This New York Times deep dive into the Proud Boys and the cops’ response to them is very enlightening. They’ve being taken seriously now, but the authorities knew all about them in the past and did nothing. Why? No surprise here — because they sympathized with them:
A protester was burning an American flag outside the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland when Joseph Biggs rushed to attack. Jumping a police line, he ripped the man’s shirt off and “started pounding,” he boasted that night in an online video.
But the local police charged the flag burner with assaulting Mr. Biggs. The city later paid $225,000 to settle accusations that the police had falsified their reports out of sympathy with Mr. Biggs, who went on to become a leader of the far-right Proud Boys.
Two years later, in Portland, Ore., something similar occurred. A Proud Boy named Ethan Nordean was caught on video pushing his way through a crowd of counterprotesters, punching one of them, then slamming him to the ground, unconscious. Once again, the police charged only the other man in the skirmish, accusing him of swinging a baton at Mr. Nordean.
Now, Mr. Biggs, 37, and Mr. Nordean, 30, are major targets in a federal investigation that prosecutors on Thursday said could be “one of the largest in American history.” Theyface some of the most serious charges stemming from the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January: leading a mob of about 100 Proud Boys in a coordinated plan to disrupt the certification of President Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat.
But an examination of the two men’s histories shows that local and federal law enforcement agencies passed up several opportunities to take actionagainst them and their fellow Proud Boys long before they breached the Capitol.
[…]
Local police officers have appeared at times to side with the Proud Boys, especially when they have squared off against leftists openly critical of law enforcement. Some local officials have complained that without guidance from federal agencies, their police departments were ill equipped to understand the dangers of a national movement like the group.
“It has largely been left to the locals to sort things out for themselves,” said Mitchell Silber, the former director of intelligence analysis at the New York Police Department.
To pre-empt violence by other far-right groups, federal authorities have often used a tactic known as the “knock and talk.” Agents call or confront group members to warn them away from demonstrations, sometimes reviving past criminal offenses as leverage.
Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, told a Senate committee this month that agents had done that in the run-up to a pro-Trump rally in Washington on Jan. 6 that preceded the Capitol assault. They contacted “a handful” of people already under criminal inquiry to discourage attendance, he said.
Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, said that federal agents had called or visited him on eight or so occasions before rallies in recent years. But it was never to pressure him to stay away.
Instead, he said in an interview, the agents asked for march routes and other plans in order to separate the Proud Boys from counterprotesters. Other times, he said, agents warned that they had picked up potential threats from the left against him or his associates.
But before the Jan. 6 event, no one contacted the leaders of the Proud Boys, Mr. Tarrio said, even though their gatherings at previous Trump rallies in Washington had been marred by serious violence.
“They did not reach out to us,” he said.
In summer 2017, neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Va., to announce their resurgence at the “Unite the Right” rally. Its organizer, Jason Kessler, was a member of the Proud Boys.
The group had been founded a year earlier by Gavin McInnes, now 50, the co-creator of the media outlet Vice. (The company has long since severed all ties.) He was a Canadian turned New Yorker with a record of statements attacking feminists and Muslims, and he often expressed a half-ironic appetite for mayhem. “Can you call for violence generally?” he once asked in an online video. “’Cause I am.”
The Proud Boys had been volunteering as body guards for right-wing firebrands like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos and frequently clashed with left-wing crowds, especially at college campuses. Proud Boys “free speech” rallies in bastions of the left like Seattle, Portland or Berkeley, Calif., routinely ended in street fights.
Yet Mr. McInnes shunned the Unite the Right gathering, saying in an online video: “Disavow, disavow, disavow.” By his account, the Proud Boys were not white supremacists but merely “Western chauvinists.” That stance helped the Proud Boys evade scrutiny from federal law enforcement.
The rally turned violent — a participant drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring more than a dozen — setting off a broad repudiation of the groups that attended.
Despite Mr. McInnes’s cautions, several prominent Proud Boys attended, including Mr. Tarrio, the current chairman, who was photographed blowing kisses to a crowd of counterprotesters. But members cite his role to argue that the Proud Boys are not racially exclusive: Mr. Tarrio’s background is Afro-Cuban, making him one of the rare nonwhite faces in the group.
The group, whose total membership is unknown but believed to be in the thousands, has never articulated a specific ideology or dogma. Its rallies, though, feature hyper-nationalist chants about immigration, Islam and Mr. Trump. Its members have lionized Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, and their events often appear to be thinly disguised pretexts to bait opponents into confrontations.
Indeed, the Proud Boys have made little effort to hide violent intentions. In fall 2018, for example, members of a New England chapter posted notes on the online service Venmo as they paid their monthly dues and transportation costs to an October “Resist Marxism” rally in Providence, R.I.
The event would quickly degenerate into brawls, just what some of the Proud Boys had anticipated.
“October blood money and bus,” one wrote with his payment.
“Right wing atrocities,” wrote another.
“Helicopter fuel. Those filthy commies are not going to push themselves out of helicopters,” quipped a third, alluding to Pinochet’s practice of executing dissidents by dropping them from the air.
Your average street brawler is someone who evokes Pinochet’s tactics. Right.
While Bill Barr was wringing his hands over Antifa in Portland throwing paintballs at a courthouse, these guys were flying all over the country being helpfully guided by the local police and the FBI.
The Proud Boys have been closely affiliated for years with Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s confidant who he pardoned at the end of his term. Stone was hanging with the Proud Boys on the day of the Insurrection. There is one degree of separation between these terrorists and the former President of the United States. And I’m not convinced there’s any separation at all.
