Editing Proud Boys (section)

===History===
Gavin McInnes co-founded ''Vice Magazine'' in 1994 but was pushed out in 2008 after several years of turmoil following a New York Times interview in which he talked about his pride in being white. After leaving, he began "doggedly hacking a jagged but unrelenting path to the far-right fringes of American culture", according to a 2017 profile in ''The Globe and Mail''.

The Proud Boys organization was launched in September 2016, on the website of Taki's Magazine, a far-right publication for which [[Richard Spencer]] was executive editor. It existed informally before then as something like a McInnes fan club, and the first gathering of the Brooklyn chapter in July 2016 resulted in a brawl in the bar where they met. The name mocks the song "Proud of Your Boy" from the soundtrack for the film ''Aladdin'', which had become a running theme on McInnes' podcast hosted by Anthony Cumia's Compound Media. McInnes had heard the song at his daughter's school performance in December 2015 and took immediate dislike to the perceived "fake, humble, and self-serving" nature of the lyrics.

The organization has been described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and NPR's ''The Takeaway'', and Spencer, McInnes, and the Proud Boys have been described as "hipster racists" by Vox and Media Matters for America. McInnes says victim mentality of women and other historically oppressed groups is unhealthy: "There is an incentive to be a victim. It is cool to be a victim." He sees white men and Western culture as "under siege" and described criticism of his ideas as "victim blaming". Their views have elements of white genocide conspiracy theory.

In early 2017, McInnes began distancing himself from the alt-right, saying their focus is race and his focus is what he calls "Western values"; the rebranding effort intensified after the [[Unite the Right rally]]. In 2018, McInnes was saying that the Proud Boys were part of the "new right".

In early 2018, ahead of an appearance at the annual Republican Dorchester Conference in Salem, Oregon, [[Roger Stone]] sought out the Proud Boys to act as his "security" for the event; photos posted online showed Stone drinking with several Proud Boys.

In late November 2018, it was reported, based on an internal memo of the Clark County, Washington Sheriff's Office, that the FBI had classified the Proud Boys as an extremist group with ties to white nationalism. Two weeks later, however, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Oregon office denied that the FBI made such designations, ascribing the error by the Sheriff's Office to a confusion over the FBI designating the group as such, as a designation made by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and other outside agencies.

In November 2020, [[Kyle Chapman|Kyle "Based Stickman" Chapman]] said he would "reassume [his] post as President of the Proud Boys", though it is not evident that Chapman has ever been president of the group. He also announced that the group, which denies being a racist or white supremacist organization, would take on an explicitly white supremacist direction, and that he intended to refocus the organization on the issues of "white genocide" and the "failures of multiculturalism". He also announced that he would change the logo and rename the group to the "Proud Goys", a term used among the far-right to signal antisemitism. The attempted coup is not believed to have been successful, and the Proud Goys name has not been adopted outside of Chapman's social media.

Evidence of further disarray within the leadership of the Proud Boys emerged in February 2021, in the aftermath of the [[2021 United States Capitol storming]] and the many arrests of Proud Boys that followed. The Alabama state chapter issued a statement saying, "We do not recognize the assumed authority of any national Proud Boy leadership including the Chairman, the Elders, or any subsequent governing body that is formed to replace them until such a time we may choose to consent to join those bodies of government." The state chapters of Indiana and Oklahoma endorsed the Alabama statement.