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The Ottawa native and co-founder of the Vice media empire was, in effect, just practicing what he preaches.

As head of the Proud Boys, a fledgling but high-profile branch of the American hard-right, McInnes is part of an unsettling new trend in U.S. politics: radicals on both the left and right willing to act out their ideological differences with force.

He has pledged to fight back against violence from leftist activists, and his Proud Boys have repeatedly followed through – at raucous demonstrations from Berkeley to Portland, Chicago to New Orleans.

They even have a spin-off organization – the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights – that McInnes describes as his “military division.”

“We’re the only ones fighting these guys, and it’s fun,” he enthused in a recent video for The Rebel, the Canadian ultra-conservative online media outlet. “When they go low, go lower. Mace ’em back, throw bricks at their head. Let’s destroy them. We’ve been doing it for a while now and I gotta say, it’s really invigorating.”

Canada may be stereotyped currently as a liberal antidote to Trumpian America, but the father of the Proud Boys has injected an unruly Canadian voice into the heart of the populist, nativist revolution.

Exactly what the group stands for is up for debate. It describes itself as a fraternal organization that promotes “Western chauvinism,” closed borders and housewives, and is against “racial guilt,” but insists it is not racist or even “alt-right.” Some of its tenets are slightly odd or deliberately whimsical – such as a ban on members masturbating and an initiation ceremony that involves naming five types of breakfast cereal.