The founder of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that played a major role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol and was memorably instructed by Donald Trump to “stand back and stand by”, told the makers of a Trump documentary that his group wasn’t responsible for what happened that day.
In the film, Gavin McInnes, the UK-born British Canadian citizen who co-founded Vice magazine and was influential in the New York hipster scene of the early 2000s before becoming a far-right militia figure, says: “It was you. If anyone should apologise … it should be the corrupt leftwing media, and I’ll accept your apology now if you want to do it.”
McInnes was quoted in the documentary, which has aired on the BBC’s Panorama strand, as saying: “We want to make America hate again.”
The program – Trump: A Second Chance? – talks to ardent Trump supporters about their enduring support for the New York property developer and reality TV show figure who faced two impeachment inquiries during four years in office and has been indicted in four separate criminal cases since, including being found guilty of 34 felony counts.
Polls suggest an exceptionally tight US presidential race, with the final few days of campaigning before next week’s vote characterized by Democrats’ claims that a second Trump term would plunge the US into a period of neo-fascism.
At a packed Trump rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, the speakers rotated between patriotism and grievance, including a podcaster who called the unincorporated US territory of Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, made lewd comments about Latinos, depicted Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers.
McInnes, described by Vanity Fair as “one of our era’s most troubling extremists”, was not at the January 6 protest. But about 50 members of the Proud Boy group – designated a “terrorist entity” by the Canadian government – faced charges for their part in the insurrection, which was staged to prevent the certification of the 2020 election.
The Proud Boys chair, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, 39, of Miami, Florida, was sentenced to 22 years in prison last year after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges.
The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the sentences that the Proud Boy members received reflected “the danger their crimes pose to our democracy” and Tarrio had “learned that the consequence of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power”.
McInnes resigned from the Proud Boys in November 2018 after 10 members were charged in connection with a brawl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But in 2022, he was pictured in a black hoodie embroidered with the gold Proud Boy logo.
McInnes said on his Get Off My Lawn podcast that he was wearing the Proud Boy regalia “as an homage to our brothers behind bars”.
Last month, McInnes was scheduled to speak at dinner hosted by Uncensored America, a student organization at the University of South Carolina. The invitation misspelled Kamala Harris’s first name in a sexually suggestive way, the news station WIS 10 reported.
McInnes’s planned appearance at the event sparked controversy over free speech on campus. A petition protesting against the event argued it contributed to “overall negative environment that the university continues to allow”.
In response, McInnes said he would not be the one bringing hate to the event, and repeated the sentiment he offered to Panorama.
“If you’re looking for violence you’re looking on the wrong side of the political spectrum. The left are the violent ones. They burnt down this country for two years straight. We had one riot on January 6,” he said.
He said the dinner, a “roast” in colloquial terms, was set to “make fun of what could be the worst president in American history”, referring to Harris’s candidacy.
The impending election is predicted in polls to fall along gender lines. Polls show men are more likely to say efforts to promote gender equality have gone too far and plan to vote for Trump. Women are more apt to say those efforts haven’t gone far enough, and plan to vote for Harris. The margins for each are split roughly 60-40.
• This article was amended on 29 October 2024. An earlier version said that Gavin McInnes had said to BBC Panorama: “We want to make America hate again”; in fact this was from 2016 archival footage included in the documentary. Also McInnes is not designated a “terrorist entity” by the Canadian government – that reference was meant to relate to the Proud Boys.
