Pop Culture Got Stale. Counterculture Went Right-Wing.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/books/review/culture-right-wing-david-marx.html

https://archive.ph/yOBnd

Pop Culture Got Stale. Counterculture Went Right-Wing.
How the rise and fall of the nihilist hipster gave us the cruel reactionaries of today.
By Jennifer Szalai
Nov. 21, 2025

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In the early 1990s, a couple of Quebec publishers started a community newspaper as part of an employment program to supplement government welfare checks; they called it Voice of Montreal and filled it with local listings. Soon, three of its young staffers developed grander ambitions. They began selling ads in other Canadian cities, shortening the name of the paper to Voice, and eventually cut ties with the original publishers. By 1999, flush with cash from a Canadian software tycoon, Voice had become Vice and moved to New York City.

Vice eventually expanded into a media and branding juggernaut that included an HBO series and a raft of Emmys. But in the aughts it was mostly known as a glossy magazine that posed a defiant middle finger to the cultural mainstream. Vice’s sensibility was decadent and caustic, a welter of expensive drugs, cheap beer, porn-inspired sex and adolescent high jinks. A feature called Gross Jar offered intermittent updates on what was happening inside a jar whose foul contents included urine, pieces of raw chicken and an editor’s facial scabs.

But the giddy attacks on mainstream tastes were curdling into something darker. One of Vice’s founders, Gavin McInnes, learned that he could use racism and misogyny as reliable bits for generating outrage (“I think hate is great. It’s super!”). In McInnes’s hands, the magazine’s infatuation with trucker hats and Pabst Blue Ribbon looked like more than just trash-camp aesthetics. “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of,” he told The Times in 2003. That was the same year he wrote an essay for Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative depicting illiberalism as the last hipster frontier: “Suddenly it had become fashionable to link liberalism with weakness and conservatism with honesty.”

It was only a matter of time before McInnes’s cultural provocations spilled into the political realm. In 2008, he left Vice; eight years later, he founded the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys.

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