proud boys 2

see main for older 719 (this is bak/txt?)

see joe biggs proud 3

interesting contrast to boogaloo re love of cops:[trump gestalt switch, see intercept]

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aDAM KLASFELD / October 19, 2018

MANHATTAN (CN) – New York City police arrested two members of the far-right Proud Boys on Friday, a week after videos captured members of the group beating up protesters outside the official Manhattan club of the Republican Party.

Proud Boy Geoffrey Young, 38, was released on his own recognizance after being arraigned on two misdemeanor counts of riot in the second degree and attempted assault in the third degree.

A New York City police detective said that surveillance video caught Young punching and putting one person in a headlock, while kicking another person in the stomach.

A witness recorded Young kicking a third person three times in the head, police say.

The New York Daily News reported that police also arrested Jay Kinsman, who has not yet been arraigned, on Friday.

The arrests fall a full week after video captured the NYPD standing by as Proud Boy members attacked protesters outside the Upper East Side’s Manhattan Republican Club, which invited the group’s leader Gavin McInnes to reenact the samurai sword assassination of a Japanese socialist.

After that event, video captured Proud Boys participating in violence, but the NYPD arrested only three anti-fascist protesters that night.

New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, the Democratic nominee for state attorney general, pushed for police action the day after the violence.

"I am disturbed and disgusted by the videos I’ve seen of members of the neo-fascist, white supremacist Proud Boys group engaging in hate-fueled mob violence on the streets of New York City," James tweeted on Oct. 13. "New York will not become the next Charlottesville, and we refuse to let the actions of a hateful few define our city."

Legal Aid attorney Rebecca Kavanagh argued that the charges show the NYPD continues to treat the group with kid gloves.

“Why when video shows #ProudBoys stomping on person lying on ground in the fetal position is #NYPD planning only to charge them w/ Riot & Attempted Assault?” Kavanagh tweeted two days before the charges became public. “Riot is a Misdemeanor & I guarantee my clients would be charged w/ Gang Assault.”

The Daily News reported that police are looking for seven more Proud Boys and three anti-fascist protesters, widely known as Antifa.

In a press conference on Thursday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested that both sides are complicating the investigation.

“You’ve got two factions, if you will, that unfortunately both seem to engage in violence at times and don’t want to cooperate with the police,” de Blasio told reporters. “That makes this more complicated.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo refused to draw equivalencies between the groups.

“The Proud Boys are a hate group,” Cuomo told WCBS this morning. “They are a white supremacist group, anti-women group and there was violence after they brought the Proud Boys and they brought them to the Republican headquarters.”

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https://thehumanist.com/magazine/january-february-2019/features/what-patriot-prayer-is-praying-for

"THERE HAVE DEFINITELY been a couple of times where I walked away from one our rallies and thought: Was that bad for the country? Did I just make things worse?”

This is not what I’d expected to hear from Joey Gibson, the founder of the Portland-based far-right group Patriot Prayer, when he agreed to let me interview him last year.

“I mean I don’t think that’s true, but I have thought about it a couple of times,” he said sheepishly.

Gibson is of white and Japanese descent. In his early thirties, he has a round, babyish face with a wide smile and a slight tan. His eyes are large, coffee brown and almond shaped, and are constantly shifting to check his surroundings. He has a strong jawline covered with a well-kept black beard, a shaved head, broad shoulders, and a stocky build. In fact, he reminded of the caricatures of soldiers used in video games like Call of Duty. Gibson doesn’t slouch; he walks with his back straight and his head up. He exudes confidence and is a passionate speaker. I can understand why so many people are drawn to him.

When I first met Gibson he was wearing a black trucker hat with a grayscale American flag patch on the front, similar to those sewn onto the tactical uniforms of battlefield soldiers. The same flag adorned the back of his black-hooded jacket, both of his chest pockets, and his left sleeve—the same place I wore mine when I was in Iraq with the Third Brigade of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. He also sported “Don’t Tread On Me” and “In God We Trust” patches and carried a coyote-brown, military-style backpack. In the army, we called it an assault bag.

“I believe my purpose is to spread the message of free speech and love. No liberal is going to be mad when I talk about freedom, or free speech, or love, or God.”

When I accompanied Gibson and his crew to Seattle, Washington, for the Second Annual Women’s March in January of 2018, they dressed like they were going to war. They wore flak vests and ballistic helmets. Some had detachable, embroidered name tapes attached to hats, jackets, and the like. Of the approximately thirty people in the group, I met just one who was a military veteran like me. (In the army, we had politically incorrect names for guys who liked to deck themselves in all sorts of unnecessary gear. These were the soldiers who never left the big, cushy forward operating bases with their Pizza Huts and Burger Kings. The truth is, when you’re on patrol, conducting a cordon and search or on an overwatch mission, you want to be as light as possible.)

Joining Gibson’s Patriot Prayer were members of the “fraternity of proud Western chauvinists” known as the Proud Boys, led that day by Tusitala “Tiny” Toese. The Proud Boys is a faction of the alt-right listed as a general hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and classified by the Federal Bureau of Investigations as an extremists group with ties to white nationalism, according to an article published by the Guardian this past November. Earlier, in October, members of the Proud Boys were arrested in New York for assault following a speaking engagement at the Metropolitan Republican Club by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes (who publicly broke with the group following the Guardian piece).

When we arrived at the march, I noticed flyers warning marchers of the presence of Joey Gibson and the “misogynistic Proud Boys” and urging marchers not to engage with them. “Don’t feed the trolls!” the flyers read. Some of the Proud Boys also wore flak vests and the like, and one wore a pin and carried a flag emblazoned withPepe the Frog, a cartoon meme used by white nationalists but which the Proud Boys claim is not racist. In the spirit of true hipster exceptionalism, they claimed they’re just being “ironic” and “triggering snowflakes” when employing racists tropes.

The Patriot Prayer group and theProud Boys both shouted overtly misogynistic slurs at the marchers and then screamed “Triggered!” if any woman dared to react. The only real difference between the two was the Proud Boys constantly shouting, “proud of your boy!” and “Uhuru!” intermittently. “Proud of Your Boy” is a song from the stage production of the Disney film Aladdin, and the impetus for the group’s name. The shouting of “Uhuru” comes from a YouTube video featuring well-known queer black activist Gazi Kudzo, who shouts “Uhuru” every time he gets a white person to agree that white people should pay reparations for slavery. Again claiming irony, it seems more akin to mockery.

The Proud Boys say they are pro-West and anti-white guilt. They also claim they’re not racist and have members of all races. As a matter of fact, most deny the existence of racism altogether and say the only reason it persists is because liberals say it exists. They are, however, proclaimed nationalists, anti-immigrant, anti-political correctness, and anti-gay and trans, though they do have some members from the LGBTQ community in their group.

During the Women’s March, the Proud Boys were decidedly inflammatory. Some wore shirts that targeted feminists as “parasites to the patriarchy.” They stole a pink hat off a woman’s head and passed it around like bullies on a playground. They called women fat whores, baby killers, faggots, and dikes. They told them that they only hated Trump because he wouldn’t grab their pussies and occasionally told them to go make a sandwich.

Later that night I drove Gibson to a rally in Portland, Oregon. When I asked him how he felt about the Proud Boys’ earlier escapades, he deflected and told me, “I didn’t hear them say that.” Likewise, when a woman confronted him, saying that one of his group had punched her in the face at his last rally, he told her that he hadn’t seen it and doubted that it had happened. “The Proud Boys respect women,” he said. Gibson told me that the Proud Boys were just there for security, to make sure that Patriot Prayer could spread their message, not to start a fight.

He went on to describe that message and tell me what inspired him to become an activist.

A member of the “Hell-Shaking Preachers” from southern Washington joined Patriot Prayer’s counterdemonstration at the second Women’s March in Seattle. (photo by W.B. Nichols)

“It wasn’t Trump,” Gibson said, “it was the social justice warriors [SJWs]. I knew how bad the political correctness in America had gotten in terms of the SJWs. How they want to control our speech, and our thoughts, and how they’re brainwashing the public.”

He told me of a news clip he’d seen a year earlier in which a teenage Trump supporter was chased by a crowd outside one of Trump’s rallies in San Jose, California. “I knew things were bad in America, but I didn’t know they were that bad,” he lamented. “There’s something wrong when you start seeing mobs of liberals chasing kids.”

For Gibson this was a call to action. He says it changed his life and gave it purpose. As he talked he became visibly excited, gesticulating with large, sweeping movements. His eyes roamed around the inside of my Ford Flex like he was addressing a crowd. His voice took on a timbre tinged with authority and belief.

“I believe my purpose is to spread the message of free speech and love. No liberal is going to be mad when I talk about freedom, or free speech, or love, or God. One of the things I believe is that God has told me to be a protector of truth. He gave me the image of a lighthouse.”

When I asked him what exactly that meant, he said he was supposed to expose the truth,

To make people see the hypocrisy and the craziness of the liberals and the SJWs. Not with my words but through our actions. Being a lighthouse is basically just standing tall with a very consistent message, no matter how crazy things get. I’m like a beacon for other people who are nearby or watching or listening to the videos. God wants me to preach a certain truth to people and to protect that truth whatever it may be. Especially when we’re surrounded by so many lies in this country.[stand your ground]

Despite his talk of love and peace, Gibson’s rallies often erupt into violence. Though he rarely, if ever, openly promotes violence, he draws and allows people into his events who he knows will be violent. In addition to the Proud Boys, Gibson had the SPLC-labeled hate group Oath Keepers conduct security at one of his rallies as well as the anti-government militia group called the Three Percenters. They were the ones in pseudo-military gear carrying AR-15’s across their chests during the “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017—the rally that ended with the murder of thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, who was run over by a white supremacist.

I brought up the March 4, 2017, “March 4 Trump” demonstration in Berkeley,  California, that turned violent. Members of the alt-right, decked out in faux-military gear, had faced off against members of the anti-fascist group Antifa, who donned their standard uniform of black clothes and covered faces. Though Gibson was present, it wasn’t organized by his group.

“It was like a total war zone,” he recalled. “I was running around, like helping people and stuff and…it was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Of course, I had seen a war zone during my active duty in Iraq, and I told Gibson that a bunch of people playing dress up and fighting in a field is nothing at all like a war zone.

“Yeah, but that was a huge eye opener for me,” he responded. “Especially the police standdown. It made me committed to go and keep hitting places until the police did their jobs. I felt like the politicians, the mayor, and the city council were using the police as political pawns. They stopped the police from doing their job.”

On May 26, 2017, in Portland, Oregon, fifty-three-year-old war veteran Rick Best, twenty-three-year-old Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, and twenty-one-year-old Micah Fletcher intervened and stopped a man from harassing two young girls on the city’s lightrail train, one of whom wore a hijab. The man they confronted was Jeremy Christian, a self-professed white supremacist who was in town for Gibson’s “Freedom Rally.” Christian stabbed all three men in the neck, killing Best and Namkai-Meche and severely wounding Fletcher.

I wondered how Gibson felt about the death of these two men. He’d held another rally in Portland just one week after the murders. A rally which, again, ended in violence.

“Tell me about Jeremy Christian,” I said. Joey turned to face me with narrowed eyes and a furrowed brow. This was something Joey did not want to discuss.

“Why are we talking about him?” he asked gruffly. “How did we get here?” He rolled his eyes slightly and let out a kind of sigh. “Look,” he said, “I posted a week’s worth of videos against white supremacy, and [neo-Nazi group] Identity Evropa, and identity politics before that march.”

“So, why do you think those people show up?” I asked.

“For the publicity,” he said. “To further their own cause.”

“What about Jeremy Christian?” I asked. “He didn’t have a group. He was just a white supremacist who was attracted to your message. Does it concern you that these are the people who are answering your call, so to speak?”

Gibson repeated that he’d never promoted violence against anybody...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/09/30/the-app-that-the-proud-boys-used-to-celebrate-donald-trumps-debate-performance

who emerged the winner from the presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden?

To many, it was hard to tell. It seemed like cacophonous chaos, the night producing less of a clear victory for either man than an overall loss for a country that had to sit through 90 minutes of barbs, cross talk and ill will. But the crowd on Parler, a new social media app that courts conservative America, including the far-right Proud Boys, seemed to reach a more definitive conclusion: This was a total victory for Trump.

“People were on Parler tonight because they can freely express their views without fear of being throttled, banned, deplatformed,” says John Matze, the app’s founder. He sees Parler as an alternative to Twitter and Facebook, the mainstream platforms that Matze and others believe try to silence conservatives. “Overall, I think their Parler experience contributed to a fair and free election.”

Parler, founded in 2018, has become a beacon for Republicans during the past few months, and in June, Trump publicly flirted with the idea of leaving Facebook and Twitter to concentrate efforts on Parler. He didn’t, though he, his son Eric and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani all made official accounts and became active on the app. So did plenty of Trump supporters. At one point this summer, Parler was getting 500,000 downloads a week, and its user base neared 2 million, many times the amount on the app before Trump highlighted Parler, a place that the Proud Boys have made a home for themselves since Twitter and Facebook suspended the group in 2018.

[Recommended For You

Unsurprisingly then, Parler was a hotbed of activity throughout Tuesday’s debate. John Solomon, the founder and editor in chief of the right-leaning News.com, labeled the evening a “Biden blunder.” The event was characterized in violent terms by one self-described “supremacist” on the app, @MidnightMarauder: “The equivalent of #trump bringing a gun to a pillow fight.” While another user, @HouseofTrump, simply concluded that Biden “truly has no clue.”

Those words glow with only low luminosity when compared to the 10,000-watt intensity on the app after Trump told the Proud Boys during the debate to “stand back and stand by,” a phrase that the group understandably interpreted as a call to arms.

Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs could hardly contain his glee,typing out this on Parler: “Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy.” (He reportedly made similar comments on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that has attracted nationalist groups because of its anonymity-protecting technology.) Biggs has a sizable following on the app, some 34,000 people, and he describes himself in his Parler profile as a “Singer, Motorcycle rider and freedom fighter.”

Enrique Tarrio, another Proud Boys chief, echoed Biggs’ comment. “I’m am [sic] extremely PROUD of my Presidents performance tonight,” he wrote on Parler. The Proud Boys’ widely followed main account, @TheProudBoys, which has 50,000 subscribers, offered up a brief summation of the evening, punctuating their excitement with capital letters: “THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!” Below those words was a picture of a black T-shirt with the words “Proud Boys Standing By” emblazoned on it in canary yellow.

Matze, the app’s founder, had this to say about the talk on his app. “We are a neutral town square. As long as [the Proud Boys’] speech is legal . . . and they follow our [terms of service] . . . we do not discriminate based off group or association.”

As it happens, the boys did not, actually, have the last word on Parler last night. An hour after the debate, user @IceQueenAsh, who has decorated her Parler profile with Pepe the Frog and characterizes herself as a “#proudmom” and a “#proud patriot,” wrote: “Screw it I’ll say it! #TheProudGals are here in spirit and damn proud how #TheProudBoys have handled themselves!”

“The Proud Boys are awesome,” she concluded. “Good old fashion red white and blue!”

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-30-2020/

CCJ DCR narco guy // djt, emials says 2nd civ war already started, get guns

this email for patriot only your donor t

profile says exclus trump army, ID w/ pres 1st line of defense when comes to fighting off the liberal mob camo hat

db no lnx

Far-Right Proud Boys Rally After Trump’s Debate Defense: ‘Fuck Them Up’

‘STAND BACK AND STAND BY’

Given the chance to finally explicitly condemn right-wing extremism, Trump insisted “This is a left-wing problem” and gave a shoutout to the Proud Boys.

Hanna Trudo

Will Sommer

Spencer Ackerman

Updated Sep. 30, 2020 10:12AM ET / Published Sep. 29, 2020

President Donald Trump refused to condemn right-wing extremist groups when put on the spot during a segment about Black Lives Matter protests during the first presidential debate.

“I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing. I’m willing to do anything, I want to see peace,” Trump said in Cleveland.

“Well, then do it sir,” Fox News moderator Chris Wallace replied, giving the president an ample opening to disavow such violent militias.

“Who would you like me to condemn? The Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s gotta do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem,” Trump said.

Democratic nominee Joe Biden then stepped in with an attempt to correct his opponent on stage. “Antifa is an idea, not an organization,” he said, before Trump cut in.

“You have to be kidding,” the president scoffed.

The former vice president was referencing comments made by FBI director Chris Wray, who said earlier this month during testimony that antifa is “not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.” Wray also testified that white supremacist violence makes up the lion’s share of the U.S. domestic terrorism threat.

Outside of the debate, Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs saw Trump’s remarks as permission to “fuck” up the group’s foes.

The Proud Boys on Telegram have now posted an image with its logo and Trump's remark. https://t.co/xSySGrohcm pic.twitter.com/UAJFsKCsbX

— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) September 30, 2020

“Trump basically said to go fuck them up!” Biggs wrote on Parler, an alternative social media network that courts conservatives. “This makes me so happy.”

Other Proud Boys leaders posted on Parler and Telegram, another social network popular with far-right figures banned, that they would follow Trump’s request to “stand down and stand by.”

“I will stand down sir!!!” Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio wrote on Parler. “Standing by sir. So Proud of my guys right now.”

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Tarrio predicted that “stand back, stand by,” would become a Proud Boys slogan. Earlier Proud Boys mottos have included “The West Is the Best” and “Fuck Around and Find Out,” a warning to the group’s perceived enemies.

“I think this ‘stand back, stand by” thing will be another Proud Boy saying,” Tarrio said.

Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security intelligence analyst who in 2009 warned of the growing threat of far-right militias, told The Daily Beast that “within the context of Trump’s statements which insinuate future voter fraud, a rigged election, etc., [it] sounds like a subtle endorsement of future use violence by the Proud Boys. Again, another statement by the president that fans the flames of fear and seems to support violent far right groups, rather than condemn them.”

On a briefing call with reporters after the debate, Kate Bedingfield, the Biden campaign’s communications director, addressed the shock and significance of Trump’s failure to distance himself from the group.

“I think that was an incredibly critical moment in this debate,” Bedingfield said in the on-the-record call. “He had multiple opportunities to say he disowns white supremacy. He was asked explicitly to do so and once again he openly refused. Even after citing the Proud Boys by name, he refused to condemn that group and to condemn white supremacy.”

CNN political commentator Van Jones, who has worked with the White House in the past on criminal justice reform issues, tore into the president over his refusal to condemn far-right extremism and racism Tuesday night.

“Only three things happened for me tonight,” Jones noted during CNN’s post-debate show. “Number one, Donald Trump refused to condemn white supremacy. Number two, the President of the United States refused to condemn white supremacy.”

“Number three, the commander-in-chief refused to condemn white supremacy,” he continued, his voice rising. “On the global stage, in front of my children, in front of everybody’s families, and he was given the opportunity to condemn white supremacy and he gave a wink and a nod to a racist, Nazi, murderous organization that is now celebrating online!”

Trump also declined to pledge to accept the outcome of the election. Asked if he would instruct his followers to react calmly and avoid “any civil unrest,” he went in the opposite direction: “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen.”

“I am urging my people… I hope it’s going to be a fair election… but if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that,” he said.

— Justin Baragona contributed reporting

GUK

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/oregon-portland-pro-trump-protests-violence-texts

no lnx

Revealed: pro-Trump activists plotted violence ahead of Portland rallies

Patriots Coalition members suggested political assassinations and said ‘laws will be broken, people will get hurt’, leaked chats show

[pix Far-right organizers clashed with counter-protesters at the Justice Center in Portland, Oregon, 22 August.

Jason Wilson and Robert Evans

@jason_a_w

Wed 23 Sep 2020

Leaked chat logs show Portland-area pro-Trump activists planning and training for violence, sourcing arms and ammunition and even suggesting political assassinations ahead of a series of contentious rallies in the Oregon city, including one scheduled for this weekend.

The chats on the GroupMe app, shared with the Guardian by the antifascist group Eugene Antifa, show conversations between Oregon members of the Patriots Coalition growing more extreme as they discuss armed confrontations with leftwing Portland activists, and consume a steady diet of online disinformation about protests and wildfires.

[Facebook removes Patriot Prayer pages in bid to halt 'violent social militias'

Violent Pro-Trump Militias

The events in Kenosha are the latest in a long line of cases in which self-styled vigilantes have gathered under the banner of the “thin blue line” — a flag and movement devoted to the defense of law enforcement and the president — and engaged in violence with counterprotesters while police stood back.

Days before the killings in a Wisconsin, a so-called Back the Blue rally in Gilbert, Arizona, saw armed pro-police demonstrators beating counterprotesters while law enforcement looked on. In the run up to the confrontation, which are now a weekly event, supporters of the rally posted violent fantasies online and death threats against their critics. Days later, police in Portland stood by as gun-toting men waving “thin blue line” flags brawled with leftist protesters in the city’s streets. The clash came just weeks after Portland authorities acknowledged that a former Navy SEAL who had boasted about infiltrating “ANTIFA” was under investigation in connection with the detonation of an explosive device near protesters. Pro-police protests New York have also devolved into violence.

Armed Vigilantes Antagonizing Protesters Have Received a Warm Reception From Police

Mike German, a former FBI agent who went undercover in far-right groups in the 1990s and who is now at the Brennan Center for Justice, noted that law enforcement’s tendency to back off in the face armed right-wing protests was evident in altercations during Trump’s 2016 run for office, and has continued throughout his administration. “To see the police continuing to treat these far-right militants as friendlies is troubling,” he said. During the 1990s, German explained, law enforcement understood that the most violent members of right-wing groups, those with criminal records that exposed them to risk of arrest, did not show up at public protests. That’s no longer the case.

“There are people who have been engaged in protests in Portland for years now,” German said. “They’re well identified. I know them and I don’t live in Portland. Several of them are under court orders not to attend another protest because of the violence they’ve already perpetrated. And yet, they can engage with the police as if they’re auxiliaries. It’s really astonishing — people can point guns at people in broad daylight and not be arrested.”

[pix Alan Swinney, a member of the right-wing extremist group Proud Boys, fires sting-ball grenades as far-right demonstrators, many armed, clash violently with Black Lives Matter counterprotesters, in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 22, 2020.

Photo: John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images]

Data collected by the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and shared with HuffPost Friday charted nearly 500 instances of right-wing extremists gathering in response to Black Lives Matter protests since the police killing of George Floyd in late May, leading to 64 cases of simple assault, 38 vehicle assaults, and nine cases of shots fired at demonstrators resulting in three deaths.

Among the myriad factors contributing to the political violence and unrest the country is now witnessing is an inversion of the relationship between some elements of the armed right and the federal government, Beirich argued. “The anti-government movement is no longer anti-government in the sense that the federal government is no longer its enemy,” she said. “Trump has changed that calculation — the militias, the larger anti-government world, is essentially a pro-Trump political formation.” German, who published a report this week on extremist infiltration of law enforcement agencies, described the increasingly public alignment of the far right, police on the ground, and the White House as “a widening of the umbrella” for extremist groups.

“The president has identified the Black Lives Matter protests and so-called antifa as the enemy and that sends a message to the police as to who to go after but also to these groups,” he said. “So these groups and the police seem to have aligned on a common enemy, but law enforcement is making a very big mistake if they think that because they are enemies of your enemies, they are your friends. They are not your friends, as they have demonstrated and as they will continue demonstrating as law enforcement tries to regulate their violence.”

A Surge of Far-Right Extremism

The election of Barack Obama was followed by a surge in right-wing extremist activity that then exploded under President Donald Trump, Beirich explained. “There’s been this slow drumbeat of one white supremacist attack or militia anti-government attack, and then another, and then another,” she said. “It just kept accelerating into the explosion that we’ve seen lately.”

In Obama’s second term, the surge in right-wing activity became intermingled with a visible pro-police movement that took hold in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Rittenhouse came of age during this critical moment. On Wednesday, BuzzFeed News reported that the teenager had a front-row seat at a rally Trump held in January, and was part of a cadet program at a local police department that provided ride-alongs and firearms training. Speaking to Vice News on Thursday, former classmates described Rittenhouse as a “ride or die” Trump supporter who loved “triggering the libs.”

If the notice to appear drawn up by the Antioch Police Department is accurate, Rittenhouse was born on January 3, 2003, late in the 18-month window between the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq. He came into the world just a few weeks before the Department of Homeland Security, and he was likely still in elementary school when the “thin blue line” flag that he included in the background of his Facebook profile became the symbol of a movement forged in reaction to Obama-era police brutality protests.

Posts Rittenhouse made on social media indicate that his worldview was drenched in a militarized culture that has animated large swaths of the country after nearly two decades of war and the emergence of law enforcement as a powerful cultural and political constituency. Embedded in that worldview is a “tactical” community with its own symbols and language, built around the idea of constant threat, good guys versus bad guys, and the sacred role of guns in maintaining social order. In a video taken before Tuesday’s killings, the teenaged Rittenhouse can be heard articulating his role at the protest in terms that echo the language of modern American police, which consistently strives to center police officers’ willingness to run toward danger.

“People are getting injured and our job is to protect this business, and a part of my job is to also help people,” Rittenhouse told a reporter from the right-wing website Daily Caller. “If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle because I need to protect myself, obviously, but I also have my med kit.”

If Rittenhouse forged his political identity online in the past half decade, and it appears he did, he would have encountered a largely unchecked universe of blended pro-police and right-wing ideas, memes, and imagery, Beirich noted. “Just remember that none of the social media companies in this kid’s lifetime had really dealt with the issue of militias on their system,” she said. “He would have been exposed to every militant idea — the need for war, arming yourself — all that stuff would have been widespread where kids like this guy lived.”

Online support for Rittenhouse has exploded since his arrest, with fundraisers and “Free Kyle” memes spreading widely against the backdrop of a profoundly fraught political moment.

[pix Enrique Tarrio, chair of the Proud Boys, speaks with a police officer during the End Domestic Terrorism rally at Tom McCall Waterfront Park on Aug. 17, 2019, in Portland, Ore.

Photo: Karen Ducey/Getty Images]

From the beginning, Trump courted the hard-right edge of American law enforcement, gathering endorsements in his 2016 run for office from unions representing Border Patrol agents, ICE officers, and the Fraternal Order of Police. That courtship has continued into 2020, with the NYPD’s Police Benevolent Association, which represents 24,000 officers, throwing its support behind the president. In Philadelphia earlier this summer, a meeting between Vice President Mike Pence and the local police union also featured members of the Proud Boys,a right-wing street-fighting gang that often shows up at pro-police protests to brawl with leftists.

Trump Supporters Rush to Defend One of Their Own Who Killed Protesters in Kenosha

The killings in Kenosha came one day after a couple from St. Louis, Missouri, who used guns to threaten a Black Lives Matter protest outside their mansion, appeared as speakers at the Republican National Convention. The couple’s message, and the message of the Republicans and the Trump administration as the president seeks reelection, is that the protests that have roiled the country are a threat and that Americans, when threatened, are entitled to defend themselves. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his millions of viewers Wednesday night. Referring to Rittenhouse on Twitter,Ann Coulter, the far-right commentator whose political views Donald Trump is known to consider as bellwether for his base, added: “I want him as my president.”

“That’s the message that’s going to be pounded every day until November 3,” Beirich said — and it should be deeply troubling. “When political figures and public figures take advantage of fraught situations in this way it always ends in violence.” Beirich added, “I can’t think of anything more irresponsible than what the RNC and Trump are doing. It’s unbelievable.”

The bullet that took Anthony Huber’s life pierced his heart, tearing through his aorta, his pulmonary artery, and his right lung. On Wednesday night, Huber’s partner, Hannah Gittings, put out a call to friends to meet at the local skatepark in Kenosha; a GoFundMe launched in his name soon raised thousands of dollars for the family he left behind. In addition to being a talented and known figure in the local skate scene,Huber’s friends remembered him as a “peaceful person” and a “defender” who “put his life on the line for others.” Gittings told a local CBS affiliate that he was the smartest, kindest, and most loving man she ever knew.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-report-details-how-far-right-militias-and-white-supremacists-infiltrate-us-police-departments

no lnx twt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/extremist-proud-boys-have-been-trying-to-ally-themselves-with-philadelphia-police-and-showed-up-at-a-local-fop-event-report/

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/10/1959772/-Proud-Boys-show-up-to-support-Pence-Philly-police-while-harassing-protesters

The far-right Proud Boys—designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—have been lurking around the fringes of both the Trump reelection campaign this year and the police brutality protests of the past month and more. This week in Philadelphia, members of the group made the connection explicit.

At an appearance by Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday—in which he gave a stoutly pro-police speech at the Friends of Police Lodge 5 in Northeast Philadelphia—a group of about 10 Proud Boys stood outside and harassed a small group of protesters. The same men later appeared at a gathering of police officers after the Pence speech and were apparently welcomed warmly.

“You literally are what separates order from chaos … but we live in a time when the radical left presenting the American people with one false choice after another,” Pence told the gathering. “Under this president and this administration we are not going to defund the police, not now, not ever,” he added.

Outside, the Philadelphia Inquirerreported, the gathered Proud Boys and other supporters of the police stood in the street and exchanged shouted epithets with anti-police protesters. When some men supporting Black Lives Matter began engaging them, they chanted: “All lives matter!”

At one point the exchange was broken up by a large group of men on motorcycles—led by a Dodge Charger with flashing lights, apparently imitating a police cruiser—that rode through the area. Afterwards, police lowered barricades they had erected and allowed the pro-police contingent, including the Proud Boys, into the lodge for a “Back the Blue” after-party.

Proud Boys have previously made their presence felt at other Trump/Pence campaign events, notably in Colorado and Washington State, as well as at Democratic events, where they harassed liberals attending rallies. At Trump’s reelection announcement event last year in Orlando, Florida, a group of Proud Boys were prevented from attacking anti-Trump protesters by police.

“We are aligned with Trump in that we believe in America First,” said one Proud Boy at the Colorado Springs event. “There’s an America First agenda. And ‘America’ means everybody that’s here in America. We’re sick of people dividing each other across lines of race and ethnicity.”

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2020/06/19/mapping-paramilitary-and-far-right-threats-racial-justice

no lnx

By Political Research Associates and the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR)

Additional research support provided by Alexander Reid Ross

We have been tracking reports of paramilitary and other far-right actors who are showing up at or adjacent to protests demanding an end to racist policing and a transformation of our carceral state. This map seeks to right-size the threat of paramilitaries to our social justice movements, neither exaggerating nor minimizing. We have confirmed 136 reported incidents since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, and with new reports daily there are dozens more as of yet unconfirmed incidents to review. Given the variety of groups and factions involved and types of incidents, we have divided the data into a few broad categories of actors/ideologies on the one hand and actions and tactics on the other. In most cases, the underlying data preserves more nuance and can be used to make finer distinctions.

Background

Although most people may not remember, if they ever knew, far-right paramilitaries did turn up at previous rounds of protests over police violence. For example, during the second wave of Ferguson protests, after a grand jury declined to indict the officer who killed Michael Brown, members of the paramilitary group the Oathkeepers patrolled rooftops claiming to be there to protect people and property. The heavily armed militia—which reports drawing its membership primarily from military veterans, police officers, and other first responders—was greeted with mixed reactions by protesters. Mostly they were a distraction from demands for justice and police accountability.

Now in 2020, far-right paramilitaries are once again making the scene at racial justice protests.Particularly in the last days of May, rumors circulated that large numbers of armed militia members and/or outright White Nationalists were infiltrating, disrupting protests and threatening activists. Some of the armed militias were claiming to be there to support the protestors—or at least to speak against police violence and overreach.

President Trump continues to try to divert attention to an invented threat from “antifa,” tweeting that he will have them declared a terrorist group and the Attorney General of the United States has threatened to point the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) at “Antifa and similar groups.” Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has run over 2,000 advertisements on social media since June 2, warning about “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups,” some versions of which featured a point-down red triangle, an image used to identify political enemies in Nazi concentration camps. Even as police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets against protestors, activists and organizers were left wondering how seriously to take the threat of violence from right-wing paramilitaries.

Key Findings

The absolute number of far-right and paramilitary actors at racial justice and police accountability protests has been relatively small, typically no more than a dozen people, and often only one or two men in Hawaiian shirts and tactical gear in a sea of racial justice protestors. The exceptions have been where less organized groups of people with guns have turned up to confront an imaginary “antifa” menace, usually in smaller towns in the West.

In spite of the low numbers involved, there are reasons to be concerned. Some of the paramilitary actors are proving to be willing not just to talk about using violence to stir up chaos and provoke confrontation between protestors and the state, but to take violent action.

Steven Carillo, an active-duty staff sergeant in the Air Force, has been arrested and charged with killing a guard at the federal courthouse in Oakland. In a Facebook post before the attack, Carillo allegedly wrote: “Use their anger to fuel our fire. Think outside the box. We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage.” Wounded in a firefight with Santa Cruz deputy sheriffs, Carillo apparently highjacked a car and scrawled “Boog” on the hood in his own blood.

Three men also connected to the Boogaloo movement were arrested in Nevada on charges of possessing explosives and conspiring to incite violence.

Other rightwing violence has been less intentionally directed toward fomenting chaos and confrontation with the state. For example in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a one-time city council candidate shot and critically wounded a racial justice protestor and assaulted several others in an attempt to defend a conquistador monument. He was subsequently defended from the crowd by members of the New Mexico Civil Guard, a militia group, though they subsequently disavowed any connection to the shooter.

Map Details

Incidents are grouped into four categories:

Harassment/counterprotest is the largest category, with 106 instances, and includes a variety of activities including verbal harassment, intimidation, those claiming to be there to protect property, prevent looting, or defend the First Amendment or engaged in the doxxing of protestors.

Violence/threat, which includes only actual or attempted violence in or around the protest space or direct menacing, such as pointing a gun or other weapon at someone.

Attended protest claiming support, includes mostly members of the Boogaloo faction, and only when they have shown through words, spoken or written, or through their actions, that they intend their presence to be in support of racial justice and police accountability, for example by carrying signs that say Black Lives Matter or Justice for George Floyd.

Law enforcement complicity is a small category in the data with large implications and refers to law enforcement officials who indicate alignment with paramilitary or far-right groups, for example by wearing a III% insignia.

The main actors that show up in our data include:

The Boogaloo, or Boogaloo Bois, is a very loose network of actors that originated online, but who have begun to show up at in-person protest actions in recent months. They are often recognizable by wearing tactical military-style gear and Hawaiian shirts. The “Boogaloo” is a code word for a new civil war, which they tend to see as inevitable, if not desirable. They have shown up in a variety of ways, including claiming support for police accountability and violence/threat.

The Oathkeepers and the III% (Three Percenters) are closely allied paramilitary or militia factions that typically claim a constitutionalist orientation—that is, that they exist to defend the Constitution from threats. Many are or claim to be military veterans or first responders of one sort or another.

Proud Boys, who define themselves as “Western chauvinists” defending U.S. institutions from leftists and outside influences. In practice, they are best known for their street brawls with anti-fascists, anarchists, anti-racists, and others. They have shown up mostly in the counterprotest/harassment category.

Other categories include armed mobs of mostly white men who have appeared after online calls to defend their communities from mostly imaginary threats of left-wing looters being bused into town. They are, as far as we can tell, not part of any organized or recognizable group. There are also a small number of explicit White nationalists, including some neonazis, who have shown up in the counterprotest/harassment lane.

The map presented here is our joint attempt to create a resource for organizers and activists, journalists and researchers, to place the threat of the far-right showing up at racial justice protests in context, more-or-less at a glance.

amanda

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/theres-an-insidious-agenda-behind-the-anti-lockdown-protests

On Sunday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, appeared on CNN and declared that the protests against stay-at-home orders that plagued her state capital, as well as numerous others, “depicted some of the worst racism and awful parts of our history in this country,” pointing to the regular appearance of swastikas, nooses, Nazi slogans and the American swastika, also known as the Confederate battle flag. (We can safely assume that the usual excuse of “Southern pride” used to defend the Rebel flag doesn’t apply in Michigan or Ohio or Illinois, states where thousands of young men fought and died for the Union.)

Conservatives cried foul at Whitmer’s words, of course, but there’s little point in denying it. We all have eyes and ears, and no one is mistaking the protesters for people who would flinch if they heard a friend casually use the n-word in conversation.

The question isn’t whether white identity politics and racism are fueling the protests. The real question is why. Racism isn’t some kind of magical force that shields your body from the coronavirus. Even Donald “Inject Bleach” Trump hasn’t been fool enough to suggest you can defeat the virus by wrapping yourself in the Confederate flag. Yet there’s no denying that there’s a direct correlation between racist attitudes and the belief that the coronavirus is an overblown hoax and the lockdowns are the result of a widespread leftist conspiracy.

That isn’t just true of the protesters, either. The most prominent voices in media and politics who are egging them on and denouncing stay-at-home orders also happen to be the people who are doing their utmost to mainstream white nationalist ideology.

Trump, of course, is the most prominent example of this. He has been eagerly cheering on the protesters, starting with his “LIBERATE” tweets last month that encouraged protesters who were defying social distancing recommendations.

This past weekend, Trump continued to publicly support the far-right protesters, who stormed the Michigan state capitol with guns in a clear bid to intimidate and threaten state politicians out of voting to continue the restrictions on commerce and movement that are meant to keep the coronavirus from spreading. Trump even called them “very good people,” an eerie echo of the words — “very fine people” — he used to praise the neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville in 2017.

In the media, two of the biggest lockdown opponents are also two of the loudest voices seeking to bring white nationalism into the mainstream of American politics.

Over the weekend, Laura Ingraham of Fox News retweeted propagandafrom a notorious white nationalist group, VDare. The tweet blamed immigrants of color for spreading the coronavirus at a meatpacking plant, in a blatant bid to racialize a virus that experts believe was primarily introduced in the U.S. by visitors from Europe, not by immigrants from Africa, Asia or Latin America.

Ingraham has been at the forefront of coronavirus conspiracy theory, denouncing everything from mask-wearing to scientific studies that debunk supposed miracle cures as part of a massive conspiracy to hype the threat of the disease. She even hosted a segmentdenouncing CNN anchors for reporting on their own experiences with COVID-19, clearly threatened by the way such reports make the disease seem both relatable and terrifying.

Ingraham is a major conduit of white nationalist ideology from the fringes to the mainstream, as documented by this 2018 Media Matters report that shows how she uses her perch at Fox News to stoke the belief that “demographic changes” — unsubtle code for growing communities of color — constitute a national emergency.

Same story with Tucker Carlson, whose white nationalist leanings have been thoroughly documented for years. Carlson initially took the coronavirus seriously, in distinction to many other Fox News hosts. But after stay-at-home orders became widespread, he took a hard right turn into denialism, doing segment after segment portraying the social distancing measures as an illegitimate power grab and implying that fears of the virus are being deliberately exaggerated to justify the shutdowns.

With this kind of prompting from Trump and major media figures, it’s no surprise that white nationalists and other far-right groups fueled by white identity politics have led the protests.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained in a recent report, while the anti-lockdown protests were organized and funded by wealthy right-wing donors, :{far-right groups like the :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:**Proud Boys**“quickly realized” the value of the protests to amplify their proto-fascist views, recruit new members and further ingratiate themselves with Republican politicians.

:{Neil MacFarquhar :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{of the New York Times expanded:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}: on this in a piece on Sunday, reporting that thefar right sees the crisis as “a potent recruiting tool” its various groups can exploit “to bolster their white supremacist, anti-government agenda”.

David Neiwert, a journalist who has covered the far right for decades, wrote at Daily Kos that far-right groups are seizing on the crisis, hoping they can use it to kick-start “the long-sought ‘second civil war’ they believe is on the verge of erupting in the United States.” This partly illuminates the significance of Confederate flags at the protests, displayed by those who clearly hope the forces of racism and reactionary politics will win the second time around.

To a large degree, then, the marriage of racist politics to the anti-lockdown agenda is opportunistic. Trump himself has clearly indicated he thinks both that his re-election prospects hinge more on the economy than on the number of people dead from COVID-19 (partly because he still thinks he can cover up the latter) and that the economy will come roaring back to life if the lockdowns are ended. (This is doubtful!) Trump’s biggest champions, who share his racist agenda, are backing his play in the hopes that he’s right and that the combination of reopening the economy while minimizing or obscuring the body count will get him re-elected.

But as with so much of the horror show that is unfolding in the era of Trump, the rot runs deeper than political expediency. There’s obviously something deeply compelling to white identity ideologues about the idea that this virus is a hoax concocted by the “deep state,” beyond their desire to defend Trump.

The far right has grown increasingly hostile to the government in the face of social programs — most recently Obamacare — that they view as redistributing money from “deserving” white people to people of color. All the bellyaching about “tyranny” and patriotic cosplay is about creating a moral justification for anti-government views that are rooted in racist resentment and xenophobia. The lockdown protests are about further enshrining their hatred of Democrats, and their reluctance to pay taxes or share public goods with nonwhite people, as resistance to “tyranny.”

There’s no doubt in my mind, either, that the protests are fueled by the fact that thecoronavirus pandemic is disproportionately affecting people of color and ravaging urban areas that have long been demonized by right wing media and Trump. While no one has stupid enough to suggest that white skin somehow shields you from the virus (at least not so far), a lot of rural and suburban white people who oppose the shutdowns are viewing it through a racialized lens. This is gently being referred to as the “urban-rural divide” on the issue, but should be understood as white conservatives who resenting having to give up their haircuts and dinners out at Chili’s to protect the health of people living in racially diverse cities.

Of course, what’s really happening is pretty much the opposite: The lockdowns are likely keeping the virus from spreading further into rural and suburban America (though the numbers in those areas are noticeably beginning to rise, despite the media’s focus on New York and other large cities). With Republican governors in many states beginning to ease restrictions to demonstrate their fealty to Trump, there’s a not-small chance that the relative safety that white people living in less dense areas currently experience will evaporate.

But if that happens, don’t expect right-wingers who oppose the lockdowns to apologize for not taking this seriously. They’ll just pivot to blaming cities and people of color for “spreading” the virus,even though those are the people and places who have most firmly supported the measures meant to contain the virus in the first place. The American right, like their feckless orange-skinned leader, will never accept blame for their failures, even as the corpses pile up.

:{Proud:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: :{Boys:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: and the White :{Ethnostate:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:: How the Alt-Right Is ...

:{https://www.amazon.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/Proud-Boys-White-Ethnostate-Imagination/dp/0807063363:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

Stern has fashioned an invaluable guide with which to unmask a new breed of racism." —Shelf Awareness "Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate is the definitive guide to alt-right ideas today. Stern brilliantly documents how a younger generation of activists are repackaging the Far Right, waging a battle for cultural dominance.

:{PROUD:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: :{BOYS:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: AND THE WHITE :{ETHNOSTATE:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: by Alexandra Minna :{Stern:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: ...

:{https://www.kirkusreviews.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/book-reviews/alexandra-minna-stern/proud-boys-and-the-white-ethnostate/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

The alt-right standards for determining who qualifies as white—and who does not—can become complicated; Stern illuminates that element with impressive insights. An anomaly that not even the author can explain involves why alt-right subscribers fear annihilation so deeply when the U.S. remains controlled by a powerful white patriarchy.

bk on proud b (previous on histy of eugenics)

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-21-2019/

rww

Proud Boys member Donovon Flippo has accepted a plea deal after participating in a violent attack in Portland that left its victim with a split lip and a bloody nose, according to Western States Center. More details about the deal will be announced later today in Portland.

Flippo was arrested in March on a federal charge of third-degree assault and a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree assault for an attack he participated in the prior year. The Oregonian reports that Flippo allegedly joined Proud Boys member Tusitala John “Tiny” Toese in an attack on 35-year-old Timothy Ledwith in Portland that left Ledwith bleeding. The paper reported:

Timothy Ledwith, 35, said he was punched June 8 by Flippo and Proud Boys member Tusitala John “Tiny” Toese after they exchanged words near Northeast 12th Avenue and Broadway. Toese punched him in the face, Ledwith said.

Ledwith fell to the ground, hit his head and when he came to, noticed Flippo standing over him. Another witness reported that Flippo had struck Ledwith next, according to Ledwith.

A grand jury voted to bring charges against the two right-wing extremists who attacked Ledwith earlier this year after Willamette Week reported that Portland Police had built a case against Toese and Flippo but decided not to pursue it. Text message exchanges between Portland Police Lt. Jeff Niiya and Patriot Prayer organizer Joey Gibson revealed an amicable relationship between Gibson and police.

Flippo was involved in a similar incident in Vancouver, Washington, with Toese, but the duo was allowed to leave the scene without charges. Toese is thought to still be residing in American Samoa but said on Facebook earlier this year that he would return to Portland to face charges.

The attack adds to other violent incidents involving Proud Boys hate group members across the United States.

The office of the Multnomah County District Attorney was not immediately available for comment.

Tags: violence Proud Boys

RWW

Organizers of a “Demand Free Speech” rally planned for Saturday in Washington, D.C., told the National Park Service that they expect up to 1,000 participants—but wrote that there “could be more or less”—to attend their demonstration. Given the fact that, per the sponsoring group’s permit application, they’ve rented only one toilet, perhaps they’re banking on the “less.”

A copy of an event permit application the National Park Service provided to The Daily Beast shows event organizers’ stated plans for the rally, which is expected to attract members of the Proud Boys, identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and followers of far-right personalities including Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, and Gavin McInnes, who have been removed from social media platforms for violating community guidelines. The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reports that the application has been approved and that counter-protesters plan to rally across the street from Freedom Plaza.

Event organizers told NPS in their application that they will assemble an event space with 10 chairs, five tables, one tent, and just one portable restroom. Organizers stated they will have space for 50 camera tripods but will not assemble a press riser. They are expecting one bus and 22 speakers, and wrote on the permit that “no marches or parades” will happen during the event.

In a section stating expected disruptions to the event, event organizers wrote “Antifa” and “All Out DC,” which is a coalition of groups organizing to oppose their rally on Saturday. Rally organizers state that they will have 50 event marshals providing “protection and security” at the event who will wear “red stop hate hats.” Those marshals, organizers state, will use 20 handheld radios and 10 bullhorns at the event.

Sommer reported in his Right Richter newsletter that some announced speakers for the rally have started to pull out of the event. Organizers sold tickets to a VIP event after the rally, but were bootedfrom at least one venue they sought to secure.

Tensions around right-wing organizing have swelled since Quillette writer Andy Ngo was injured [by antifascist activists last weekend in Portland, Oregon.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/proud-boy-member-fired-by-ice-contractor-following-expose/

Proud Boy Member Fired by ICE Contractor Following Exposé

ByTalia D | July 3, 2019 2:04 pm

After posting bail in March for a member of the often-violent, far-right Proud Boys group,Nicholas Carefelle was let go last month from his position at the GEO Group, a private prison contractor that runs immigrant detention centers for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reports Willamette Week.

Donovan Flippo, a self-professed member of the Proud Boys, had just been arrested in for an alleged assault against an anti-fascist activist that took place in 2018 when Carfelle stepped up to pay Flippo’s $750 bail.

The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Proud Boys as a hate group due to its members’ repeated use of violence and extremist rhetoric, and are known for expressing anti-Muslim sentiments. Willamette Week’s Katie Shepherd was unable to determine the exact nature of Carefelle’s work for GEO, or whether he had direct contact with immigrants. However, before Carefelle was fired by GEO, she reported:

[Carefelle] performs work for the federal government under contracts with ICE. The GEO Group has access to government information about immigrants and access to immigrant detainees through detention centers, probation services, and transport operations. GEO Group, which specializes in incarceration, runs “residential centers,” or detention centers, where ICE houses detainees awaiting hearings in immigration court.

Members of the Proud Boys have repeatedly engaged in violent rhetoric and demonstrations, and the group’s founder has hosted numerous racist extremists on his Compound Media talk show for the edification of the group’s members. Earlier this year, Right Wing Watch profiled a white nationalist who attributed his radicalization to that pipeline.

Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, left the group last November in the hope that doing so would help group members who were facing charges after Proud Boys engaged in violent brawls in New York City following a McInnes speech earlier that year at the Metropolitan Republican Club. Other violent rallies involving Proud Boys include the Patriot Prayer rallies in the Pacific Northwest, which have sown chaos at public gatherings in Portland and other cities for the last two years.

In addition to posting Flippo’s bail, Carefelle opened his Vancouver, Washington, home to a BBC News crew who were recording a documentary about the tension between different left-wing activists and extreme right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys. The documentary and subsequent article by BBC News show several well-known Proud Boys in Carefelle’s house.

After Willamette Week presented court records to the GEO Group that demonstrated that one of their employees had paid Flippo’s bail, the contractor launched a personnel investigation. Pablo Paez, GEO Group executive vice president, later told the Willamette Week that Carefelle no longer worked for the ICE contractor.

Tags: Alt-Right Proud Boys

bak 719 no lnx

see proud boys 719

trying to fix image but then jnz?

gateway drug to alt rt?

https://www.splcenter.org/20180419/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4chan-investigating-pathways-alt-right

no lnx grafs see alt rt troll

In this article

What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?

"Stepping stones" and "in-betweeners"

Race realism

Chan culture

"Lolbertarians" and Neoreactionaries

YouTube personalities

"The JQ"

What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?

The question was posed in two threads posted during the last week of March on the white nationalist forum The Right Stuff (TRS), leading 74 individual users to describe their radicalization narratives.

Respondents recount a transformation that takes place almost entirely online. Led either by their own curiosity or an algorithm, the content they consumed became increasingly extreme, fostering their radicalization and guiding them eventually to TRS. Their responses reveal a pipeline between the alt-lite and racist “alt-right,” with many users explaining that alt-lite figures like Gavin McInnes were the first to introduce them to hardcore, veteran white nationalists.

The two threads, titled “WHAT BROUGHT YOU INTO THE MOVEMENT?” and “Path here beginning from Gavin,” asked posters to reflect on their own “red pill” narratives and provide tips for converting others. “Here’s the challenge,” a user identified as The Somalisher wrote. “Create a list of succession from the Alt-Light to us. I have friends who like Gavin…But I can’t exactly throw [Andrew] Anglin at them.”

The user continued, “It sometimes requires softer steps to ‘radical’ perspectives.”

The two threads refer specifically to bringing people into the fold of TRS and the Daily Stormer, which together serve as the core of neo-Nazism online. TRS, the brainchild ofMike “Enoch” Peinovich, started as a political blog in 2012 and has since transformed into one of the largest alt-right media platforms. It hosts a lively message board called the 504um and dozens of podcasts, the most popular of which are “The Daily Shoah” and news-oriented “Fash the Nation.” The Daily Stormer operates in the same orbit, consciously using humor to indoctrinate its readers.

Together, the two sites have become the preeminent propaganda machines for the alt-right. They’re also some of the most effective spaces for organizing real-world, local groups, called “book clubs” by the Stormer and “pool parties” on TRS.

The alt-right is a motley movement, drawing in people from a number of venues and subcultures. The 107 individuals and platforms mentioned by posters in the TRS threads have been labeled according to their ideology, which include alt-right, legacy white nationalist, alt-lite, mainstream, libertarian, skeptic, men’s rights activist, and conspiracy, in addition to a random category for those not easily classified. This heterogeneity is a boon to the movement, creating a number of avenues for individuals of different taste and predilections to fall within its clutches.

Though both the alt-lite and alt-right reject “establishment” conservatism, the former claims to adhere to civic nationalism — a poorly defined catch-all term for those who embrace nativism but shy away from more radical racist rhetoric — while the latter is explicitly white nationalist. Legacy white nationalists include those like Jared Taylor,Patrick Buchanan and Paul Kersey who, although they might be popular within the alt-right, were part of the white nationalist movement before that label emerged.

The number of times each individual or platform was mentioned as an influence was tallied, and those mentioned by three or more posters are listed in the chart below. Disconnected as they might seem, the most cited influences — the “politically incorrect” 4chan board /pol/ and the American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor — hint at two common paths to the alt-right: either through participation in the rampantly racist and misogynistic online trolling culture of 4chan and its offshoots, or through exposure to Taylor’s variety of pseudo-academic “race realism” that couches timeworn racist tropes in the language of science.

Within alt-right spaces like TRS, these two fibers of the movement are woven together — resulting in an ironic, meme-ified version of old-school race science — and embellished with antisemitism.

TRS and the Daily Stormer both argue that, with the right optics and messaging, they can attract a critical mass of followers to the cause and eventually shift what lies within the respectable terms of political debate. The respondents in these threads show how the current media landscape — replete with podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs that contain tempered bits of white nationalist propaganda under the guise of patriotism, “Western chauvinism,” science or hard truths — can aid that agenda, coaxing the “normies” down the path to white nationalism.

Stepping stones" and "in-betweeners"

TRS 504um posters describe their radicalization as a gradual process, with charismatic alt-lite personalities like Gavin McInnes introducing them to ideas they would eventually take to their extreme. McInnes, especially, hides under a guise of irony, freely using racial slurs and making incendiary comments about women, Muslims and African Americans in the name of mocking political correctness.

McInnes, who formed the Proud Boys in 2016, has repeatedly insisted the SPLC-designated hate group is simply a right-wing men’s drinking club in the vein of the Elks Lodge, and has taken pains to distance himself from the alt-right. But even he agrees that there’s overlap between his “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys and self-proclaimed white nationalists: “both sides have in common Western chauvinism, they’re not embarrassed by whiteness or whatever, [and] they don’t believe diversity is the end-all and be-all.”

Responses within the TRS threads show how easy it is to slip from the notion that “the West is the best” into believing that western culture is superior because it’s white. Of the respondents in the sample, roughly 15 percent mentioned McInnes as a step in their path to white nationalism or recommended using his videos and writing to convert others. There are more than a few real-life examples of Proud Boys moving into more extreme groups.

McInnes is loathed by many at TRS for being unwilling to take racial politics head-on and “counter-signaling” them, but he’s still credited with helping to cultivate their own belief in white nationalism. In a thread called “Do We Still Hate Gavin McInnes?” a user calling themselves KarlVonBraun came to his defense, writing “I remember first hearing Gavin trash niggers who do that pole/street dance thing on the subway…Basically he says everything short of calling them worthless niggers. I'd literally never heard anyone be brutally honest about what is uniquely nigger behavior while maintaining decorum, without crossing lines you can't cross. It was totally exhilarating.” Another user wrote, “I guarantee that he is still (without meaning to) funneling people into the Alt-Right.”

McInnes is also responsible for introducing a number of TRS users to Jim Goad and, indeed, for much of the writer and podcaster’s recent resurgence in popularity. Goad got his start as a writer in the 1990s producing his own controversial and acerbic independent magazine and, in 1997, published a book in the same vein. The Redneck Manifesto, which begins with a chapter called “White Niggers Have Feelings, Too,” bemoans liberals’ tendency to look down on poor whites and argues, “Multiculturalism is a country club that excludes white trash.” Goad (much like McInnes) began his career as a sort of small-time countercultural celebrity, but his focus on white persecution now earns him widespread praise within the alt-right.

McInnes has hosted Goad on his shows numerous times and, on a list he created of “required reading” on Western culture, included Redneck Manifesto together with Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America — both writers who are also mentioned as influences by TRS posters. One respondent called Goad’s book “an early redpill on the malicious anti-white agenda of the left.”

Goad takes advantage of the fact that he’s often treated as a serious literary figure, presenting his extremist views on race as simply thoughtful meditations on politically taboo topics or as an attempt to resist political correctness. He’s used his numerous platforms to perpetuate the myth of white slavery and criticized the “corporate globalist left” for making it difficult for the Daily Stormer to maintain a domain. He even hosted Andrew Anglin, the site’s founder, on his podcast, as well as former Ku Klux Klanlawyer Sam Dickson and the Holocaust-denying author Michael Hoffman.

Goad, who is cited six times by TRS members, disparages “Those who blame Jews for everything.” But in the same breath, he repeats their rhetoric, making him into what one poster calls the “missing link” from people like Gavin to the white nationalist TRS. If you’re trying to red pill a friend and “they like Gavin,” NotDonSilvo wrote, “send them his old podcast with Jim and some of his Taki articles or guest appearances in Gavin’s Compound Media [show].”

Besides his podcast, Goad’s main platform is Taki’s Magazine, an extreme right-wing publication with an irreverent tone that promises its “only ideology is to be against the junk culture foisted upon us by Hollywood and the mainstream media.” Along with Goad and McInnes, it publishes authors like John Derbyshire, who was fired from the conservative National Review after he wrote an article for Taki’s about advising his teenage children to “stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.” It described black people as “ferociously hostile to whites” and is now listed in the “greatest hits” section on Taki’s website.

Taki’s contributors overlap with those at the hate site VDARE, including Steve Sailer — cited four times by TRS users — whose writing is largely dedicated to opposing immigration and drawing a false link between race and intelligence.

Both Taki’s Magazine and VDARE are cited by posters of the TRS threads as “good in-betweeners,” and, together, are cited in more than 16 percent of responses. Both websites, the user Cniva wrote, are “good at presenting racism in a ‘we’re just being reasonable/this is what the science says, why are you acting so upset?’ type of way.”

Race realism

Many members of the forum note that McInnes’s online videos were particularly impactful because they introduce viewers to more extreme figures. “[D]ude i got here from Gavin because there was a time about 2-3 years ago when Gavin would take [sic] to people like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer,” one user posted. In one of his genial interviews with Taylor (who he’s called a “super smart guy”), McInnes allowed the American Renaissance editor to peddle his racist tract “The Color of Crime,” which uses faulty statistical analysis to argue that non-whites are more prone to criminal behavior.

all that section

"Stepping stones" and "in-betweeners"

Alex Jones has found a new home on Instagram after being largely removed from the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is the only major platform that continues to permit Jones and Infowars to publish content. Jones gained a massive amount of Instagram followers after his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, which is increasingly a magnet for the far right.

Jones has used his Instagram account -- which has about 314,000 followers -- to post videos featuring hate speech, conspiracy theories, and various extremist figures who have already been banned from the platform.

On his account, Jones posted an Infowars clip claiming that "globalists" in the U.N. are "flooding nations with millions of foreigners who have no intention to assimilate and who are not held accountable for their criminal actions." This white supremacist talking point -- that migrant caravans are evidence of a Jewish plot to replace white people -- was embraced by the shooter who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh, PA synagogue last October.

Another post featured anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant extremist Katie Hopkins describing immigrants "snaking their way" through Europe and pushing out "white Christians" and "Christian culture."

Since publication of this Media Matters report on Jones' move to Instagram, three videos containing anti-LGBTQ speech and three videos containing white nationalist content have been removed from Jones' account. They appear to have been removed by Jones. In addition, six posts and one IGTV video featuring Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes have been removed from Jones' account. These videos appear to have been removed by Instagram for violating their community guidelines.

Also: Alex Jones and Infowars had a secondary YouTube channel where they pushed conspiracy theories. In one of the videos, Jones even alleged that the New Zealand mosque shootings were a false flag. After Media Matters reported on the channel, YouTube removed it, citing violations of YouTube's terms of service.

This year, by contrast, a collection of white nationalists, far-right grifters and conspiracy theorists were kept at an arms’ length and mostly had to be content with roaming the Gaylord Hotel outside of the convention. Many were initially denied passes, but managed to wangle their way inside, although they had to be content themselves with posting about CPAC on Twitter, rather than having direct contact with attendees.

Among those spotted was Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist podcaster who lurked around the edges of CPAC like a vulture. Faith Goldy, a white nationalist who ran for mayor of Toronto in 2018 — getting 3.4 percent of the vote — was also present. Patrick Casey, the executive director of the far-right group Identity Evropa, tried to get into CPAC before being informed that his pass had been canceled. Casey then promptly launched into an angry tweetstorm about how CPAC wasn’t a forum for real conservatives anyway.

Certainly the most amusing example of the far-right and its associated grifters attempting to get some form of CPAC cred occurred on Thursday afternoon, when noted pro-Trump trolls Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl — both of whom were also denied their in their initial attempts to get into CPAC — held a “press conference” along with conservative lobbyist Jack Burkman to outline another set of spurious, unsubstantiated allegations, this time against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

The event rapidly devolved into farce, with Wohl talking over Loomer every time she tried to speak about her supposed “censoring” on social media, and journalists asking why a document marked “Strictly Private and Confidential” was being distributed to the public.

Wohl and Goldy were later spotted chatting to each other at CPAC, but wearing attendee and not media badges. It is not immediately clear why Wohl especially was allowed in, after being so pointedly denied entry earlier in the day.

Later that night Wohl made an appearance at an afterparty hosted by Turning Points USA, the conservative student group, which featured Donald Trump, Jr. and TPUSA leader Charlie Kirk. Among the (mostly college-aged) revelers was Enrique Tarrio, current leader of the far-right Proud Boys gang was also spotted roaming the halls.

On Friday, two members of the Proud Boys in New York City pled guilty to charges stemming from a fight outside the New York Metropolitan Republican club in 2018, where the Proud Boys viciously attacked counter-protesters.

But CPAC’s shooing away of far-right personalities, at least superficially, isn’t the sign of some conservative bulwark against far-right ideas

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gavin-mcinnes-abandoned-the-proud-boys-but-its-simply-too-late

McInnes, CRTV host and the founder of the Proud Boys, publicly announced his departure from the Proud Boys last weekend, but it’s unlikely to rectify the group’s hastening into the fringes of the far-right and its impending implosion.

McInnes’ withdrawal from the Proud Boys came days after The Guardian’s Jason Wilson reported that a document produced by Washington state law enforcement stated that the FBI had classified the Proud Boys as an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism.” Alexander Reid Ross at Haaretz noted that, as far back as 2017, McInnes had expressed worries of facing charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which provides stiff penalties for leaders of criminal enterprises, including gangs.

Several Proud Boys members are facing charges for the violence they committed, captured on video, against anti-fascist protesters who demonstrated in protest of McInnes’ speech at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City last month, which attracted individuals affiliated with skinhead gangs. Violent encounters are common when Proud Boys gather in public; the group’s “Fourth Degree” hierarchy incentivizes engaging in violence for their cause.

McInnes announced that he was quitting the organization he started in hopes, he said, that it would assist the group’s members who are facing charges for engaging in violent brawls in the streets of New York City last month. (Some contend that it was just his way of bailing when the going got rough.)

“I am told by my legal team and law enforcement that this gesture could help alleviate their sentencing,” McInnes said in the video.

McInnes goes on to repeat his longstanding assertion that white supremacists don’t actually exist in America, in spite of the fact he has featured white supremacists and white nationalists on his web-based radio show throughout the years, not to mention that time he personally thanked the white nationalist Richard Spencer for helping him land a column at Taki’s Magazine.

[vid]

Following McInnes’ lead, Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right provocateur with prior affiliations with white nationalists, also publicly distanced himself from the group. Yiannopoulos had been cozy with members of the Proud Boys, attending many of their events. In September, Yiannapoulos was identified by the Proud Boys’ media arm as the organization’s “New Vice President.”

“I have been instructed by my lawyers today to add my voice to that of Gavin McInnes, the founder of the fraternal men’s organization, and announce that I am publicly dissociating myself with the club,” Yiannopoulos wrote on his blog. “It’s fucked up, and I wish to God I didn’t have to do it, but this is America in 2018, a country gripped by moral panic about a ‘white supremacy’ outbreak that simply doesn’t exist.”

Similarly, a statement announcing the organizational change states that the Proud Boys group “has never had any association with the alt-right or with white nationalism.” (It has.)

McInnes spent the better part of 2016 and 2017 recruiting young men to his group and filling their minds with far-right ideology and stoking a longing for committing acts of violence that could be portrayed as righteous acts of self-defense. But over the last year, McInnes has apparently struggled to control Proud Boys members, who have participated in white supremacist gatherings against his wishes and provoked semi-regular violent clashes alongside white nationalist groups on the West coast.

Now that the consequences of flirting with extremism are starting to manifest in ways that might have a consequence for McInnes, he has abandoned the group. Although, it appears the group will attempt to continue under the direction of other aggressive leaders.

The Proud Boys statement on McInnes’ departure announces that Jason Lee Van Dyke had become the “duly elected chairman of the Proud Boys Elders Chapter,” identifying him as a “fourth degree brother and current Sergeant-at-Arms of the Dallas/Fort Worth chapter.” Van Dyke told Right Wing Watch he told the Proud Boys he “would only serve as chairman to preside over proceedings for as long as it took to pass bylaws.”

“I occupied the position of chairman for a grand total of about 36 hours and that was only to pass the bylaws that are attached here. Now that they have been passed, I occupy no position with the organization,” Van Dyke said.

Van Dyke was suspended from Twitter in 2017 after sending another user a photo of a noose and calling them a racial slur. Van Dyke said the tweet came after a computer hacker he “believed to be black based on his Twitter profile picture” posted social security numbers belonging to him and his parents on Twitter.

“I regret the racially charged language that I used in that tweet but I absolutely do not regret threatening that individual under those circumstances,” Van Dyke told Right Wing Watch.

In another post, he said he was “very close to ‘coming out’ as a full blown fascist,” which he said was meant to ridicule HuffPost for allegedly referring to Trump supporters like the Proud Boys as “fascists.” He admitted to HuffPost that he once threatened to kill someone’s entire family.

Austin Gillespie, an alt-right activist who uses the moniker “Augustus Invictus,” claimed on YouTube that he had been appointed the new leader of the Proud Boys, although his remarks appear to be made sarcastically. Gillespie is the former leader of the “Alt Knights,” a paramilitary faction of the Proud Boys. Van Dyke denied that Gillespie was a Proud Boy and said the newly passed bylaws made him “ineligible for membership.”

Proud Boys Redacted Bylaws

...

The Constitution and Bylaws of Proud Boys International L.L.C.

Revised November 24, 2018 Proud Boys International L.L.C. c/o The Van Dyke Law Firm P.L.L.C. 108 Durango Drive Crossroads, TX 76227

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I have used the Van Dyke Law Firm on numerous occasions. Every time, the effort and results are the same, a win. I highly recommend Mr Van Dyke and his team. Always prompt, efficient, and they know their way around the court room. Great job.

2 people voted for this review

J P.

San Francisco, CA

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1.0 star rating 11/30/2018

This man is a homophobe, racist, and scumbag. If you want to support the worst of humanity, Jason is your guy.

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Dave H.

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1.0 star rating 11/29/2018

Very unprofessional. Threatens others with violence and calls others "faggots" if they disagree. Google Jason Van Dyke Law and see what comes up. He's a thug and a criminal. Exhibit A twitter.com/AndyBCampbel…

S H. and 5 others voted for this review

Meghan S.

Albuquerque, NM

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1.0 star rating 11/30/2018

Former Proud Boys lawyer and known violent racist. Do not recommend. Good for racists, I guess.

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Art V.

Vancouver, Canada

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1.0 star rating 11/28/2018

Extremely unprofessional when I called to get insight in a case. Spoke to Jason was like he couldn't understand the basic concepts of what I was discussing, and was in some type of manic out of breath rush. He kept saying how it would be "all good" but I just needed to pay him, but he couldn't even articulate the basics of my situation. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

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Jason P.

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1.0 star rating 11/27/2018

Jason handled my case very poorly. I was arrested for assault and he was unable to get the charges dropped or reduced. I was simply trying to become a 4th Degree Proud Boy and was told by Gavin that getting arrested for the cause would grant me this rank. I hired Jason to represent me against these charges and was very disappointed. He showed up to court smelling of alcohol and performed laughable cross-examinations of the other side's witnesses. He's a terrible lawyer. Do NOT retain his services unless you want to spend time in jail.

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E B.

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1.0 star rating 11/24/2018

This man harassed black individuals on twitter sending them pictures of nooses and using the n word telling them he will murder then

Angela G. and 1 other voted for this review

Amber M.

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5.0 star rating 7/18/2014

I worked with Jason at a commercial collection agency for three years and I would recommend him for any case, big or small. He get's the job done and takes care of his clients.

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Hal W.

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5.0 star rating 7/17/2014

First to Review

I had the pleasure of working with Mr.Vandyke at a commercial collection agency. He is a professional businessman with a tenacity like no other. He fights for his clients rights and actually puts them in front of his self. a rare quality in lawyers. He worked tirelessly on every case he had and strives for nothing but excellence. I have no problem recommending him and will contine to do so.

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=-=

We Were Promised Proud Boys. Philadelphia Had Other Ideas.

By Jared Holt | November 19, 2018 11:47 am

It was hard to hear what right-wing rally goers were saying over the speakers without standing close. Hundreds of anti-fascism protesters had gathered across the street from Saturday’s “We The People” rally outside the Independence Visitor Center in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to overshadow the few dozen self-declared “patriots” who attended Saturday’s—a light turnout, peppered with members of the violent, right-wing Proud Boys group.

Ted Chmielnicki

“To be completely honest, this is pitiful,” Ted Chmielnicki, a rally speaker, said of the weak attendance. He accused members of a state-based militia group of trying to “actively sabotage” the event by telling people hate groups had been invited to the rally.

Christian Yingling of the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia responded to the claims in a Facebook post, writing that event organizers were “attempting to blame us for the hate groups they invited not showing up.” Right Wing Watch has contacted Yingling via Facebook Messenger asking if he would let us review private messages he claimed in the post to possess, which allegedly contain evidence that hate groups were courted ahead of Saturday’s event.

“They were using the same rhetoric as Antifa, as the left, to try to destroy,” Chmielnicki said. “To have it from our own side, it’s disgusting.”

The rally’s Facebook event page stated that “all Patriots, Militia, 3%, constitution loving Americans, pro good cop, pro ICE, pro law and order, pro life, pro American value, pro gun and anti illegal immigration” believers were welcome to attend Saturday’s rally. The event’s initial planning involved members of the Proud Boys organization, which was founded by CRTV host Gavin McInnes and has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The event had also piqued the interest of Bob Gaus, member of a neo-Nazi group, as Rewire News reported. Gaus, who co-founded the Neo-Nazi group Keystone United, had asked in a comment on the Facebook event page if there was a meeting point for participants. Right Wing Watch did not spot Gaus in attendance at Saturday’s rally and a rally organizer told us that they privately asked Gaus not to attend.

Organizers were adamant that the rally was not a “Proud Boys event,” but Zach Rehl, a planner of We The People, is a member of the group. Rehl has organized past rallies in the city that have attracted people in extremist circles. Andrew Kovalic, who was reported to have originally planned security for the event, was fired from his job at Comcast for being a Proud Boys member.

When chatter first began that members of the Proud Boys group would take part in the rally, anti-fascist organizers began mobilizing crowds to turn out and oppose the demonstration. The Push Back Campaign spearheaded the effort, earning the endorsements of a handful of anti-fascist groups, legal groups, and labor unions. A post on the Push Back Campaign’s website read:

Far-right groups with ties to Neo-Nazis known as the “Proud Boys” and the “Three Percenters” are planning to attend a rally in Philadelphia on November 17th called “We the People”. They provoke and attack people on the streets who they deem to be unworthy of their far-right, fascist vision of the country. The Proud Boys were present in Charlottesville, terrorize residents in the cities of Portland, New York, and Providence, and have been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The residents and allies of Philadelphia must stand in opposition to this escalation of the far-right’s push into the city’s culture and politics.

Rehl said the planned demonstrations against his event would be “kind of hilarious” if the Proud Boys didn’t attend his event during an interview on WPHT 1210AM before the rally.

They did.

Proud Boys member David Kuriakose

At least two Proud Boys attended Saturday’s rally, including David Kuriakose, who is facing riot and assault charges in New York City for his participation in brawls after McInnes delivered a speech to the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan last month. McInnes’ speech, and the subsequent violence, attracted members of the New York skinhead gangs 211 Bootboys and Battalion 49, and led to the arrest of several Proud Boys.

Alan Swinney, another Proud Boy, showed up at the Philadelphia event dressed in a full suit of armor. On two occasions, Swinney exited the barricades surrounding the rally to in apparent attempts to goad anti-fascist protesters into committing violence. On Swinney’s second foray outside the perimeter, an opposing demonstrator took the bait. The counter-protester was arrested.

Proud Boys member Alan Swinney

A separate scuffle involved a man that Billy Penn identified only as “Zachary.” Billy Penn purported Zachary to be a person mistakenly attacked by anti-fascist protesters, although there is some debate over whether he may have obscured his connection to the Proud Boys. Zachary entered the crowd wearing a hat advertising the Silver Dollar Bar, which coincidentally is the name of a bar where Proud Boys members crashed a Democratic Socialists of America meeting in September. (Update: The Silver Dollar Bar hat Zachary was seen wearing is actually from a bar in North Dakota). When an observer of the scuffle asked Zachary why he left the rally to go to the counter-protest side, he responded: “it’s a free country.”

McInnes was allegedly spotted in the city on Thursday, and many anti-fascist demonstrators told Right Wing Watch they had worried he might attend with a troop of his followers. But at Saturday’s rally, McInnes was nowhere to be seen.

Hundreds turned out on Saturday to oppose the rally, including government whistleblower and activist Chelsea Manning. Many protesting the event brought along signs, costumes, and memorabilia of the Philadelphia Flyers mascot “Gritty,” whose likeness has been co-opted by anti-fascist demonstrators and leftist activists.

“Whose streets? Gritty’s streets!” activists chanted.

Embedded video

Jared Holt

@jaredlholt

Replying to @jaredlholt

That's the good stuff

2,313

Without active threats to oppose, anti-fascist demonstrators spent most of their day mingling with one another. Many groups that had demonstrated at the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, had traveled to the Philadelphia event, which became something of a reunion for many in the anti-fascist crowd, who were overheard sharing stories in good spirits. One activist described the gathering to Right Wing Watch as a sort of “Antifa Thanksgiving.”

‘Gritty’ Patch eat the rich"

Daryle Lamont Jenkins, a well-known anti-fascist activist in Philadelphia and the founder of One People’s Project, told Right Wing Watch that the community organizing efforts were responsible for the right-wing rally’s low turnout, which he called “pathetic.” One People’s Project endorsed the Push Back Campaign.

“They tried to pick a fight with us and we weren’t having it,” Jenkins said. “We mobilized against them and we’ve done it before. … Their numbers are down because of us.”

The less-clued-in participants in the right-wing rally were confused at the opposition to the event they were attending. We the People rally-goer Dmitry Kyrychenko, a local Philadelphian, said he found out about the event via a post on the Philadelphia Police Department Facebook page. Kyrychenko said he believed that rally counter-demonstrators were opposing “free market principles,” and expressed his shock that they would oppose a rally promoting American exceptionalism.

He was wearing a shirt displaying the NPC meme that received a flash of attention in right-wing internet circles, accidentally matching another rally attendee.

View image on Twitter

Jared Holt

@jaredlholt

Replying to @jaredlholt

These two folks have NPC shirts. They don't know each other and accidentally matched.

946

9:47 AM - Nov 17, 2018

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Twitter Ads info and privacy

Tags: Gavin McInnes Alt-Right New Right CRTV Proud Boys

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/19/fbi-describes-proud-boys-a.html

extremist

https://www.alternet.org/i-blame-soros-trump-loving-proud-boys-founder-whines-after-being-shunned-liberal-neighbors

'I blame Soros!': Trump-loving Proud Boys founder whines after being shunned by liberal neighbors

Like every bully, Gavin McInnes proves he's the biggest snowflake of all.

By Brad Reed / Raw Story November 13, 2018,

Gavin McInnes, the Trump-loving founder of the far-right Proud Boys organization, has been bitterly complaining in recent months that his liberal neighbors in a wealthy New York suburb do not like him.

The Daily Beast's Kelly Weill reportsthat McInnes has been heard regularly whining about the people in his neighborhood who want nothing to do with him -- and he blames none other than liberal billionaire George Soros for his struggles.

"I blame Soros for all of this," McInnes recently told InfoWars founder Alex Jones. "Soros is terrorizing me and trying to shut down my fraternal club, the Proud Boys. And he’s paying people to mess with my life, and spread these lies about me, spread fake news."

One of the alleged hardships McInnes has had to endure was having his application to a local country club sabotaged by a fellow golfer whom he said mocks his involvement with InfoWars.

Additionally, McInnes has told Jones that his proud love for President Donald Trump results in him getting disgusted looks on the streets wherever he goes.

"I see whispers all the time," the Proud Boys founder explained. "I’m walking down the street and a housewife goes like she’s finally seen Hannibal Lecter walk by. And what is the horror? The horror is that I like Trump, and that if I like Trump I might be conservative."

After the infamous street brawl between Proud Boys and left-wing demonstrators at New York's Metropolitan Republican Club, several of McGinnes' neighbors also started planting "Hate Has No Home Here" signs on their front lawns to let him know he wasn't welcome in their community.

Read the whole story of McGinnes' plight here.

ref

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gavin-mcinnes-whines-his-fellow-rich-neighbors-dont-like-him

no lnx

Gavin McInnes Whines His Fellow Rich Neighbors Don’t Like Him

The self-styled conservative punk lives in a liberal New York enclave where he says he’s the victim of everyone from soccer moms to George Soros.

Kelly Weill

11.13.18 4:44 AM ET

Online, Gavin McInnes is the gung-ho, ex-punk leader of a hate group who rails against liberal decadence. At home in his wealthy New York suburb, he’s upset that liberals won’t accept him.

“I blame [George] Soros for all of this,” McInnes said during a September broadcast of Infowars, on which he bemoaned what he claimed was his supposedly degraded social status. “Soros is terrorizing me and trying to shut down my fraternal club, the Proud Boys. And he’s paying people to mess with my life, and spread these lies about me, spread fake news.”

McInnes, 48, built his profile as a New York media provocateur. As co-founder of the media company Vice, he was an architect of the ironic hipster culture of the early 2000s, a scene that sometimes gave him cover for racist remarks that he defended as jokes before leaving Vice in 2008. Years later, in 2016, he began a new chapter in life: founding the Proud Boys—a violent, ultranationalist men’s club—and selling his $2.5 million Brooklyn penthouse to buy a home in Larchmont, a tony Westchester County town 20 miles north of the city.

After months of high-profile street fights involving the Proud Boys, neighbors in McInnes’ upscale town are starting to take notice of who exactly moved next door.

A local man at a country club mocked McInnes for being involved with Infowars and tried to sabotage his application to join, he claimed in the September broadcast. One of his daughter’s tutors allegedly stopped working for the family, citing McInnes’ politics. In a June broadcast, he claimed to have gotten into an altercation with a neighbor and kicked the man’s dog.

“I see it in my neighborhood,” McInnes said. “I see whispers all the time. I’m walking down the street and a housewife goes,” he made an outraged face “like she’s finally seen Hannibal Lecter walk by. And what is the horror? The horror is that I like Trump, and that if I like Trump I might be conservative.”

Larchmont residents’ real problem, locals say, is with McInnes’ role in the Proud Boys, which has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And the Proud Boys’ involvement in a Manhattan brawl brought McInnes to the neighborhood’s attention.

“I myself am Native American with a full blood mother who grew up fully immersed in our tribe, speaking our traditional language. I would never accept racism to surround me in my own life.”

— Emily McInnes

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On Oct. 12, McInnes spoke at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Republican Club. While he received a police escort after leaving the club, a crowd of Proud Boys lingered behind, and they brawled with anti-fascist protesters. Police arrested five Proud Boys and are seeking the arrest of four others, as well as three anti-fascists involved in the brawl.

Michael Sabino, who lives near Larchmont, said he’d been unaware of McInnes’ residence until then.

“What made me aware was the brawl at that event in Manhattan,” he told The Daily Beast. “Among my friends and people I speak with online, everybody’s disgusted.”

On Oct. 20, a Larchmont local emailed neighbors.

“So the founder of the proud boys lives in [a Larchmont neighborhood],” read the email, which was reviewed by The Daily Beast. “I suggest we buy the ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ lawn signs and ask our friends and neighbors in [the neighborhood] to put one on their lawn. Imagine if everyone had one. It would send a clear message to him and his ilk. The signs are $20 each and bulk orders ship free. Spread the word.”

The email was quickly forwarded to other community members, a person familiar with the messages said. By the following day, the campaign had “gone way beyond me and farther than anything I can manage,” the original emailer wrote neighbors, reminding them that the campaign should preach “the opposite of hate and intimidation.”

Two days later, McInnes’ wife, Emily, sent emails to people involved with the lawn-sign campaign.

“Hello neighbor,” she began. “I want to make sure some misinformation about my family is not being spread. The media has recently accused my husband of being an alt-right hate group leader. This is simply not true.”

She described the Proud Boys as multiracial and blamed the media for implying otherwise.

“The club that is affiliated with my husband is multi-ethnic and it explicitly states it does not endorse these sentiments in any way,” she wrote. “The men affiliated with my husband who were in an altercation with the masked Antifa group that is getting press recently are either people of color or married with children to African American women. To be clear—they are the ones being painted in this slanderous and completely false light.

Unlike her husband, Emily said she is a Democrat.

“I myself am Native American with a full blood mother who grew up fully immersed in our tribe, speaking our traditional language,” she said. “I would never accept racism to surround me in my own life. It is true my husband is a Trump supporter and enjoys being a provocateur at times. I think this, paired with the climate right now and his passion for free speech has caused this horribly inaccurate narrative. I vote Democrat but I respect if you don’t. My kids have been raised this way as well—to respect all humans—and it pains me to think they may be suffering because of these very adult conflicts and narratives. I wanted to make this all clear and I am happy to discuss anything at any time if needed.”

The following week, liberal writer Amy Siskind wrote a Facebook post warning that McInnes lived in Larchmont. Siskind lives nearby and announced that she was planning an anti-hate vigil “in light of events last week.”

The evening after local news site LoHud ran a story on Siskind’s announcement, the McInnes family showed up on Siskind’s doorstep. Siskind, alarmed, called the police. McInnes later told LoHud that Siskind shouldn’t have been alarmed about the unannounced visit.

Of the people gathered outside, “three of them are little kids and one was holding his teddy bear,” he said. “The pipe dream was that she opened the door and my wife would say, ‘Look, let’s talk about this. I’m a Hillary supporter. Why are you putting my beautiful children in danger?’ This was not about intimidation and I was very open with everyone.”

Although the neighborhood skews liberal, Larchmont’s Sabino said he knows people on the political right who reject McInnes. “Even they see this guy and hear what he has to say, and they don’t like it,” he said. “They’re like ‘This guy’s a jerk.’ I’m not trying to say nobody likes him. He obviously has a pretty big following.”

But Emily McInnes’ email touched on a reality of the Proud Boys that has sometimes confused media who attempt to portray the group as strictly white-nationalist: Some members are men of color. But the Proud Boys’ ideology is more nebulous than other right-wing extremist groups. Some members and former members are undeniably affiliated with white nationalism: A 41-year-old Proud Boy arrested in the Manhattan brawl attended Unite the Right, the deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year.

THE NEW FAR-RIGHT

Why Young Men of Color Are Joining White-Supremacist Groups

Arun Gupta

More than anything, the Proud Boys are anti-leftist. Members talk openly of beating leftist opponents (“commies” and “antifa”) in the streets. Proud Boys at a violent Portland, Oregon, rally wore T-shirts valorizing Augusto Pinochet, a Chilean dictator who murdered tortured and murdered leftist political foes. When a prominent Twitter user made videos mocking the Proud Boys, a member showed up at his home. Members have also variously expressed sexist, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBT views. The ideological flexibility gives some space for members of color; the aforementioned Proud Boy who attended Unite the Right also runs with a primarily Latino skinhead crew. It also gives plausible deniability for figures like McInnes, who constantly toe the line of acceptable hatred.

“Racism isn’t a thing,” McInnes said in the same September Infowars appearance in which he described neighborhood spats. “So why are you so obsessed with it?”

McInnes uses these broadcasts to craft his public profile as an edgy, conservative grouch. He’s used punk-rock posturing to present himself as a counterculture voice in decidedly un-punk outlets like Fox News. When he talks about street violence, it’s nostalgic, hitting Fox News-friendly notes about the supposed decline of masculinity.

Members of McInnes’ old scenester circles have also called out the contradiction: Being a rich conservative isn’t very punk. When McInnes praised Sheer Terror, a hardcore band that sings about being broke and miserable, the band denounced him and the Proud Boys. “The whole ‘Conservatism Is the New Punk’ thought is a fucking travesty, and a sad joke,” Sheer Terror’s frontman told RVA Mag. “I don’t want to hear about how you’ve ‘grown up, and have kids and a mortgage.’ You don’t eat shit just because the toilet’s closer than the fridge.”

Even McInnes’ mockery of the suburbs—a common punk trope—takes on a right-wing bent. In the September Infowars broadcast, McInnes pushed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, claiming his neighborhood spats were the effects of a campaign by George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist and prolific Democratic donor who is Jewish.

“I’m laying on the couch here bitching about the sort of pariah status that has been imbued upon me,” he told viewers. “The reason it’s relevant to your life, is I believe it can be traced back to Soros.”

Right-wingers have blamed Soros for everything from immigration to Black Lives Matter to efforts to count every vote in the 2018 midterm elections. The blame game echoes previous efforts to portray wealthy Jews as mass manipulators, efforts that have led to pogroms and genocides against Jews. Most recently, Soros was sent a bomb allegedly by a rabid Trump supporter.

In McInnes’ case, he accused Soros of funding a network of “lesbian” lawyers who harass the far right. (He also falsely accused Soros’ staff of organizing Unite the Right “to discredit us all.”)

“I think I’m part of this sort of computer virus the Soros machine sends out in the system to mess with your life,” he said.

But there’s something more sinister than simple conservative shit-talk at play: With one foot in the world of right-wing street fights and the other in upstate country clubs, McInnes is marshaling an extremist group from a safe remove. One Gavin McInnes champions violence and reaps speaking fees, the other doesn’t care for critical emails from neighbors.

“Of course he’s got to live somewhere,” Sabino said. “But I consider this as factual: The Proud Boys are a gang. They’re listed as a hate group. When the leader of a hate group moves within driving range of you and people you care about, that’s concerning. That’s not petty, that’s real.”

BEDFELLOWS

Republicans Are Adopting the Proud Boys

Kelly Weill,

Will Sommer

ref

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-are-adopting-the-proud-boys

Nine members of the far-right Proud Boys group and three protesters are facing riot and assault charges after a street brawl between them Friday night in New York.

The fight wasn’t a random clash, though: The Proud Boys were in Manhattan thanks to an invite from the Metropolitan Republican Club.

In a speech at the club, which was vandalized before the event, Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes waved a sword at anti-fascist protesters and celebrated the assassination of a socialist Japanese politician. McInnes, a Vice co-founder who left the company in 2008, dressed up as the Japanese assassin who killed the politician, complete with glasses that made his eyes into a racist caricature of a Japanese person’s eyes.

It was a bizarre event to host at the GOP’s Manhattan clubhouse, but the Metropolitan Republican Club defended McInnes and the Proud Boys after the fight. In a statement released Sunday, the club said McInnes’ speech “was certainly not inciting violence.”

WANTED BOYS

NYPD Looks to Charge 9 Proud Boys for Manhattan Fight

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The Republican club’s role hosting the event highlights how the Proud Boys have managed to insinuate themselves with mainstream Republicans, even as they increasingly make the news for their violence. But the New York Republicans aren’t alone—the Proud Boys have already managed to make their way into other mainstream GOP campaign events and conservative media.

Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Devin Nunes have posed for pictures with Proud Boys on the campaign trail. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson posed in a Fox green room with two Proud Boys and Republican operative Roger Stone earlier this year.

“The skinheads, for example, would become functional equivalents of Hitler’s SA and Mussolini’s squadristi only if they aroused support instead of revulsion.”

— Historian Robert Paxton

Stone has himself taken steps to be initiated into the Proud Boys and made headlines in March, when he used the Proud Boys as a security force at the Dorchester Conference, a Republican event in Oregon. By then, the Proud Boys were already notorious in Oregon for a series of bloody Portland brawls. But Dorchester board member and former Oregon legislator Patrick Sheehan defended the Proud Boys’ attendance, telling Willamette Week that Stone “was worried about getting killed… He gets death threats constantly.”

RU s

https://vimeo.com/295460900

https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-proud-boys-claim-self-defense-when-defending-ring-wing-violence-total-joke

amanda m

When far-right groups like the Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer get into street brawls, they have a go-to rationalization: It was self-defense. The argument is that fringe right-wingers are out there peacefully protesting or attending speeches, and that the violence that often seems to erupt afterward is merely a reaction to leftist provocation.

"Antifa terrorists attacked us, not the other way around," argues a typical post at the Proud Boys Facebook page, after members of the group were filmed beating up anti-fascist protesters after Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes gave a speech at New York's Metropolitan Republican Club.

Conservative media has picked up this talking point and has aggressively defended and promoted far-right groups — who have also gotten into street fights in Portland, Oregon, and Providence, Rhode Island, in the past month — painting them as victims who only engage in violence as a last resort to defend themselves.

On her Fox News show, Laura Ingraham interviewed Joey Gibson, the head of Patriot Prayer, who denied "any intention to get violent" and said the violence in Portland was purely self-defense.

Sean Hannity, on his own Fox News show, put the blame on for these outbreaks of violence on Democratic rhetoric he considers rude, even though none of the figures or incidents he mentioned were anywhere near these events. He explained what happened last week this way: "A bunch of anarchists go to the New York GOP club, Republican club, whatever it happens to be, and they’re committing vandalism, anarchist signs that they’re putting up, etc., and then there’s a confrontation on the street there."

David Neiwert, an investigative journalist and author who does research for the Southern Poverty Law Center, disagrees. In a recent report on the Portland brawl, he argues that both the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer deliberately assemble "a ready-to-rumble crew with out-of-town violent extremists, then troll through the urban center in hopes of confronting left-wing protesters, ensuring violence eventually will break out."

It's the question that bedevils this particular issue: Are these groups out with innocent intentions and only acting in self-defense, or are they actively seeking to create violent confrontations, while using "self-defense" as an excuse and for legal cover for their actions?

On Monday, Media Matters tweeted a video showing how frequently far-right pundits, and McInnes in particular, have praised violence as, to quote McInnes, "a really effective way to solve problems."

Gavin McInnes: "i cannot recommend violence enough. It is a really effective way to solve problems." pic.twitter.com/XcWBWBkrh8

— Media Matters (@mmfa) October 15, 2018

At the New York event itself, McInnes, as he promised on Instagram, celebrated an act of unprovoked violence against leftists that has become a major far-right meme.

"Wearing glasses with caricatured Asian eyes drawn on the front, McInnes played Otoya Yamaguchi, a young far-right extremist who assassinated the leader of the Japanese Socialist Party on live television exactly 58 years ago on October 12, 1960," described Carol Schaeffer, a journalist for Bedford & Bowery.

Meanwhile, the Portland Mercury has contradicted Joey Gibson's claim that he wasn't looking for a violent encounter, sharing a video that appears to have been recorded on Friday in which Gibson tells his followers, "We will challenge and we will instigate, but we do it by marching through these streets." He makes sure to say that leftist protesters "have a right to be here as long as they are not being violent," but promises that if "they want to get in our way, then they need to deal with the punishment."

During the period when he was forming the Proud Boys, McInnes had a self-titled show on Compound Media. Salon has reviewed numerous clips from this show in which McInnes spoke about violence against leftists.

“If you’re wearing a MAGA hat, and some guy with a slightly punk demeanor comes up to you and says, ‘Hey, are you Sal’ or ‘Are you pro-Trump?,’ choke him," McInnes advised on Feb. 2, 2017. "Trust your instincts. Don’t give him a fucking chance. The guy’s not there to chat.”

That episode was one in which McInnes spent a great deal of time dwelling on photos of Proud Boys with injuries they claimed were from fights with leftists. He praised the group members for leveling up to the "fourth degree" in their hierarchy by fighting with the left.

“This is the Civil War. If you’re dressed as a Confederate soldier and a Yankee comes up to you, don’t listen to what he has to say. Choke him," he continued during this segment.

"Oh, I think I’m not allowed to say that," he added, in a joking tone. Then he turned to the camera and added, "In self-defense."

A few months later, McInnes posted on the Proud Boys website to say that he had been joking when he praised "kicking the crap out of antifa." He added, "We don’t start fights, we finish them."

New York state law defines self-defense as "an emergency measure to avoid an imminent public or private injury which is about to occur by reason of a situation occasioned or developed through no fault of the actor."

"When you start griping and yelling and telling us to shut up and calling us Nazis and saying you’re going to come punch us, we beat the shit out of you," McInnes said on the June 12, 2017, edition of his show. He added that the goal of such violence was to support "freedom," but added, "We do it cause it’s fun."

“It’s fun beating you up, because you suck shit," he added.

“I think there’s not enough violence in today’s day and age," McInnes complained on March 30, 2016. “I want violence. I want punching in the face. I’m disappointed in Trump supporters for not punching enough.”

To be clear, some of the anti-fascist counter-protesters who confront these right-wing groups are, in fact, throwing the first punches or throwing bottles. (That may have been the case last Friday in New York.) While some radical leftists justify this kind of response as necessary to counter far-right groups, there are questions involved not just about morality but also about tactics. If, in fact, right-wing groups are trolling for fights so they can beat people up under the guise of self-defense, it seems unwise to play into their hands.

"I don’t foresee violence, but we’re happy to deliver it if it wants to rear its ugly head," McInnes declared on May 9, 2017.

Three anti-fascist protesters were arrested immediately after the fight in New York last Friday night. None of the Proud Boys were, which drew heavy criticism. Police have subsequently announced they are seeking to arrest nine of the far-right brawlers. According to the New York Times, surveillance footage "captured a protester hurling a plastic bottle toward the Proud Boys" and a "man in a red hat then appears onscreen and can be seen throwing the first punch."

seems to be trying to throw off wacko bad PR?

but not so much

Friday, October 12, the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City invited Proud Boys founder and right-wing media host Gavin McInnes to speak.

On his CRTV show (CRTV is the digital network run by Fox News host Mark Levin), McInnes advocates for revanchist positions: He's called for "a big memorial for all the whites," teamed up with a men's rights activist to attack Black women, talked about how great he thinks the patriarchy is, made disgusting remarks about LGBTQ people, argued that women don't belong in the workplace, and much more. McInnes' written work can best be described as attempting to forge new ways to be racist.

McInnes is also the founder of the Proud Boys. Proud Boys is a self-described “Western chauvinist” men-only fraternal organization. There are two crucial things to understand about the group: Misogyny and violence. Misogyny is the core operating principle of the group: Not only are women not allowed to join, they are not even allowed to be present when meetings take place. The group even has a ritual where members subject themselves to punches while naming breakfast cereals. To reach the inner sanctum of the group, a Proud Boy must engage in violence with anti-fascists. The group also has ties to white supremacists; the chief organizer of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was a Proud Boy, and when a white nationalist narrative goes viral, there's usually a link to the Proud Boys. In terms of finding members, Proud Boys has used Facebook and Infowars to recruit. If you had to sum up the Proud Boys, it would be to describe them as a pro-Trump street gang, the violent wing of the modern Republican Party.

After the event, Proud Boys assaulted three protesters; video shows "more than a dozen" Proud Boys, including at least three skinheads, punching and kicking protesters on the ground. The NYPD told Buzzfeed News that they were still "researching a response" as to why none of the Proud Boys were arrested even though there were officers on the scene. Video from the scene is horrifying.

As the beatdown happened, Fox News immediately put the blame onto left-wing protesters and portrayed the Proud Boys as the victims. There is no evidence whatsoever for that conclusion, and to the contrary, while Fox News warned of "swords and vandalism" at the event, the only sword was wielded by McInnes himself -- the event was to commemorate and reenact the execution of the Japanese socialist Inejiro Asanuma.

While shocking, Fox News' protection of the Proud Boys should come as no surprise. Fox News is explicitly deferential to the Proud Boys. They've interviewed McInnes on air without even identifying him. Tucker Carlson has posed for pictureswith Proud Boys and refused to distance himself from the group, and in fact has even echoed some of McInnes' rhetoric. A New York Post columnist recently arguedon Fox & Friends that the Proud Boys "don't have any real dark beliefs."

But it's not just right-wing media that gets the Proud Boys wrong. NBC News profiledthe Proud Boys in 2017 and made a series of mistakes, in the end only glamorizing the group. A New York Times headline about the melee merely labelled McInnes a "right-wing provocateur."

Trump has repeatedly incited violence at his rallies. Of course a pro-Trump group would take that call to action to the streets.

Amidst right-wing violence, conservatives complain about angry left-wing mob

Roger Stone and ‘Sheriff Joe’ Surprise Attendees of Rally Peppered with Far-Right Extremists

By Jared Holt | September 10, 2018 11:48 am

The Mother of All Rallies, the pro-Trump “patriot” rally that attracted far-right extremists last year, featured surprise guests at this year’s event last weekend, including failed U.S. Senate candidate from Arizona Joe Arpaio and GOP operative Roger Stone, who arrived on site with an entourage of members from the Proud Boys hate group.

While last year’s Mother of All Rallies brought out an underwhelming showing, this year produced the same as only about 200 people— including event organizers, speakers, reporters and supporters—gathered on the National Mall on Saturday.

(Photo: Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch)

Stone, who is a focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between Trump associates and Russian officials, stopped by the rally for an unscheduled appearance and told attendees they were the “tip of the spear” and the “cutting edge of the counter-revolution,” borrowing mainstay lines from his frequent appearances on the conspiracy theory outlet Infowars.

“Let me say one thing about Russian collusion: It’s bullshit,” Stone said, to applause. “It’s a canard, it’s a fraud, it’s a left-wing conspiracy theory.”

He went on to label Mueller “illegitimate” and suggested Mueller may have covered up the deaths of inmates who were imprisoned to conceal ties between the FBI and the mob. Stone also claimed he will not be indicted, but that he might be “framed,” though he promised not to flip on Trump.

(Photo: Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch)

Event organizers said they met Arpaio at the Trump International Hotel in Washington the night before the event and that he had agreed to speak at their rally.Arpaio’s speech was brief, but he did tell the crowd that he was turning over his unused campaign funds to Trump’s re-election efforts.

While most of the event attendees appeared to be standard-issue Trump supporters, the rally—as it did last year—also contained several hardcore extremists.

(Photo: Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch)

Running security were clusters of people wearing insignias of anti-government militia groups, including the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and the Light Foot Militia. The latter group’s Pennsylvania branch was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the City of Charlottesville, Virginia, after the melee sparked by the 2017 Unite the Right event—a lawsuit they resolved by “agreeing not to return to Charlottesville to engage in coordinated armed activity during rallies and protests.”

(Video Still: Alejandro Alvarez / News2Share)

At this year’s Mother of All Rallies event, News2Share filmed members of American Guard, a group of white supremacists. American Guard was founded by Brien James, who was also in attendance. The Anti-Defamation League reported that James was also a founder of a violent skinhead gang called the Vinlanders Social Club whose members and affiliates have been responsible for at least nine murders. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that in 2000, James punched and stomped a man “to the brink of death at a party for refusing to seig heil,” and that James had bragged about multiple trials he faced for attempted murder, batteries and hate crimes.

(Photo: Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch)

Also among those in the crowd this year was Jovi Val, a far-right activist who, for a brief moment, rose to fame in online pro-Trump circles after he was attacked with a glass bottle in a New York City bar fight over his wearing of a Trump hat. Since then, he’s been showing up at far-right rallies like the “Speak English Please” rally in New York City and has proven himself to be inflammatory enough to get reportedly denounced by CRTV host Gavin McInnes. The video host, who also founded the Proud Boys, now claims that Val is not a member of his group despite the fact he had previously identified Val as such. Val was spotted last month in Washington amongst the neo-Nazis attending the anniversary event of Unite the Right.

The event ended early due to rain.

Tags: Joe Arpaio Roger Stone Alt-Right Anti-Government white supremacist American Guard Light Foot Militia Oath Keepers Proud Boys Three Percenters

started at vice media

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys

Their disavowals of bigotry are belied by their actions: rank-and-file Proud Boys and leaders regularly spout white nationalist memes and maintain affiliations with known extremists. They are known for anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric. Proud Boys have appeared alongside other hate groups at extremist gatherings like the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. Indeed, former Proud Boys member Jason Kessler helped to organize the event, which brought together Klansmen, antisemites, Southern racists, and militias. Kessler was only “expelled” from the group after the violence and near-universal condemnation of the Charlottesville rally-goers. Other hardcore members of the so-called "alt-right" have argued that the “western chauvinist” label is just a “PR cuck term” McInnes crafted to gain mainstream acceptance. “Let’s not bullshit,” Brian Brathovd, aka Caeralus Rex, told his co-hosts on the antisemitic The Daily Shoah — one of the most popular alt-right podcasts. If the Proud Boys “were pressed on the issue, I guarantee you that like 90% of them would tell you something along the lines of ‘Hitler was right. Gas the Jews.’”

McInnes himself has ties to the racist right and has contributed to hate sites like VDare.com and American Renaissance, both of which publish the work of white supremacists and so-called “race realists.” He even used Taki’s Magazine — a far-right publication whose contributors include Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor — to announce the founding of the Proud Boys. McInnes plays a duplicitous rhetorical game: rejecting white nationalism and, in particular, the term “alt-right” while espousing some of its central tenets. For example, McInnes has himself said it is fair to call him Islamophobic.

In its own words

“We brought roads and infrastructure to India and they are still using them as toilets. Our criminals built nice roads in Australia but aboriginals keep using them as a bed. The next time someone bitches about colonization, the correct response is ‘You’re welcome.’”

—Gavin McInnes, “10 Things I like About White Guys,” Taki’s Magazine, March 2, 2017

“Well look at the canary in the coal mine called Britain. We see guys get away with raping children regularly, and they have excuses like ‘I didn’t understand the word ‘no.’’ We have a woman raped several times in one night. All these guys seem to…they don’t all get away but they seem to get away way too often. And then you have people being jailed for rude tweets and comments when they’re white, so…people in America say ‘Muslim are what? One or two percent of the population? There’s never gonna be sharia law here.’ And I say have a look at Britain. Have a look at Europe. That’s where we’re headed.”

—Gavin McInnes, “Get Off My Lawn”, November 4, 2017

“Maybe the reason I’m sexist is because women are dumb. No, I’m just kidding, ladies. But you do tend to not thrive in certain areas — like writing.”

—Gavin McInnes, The Gavin McInnes Show, June 28, 2017

“I just realized something. Cory Booker is kind of like Sambo. He’s kind of shucking and jiving for the white man. Cory Booker grew up rich in an all-white suburb. He’s basically a white guy. His parents were very wealthy executives at IBM… .But he wants to be a black dude, so he pretends that he’s down with the brothers and he acts outraged about racism all the time — for white people. That gets him votes from whites.”

—Gavin McInnes on his CRTV show “Get Off My Lawn,” January 17, 2018

“The white liberal ethos tells us blacks aren’t at MIT because of racism. They say blacks dominate the prison population for the same reason. They insist America is a racist hellhole where ‘people of color’ have no future. This does way more damage to black youth than the KKK. When you strip people of culpability and tell them the odds are stacked against them, they don’t feel like trying. White liberals make this worse by then using affirmative action to “correct” society’s mistakes. When blacks are forced into schools they aren’t qualified for they have no choice but to drop out. Instead of going back a step to a school they can handle, they tend to give up on higher education entirely. Thanks to the Marxist myth of ubiquitous equality, this ‘mismatch’ leaves blacks less educated than they would have been had they been left to their own devices.”

—Gavin McInnes, “America in 2034,” American Renaissance, June 17, 2014

“I’m not a fan of Islam. I think it’s fair to call me Islamophobic.”

—Gavin McInnes, NBC interview, 2017

“Palestinians are stupid. Muslims are stupid. And the only thing they really respect is violence and being tough.”

—Gavin McInnes, The Gavin McInnes Show, March 8, 2017

“Why don’t we take back Bethlehem? Why don’t we take back Northern Iraq? Why don’t we start our own Crusades? That’s what the Crusades were. They weren’t just someone picking on Muslims for no reason — they were a reaction to Muslim tyranny. We finally fought back.”

—Gavin McInnes, The Gavin McInnes Show, March 8, 2017

“Buying woman parts from a hospital and calling yourself a broad trivializes what it is to be a woman. Womanhood is not on a shelf next to wigs and makeup. Similarly, being a dude is quite involved. Ripping your vaginal canal out of your fly doesn’t mean you are going to start inventing shit and knowing how cement works. Being a man is awesome. So is being a woman. We should revere these creations, not revel in their bastardization.”

—Gavin McInnes, “Transphobia is Perfectly Natural,” Thought Catalog, August 8, 2014

“I am not afraid to speak out about the atrocities that whites and people of European descent face not only here in this country but in Western nations across the world. The war against whites, and Europeans and Western society is very real and it’s time we all started talking about it and stopped worrying about political correctness and optics.”

—Kyle Chapman, who formed the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, a wing of the Proud Boys, Unite America First Peace Rally, Sacramento, California, July 8, 2017

“Put something on the table! Give us a reason to accept you, because you know what? Sharia law ain’t it. Raping women ain’t it. Cutting off clits ain’t it. Throwing gay people of roofs ain’t it. You are a disgrace.”

—Pawl Bazile, a production director of Proud Boys’ magazine, on Muslims, March against Sharia rally, New York City, New York, June 10, 2017

Background

Canadian Gavin McInnes has been flaunting his contempt for PC culture for decades. Before entering the fray of right-wing politics, McInnes co-founded VICE Magazine, a publication that came to epitomize hipster culture in the late 1990s and 2000s. While the magazine tended to dabble in provocative and taboo topics — generally under a veneer of irony — McInnes took pleasure in stepping over the line. In 2002, for instance, when a New York Press reporter asked McInnes what he thought about his neighbors in New York’s Williamsburg neighborhood, he responded, “Well, at least they’re not niggers or Puerto Ricans. At least they’re white.”

While presenting his observation as a joke and revenue-generating ruse (“incendiary political statements garnered endless publicity for us,” he later told Gawker), McInnes seems to have meant its underlying sentiment sincerely. “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of,” he told The New York Times a year later, revealing an ideology that would later form the foundation of the Proud Boys. “I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.” McInnes also started writing for VDare.com, a white nationalist hate site. In one 2005 article, he railed against Canadian multiculturalism and lamented that Jared Taylor, the editor of the race-science newsletter American Renaissance, had not been invited to speak at the University of Ottawa. Ten years later, McInnes would welcome Taylor onto his own show, where the white nationalist spent more than an hour explaining why he believes white people are “better” than African Americans.

McInnes left VICE in 2008, citing creative differences, and pursued a variety of other media projects. But his relationship with mainstream outlets started to erode in 2014 as he began to swap irony for earnestness. As part of an American Renaissance series featuring “race-realist commentators on the future of American race relations,”McInnes offered his predictions alongside fellow contributors like John Derbyshire, Paul Gottfried, Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor. In his piece, McInnes wrote that while he didn’t harbor any hate for minorities, he did for white liberals who subscribed to a “Marxist myth of ubiquitous equally” and refused to acknowledge innate disparities between people of different races — a notion he supported using the long-discredited work of Charles Murray. McInnes insisted he held out hope for the future of American race relations: once “we’re all forced to live side by side, we’ll quickly realize we’re incompatible, and agree to disagree,” he concluded. “The blind utopians at The New York Times will be crushed and the rest of us realists will be dancing in the streets.”

Only months later, McInnes published an article titled “Transphobia is perfectly natural” that prompted his then-employer, the ad agency Rooster, to indefinitely sever ties with him. “We’re all transphobic,” he wrote in the Thought Catalog piece. “We see there are no old trannies. They die of drug overdoses and suicide way before they’re 40 and nobody notices because nobody knows them. They are mentally ill gays who need help, and that doesn’t include being maimed by physicians.” McInnes has also referred to transgender people as “gender niggers” and “stupid lunatics.” McInnes’ repugnant rhetoric extends to women, too. He’s written that “through trial and error, I learned that women want to be downright abused” by men, and, in a tweet, that “Every guy I’ve ever known to be involved in a ‘domestic’ was the result of some cunt trying to ruin his life.”

With former business partners turning him away, in the spring of 2015 McInnes formed a partnership with the Canadian far-right video channel Rebel Media and, a couple months later, launched “The Gavin McInnes Show” with Compound Media. On both platforms, he regularly chatted with right-wing guests (his first show featured the far-right provocateur and former Breitbart reporter Milo Yiannopoulos) and carved out an ideological space for frustrated young men to rally around: western culture is superior to all others, racism is a myth created by guilty white liberals, Islam is a culture of violence, and feminism “is about de-masculinizing men,” he told his audience. A group of like-minded men at Compound Media — who bonded over their shared frustration with PC culture — began to meet in New York City dive bars. From these gatherings, the Proud Boys were born, and McInnes officially introduced the group in Taki’s in September 2016.

There are three degrees of membership within the Proud Boys, and to become a first degree in the “pro-West fraternal organization” a prospective member simply has to declare “I am a western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” To enter the second degree, a Proud Boy has to endure a beating until they can yell out the names of five breakfast cereals (in order to demonstrate “adrenaline control”) and give up masturbation because, in theory, it will leave them more inclined to go out and meet women. Those who enter the third degree have demonstrated their commitment by getting a Proud Boys tattoo. Any man — no matter his race or sexual-orientation — can join the fraternal organization as long as they “recognize that white men are not the problem.” Women have their own contingent called the Proud Boys’ Girls.

Members are identifiable by more than ink: they sport yellow-trimmed black Fred Perry polos and yell the tongue-in-cheek catchphrase “Uhuru!” — a Swahili word they picked up from a YouTube video in which an activist talks to white people about reparations. Their name comes from an Aladdin song, “Proud of Your Boy.” They adhere to a list of libertarian-leaning principles, including opposition to the drug war, racial guilt, and political correctness, and support for small government, closed borders, and “Venerating the Housewife.”

The oddball humor that tinges Proud Boys culture, and creates a set of references incomprehensible to those on the outside, has attracted a surprisingly large number of men. There is an obvious overlap between their views and those of President Donald Trump, whose election in 2016 played a clear role in increasing Proud Boys’ membership. A red MAGA hat is nearly as prominent at Proud Boys gatherings as their Fred Perry polos, and, in fact, one of their first public outings was at a pro-Trump art show – called #DaddyWillSaveUS – where McInnes displayed photos of himself as a white slave. It’s a favorite mythical reference of his as well as neo-Nazis and white nationalists; one episode of his Rebel Media show centered on the notion that the “history of slavery is rife with white slaves.”

The Proud Boys took off after the presidential election. Each of their official Facebook and Twitter pages had over 20,000 followers at the end of 2017. The website Rewire estimates there are roughly 6,000 members. Group meetings, according to McInnes, “usually consist of drinking, fighting, and reading aloud from Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West.”

For McInnes and the Proud Boys, much like Buchanan, pro-Westernism is indistinguishable from outright opposition to Islam. McInnes’s Rebel Media videos feature titles like “Donald Trump’s Muslim ban is exactly what we need right now,” “10 examples of the Koran being violent,” and “Islam isn’t ‘dope.’ It’s sexist.” He’s also hosted Pamela Geller, among the most prominent figures in today’s anti-Muslim movement, on his newest show on the conservative online outlet CRTV, “Get Off My Lawn.” “People in America say ‘Muslims are what? One or two percent of the population? There’s never gonna be sharia law here,’” he said during the interview before assuring viewers that Britain, where Muslims are “raping children regularly” and where “women are raped several times in one night,” is the “canary in the coalmine.” In an interview with NBC, McInnes admitted “I’m not a fan of Islam. I think it’s fair to call me Islamophobic.”

The Proud Boys’ pro-western posture allows them to position themselves— somewhat counterintuitively — as a tolerant and progressive social force. If Islamic backwardness, as they imagine, threatens gay people and women, then they serve as their guardians by protecting and promoting “western values.” Their opposition to Muslims and Islam, improbably, stands as a marker of their own tolerance. In that way, their ideology is similar to many European far-right groups — like the French National Front and Danish Party for Freedom — who push hardline anti-immigration policies at the same time they call for greater tolerance in the form of secularism and gender equality, all the while attempting to distance themselves from overt racists. According to the sociologist Rogers Brubaker, the concurrent embrace of intolerance and inclusion is not only a rhetorical strategy but a political one, employed to “reach out to new constituencies and gain mainstream acceptance” from people who might otherwise hold an aversion toward extremist groups.

Proud Boys do their best to muddy right-wing taxonomies. Despite the pains they’ve taken to distance themselves from open white nationalists and antisemites, Proud Boys have been present at high-profile alt-right events, including the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “[J]ust don’t fucking wear your Fred Perry, or decide to belt: ‘Proud of Your Boy,’” McInnes limply warned followers before the event. “[I]f you decide to rub elbows with those people [while] in colors, you very well could find yourself disavowed.”

But they did show up, which McInnes evidently expected. In the first episode of his Compound Media show after the August rally, McInnes said he had been “just combing through all the media reports going, ‘Don’t say Proud Boys, don’t say Proud Boys, don’t say Proud Boys,’” hoping the “lunatic Nazi” who allegedly killed Heather Heyer wasn’t a member of his group. He wasn’t, but the white nationalist Jason Kessler — who has been filmed undergoing his second-degree Proud Boy initiation — was the rally’s principal organizer. Less than two months earlier, Kessler had been a guest on “The Gavin McInnes Show,” where he promoted Unite the Right and, in a chummy interview, laid out the ideological overlap he and McInnes shared. “What’s really under attack is if you say, ‘I want to stand up for white people. I want to stand up for western civilization. I want to stand up for men. I want to stand up for Christians,’” to which McInnes nodded in agreement and added other examples: “I’m against immigration…I’m against jihadis. I’m against radical Islam.”

After Charlottesville, in a move to protect the fratty and innocuous Proud Boys’ brand he’s worked so hard to cultivate, McInnes ejected Kessler from the organization and insisted he had never really been a Proud Boy. “I’m suspicious of you, coming to Proud Boys meetings saying you’re not alt-right…and I think you were there to try to recruit guys,” McInnes told Kessler when they spoke on his show two days after the rally. It was only after the violence in Charlottesville, when any doubts about the true nature of the movement were stripped away, that Mcinnes attempted to earnestly distance the Proud Boys from the alt-right label. Before that, he seemed content to let the Proud Boys brand appear more ideologically ambiguous, profiting off the alt-right’s rising popularity until things got ugly.

Although McInnes has attempted to distance his organization from the violence of Charlottesville, violence is firmly entrenched in Proud Boy dogma. McInnes was filmed punching a counter-protestor outside of the Deploraball in January 2017, and after a speaking engagement at New York University the next month turned violent, he wryly declared, “I cannot recommend violence enough. It’s a really effective way to solve problems.” In fact, in early 2017, the Proud Boys added another degree to their membership hierarchy: in order to enter the 4th degree, a member needs to “get involved in a major fight for the cause.” “You get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa,” McInnes explained to Metro. Though he claimed in the interview he was ready to “get violent and beat the f--k out of everybody,” he later backtracked in a Proud Boys Magazine piece, assuring the public the fraternal group was opposed to “senseless violence.” “We don’t start fights, we finish them,” McInnes wrote.

Around the same time, Proud Boys member Kyle Chapman announced he was forming a new “tactical defense arm” of the Proud Boys — with McInnes’ “full approval” — called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK). The paramilitary wing positions itself as a defensive organization formed to protect right-wing activists at political demonstrations. Chapman, who has an extensive criminal history, first gained renown within the alt-right when he was photographed hitting a counter-protestor over the head with a stick at a March 4, 2017, pro-Trump rally in Berkeley, California.

....

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/crtv-has-been-booking-its-hosts-on-infowars-and-pivoting-toward-the-fringe/

right-wing digital media outlet CRTV has booked three of its hosts on the conspiracy outlet Infowars in the last two weeks, serving as the latest indication that the network is pivoting to appeal to the fringes of the far-right.

CRTV is a subscription-based video streaming network that streams through services like Roku and Apple TV. It was launched in 2016 by Conservative Review, the online outlet founded and edited by conservative political commentator Mark Levin, and was initially headlined by Levin and Michelle Malkin.

The network’s initial hires were voices who were already well known in conservative media, such as Steve Deace and Steven Crowder. But CRTV has recently hired a few right-wing YouTube personalities who have established cult followings in the far-right. Recent hires have included McInnes, a far-right media personality who leads a bizarre fraternity called “Proud Boys” that initiates its members by beating them until they name five breakfast cereal brands (really). The Southern Poverty Law Center recently named the Proud Boys a hate group thanks in part to McInnes’ track record of using racist, misogynistic and xenophobic rhetoric on his CRTV show. Laura Tam—known online by her username “Roaming Millennial”—has also been hired by the network and has been producing videos for CRTV aimed at mocking concepts like structural racism.

McInnes has made numerous appearances on Infowars over the past few years and appeared on the network as recently as March 14. But in recent weeks, more CRTV hosts have appeared on the conspiracy outlet—the latest indication of CRTV’s apparent efforts to appeal to the fringes of the Right.

CRTV did not respond to request for comment.

Earlier this month, after CRTV host Steven Crowder was temporarily suspended from Twitter after he posted a video containing an anti-gay slur, he appeared on Infowars with Alex Jones. Crowder urged conservative YouTube personalities who believe they are being censored on the platform to begin taking legal action against YouTube to “hit them where it hurts legally and sting them.”

During his Infowars appearance, Jones praised Crowder’s popularity with younger viewers, which Jones claimed “scares the globalists.” Jones also used Crowder’s appearance to repeat his bizarre claims that LGBTQ activists want to protect people who want to have sex with your car and declared gender nonconformity was “total mental illness.”

Crowder, who hosts a late night show for CRTV that often features distasteful jokes about LGBTQ people and racial minorities, also used his appearance to complain that his critics have falsely labeled him a neo-Nazi.

Jones sympathized with Crowder, saying, “That’s what they do to me. They say that I say there’s Martian bases. They say I say firefighters blew up the World Trade Center. No, I said there was a stand-down. It’s come out in the news. That’s how they get us all. They misrepresent what I say. They misrepresent what you say. Then they attack when you go on my show or I go on yours.”

Jones made an appearance on “Louder with Crowder” in December 2016, shortly after Crowder announced that his show had been picked up by CRTV. Crowder had also appeared on Infowars oncein 2016, before he was employed with CRTV.

Yesterday, Tam joined Infowars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson while he complained that conservative institutions like Fox News haven’t sufficiently embraced right-wing internet stars popular with younger audiences. Tam said that liberals have turned TV networks popular with young people, like MTV, “into propaganda mills” that are “dang effective” and that conservative leaders aren’t putting the same amount of effort into connecting with young people.

The duo went on to discuss one of Tam’s more recent YouTube videos, in which she claimed that so-called “social justice warriors” and members of the racist alt-right movement are “a mirror image of each other when it comes to race, segregation [and] views on society.” Watson said the alt-right movement only exists so members of the press can use it as a tool to attack “ordinary conservatives,” going on to cite our report last year about alt-right activists on YouTube and the figures like Tam who have helped to legitimize them to more mainstream audiences. Tam lied about the contents of our report and claimed she was labeled an alt-right figure (she wasn’t) before saying that the alt-right is “exactly like Black Lives Matter, but for white people.”

In the hours prior to Tam’s appearance, Alex Jones had been comparing the teenage leaders of the March for Our Lives rallies to Hitler Youth, going so far as to dub over footage from Florida shooting survivor David Hogg’s speech at the D.C. rally with audio from an Adolf Hitler speech.

Infowars is the nation’s most notorious conspiracy theory factory, where viewers are indoctrinated every day with conspiracy theories including the idea that a top-level Trump administration official is posting cryptic riddles on 8Chan about a secret operation to destroy a satanic pedophile ring, that humanity is on the verge of a world war that will kill nearly everyone, and that global elites ordered last month’s school shooting in Florida to distract from Rep. Devin Nunes’ nothingburger FISA memo. The outlet has also stood behind claims that Michelle Obama is secretly a transgender woman, that global elites are using liberals to commit genocide, and that the FBI may execute Jones.

Jones routinely declares that mass shootings are “false flag” attacks orchestrated by liberal global elites, spouts bizarre and inflammatory claims about LGBTQ people, and warns listeners about a secret satanic pedophile cult supposedly controlling mainstream media.

And believe us when we say that barely scratches the surface.

Tags: Alex JonesGavin McInnesPaul Joseph WatsonRoaming MillennialSteven CrowderAlt-Rightconspiracy theoriesMediaNew RightCRTVInfoWarsProud Boys

The Proud Boys, a truly bizarre “western chauvinist” fraternity that was recently named a hate groupby the Southern Poverty Law Center, is hosting a Patriots Day rally in Massachusetts headlined by three figures who inhabit the far reaches of right-wing politics.

According to a Facebook event created by the New England chapter of Proud Boys, the April 16 rally will feature alt-right icon Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman, who was charged with assaulting counter-protesters at a rally in Berkeley last year, right-wing Senate candidate V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who has cozied up to alt-right activists, and YouTube pundit Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, who calls himself “liberalist” despite offering himself as an ally to the fringes of the far-right.

The rally will be hosted by John Medlar, a “local free speech activist” who also organized a “free speech” rally at Boston Common last year shortly after a woman was murdered at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event page promises “music, rousing speeches, and open-mic free speech.”

Last year’s rally at Boston Common ended early after it was overwhelmed by counter-protesters. Ayyadurai also spoke at that rally.

The Proud Boys and their founder, CRTV host Gavin McInnes, have a well-documented history of spreading hate and vitriol. Former Proud Boy Jason Kessler helped organized the “Unite the Right” rally, which several Proud Boys attended. McInnes has made a career out of peddling transphobic, misogynistic and anti-Muslim rhetoric—ideas that have taken hold with many members of his organization.

The group also has a history of violence at rallies, some of which may be motivated by the fact that the final “degree” of Proud Boys membership requires physically assaulting an anti-fascist “Antifa” protester.

One member has already created an anime-style promotional video for the event:

berkeley trump rally

Oakdale, CA, resident, Nathan Damigo. Identity Evropa

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/far-right-white-supremacists-berkeley-protests-antifa-trump

...

Some people on this side came in from other parts of the country. A white man named Ian Herrin tells me he came from Colorado Springs to be "part of the movement." He says he was inspired to come by Lauren Southern, an alt-right activist and writer. Southern is walking around in a helmet surrounded by a security entourage of Proud Boys, a group of self-proclaimed "Western chauvinists" led by Vice magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes. I approach a man dressed head to toe in camouflage, who wears a mask reminiscent of Jason from Friday the 13th. Mike won't tell me his last name, but he says he's from Orange County, California, and a member of the West Coast Patriots Three Percent, a militia-type prepper group that does armed paramilitary training. "The last rally when they shut down Milo, it kinda pissed me off," he tells me. "Everyone has a right to say what they want to say, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. That's what the Second Amendment—uh, First Amendment—is for."...

kpfa radio: tried to keep damagio at arm length? not on stage, no security from militia?

https://www.compoundmedia.com/guest/lauren-southern/

April 17, 2017

The Gavin McInnes Show 333

Today on TGMS, Gavin talks to everyone he knows that was at the riots at Berkeley. We hear from Rich Black, Lauren Southern, Nate Comstock, Sabo, Based Stickman, Irma Hinojosa, and Baked Alaska all about their experiences covering, fighting in, and participating in the riot.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/04/15/proudboys-berkeley-violence-trump/

(CBS SF) — A pro-Trump group known as the Proud Boys sponsored the protest that descended into bloody violence at Berkeley’s Civic Center Park on Saturday. They say they have a right to bring their views to liberal Berkeley.

According to the description on their Facebook page, “The Proud Boys are a fraternal organization founded on a system of beliefs and values of minimal government, maximum freedom, anti-political correctness, anti-racial guilt, pro-gun rights, anti-Drug War, closed borders, anti-masturbation, venerating entrepreneurs, venerating housewives, and reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism during an age of globalism and multiculturalism.”

Mtn_Sn3k @Mtn_Sn3k

PHYSICAL REMOVAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#Antifa #Berkeley #BerkeleyProtest #BashBack

3:20 PM - 15 Apr 2017

174 174 Retweets 337 337 likes

Rich Black @boldandproper

Today was an enormous victory! I could not be more proud or grateful for every one who attended the event! This was the turning point!

2:55 PM - 15 Apr 2017

20 20 Retweets 74 74 likes

Shane Bauer ? @shane_bauer

.@BasedStickMan_ says "Berkeley got sacked." To Seattle, Boston, and other cities: "We're coming for you."

2:46 PM - 15 Apr 2017

1,683 1,683 Retweets 2,068 2,068 likes

Saturday’s melee in Berkeley, was similar to recent clashes between left and right-wing factions in the recent past. There is almost a script to how these rallies and counter-protests go in Berkeley.

KPIX 5 asked Tom Marcianno of Fremont, who took part in Saturday’s rally, if his group was intentionally trying to provoke a reaction by bringing a pro-Trump message and gathering to the heart of liberal Berkeley.

Q: Coming to Berkeley, isn’t that like poking the bear?

A: Well, it is in a way, but, we’re not doing it to be gleeful about it or to deliberately upset people who are against us. We have every right to be here.

Q: But you are going to upset people by your presence.

A: But, that’s their problem. They seem to be upset about a lot of things that are completely irrational. We don’t have an answer for that. If they want to hold a rally where I’m from, they’re welcome to do it. There might be a counter demonstration But, we’re not going to stop them from exercising their freedom of speech.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Strong Language, Violence

According to Berkeley police, the organizers did not seek or obtain a permit for Saturday’s rally, but they “widely advertised the rally.”

RELATED: Viral Video Shows Student White Supremacist Sucker-Punch Berkeley Anti-Trump Protester

In all, some 20 people were arrested, and “more arrests will be pursued” when police review footage posted on social media.

Charges include assault with a deadly weapon and other felony assaults.

IMAGES: Violent, Bloody Day In Berkeley

Police said 11 people suffered injuries and required medical treatment. Seven were taken to local hospitals.

READ: Protest Turns Violent, Bloody As Pro-Trump, Anti-Trump Camps Clash In Berkeley

http://sfist.com/2017/03/05/pro-trump_rally_in_berkeley_turns_p.php

..lp, that pro-Trump rally happened as scheduled on Saturday in downtown Berkeley despite the lack of a permit, and as was widely predicted, a bunch of black-clad anarchists showed up and started throwing punches. As the Washington Post reports and as you can see in the video above, "a few hundred" people showed up to the rally, including counter-protesters, and things turned quickly violent, with police arriving in riot gear.

Per the LA Times, seven people were injured and 10 people were arrested following the melee.

Saturday's March 4 Trump was one of about two dozen similar events happening simultaneously around the country, organized at least in part by the alt-right Proud Boys, a vaguely defined movement promulgated by former Vice editor turned conservative pundit, Gavin McInnes. And it was happening just a month after another alt-right hero, Milo Yiannopoulos, was supposed to speak at the UC Berkeley campus, but was instead met with a night of violent disruption and protest. When the March 4 event was announced in mid-February, it was billed as a rally in support of "free speech."

It was less of a show of free speech as free shouting, however, and as the Chronicle reports, "The fighting Saturday started even before the event began, with people throwing punches, swinging signs and tossing smoke bombs." Also, only about 60 to 75 Trump supporters were there, according to the Chronicle, and counter-protesters and self-proclaimed anarchists far outnumbered them.

According to the Daily Californian, "Trump supporters attempted to continue to march towards UC Berkeley’s campus as originally planned, but many counter-protesters blocked them to prevent them from leaving." Also, multiple Make America Great Again hats were set on fire.

Berkeley Councilman Ben Bartlett gave a statement to reporters saying "This is a sad day. We are better than this."

City spokesperson Matthai Chakko told the Chronicle that five people were arrested on suspicion of battery and four on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

Some of those in attendance, and the injured, suggested that Berkeley police had waited too long to intervene, but Chakko said they held back initially because they thought their involvement would cause an escalation. "The goal was to work quickly to identify and arrest anyone specifically involved in criminal activity,” Chakko tells the Chronicle. “We also made an attempt to intercede during acts of violence.”

Said Trump supporter David Tomes — who, bizarrely, is a 49-year-old yoga studio owner from Marin County and a Republican — "This is the most immature and disgusting display of human interaction."

Has he read any of the president's tweets lately?

https://medium.com/@willsommer/the-fratty-proud-boys-are-the-alt-rights-weirdest-new-phenomenon-7572b31e50f2

tracking

no link

Feb 5

The fratty Proud Boys are the alt right’s weirdest new phenomenon

Excerpted from Right Richter, a weekly newsletter on right-wing media

The first-ever Right Richter Special Report covers the phenomenon that is the Proud Boys adult “Western chauvinist” fraternity. It’s like Old School, but with uncomfortable racial and sexual subtext!

I suspect that the Proud Boys will soon get a good amount of media attention, now that antifascist protesters crashed their founder’s NYU speech last week. Unlike many alt-right developments that have scored press, the Proud Boys actually do have members who show up to real-life events.

Be warned, though: this is a mindbender. As one right-wing critic of the Proud Boys said in a video explaining their rules: “I shouldn’t know about any of this… I can’t relate to anyone in my life anymore.”

Consider the Proud Boy: An angular young white man stands in what looks like a poorly decorated frat house.

“Ready, go…Cheerio!” he says, before getting punched in the face.

A friendly beating ensues. He’s well on his way to being a Proud Boy.

(Update: The Proud Boy initiation video above went private, but here’s footage of multiple second-degree initiations.)

Proud Boys Origins: Where does a young man looking for fellowship turn to in a world where, according to some, masculinity is a sign of shame? To hear Vice co-founder turned neo-masculine reactionary Gavin McInnes tell it, the answer is the Proud Boys, a “pro-West fraternal organization.”

Launched last year by McInnes, the Proud Boys take their name and #POYB hashtag from “Proud of Your Boy,” a song in the Aladdin musical.

Aladdin apologizes to his mother for his rascally ways. When McInnes heard the song at a school recital, though, he thought that no one could truly be proud of a boy singing such an apologetic song. McInnes, a newly former Fox News contributor who says he quit the network because it wasn’t conservative enough, now looks to move the Proud Boys from his own fan club to something more significant.

The Life of a Proud Boy: Today the Proud Boys’ public Facebook group has thousands of fans, with several requests daily for admission to the private Facebook group.

They’re starting to make news?—?Proud Boys scrapped with antifascist protesters at one of McInnes’s speeches, and one account from “antifa” activists describes Proud Boys in “Make America Great Again” hats brawling with protesters at the Berkeley riots outside a Milo Yiannopoulos last week. A Proud Boy apparently got roughed up in the action.

The Proud Boys operate on tenets that McInnes has been pushing in his second career as a right-wing provocateur: unapologetically rowdy and pro-Trump, the Proud Boys operate under the credo that “the West is the best.”

The Proud Boys welcome gay and non-white members?—?as long as people of color who hope to be Proud Boys “recognize that white men are not the problem.” Other Proud Boy doctrines are similarly politically conservative and lame, including “glorify the entrepreneur” and “venerate the housewife.”

What a World: The Proud Boys were thrilled with Trump’s election:

Proud Boy Ethos: Being a Proud Boy seems to be mostly about getting drunk and shoving antifascists. A Politico video shot on inauguration weekend sums up what a Proud Boy meet-up is like: weird pseudo-intellectual stuff and street scuffling with leftists. McInnes reads from Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West, leads the Proud Boys on a march to the Deploraball?—?and licks a protester’s face along the way.

The rambunctious but socially awkward vibe is very odd-kid-in-middle-school-who-isn’t-really-a-nerd, or guy-who-got-into-a-fraternity-only-because-he’s-a-legacy. Which leads us to…

The Masturbation Thing: A recurring trope on various parts of the fix-your-life internet, whether it’s Reddit’s “nofap” page or pick-up artist forums, is the idea that abstaining from masturbating will bring about a wholesale life change.

McInnes promotes a similar idea called “#nowanks,” saying that masturbating more than once a month drains one’s interest?—?especially for millennials?—?in sex. The caveat: Proud Boys can always masturbate within a yard of a woman, with her consent.

Proud Boy Initiation: Proud Boys membership operates on three degrees. The first is just declaring yourself an “out” Proud Boy. The third is getting a Proud Boy tattoo?—?in a prescribed font, naturally?—?and keeping with the masturbation regimen.

Getting a shot (or not!) at the third level, though, means running a true gauntlet at the second: the cereal punching. In this initiation, Proud Boys enthusiasts punch a hopeful (albeit not around the face or testicles) while he cries out the names of cereals.

You must get the crap beaten out of you by at least five guys until you can name five breakfast cereals. If you hammer out, “Chex, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, and Special K” in a matter of seconds, you’re free to go. If you get flummoxed by the punches and cannot think straight, well, sorry, you’re going to get pounded.

This sounds like nonsense, but it’s real.

Proud Boy “Culture”: The Proud Boys have a uniform?—?a black Fred Perry polo shirt with yellow stripes. (Coincidentally or not, Fred Perry is also a popular brand for skinheads.) They have a catchphrase, “uhuru,” a slogan they cribbed from a video calling for reparations over slavery.

They also have a fan song that centers on the “Uhuru” refrain, and it’s weirdly catchy.

Proud Boy Feuds: Naturally, an alt-right, all-male movement is riven with feuds, both internal and external.

Despite how bizarre their politics can look from outside of Trump circles, the Proud Boys actually fall on the moderate side of the alt-right.

On far more extreme sites like the Daily Stormer, writers blast McInnes as a “cuck” for refusing to discuss the “JQ.” That’d be the “Jewish Question,” or the deranged idea that a Jewish conspiracy runs the world.

One video, shot in a mocking take on the Proud Boys usual throwback 1980’s style, summarizes what Nazis don’t like Proud Boys:

“We’re the Proud Boys, we don’t talk about race / I even let a black guy fuck my wife in my place. Don’t talk about Jews. Please, don’t talk about Jews. Please.”

What to Make of the Proud Boys: I think the Proud Boys are too weird to ever become more than an oddball off-shoot of the alt-right. Their name is terrible, and who wants to hand over their sexual activities to Gavin McInnes?

Still, the Proud Boys offer a bizarre, structured look into the new era of white male identity politics. It’s one that’s willing to fight, even if their looks are very bad.

Update, April 15: Since I originally wrote this in February, the Proud Boys have publicized a new, fourth degree.

The first degree is declaring yourself a Proud Boy, the second is getting the cereal beat-in, and the third is adhering to the masturbation regimen and getting a tattoo. Now the fourth degree is brawling with antifascists. Summarized here:

Fourth degree?—?The final step involves “a major fight for the cause,” McInnes said. “You get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa” and possibly get arrested.

The Proud Boys’ April 15 brawl in Berkeley, Calif. with antifascists and backed up by affiliated pro-Trump groups produced plenty of opportunities for Proud Boys to earn their fourth degrees.

In one video from the fighting, a Proud Boy?—?naturally in a black and yellow Fred Perry shirt?—?is shown getting arrested while another yells “You got your fourth!”

Gavin Miles McInnes (/m?'k?n?s/; born July 17, 1970) is a Canadian writer, actor, comedian, co-founder of Vice Media (which he departed in 2008),[1] and the host of The Gavin McInnes Show on Compound Media. He is a contributor for The Rebel Media and Taki's Magazine, and was a frequent guest on television programs on Fox News and TheBlaze.[2] The co-founder in 1994, and long-running editor (until 2008), of Vice Magazine, [3] McInnes has been called "the Godfather of the Hipster movement"[4] and "one of hipsterdom's primary architects".[5]

Since leaving Vice McInnes has become increasingly known as a right-wing provocateur[6] and media figure,[7] while also being called a "troll".[8] He is cofounder of a "pro-Western fraternal association" known as the Proud Boys.[9]

Contents [hide]

1 Early life

2 Career

3 Personal life

4 Publishing history

5 Filmography

6 References

7 External links

Early life[edit]

McInnes was born in Hitchin, England, to Scottish parents, James and Loraine McInnes.[10] His family immigrated to Canada when McInnes was four.[11] He attended Ottawa’s Earl of March Secondary School, studied English literature at Carleton University and received a BA degree at Concordia University in 1991.[12] As a teen, McInnes played in the Ottawa punk band Anal Chinook.[13] As an adult, McInnes immigrated to the US from Canada.

Career[edit]

McInnes co-founded Vice in 1994 with Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi.[3] His role as an editor at Vice led to him being referred to as "the Godfather of hipsterdom"[4] and one of the "primary architects of hipsterdom".[5] He occasionally contributed articles to Vice, including The VICE Guide to Happiness[14] and The VICE Guide to Picking Up Chicks,[15] and co-authored two Vice books: The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll,[16] and Vice Dos and Don'ts: 10 Years of VICE Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques.[17] McInnes was featured in a 2003 New York Times article about Vice magazine expressing his political views.[18] In an interview in the New York Press, McInnes said that he was pleased that most Williamsburg hipsters are white.[18] McInnes later claimed in a letter to Gawker that the interview was done as a prank intended to ridicule "baby boomer media like The Times".[19] After he became the focus of a letter-writing campaign by a black reader, Vice apologized for McInnes's comments.[18] In 2006, he was featured in The Vice Guide to Travel with actor and comedian David Cross in China.[20] He left Vice in 2008 due to "creative differences".[1] In a 2013 interview with The New Yorker, McInnes claimed his split with Vice was about the increasing influence of corporate advertising on Vice's content, stating that "Marketing and editorial being enemies had been the business plan."[21]

In 2008, McInnes created the website StreetCarnage.com. He also co-founded an advertising agency called Rooster where he serves as creative director.[22] In 2009, McInnes convinced a journalist at The Village Voice that he had been knocked out after losing a challenge to an MMA fighter.[23] The footage was actually an outtake from a failed TV pilot.[24] In 2010, McInnes convinced a journalist at Gawker that he had eaten a bowl of urine-soaked corn flakes after not winning their "Hipster of the Decade" competition.[25] The footage was actually an outtake from a collection of comedy sketches called Gavin McInnes Is a Fucking Asshole.[26]

McInnes was featured in Season 3 of the Canadian reality TV show Kenny vs Spenny, as a judge in the "Who is Cooler?" episode. In 2010, McInnes was approached by Adult Swim and asked to play the part of Mick, an anthropomorphic Scottish soccer ball, in the short-lived Aqua Teen Hunger Force spin-off Soul Quest Overdrive.[27]After losing a 2010 pilot contest to Cheyenne Cinnamon and the Fantabulous Unicorn of Sugar Town Candy Fudge, six episodes of Soul Quest Overdrive were ordered, with four airing in Adult Swim's 4 AM DVR Theater block on May 25, 2011 before quickly being cancelled. McInnes jokingly blamed the show's cancellation on the other cast members (Kristen Schaal, David Cross, and H. Jon Benjamin) not being "as funny" as him.[28]

An occasional standup comedian, McInnes directed a documentary on his standup comedy tour in 2013's The Brotherhood of the Traveling Rants.[29] For the film, McInnes faked a serious car accident. The year before (2012), he published a book titled How to Piss in Public.[30] In 2013, McInnes starred in the independent film How to Be a Man, which premiered at Sundance Next Weekend.[31] He has also played supporting roles in other films including 2010's Soul Quest Overdrive and 2015's Creative Control and One More Time.

In October 2013, McInnes was interviewed by The Huffington Post on a panel about masculinity. He said that "people would be happier if women would stop pretending to be men", and that feminism "has made women less happy".[32] He explained that "We've trivialized childbirth and being domestic so much that women are forced to pretend to be men. They're feigning this toughness, they're miserable."[33] A heated argument ensued with University of Miami School of Law professor Mary Anne Franks.[34]

In August 2014, McInnes was asked to take an indefinite leave of absence as chief creative officer of Rooster, following online publication at Thought Catalog of an essay about transphobia titled "Transphobia is Perfectly Natural"[35] that sparked a call to boycott the company. In response, Rooster issued a statement, saying in part: "We are extremely disappointed with his actions and have asked that he take a leave of absence while we determine the most appropriate course of action."[36] McInnes defended the article by saying "All I was saying was transsexuals have a huge suicide rate", and calling the reaction "fake hysteria".[37]

In June 2015, Anthony Cumia announced that McInnes will be hosting a show on his network, therefore retiring the Free Speech podcast. The Gavin McInnes Show premiered on Compound Media on June 15 and airs Monday through Thursday at 10:30 A.M EST. McInnes is a contributor to Canadian conservative portal The Rebel Media and a regular on Fox News' Red Eye, The Greg Gutfield Show, and The Sean Hannity Show. He writes for the web magazine Taki's Magazine,[38] and previously wrote for TruthRevolt,[39] Death and Taxes,[40] The Federalist,[41] and VDARE.[42]

He has also argued that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposal to "ban Muslims from returning to America is brash and bold, but it's also what we need in this day and age."[43]

On February 2, 2017, in an episode of his show The Rebel, McInnes announced his resignation from Fox News.[44]

McInnes was accused of antisemitism in March 2017 when, during a trip to Israel with The Rebel, McInnes made controversial comments about the Holocaust and also alleged Jews of being responsible for the Holodomor and the Treaty of Versailles. He subsequently claimed his comments were meant to be humourous. McInnes also produced a satirical video for Rebel called "Ten Things I Hate about Jews", later retitled "Ten Things I Hate About Israel", which also resulted in accusations of antisemitism.[45][46][6][47]

Personal life[edit]

In 2005, McInnes married Manhattan-based publicist and consultant Emily Jendrisak,[10] who is of Native American descent.[48] McInnes said in 2013 that after being an atheist most of his life, fatherhood made him believe in God and he became Catholic. He has three children.[49]

McInnes adheres to libertarianism. He has referred to himself as a "western chauvinist" and started a men's organization called Proud Boys who swear their allegiance to this cause[50][51] In a 2003 New York Times profile, McInnes stated: "I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, English-speaking way of life." [52] He previously wrote for VDARE, a white nationalist website.[53][54]

As a Catholic, McInnes is a member of the Knights of Columbus.[55]

Publishing history[edit]

The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll (Warner Books, 2003)

Vice Dos and Don'ts: 10 Years of VICE Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques (Grand Central, 2004)

Street Boners: 1,764 Hipster Fashion Jokes (Grand Central, 2009)

How to Piss in Public: From Teenage Rebellion to the Hangover of Adulthood (Scribner, 2012)

The Death of Cool: From Teenage Rebellion to the Hangover of Adulthood (Paperback version of How to Piss in Public) (Scribner, 2013)

Filmography[edit]

Kenny vs Spenny: Episode "Who is Cooler" (2006) – as himself (guest judge)

Vice Guide to Travel (2006) – as himself

Sophie Can Walk (2008) – as himself

Asshole (2009) – as himself

A Million in the Morning (2010) – as host

Soul Quest Overdrive (2010) – as Mick

How to Be a Man (2013) – as Mark McCarthy

The Brotherhood of the Traveling Rants (2013) – as himself

Creative Control (2015) – as Scott

One More Time (2015) – as Record Producer

Long Nights Short Mornings (2016) – as Comedian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Media

Vice Media (stylized VICE Media) is a North American digital media and broadcasting company. Originating from the Montreal-based VICE magazine co-founded by Suroosh Alvi,[4] Shane Smith, and Gavin McInnes (who departed the company in 2008),[5] VICE expanded primarily into youth and young adult-focused digital media, including online content verticals and related web series, the news division VICE News, a film production studio, and a record label among other properties. In February 2016, VICE Media launched a cable television network in Canada and the United States known as Viceland—a millennial-targeted network which draws upon the resources of the lifestyle-oriented verticals of VICE. The Viceland TV channel currently operates in many international territories, with plans to expand to a total of 44 by the end of 2017.[6] VICE Media broadcasts two news programs on HBO. VICE News Tonight, which premiered October 10, 2016, showcases a nightly roundup of global news, technology, the environment, economics, and pop culture while eschewing traditional news anchors.[7][8][9] HBO also broadcasts the Emmy-winning weekly documentary series VICE, which premiered on the network in April 2013. VICE features segments on global issues hosted by Shane Smith, co-founder Suroosh Alvi, and a rotating cast of correspondents.[10][11]

Originally based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, VICE re-located to New York City in 2001. In 2014, VICE Media was the subject of a 10%, US$200 million equity investment by U.S. broadcasting company A&E Networks, a joint venture of The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Corporation. Disney made a second 10%, US$200 million investment in 2015.

Contents [

1 History

1.1 Founding and early years (1994–2005)

1.2 Digital expansion (2006–2011)

1.3 Global expansion (2012–present)

2 Properties

2.1 VICE magazine

2.2 Digital channels

2.3 VICE News

2.4 Viceland

2.5 VICE HBO series

2.6 VICE Music

2.7 VICE Films

2.8 The VICE Guide To Everything

2.9 VICE Books

3 Business operations

3.1 Global expansion

3.2 Virtue Worldwide

4 Lack of union recognition

5 Office expansion in Brooklyn

6 See also

7 References

8 External links

History[edit]

Founding and early years (1994–2005)[edit]

VICE Media founders Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi, and Gavin McInnes[12] launched the magazine Voice of Montreal in October 1994 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada with government funding to cover music, trends and drug culture not covered in print.

They changed the name to VICE in 1996, and as the magazine became increasingly popular, the company found it difficult to scale their operations while based in Canada.[13] After being acquired in 1999 and moving to New York City , the co-founders bought VICE back and moved to new offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2001.[14] The magazine continued to gain attention and readership due to its content, commentary, and contributions from the likes of Terry Richardson, Ryan McGinley, and others. The magazine then rapidly expanded internationally, with Andrew Creighton and Andy Capper co-founding the UK division of VICE. The magazine then expanded further into all 5 continents.

Digital expansion (2006–2011)[edit]

In 2006, on the advice of creative director Spike Jonze, VICE began expanding into digital video, launching new video service VBS.tv as a joint venture with MTV Networks.[15][16] VBS gained a fan base with shows like The VICE Guide To Travel, Epicly Later’d, and Toxic. The documentaries on the channel featured unusual subjects, and were hosted by young people working at VICE Media, often the founders themselves.

In 2007, VICE Media began aggressively expanding its digital video operation, launching new channels, such as Motherboard (tech), Noisey (music), and The Creators Project, an arts/technology site founded in partnership with Intel. VICE Media would later launch sites around Electronic music culture (Thump), global news (VICE News), food (Munchies) and sports (VICE Sports). Additionally, VICE Media launched Virtue Worldwide, a creative services agency, to expand their capabilities for work around their platforms.[17]

In 2008, co-founder Gavin McInnes left VICE Media due to "creative differences" with the company,[18] and founded the website streetcarnage.com. He later co-founded Rooster, an advertising agency, where he has since been terminated after publishing his controversial opinions on transgender issues.[19]

Global expansion (2012–present)[edit]

In 2012, VICE Media continued to expand its coverage focused around news and current events.

In mid-August 2013, Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox invested US$70 million in VICE Media, resulting in a 5 percent stake. Following the announcement, Smith explained, "We have set ourselves up to build a global platform but we have maintained control."[20]

In 2013 VICE Media premiered a new 30-minute news program for HBO titled VICE, executive produced by Bill Maher. In 2014, the second season of the show won a Creative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series or Special in the 66th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards.[21]

In 2014, VICE Media launched its news channel, VICE News, which almost immediately gained global attention for its coverage of protests and conflict in Ukraine and Venezuela. As of October 2014, the leader of BBC’s Newsdesk claimed the organization was “playing catch-up” to VICE News.[22]

VICE Media has routinely advocated for their “immersionist” brand of journalism in the pursuit of more authentic and interesting stories. Their founders and editors have regularly garnered controversy from the likes of the New York Times’ David Carr, who bristled in an exchange with Shane Smith in the 2011 documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times. In a 2014 Time column, Carr said that VICE had since grown into a strong news entity. In August 2014, Carr published a New York Times column further reversing his earlier criticism of VICE, saying, "Being the crusty old-media scold felt good at the time, but recent events suggest that VICE is deadly serious about doing real news that people, yes, even young people, will actually watch."[23]

On July 2, 2014, VICE Media announced that it would be relocating into a warehouse space in Williamsburg formerly occupied by music venues 285 Kent, Death by Audio, and Glasslands. VICE spent US$20 million to renovate the 60,000-square-foot (5,600 m2) building as part of an eight-year lease,[24] facilitating the establishment of new production facilities with full broadcast capabilities, and received an offer of US$6.5 million in tax credits from New York state's Empire State Development.[25]

In June 2014, it was reported that Time Warner was negotiating to acquire a minority stake in VICE Media; among the company's plans were to give VICE Media control over the programming of HLN—a spin-off network of CNN which had recently struggled in its attempts to re-focus itself as a younger-skewing, social media-oriented news service. However, the deal fell through as the companies were unable to agree on a proper valuation,[26] and VICE Media chose to partner with A&E Networks for a 10% minority stake.[27] A&E's co-owner Disney made a second investment of $200 million[28]

On October 30, 2014, VICE Media announced a CDN$100 million joint venture with Rogers Communications that to facilitate the construction of production facilities in Toronto, as well as the introduction of a VICE-branded television network and digital properties in Canada in 2015. Rogers CEO Guy Laurence described the proposed studio as "a powerhouse for Canadian digital content focused on 18- to 34-year-olds" that will be "exciting" and provocative." The content of the partnership will be aimed primarily toward digital platforms.[29][30]

In November 2014, VICE Media announced that Alyssa Mastromonaco, who formerly worked in the Obama administration, would come on board as the company's chief operating officer in January 2015,[31] and that James Schwab, who had previously advised VICE and Dreamworks on media deals, would be joining as Co-President.[32]

On March 26, 2015, HBO announced it would renew its contract to broadcast the weekly VICE documentary series for four years, while expanding the annual broadcast schedule from 14 to nearly 30 episodes.[33]

In November 2015, VICE and A&E Networks announced Viceland, a then-upcoming cable network that would feature VICE-produced content.[34][35][36] In March 2016, VICE acquired controlling stake in UK television and film production company Pulse Films.[2]

VICE partnered with HBO again to launch nightly news program VICE News Tonight, beginning on October 10, 2016. The program is slated to run 48 weeks each year, featuring pre-edited video and graphics segments covering global news, technology, the environment, economics, and pop culture, while eschewing the use of live TV anchors.[37][38][39]

On March 22, 2017, VICE Media finalized a deal with French digital media studio Blackpills for the creation of a lineup of original short-form programming, set to premiere on VICE's digital video hub, video.vice.com. Blackpills is set to enlist filmmakers including Luc Besson, Bryan Singer, and Zoe Cassavetes in the creative effort. VICE's London subsidiary Pulse Films will also contribute original content that will air on video.vice.com.[40]

On March 14, 2017, VICE announced an expanded original programming deal with Snap Inc. The new deal builds on VICE's previous deal to serve as a 2015 global launch partner on the Discover platform. The first program planned under the new deal is Hungry Hearts with Action Bronson, starring the titular rapper.[41]

Later in March 2017, Shane Smith stated that Vice Media would enter the Indian market in the second half of 2017 through a partnership with the Times Group. The company intends to operate a TV network with the Times Group, mobile and online platforms, an OTT platform, and print media. Smith also revealed that the company had "held India back as a launch partner because it's so important to get it right. We didn’t just want to come in, set up a studio and go. We wanted to have a plan, make sure we did it correctly."[42]

Properties[edit]

VICE magazine[edit]

Main article: Vice (magazine)

VICE is a print magazine and website focused on arts, culture, and news topics. Founded in 1994 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the magazine later expanded into VICE Media, which consists of divisions including the magazine and website, a film production company, a record label, and a publishing imprint. As of February 2015, the magazine's Chief Creative Officer is Eddy Moretti, Andrew Creighton is President, the editor-in-chief is Ellis Jones[43] and Alex Miller is the global head of content. The monthly publication is frequently focused on a single theme.

Digital channels[edit]

Name Launch[1] Genre

VICE 2011 Culture

VICE News 2013 News

Noisey 2012 Music

Motherboard 2010 Technology and science

Broadly 2015 Women's interest

Munchies 2014 Food and cooking

VICE Sports 2014[2] Sports

The Creators Project 2010 Arts and creativity

Thump 2013 Electronic music

i-D 2013 Fashion

Fightland 2014 Mixed martial arts

Waypoint 2016[44] Video Games

Tonic 2016[45] Health and Wellness

^ Launch refers to year where the first VICE-produced video was released on their respective channels.

^ In 2014, VICE Media took over the YouTube-funded channel The NOC, which was launched in 2012.

VICE News[edit]

Main article: Vice News

VICE News is the name of VICE Media's current affairs brand, consisting primarily of documentaries. It was created in December 2013 as a division of VICE Media, Inc. VICE News promotes itself on its coverage of events that may not be as well covered by other news sources. VICE News creates content daily, distributing written articles and video on its website and channel.[46]

Viceland[edit]

Main article: Viceland

Viceland is a cable television network operated by VICE in partnership with A&E Networks in the U.S. and Rogers Media in Canada, primarily featuring documentary-style programs targeted toward millennials.[34][35][36]

VICE HBO series[edit]

Main articles: Vice (TV series) and Vice News Tonight

In 2013, HBO aired the first 10-episode season of a half-hour newsmagazine known as VICE, with Bill Maher as executive producer. The initial season saw international coverage for the season one finale that had VICE play an exhibition basketball game in North Korea with Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters. The show was renewed for a second season, which aired in 2014 and won an Emmy award for Outstanding Informational Series or Special.[47]

The show was picked up for two more 14-episode seasons by HBO in May 2014, which aired in 2015 and 2016.

In October 2016, a second Vice News program, a nightly news program called Vice News Tonight, premiered.

VICE Music[edit]

Vice Records

Parent company Vice Media

Founded 2002

Status Active (as of 7/27/2016, website is nonfunctional)

Genre Rock, hip hop, electronic, reggae

Country of origin United States

Location Brooklyn, New York

London

Official website www.vicerecords.com

VICE Records or VICE Music is a record label founded in 2002. It has released albums and singles by the following artists through various major label distributors:

120 Days

Acrassicauda

Action Bronson

Almighty Defenders

The Black Lips

Bloc Party

Boredoms

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Chromeo

Death From Above 1979

Deniro Farrar

Fucked Up

Growing

Head Wound City

Justice

King Khan and the Shrines

Off!

Rich Boy

Snoop Dogg

The Raveonettes

The Stills

The Streets

Team Spirit

Vybz Kartel

VICE Films[edit]

On December 8, 2014, 20th Century Fox and VICE Media launched VICE Films to finance, produce, distribute, market, and acquire narrative films.[48]

VICE Films released the feature length rockumentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad in 2008, which follows the thrash metal band Acrassicauda in Iraq. The New York Times praised the production and reporting, calling it a "splendid feat of D.I.Y. reportage...Both a stirring testament to the plight of cultural expression in Baghdad and a striking report on the refugee scene in Syria, this rock-doc like no other electrifies its genre and redefines headbanging as an act of hard-core courage."[49]

VICE Films had its first theatrical release White Lightnin' in 2009, and a documentary on professional bull riders, entitled The Ride, in 2010.[50]

Swansea was featured in a television documentary "Swansea Love Story" as part of the Rule Britannia series on VBS.tv. The episode covers a heroin epidemic in the UK.[51]

Reincarnated, a documentary film on Snoop Dogg's transformation into reggae artist and Rastafari Snoop Lion, was released in 2013.[52]

Lil Bub & Friendz, a feature documentary about meme cats such as Grumpy Cat,[53] premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18, 2013[54] and won the Tribeca Online Festival Best Feature Film.[55]

In 2014, VICE produced and distributed all this mayhem follows the rise and fall of renown skateboarders Ben Pappas and Tas Pappas.

“Fishing Without Nets,” VICE Films’ first narrative feature, won Best Director for Cutter Hodeine at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.[56] The film was released online in partnership with 20th Century Fox in October 2014.

The VICE Guide To Everything[edit]

The MTV series The VICE Guide to Everything, which premiered in December 2010, was a weekly news magazine featuring short video segments on various global issues, hosted by Shane Smith and roster of correspondents. The segments sought to cater to a younger audience with a more condensed, entertaining approach to the news.[57][58][59][60][61]

VICE Books[edit]

VICE Media, through its magazine VICE, has published the collections The DOs and DON'Ts Book and The VICE Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. In 2008, the photograph compilation The VICE Photo Book was released and featured published works from previous editions of the magazine.[62]

Business operations

...

Virtue Worldwide[edit]

On January 26, 2017, VICE announced the consolidation of its in-house agency Virtue with Carrot Creative, a digital and mobile agency VICE acquired in 2013, Pulse Films, a production company VICE acquired in 2016, and Starworks Group, a fashion and entertainment brand development agency VICE acquired in 2016, into the new “Virtue Worldwide.” Based in Brooklyn, New York, the combined 450-person global consultancy provides the services of a full agency network and multi-platform content creation studio. Virtue Worldwide will be led by CEO Lars Hemming Jorgensen.[85]

Relying on these in-house and acquired agencies, apart from its editorial operations, VICE works with advertisers to create global ad campaigns tailored to the company's younger audience.[86][87] The ads generate revenue from the production of the ad and placement within a given media property.[88] VICE maintains the separation between the production of branded and hard news content, while some critics contend that their operation "blurs the line between editorial and sponsorship".[89] This practice is sometimes referred to as "native advertising," due to how ads are often mingled with regular content.[90] Co-founder Alvi has also said that VICE has had "franchises that were underwritten by sponsors - that's our goal, to get a lot of our news franchises and stories and reports sponsored by advertisers. It's kind of the way news used to be in the fifties: 'Brought to you by Gillette' or whatever it was. We love that model."[91]

Some of the brands that VICE has worked with are Google, Unilever, Bank of America, Samsung, Toyota, Levi Strauss & Co. and Intel.[92] However, some advertisers have been controversial; Edition Worldwide, a subsidiary of VICE UK, was called "highly irresponsible" by the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and other anti-smoking groups for their work producing content for tobacco giant Philip Morris International. This was seen as unethical by anti-tobacco groups due to the young audience which VICE News usually attracts.[93][94]

Lack of union recognition

On August 7, 2015, the roughly 70-person writing staff of VICE Media US voted to unionize, joining the Writers Guild of America. VICE management quickly recognized the union. The successful union drive followed in the footsteps of Salon, Gawker, and The Guardian.[95][96]

In February 2016, staff members at VICE UK called for unionisation with an officially recognised trade union by the National Union of Journalists. Staff members said this was following the steps of VICE US (which unionised with the Writers Guild of America, East[97]), in order to allow the staff to "share in the success of the company", to strengthen job security by VICE providing better contracts, to address "pay issues ... so everyone gets a fair deal, including freelancers" and enhance career progression opportunities.[98]

This proposition was rejected by VICE UK; the company refused to recognise the National Union of Journalists but instead said that they were free to set up an internal staff council. VICE chief executive, Matt Elek, claimed the NUJ had displayed "a concerning lack of transparency from them about who they are purporting to represent here [and had] not been able to provide us with any numbers to demonstrate the degree of support they have in this office", adding that: "The NUJ are used to working with old print media businesses and structures – they are not used to innovative, digital workplaces like this where the culture has always been to encourage flexibility and allow people work across different departments."[99]

The rejection is in contrast to the US, where journalists working for the digital operations of VICE, Gawker and the Guardian have all won union recognition.[99] In response, Michelle Stanistreet (General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists) said:

The accusation that the NUJ has not been transparent in its discussions with VICE management is simply untrue. It's a shame that the company has proven so resistant to listening to its own staff and facilitating what they want – a collective voice at work. That the NUJ and its 30,000 members – including those at VICE – are not used to the reality of a digital workforce is laughable and shows it's the company who are out of date with 21st century trade unions. Rejecting calls for union recognition from their own journalists and then trying to fob them off with a Rupert Murdoch-style staff association is a pretty old-fashioned union-busting ruse that misses the point. NUJ officials and reps at VICE will continue with the push for recognition and if the company wants that to be gained

The Rebel Media (often stylized as TheRebel.media) is a right-wing Canadian online political and social commentary media platform[1][2][3] founded in February 2015 by former Sun News Network host Ezra Levant. The Rebel Media broadcasts its content on the Rebel Media channel and website.

Former Sun News Network parliamentary correspondent Brian Lilley and former SNN reporter Faith Goldy have joined the outlet.[4] Gavin McInnes[5] is also a contributor.

Levant argued that his online production would be unencumbered by the regulatory and distribution difficulties faced by Sun News Network and that its lower production costs would make it more viable.[6] A crowdfunding campaign raised roughly CAD 100,000 for the project.[7]

As of April 1st, 2017, the YouTube channel of the Rebel Media has more than 640,000 subscribers.[8]

Contents [hide]

1 History

2 Contributors

3 Past contributors

4 Shows

5 See also

6 References

7 External links

History[edit]

The Rebel Media was formed by Levant and Lilley following the closure of the Sun News Network, on which they were leading personalities. It soon attracted a number of other former Sun News Network personalities such as David Menzies, Paige MacPherson, Faith Goldy, Patrick Moore, and briefly by Michael Coren.[9]

In the summer of 2015, the channel, led by Levant, launched a campaign to boycott Tim Hortons, a chain of Canadian coffee shops, after it rejected in-store ads from Enbridge due to complaints from customers opposed to the oil pipeline projects being promoted by the ads.[10][11]

In early 2016, the Alberta government banned The Rebel Media's correspondents from press briefings on the grounds that, because Ezra Levant had testified in court in 2014 that he was a columnist or commentator rather than a reporter, none of his current correspondents could be considered to be journalists. On 17 February 2016, the government admitted that it made a mistake and said that it would allow The Rebel Media correspondents into press briefings.[12] The Canadian Association of Journalists supported preventing government from choosing journalism coverage."[13]

In late 2016, The Rebel Media advocated for accreditation by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to permit its access as journalists to their event. The Rebel Media had previously published articles claiming that the public is being deceived about climate change. Its criticism of journalists at the 2015 Paris climate change event was also described as inaccurate by DeSmog Canada.[14] Rebel Media also criticized that UN had accepted The Tyee, National Observer and DeSmog Canada.[15]

Rebel Media did receive support from the federal Canadian government and three journalism organizations and eventually was granted access by the UN.[16]

Lauren Southern, one of The Rebel Media's popular contributors, left the organization in March 2017.[17]

In March 2017, the Rebel sent several of its contributors on a tour of Israel. The trip became controversial when Gavin McInnes made questionable comments about the Holocaust and also alleged Jews of being responsible for the Holodomor and the Treaty of Versailles. He subsequently stated that these are not his own views. McInnes also produced a video for Rebel, intended to be humorous, called "Ten Things I Hate about Jews", later retitled "Ten Things I Hate About Israel" which also resulted in accusations of antisemitism.[18][19][20][21]

Contributors[edit]

Ezra Levant

Gavin McInnes

Tommy Robinson

Faith Goldy[22]

Jay Fayza

Barbara Kay[23]

David Menzies[24]

Brian Lilley

Sheila Gunn Reid[citation needed]

Andrew Lawton[citation needed]

Christopher Wilson[25]

Holly Nicholas[citation needed]

Tiffany Gabbay[citation needed]

Alexander Jones[citation needed]

Joe Oliver[citation needed]

Michael Campbell[citation needed]

John Robson[citation needed]

Victor Laszlo[citation needed]

Claire Lehmann[26]

Past contributors[edit]

Michael Coren

Lauren Southern

Marissa Semkiw[27]

Shows[edit]

The Rebel has several shows, including:[citation needed]

The Ezra Levant Show

On The Hunt with Faith Goldy

Stand Off with Lauren Southern

Culture Wars with Tiffany Gabbay

How's It Goin', Eh? with Gavin McInnes

The Sensible Environmentalist (hosted by Patrick Moore)

proud boys 2

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