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Gavin McInnes, the right-wing Canadian hipster provocateur who co-founded the Vice media empire in Montreal, has quit the Proud Boys, a fraternal organization that has been linked to white nationalism.

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“I am officially disassociating myself from the Proud Boys in all capacities, forever. I quit,” McInnes said in a video posted to YouTube. “I was never the leader, only the founder.”

He said he did this reluctantly, as he sees the Proud Boys as the greatest fraternal organization in the world, but “rumours and lies and terrible journalism has made its way to the court system.”

This refers to the NYC Nine, a group of Proud Boys members who were arrested after a brawl in Manhattan after a talk by McInnes. McInnes said he has been told that his disassociation “could help alleviate their sentencing.”

He was reading from a script.

Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

He denied that the group, whose members wear distinctive Fred Perry golf shirts and style themselves as “Western chauvinists,” has ties to white nationalists. He also denied that the Proud Boys is an extremist group, and characterized it as more of a group of guys who like stupid jokes and silly games, such as punching each other until they can name five breakfast cereals.