*Who Are The Proud Boys, 'Western Chauvinists' Involved In Political Violence?*
"Who Are The Proud Boys, 'Western Chauvinists' Involved In Political Violence,?" The Guardian, July 14, 2018. *EXCERPTS:
On 30 June in Portland, Oregon, a rally staged by the rightwing Patriot Prayer group degenerated into a riotous fight with leftwing counter-protesters. Ethan Nordean, a muscular 28-year-old from Washington state, was captured on video fending off two baton blows from a masked counter-protester. He then flattened his assailant. The video has been used to buttress the preferred rightwing explanation for the Portland riot: leftwing aggression. It has also been seized on as a recruiting tool by a group, the Proud Boys, which has risen to prominence on the far right since the 2016 election and which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists as a hate group..
Since early 2017, a core group of Proud Boys from the Pacific north-west have been active participants in a number of rightwing rallies. Nordean has attended events in Portland and Seattle. Before the 30 June rally, Patriot Prayer founder and Republican Senate candidate Joey Gibson issued a national call for participation. At least 60 Proud Boys answered. Some came from other states, including California and Texas. Many wore body armour, helmets and gas masks.
Keegan Hankes, an SPLC researcher, said the group had “been open and very consistent about using violence as a tool”. Its use of the footage from Portland, he said, showed how “a good bit of this is about attention-seeking as well. They live on the internet to promote their brands.. McInnes claims his group does not promote violence at all. In a post in which he denied that his group is part of the “alt-right”, he said it was simply “a men’s club that meets about once a month to drink beer.” McInness, who was born in Britain and moved to Canada at a young age, was a co-founder of Vice Media, which he left in 2008. After a stint with the Rebel Media, a far-right Canadian company, and a decade as a columnist for the “paleoconservative” Taki’s Magazine, he is now a host on CRTV, a conservative network. He founded the Proud Boys, which he calls a “fraternal organization” in 2016.
As well as items from a growing range of official merchandise, members often wear red Donald Trump caps. Their Fred Perry shirts have a history in subcultures including football hooliganism; black and gold are the colors of anarcho-capitalism, a libertarian ideology which seeks to abolish government in the interest of free markets.
The group’s magazine has published a list of its political commitments, which echo talk-radio style constitutional conservatism and add libertarian touches such as opposition to the war on drugs and an antifeminist veneration of traditional gender roles. The group thus falls in line with McInnes’s views, which are broadly Trumpist. In Canada, the Globe and Mail summarized his beliefs as: “Libertarian politics, father-knows-best gender roles, closed borders, Islamophobia and something he calls ‘western chauvinism’.”
Gavin McInnes denies that his group is racist, and he and other Proud Boys point to the presence of non-white members. But in Portland on 30 June, a man in Proud Boys colors taunted counter-protesters through a bullhorn. “Illegals,” he said, should have their heads “smashed into the concrete”. Another man marched alongside the group and yelled racist slurs. Other Patriot Prayer rallies at which Proud Boys have been present have drawn members of far-right groups including Cascade Legion and Identity Evropa..
McInnes has claimed repeatedly that “fighting solves everything.” In a podcast last May, he said: “You’re not a man until you’ve had the crap beaten out of you [and] beaten the crap out of someone.”...Cont..
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/14/proud-boys-far-right-portland-oregon
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