“My message to the Proud Boys and to all the other white supremacist groups is: stop and give up.” The words are by Joe Biden on Wednesday afternoon. “This is not what we are. This is not what we are as Americans.” The night before, it was the person who, in the debate with Donald Trump, gave the coup for this extreme right wing to gain visibility.
Asked by moderator Chris Wallace whether he would condemn militias and white supremacist groups, the president and candidate for a new term said he was willing to do so, but he did not and immediately said: “I would say that almost everything I see is from the left and not from the right. I am willing to do anything. I want to see peace. ” With Wallace and Biden challenging him to make the conviction, Trump turned the tables: “Do you want me to call you? Who do you want me to call? Give me a name”, to which Biden released “Proud Boys.”
The response was quick and short and may have gone unnoticed by many viewers, wrapped up in noise (in just over an hour and a half the Washington Post said the interruptions made by the candidates: 71 by Trump and 22 by Biden): “Proud Boys, step back and be ready.” Instead of publicly condemning racism and supremacism, the President of the United States had just winked at a violent far-right group.
And it was the band itself that assumed itself to be violent. It was created in 2016 “as a joke” by Canadian Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of the vice media communications group. “I don’t like violence, justified violence is great, and fighting resolves everything, “he said.” I want violence. I want punches in the face“, according to the ABC News.
McInnes, like Trump, has an ambiguous speech about values. McInnes, for example, has publicly rejected belonging to the alt-right racist after the white supremacy demonstration in Charlottesville – where a person was murdered after an individual charged with a speeding car against a group of opponents. This despite his proximity to the demonstration speaker Richard Spencer and a Proud Boy, Jason Kessler, having organized the rally.
Not even Trump went so far in retreat: his words became famous when condemning the “two sides”.
The Proud Boys contest the ratings of white supremacists, but their actions are often conveyed by white supremacists and extreme right-wing politicians, in addition to the gestures, symbols and language that they use to denounce them as such.
McInnes’s past commentator on sites of extreme right and conspiracy theories, but also as a regular guest on TV stations like Fox News deny this supposed moderation. He defended Rodney King’s beating by the police (the case that led to huge riots in California in 1992), insulted blacks, Asians, transsexuals and Muslims, has a tattoo with neo-Nazi symbolism, does the Nazi salute and defends violence.
Apparently, the aspirant to join the gang has to declare: “I am a chauvinist from the West, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world”. And to reach the highest sphere, the militant’s test of fire is “beating an antifa”.
Murder as an inspiring gesture
Officially, McInnes severed ties with the Proud Boys after a night when the band showed its face. In 2018, Republicans invited him as a speaker at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York, where presidents and senators spoke in the past. McInnes, who is also an actor, decided to start his performance with the reconstitution of the murder with a samurai sword by Inejiro Asanuma, leader of the Japanese Socialist Party, by a far-right nationalist. “An inspiring moment”, he wrote before the event on Instagram.
It didn’t stop there. On the way out, his acolytes attacked protesters who were outside the club. Some of the members were arrested and two were sentenced to four years in prison. The case led to McInnes leaving as the group’s leader.
The call via Roger Stone
Before, the band of “proud boys” had started a relationship with Trump’s world. The call – at least one – was through Roger Stone. Former adviser and longtime friend of Donald Trump started by hiring the Proud Boys for security. When Stone went on trial for obstruction, false testimony and manipulation of witnesses to Congress, the Proud Boys escorted and sat in the courtroom.
Already on Wednesday, in the face of growing indignation created by his words, he said: “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are, but whoever they are has to leave,” he told reporters at the White House. “Withdraw, let the forces of law do their work. Whoever they are, let them go.”
Roger Stone, who was sentenced to 40 months in prison for trying to disrupt the investigation to Trump, was eventually forgiven by his friend and president. Hence, Trump’s justification of not knowing the group is similar, in the double gesture, to McInnes, sometimes saying one thing, now another.
Facebook and Twitter banned the gang for spreading a hate message in 2018, YouTube did it last year.
The militants found other platforms like 4Chan, Parler and Telegram. According to the SITE Intelligence Group, which follows extreme right groups, the message was received in a party environment and there was no shortage of people who saw the message as a signal to attack.
“Trump legitimou-os”
“He legitimized them in a way that nobody in the community expected. It’s unbelievable. The celebration is incredible,” said Rita Katz, SITE’s executive director, to the Washington Post. “In my 20 years of monitoring terrorism and extremism, I never thought to see something like that from a US president.”
Since Trump came to power in 2017, violent actions by racist far-right supporters have multiplied in the United States. An attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue killed 11 people in 2018. In August 2019, a young American man killed 22 people, mostly Hispanic, for racist reasons, in a hypermarket in El Paso, Texas.
In the face of the outrage against systemic racism and police brutality against African Americans sweeping the country due to the George Floyd case, Trump never acknowledged the problem, preferring to criticize the riots and violence he claims to be from the extreme, anti-movement -left.
That was said again in the debate, after talking about the Proud Boys. “I tell you something: someone has to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a problem on the right, it is a problem on the left.”
Donald Trump has come to threaten with the antifa ban and its assimilation to a terrorist group. Except that, unlike the Proud Boys and similar bands, like the Patriot Prayers, the antifa is a movement and not a group, whose common denominator is the struggle against fascist groups.
– .
