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May 4, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
21:27
The Ironic Trajectory of The Proud Boys

Richard discusses the curious nature of Gavin McInness’s treasonous drinking club. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Hey everyone, this is Richard, and I am going to talk about the Proud Boys and the more general trajectory of the alt-right or dissident right or alternative politics or whatever you want to call it over the past five to seven years.
So, as you probably have heard, the Proud Boy leadership...
was convicted of sedition today for their role in the January 6th attack.
This comes after the Oath Keepers, a similar group, maybe a little bit older, maybe more of the 90s militia types than the Proud Boys.
But they also face these same charges, and they also are going to prison.
Now that these charges have stuck, and I presume they will stick, although the Proud Boys will surely appeal this, but these charges will stick.
And it's going to do two things.
First off, it might open up prosecutions of other people involved in the...
Let's say planning or kind of middle management of January 6th.
And it's also going to obviously affect how we think about that event and the narrative that will eventually win out.
With regard to the first point, one thing that I have found rather...
troubling about the prosecution of January 6th is that some 1,000 people have been prosecuted, sentenced, or faced jail time.
There have been quite a bit of law enforcement with regard to this matter, as there should be.
But what I've noticed, and this is something I've talked a lot about, In my discussion podcast with the group is the fact that they seem to go for a kind of high-low enforcement of the law against people involved in January 6th.
And I think the January 6th commission was actually integral in this.
So what I mean by that is that...
All of the people, more or less, who entered the Capitol, broke a window, punched a cop in the face, pooped in the corridors of power, whatever, have been prosecuted and have served time to some extent.
And again, this is hundreds of people at this point.
I think the arrest total is over 1,000, actually.
On the other hand, the January 6th Commission seemed to focus like a laser beam on Donald Trump.
Now, they certainly talked about all sorts of people.
They showed images of the violence and mayhem.
But it was, in effect, a show trial to convict Donald Trump.
And I don't say show trial in the sense that it was meaningless.
I say show trial in the sense that it's not an actual trial, although it seems like one.
It has all the trappings and the mechanism of a trial, but no one is actually convicted.
But it was a show trial in order to convict Donald Trump, which is fair enough.
But to be honest, I don't feel that sorry for Trump.
But I do actually feel sorry for the hundreds of people who have been arrested and.
And who have FaceTime, already served it, or may be facing something worse, and had their lives upended, at the very least, by the whole process, and by the whole Stop the Steal movement, and by the whole Trump movement, to be honest.
If I were Joe Biden, I actually would have seriously considered pardoning all of these people, and basically just said, listen.
You did something really wrong, and you need to face that reality.
However, I'm not sure spending some time in jail is going to help you break out of that reality.
And in a way, you were a victim of this thing just as much as the police at the Capitol were.
Now, obviously, it's different.
These people were the aggressors, of course, but they were also victims in the sense that they were progressively brainwashed over the course of years by QAnon propaganda, by stop-the-steal nonsense, by Trump himself through his tweets, through his call for a wild rally on January 6th and all this stuff.
They acted almost like automatons, an army of robots, if you will, in order to achieve a political objective of Donald Trump and his team.
So in a way, they are victims, and in a way, I feel sorry for them, and if I were an A kind of Nixon-goes-to-China gesture, which I think are usually the most successful ones.
What has frustrated me, what I find troubling, is that the middle management of January 6th hasn't really been held to account.
So we have all of these loons and goons who have been arrested properly, and we have this specter of a prosecution against Donald Trump.
For January 6th to take place, there's a whole middle group of people who, in effect, have gotten off scot-free.
And I think in so many ways, the January 6th committee was an attempt to whitewash the conservative movement.
In a way, the January 6th committee was the exact opposite of what Tucker Carlson depicted it.
He depicted it as a partisan witch hunt along with Donald Trump.
It was actually something else.
It was a partisan whitewash.
It was Liz Cheney's attempt to whitewash all of her friends, the good Republicans who weren't exactly MAGA, including Mike Pence, to demonize Trump, deservedly in many ways, and to...
basically demonstrate that there were violent actors.
The fact is, the entire conservative movement was kind of headed in this direction.
And that includes many people who...
Uh, so, um...
Four members, including Enrico Terrio, who became a leader of the Proud Boys, are going to prison.
In fact, looking at this case, we haven't gone through sentencing yet, of course, but looking at this, they are in a whole heap of trouble.
This is according to the New York Times.
The sedition charge, which is rarely used and harks back to the Union's effort to protect the federal government against secessionist rebels during the Civil War, was also used in two separate trials against nine members of another far-right group, the Oath Keeper militia.
Six of those defendants, including Stuart Rhodes, the organization's founder and leader, were convicted of sedition.
Each of the others were found guilty of different serious felonies.
On the conspiracy counts alone, the men could face a maximum of nearly 50 years in prison, and they were found guilty of other felonies as well.
So this is very bad.
You know, there was so much talk about a civil war on the grift right, you know, the Tim Pool-type programming.
Civil war, civil war, civil war is coming.
And in many ways, it depicted conservatives as kind of victims in the civil war.
The Civil War didn't come exactly.
There was this insurrectionist, seditious event.
But it seems like we've gone straight to Reconstruction and we're convicting people of sedition.
So it came and went.
I think it's worth revisiting the Proud Boys because they're a unique group.
I think if in the public's imagination, and here I'm talking about the broader public, I think if they hear Proud Boys at this point, they probably think of them as a violent white supremacist gang.
That meme has been inculcated, and in many ways, it's accurate.
In some ways, not.
But I think some of the history of all of this has gotten lost.
So I first heard about the Proud Boys in 2016, along with many others.
And I actually heard about them before the election of Donald Trump.
And when I first heard the name, I assumed that it was a gay conservative group.
I guess that word proud has been kind of commandeered by the gays over the past 10 years.
But anyway, but it wasn't.
And Gavin actually sent me an email.
So this is an email that I received on the evening of September 20th, 2016.
This email was sent to Jared Taylor, myself, and Peter Brimelow.
So my sense is that Gavin was trying to kind of like...
Curry favor, get a little cred from the white nationalist leadership.
Do you guys know about my new organization?
It's going very well.
We are a multiracial.
We are multiracial, but recognize the West is the best.
And that was predominantly white men.
Okay, not great grammar here.
So he's basically saying we are multiracial, anyone can join, but...
You know, we're Western chauvinists and, well, you know when we say the West, we just basically mean whites.
The Blacks on board, don't blame Whitey for nothing.
Okay.
I think it's a reasonable solution to the mess we're in.
And then he links to an article at Talkies Magazine.
I invited you guys to the Facebook page.
It's private and a wealth of great links and dank memes.
Woo!
Blast from the past from 2016.
So...
Gavin, at the beginning, was currying favor with white nationalists, basically telling us that it's more or less white nationalism, you know, but America is a diverse place, so we're gonna let some based African Americans and Hispanics on board, etc.
That was Gavin's...
Image of the thing as it began.
Now, I was on Gavin's show many times during 2016 and even into 2017.
It was pretty fun.
I don't remember what we talked about exactly, but it was, you know, fair enough.
And then things started to change by kind of mid to late 2017.
And I should mention this.
Gavin and I have a history.
I used to be the editor of Talkies Magazine in 2008 and 2009.
I think it was up until 2010 that I left and founded AlternativeRight.com in 2010.
And Gavin had been around.
I mean, I think he had written an article for the American Conservative or something at some point in like 2005, let's say.
And I actually recruited him, and that recruiting meant meeting him at various coffee shops in Williamsburg, going full hipster, embedding myself in hipsterville in order to get him to be a writer, kind of a columnist.
So he wrote a number of articles for me while I was editor, and then he became a kind of regular columnist after that.
And I don't know what his status is at the moment.
I think he moved on and kind of focused on doing talk shows.
But anyway, by 2017, Gavin was basically denouncing the alt-right.
So he had gone from, in 2016, being like, hey guys, listen, we're on your side, just let us do our thing, and so on, which, of course, I was fine with.
And then he moved to, we're not white supremacist.
We're not the alt-right.
I can't believe they call us the alt-right.
It's so rude.
Look, our leaders have black wives, and look at this Hispanic guy, and blah, blah, blah.
So they thought that they could gain something by basically claiming they're not racist.
Now, this is something that's very typical.
This is something you see among almost every conservative group for the past 50 years.
But again, the trajectory of the Proud Boys proved to be quite ironic in this regard.
Because I would say that even...
Today, I bet if you found someone who's still a member of the Proud Boys, they're still going to be saying that line.
Just as they're convicted of sedition against the government, they're still going to be saying, well, but we're not anti-Semitic.
Or, we ain't white supremacists.
We're just American patriots.
They're going to still say that line as their leadership goes to prison for 50 years.
Well, they got into hot water in 2018 as well, and there was a violent altercation in New York City.
And Gavin made a rather cagey and strategic decision to step away.
From leadership of the Proud Boys.
He was, of course, the founder.
And he said, as of today, I'm officially dissociating myself from the Proud Boys.
And I'm reading here from an article in The Guardian, referencing the New York group as the NYC9, McGinnis said, I am told by my legal team and law enforcement that this gesture could help alleviate their sentencing.
He added, fine.
At the very least, this will show jurors they are not dealing with a gang and there is no head of operations.
Well, that's a ridiculous statement.
And it's so ridiculous, I think it...
It really must be a lie.
First off, you can't...
If you commit a crime, you can't then dissolve the gang a week later and say, see, we're no longer a gang, and so we weren't...
It doesn't work that way.
It's out of sequence.
Secondly, I don't think it really...
I don't know.
Whether there's a top guy or not...
The question is whether it's a gang or is it not.
If you act like a gang, you are a gang.
Like, if you walk like a duck and you quack and walk like a duck, you are a duck, effectively.
So it was basically a way of Gavin getting out from this group and avoiding any kind of criminal prosecution while claiming that he's doing it in support of the boys, you know, kind of thing.
and from 2018 on the group Basically became one mini Charlottesville after another in Portland, Oregon.
And they were kind of having these battles over nothing, in effect.
The Charlottesville protest was inspired by a defense of the Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues.
On some level, by 2018 and 2019, the Proud Boys were just the Proud Boys.
They were going to fight Antifa basically over nothing.
Now, Gavin also bragged about avoiding Charlottesville and not wanting to be involved with those white supremacists there.
As it turns out, Jason Kessler, who organized Charlottesville, was a member of the Proud Boys.
But, you know, what can we say?
And yet, again, the ironic trajectory of this group is that they continue to denounce white supremacism as if that's going to gain them favor in the media, while they increasingly become an actual...
violent gang and eventually involved themselves in an insurrection against the U.S. government.
Now, it was a buffoonish, clownish I think there's also this kind of like weird quality to the alt-right of the past five years where they want to present themselves as kind of ostensibly ridiculous.
as if that will change the essence of who they are.
So, you know, Gavin will say like, we're Western chauvinists.
We're, you know, the best, the West is the best.
And, you know, we invented the modern world and all this kind of stuff.
And then they'll also, you have initiation rituals where you have to name five, serials while people are punching you.
The Proud Boys themselves isn't named after gay pride as I first thought.
It's actually named after a song from Aladdin called "Proud of Your Boy" or something like that.
So there's just this kind of ironic absurdity to the whole thing.
And it's presented as a face on a group as if that changes the essence of what they're about.
This is something you definitely saw in the alt-right in 2016.
And I think the Proud Boys...
Which were clearly inspired by the alt-right, just kind of continued it, and they kept feeling like this game would work.
This relates as well to the optics matter of post-Charlottesville 2017 and 2018, where it's all about, oh, if we just wave a flag, then this is the one weird trick that allows us into the corridors of power or something.
It's this weird kind of like...
Obvious deception attempt.
And it just doesn't work.
You have to be who you are.
And you can't just come up with one weird trick that's going to lead you out of this.
So again, the ironic trajectory of the Proud Boys is that they continue to be politically correct in their rhetoric, of course, while they continue to get increasingly violent and increasingly engaged in actual sedition against the government.
And it's also not...
Wrong to say that Gavin wanted this and was directly calling for it.
Now, just to be honest and fair here, I'm not sure I'm quite innocent in this regard.
You can certainly find tweets of mine from 2017 where it's like, yeah, be a badass, be a tough guy, all that kind of stuff.
That vibe was in the air, there's no doubt.
Gavin took that to a whole new level.
There are super cuts of Gavin on Joe Rogan, on other podcasts, or on his own show, just directly calling for violence and directly calling for non-defensive violence.
Just saying, if you see someone who looks like Antifa, punch them in the face.
He said that and things like that all the time.
So again, you have this weird...
Like, a dichotomy between, you know, thinking that you're going to get off scot-free by claiming you're not the alt-right while you're directly calling for violence at the same time.
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