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The Proud Boys are a male-only far-right organisation which promotes a street-fighting style of political violence, which have managed to gain influence within sectors of the US Republican party, particularly former president Donald Trump.
While presenting themselves as the unofficial security division of the Republican Party, they have been implicated in violence outside the political mainstream. Five members of the Proud Boys organisation were implicated in the attack on the Capitol in 2021, potentially in key roles and face charges of seditious conspiracy, a crime established in the Civil War which carries a potential sentence of 20 years. One of the accused, Jeremy Joseph Bertino, has pleaded guilty to possession of firearms. Around forty people charged in the Capitol siege have been identified leaders, members or associates of the Proud Boys. Adding to their reputation for being at the heart of high-profile political violence, former Proud Boy Jason Kessler was a primary organizer of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, at which Heather Heyer was murdered, deliberately run over by a vehicle.
The Proud Boys is a hierarchical organisation, with four levels. Procession through the levels involves rites of passage from reciting an oath to enduring frat-boy initiation rituals. The highest level can only be attained through involvement in physical violence. There are currently chapters of the Proud Boys outside the Americas, in Europe and South-East Asia. Rather than being steeped in extremist ideology, the Proud Boys have a fixation with popular culture. The movement takes its name from a song written for the Disney cartoon Aladdin. They have also adopted a football hooligan-inspired style of dress, adopting black and yellow as a colour scheme. Their signature look is a Fred Perry polo shirt in these shades, although the manufacturers have now ceased production of this item in order to dissociate themselves from the movement. Branded Proud Boys merchandise can be worn in combination with MAGA caps, referring to Donald Trump’s electoral promise to Make America Great Again. Their own signature acronym is FAFO – Fuck Around and Find Out, which positions any violence the group perpetrates as a response to provocation. The group is perhaps more dedicated to violence than ideology, but expresses a consistent sense of grievance at the supposed decline of masculinity in the West.
The Proud Boys were founded by Gavin McInnes, a Canadian podcaster, in 2016. After a rocky career in the media, McInnes found his niche promulgating far-right ideology with his own distinctive edgy, hipster style. He had drifted from one media platform to another – including Vice, which he co-founded – until settling as an independent content creator where he could express his self-described ‘alt-lite’ ideas using social media platforms. The designation ‘alt-lite’ expresses a connection with the boarder alt-right movement but claims a distance from its overt racism; nevertheless, they are explicitly hostile to Islam, and there is a strong trend towards Western supremacism and anti-Semitism within the movement.
The movement originated when McInnes began to meet other men in dive bars in New York City so share their frustration at political correctness. The founding of the group was announced in September 2016 in Taki’s Magazine, a right-wing periodical. McInnes’s founding document clearly positions the group as neither Nazi nor racist. Instead, he uses language drawn from the ‘incel’ movement to appeal to men who feel a alienated and unsuccessful in their social and sexual lives. He states, ‘We allow weak, beta male virgins to join because our fraternity is about helping men improve their lives and that includes all men.’ McInnes’s idea of masculinity is both traditionalist and aggressive. Women are not permitted to join the Proud Boys. They position masculinity as under threat from a ‘feminised’ society and left-wing ideologies. McInnes’s ‘Ten Ways to Save Humanity’ include ending welfare for the reason that it allows women to leave their husbands, and ‘venerating’ housewives. Their precise ideology is hard to pin down, due to McInnes’s and other members’ use of irony and dark humour, which they use to distance themselves from their more extreme statements. Nonetheless, many members have expressed ideas more in tune with neo-Nazis than McInnes’s statement would imply. Generally, the Proud Boys main characteristic is an assertive homosociality and hyper-masculinity, which is expressed through heavy drinking and street violence.
McInnes’s incendiary social media accounts have been removed from all major platforms, the last to cancel him being YouTube which took down his channel in 2020. McInnes officially stepped back from the organisation in 2018, in the face of lawsuits against Proud Boys after some members became involved in a brawl with Antifa outside the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan, where McInnes was an invited speaker. He issued an internal ‘bye-law’ condemning violence in the aftermath of this event. Two members were sentenced to four years for assault. Over 2018, a member of the Proud Boys (named Rufio, after a character in the 1991 film Pan) was filmed knocking out a rival member of Antifa – a year after a video of white nationalist Richard Spencer being punched by Antifa went viral. Footage of Rufio’s attack was shared on Alex Jones’s Infowars channel, and the Proud Boys reached new heights of notoriety within right-wing media circles.
Upon McInnes’s departure, the leadership settled upon Enrique Tarrio, an American of Afro-Cuban heritage, after passing briefly through the hands of Jason Lee, a choleric and litigious lawyer. Tarrio had previously led the Florida chapter of ‘Latinos for Trump.’ After he encountered members of the Proud Boys at an event organised by Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right British columnist for Breitbart. Tarrio attended the Unite the Right rally alongside the Proud Boys. He became a fully-fledged member in 2018.
Despite the change in leadership and the incident at the Metropolitan Republican Club, relations between Republican Party members and the Proud Boys remained close. Veteran Republican ‘fixer’ Roger Stone approached the Proud Boys to provide security at one of his events, and developed links with the group bringing them into the inner echelons of the Republican Party, before his fall from grace a year later, when he evaded criminal prosecution for witness tampering when Trump issued a presidential pardon. Trump himself signalled his support of the Proud Boys in his presidential debate with Joe Biden in 2020, naming the organisation and instructing them to ‘stand back and stand by’ when asked to disavow their support. While Trump’s rise to power coincided with an increase of violent right-wing groups of all stripes, it was the Proud Boys that gained official recognition from Trump. This increased their profile within and outside the Republican Party, and was celebrated by both Tarrio and McInnes as a victory for the group.
They maintained their status as one of the best-known right-wing mobs after Biden’s election. From 2020 onwards, the media-savvy Proud Boys have shown themselves to be effective at exploiting cultural trends. They exploited anti-mask and vaccine activism to raise their profile and increase their numbers. They also tagged onto QAnon activism, which further heightened their association with Donald Trump. Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theorists believe Trump is waging a secret war against elite paedophile rings. Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement erupted into public consciousness. The Proud Boys positioned themselves as supporters of the police, and challenged protestors from the BLM movement, often engaging in violent brawls. Prior to the BLM movement, many protests were already tense face-offs between far-right and Antifa; afterwards they became more likely to spiral into outright violence. The moral support that the Proud Boys provide to a police force that feels itself embattled and under suspicion may have led to favouritism in the policing of street violence, which has become widespread. The city of Portland, Oregon has become a front-line for conflict between the Proud Boys and Antifa, where a 2021 protest devolved into a gunfight in which Proud Boys and Antifa exchanged fire.
In 2021, Reuters revealed that Tarrio had worked as an FBI informant from the period 2012-2014. This eroded confidence in his leadership, and four state chapters split away from the Proud Boys. Nevertheless, the movement continue to maintain a profile through piggybacking on other social causes, currently exploiting local parents’ campaigns against Drag Queen Story Hour taking place in their communities. They also continue to maintain close relationships with Republican politicians, including campaigning for Marco Rubio, the senior Republican senator for the state of Florida. Besides building relationships with Republican politicians who may appreciate having , the group has electoral ambitions of its own, with a member filing to run for office in California in 2022.
However, leader Enrique Tarrio stands accused of sedition in relation to participation in the Capitol insurrection, and a conviction is likely to disrupt the Proud Boy’s activities severely. With a reduced access to mainstream social media, they predominantly organise on Telegram, and have lost access to the general public. Whether or not they re-emerge after the Capitol trials are completed is unclear. Despite McInnes’s self-conscious distancing from the group in 2018, he has remained engaged with their activities via Telegram and Parler, the right-wing alternative to Twitter. He also addressed a Proud Boy annual events in 2020. Whether he has the will or the ability to sustain the movement in the event of Tarrio’s imprisonment remains to be seen; it is also unknown whether another potential leader waits in the wings. Even if the Proud Boys dissolve if Tarrio is imprisoned, this may not erase the potential for violence they pose; it may only lead to former members swapping out their Fred Perry polos and MAGA hats for Hawaiian shirts and military fatigues through associating themselves with the Boogaloo anti-Government militia, or other alternative violent far-right organisations.