Proud Boys Founder Named Group to Mock a ‘Twelve-Year-Old Boy With Brown Skin’ He Saw in a School Recital: Book
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Huffington Post reporter Andy Campbell’s new book on the Proud Boys opens with the story of how the group got its name.
Campbell reported that founder Gavin McInnes was once so appalled by a young boy singing a song from the musical Aladdin at a school recital he attended that he decided to mock the boy and name the group after a lyric in the song.
“The Proud Boys name first came to Gavin McInnes while he watched, with disgust, as a twelve-year-old boy with brown skin sang a musical number onstage at a school recital,” Campbell writes in his book titled: We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism.
“McInnes was pissed that he had to be in the audience at all. He’d already sat through performances of his son playing the drums and his daughter playing the guitar, and now here was this kid, singing a song from a Broadway musical,” Campbell continues, noting that McInnes has previously spoken of his hate of musicals.
“Fuckin’ musicals, man. My wife’s a fag hag so I had to sit there and just not laugh. I couldn’t say to my boys, ‘Don’t ever fucking do that or I will be the opposite of proud,” Campbell quotes McInnes saying on an early episode of his podcast The Gavin McInnes Show.
“This little Puerto Rican kid comes out, and he goes, ‘I’ll make you proud boy! It was the gayest fucking song,'” McInnes added. “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 it couldn’t have been the real dad.”
On the podcast, McInnes’s producer then played a bit of the song “Proud of Your Boy” from the Broadway version of Aladdin.
“Oh my God, he was singing an Aladdin song? What a dork,” McInnes then mocked the kid singing, “‘You’ll be proud of your boy!'”
“The worst part is, I don’t think he was gay. I think he was just like, ‘This is a good song, and I can really use my fuckin’ diaphragm,” McInnes added.
I think people are generally aware that the Proud Boys are a fundamentally racist group.
I don’t think people realize their very name is based on a racist joke their founder made while watching a school play.
That’s the start of @AndyBCampbell‘s book, and it’s jaw dropping. pic.twitter.com/a1xxx8aA8h
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 20, 2022
Campbell concludes of the whole incident:
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 hated 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?’” Campbell then quoted McInnes recalling his wife’s reaction to the name.
“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,” McInnes concluded.
The Proud Boys were eventually embraced in 2020 by then President Donald Trump and later played a prominent role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. McInnes left the Proud Boys in 2018.
McInnes, who also co-founded Vice in 1994, made headlines recently for a prank in which he appeared to fake his own arrest, but instead skipped town and went on vacation in Europe.
The incident angered many of his allies on the far-right who believe government agencies are truly looking to arrest people like him and elicited comparisons to actor Jussie Smollet who faked a hate crime against him.
