Vice linked a cool aesthetic to right-wing ideology early.

Evidence

“Terry was in deep shit with all of those first-year feminist types,” explained Vice magazine cofounder Gavin McInnes about the near walkout at Deitch’s gallery. Richardson’s style helped define Vice’s visual aesthetic as it positioned itself as the unofficial in-flight magazine for New York’s descent into self-destructive juvenilia. “We were in a community of musicians, drug abusers, and prostitutes,” boasted fellow Vice cofounder Suroosh Alvi, “and we all needed something to read.” Vice soon became the defining media outlet of the early 2000s, and by slowly anchoring its vision of cool to right-wing ideology, it presaged cultural shifts that would unfold over the next two decades. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Vice’s rightward cool pivot and McInnes’s trajectory foreshadow today’s manosphere/alt-right pipeline — relevant to Marx’s account of what the era produced.
• QUESTION: Why did right-wing ideology, not left, absorb Vice’s anti-PC cool? A causal gap Marx’s status-mechanism framework should explain.