Amna Nawaz:
The Proud Boys were founded a decade ago, but the far right group gained notoriety for being heavily involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Several leaders of the organization were convicted of seditious conspiracy before receiving clemency from President Trump.
Like many large membership groups, some divides emerged between national leadership and the more than 150 local chapters. That is how Jen Golbeck ended up in the backwoods of North Carolina earlier this year. She documented her weekend with the Cape Fear chapter of the Proud Boys for “Esquire” magazine. She’s also a professor at the University of Maryland, where her research includes a focus on social media and online extremism.
Welcome to the “News Hour.”
Jen Golbeck, University of Maryland: Thank you.
Amna Nawaz:
So, just as a reminder for our audience, the Proud Boys are labeled as an extremist group by the FBI. They’re described as far right, neo-fascist group by extremism researchers. They have articulated anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, misogynistic views.
You literally reached out to every single chapter to see if anyone would host you. Why? What did you hope to learn?
Jen Golbeck:
I think it’s important that we see all this discourse online across the spectrum. Some of it goes very extreme, but I’m really interested in, like, what are these people like on the ground? How much does their online behavior match what they say and do offline?
And I think the best way to do that is to go talk to them and listen. So, yes, I e-mailed every chapter in the country and one chapter agreed to talk to me.
Amna Nawaz:
So what did you find about how that online behavior matched with them in the real world? They describe themselves as a men’s club, right? What did you see with them in your time there?
Jen Golbeck:
I was really expecting it to be this very kind of bro-ey, kind of toxic relationship that they had with each other. They definitely are a men’s club.
They actually have very warm friendships, but all those things that you just said, the anti-Muslim sentiment, the misogyny, the very far right ideology, absolutely is there in person. So there’s a real match to online, but when they’re with each other talking within the group, they’re very friendly and warm.
They drove me out to their clubhouse and gun range, scanned me for electronics before to make sure I couldn’t be tracked on my way out there. And we spent half the day them shooting guns on the gun range. They had a chapter meeting that I was not allowed to attend, but I did talk to a couple people during that, and then had dinner and drinks on their porch.
So the way the day flowed is what I expected.
Amna Nawaz:
Yes.
Jen Golbeck:
The way that they were with each other was a little surprising.
Amna Nawaz:
What do you mean by that?
Jen Golbeck:
I thought they would be a little more cruel with each other, a little harsh in a way that men can sometimes get.
I didn’t see a lot of that, but I did see a lot of hostility towards groups that they saw on the outside. They would call them Antifa, their local liberal groups, trans people. That has been a special focus of them. That was — that was right out there in front. And they’re not shy about hiding those beliefs.
Amna Nawaz:
Tell me more about the line of thinking as you learned in your time with them, because this is a group that they debuted in a far right media outlet that’s led by an avowed white nationalist, right?
They have fought in a very violent way with Black Lives Matter marchers and protesters, and that they describe themselves to you as anti-racist. How do those two things line up?
Jen Golbeck:
They definitely don’t mean anti-racist in the way that people on the left would think of that term.
They don’t see themselves as white nationalists, and there are plenty of members of the Proud Boys, including in the chapter I visited, who are not white. In the Cape Fear Proud Boys, I met a man who goes by Skoden. He’s a Native American.
I asked him:
“Do you consider yourself white?” And he’s — he was a little offended at the question. Absolutely not. Enrique Tarrio, who is the chairman of the national chapter and was one of the people who got a sadistic conspiracy charge for January 6, is of Black Cuban descent.
So they’re not white nationalists in the way that some other groups are. They’re not racist in the way that you would see like from the Klan or from some very far right groups. At the same time, they’re pushing an agenda that a lot of us would see as white supremacist, sort of keeping in place the policies that have led to white domination.
If we look, for example, at the Supreme Court rulings recently that rolled back parts of the Voting Rights Act, that’s something that this chapter in the Proud Boys generally celebrated, seeing that as sort of restoring the power that should be in the hands of white people.
And so I think they see themselves as not racist because they’re not opposed to the existence of people of color. And that’s sort of where their I identification of racism ends. They don’t really see the structural racism and the way that people on the left are trying to fight that.
Amna Nawaz:
At the same time, you take a group photo before you leave, and in that photo, every single one of those members, many of them holds up what’s really associated with sort of like a white power hand signal.
Did you ask them about that?
Jen Golbeck:
Over and over. They texted me before and text me now with the emoji for that symbol in their text messages.
And, yes, I explicitly asked them, you say you’re not white nationalist, but why do you throw this up? And they gave me a line that they used a lot of the time, which is we do this to troll the libs. We do this to make liberals upset.
The origin of this OK hand signal meaning white power actually arose out of this online trolling situation. And it was literally, like, invented, let’s tell liberals that this means white power to upset them. But it became adopted by actual white nationalist organizations.
And so it occupies this very interesting and common ironic space on the right, where they’re sort of trolling, but they sort of mean it, and they use the excuse of, well, we’re just trying to upset people to get away with things that are intentionally offensive and a lot of them probably do believe.
Amna Nawaz:
You also point out in your reporting this interesting contradiction, which is they call themselves the Proud Boys, and yet in the photo, they are all hiding their faces. Did that come up in your conversations with them?
Jen Golbeck:
This was a precondition of my visit. So I said I wanted to take pictures, that I’d be bringing cameras out, and they agreed to that as long as I didn’t take pictures of any of their faces, which I agreed to. It came up a number of times while I was there taking pictures.
They’d see the camera come up and they’d pull the gaiters up over their faces. And I assured them that — I promised I would agree not to shoot their faces and would agree to that. So there is this contradiction there, right? They call themselves proud, but they don’t want to be identified.
On one hand, I understand this. They get identified and they do face consequences for that. People will leave them bad reviews on their businesses. They can get fired. I understand that they don’t want those consequences to happen. At the same time, it’s a tactic that they’re willing to deploy against the left.
They dox people they don’t like all the time. And, yes, how proud can you be if you don’t want to be identified with your ideology?
Amna Nawaz:
As you mentioned, your full report is online, available at “Esquire.”
Jen Golbeck, thank you so much for being here.
Jen Golbeck:
Thank you.
