The one contribution that the Proud Boys — the mostly white-boy street thugs who arrived on the scene around the same time, not coincidentally, as the political ambitions of their hero Donald Trump — and the movement's Canadian founder Gavin McInnes have made to the canon of modern intellectual thought is that society needs a bloody punch in the nose.
"I want violence," McInnes, who has clung to a veneer of respectability for also founding the magazine that became Vice, proclaimed on his talk show in the spring of 2016, as Trump was claiming the GOP presidential nomination. "I want punching in the face. I'm disappointed in Trump supporters for not punching enough." Those words came just before McInnes publicly announced he'd organized his followers into the Proud Boys gang.
McInnes was presumably less disappointed over the next six years as he watched his ambitions translated into blood-soaked bedlam — first in street clashes with leftists, like a 2018 brawl outside a GOP-sponsored event in Manhattan (for which two Proud Boys were sent to prison), and ultimately for the group's critical role in the Jan. 6 insurrection that aimed to keep Trump in power, a day that left five dead and scores wounded.
