Proud Boys and a New Era of American Fascism

Refuse Fascism: Proud Boys and a New Era of American Fascism

Episode 138 Sun, Dec 18, 2022 5:59PM • 51:56

Andy Campbell 00:00

The Proud Boys feel just absolutely emboldened to continue what they’re doing. They’ve never been told by anybody that what they’re doing is wrong other than the people that they are attacking. These guys started out as an anti-immigrant, very just violently nationalist gang. Their rhetoric has gotten way worse and more violent. They have a huge support network and nobody’s doing anything to stop it. We are seeing extremist forces gathering together in the same way they’ve done since Unite the Right — since Trump took power really — at more of a rapid clip than ever before. The Proud Boys are on a roll today and certainly the spirit of January 6th has clearly not gone anywhere.

Sam Goldman 01:03

Welcome to Episode 138 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Andy Campbell. Andy is a senior editor and reporter at Huff Post focusing on crime and extremism. He is the author of ‘We Are Proud Boys, how are a right-wing street gang ushered in a new era of American extremism’.

But first, thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews our show on Apple podcasts, shares and comments on social media or YouTube. It helps us reach more listeners and we read every one. So after listening to today’s episode, go help us find more people who want to refuse fascism by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts and encouraging your friends and fam who listen to do the same. It makes a great holiday travel activity. Subscribe, follow so you never miss an episode, and of course continue all that sharing and commenting on social media.

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Before we get in to today’s episode, we have to talk about where we are right now in relation to the fascist threat. I am keeping it brief, or trying to, because there is a lot in today’s interview. Thanks to Talking Points Memo we now have access to a trove of thousands of text messages. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former Chief of Staff received and sent during the post election period. It is another indictment on top of a mountain of other evidence that shows that the Republi-fascist party didn’t merely tolerate Trump but collaborated with him, including proactively, to subvert the election both before and after the January 6th insurrection.

Despite what Meadows’ memoir might try to convince folks these texts in addition to testimony given to the House January 6th Committee underscore that he was at the helm. While some of Meadows’ text messages had already been made public, many had not, particularly those that were sent from and to Republican members of Congress. Here are just two examples: Representative Jim Jordan texted Meadows that Vice President Mike Pence should disqualify electoral votes from key states to prevent a certification of Biden’s victory. Meadows replied, “I have pushed for this. Not sure it is going to happen.” Representative Ralph Norman texted Meadows on January 17th 2021, citing a bonkers conspiracy theory about Dominion voting systems rigging the election and declaring via text “our last hope all caps is invoking marshall [sic] law. PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”

The text messages show he met with these officials and that this GOP effort to subvert the election was supported by right wing dark money groups, including the Conservative Partnership Institute, which hired Meadows after Trump left office. The correspondence includes both the most high profile and the most unhinged figures within the Republican legislative roster — with significant overlap of course — overwhelmingly working to overturn the peaceful transfer of power in favor of fascism. In related news, the House Select January 6th committee will take up criminal referrals against Trump on at least two charges: obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

The Select Committee could pursue additional criminal referrals for Trump and others, including the charge of insurrection. There are referrals will be voted on Monday during what’s very likely to be their last public meeting for the panel before the end later this month. Keep in mind referrals do not carry any legal weight or compel the Justice Department to act. Also keep in mind Trump has roamed free for now, about two years. We alerted people — we, Refuse Fascism — to the rolling coup that Trump and his minions were carrying out and which, if we’re really being honest, never stopped, now nearly two years later, that Trump is still free to hold his fascist rallies, that he is still considered the GOP front runner that proponents of the Big Lie hold political office, that state level GOP fascists are adopting platforms advancing a fully fascist program, while also promoting the Big Lie, highlight again, the fact that this country is full of fascists, and that this will not easily be resolved.

Last week, we spoke with Micah Lee of The Intercept about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and how it fits into a larger fascist assault on our society. Little did we know that Musk would go on to target Micah just days later, making that conversation all the more prescient and worth hearing. Lee’s account was suspended along with seven other leading journalists covering Musk-olini suspending their accounts as well as banning any links to alternative social media platform Macedon, where many of those targeted by or even just disturbed by Elon and his fascist acolytes are flocking to. Most, not, all of these journalists accounts have been reinstated.

But the message is clear: Twitter is now a site that actively welcomes Nazis and suppresses anti fascists and Musk will use whatever power he has to fuck with whoever he sees as an obstacle to this transformation. To his twisted mind, all the better for him if that decimates Twitter’s positive value to society, and puts up barriers to meaningful journalism and dissent throughout wider society as well. I think it’s also worth noting the parallel between Dave Chappelle’s morally bankrupt championing of Elon Musk, and the deep ties and influence that Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes had within the “alternative comedy scene” in the early aughts. Something Andy and I touch on in our convo. With that, here’s my interview with Andy:

Sam Goldman 07:54

A collection of fascist figures, white nationalists, ultra nationalist European leaders, got together in Manhattan for the New York Young Republicans (NYYRC) annual gala this past weekend, where Gavin Wax, the group’s president, declared total war on perceived enemies. In his remarks to a full room on Park Ave on New York’s Upper East Side, he declared, “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena; in the media in the courtroom, at the ballot box and in the streets.” At the same event, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told a crowd — to cheers, applause, standing ovation — “I will tell you something. If Steve Bannon, I organized that”, in reference to January 6th, “we would have won, not to mention it would have been armed.”

As I read and watch videos of all of this, I thought about the Proud Boys rise to fame on the scene at New York Metropolitan Republican Club four years ago now, where they were invited to the Metropolitan Republican club, Gavin McInnes was invited, he proceeded to oversee/facilitate a violent mob attack on the streets of New York. I thought many things about this, one of which, I am so glad to be talking to Andy Campbell. Andy is a senior editor and reporter at Huffington Post focusing on crime and extremism, and he’s the author of We Are Proud Boys, How a Right-wing Shrieking Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism. Welcome, Andy. Thanks for coming on to the show.

Andy Campbell 09:45

Oh, thanks for having me. It’s a real treat for me to be here.

Sam Goldman 09:47

I wanted to just start with a basic question: Who are the Proud Boys? and maybe even more than who they are, what do they stand for? What is their ideology?

Andy Campbell 10:00

Well, first of all, you drew a great connection between this group and that event in Manhattan over the weekend, because it reads like a Proud Boys manifesto. These guys started out as an anti-immigrant, very, just violently nationalist gang on the show of Gavin McInnes, their founder and also the co-founder of Vice Media, although he’s not there anymore. Gavin McInnes gets pushed out of Vice Media in about 2008, and he brings his audience of violent men to his new show with him on which he pelts them with, just misogynist, bigoted rhetoric.

He says that women, especially working women, are responsible for the downfall of masculinity and men in general. He says that anybody can join his new group as long as they agree and respect the fact that white men have an outsized role in the success of the West, so there’s a white supremacy angle there, and most of all, he wanted them to get out there and do what crusty old Republicans couldn’t do, and fight for GOP causes. He made their top rank — the fourth degree of four degrees. To get that top rank, you have to commit a significant act of violence or get arrested for the cause, and the cause at the time being Trump’s cause, but what is now just general GOP causes.

As they evolved from this street gang that would show up at MAGA rallies and fight any counter-protesters that they can find, through different leadership and through other Proud Boys. They grew into a more political monster. They realized, following their involvement in Unite the Right rally in 2017, where, I was there and several Proud Boys were there, including Enrique Tario, their former chairman, they realized — Enrique Tario told me directly for this book — “we are going to dissolve if we are seen like the groups there, at Unite the Right, which is just a hate group, just a violent hate group.” We need to become more political, we need to get involved with the GOP. We need to get involved with law enforcement. We need to pull this country to our side and project ourselves as something more patriotic and more constitutionally protected than just a violent hate group.

And that’s exactly what they did, they’ve garnered all of these relationships with Trump’s inner circle, with all kinds of Republicans by doing security for them, by working with them on their campaigns, and doing a little bit of their own politicking themselves. So, they have pulled law enforcement, politicians, media onto their side to the degree where even after their outsized role in January 6th, they’re continuing on their violent parade today, six years later, and they’re being celebrated. Like you said, the GOP is at these official events touting their exact rhetoric that they’ve been pushing since they started in 2016. The Proud Boys are on a roll today, and certainly the spirit of January 6ith is clearly not gone anywhere.

Sam Goldman 13:12

Before I forget it, I just want to say that one of the things that strikes me as you’re talking is that a lot of people right after January 6th, I think that they thought: Oh, this is the nail in the coffin of that whole trend, the mob, if you will, that’s done. Instead, we’ve seen them exit that period battle tested, hardened, along with the Republican Party become hardened and transformed; their ranks purged of any non-MAGA, non-Trumpist vestiges that had left in the first place. There was this mutual support that we’re seeing that I think the Proud Boys are really prime example of, and your book does a lot of work on it how the legal and extralegal forces of fascism work together, and the danger that poses in their aims to beat, cheat, and terrorize their way back to power. As Marjorie Taylor Greene made clear, to make sure that this time it’s unrestrained and even more brutal and grotesque.

Andy Campbell 14:22

To your point, the DOJ has 465 guilty pleas after January 6th. They have Proud Boys leaders sitting in jail right now, and they have hundreds more arrests to pour over, and yet we are seeing extremist forces gathering together in the same way they’ve done since Unite the Right, since Trump took power really, at more of a rapid clip than ever before, and nobody has ever rebuffed these guys. It shows the resiliency of the Proud Boys that they can move and organize and mobilize with money, with allies and with support from the GOP in the field despite their leadership sitting behind bars. It also just shows that the normalization of political violence in this country, they’ve moved the goalposts so far at this point that a swath of Americans do believe that they are out there fighting for GOP causes, that they’re doing something patriotic out there.

Ann Coulter, a media pundit and Gremlin, wrote a blog following January 6th, it was like this salivating, loving blog titled “Thank God for the Proud Boys.” She’s writing this love letter to these guys for doing security for her. That is just how a lot of Republicans view these guys. They are mobilizing now following January 6th on all GOP grievances showing up at all facets of American civic life. It’s not just MAGA rallies anymore. It’s not just Antifa / BLM events. It’s children’s hospitals where trans healthcare is being discussed. It’s drag queen story hours across the country, and those types of events are what Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are complaining about on day to day.

You have Tucker Carlson on Fox News complaining about drag queens, and a week later in Nevada this summer Proud Boys show up to a public library where there is a community drag queen story hour that the community wanted and has been having for a long time. They show up armed with rifles, send parents and children fleeing, fearing for their lives thinking there’s going to be a mass shooting there. That kind of harassment and violence has been playing out week to week all summer through today. Columbus, Ohio a few weeks ago, you have Proud Boys joining Neo-Nazis joining Patriot prayer and other allies in the street to cancel drag queen offense.

The end goal here is they’ve already moved past January 6. The GOP has moved past this despite all the convictions, they are working to move the goalposts so far that all drag and LGBTQ is seen as this inherent threat by flooding the zone with the rhetoric that MTG and the Proud Boys put forth, the groomer rhetoric. Really all this shows is that prosecutions are just one part of this response. Obviously it’s done something to tamp down the Oathkeepers and a little bit to tamp down the Proud Boys, but the spirit behind January 6th is very, very much alive, and it’s going to take a lot more of a cultural reset than just prosecutions to start to rein this in.

Sam Goldman 17:34

Exactly. I think that that last point is really important, and also to consider that the forces that unleashed this mob have yet to be held to account. There has been zero accountability there, and this won’t be resolved through some arrests, even significant ones. I think one of the trials just started today.

Andy Campbell 17:55

There was the second Oathkeepers trial started. The Proud Boys are just about to start their sedition trial. We’ll probably see the majority of that in the new year. But we will learn a lot and I’m very excited about it. But you’re right, it’s not doing anything about their mobilizations and it’s not doing anything to tell them, the extremists in the street, that they’re not wanted, because they are wanted. They’re being told that day in and day out.

Sam Goldman 18:21

I would also say that the notion that the courts or some sort of election result is going to just reset is we’re seeing evidence every day that that isn’t how it works. I think what you were getting at with talking about these mini mobs that are going after educators, health officials, parents, and elected officials as well. You know, like all of it, these mini mobs are going after Proud Boys and friends. I think it’s interesting to see — interesting, not in a positive way interesting and a horrifying way — to see this new collaboration — perhaps it’s not that new, but I think that they’re working together more so than in the past — between what I consider a driving force in the Trumpian movement, which is the Christian fascists, and these more like Stormtrooper Proud Boy, Patriot Front-type forces whipping up a special hatred against LGBTQ people, anyone who defends them, and labeling folks as predators and pedophiles, and how fucking dangerous that is. Yes, they’re playing a role in this street, but they’re also playing a role in the state houses and they are influencing, not just through language, which matters, but also through influencing policy.

Andy Campbell 19:36

I think that the other factor is that what January 6 showed is that there’s no longer room for doubt that the Tucker Carlsons, the MTGs, the Trumps of the world know that they have this mob in the streets and that their rhetoric leads to real world violence immediately. The pipeline is so short; it was only a couple of days between Trump naming the FBI people who raided Mar a Lago. And then somebody showed up with a gun to shoot up an FBI field office. They know exactly, at this point, who they have in the field, and they know what their words mean. And following January 6th, following the club Q shooting recently, their rhetoric has gotten way worse and more violent. They are prodding these guys in real time.

Sam Goldman 20:27

Going back to what you were saying a little while ago, you talked about the police and the GOP more broadly, I wanted to talk about what cultural, societal, institutional support fosters the Proud Boys’ continued existence is such a powerful force.

Andy Campbell 20:46

The first big thing is that they have their political power. In 2017, like I said, after Unite the Right, Enrique Tario decides they need to become a more political monster. He already had, at the time, a relationship with Roger Stone and a number of other Republicans in Florida. So he uses his relationship with Roger Stone to gain influence in political circles. Roger Stone told me in an interview that he had been advising Enrique and the proud boys for years on how to run for elections, how to make themselves look more politically palatable, and he also advised them several times on how to get better lawyers and sort of get their way out of trouble, including after that 2018 attack at the Metropolitan GOP club in Manhattan.

So, early on, these guys had the political power. They were doing security as well for people like Ann Coulter, Matt Gaetz, and other politicians across the country to kind of show that, hey, we’re here defending you against the great Antifa “scourge” and BLM and all that. But they also knew that to continue what they were doing in the street, that they needed law enforcement on their side. Their infiltrations of law enforcement — or really, the other way around — is sweeping. They use pro-police messaging at their rallies. Any rally you go to, especially those that I covered in Portland, Oregon, you’ll see a line of Proud Boys, a line of counter protesters — which often are just locals, not necessarily black clad Antifa — but you’ll see between them heavily armored police.

Because the Proud Boys are carrying Blue Lives Matter banners and other pro-police messaging, who do you think that the police are going to turn their munitions on? Always the locals, never the Proud Boys. There’s this kind of inherent support that goes with whoever the police view are on their side, but also, a lot of police believe in what the Proud Boys are doing; that their own, because of laws in place, that the police themselves can’t do what they want to do in terms of violent enforcement, and the Proud Boys are out there for them. So you have Proud Boys who are officers.

You had two Proud Boys who were at the insurrection and were also law enforcement, a father and son. So you have Proud Boys members who are also law enforcement and law enforcement doesn’t often know what to do when it finds out that it has extremists in its ranks, because, hey, it’s not illegal to be a Proud Boy. Some jurisdictions look at that and say: Well, this is a free speech issue. Now, you and me understand that this is actually a bias issue. When you have a person of color, for example, who’s standing across from an officer who’s a member of a extremist gang with political violence in its rule set and white supremacy is one of its tenants, do you think they’re going to get a fair shake? I don’t think so. But there’s no national standard to respond to that, and so they have that support network.

Lastly, they have the biggest media on their side. They have this gamut of bigoted carnival barkers and far right media, the Tim Pools of the world. They have Gavin McInnes’s violent tenets for them, which were first featured on Joe Rogan’s podcast, who has 11 million followers. And then of course, you have Fox News, which brings them on and supports them day to day. So they really have the trifecta when it comes to support network and all of these things are pushing this extremist machine forward. It’s not just the Proud Boys, it’s the entire politically violent spectrum of extremists, and none of them are doing anything to rein it in. When it does come time for Fox News to rein it in, they instead, of course, cast blame elsewhere. Tucker Carlson maintains that Antifa did January 6th. The new rhetoric on the right is that it’s a fed op because Proud Boys have been infiltrated by Federal officers, but that really says more about their ability to vet their own than it does about sort of the federal government leading January 6th. They have a huge support network and nobody’s doing anything to stop them.

Sam Goldman 25:01

I think that there’s a trend that I keep saying: They’re not going away on their own. None of these forces are just going to slink back into the darkness from which they came. There’s no reason they would. There’s no evidence that they will. In addition to the multitude of factors working to push this forward, there’s also a sheer lack of resistance. It is so past time that people stop looking to the GOP to rein itself in — to find its, what is the phrase, like truer or angels or something like that? [AC laughs] whatever the phrase is. It’s not going to happen. That isn’t how this works. You talk about kind of what’s greased the wheels for them being able to propel forward in your book. You talked about the mainstream media and the role that they played in platforming, and both sides-ing in refusing to truly sound the alarm on the danger that they posed, and I definitely agree with that. I think that there’s also this piece where the general public continues to just cede the ground to them.

Andy Campbell 25:19

The most obnoxious and really terrifying question that I get to this day as an extremism reporter is why don’t we just ignore them? They’re not in my community.

Sam Goldman 26:20

What do you say to that?

Andy Campbell 26:22

First of all, that’s how we got Unite the Right, that’s how we got all sorts of extremism. In fact, when you ignore, the opposite happens. The KKK didn’t fall out of the height of its power in the late 20s because the nation rebuffed them. It’s because enough of the nation agreed with them, that they just weren’t needed as a political force anymore, and it was sort of ingrained in the country. That’s what you have to worry about with the way we’re headed with this rhetoric now. Always, the answer has been community activism. Unite the Right, the government, law enforcement did not have a major role in putting together the $25 million lawsuit that took down a lot of the architects of Unite the Right. It was local activists and researchers putting together dossiers.

What happens here with January 6th was not the federal government that put together thousands of dossiers on people. It was researchers and community activists. And, it’s not law enforcement that has been tamping down piecemeal extremist mobilizations, it’s been the localities. It’s been people coming together and physically sometimes fighting back. Often these things get disrupted before they happen. I talk a lot to researchers in the book, who spend their time online trying to destabilize these movements before they happen.

I think the other factor here is that it’s not just ignorance, but it’s also the right has done a lot of successful work in stigmatizing all forms of activism, to say if you go out in the street for your community, that you’re a molotov holding anti-fascist and that you are subscribing to militant leftism, when in reality you’re doing lawful activism and standing up against the threat for your neighbors. The only successful work against this has really, really come from local activism. My family’s conservative and when they say: Well, what about Antifa? I say maybe join up. It’s really about local activism.

Sam Goldman 28:26

I have a lot of unity with you. I think there is a need for Not in My Neighborhood kind of thing, but there’s also: Not in anybody’s neighborhood. [AC: Oh, yeah] Getting people to get out of this — and it’s really hard — My block, my zip code. No! This shouldn’t be anywhere. This hate should not have a home anywhere. Related to this, as I was reading your book, I was nodding underlining and underlining. There’s a section where you were talking about drawing the connection between researchers like yourself, people who are journalists who are on the ground, activists who were on the ground, they knew that Unite the Right was going to be what Unite the Right was.

They knew January 6th was going to happen because they were saying it both times and each of those times there was like a [response]: “We didn’t know this was gonna happen. How’d this happen?” Surprise. That happened, and at the same time, normalization happens; This is just the way we do things. I kind of have a hard time wrapping my head around — to me these are very dissonant ideas. This could never happen here and this is the way we do things here. But they coexist in people’s minds. [AC: Right] How does that work?

Andy Campbell 29:41

You’re right. It’s ridiculous. There’s this kind of counting game that happens with these events where it’s like: Okay, activists have sounded the alarm about this event that’s happening in, maybe Florida. They sound the alarm for a long time. It gets hundreds of activists ready to go. People go out in the streets. The event ends up being nothing because the activists outnumbered the fascists that would have showed up like the Proud Boys, and then it ends up looking like nothing instead of looking like a successful blocking of an extremist event.

So this happens over and over and over again. The extremists set up an event and either it gets blocked or there is violence. So then you have the news media and law enforcement waiting for something really violent to happen so then they can go on Twitter, make a few arrests, go on Twitter and complain I told you so. At the same time, they’re flooding the zone with so many extremist events. In 2016 it was weird to see a guy wearing a Pepe flag standing next to a mom holding up a sign and wearing a MAGA hat. Now you will see normal people — I say normal because they’re not involved in any sort of group, standing alongside actual neo-nazis and Proud Boys and Oathkeepers and other militants at everything.

You’re right. It’s this weird thing where it’s been so normalized that we expect the extremism events, and we, for whatever reason, have to wait for the big ones to make any sort of movement. The normalization is such that after January 6th — this is the one I always quote because it’s so wild — an outgoing DHS official tells the New York Times: Well, we just thought the Proud Boys were a fraternal drinking organization that just gets out of hand from time to time. That goes to show you just how successful they’ve been at projecting what they’re doing, not as hate fueled extremist violence, but as these reluctantly pulled into fighting fraternal organizations.

It’s scary to me that we are still playing this game. I’m looking at Telegram just today, and the Proud Boys are flagging six or seven different drag queen story hours across the country. There’s people, I think it was in Oregon, somebody shot at a bar that was holding a drag queen story hour the other week, then, of course, the Club Q shooting. Nobody on the national law enforcement level seems to be taking this seriously as a big nationwide movement. We’re still, even after Club Q, waiting for the big one to happen, but the big one is happening in small ways every day. It’s hard to wrap my head around too, but I think people are desensitized to the extremist violence that we’re seeing. We’ve already seen the big ones, and we’re seeing the big one played out on different stages across the country right now.

Sam Goldman 32:39

I was reading in relation to some of the harassment that is happening at these story hours, that 12 times as many anti-LGBTQ incidents have been documented this year.

Andy Campbell 32:51

Their end goal here, like I said, is to make it seem like all LGBTQ, all drag is groomers; is an inherent threat. They’ve been successful at changing the narrative by flooding the zone with rumors to the degree that the media on the whole sees those numbers and still likens this thing to a debate, as if there is a debate that these people should exist. It’s been really successful. [SG: Yeah] In moving those goalposts for sure.

Sam Goldman 33:25

It’s genocidal at this point. As you talked about with some of the examples and things that we’re seeing, it’s absolutely genocidal. I think that one of the things that I appreciated — even though it’s like: Oh, I don’t want to read this — was, towards the beginning of your book, you make us confront Gavin McInnes in all of his disgusting existence. I remember being like: ick! by Vice — it’s just misogyny, but packaged in a trendy way, or I don’t know. I think that there’s a through line between the roots of his absolutely toxic patriarchy and the joy of debasing women, and now their focused attention to the harassment and terror inflicting on not only trans folks, although that’s definitely a target, but the entire LGBTQ community

Andy Campbell 34:22

Absolutely. From the start, Gavin McInnes was very, very popular back in the early aughts, when the misogynist rhetoric was all of comedy. Gavin McInnes was friends with people like David Cross and Sarah Silverman. I just talked to somebody in media circles the other week, who was like: Yeah, we all hung out at Gavin McInnes’s house back in the day. He was just one of the top counterculture comedian types, but I think what happened in this shows…

Sam Goldman 34:50

Although, sorry to interrupt, what was that counter culture? This is what I don’t get, misogyny is the culture. What made him counterculture? Yeah, I don’t understand that.

Andy Campbell 35:03

Counter culture in the sense that you could put cocaine and boobs on top of what the regular mainstream media was already saying. So you’re right to say the mainstream media was already ragging on women really hard, but he added the coke and the fallout rape fantasies into the pages of Vice, and it was really popular among young people. So it’s not counterculture in the sense that it was going against what the mainstream was doing. You are absolutely right. I think this shows just how many steps back we’ve taken in the last few years. A lot of comedians realize that the culture was starting to grow out of that.

We still have huge problems with misogyny and mainstream culture, but I think that people didn’t think that was funny anymore. As it got into like the 2006-2008 era, Gavin McInnes gets pushed out of Vice in 2008 and he decides to double down on that and decides to make himself and his audience, the victims. You see this happening with people like Dave Chappelle and all the cancel culture bros out there, where they’re saying: Not only am I going to double down, but I am a victim in all of this, even though what I am saying is leading to real violence and real harm, and people don’t find me funny anymore. He did double down. He opened up for the masses, a venue for continuing that violent, hateful, bigoted discussion, and it’s just spread like wildfire into polite conversation among politicians.

That’s where it’s scary. I think Gavin, and really, the right wing media ecosystem has had a huge part in making it comfortable to talk about this stuff; making it comfortable for Fox News to immediately after the Club Q shooting, just keep on pushing the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. It’s disgusting and terrifying and it should be disqualifying. I can’t believe that these things are allowed to be said on mainstream media now. But you’re right that Gavin McInnes rhetoric that may have been too hot for TV back in the day is TV now.

Sam Goldman 37:07

You end your book talking about how bright, bright, bright the Proud Boys future is? Talk to us a little bit. [AC: Yeah] Why?

Andy Campbell 37:18

Through these support networks, the Proud Boys feel just absolutely emboldened to continue what they’re doing. They’ve never been told by anybody that what they’re doing is wrong, other than the people that they are attacking. Again, throughout this year and throughout last year, they’ve been mobilizing on the right’s grievances with heightened frequency, even after January 6th. If you look at the data of the events that they’re doing, it’s not just that they are hosting their own Proud Boy events anymore, they are just going out where they’re told to go and latching on to any movements that they can, and they’re being celebrated for that.

Their events are there, but even if the Proud Boys somehow became illegal, and there’s no domestic terrorism statute or otherwise that’s going to make them illegal tomorrow. But even if they dissolved or it became too difficult for them to stay a group, the playbook that they’ve written for extremism, helped to write for this moment in American extremism, is such that it’s okay to go out there and fight for what you believe in, even if what you believe in is violent bigotry, anti-democratic sentiment. Enough of the country, enough jurisdictions, are allowing this to be seen as political discourse, and that is constitutionally protected. That’s another way that they have normalized violence in this country is that we have gotten to a point, prior to Trump, where if you are committing violence on behalf of a political party, you are — especially when it’s physical and in a city or locale — you’re not going to have a good time. Now they’re still getting permits for their events, which is just absolutely beyond me. Now.

Andy Campbell 39:03

Meanwhile, those of us who are doing it in the name of justice, you get your permits denied left and right.

Andy Campbell 39:10

They’re arresting reporters. [SG: Yeah] They’re arresting activists. They’re arresting locals, like I said, it doesn’t matter what grievances it is, they’re going after people. So, between the stand back/stand by moment with Trump and January 6th, he was obviously very anti-media, calling media the enemy of the people. The attacks on journalists in that period skyrocketed and absolutely nothing happened to the extremist factions committing this violence. So you have such a normalization that it doesn’t matter whether it’s the Proud Boys doing it. What matters is that we are not responding to it in any significant way. We’re seeing that all the prosecutions, all of the investigations, the January 6th committee’s, are not moving the needle in terms of killing the underlying problem.

Part of that is half of the country is ignorant about the problem itself. Over the years I’ve watched so many house hearings on extremist violence, racist violence, and every single one of those hearings was derailed by the Republican invitee who would argue that white supremacist violence doesn’t even exist. And then they would spend the entire hearing debating whether there is such a thing as white supremacy, and everyone became dumber having watched that. It’s this playbook that they’ve helped create. I don’t want to say that they helped create the playbook of political violence or anything. Obviously, we’ve had Brownshirt factions for decades and decades.

Sam Goldman 39:45

A country founded on genocide kinda lays the groundwork for that.

Andy Campbell 40:38

But they’ve shown in the digital age, how easy it is to recruit, how easy it is to push out a message, and how easy it is to commit extremism, as long as you make the right friends in politics in the digital age.

Sam Goldman 40:50

Speaking of the digital age, while I have you, help us understand what is happening with Twitter with Elon Musk. I said something on the last episode when I was talking to Micah Lee, we were talking about the public red pilling of Elon Musk. But if you really look at it, there’s been seeds within him the whole time. There can be no disputing he is inciting a violent mob. [AC: One hundred per cent.] And as you’re somebody who’s pays attention to boots on the ground types of fascists, what is happening? How should we understand this? What is going on?

Andy Campbell 41:26

I’m glad you bring it up, because it’s so difficult to get people to care about sort of the mini culture war that’s happening on Twitter because it feels like a mini culture war, but it has so many implications that are broader than just this social media platform.

Sam Goldman 41:40

Yeah, people keep telling me it’s petty, and I should stop bringing it up.

Andy Campbell 41:43

Twitter itself is petty and it’s stupid, and nobody should ever go on it because it sucks and it always sucked. But it impacts policy. It impacts what’s going on the news tonight. Fox News dedicates maybe 95% of what it does on grieving about the Taylor Lorenzes and other leftist media people on Twitter; it drives the narrative. The other thing is it’s just a huge platform. Everybody across the world uses it. So, for me as a journalist, it’s so helpful because I know if there’s an emergency in Houston, that I can look up Houston and find video and people to talk to within seconds. It is such a useful tool because so many people are on it.

Because so many people are on it, we spend — and when I say we, I mean reporters, activist educators, researchers — have spent so long trying to weed out people who were using that huge platform to push harmful rhetoric and violence, spent so long pulling them out of there and showing the content moderators that, hey, these people are pushing hateful violence, and it’s leading to shootings, it’s leading to extremist events, and we need to stop it. Person by person those people were weeded out, shown to be abusing the terms of service on Twitter. Proud Boys were banned from Twitter, so many Nazis and just extremists were taken off there. All of that work done over the last 10 years or so is just kaput now. All of the extremists feel emboldened to come back. They’re coming back in droves. Sometimes on the direct invite of Elon Musk.

So, we’re seeing these people get platforms again. People like Milo Yiannopoulos, a virulent bigot who has done such harm and pulled together so many Unite the Right style extremist events. That guy and Nick Fuentes, who may as well be straight up neo-nazi, likens himself to Hitler and very lovingly approves of the guy, those guys were sort of pushed out to even the fringes of the far right, to the point where they still had followings, but it was not seen as good, even among far right people, to be standing next to them because they were such extremists, dinguses. And Kanye… And Elon brings them back into the fold within a week. And now they are back and they are having audiences with the fucking former president.

What Elon has done, is doing, is just turning Twitter into the new 4chan, bringing back all of those fringe voices into the fold, and giving them the biggest platform in the world. What people don’t understand when they think of Twitter, that aren’t journalists, is that Twitter is the biggest platform to push what shows up on a small blog somewhere, be it 4chan or Reddit. It is the vector by which that rhetoric shows up on the news. So, by bringing back all of these extremist forces, the producers on mainstream media are looking at that and going: Well Hey, Nick Fuentes is back. What’s the problem with bringing him on our show? Hey, he has an audience with the President. He has an audience with the richest man in the world. Why shouldn’t we have him on our show? He is normalized again.

So that is the threat here, and that’s what Elon’s doing. He’s laughing as he’s pulling these people back because he is himself a Groyper, Pepe, frigging extremist. He is that kid in the basement that is pulling together all of these Pepe memes and pushing them out on violent hate sites.

Andy Campbell 41:45

Thanks for that, Andy. [AC: It’s bad out there.] It’s so bad. I wanted to, before you go, ask you two questions. One is: What is the story that we’re not paying attention to?

Andy Campbell 45:32

One story that I want to hear more of, I want to hear from parents who bring children to drag queen story hours. Because I was raised among theater kids. I was raised in music and arts and history by the greatest Queens ever. It was great for my community to have drag queens in educational positions and entertainment positions around kids. It was freaking awesome. We are all better off for it. I don’t think that we’re hearing enough positive stuff about why these events and people are good for their communities.

I don’t know about you, but the only people that were assaulting kids in my community were church leaders and teachers in our high school. It wasn’t drag queens. I think we just need to spend a lot more time sort of understanding why the things that the right casts as bad and inherently threatening to our communities — be it activists, drag queens, LGBTQ in general — why they’re actually good, and why we’ve been doing so much work to help people understand for decades, that they’re good for their communities, and that they have a right to exist and live free of violence.

Sam Goldman 46:42

Appreciate that. Besides people going and getting your book reading your book, talking about your book, what is one thing you think that all these decent folks who are listening who are like: Ahh, this is terrible. We need to take action. What’s the one thing you hope that they’ll do? Or you encourage them to do?

Andy Campbell 47:06

Yeah. Erasing the stigma on activism in general, especially in your local communities. I work for a national publication in Huff Post, but I think local news is the answer to community success. And I think local activism is also a factor there. And I think going and supporting your local activism in any way possible. Going and showing your racist uncle why the nice Public Library hosting a drag queen story event is actually good. And also, when you see an extremist threat in your community, going out and activating around that in whatever way — could be online, could be in person, there are many ways to do that — is really going to help move the needle here. Getting out there and activating is what it takes.

Sam Goldman 47:45

So let’s make some noise, y’all. Thank you, Andy, for coming on and sharing your expertise, your perspective, your insight, and of course, your time.

Andy Campbell 47:58

Thank you for having these important conversations. You, week to week, are bringing light to so many, so many, good conversations. So I appreciate it.

Sam Goldman 48:06

According to updated research by GLAD and Equality Texas, at least 141 protests and threats against drag events across 47 states have happened in the United States this year. We will be running the story suggested by Andy very soon, so stay tuned.

Sam Goldman 48:22

I really enjoyed this conversation. It kept me thinking. One thing I kept thinking about afterwards was a local and community organizing. In particular, it struck me how here in the U.S., it’s very common to hear people framing their opposition to fascist politics in terms of: “Not in my city, or; Hate has no home here,” talking about how the best we can do, and the most important thing we can do is organize locally when these fascists show their heads.

One thing that struck me is the contrast between that on the one hand, and the women and girls and others in Iran who have been heroically rising up largely within the communities in which they live — often, not always, but often in response to representatives and enforcers and supporters of the regime coming to their communities or to their schools, universities, but also organizing it on their own initiative. Instead of chants of: Not my community, they’re saying: Death to the dictator. Down with the Islamic Republic. Women life freedom.

So here, in the belly of the beast, I feel we have, if anything, a heightened responsibility to not simply beat back the fascists and their enablers when they raise their heads in the communities in which we live, we have to confront what we’re up against nationwide and defeat them. Community activism, local activism, has an enormous place in that. But I feel it’s vital to interrogate on what basis, to what end, and to not act for ourselves and ours alone, but to act for all of humanity and the planet.

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