Gavin McInnes is a Scottish-Canadian writer, actor, and creative director, as well as the co-founder of Vice Magazine, which has since expanded into VICE Media. His edgy, no-holds-barred commentary for more conservative outlets like Taki’s Magazine (one of his recent articles was called “This Country Was Not Built By Beta Males”) has resulted in any number of minor tempests in teapots, from McInnes telling a shocked Huffington Post Live Audience that feminism “made women miserable” to the mainstream media widely covering a spoof video he put up of him fake-wrestling his toddler. He regularly appears on shows such as FOX News’ The Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld among many more. I got a hold of him by cell phone (after first accidentally calling him while he was getting his hair cut):
JVM: You said that before you used to be pro-choice, back in your younger days. What really changed your mind on that issue?
GI: Seeing them come out. Seeing what they do when they come out, you know. The example I always use is, I have a friend who is, I don't know if she was pro-choice, I just assume she was, I live in New York, and I said (she's got two kids), and I said “What would you do if you got pregnant right now?” And she goes, “Lie on the floor and cry for three days,” 'cause she doesn't want another one, right. And you say that to someone that hasn't had kids, and they would just laugh at you and go, “Get rid of it.”
And I honestly believe that I'm not alone on this, but when you see the miracle of life, you go, you feel totally differently about abortion. And I grew up punk rock where it was cool, it was empowering, girls would make jokes about it. And I know they were traumatized after, but they would never show that, because that's somehow not empowering and they would just joke and be flippant and roll their eyes, and that was just sorta the culture I grew up in, and once I saw what happens when a baby is born, watched a little person become a woman, not a woman, but a girl who texts me and stuff, I realized that it's not the inconsequential thing I was raised to believe.
JVM: A lot of the left-wing TV hosts like Bill Maher spend a lot of time making fun of women who stay home and raise their kids. I remember he said Ann Romney had never done a day of work in her life and she raised five boys. Do you think it could be argued that that's a much more sexist thing to say, to take women that are sacrificing so much for their own children, and claiming that that's somehow not as important as doing whatever else?
GI: Well the thing is, Jon, is it's not that it's fun. He [Maher] sits around reading blogs, and then he gets surprised by people who are too lazy to do all the research, so then he has a team of researchers, a team of writers to help him be witty during this one hour conversation, and gets paid millions of bucks. So he's a hard worker, he calls that work. And shaping a human life–dealing with discipline, finding schools, trying to, you know, retain [their] innocence for as long as you can, trying to prolong Santa for as long as you can, all these different things shaping human mind, keeping them happy, keeping them stimulated, trying to avoid TV, I mean, I could list the things a mom has to do in one day, all the different things, challenges she has in her job, and it would make my job and most jobs, look like complete wastes of time. I make commercials for a living, half of it gets thrown in the garbage, and I pitch TV, half of those shows get thrown in the garbage, so I essentially work for the garbage.
JVM: Pro-choice people never want to see the evidence of what they support. Why do you think that is?
GI: You know, Thomas Jefferson said, “there is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world,” and I've always said about abortion that you're not allowed to be pro-something you don't have the stomach to Google Image, you know?… You know, they tell us it's not a human being, and you look at a third trimester abortion, you see what's going on, you know, it's a horror movie.
JVM: You've described the 1990's college hookup culture you were part of, and it hasn't changed a whole lot since then, of course. But when you say you're raising beautiful daughters, I assume that once you get married, and you get a different outlook, you probably don't want your daughters around that.
GI: No. No. And I mean, I'm not a snob. I like ghetto rap and punk rock, and all that stuff. But I think that stripping is degrading to women, and I think it's a sad life. I know. I've seen it. It's sorta like boxing. Mike Tyson is a great fighter, and it's fun to watch him fight, but he's like that because he had a childhood where he had the sh** beaten out of him every day, and parents that hated him. Stripping exists, but let’s recognize that these women are essentially Mike Tysons out there in the ring. You know, they've had their sexuality taken away from them, in a sense. I'm getting…here, I'm talking about different concepts, but my point is, I think that the liberal world is realizing that, as I did, that it just doesn't add up. And I think the world is catching on. You can check the internet, but that's because the only place these liberal graduates, these liberalized graduates have to go, is the internet. So they spill out, and lost logic is seeping in. I was just at a conference, in Palm Beach this weekend, called Restoration, and there was a lot of old conservatives, and they were really negative, and they've given up. And I just kept saying to them, “Guys, the truth is seeping in. And the children in the information age, the really young kids, they don't believe all this.” And I also noticed it with abortion. Like you have punks for the first time carrying pro-life signs, and you have bands like Flat Foot 56 being “Be a man, don't be a quitter, just because the child's within her.” And I think that it's changing.
JVM: So what sort of encouragement would you give a generation that got sold a bad bill of goods?
GI: Well, I think that that's the beauty of the truth, it seeps in. And that divorce experiment didn't work. You know, the empowering single mothers experiment didn't work. And this whole idea that you can treat abortions like they're no big deal, hasn't worked. Now it's a traumatizing event. And I think women are starting to learn this.
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