Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Are Proud Boys “Rolling Out” Defending Trump, as Its Leader Tweeted?
November 11, 2020
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio with supporters (Anthony Crider)
By Bill Berkowitz
On Saturday, November 7, after major media outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio called on his followers to rise up and defend Donald Trump. “We’re rolling out,” Tarrio said. “Standby order has been rescinded.” Tarrio was referring to Trump’s statement at the first presidential debate, when he refused to denounce the Proud Boys, and told them to “stand back and stand by.”
The Proud Boys are a far-right and neo-fascist male-only organization that promotes and engages in political violence in the United States and Canada.
According to the Daily Dot website, “While Tarrio’s statement is vague, his followers on Parler [an alternative social media site used by ultra-conservatives] have begun calling for violence over the false claims that Trump lost the election due to widespread voter fraud.”
With Twitter flagging false claims made by Trump and his supporters, Parler has become “the most-downloaded app in the United States as conservatives flock to the self-styled "free speech" app after the US election,” according to the BBC. “Owner Dan Bongino said the service was adding ‘thousands to users per minute’ on Sunday. The BBC noted that “Parler founder John Matze said the app had added two million new users in a day, and increased its daily active users four-fold over the weekend.”
Enrique Tarrio’s words initiated a flurry of comments, many of which were predictably incendiary. So much so that Tarrio was forced to issue a statement saying that he was not calling for violence. “Lol media has already taken my previous statement and turned it into some type of call for violence,” Tarrio said. “This is how they make protesting illegal.”
On November 9, the Williamette Week reported that “The Portland Police Bureau arrested three men Sunday night on charges of criminal mischief after a group of protesters … reportedly broke windows at the headquarters of the Multnomah County Democratic Party and painted graffiti on the walls. ‘NO PRESIDENTS,’ they wrote.”
“On Saturday in Carson City,” the Sierra Nevada Ally’s Brian Bahouth reported, “after most major news organizations, include[ing] Fox News, called the race …, as many as a hundred people gathered along Carson Street in front of the Nevada State Capitol waving flags and signs. …A pack of Proud Boys in matching apparel patrolled the sidewalk and threated violence on several to include this reporter.”
Bahouth noted that the Proud Boys “wore matching hats, shirts, hoodies, Polo-style shirts, and flack jackets. Their apparel was accented with gold trim and an Armanen rune, reminiscent of the lightning bolt-like symbol used by Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel or SS.” For more on the fashion choices of fascist groups, click here.
Although there hasn’t been an eruption of violence, the Proud Boys are only one of several bitter ender white nationalist/supremacist groups that are “parroting the president’s claims of widespread fraud, which he has provided no evidence to back up,” Forbes magazine’s Nicholas Reimann recently reported.
Vice’s Trone Dowd reported that a police chief in Arkansas “resigned after calling for ‘Death to all Marxist Democrats’—referring to Biden voters—on a social media platform popular with the alt-right. As the election results tilted in Joe Biden’s favor on Friday, Police Chief Lang Holland, a top cop in the small town of Marshall, encouraged attacks against Democrat voters on Parler, a message board used by right-wing groups like the Proud Boys after they got kicked off more-mainstream platforms.”
Holland, a member of the Parler groups, The Patriots and Ozark Proud Boys, “said he wanted to see Trump voters assault Biden voters after the president was reelected. ‘When this is over and Trump is president for four more years. Do not go to sleep,’ one of the posts says, according to screenshots posted by KATV, the ABC affiliate in Little Rock [Arkansas]. ‘Do not forget what these Marxist bastards have tried to do. When you see one in public get in their face do not give them any peace. Throw water on them at restaurants. Push them off sidewalks. Never let them forget they are traitors and have no right to live in this Republic after what they have done.’”
Vice noted that “:The posts have since been deleted from Parler, as Holland created a new account in an attempt to pass off his old one as a fake.”
In mid-September, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued an assessment that was leaked to The Nation magazine, describing “lone offender white supremacist extremists” as posing “the greatest threat of lethal violence” in the 2020 election.
The FBI wasn’t the only institution to be concerned about post-election violence. The American Independent’s Amy Lieu and Donna Provencher reported that “The Brookings Institute … predicted post-election violence a week before the election, blaming Trump for advancing a narrative of a rigged election, as well as a rapid increase in radicalized conservative and anarchist groups during the coronavirus pandemic.
“According to Brookings, there was a 60% growth between February and April of Facebook pages promoting political uprisings. And other fringe right-wing extremist groups besides the Proud Boys — like QAnon and the Oath Keepers — have hinted at violence if Trump were not reelected.”
Washington D.C.’s FOX 5 recently reported that “D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she and her staff are monitoring reports of a weekend protest that could include members of the far-right group, the Proud Boys.” Bowser said that the city is “follow[ing] those activities and be prepared for those activities. Our police chief will have a similar posture this weekend as he did last week. We will be there to support peaceful exercise of First Amendment demonstrations."
One of the major concerns is the question of openly carrying weapons, in that "The gun laws here are different than in other places. People who have a permit to carry a weapon can carry a weapon. We call it a concealed carry permit," she added.
"The gun laws here are different than in other places. People who have a permit to carry a weapon can carry a weapon. We call it a concealed carry permit," she added.
How far the Proud Boys, QAnon, Oath Keepers and other white nationalist and Trump-supporting groups will go in responding to Trump’s false election fraud claims, is anybody’s guess.
Follow BuzzFlash on @twitter
Continue the conversation at the BuzzFlash Nation group on Facebook