the magazine without me having seen it; I was the editor then, but he made many of the final decisions about the magazine’s content.) Asked about that story today, he claimed that his anti-immigration stance then came “from an environmental perspective.”
In retrospect, none of us, including myself, were innocent bystanders. Some were even enablers. Smith, for his part, would tell Wired in 2007, a year before McInnes’s departure: “Gavin liked to push buttons, and he got a lot of personal notoriety for dealing with race issues. This is not what we’re about, it’s never what we’ve been about.” Though the organization’s complicity during McInnes’s tenure can’t simply be waved aside, there’s also no way that Vice’s management and staff could have seen all that was coming. Part of the failure may be that nobody understood his tactics, even if his politics were hiding in plain sight. In that regard, the circle of people who worked with McInnes—and avidly read Vice in that era—might be compared to, say, the parts of the culture that long celebrated Woody Allen or Louis C.K., two humorists who achieved fame and fortune even as they openly told us, through their work, who they were all along. (In McInnes’s case, he also told us through the work of Vice’s contributors, whose words he sometimes changed freely, adding entire paragraphs to writers’ articles, according to several sources.) He was my boss and the de facto editor in chief; looking back now, I deeply regret not pushing back, especially during my year at the helm.
Until that point, McInnes had been, above all, a trickster—“a mean clown,” as two former associates put it. But with 9/11, many culture critics began to assert that irony was in retreat, and irony, after all, had been Vice’s primary register. A change came over the magazine. McInnes too became more hawkish. “Politically correct words are the result of liberals trying to shape fear and guilt into meaningless syntax,” McInnes wrote in 2002. In an unhinged New York Press interview that same year, he uttered homophobic and racist slurs, using the N-word and denigrating Puerto Ricans. Regarding Williamsburg’s gentrifiers, he said, “At least they’re white.”
With his partners busy expanding the brand—and seeking wealth (“I was willing to sacrifice happiness for greed,” Alvi admitted in 2002)—McInnes became increasingly influenced by the writings of Jim Goad, author of The Redneck Manifesto. “The greatest writer of our generation,” McInnes has said of him. (Goad attended the Proud Boys’ election night party in 2016; the organization’s now-defunct website described a book of his as “Proud Boy Holy scripture.”) Another writer who made a lasting impression on McInnes was paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, from whose book he has often read aloud at Proud Boys events. In January 2003, Vice did a “The West is the Best” issue, inspired by Buchanan’s The Death of the West. In that issue, McInnes ran an interview entitled “The Merits of War” with Scott McConnell, executive editor of Buchanan’s magazine, The American Conservative. That August, McInnes himself published an AmCon piece about his efforts to convert Vice readers to conservatism: “I felt like Dr. Frankenstein,” he wrote, of his red-pilling campaign. “‘IT’S ALIVE!’ ”
When other media outlets confronted him about the monster he was creating, he brushed it off—“I did it for a laugh”—telling Gawker that he’d fabricated facts and nobody had caught on. The New York Times ran a feature describing McInnes’s views as “closer to a white supremacist’s”—a characterization he bridles at today. “I love being white…. It’s something to be very proud of,” it quoted him as saying. “I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”
I remember how upset Alvi was whenever we spoke about that article. For him, the son of Pakistani immigrants, the situation seemed particularly noxious. Smith too was allegedly furious. Even so, it would take five more years for his partners to cut ties with McInnes—which is when things got truly Shakespearean.
On meeting the three witches, Banquo wonders whether he has consumed some “insane root / That takes the reason prisoner.” McInnes certainly took a prodigious amount of drugs, especially cocaine, as he’s often bragged. Under his leadership, the magazine openly discussed ways to “max out your coke high.” But the intensification of his far-right views coincides with the time that he started taking another psychotropic drug: Adderall, an amphetamine-based stimulant that helps with focus and is prescribed for ADHD. It can be taken recreationally or to boost productivity—but there are serious consequences if abused. (Donald Trump, it is worth noting, has himself weathered unproven allegations of hearty Adderall use.)
McInnes, who has spoken publicly about taking Adderall to help him write, has dated his use of the drug back to the early 2000s. “I didn’t take more or less than anyone else,” he wrote in an email, “and NO it did not effect [sic] my writing.” But those around him took notice. “Adderall is a really big part of the story,” alleges a former colleague. “He was using a lot of Adderall—a lot lot… We know what the side effects are: It can lead to grandiosity, to feeling like you are right and the world is wrong. It can include elements of paranoia. And all those psychological phenomena are wrapped up in Gavin’s transformation.”
In one episode of his podcast, McInnes has described procuring Adderall from a Park Avenue doctor. He continued taking the drug after having children with his wife, Emily Jendrisak, whom he married in 2005. The way he describes his stag party, held in upstate New York, gives a sense of how altered his worldview had seemingly become. As relayed in his autobiography, he got upset at his father “for not doing cocaine with us.” Then, he claims, 10 of his friends dressed up as Klansmen, “hoods and all,” as they burned a 15-foot wooden cross. (Nobody I spoke to would confirm whether this actually happened; McInnes insists in the memoir that its contents are true.) By that point, McInnes, still at Vice, was also contributing to VDARE.com, a site that promoted “the work of white supremacists,” according to the SPLC.
Smith attended the wedding. “I remember him standing there, surveying,” Eric Digras recalled. Smith, according to former Vice employees, seemed to know that something, somehow, would need to change. “There was a kind of rivalry there that I think was mainly coming from Shane,” said Jesse Pearson, the editor at the time. “That’s when it became like a Shakespeare play: These two power-hungry lords fighting for the kingdom.” Added another colleague from this period, “The defining aspect of the relationship was their rivalry. They were two trashy dudes in spandex trying to out-guitar-solo each other every night.”
A decisive turning point came five months after the wedding, when McInnes attended the 2006 American Renaissance Conference, a “racial realist” meetup that attracted hundreds of white nationalists. As its website explains, “attendees are united by a common belief in black intellectual inferiority, opposition to non-white immigration and ardor for maintaining America’s white majority.” While there, McInnes noticed former KKK leader David Duke at the bar. “I texted my friends: Just hanging out with my old pal David Duke,” he explained in our interview. “That became like, I’m at a Klan rally…. I think some people used it as an excuse”—meaning a reason to link McInnes to the KKK and, perhaps, get rid of him.
Though he never actually wrote about the gathering, he characterized it as a reporting assignment. “It was just me doing my job,” he claimed. Those around him weren’t so sure. This was, after all, the same McInnes who’d written in 2002 that a liberal spotted at a strip club “would either deny it was happening or claim it was some sort of research project.” However one chooses to interpret McInnes’s presence at the conference, it pretty much ended his relationship with Vice. “That became the moment,” noted Pearson. “That forcing-out-of-the-company thing.”
The separation with McInnes took time, a period during which he and his wife had their first child. “One day,” McInnes recalled, “corporate built a closed office for the top brass and I was not in it.” His desk, instead, was in the bullpen, from which he worked—as well as working remotely—until he and the company parted ways. Lesley Arfin, a magazine contributor at that stage, who went on to be a writer on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Girls as well as cocreator of Love, believes that McInnes, to this day, may be “stuck in trauma” over what happened. “I don’t think that he ever recovered from that humiliation,” she insisted. “You lose your best friend and your job, that is like your entire fucking personality—and you just had a baby, like boom! Three life-changing things right in the same [stretch of time].” (“I was not fired,” McInnes clarified. “We split because I wanted to keep it offensive and they wanted to get serious.”)
Following McInnes’s departure (the company completed its separation agreement with him in 2008), Vice started to experience phenomenal growth. By then, the company had pivoted toward online video, which would become one of the main sources of its success. In time, Vice Media, led by Smith and serving a lucrative millennial audience, would launch new digital video platforms and expand into film, music, and news, joining forces with partners such as MTV, HBO, Showtime, and Snap Inc, while attracting investors ranging from 21st Century Fox to Disney to George Soros. The office environment, however, was marred by allegations of sexual misconduct and bullying behavior as well as outright sexism. (Two years ago, the company agreed to a $1.87 million payout to women employees who had been compensated less than their male counterparts. A heavily female leadership team is now in charge, with women currently accounting for more than half of Vice Media’s global workforce.)
McInnes’s deepening radicalism can be tracked online in a weekly column he wrote from 2008 to 2017 in Taki’s Magazine, the at times far-right-fomenting webzine published by the Greek journalist and socialite Taki Theodoracopulos, cofounder of The American Conservative. Sample titles: “The Myth of White Terrorism,” “Rioting: The Unbeatable High,” and “What’s the Matter With Blackface?” McInnes was recruited to write there by Richard Spencer, who has since become one of the country’s most reviled anti-Semites. “People change and movements evolve,” McInnes told me in one email. “Richard Spencer said ‘Hail Trump’ at that conference and the whole thing went careening off a Nazi cliff…. Spencer was a cool guy. He got me my job at Takimag in 2008 after I left Vice. Back then, he was just some paleoconservative who was obsessed with the founding fathers. The Spencer of today has nothing to do with the guy I knew 10 years ago.”
For his part, the McInnes of today describes his position as “basic dad politics.” He sent me a list outlining his views, saying, “They’re the same views as any rational person.” It included his thoughts on subjects such as “Racism is not a thing,” “America was not built on slavery,” and “Gay marriage is a scam.” His views were openly Islamophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist, and discriminatory toward a variety of groups. One through line: his underlying preoccupation with other people’s bodies, identities, and their realities or personal decisions. When I asked him why he dwelled on that theme, he deflected, as usual: “Proud Boys are unique Americans in the sense that they eschew identity politics.” But as described by the SPLC, “McInnes plays a duplicitous rhetorical game: claiming to reject white nationalism while espousing a laundered version of popular white nationalist tropes.”
McInnes is someone who apparently concluded long ago that white male privilege was imperiled. Come 9/11, believing that his reality was literally under attack, he’d embraced the notion that conservatism was essentially about upholding the status quo for those in power, meaning white men like himself. By 2016, in founding the Proud Boys, he tried to turn his ideologies into political action. Beyond that, McInnes’s overarching philosophy seemed to be that free speech included hate speech. “When you hate someone,” as he once said, “it’s because you recognize something that you hate about yourself.”
“I always thought he was a narcissist,” Arfin mused.
“He’s definitely profoundly narcissistic,” Eric Digras stated, while other members of his inner circle didn’t hesitate in using stricter diagnostic labels. Regardless, Digras still maintains ties with McInnes as an old friend in hopes of keeping him “tethered to his humanity.”
In terms of my own reportorial interactions with McInnes, when I contacted him after a break of two decades in our communication, he offered to “just jump ahead of all” my questions and essentially interview himself so that I wouldn’t need to interrupt with cardboard-people words of my own. Among his concerns: that nothing he’d said be linked with Nazism. “Everyone keeps coming back to, ‘Are you a Nazi?’ ” he huffed. Nothing could be further from the truth, he insisted.
“I can only imagine it just seems like an unfortunate misunderstanding?”
“It’s not a misunderstanding,” he retorted. “It’s a weapon that people use to try to silence someone else.”
Why, then, did he think that he’s perceived to be the founder of a hate group? “I am the most misunderstood person in America,” he emphasized in a follow-up email, again deflecting—and sounding not unlike one of his icons to whom he owes his recent notoriety: Trump. “At no time in history has someone this reasonable been this misrepresented.”
He believed his predicament stemmed from the fact that in 2018 the SPLC classified the Proud Boys as a hate group, based on group members’ violent conduct, “their associations with white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations, and statements disparaging women, minorities, and other marginalized groups.”
To date, he claimed, he has spent $200,000 after raising it to sue the SPLC for defamation. “The left set out to destroy my reputation and they did a great job,” he said. His latest opponent is the Canadian government, which has listed the Proud Boys as a terrorist neo-fascist entity; McInnes’s association with the group could render him inadmissible if he attempts to return to the country.
Although he served as its leader during its first two years while the group became more formalized and militarized, he may have stepped down just in time. In Trump’s America, the idea of the Proud Boys caught on and “very quickly accelerated out of control,” explained Jared Holt, resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in Washington. “It went from a gaggle of street brawlers into something able to earn the buy-in and the respect of massive portions of the GOP base.” Holt, who has been monitoring the group since the start, told me, “It’s really just a few steps removed from white genocide conspiracy theories.”
Throughout our conversation, McInnes came across as unwilling to take full responsibility for his situation. In his words, he’d simply wanted to “fuck shit up.” He didn’t appear to recognize that statements he has made outlining his ideology are at the root of his troubles.
McInnes’s views have affected his home life. In 2018, ABC’s Nightline interviewed him and his wife, Emily, at their house in New York’s Westchester County, where residents put up signs vilifying him. On ABC, McInnes drank beer as his wife told him, “Your politics having evolved this way in the last few years has been a challenge.” He looked away. Asked whether he was willing to apologize for what he’d created, he said no, firmly. Would he take any of it back if possible? He thought about it, stroking his face roughly. “Yes, I guess, well…. I don’t know.” Then he made a final, dismissive wave. “Nah,” he said, as conclusively as he could muster. It was too late for all that.
“It’s a very chillax day,” McInnes said when I called him around midday on a Friday in March. “Trying to avoid the bar for as long as possible. If you go there at noon, you’re kinda fucked for the day. At night, you’re slurring.”
McInnes, an avid boozer, has consistently maintained that he started the Proud Boys as an outlet for harmless fun: an Animal House-style drinking club for male buddies. But even he could see that what began as an extension of his brand had spiraled into something much more nefarious. He’d watched the Capitol riot on TV like everyone else. “I thought, What the fuck have you imbeciles done now?” he said. “They’re not the brightest bulbs in the tree. They’re not exactly sophisticated.” At one point he mentioned that he had warned his cohorts, “You’re gonna get shot; someone’s going to die; do not go”—insisting a march on Washington was an “obvious trap,” just as he had cautioned marchers attending the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was organized by a then Proud Boy.
Of all the pro-Trump outfits that broke into the houses of Congress, more Proud Boys have been arrested than those affiliated with other groups, such as the Oath Keepers or Three Percenters. Even so, McInnes contended that the group is being demonized. “The media wanted it to be a Proud Boys event so badly,” he argued in March. “There were 30,000 people there that day, 250 arrested for storming the Capitol.” Only a handful, he said, “happened to be members.” (More than 100 Proud Boys from across America traveled to Washington for the riot. To date over two dozen purported members have been charged; prosecutors also allege that some of them coordinated their efforts with Oath Keepers.)
At the same time that FBI indictments of Proud Boys were being released publicly, a number of reports described McInnes’s former company, Vice Media, as seeking to close a deal with a special-purpose acquisition company at around half its peak valuation of $5.7 billion four years ago. (It wasn’t clear, given Vice’s outstanding debt and investors, where this would leave Smith, the company’s biggest individual shareholder.)
Through the years, McInnes seemed to have adhered to the first half of his magazine’s principles, by living the stupid young part of his life smartly. Now well into his Gen X dotage, his current reality is another question. Either way, Vice alum Arfin noted, “Vice will always be tied to this alt-right shit, and Gavin will always have this hipster-liberal phantom cell phone vibration buzzing in the back pocket of his khakis.”
In our conversation, McInnes struck a genial tone. He said he hadn’t changed much since the time I knew him: “I hated the government; I still hate the government. I want to burn it to the ground.” I asked if he thought the government has him under surveillance. “Oh, they absolutely do,” he replied. “This call’s being listened to right now by the feds. The FBI and the NYPD monitor all my calls and follow all my texts. I’m banned from all social media…. I’ve been de-personed.”
He had a theory on how he’d ended up this way; it went back to eighth grade. “They put me in a special class, even though my grades were okay, because I was just a lot to handle,” he confided. “Eventually, if you keep being provocative, they’ll try to separate you from the rest of the students. And that’s what’s happened on a much grander scale: I’m in the special class right now. That’s the fate of someone who keeps being a class clown.”
I wondered whether he could see the difference between being a clown and inciting violence. Did he know that his actions led him here, that the words he’d uttered had consequences? “I’m not going to deny any culpability here,” he admitted. “I’ve always wanted to kick the hornet’s nest and keep things exciting. But the most recent developments are insane. I didn’t know the hornets would be doing that.”
Some sources I interviewed wondered if McInnes, instead of playing the victim, might take this opportunity to repent or reverse course, no matter how cynically. He did neither. Others were curious if perhaps his parents and loved ones were in a position to help put him on a better path. But when I called his father, Jim McInnes, he was adamant that everything his son had done was a joke, that the media simply didn’t get it. In fact, he said, he’d been writing a book about the whole thing. He even had a title. He was calling it Proud of My Boy.
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