Gavin McInnes during his interview by Thomas Morton in the feature documentary, It’s Not Funny Anymore: From Vice to Proud Boys.CBC/Supplied
Canadians will sometimes proudly claim to have burned down the White House during the War of 1812 – even if it was, technically, the British who lit it on fire on Aug. 24, 1814.
But you’d be hard pressed to find any pride in the role Canada played in the storming of the American Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In fact, we seem in denial about our connections to that day of political violence, which looms large again ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
It’s Not Funny Anymore: From Vice to Proud Boys, which premieres on the documentary Channel on Tuesday at 9 p.m. before streaming on CBC Gem from Friday, is a timely reminder of the effect far-right influencers from our side of the border have had on extremism and democratic decline in the United States.
Quebec director Sébastien Trahan zooms in on one of the better-known far-right figures to emerge from the Great White North: Vice magazine co-founder turned Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes.
Thomas Morton, an American writer who worked at Vice in New York from 2004 to 2019, is the on-screen presence – and a man on a personal quest for understanding – in this feature-length doc.
He doesn’t get how McInnes, whom he considered a mentor and a fun guy, ended up starting the Proud Boys, an organization designated a terrorist entity in 2021 by the Canadian government after the Capitol riots, where members were part of the group that breached the first barriers.
Morton wonders, naively: Is this an elaborate prank with the punchline yet to drop?
Raised in Ottawa, McInnes first rose to prominence when Vice was a Montreal-based magazine in the 1990s. He was the writer of its very popular Dos And Don’ts parody fashion-advice page and, Trahan’s documentary makes the case, primary architect of its once-hip, profane, punky, anti-establishment tone.
After he parted ways with an ever-growing Vice Media that was increasingly positioning itself as the progressive voice of young people in 2008, McInnes contributed to right-wing outlets, from Fox News in the U.S. to Rebel News in Canada, before launching his own online channel devoted to inflammatory rhetoric.
In 2016, McInnes started the Proud Boys – an all-male club with the following initiation oath: “I’m a proud Western chauvinist, I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” During a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, then-president Donald Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” – and then Jan. 6 happened.
After a number of Proud Boys were arrested because of violence that erupted outside one of his speeches in 2018, McInnes publicly disassociated himself from the group – but also said: “This is 100 per cent a legal gesture.”
It’s Not Funny Anymore reveals that on his current show McInnes regularly hosts Proud Boys convicted of conspiracy to commit treason for their involvement in Jan. 6 – and calls them “martyrs and political prisoners.”
Trahan’s documentary is perhaps most worthwhile viewing as a study of denial, however.
Anecdotes shared by former Vice employees don’t make it seem as if upholding any norms, democratic or otherwise, was ever a Do rather than a Don’t in McInnes’s book.
Morton talks about how he was sent to buy street heroin for a story, and alleges that McInnes popped the bag he brought back, creating a cloud of powder that got those in the vicinity high. Amy Kellner, another former Vice employee, alleges: “Gavin was naked a lot in the office.”
In a move that makes these stories appear like hijinks rather than HR nightmares, Trahan uses puppets to recreate them. Yes, there’s a marionette of McInnes that flashes a little felt penis.
Morton eventually gets an interview with McInnes – but wastes it by presenting his convoluted theories about why the far-right personality changed (a concussion, or trauma over being pushed out of Vice). McInnes tells him matter-of-factly that his whole hypothesis is false: “There is no change.”
It’s not good journalism, but it makes for compelling TV to see a subject so totally dominate an interviewer – their interaction literally beginning with McInnes tackling Morton.
In its ugliest moment, McInnes gets close to Morton, who, like him, is white, and utters a series of racial slurs in his face.
In advance of the interview, McInnes had texted Morton: “The violence of the Proud Boys has always been measured and necessary … and over punished.” He sent a video of a hockey fight to illustrate that violence isn’t always bad.
One of Morton’s daft theories about McInnes is that he turned to the darkest side of MAGA out of “convert zeal” after moving to the U.S. – but the idea that Canadians are not as susceptible to dangerous, violent far-right ideologies at home is a myth. Research has shown that our country is a world leader in extremism online, and perpetrators of the worst white-supremacist violence internationally have been shown to be consumers of our fringe media.
Maybe it’s time to put aside denial and tackle the unfunny reality that, to expand upon the late professor Harold Innis’s claim, Canadians are hewers of wood, drawers of water and sowers of hate.