Angry Planet - Proud Boys, the Boogaloo, and Everything in Between

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

What’s the difference between a Proud Boy and a Boogaloo Boi? Are Patriot Prayer and Patriot Front the same thing? If I wear a Hawaiian shirt while eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, does that make me a member of a far right group? How many of these tacticool bearded weirdos are there, really, and are they dangerous? If it feels like the world today is weirder, wilder, and grosser than the one in the past … I feel you. 2020 has seen an explosion of Far Right groups and if you find it hard to keep track of them all, you’re not alone.Here to help us order and sort the Proud from the Boogaloo is Jason Wilson. Wilson is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian and Bellingcat.Recorded 10/1/20What’s a proud boy?The Proud Boys debate momentWhy Portland is the rallying point for far right groupsWhat the Justice Department knows and what it’s doingShirt movements, modern and historicBoogaloo boisWhat the numbers tell usThe John Birch SocietyThe Eisenhower ConspiracyAngry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. But what we see in those chats is very explicit plans to, as they put it, hunt anti-fascists. Very explicit plans to procure mission, I guess, is the right word, like pellets for these guns that would do the maximum damage. glass pellets or should we freeze them? Can we get pellets that contain gas? Very explicit discussions about weaponry, about how to do the most damage and what I would call incitement to homicide. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country almost with impunity and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.

Hello, and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Gault. And I'm Jason Sears. What's the difference between a proud boy and a boogaloo boy? Are Patriot Prayer and Patriot Front the same thing? If I wear a Hawaiian shirt while eating a bowl of lucky charms, does that make me a member of a far-right group? How many of these tactical bearded weirdos are there really, and are they dangerous? If it feels like the world today is weirder, wilder, and grosser than the one in the past, I feel you. 2020 has seen an explosion of far-right groups, and if you find it hard to keep track of all of them, you're not alone.

Luckily, our guest today has been keeping track of many of them. So here to help us order and sort the proud boy from the boogaloo is Jason Wilson. Wilson is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian and Bellingcat. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on one of my favorite podcasts. That is so nice to hear. Thank you. Obviously, we were talking a little bit before we started recording, but we had discussed talking about taxonomy of the different far right groups and linking it to the John Birch Society. About a week ago, we were going to talk and we're recording this on October 1st now a couple days after the first.

presidential debate, and one of those groups was called out during the presidential debate. So I think we have to talk about that. So you've been following this a lot. I think you literally published something with The Guardian right before we got on the air about this group. Who or what are the Proud Boys and why were they being talked about during the presidential debate? The Proud Boys are a, I would, I think it's best to just cut to the chase now and say they're a kind of shirt movement, I think, and there are parallels between them and the shirt movements that were seen in various countries around the world in the interwar period. So they are, they call themselves a men's fraternity, a drinking club. They call

themselves Western chauvinists. And they were formed by Gavin McGuinness, who was a co-founder, founder of Vice has long since left and is now a fairly fringe conservative media figure since he's been de-platformed and thrown off a number of social media services and also CRTV. He was broadcasting on that. But anyway, he got this group together and they do drink together just a couple of weeks back. They were in Las Vegas for their annual Westfest. But the reason that they're of such concern to people is that they're also fond of violent confrontations with the left in American cities. And in particular, in the city where I'm based, the city of Portland, Oregon, over the entirety, really, of the Trump administration, we've seen proud

boys coming into town and getting into fights with anti-fascists. Yeah, they have been, the story I published this morning is based on the Blue Leaks Trove. I pulled some stuff out of that. But your listeners may have heard of that. That's a rather large data breach associated with the Fusion Centre that happened in June of this year. And what I found in there was that a number of agencies, including fusion centres, which are the kind of, they're a national network of state-based information sharing type institutions that put federal, local, tribal, state agencies together and put them all in the loop with the same information. And they're part of the country's counterterrorism infrastructure.

Anyhow, I found fusion centres, local police agencies, federal agencies, all talking about the proud boys in terms of, they're a white supremacist group, they're an extremist group, there was a, I found an advertisement for law enforcement training in Orange County, California, where they were being, you know, treated as a gang and thought about as a gang along the same lines as the Hammerskins or the Rise Above movement. There are a lot of agencies taking these guys really serious. as a violent extremist group. Yeah, and look, what happened on Wednesday, sorry, Tuesday night at the debate, came after they had mobilized nationally to descend once again on the city of Portland.

So they had a rally in Portland on the weekend, at a park on the city's northern fringe. They were originally going to come downtown, but they changed the venue, possibly to take it off federal property where it was originally scheduled to take place, and possibly also that they may have been told by various agencies that it would be preferable for them to do something less confrontational. In any case, that was in response to a shooting homicide that happened in downtown Portland on the 29th of August when a guy called Aaron Danielson, who was a member of another group, Patriot Prayer, who's another right-wing street fighting group here in the area where he was shot dead by a gentleman who identified as an anti-fascist,

as Antifa, and his admitted killer was later himself on the 3rd of September shot dead by police. So I guess I would say that the proud boys have been integral to this cycle we've seen in Portland of the entirety really of the Trump administration where local right-wing activists engage in incursions into, I say incursions, because mostly they're not actually from Portland. They're from outlying parts of the metropolitan area or parts of small town, Washington and Oregon. We've had incursions by them into the city, acts of provocation.

Eventually at some time in the summer, this results in some kind of catastrophic or heinous act of violence. And then national Republican politicians get involved, national groups like the Proud Boys get involved, and then they stage this kind of spectacular sort of intervention into the situation and Proud Boys will come into town from all over the country. That's the immediate view to the president's remarks, probably what was on Joe Biden's mind, the reason that he raised it. But yeah, the Proud Boys have, are not only integral to events

in the city of Portland, but they've really been a consistent element of the kinds of street confrontations and contentious rallies that we've seen in the country throughout the last four or five years. What are we talking about when we're, talking about numbers, because what I've read was the rally in Portland was something of a squib, damp squib, only a couple hundred people showed up. How does that compare with their actual numbers? Yeah, as you say, they only really, my estimate was around 350, but that would include locals and media. There was a lot of media here, a disproportionate amount of media possibly. But Yeah, let's say they had a couple of hundred.

I think the biggest crowd I've ever seen the right bring to Portland was probably in August 2018 when it would have been something like five or 600, mostly proud boys. In terms of their national numbers, it's probably not correct to describe it as a mass organization. I would imagine it's we're in the four figures and maybe not even the high four figures. I would say there's probably several thousand of them throughout the country. The problem is, though, if enough of them descend on your town,

and there's something particular about Portland, I think, about its size, it's not the biggest city, so that they can have a disproportionate impact here in terms of disruption. But yeah, I would say several thousand. I didn't mention some basics initially either. They're identifiable by, they wear black Fred Perry polo shirts with gold fringes on the collar. And last week, actually, the Fred Perry Company said they would no longer be selling those shirts in the United States because of their association with the proud boys. So they also tend to wear red Trump hats. And there are people in the organization like one of the de facto

leaders now, I guess Joe Biggs, who are military veterans. There have been some instances where serving police officers have found to be involved with the group. And in fact, one in Vancouver, Washington, which is just over the Columbia River from Portland and effectively part of the metro area, a deputy there was fired several years back because she was involved in the proud girls, which I guess is the women's auxiliary organization when she was selling merchandise associated with that groups. The numbers aren't huge, but if they can concentrate those numbers in a city like Portland, they can cause some real problems. I think the worst, I was, I'd put it on Charlottesville for the Guardian, and obviously that was a terrible day because of the

homicide, the vehicular homicide that happened at the end. But in terms of the street fighting, Charlottesville was not as bad, in my opinion, as what happened on the 30th of June, 2018 in Portland, where they had a kind of pitched battle with anti-fascists in the streets that police totally lost control of. And that day, your listeners can find video of that day. I saw six, seven, eight people attacking someone prone on the ground, proud boys attacking anti-fascists who'd fallen on the ground. There was an infamous kind of punch thrown by a guy who goes by Rufio Panman in the movement where he struck this resounding blow to an antifascist who was lifted off

their feet and then sprawled on the ground. And that moment became a huge recruiting tool for this group. But yeah, that was a terrible day. And I think another terrible day was this year on the 22nd of August when a number of proud boys and associated people came into the downtown area and they were shooting paintball pell pellets directly and indiscriminately in a crowd of leftist protesters. One journalist Robert Evans, who actually have written with,

He had his hand broken by a proud boy with a folding baton that day. It was an extremely violent day, and they also destroyed a snack man that had been catering to protesters downtown. So that was a very bad day as well. And people who, I didn't actually cover that one, but people who were there also compared that day to Charlottesville and said it was maybe a more dangerous situation. Because, you know, there were guns drawn and stuff. So this movement is all about violence, really.

There are degrees of membership in the group, and the details there. Some of them are silly. One of the degrees involves getting beaten up by other proud boys where you try to recite the names of breakfast cereal. But the fourth degree of membership nuanced the language around that, but it used to be explicitly that you had to engage in violence and carry out an act of violence in the course of movement activity. The language now.

the language now is more euphemistic. It's something about sacrificing something for the movement, but everyone knows what it means. And so you had this situation, especially in 2017 and 2018, where you had guys coming to cities like Portland so they could get their fourth degree. So, yeah, it's a movement that's all about violence. I don't likely compare it to the shirt movements of Central Europe in between the wars. It's a very similar kind of purpose, which is a kind of, they see themselves as political enforcers, and they're personally loyal to the president. They explicitly define themselves as a pro-Trump group. And look, while their stated politics on their website and stuff may not be,

seem extremist in the context of Republican politics in 2020, the preparedness to use violence, I think, is what defines them as an extremist group. And yeah, I think they're capable of enormous disruption and enormous harm, they're able to concentrate their numbers in a particular way, just because of their fondness for violence. Will you define for the audience what a shirt movement is? Oh, sure. Yeah. The most famous probably are the black shirts associated with Italian fascism, and then the brown shirts or the SAA associated with Nazism in Germany. And those groups, we look for a lot of the time, the discussions about, there have been discussions obviously about whether President Trump is a kind of

fascist leader. And they often get bogged down in details about ideology. If you read scholarship on into war fascism, exotic theories of race really aren't necessary to defining fascism. All necessary is this kind of eliminationist idea about some kind of national enemy. Italian fascism until a long way into the war was not violently anti-Semitic in the same way that Hitler Hitlerism was, but what they did do was go around trying to find leftists to beat up, and that was effectively what the black shirts did ahead of Mussolini seizing power. They defined the national enemy as socialists and other leftists, and they went around beating them up. The mass politics of the 1920s and 1930s were very different to the politics

of today. Those societies, for one thing, were much younger, just in terms of the average age of the people who lived in them. And the spectacle of mass gatherings was a big part of that politics. So things that have changed slightly. And I'm not saying that, you know, the Pramb Boys exist on a scale that the Blackshirts did in Fascist Italy. But it's a very similar purpose and a very similar ethos. And it's not the kind of thing that you want to get out of control, let get out of control in any society, I don't think. So they're effectively, they're a paramilitary or militia group that's dedicated to street fighting with the perceived enemies of their movement and their leader. I'm wondering about how these new groups, when you mentioned militias, relatively new groups, I guess,

how they match up against, let's say, the Michigan militia of the late 90s, Timothy McVeigh and his groups, are the groups allied with his ideology, the Freeman in Montana. Are these guys descendants of those movements? I think that they are conscious, in some cases, modification of that 90s militia moment. There are certainly common elements. If you look at members of the Buguloo movement or members of decentralized kind of militia movements like the three percenters, if you look at the oathkeepers, yes, there is this idea that the Second Amendment is sacred and that the right to bear arms is under threat from left of center,

politicians in particular. There is a strong basis in other kinds of conspiracy theories. There is a sort of fundamentalist and idiosyncratic reading of the Constitution. And there is an idea that the federal government has usurped powers that more properly belong to either the states or even to figures like the local sheriff. But I think the difference is that the 90s militias were much more politically and socially marginal than the people who are involved in these movements now. In a very profound sense, all of that stuff has become much more mainstream, especially if you look at right-wing politics. I would encourage you and your listeners to go back and look at,

you can find on YouTube the hearings that were held by a congressional committee, I forget which one, but during the 90s in the wake of that militia movement, and they were looking into this phenomenon in the wake of both Waco and and then the bombing in Oklahoma City. And Republicans are clearly, the Republican members of the community are clearly trying to distance themselves from these guys

and are clearly actually genuinely appalled by some of the things that the militia groups have done. You're not going to find, look at the Carl Rittenhouse situation, you're not going to find Republicans reflexively distancing themselves from these groups now. And look, I think, if we look at the origins of the oathkeepers

and the origins of the things, three percenters. They both spring up really late in the 2000s, so 2008, 2009, and they're really most immediately a response to the election of President Barack Obama. So these kind of armed groups have been basically dormant for various reasons throughout the Bush administration, partly because they thrive on opposition to the federal government, partly because the war on terror was a kind of all-encompassing thing that didn't leave a lot of room on the right flank in some instances for these movements to spring up. And partly, there's other details as well. A lot of these guys were discredited by how much they invested in the Y2K idea and how that was

going to almost end society. And they were encouraging people to prepare for that. And then nothing happened. And you had that kind of when prophecy fails type moment where, you know, people drifted away. But then when Obama was elected, you had a response on the right that took a number of forms. One was the Tea Party movement and one was these kind of militias who, like their predecessors, were concerned about federal government overreach now that a Democrat was in the White House. And I think that what happened was that there was a lot of cross-pollination between a radicalizing Republican Party that you saw in the form of like the Tea Party movement,

a radicalizing Republican grassroots anyway, an increasing stridency in conservative media in response to President Obama and these militia movements. There was a lot of cross-pollination and a lot of the bright lines that may have been there in the 1990s was erased. And I would say that now, because of the work I don't like to say too much about exactly where I live, but I would say I'm close to the edges of the metro, and so there are rural areas nearby. Now it's nothing for me to see a pickup truck go by with a three percenters decal on it, far from being a marginal, radical fringe that even most conservatives reject.

The three percenters idea has become almost like a lifestyle, a right-wing lifestyle brand at this point. And there is just not the same level of immune response on the right to these radical currents. And so you had that guy who was drafted into the NFL, who had a three percenters tattoo, and that was all a big, there was a big fuss about that. I'm sure you remember, that was earlier this year. I'll find the guy's name and send it to you. Maybe you can put it in the show notes. But anyway, a guy was drafted to the NFL. He had the three percenters tattoo, and there was a fuss about this. And the guy just didn't seem to realize that this might be a problem. And I think the reason for that is that this logo of a militia group has become just now reduced

to a symbol almost of not reduced. Sorry, the logo of this militia group has now become disseminated so widely that it's now, for some it now indicates just a kind of support for the second. amendment or a kind of authentic conservatism. So yeah, things have gotten mixed up. And the Rittenhouse situation where Kyle Rittenhouse, you'll remember, went, traveled into, he was a 17-year-old kid, he traveled into state to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot three people and killed two, who he, again, perceived were his enemies or the enemies of law and order. And now he's in insignificant legal trouble. But I think that whereas once conservatives might have at least been relied on to condemn lawbreakers who claim to be acting in their name, this kid raised a million dollars in crowdfunding to support his legal expenses and has been lauded across conservative media, including Fox News, as someone who was trying to do the right thing and defend his community.

It's a kind of, it's a much more dangerous moment in some ways than the 1990s because there isn't I don't think that response. And I said the Tea Party represented a radicalization of the Republican grassroots. Robert Evans and I did a story a week or so back, both for The Guardian. And we did a version for Bellingcat, a longer version, that we got leaked some chats where people were planning ahead of these protests in Portland. And they were explicitly planning violence. What was the name of that group?

I think that's an important kind of context for that particular story because it's a separate network of people than like the proud boys and the three percenters, etc. There may be some like overlapping there, but it's a distinct entity, correct? Right. It's just called the Patriots Coalition, the Oregon Patriots Coalition. Yeah. And look, some of those people are familiar presences at rallies and have been violent before. Some of them aren't, but they don't define themselves in terms of any. exotic ideology. They don't have a ton of ideological commitments and they just describe themselves as patriots and Trump supporters. And that's the concern at this point that the people who are not subscribing to the kind of radical ideological positions that we saw in the 1990s militia movement,

these radical perspectives on the Constitution or the right to bear arms or the idea that the United nations is going to displace American sovereignty. Some of them might be believers in conspiracy theories like QAnon, for sure. But that's not, that's not the basis of their organizing. The basis of they're organizing is that they're Trump supporters and that people protesting against the president or even the police are somehow enemies, enemies of the nation, national enemies. That's the concern that millions of people have been radicalized in this way over the last four or five years. And you tell us a little bit more about the chat logs that you and Robert have uncovered

what they said in what the general thrust of that group was. Yeah, they were discussing planning. They were planning for rally. So to give you a little more context, there have been now, I think as of today, last night, there have been 115 nights of protesting Portland. There was a brief, very brief, one or two nights, respite. when we had the wildfires come through. But basically, ever since the George Floyd protests began nationally,

there's been one every night in Portland. Now, mostly they, the far, especially early on, you didn't have far right groups coming in to confront those protesters. And I think they were just simply too large. And they didn't want to kind of protest such a large, you know, crowd. However, from around mid-August, you did start to get groups of far-right, folks coming into town to confront, disrupt these protesters. Now, the imprimatur for those counter-protests came from pro-police groups here.

I've also written about them. There's one called C-O-PS-N-W, Cops Northwest, and there's one called Back the Blue, PDX. So, PDX is an abbreviation for Portland. If listeners don't know that. they started doing little protests in the outer metro area where they weren't opposing people, but then they started also coming into town. So on the 17th of August, you had an occasion where a bunch of,

they were joined by a bunch of people with pellet guns and mace who let loose with that on protesters. And then that also happened on the 22nd. And that was that terribly violent day that I mentioned. Then on the 29th, there was a pro-Trump. truck convoy, some members of which strayed from the route that they had agreed on with Portland Police Bureau and drove into the downtown area. And then once again, we saw people shooting at pellet guns, at protesters from trucks and spraying them with mace from trucks. And we saw them driving their trucks at people. And that was actually the night that homicide

happened. So that's like the context for not only that homicides. But these are also the events that these folks were discussing, and they were also discussing attending the rally that happened on Saturday. And in fact, some of them did attend. Some of the people involved in the chats did attend. But what we see in those chats is very explicit plans to, as they put it, hunt anti-fascists, very explicit plans to procure mission, I guess, is the right word, like pellets for these guns that would do the maximum damage, glass pellets or.

Should we freeze them? Can we get pellets that contain gas? Very explicit discussions about weaponry, about how to do the most damage. And what I would call incitement to homicide, there was a guy in the chats called Mark Melke, who is a military veteran. He was a captain in the US Army. He claims to have been a combat veteran. I can't find great evidence for that, but he certainly did serve overseas more in an intelligence and community liaison. He knows a number of languages. I can't find direct evidence that was actually involved in combat. Nevertheless, I'm sure he's had basic training and he has been seen leading a militia called 1776 2.0 into the city. Now, he hasn't been recorded or observed actually directly involving himself in violence,

but he was the most gung-ho person in the chats calling for people to solve this problem downtown by killing anti-fascists and suggesting that people should sufficiently disguise their identity so that they couldn't be prosecuted for this if they happened to be caught on a security camera or something like that. Yeah, very explicit, very bloodthirsty discussions about coming into Portland. He lives in Dallas, Oregon, by the way, which is a small town just west of the Capitol Salem, maybe 40 or 50 minutes west, southwest of Portland. Yeah, very very. explicit, very bloodthirsty, and also this sense that they were doing all of this for the president in support of the president against those who would oppose the president.

Somewhat chillingly, they also, and I'm seeing this out in the open on social networks like Palau, they also had the view that any result other than a Trump victory in November would mean that the election had been rigged, that a Trump victory was more or less inevitable, any other result would mean that it had been rigged, and that would be the moment where they would have to take up to struggle on behalf of the president. And so that's that, plus the kind of a vigilante, armed vigilante activity I saw here during the wildfire emergency,

which was entirely powered by social media rumors. In rural areas, people were taking up arms, holding up journalists at gunpoint, carrying out illegal checkpoints. When I see that kind of discussion of November, And then I see that sort of immediate response to social media rumors in rural areas. That's what makes me concerned about November. Now, there are other groups that are also out there that you've talked about.

Just curious what a boogaloo boy is. I'm also curious how they came up with such a stupid-ass name, but that's just me. It's breaking two. How do you're a child of the 80s? That's just, it's just not right. Have you never seen the Israeli exploitation classic? Breakin 2, Electric Boogaloo, Jason? I have not seen the movie. I did see Breakin, I believe, at the time, but I did not come back

for the sequel. I'm told it's not great. Anyway, yeah, that's exactly where they got their name. So this idea of the boogaloo that was a more generalized meme or internet joke for a really long time, that a repeat of something would have that electric boogaloo phrase tacked on the end. But Robert and I again wrote in depth about this for Bellingcat and wrote a related article about militia groups for The Guardian. I guess this was back in May when this thing was really taking off. So on the, 4chan has a number of boards. One of them is Kay, which is the weapons board. And a lot of this stuff seems to have originated there. And that was one of the places where the prospect of a civil war in America was constantly and obsessively discussed.

and a common view was that this would come about as a result of an attempt to confiscate people's firearms. And I've got to say that belief is also really widely held on the right, as is the belief that if mass confiscation were attempted, that would be the thing that would actually unite all parts of the political right in a kind of struggle. So that's why you had the Christchurch shooter, saying that part of his objective was to actually bring about gun restrictions in the United States, which would lead to a kind of uprising against a liberal democratic government. So anyway, that was a place where it was obsessively discussed,

and then a lot of that then moved to Facebook. And any movement, any of these movements that can be on Facebook will be on Facebook for as long as they can, because Facebook is an absolutely superb engine for a building. a political movement, and we've seen them use it time and time again. QAnon have used it with remarkable effectiveness as well. So anyway, they moved over to Facebook. A lot of this stuff moved over to Facebook throughout 2018 and 2019. And they developed this distinctive aesthetic.

And to the extent that Facebook did crack down on this stuff, they developed encoded versions of the Bugaloo. idea. One was the big igloo, which just simply sounds similar, or the big luau. And so that's where the Hawaiian shirts come from, the idea of the big luau, where a luau is also a place where you might have roast pork. And so a thing to know about this movement is that, at least in its rhetoric, it's absolutely insurrectionary. And unlike more authoritarian groups like the oathkeepers who will have thin blue line patches on their clothes and often are, at least they try to recruit from serving police officers or former police officers. The Bugaloo movement was absolutely anti-police

and was, I would describe it for the most part, the main part of the movement, as a kind of insurrectionary libertarianism, insurrectionary right-wing libertarianism. So pro-second amendment, pro- First Amendment, pro-second amendment to the extent that they really thought that citizens should be able to have rocket launches and tanks and anything that the government has, one of them told me. Anything that the government has, we should be able to have. And he stopped short of saying that people should have nuclear weapons. But he thought, yeah, let's see them fly in F-35. Hell, we can't fly in F-35. Or maybe the F-35 can't fly, but that's a different story. Yeah, they're absolutely, again, opposed to what they call the alphabet boys, people from the alphabet

agencies, and in particular the ATF. And we saw the results of that a few months back when a guy called Stephen Carrillo actually killed two law enforcement officers, one federal protective services officer in Oakland and then a sheriff's deputy who was looking for him. They're absolutely, again, mostly rhetorically, but obviously there are going to be people on the fringes of this who are going to take this stuff seriously. And there's been a number of terror plots which have an anti-police dimension uncovered now that related to the boogaloo movement. But anyway, back to my narrative. They moved to Facebook.

There was a kind of coming out party for the boogaloo movement in January when there was a mass protest against new gun laws that were being passed in the state of Virginia. And a number of boogaloo boys showed up to that protest associated with one of the bigger Facebook groups that was associated with the movement. And then coronavirus happened. and coronavirus really exacerbated, at least for a time, every kind of social tension that exists in the country, and it also exacerbated the kind of apocalyptic fantasies of these groups.

And so you had a massive surge. Excuse me. Say all that again. Coronavirus exacerbated every social tension in the United States, and it exacerbated also the apocalyptic fantasies that really power these groups about. social breakdown at the end of the United States and coming struggle. So they had a kind of surge of interest online that there was a surge of people joining their

groups. There was a kind of stepping up of this rhetoric. There was a ton of evidence of successful co-optation of this whole thing by white supremacists and others who envision a kind of apocalyptic confrontation, but, you know, what they envision is a race war. But it's easy for them to co-op this kind of this idea. and to try and pull people out of this movement into theirs. And that's about when we started writing about it.

At some point, not long after that, Facebook actually did start taking this whole thing more seriously and started taking a lot of groups down. And in fact, there are still some there heavily disguised, but they really did tear the heart out of their presence on Facebook. And I would say now that movement, we saw people in Hawaiian shirts at the early George Floyd protests, But I think the golden age of the Boogaloo movement is probably over. The question is how much damage these movements do while they're going. How many people now have been persuaded that there is an apocalyptic confrontation looming

and that their response to that should be to take up arms and possibly against the government? There's no way to tell. There's no way to tell how many people now have that mindset. There's no way to tell how many people were pulled from that movement into violent white supremacist groups. There's no way to tell how many people have put together a case of weapons or started training with other people in secret. That's the problem.

And that's the problem we had in the 90s as well. It all seems fine until someone blows up a federal building. There's no way to tell what the undercurrents are and what's happening out of view. I would say, too, I look at extremists, signs and far-right groups of all kinds. And the thing that I have noticed is that these groups are getting a lot better at operational security. They're always going to have that structural problem where to recruit, they need to do stuff in public, and they need a public presence, including a public presence online. And on the other hand, they want to do stuff that's illegal, so they need to keep that secret.

And there's always that structural problem that by recruiting in public, you may attract infiltrate it, you may attract law enforcement and then they may have access to what you're doing in secret. But if you're in a position where you don't need any more people or you've got enough people to carry out the kinds of things that you want to do or you do something as an individual actor, it's very hard for law enforcement, let alone reporters, to know about any of that before the worst happened. All right. We're going to pause there for a break.

Angry Planet listeners, you were on with Jason Wilson. learning all about the proud boys and other assorted far-right groups. Welcome back. You are listening to Angry Planet. We are talking to Jason Wilson about the proud boys. Can we talk a little bit of history then? I want to put this a little bit further context because I think there's, I'm always looking for historical analogs for stuff like this. I think the shirt movement of the interwar period is a really good one, but this is not the first time that America has had what I would characterize as kind of conspiracy-driven far-right extremists and had a Republican Party that's been trying to grapple with how to deal with that.

Can we talk a little bit about the John Birch Society? Yes, sure, absolutely. I would also say that even before the Birchers, going right back to Bacon's Rebellion, there have been populist movements who have been prepared to take up arms in order to achieve their political demands. and oftentimes they have done so to assert the continuing privileges of white men in this country. So, yeah, and often they have imagined shadowy forces, whether it's Catholics for the nativist movement or Jews or communists in the case of the Birchers or some kind of conflation of different threatening actors. But yeah, I think that's what we can say about the John Birch movement.

is that, which still exists, and I'll get to that a little later, is that it was a direct response or an adjunct almost of McCarthyism and a kind of response in some ways to this panic that went through the American rights in the late 40s and early 50s, this notion that the United States had lost China when the nationalist forces were defeated by the communist, the Chinese communists. There was this notion that the United States had lost China and that that communists would now extend their sphere of influence. And you get into all of those kind of ideas like the domino theory, which led the United States into Vietnam, the idea that each of these Asian countries was somehow, if one fell, it would be more likely than another did. And in the longer kind of view, I think we may come to think about what happened in Vietnam as,

more as a delayed anti-colonial and almost nationalist movement rather than an enduring, creating an enduring communist state. But that's something we could come back to. But in case, Robert Welsh founded the John Birch Society at that time. John Birch, I won't get too much into the story, but John Birch was not a member and was in fact an American soldier who had been, he was a kind of, the movement's martyr, if anything. He was an American soldier who had been killed by the Chinese communists. And the John Birch society was premised on, I guess, the same conspiracy theory that McCarthyism was, which was that there were communists exerting influence at every level of government,

that there were communists everywhere who were concealing their true beliefs, to subvert the United States. Now, the grains of truth, Al Jihis and others who actually were working for the Russian, and were communists and were spies. They fueled this set of beliefs. But of course, there were grains of truth, that were precisely grains of truth. Overall, the level of communist infiltration and subversion that Birch, the Birch's, or even McCarthy was imagining just simply wasn't true. It wasn't the case. For example, Welsh had written a book that he was very proud of that outlined the theory

that Eisenhower was a communist. a secret communist agent, right? This was one of the things that kind of separated him from more mainstream groups. They thought that was perhaps a bridge too far. Exactly. And those kinds of beliefs, I think we can take a number of things from that. That actually, Eisenhower was a relatively liberal figure in ideological terms. He was a kind of something like a centrist and made a famous speech about the military

industrial, a famous warning about the military industrial complex and was authentically concerned about the expansion of the US national security state after the Second World War. And yeah, Welch and the Birches were viewed as a problem. One of the, a credentializing moment for William F. Buckley, as a kind of gatekeeper of conservative thought, was his kind of purging and exclusion of birches from the pages of national review, and any other conservative forum that he could influence. The Birchers were a problem for Barry Goldwater in his presidential campaign, like his association.

He was farther to the right than Eisenhower, obviously. But that kind of association with right-wing conspiracy theorists was profoundly damaging to him and was an attack that was used against him by Johnson in 1964. Yeah, so the John Birch Society, like they thought that communist subversion was everywhere. They thought that the Soviet Union or China or both were orchestrating a kind of network of communist subversion who were going to take over the country by stealth. And they were Welsh himself and others associated with the movement were, you know, prolific conspiracy theorists. And to the extent that the entire body of conspiracy theory

that Welsh produced is not necessarily coherent, you know, in its details and conflicts in its details. But you get the idea that communists are out to destroy the United States. I really, I guess, William Buckley's, you know, flexing of conservative council culture and deplatforming, the Birches, was actually effective. And I think throughout the 60s, as well, the country as a whole was liberalizing somewhat, although obviously Nixon was the president for a number of those years. But they just, for various reasons, they really started their decline throughout the 1960s and became more and more marginal. One thing they did do, though, was a whole lot of people who later became extremely problematic actors in the far right. So

people like Tom Metzger, who later founded White Aryan resistance, and actually members of which or associates of his were three skinheads actually murdered an Ethiopian student in a hate crime in Portland in 1988, I think is the correct year. The guy's name was Mulligeta Soror, and the three of them just beat him to death in the street in Portland. And they were associates of Metzger. And on that basis, actually, Metzger wound up being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And he's still alive, but basically he's never been able to. to accumulate any money really ever again because he just owes so much in this settlement. So he lost everything as a result of that incident.

But he passed through the John Birch Society in Southern California in the 60s. Anyway, as a national force, they had really waned entirely, I would say by the end of the 1960s. What's interesting today, though, is that there's a kind of local resurgence in my neck of the woods. The John Birch Society has been very successful in recruiting in eastern. Washington State around Spokane and a guy who I've reported on quite a lot, a guy by the name of Matt Shea who was, let's see, six-term member of the Washington State House representing Spokane Valley, which is the kind of suburban fringe of Spokane, a separate city, which is basically the suburban fringes of the Spokane Metro, which butts up against Idaho. He is basically a Neo-Bercher

and he's very closely associated with the John Birch Society. He emcees their dinners, emcees their events. As a result of the reporting of me and others, the State House, the Republican caucus excluded him, and then the State House did an investigation, and their investigator found that he'd been involved with domestic terrorism by involving himself in the Malheur occupation and various other things. But yeah, Shea is a Bercher.

He is totally consonant with their current beliefs, and the current tendency of their conspiracy theory, which is to basically conflate Antifa, the modern left, with jihadi terrorism, and to say that the left and radical Islam are involved in a shared project, which aims to, again, subvert the United States and to create what they call counter states.

So, I guess, secessionist parts, secessionist territories within the United States. The irony, there is that Shay's actually involved in a project to try to get eastern Washington to secede from the rest of Washington. And I suspect he has designs on leading that secessionist entity. He doesn't want to succeed from the United States, but just from Washington. Anyway, he's not going to go, he's not running again for the State House. He's now, and his, the partner in a law firm actually broke up the band and then reformed it without him, so to speak.

So he's been excluded from his law firm, which was his other shot at making a living. Now he's become a preacher. He's the pastor of an evangelical church now in Spokane. And that's what it looks like he's doing for the future. But yeah, there is a kind of crossover in that part of the world between the John Birch Society, the Republican Party, between libertarian groups that are really descended from the Tea Party movement. And yeah, and they're a part of that. I can never see them becoming a national force on the scale that they were in the 1960s.

Let's not forget that Phyllis Schlafly, the famous anti-ERA and anti-feminist campaigner, who herself became a significant force in right-wing politics, also came through the John Birch Society. And I believe was involved in it throughout her life. I don't think she ever left the John Birch Society. I've got records of going to meetings in California as late as the 1980s and 1990s. Yeah, I believe it was one of those things that she always denied, but there was strong evidence that she was continuing to be involved in them. Her Eagle Forum meetings that I'm referring to, the record of those meetings in California in the 1980s and 1990s, she was certainly hosting, you know, Birchers at those meetings.

And also people like Stan Monty, who was a right-wing kind of conspiracy broadcaster and a John Birch type who actually made. Matt Shea acknowledges every week in his broadcasts out in Spokane. He says it's brought to you, each of his broadcast, he says, is brought to you by his own campaign. I think he pays the radio station to broadcast and the legacy of Dr. Stan Monteith. So I think there might be some kind of monetary gift there from Stan Monteith, but he was an associate of Schlafly's as well. So that, it was a profoundly influential movement in determining what the right flank of Republican politics looked like. It certainly influenced the development of extremist movements and certainly people who went on to form dangerous, violent white supremacist groups passed through the Birch Society.

And that sort of pipeline is something we've seen more recently as well with people passing through ANCAP ideology, anarcho-capitalist groups and into the alt-right or into white supremacist movements. and it lives on at least locally in the form of, in the person of someone like Matt Shea, but those conspiracy theories that conflate the left with radical Islam, they're now circulating more widely and more broadly. The theories that these groups come up with tend to have a kind of life of their own. So they're still having an effect locally in certain parts of the country. But if you want to look at the reigning conspiracy, theory of the moment, it's not them. It's something like QAnon, which we'd have to have a whole other

hour to dissect and discuss. Any case. But yeah, sorry, the other thing is there's an overlap that we can see in Spokane between Republican politics, between the kind of libertarian holdovers of the Tea Party movement between the John Birch society, between evangelical churches, and also members of militias out there. It's, you get this in not metropolitan areas. It's hard to draw clear lines between different movements and different parts of movements. It tends to be just this kind of gumbo of people who are attracted to that kind of politics. Jason Wilson, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it.

That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please consider going to angryplanet.substack.com and signing up for the premium episodes. Just $9 a month. Get you access to two episodes extra a month. Next one is coming out this week. It is all about the collapse of the Roman Empire. It's a fascinating conversation Jason had.

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