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McInnes, 47, an Ottawa native and co-founder of the Vice media empire, now heads the Proud Boys, a right-wing populist men’s group, and is a caustic hard-right media commentator in the United States and Canada, including on The Rebel.

Here’s the memo I wrote to our staff about the alt-right. therebel.media/ezra_levant_s_… —

Ezra Levant 🇨🇦 (@ezralevant) August 14, 2017

McInnes didn’t attend the rally, which was sparked by the city of Charlottesville’s plans to remove a public statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. After initially supporting the plan for the rally, he said, he smelled impending disaster more than a month ago.

“It seemed like they were drifting into the arena of the unwell,” McInnes said, quoting the movie Withnail & I.

“This gathering was a lie. It purported to be about statues; it purported to be about community, but it was really about polarizing the right and saying, ‘You are with us or against us.’ And I think they’re going to find that everyone is against them. Their rhetoric got a woman killed and a boy put in prison.

“It cut the alt-right off from everyone else,” McInnes said. “(The left and the media) see us all as one dumb unified group, and we’re not. And I think what we learned this weekend is, we shouldn’t be.”

Charlottesville also seems to have jolted Ezra Levant, proprietor of The Rebel, and some of his contributors. On Monday Levant publicly issued a “staff memo” disavowing the alt-right and the weekend’s white supremacist gathering.