WE ARE PROUD BOYS

Journalistic account of the rise of the increasingly influential—and virulent—far-right cabal whose members “have been on a yearslong fascist march.”

“I think there’s not enough violence in today’s day and age.” So declared Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes in late 2016. HuffPost writer Campbell has for years been following what in essence was a street gang gone viral, one named, with due irony, after a song from the Disney movie Aladdin, performed at a school performance by “a twelve-year-old boy with brown skin.” By the author’s account, a mere non-White complexion is enough to set McInnes into paroxysms of rage, since the Proud Boys are among the chief fomenters of the “replacement theory” that holds that White people are being crowded out of America by members of one-time ethnic minorities. The loosely knit but growing group’s vision of the world may be “chaotic,” writes Campbell, but the threat they represent to their political enemies—i.e., anyone to their left—is real. As McInnes once proclaimed, “We will kill you, that’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We look nice, we seem soft, we have ‘boys’ in our name, but like Bill the Butcher and the Bowery Boys, we will assassinate you.” The group’s leadership in the 2017 Charlottesville riots and its de facto bodyguard status for Donald Trump at the storming of the Capitol have yielded plenty of legal trouble, with conspiracy charges leveled at 17 members for their roles in the latter event. Still, Campbell suggests, Jan. 6 was only a warm-up. Even as the Proud Boys are “working to sanitize their image,” they continue to create chaos at school board meetings, women’s health clinics, and statehouses. More disturbingly, their numbers are growing, and they have become “the most successful political extremist group in the digital age.”

Right-wing politics are scary now, but this well-researched account foresees an even darker future.