Gavin McInnes is a truly deplorable person


Creep.

How did this guy get any attention at all?

These quotes come from a book, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism. I haven’t read it, I don’t think I could read it without hurling it into the trash. It must be rough to be an author writing a necessary book critiquing a subject that can only inspire deep revulsion.

The Proud Boys name first came to Gavin McInnes while he watched, with disgust, as a twelve-year-old boy with brown skin sank a musical number onstage at a school recital.

This little Puerto Rican kid comes out, and he goes, ‘I’ll make you a proud boy!’ It was the gayest fucking song, he said. When I was watching I was like, this is obviously the Hispanic son of a single mom. He did high-five a grown man afterward, but couldn’t have been the real dad.

The origins of the Proud Boys, the nation’s most notorious political fight club, can be traced to one reactionary bigot behind a microphone who hate a child he figured was a fatherless Puerto Rican. McInnes seems to embrace this characterization, though his wife is apparently appalled by it.
She’s pissed, she’s like: ‘So your whole thing, your whole organization, is mocking a twelve-year-old gay boy?’ he said. And I go: ‘That’s such a crude way to put it but yes. Yes it is. Because that little boy personifies how far gone we are.’

They know nothing about the boy. They don’t know that he’s gay, they don’t know that he’s fatherless, they don’t even know that he’s Puerto Rican, but McInnes invented this figure of hate and built his own public identity around it.

That Gavin McInnes is a notoriously popular public figure personifies how far gone we are.

To answer my question from the beginning, that confession came when McInnes “recalled the story for his guest, a comedian named Aaron Berg, who sat giggling…” There are a lot of enablers out there, people who think being transgressive is all it takes to be funny, who will sit and giggle at the most disgusting anecdotes. He built an audience of assholes, and that gave him what populist power he has.

Comments

  1. raven says

    True that Gavin McInnes is a creepy hater.
    The Proud Boys are terrorists.
    That has been obvious for a long time.

    A better question:
    Why do we let a terrorist leader like McInnes into the USA?
    McInnes isn’t one of our terrorists after all.
    He is a…Canadian.

  2. raven says

    Wikipedia: On February 3, 2021, the Proud Boys were officially designated as a terrorist entity in Canada.

    Leader of Proud Boys and Four Other Members Indicted in
    Jun 6, 2022 — New Charges in Superseding Indictment. A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment today charging five …

    https://www.justice.gov › Office of Public Affairs › News

    Quite a few Proud Boys are in prison right now for one violent crime or another.
    Including their current leader who isn’t McInnes.

    I tried to find a list using Google and didn’t get too far.
    Wikipedia has a long list that seems comprehensive.

  3. birgerjohansson says

    It would be fun to dig into his ancestry, methinks it is a decent chance to find some non-white people there.

  4. says

    birgerjohansso@4 His wife is Native American on her mother’s side. It’s one of the ironies about him, he pushes racist crap like white genocide conspiracy theories, yet he’s engaged in “race mixing” by having 3 kids with her.

  5. acroyear says

    The kid being (presumably) puerto rican, this jerk was likely talking about the actor, not the character. The song is from the Broadway version of Disney’s Aladdin, and is included as a song in the “junior” production that schools and local community theaters can license to perform. And being Aladdin, the character was obviously supposed to Arabic, Persian, or of an eastern Muslim culture.

    Now if he was talking about the character (in spite of the likely costuming and the nature of the story itself), then this guy really is a bleeping idiot.

  6. silvrhalide says

    Why, exactly, is his wife STILL his wife and apparently still hanging with this loser in a non-mandatory way? Divorce lawyers are everywhere.
    “She’s pissed, she’s like: ‘So your whole thing, your whole organization, is mocking a twelve-year-old gay boy?”

    Apparently she’s not pissed ENOUGH to say ENOUGH and kick this racist homophobic turd to the curb.

    What does she think he says about HER to all his racist asshole buddies when she’s not around? Especially since she’s multiracial herself?

  7. cartomancer says

    That beard makes him look like he mistook glue for shaving soap and then fell asleep in a bag of rolling tobacco.

  8. silvrhalide says

    @10 It is possible, usually–not easy by any stretch of the imagination–but usually possible to leave. If you want to badly enough.
    Go ahead and ask me how I know.
    The cops are shit, the so-called assistance groups are shit (and are largely in existence for the owner of said assistance company to suck up taxpayer dollars for services rendered–or not), the legal system for domestic violence victims is shit.

    But you can (usually) get out if you want to badly enough.
    I have already helped several people with the system, with assistance in what to expect, how to fill out the forms, what happens when you first go before the judge to get a restraining order of protection (illusion), etc. based on my own experiences.
    It’s fucking ridiculous how hard the process is. Which is not accidental.

    But you can still (usually) get out if you want to badly enough.
    There are just people who don’t think that the conditions under which they are living are shitty enough to leave. They minimize and deny.
    I called the cops on my neighbor–repeatedly–because while the idiot woman is beyond hope–her shitheel boyfriend broke her arm so badly that she now has a metal plate/replacement in her elbow (he actually broke the joint, the metal plate is permanent)–her kids may still be salvageable and in any event, deserve protection.
    I called the cops because her shitheel boyfriend threatened to throw her 6 or 7 year old daughter down the stairs, after hitting her in the face. The little girl ran out their apartment with her younger brother and jumped in their mother’s SUV and locked the doors. Then I called 911, had a screaming fight with the dispatcher, ending in “the kids are still locked in the car but the summer heat will either kill them or drive them from the car, just send the fucking cops FFS” (pandemic, kids not in school, no access to mandated reporters). Three cop cars showed up, separated the adults from each other and the kids from the adults.
    The whole neighborhood knows and tries to help her. (Are you okay? Do you need to come over? Do you need me to come over?) Plus other residents call the cops too. (Although it might just be the noise these assholes make fighting with each other–they are the reason no one on the block can sleep past 8am on any given day of the week.)
    She still won’t leave this asshole.
    And at some point, he will kill her. That’s pretty much a statistical inevitability. I just want him to have a police record that rivals the phone book, so some asshole judge won’t award custody of the kids to him.
    I watched the cops roll up on the apartment one night, when the two assholes had been screaming fighting for over 4 hours (it was 2am when the cops rolled up). I watched the cops record the screaming fighting & take notes for 45 mins. then knocked on their door & pulled all the inhabitants out. (At least now they’re down to a routine where they automatically pull the kids out & separate them from mom & shitheel.) When the woman asked why they were knocking on her door (seriously? It can’t possibly be a mystery why), the cop answered “well, maybe one of your neighbors called about the noise” and this idiot literally jumps out in the middle of the street and starts screaming “FUCK YOU NEIGHBORS! FUCK YOU! FUCK ALL OF YOU! etc., with variations on ‘fuck you’ until the cop basically shuts her down by telling her she’s seconds away from a disorderly conduct charge and a night in the drunk tank.
    She still won’t leave.
    Because her shitty situation isn’t shitty enough–for her–to want to leave.

    Which brings me back to Douchebag Gavin’s wife.
    As the Better Half once pointed out, the abusers & shitheels didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be abusive douchebags.
    There were early warning distance signs, signs that had to be ignored to maintain the illusion of a good relationship.
    Abusers choose their victims carefully and they choose the ones who don’t or won’t push back. The ones that do push back are the ones who leave while they still can.
    Douchebag Gavin’s wife has probably been overlooking his douchebag behavior for a long time. And she’s still doing it.
    Because she’s not pissed off enough to say enough and leave.

  9. chrislawson says

    If the giggling comedian was a guest of McInnes, it would suggest that he is not just a stupid comic who thinks transgressive humour is all it takes to be funny. More likely he’s a Proud Boy member/sympathiser.

  10. says

    @silvrhalide — Yeah, don’t get me started on how useless the pigs are, I’m intimately familiar with how they treat victims of abuse. But sitting here going “why doesn’t she leave” and pointing out “well, I did it, so she can, too” is really not helpful. She has her reasons for staying, we don’t know her reasons, we don’t get to judge her for staying when for all we know he literally has a gun to her head.

  11. birgerjohansson says

    The sole purpose of people like Gavin MacInnes is to make merely sporadic assholes like myself look pretty good.

  12. StevoR says

    @ 11. silvrhalide : You seem to be skirting pretty close to iteral victime blaming there FWIW. Also seconding what WMDKitty — Survivor wrote above too.

  13. mcfrank0 says

    A further detail, the song is from Disney’s “Aladdin” and was cut from the movie (along with Aladdin’s mother) but restored in the stage version. There is nothing in it inherently worth mocking. But, still, the comments on the song on YouTube have been turned off.

    https://youtu.be/yg4qRCKROPc

  14. KG says

    <

    blockquote>Never met a man named Gavin who didn’t turn out to be a total D-bag. – Ray Ceeya@5,/blockquote>

    What a bizarrely silly remark. I never met a man named Marmaduke who didn’t turn out to be an arsonist. That may be because I never met a man named Marmaduke. However, I do play badminton with an 82-year-old man named Gavin who is both remarkably fit for his age, and a well-liked, amiable and sporting individual. Of course he could be a serial killer, but I doubt it.

  15. karmacat says

    These kind of people always target children and they want to bully the most vulnerable. There is just something wrong with humans