Proud Boys Leadership Thread - Unrolled
The importance of knowing and understanding hate group leadership structures.
Last year I wrote an article pointing out that leadership in the Proud Boys never changed despite their attempts to diverge away from the truth. Gavin McInnes has been the driving force behind the group and maintains that role today. Why is this important? I'll tell you.
McInnes is a self-proclaimed Islamophobe. He's also openly racist and brags about it. When people lost their minds after seeing who the so-called "leader" of the Proud Boys was, I quickly pointed out that he was just a poster boy. Now that Enrique Tarrio has taken the fall, McInnes appears to be swooping in and putting himself back in front as the face of the group.
If it wasn't apparent when other Proud Boy leaders attacked Tarrio calling him a "token negro", then it should be as apparent as ever now.
No longer can the Proud Boys point to the Afro-Cuban and say, "we're not racist, look at him!" Those days are over. Their leader is an openly fascist bigot and doesn't care who knows it. They can't hide behind that lie anymore. In short, Tarrio as frontman was nothing more than propaganda theater.
Once in the US, a New York Press reporter asked McGinnes what he thought about his neighbors and he responded with, “Well, at least they’re not ni**ers or Puerto Ricans. At least they’re white.” He then doubled down on that comment to a New York Times reporter saying he meant that statement with a degree of sincerity saying, "I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life."
The discussion about the Proud Boys needs to shift to the same discussion we would have about any other race-based hate groups. Remember, they didn't start trotting Tarrio out until after Trump's failure to denounce the group and their racism became apparent. The next day they began a social media campaign making Tarrio the poster boy of their "social club".
Also remember, Tarrio shares the same beliefs that became the basis for the creation of the hate mob that the group is. As a Cuban, seeing racist and xenophobic Cubans (including Afro-Cubans) is not new. Tarrio’s bold arrogance, misogyny, Islamophobia, and homophobia are what we see among bigots in general. It’s a commonality among them.
The Proud Boys are information launderers; chaos agents with a singular goal in mind: to start an ethnic war of ideas and take their aggression out on Black civil rights groups and their white allies.
The fact that they're duping Black people and people of color only points to those people and groups ignoring McInnes' bigotry along with the hate espoused by Proud Boys’ "elders" and leaders across the country. Their fragmented nature makes them hard to track for the uninitiated. But they are no different than tracking the Klan.
The Proud Boys are skilled propagandists. They have centuries of lessons from animus that gave birth to this country. They hate anything and anyone that speaks against US colonialism, imperialism, and the oppression of Black and other non-white groups. They not only thrive on instilling fear, but they associate with and organize alongside many other hate groups just as we saw at the "Unite the Right" rally that ended in Heather Heyer's death.
They do this with no remorse and no compassion for fellow citizens. It's their hate and fascism or nothing.
The leadership structure is important because it tells us precisely what the group's intentions are. While many may brush off such knowledge, they do so at the country's peril. These hate groups fit the definition of terrorists because of their ideology.
DON'T TAKE THEM LIGHTLY.
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*links to source material in Twitter thread
Very informative piece.