Gavin McInnes’s hate machine

Abstract

At first, the Proud Boys were a seemingly innocuous white boys club that sprouted from the banter and riffs of online talk show host, Gavin McInnes. But the far right group grew into a nation-wide white supremacist organization. The group came about, thanks to McInnes and his The Gavin McInnes Show (TGMS). The Proud Boys and Gavin McInnes are a prime case study of the problem of free speech and the Internet. Here we see hate speech hiding behind the protective cloak of free speech. The conundrum becomes: How do we deal with fascist politics in the democratic space of the internet? The study conducts a frame analysis of over 32 hours of TGMS, utilizing Stanley’s (2018) rubric of fascist politics. By analyzing McInnes’s online discourse — his hate machine — we obtain a deeper understanding of how fascist politics gently slides into the mainstream and becomes a threat to peaceful political action.