Mandolyna Theodoracopulos and Gavin McInnes

Source: Patrick McMullan

This will be my last column for Takimag. It’s been almost exactly ten years at about 1,000 words a week. That’s half a million words or the equivalent of half a dozen books. I’m so thankful to Taki and his daughter, Mandolyna, for giving me the opportunity to make better and better columns. The early ones are so bad, I’m glad they’re offline. Takimag has consistently been a place where you can say whatever you want. Many others have tried. Thought Catalog reprinted Taki columns for a minute but couldn’t take the millennial backlash and quickly capitulated. John Derbyshire was fired from National Review for a column he wrote here. There has been zero capitulation from the Theodoracopuloses and I’m eternally grateful to Takimag.

My only regret is I didn’t get to hang out with them more. Mandolyna is remarkably easy to work with. I think we had two fights and they lasted one email. Taki is a riot. From screaming, “Vous êtes nouveau riche!” at other boats from his yacht to pounding the table at a fancy restaurant and hollering, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if Liberace ate pussy, he’d still be with us,” the man is a human rock concert. Those Greek tycoons have been phenomenally generous to me over the years and I couldn’t be more thankful.

The articles I’ve written have been well received if you check the top 5 list and brutally resented if you check the comments. I avoid the latter but have to admit the top 5 ranking is pretty accurate. I’m sure the other columnists here notice that when you dial it in you don’t see an appearance, but when you work hard at telling a unique story in a palatable way, the meritocracy of numbers recognizes it. I used to compare myself to Jim Goad and compete with him for more than one spot at a time on that list (I don’t think I ever got the top two spots, but he did). It’s a dumb thing to do because the man is simply one of the greatest writers of our generation. Where most of us would spend all our chips creating an impenetrable attack that nobody’s ever thought of before, Jim will do all that but craft it in a way that sounds like he’s spitballing at a bar AND add cutting insults about each person’s looks. The secret to being a writer next to Goad is to accept that he’s in a league all his own and you can’t compete.

It was also an honor working with Steve Sailer, who has blown my mind so many times it looks like Detroit. The Derb is an inspiration too. Did any of you realize his columns always clocked in at exactly 1,000 words? David Cole is one of the most interesting Jews I’ve ever met, and I still find it hard to believe Kathy Shaidle’s acerbic vitriol comes from such a kind, petite woman. Mandolyna is a great curator who would bring in columnists from other sites and grace us with Pat Buchanan’s flawless history lessons, Conrad Black’s pithy evaluations, and Michelle Malkin’s bitter tenacity. It was an honor to be remotely associated with any and all of them.

In the beginning I regularly ripped off John Stossel, but later graduated to ripping off more complex thinkers such as Ann Coulter. I tried to keep it light in the summer, which I believe is a good lesson for the right. We need to include bubblegum culture in our rants. As Nick Gillespie once said, “Nobody can remember the speaker of the house back in 1935 but everyone knows who Shirley Temple is.”

My stories focused on debunking liberal myths. America is not a racist hellhole. Women are not second-class citizens here. Islam is not a religion of peace. Free speech does include hate speech. Men are not weak and dads are not useless. Making videos about all these things is often much easier than writing them out. I’ve heard Tucker Carlson say the same thing. Maybe the written word is being replaced. I don’t see that as a big deal as long as we don’t give up on our message, which is maximum liberty for maximum proud Westerners.

I’m rebooting my whole deal and going mainstream. I’ll announce the platform in about a month but it’s going to include TV, radio, the internet, and books. The deal is an exclusive, which means no more The Gavin McInnes Show on Compound Media, no more video commentary on Rebel Media, and no more column here. That doesn’t mean I’ll be any less prolific. I’m still determined to free us all from big government, but I also want to focus on the family. America needs more dads. The left’s obsession with shattering the family and the patriarchy all comes back to daddy issues, and I’m going to reverse that trend. When I first met my wife, I said I had no interest in kids. She convinced me otherwise and my only regret is it all didn’t happen sooner. I want to share that bliss. I want more young men proposing. I want less spinsters. The patriarchy isn’t a fun idea you oughtta try out; it’s the very foundation of our country. The left, along with their deep hatred for Judeo-Christian values, are determined to end the dad.

They don’t have a plan B. They just want to watch the world burn. The media has joined them on this voyage and pulled their radicals into the mainstream. All this has done has made them all more radical and further from the average American. The MSM is now a satellite floating 200 miles from Earth, and that has created a vacuum down here on the ground. I have been working with enormously powerful people and big names to fill that void. I’m very excited about it and feeling pretty fearless, although I’m not sure how I’m going to avoid swearing for the rest of my career. Like my dick if I were to nude-wrestle Eva Mendes, it’s going to be very rewarding but also incredibly hard.