Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Patriot Prayer: The Street Gang That's Tearing Portland Apart

Episode Date: November 29, 2018

Robert Evans sits down with two members of Rose City Antifa to talk about the most dangerous street gang you've never heard of. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everybody. I'm Robert Evans, and this is Once Again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now here, once again, I'm away from my comfy recording studio in Los Angeles and in Portland, Oregon. Tomorrow there's going to be a rally by a group called Patriot Prayer, who if you haven't heard about, we will be talking about them at length today. But with me today are two guests, and how would you guys like to identify yourselves? My name is David, and I'm a spokesperson for Rose City Antifa.

My name is Isaac, and I'm a spokesperson for Rose City Antifa. So yeah, you guys are anti-fascist activists. Fox News would chire on you as Antifa in square quotes. I think that's probably fair to say, right? Yeah. So yeah, today we're going to talk about a guy named Joey Gibson and a group called Patriot Prayer, which I'm going to guess a lot of listeners probably haven't heard of, but they've kind of turned the city of Portland into a battleground over the last almost two years now

at a pretty regular basis. So that's who we're talking about today. I know you guys are coming at this with a bit of a bias, obviously, based on your position. I'm coming at this with a bit of a bias too, because I've just spent the last two weeks reading about Joey Gibson, and it's kind of hard not to when you read the receipts. So that's what we're going to do today, is read some receipts. So y'all ready to get into it? Sure, let's go for it.

Okay. Joey Gibson is a one-time failed Republican Senate candidate. He's the founder of Patriot Prayer, and either 33 or 34 years old, Wikipedia does not seem to know one way or the other. But maybe we'll get that information out of him someday. I would say he's probably the canniest gangster in our new weird age of right-wing street gangs. He certainly seems to have more on the ball than a guy like Gavin McGinnis. And I'm going to guess Gavin McGinnis is probably more well-known by most people listening to this right now. Yeah, I would think so.

I mean, I think Gavin McGinnis is probably more well-known across the country, whereas Joey Gibson is much more of a regional figure here in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, and I think that's a little bit dangerous, because I think that Joey represents a significantly higher threat. So the Proud Boys, you know, they assaulted a bunch of people in New York pretty recently. They're going to be holding a rally as well on the 17th in Philadelphia. But they're kind of fundamentally absurd in a lot of areas, which, you know, has maybe helped to make people not take them as seriously. But I also think there's kind of a limit to the sort of coverage that a group that the Proud Boys can get, you know. It's mainstream news talking about a group where all the members refuse to masturbate and punch each other while naming breakfast cereals and stuff.

It's a little hard for someone sitting in their house watching a Fox News report to see that person as like, oh, this is the good guy. Maybe they think those people are kind of weird. Patriot Prayer has taken a very different tactic towards their activism, and I think it's probably one that's going to prove more successful in the long run. Well, the Proud Boys have been widely deplatformed and widely condemned after the attacks in New York, although not totally. Patriot Prayer still has most of their platforms and access to most of their platforms. They've been kicked off of Facebook. I don't think they've been kicked off of Twitter. I think they're still on PayPal as well, if I'm not mistaken.

I know that some of their financial campaigns were shut down fairly recently over the last few weeks. I can't remember exactly which platforms. I think Teespring was one that they sold their merchandise through and a few others, but yeah, I'm not sure about PayPal specifically. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about Patriot Prayer. They bill themselves as a nonpartisan free speech activism group. Joey's usual spiel when asked about Patriot Prayer goes something like this. I'm going to quote Joey here.

This isn't a political thing. I'm not out here to tell you who to vote for. That's not what Patriot Prayer is about. Patriot Prayer is about trying to build a healthy culture and to stand out against the hate. You stand against Antifa and the communists. Stand against the white supremacists, the Nazis, whoever it may be. You stand against all these people who think that they run the streets, who think that they can control people with fear. And so Patriot Prayer has always been about going into these areas where people are too afraid to speak up.

I mean, that's just absurd. If you look at what Joey Gibson does, what he really is, is part of the entries movement of fascism into more conservative circles. What he's done since his first public demonstration in Montevilla in 2017. What he really does is take much more far right ideas and spread them in a much more mainstream conservative circles. That's why you see people like Tiny, his kind of right hand man, wearing a Pinochet did nothing wrong, right wing death squad t-shirt at a march. Yeah, exactly. And we'll get into a little bit more of that later.

I think what's important now is that, regardless of its inaccuracy, the branding does seem to be effective in that it seems to be accomplishing several of his goals. No national media organization would ever be openly sympathetic to Nazi skinheads, obviously. But a group like Patriot Prayer, who goes around wrapped in the flag, and who builds themselves against all forms of extremism, is a little bit easier to get positive media coverage out of. And I think Joey's been somewhat successful in engineering a little bit of that. For example, here's how Fox News covered an October 13th Patriot Prayer rally.

Patriot Prayer Rally in Portland turns bloody, American flags saved from flames. That's the whole title. That's the whole... Now, were either of you there at that October 13th rally? October 13th, that was this year in 2018. Yeah, I think that was the flash mob thing that he threw together. I was not personally there, no, but there were people from our group there observing and seeing what was going down at that event. Yeah, it was built as a flash mob for law and order,

which are kind of two weird things to hold together. And it was, I think, one or two days after the Proud Boys assaulted a bunch of people in New York City. And in fact, it seems like they often time their rallies together. I don't know how much... I know there is that a number of Patriot Prayer members, including Joey's right-hand man, Tiny, are also Proud Boys. And you'll see a lot of them in Proud Boys shirts. The Proud Boys are holding a march in Philadelphia on the same day that Patriot Prayer is holding their march on the 17th.

But I don't know how much coordination there is between them. I think the deal with that event on October 13th was there was actually a vigil being held to memorialize an African-American man who had been shot by the Portland police. And because of an altercation that had happened at that vigil earlier in the week, Patriot Prayer decided to come down there and confront the people holding the vigil. And that was really the reason that they went out there. And they had a whole lot of different sort of descriptions of what they were out there doing. The law and order thing, they were protesting against the mayor.

They also, at one point, said that they wanted to pay their respects at the vigil, even though they went and attacked people who were at the vigil. So they really have this whole library of different descriptions of what it is that they're doing when in actuality what they're doing is they're coming out looking to intimidate people and fight people. But yeah, if you spend any amount of time reading the news articles written about Joey Gibson or talk to Joey Gibson, you'll get the same handful of basic biographic bullet points about the man. He grew up in Camus, Washington with, quote, good parents and strict rules. He describes himself as a rebellious teen who had a lot of run-ins with the law.

Here's a quote from an article about him in The Columbian. After his senior football season, Gibson, a quarterback, got in trouble with the law. There was alcohol, probation violations, and a break-in at a restaurant in Washigal. He spent some time in jail, which led to him dropping out of school. For a time, Gibson was homeless, living in Portland, Seattle, Mexico, Hawaii, and making bad decisions, he said. Which it reminds me a lot about if you've gone to like evangelical tent revivals. The preachers and stuff at those revivals always have.

I was doing LSD, I was running around with gangs. I was a high-raising and low-sliding, popping reds and busting heads, kicking indoors and banging whores. It's the way they all, I don't know, I think it is something on the far right where if you're going to portray yourself as sort of this inspiring figure you start by talking about, and I know Tiny does the same thing. He always will say like, I used to be like the Antifa guys, filled with anger and crime and all this stuff. That's actually a lie on Tiny's part, by the way. He has this whole narrative about how he used to be on the left and be anti-Trump

and then what's converted over, but he actually never was. He was actually Republican before Trump was even running for office. That's something that we've uncovered. Same thing with Joey Gibson. I think there's this whole narrative of rebirth or recovery that he wants to push out there. Dude broke into a locally-owned restaurant and stole $1,400 worth of checks and cash. I don't know how you spin that as being like a youthful rebellious phase or what. He's also stolen money from other Patriot prayer members.

There was a long-running sort of monetary dispute between him and a member called Justin Harrington where Joey admitted that he owed Justin, I think it was more than $1,000, but that he was never going to pay it back and Justin was trying to get this money back from him and it was a thing in that group for a little bit. With Joey Gibson, he has a lot of these sorts of narratives that he tries to tap and I think that's the thing you're saying is that he seems to be able to pluck these strings of these national narratives of politics in a way that resonates with certain conservative news agencies. It's really very paper thin.

You look beneath the sort of his spiel, you look beneath his words that he puts out there, these few sound bites and you start looking at what he does and you just see how duplicitous he is. The whole idea that you said in your first quote, he said he wasn't trying to get anybody elected. The Patriot prayer events that he had in Portland over the last year were specifically billed as campaign events for his Senate campaign. Joey Gibson for Senate in Washington, of course. Yeah, so he's running for Senate in Washington throwing these campaign events here in Oregon and then saying that he's not trying to get anybody elected. It's just like there's no end of the ridiculousness for this guy.

And that's the thing. One of the difficulties that I can say as a journalist trying to cover this is that you are expected and the job is to try to tell both sides of it, to try to present things as objectively as possible. But in order to present someone like Joey objectively, if you just put out what he says and you don't dig in any deeper into it, then you will come across with him looking the way he wants to look, essentially. Like, that's the thing. When you've got 30 seconds in a news broadcast to be like, here's what Patriot prayer is. Here's what Antifa is. A lot of people are going to wind up thinking Joey's the guy on the right side of this. Yeah, or at least that there's some sort of equivalency as a narrative that we see a lot.

And you've seen that here in the local media here in the Portland area where it started out with this narrative of both sides, you know, this kind of like, oh, two different extremist groups facing off in the street, et cetera, et cetera. But over time, the local media has really come around and seen like, actually, these two sides are in completely different. There's one side that brings out all these white supremacists and Nazis and violent people. And then there's the local community-based groups that are organizing in order to defend their community against this. And really, the two sides have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that one is trying to defend the city against the other. And it's been, you know, gratifying on our part, I think, as those community activists organizing to defend the community

to see the local media kind of realize, you know, for the first time, Joey comes out and does his spiel. They might repeat it word for word. But over time, as they see the evidence sort of building up, they see these sorts of receipts piling up about Joey Gibson and the people in his groups and what they actually do. Then we see this kind of awareness starting to build. We see the media kind of learning that the narrative is only skin deep and looking for the actual truth. And there's actually been some pretty decent investigative reporting in the local area digging into Patriot Prayer and who these people actually are. And that's gratifying to see.

The national media, on the other hand, hasn't quite got there yet. Yeah, I think the issue is that the national media doesn't have quite this timeline and like kind of soaking in Joey Gibson's... His stream of crap. His stream of crap. His stream of crap. Shit. Yeah. The local media can catalog at each event, you know, the fights, the people throwing up Hitler salutes, the slurs.

Whereas the national media comes in, sees one event, sees Joey's speech and then leaves. And so it's really that time spent with Joey's vileness that allows you to like really understand what he is and what he does. Yeah. And his speeches, I was just listening to one when you guys walked in and it was all... And I think a lot of them are about getting past hate, moving past... He'll address the crowd of counter protesters and be like, you know, you guys have so much hate in your hearts. That's what we're trying to like, you know, fight against is all this hate and anger that the far left has against America. And yeah, it's when you have the receipts, you can see how hollow it is.

But speaking of someone who grew up in deep Texas and who comes from a very conservative background, it plays with a lot of people. Let's get back into his background just a little bit more before we move up to the present day. So we just talked about his bad days when he was committing fraud, robbing places. But then his middle school PE coach asked if he wanted to coach football and Joey claims to have used that as the inspiration to sort of clean his life up. He says he got his GED and he went to Central Washington University. I know he got caught up in trying to flip houses during the market crash in 2008. And in general, he seems to have had a pretty normal road up until about the 2016 election. Now, he claims he was always passionate in politics but says that, quote,

it's always been sitting in my house complaining like everyone until on June 2nd, 2016, he says he watched coverage of violence outside a Trump rally in San Jose. He claims this made him worry that people would be put off from taking part in politics if they saw violence at political rallies. That put a fire in me that I never experienced in my entire life. Something changed in me at that moment in time because at that point, I decided our country is not America anymore and that was the first time I saw that. So this is Joey Gibson's origin story, courtesy of Joey Gibson.

It's pretty hilarious when you think about the number of videos of violence that have occurred at his rallies that he's shared on Facebook, the number of speakers that he's invited to his rallies that specifically have a message of hate and intolerance and encourage that sort of violence. He had a speaker at one of his rallies that suggested that anti-fascist activists and immigrants should be put on the curb and have their heads stomped in. Where's the peace and love there, Joey? Can you imagine, though, if we lived in a country where that guy felt unsafe to talk about curb stomping people? That's not America.

This is a thing that we feel like the media has really gotten over this narrative, but this narrative of free speech is really entrenched in a lot of people's minds here in the United States. People have this right to say whatever they want at any time and they should be given a microphone and a stage and a lectern in order to spit out that vile rhetoric. The thing that we always say is really it's like the actions. The speech is not separated from the actions and everything that Joey says, even these very mild ecumenical messages that he's putting out there, you really can't unlink that from the violence that occurs because of what he does.

He always tries to keep his hands clean. He always steps back when the fight breaks out. He just posts the video later on Facebook. He tries to insulate himself from all that so he can continue to have this message and try to make that message sound sincere and genuine. But really, you can't separate these two things. And anybody who's lived in Portland or been to any of these rallies, they have that connection between him and the events that happen at his rallies,

very cemented in their mind. Now, Joey claims that this watching this violence in 2016 and San Jose is what inspired him to buy a ticket to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, which was apparently his first time traveling for politics. Now, I was at the RNC that year too and I covered most of the major demonstrations and street actions and protests at that point. And this was before there were obviously anti-fascist activists that existed since the 20s or 30s, but antifa was not a term that people used at that point.

There was some black block stuff going on then, but that's a fair to say different. It wasn't popularly known, I would say. People are definitely using the term, but yeah, it didn't have the sort of media recognition that it does now. Yeah, the earliest I can find it in mainstream media is about early 2017. Yeah, it really exploded into the national consciousness with the Milo-Unopolis rally at Berkeley, I'd say, and also the J-20 demonstrations in Washington, DC. Right at the beginning of 2017 is really when it started to become a national term. Yeah, get that recognition.

And the demonstrations and protests at the RNC were, I'm not going to say they were calm, but I would not qualify them as bloody. I was on the ground pretty much the entire time. I didn't see tear gas deployed in the areas. I was in, a couple of people got injured at a scuffle that broke out over a flag, burning a biker, attacked some people, burning a flag, and a couple of people got injured. But it was really considering it was the RNC and what everybody was expecting. It was a pretty mild event, or the protests were relatively mild. It was fairly peaceable.

And actually, I think a lot of us were really relieved by that, because everything leading up to the RNC had led a lot of people to expect that it was going to be kind of a bloodbath. And when it wasn't, most people were kind of relieved. Joey Gibson was not relieved. He saw this lack of outrageous bloodletting and decided he needed to do something about it. Quote, I noticed that the left owned the streets, so I came back committed to getting people involved, to getting people on the street, the libertarian, the conservative. So when Joey got home, he put together some flags and he started marching around in Clark County, Washington.

At least that's his description of sort of his origin, or the origin of Patriot Prayer. Quote, because I didn't know what to do. He gradually attracted people. And in October of 2016, Patriot Prayer threw a rally in Esther Short Park in Vancouver, Washington. It was in support of Donald Trump. That's his claim sort of as the origin of Patriot Prayer's rallies. As he went to the RNC, he saw the left owned the streets and he just started marching around in Vancouver until people glommed on around him, basically. I think that's a much more accurate sort of description of what his motivation is.

And you see that in their discourse and their rhetoric, especially from the followers, more than Joey Gibson himself a lot of times. This idea that the streets of a particular city have to be reclaimed from the left, reclaimed from their sort of demonized notion of communism taking over the streets of Portland or Seattle or whatever city it is. Yeah, because from where I'm sitting, what I saw at the RNC, which is like protests where, you know, we had, there were a bunch of dreamers who dressed up as pieces of a wall and sort of peacefully walled off the RNC for like, you know, a number of minutes. And there were, you know, speeches and stuff and there were some marches, but there wasn't street fighting. The violence I saw was in line with like someone pulling a sign out of another guy's hand and stopping it on the ground. I saw that kind of thing a couple of times, but nobody was like beating each other bloody. And I guess that's what it looks like when the left owned the streets and that's, Joey wasn't a fan of that. So when we come back, we're going to talk about the rise of Patriot Prayer and the increasingly bloody rallies and how the city and the police have responded to them.

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So in most of the articles you read about Joey, you'll run into a story about him at an early Patriot Prayer rally in 2017. He got into a shouting match with a counter-protester, stole the protestor's sign, and tore it up on camera. Then Joey apologized and gave the man $20. Most recitations of this story end with a variation of the line, they parted shaking hands. Now I think the point of this anecdote is to make Joey Gibson look like a, gee shucks, he's just a decent guy, he gets a little passionate at times, but he's a good man at his heart, he doesn't want this sort of violence. And I've run across this story a lot, so I think it has to be one of the major anecdotes he tells about himself to reporters. Again, as you noted, I've run into this less in the more recent coverage, but certainly the stuff from mid-2017, this story is dropped a lot.

Here's another quote from an article about him in The Colombian. On Facebook videos and YouTube, he preaches, Hey Trit, it is a disease. He counts the Reverend Martin Luther King among his political heroes. He once invited a transgender person to speak in one of his rallies because he said it's time all people were accepted. Which is a legitimately smart, I guess, I don't know, it's an interesting tactic to be like, okay, we had this one trans person speak, so it's okay that I have guys talking about curb stomping too. Everybody gets to speak. Yeah, I mean, I think with every one of these little anecdotes, there's an obvious and overwhelming counter example of something that he'd done.

Like, for example, in 2017, he personally provided security for the hell-shaking street preachers when they came down to protest the trans march at Pride. So he's like, I'm letting transgender people speak at my events, but I'm also supporting these violent people who attack trans Pride. Everyone gets to say the people who want to live and the people who want to kill them, both of their opinions are valid. Now, Joey Gibson is an Asian American man. Patriot Prayer has several non-white members, which they regularly point to in order to prove that they aren't a hate group. And I definitely agree that it's unfair to call them Nazis because Nazis is a very specific political ideology that I don't see shared by Joey. I do, however, think after pretty intense research that it is fair to call Patriot Prayer and Mr. Gibson fascists. And I think that they're lying when they claim not to be.

Now, I guess first off, what do you think about that? I don't think most of them are fascists. I think they are facilitating fascist entryism. I think there's obviously a lot of members of Patriot Prayer who are white nationalists, who are white supremacists, who are fascists. But as for whether Joey himself is, I think he's probably more of a very extreme paleo-conservative maybe. Yeah, I think something that they try and say about us a lot of times is that everybody that Antifa doesn't like is a Nazi and a fascist. And for us, the typology is actually really important. The distinguishing between the different types of fascists that are attending these events and the different sorts of nationalist politics that are in play,

especially right now in our current times in this country. So I think most people in Patriot Prayer, I would call them white nationalists. They definitely have a racial component to their language. They are promoting this idea of anti-diversity, this idea of this kind of reactionary, anti-diversity, anti-feminism, all these sorts of things, promoting this sort of vision that this country is for a particular people. And those people are the most important people, and they want to use that to bolster their idea of a strong nationalist government. However, as Isaac was just saying, yeah, definitely the entry of them is something that's particularly concerning, is the fact that making these arguments, which they can kind of hide and sneak into the mainstream,

they are also attracting what we would call actual Nazis. The sorts of people who lionize Hitler, believe in killing the Jews and genociding other at-risk populations. All of these things can be seen coming into his rallies because he attracts it like a magnet. And I do think this is part of why it's important to have a deep understanding of kind of what went on in Weimar Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party, because a lot of the people who were early supporters of Hitler and the supporters of the Nazi Party were not necessarily people who could cleanly be described as fascists. Like Otto Strasser was a major thinker in the early Nazi period, and a guy who near the end of his life before he was executed in the night of Long Nives had actually changed in a lot of his attitudes.

He was definitely very far extreme, right? But he was also at one point courted by the German government as a guy who they thought could split the Nazi Party in half, because he was much more moderate than Hitler. And we lose a lot of that nuance in history, but I do think it's important that a group can achieve fascist ends without everybody in the group being an avowed fascist. We try not to refer back to the pre-World War II Germany example all the time, because there's plenty of other examples of fascism that are also important to recognize, and that one kind of gets brought up a lot and kind of built up into this end-all-be-all example of what a fascist government looks like.

But I think to your point, the fact that there were a number of right-wing political parties that were in coalition in order to bring the Nazi government into power is an important thing to note. Yeah, this is what we've seen actually in Portland. Joey's events will attract the Daily Stormers, Identity Europa. He'll be working with Kyle Chapman, Amber Cummings of Resist Marxism, who's the trans woman that he had speak at his rally, who is, I think, a white nationalist or white supremacist, and has identified herself as that. So he is able to sort of build this white nationalist, white supremacist fascist coalition. He's able to bring the Proud Boys and the Daily Stormer people into the same rally space.

Yeah, and we talked about it on a previous podcast. There's a long history of fascist groups bringing in, in America, particularly bringing in sort of diverse people to, like the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts had a guy named Chief Red Cloud, who was a Native American who wore swastikas on his headdress, and talked about sort of the alliance of Native Americans and Aryans against the Jews and stuff like that. And that's, there's a long history of sort of a diversity within fascist movements. Yeah, and you see them talking about this and constantly relying on this as a talking point. You know, oh, we have a similar one person, so we clearly can't be racist. And, you know, Jason Kessler,

the guy who organized the Unite the Right rallies in Charlottesville, in some of the leaked chat logs that came out about the organizing for that, he specifically said, like, we need to get some people of color to kind of be our argument for the fact that we're not actually racist, even though in the same chat logs, they're making tons of anti-Semitic and racist comments. And for Unite the Right too, I think he actually pointed too tiny as an example of someone they wanted to bring to that. Exactly, he did. Yeah. Now, there's another couple other reasons, I think, to see a lot of fascism in Patriot Prayer. One of them is, as you stated, the Pinochet did nothing wrong shirts, which seemed to be fairly popular,

with at least a certain subset of Patriot Prayer members, including Mr. Tiny. The back of these shirts often has the graphic of a helicopter with people being flung out of it, and the text, Make Communists Afraid of Rotary Aircraft Again. Now, if this seems a little bit obscure to people listening, Augusto Pinochet was the breeder dictator of Chile. He executed thousands and tortured tens of thousands, in addition to raping nuns with dogs, his men were famous for their death blights, which is, of course, when they would take suspected communists and other insurgents and fling them out of helicopters to their deaths. Pinochet's shirts and other right-wing apparel worn by Patriot Prayer members also often includes the phrase RWDS, which stands for right-wing death squads.

Although, I know at least one time when Tiny has been confronted about the fact that he had this on his shoulder, he claimed not to know what the letter stood for. The Pinochet example is actually really interesting, because it's kind of an example of this fascist creep in the Patriot Prayer movement. If you look back at early or mid-2017, some of the waterfront rallies in June, July, and August, there were kids at those rallies, kind of 4chan, edgelords, who would be there with a free helicopter rides sign, be doing chants like, you can't run, you can't hide, you get helicopter rides. We saw that, I think, in early December at the Kate Steinle rally in 2017, and then you see that creep into people like Tiny, other people who now wear explicitly Whisper Pinochet shirts.

So that's kind of what the trajectory of fascist ideas in the Patriot Prayer movement in general is, like they kind of get introduced and then they get adopted at large. The fascist creep point is really a pretty salient one, an important one, just the fact that it seems like things have gotten more visibly extreme over the last year or so of rallies. Would you say that's accurate based on your experiences? Yes. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the violent aspect is certainly one aspect of how things have gotten more extreme,

but also the discourse and the language. You know, that quote we were discussing earlier about Patriot Paris saying they were going to cleanse the streets of Portland. You know, we didn't hear that kind of discourse happening back in early 2017, but over time that sort of thing has become much more common. We're seeing the instances of references to Pinochet and other violent dictators sort of stepping up. With that language comes the actual physical violence as well. Yeah, and Tiny has been particularly pictured in and around a lot of explicit fascists,

including he's posted pictures on Facebook with the logo of American Guard, which is a very far-right group run by a Klansman. The Joey actually himself has disavowed like a day before his right-hand man wound up posting on Facebook with their logo on him. There's a picture of him. I've got shaking hands with a guy wearing a sun and rad tattoo on his inner forearm, which is essentially what Nazis like to wear when they got to pick something a little bit more subtle than a swastika. Yeah, that man is Yarl Rockhill, who was a Patriot prayer attendee for a long amount of time, several months. And, you know, we had the receipts on that the whole time.

Joey can't have not known that this guy was a Nazi and that he was also convicted of statutory rape. So it was in fact that that got him finally kicked out, even though Joey had known about this statutory rape charge for a couple weeks and then finally had to kick him out of it. But it wasn't the Nazis and then got him kicked out. Well, in the video wherein Tiny is seen shaking hands with this guy, which was posted by Justin Media, which I understand are affiliated with Patriot prayer. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, the title of the video is Tiny Shaking Hands to Piss Off Antifa,

which is, again, like we're being friendly with Nazis because it triggers them or something like that, I guess. Yep. Now, on August 7th, 2017, Joey hosted a rally in Portland. Patriot prayer members marched with members of the White Nationalist Organization Identity Europa. IE was also present at the first Bloody Unite the Right rally. They're pretty extreme, I think would be fair to say. Tim Baked Alaska, GNA. He's a fascist entertainer who regularly professes open admiration for Adolf Hitler.

He was also a headliner at the first Unite the Right rally. He was on a lot of the posters and stuff. Jason Kessler really bragged about having him as a git. Baked Alaska is not the kind of guy you hang out with if you aren't cool being identified as someone who hangs out with fascists. And on October 2017, Joey Gibson let Baked Alaska give a speech at a Patriot prayer rally. During that rally, Baked Alaska also livestreamed himself getting other members of Patriot prayer to repeat the 14 words. A neo-Nazi slogan about securing the future for white children, essentially. It's not hard to find these connections, is the point.

There's more. Yeah, we could get into where there's more time. And I think that's really like a lot of what we do actually as activists is dig that up and do the research on that. And then make sure that we document that and put that online in articles on our website. Because that's the sort of stuff that Joey isn't going to tell you. And that's the sort of stuff that we really feel that it's important for people to know about him so that they can counteract the things that he says with those kinds of evidence of activity. Yeah, and I do think that's an important point that these sort of people marching in the streets with their faces covered are one aspect of anti-fascist organization. And in terms of like time spent, probably a larger aspect is research and, you know, the trying to make these connections.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, another man who marched with Patriot prayer was Jeremy Christian. He showed up at Gibson's March for Free Speech rally on April 29, 2017. I'm not aware of other times that he marched with Patriot prayer. That's the only time that we're aware of. He wore a very large chain around his neck and an American flag as a cape. We'll have a picture of him on our website behindthebastards.com. He also had a Portland Police Bureau t-shirt.

He looked like the kind of guy you would sort of write off as a harmless kook at a rally. I've seen a bunch of guys not very differently attired, but he was not a harmless kook as you guys know very well less than a month later on May 26, 2017. Christian was on a Portland Max light rail train. He started shouting racial slurs and anti-Muslim slurs at two teenage girls and three very brave men. Ricky John Best, Talyson Merton Namkai Mech, and Micah David Cole Fletcher confronted him in an attempt to protect both young women. Christian stabbed Best and Namkai Mech to death and badly wounded Fletcher. When he was arrested, Jeremy Christian told the police, I just stabbed a bunch of expletive in their neck. I hope they all die.

He later added, that's what liberalism gets you. Now, Christian had a pretty long and involved criminal history prior to this. He'd been arrested for armed robbery and spent a large chunk of his adult life in prison. He regularly made death threats on Facebook and in general showed very obvious signs of being a dangerous person. Gibson claims that Jeremy was just some nut who showed up at one of his rallies. In interviews afterwards, he made it clear that he views himself as a victim in this tragic mass-stabbing as well. He told CBS that his political enemies are unfairly using the fact that he played host to a white nationalist terrorist. Quote, that's the frustrating part. They're trying to use it to control me, to make me stand down and I won't do it.

I cannot ensure that some crazy person is going to show up and make a horrible decision. I can't control everybody. You know, not only did Jeremy Christian show up at his rally, he also posted tons of violent threats on the Patriot Prayer event page and talked about demasking and attacking Antifa, and all of Joey Gibson's followers were gung-ho about it. They were liking the post, they were commenting affirmatively to that, and Joey Gibson allowed that to remain on his post without any problem because it was consistent with his message and consistent with the beliefs of his other followers who he isn't going to disavow in that way. Well, and it's consistent with the messages that we've seen posted,

or at least one of the messages that we've seen posted in advance of the rally that's going to happen tomorrow. Some guy named Jacobs Ladder posted in the Facebook group for this. Another opportunity to kick some Antifa ass is as good as any other day. Count me in. Portland has a plethora of lunatics from left who need a whooping. Yeah, and you see it, you know, just all the time. It's a constant feature of Patriot Prayer's Facebook page. The threats against the left, against really anyone who disagrees with Patriot Prayer. Just recently, you know, the Council on American Islamic Relations in Oregon got the web funding page for Patriot Prayer.

I think it was maybe giving steam or something like that. They got it shut down and immediately the threats like we should burn down care offices was posted on Patriot Prayer's page. So Joey can't really disavow Jeremy Christian because it's also that online environment that Joey creates that leads to the violence in the streets, the slurs, the attacks on people on the max. It's just as much that as it is the street rallies. Yeah. And, you know, at one of Jeremy Christian's hearings, you know, court hearings, he like said he said out loud death to Rose City Antifa. And then Joey Gibson, before one of his August rallies this year in 2018,

was selling t-shirts to raise money that had a tombstone that said Rose City Antifa on it. So really their messages are exactly the same. Yeah. And we will continue to talk about that after the break because there's another Patriot prayer member who's made some explicitly knife based threats that Rose City Antifa exposed pretty recently. So we'll get into that. But first, it's time for an ad pivot. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

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And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We're talking about Joey Gibson, Patriot Prayer, and right now what we're talking about is sort of Gibson's claims that in spite of the fact that a guy who attended one of his rallies and posted violent threats on his Facebook page stabbed two people. Patriot Prayer is not a violent organization. He has repeatedly said that he will not tolerate any of his members advocating violence. I don't want them at the rally and they'll be kicked out. And it is possible, theoretically, that somebody hosting mass gatherings regularly, like Joey Gibson, would purely by accident draw in a single crazy and dangerous person. That's anyone who hosts a rally. It's a potential worry. It could happen once.

But as we've already talked about, this is not a one-off, and there's examples of other people who very much frighten me that seem to have the kind of potential to be someone like Jeremy Christian. One of them was very recently exposed by someone at Rose City Antifa, because I found this on y'all's Twitter page. Joshua Sintel is a Patriot Prayer follower and someone who will likely be on the rally at the 17th. Here's something he said in a livestream video. I don't need no firearms because I like knives. God, I hate these SJWs and I can't wait to get up to Portland and see them in fucking person, because I will. I've already talked to this guy and the proud boys. You want to do away with whatever the fuck you want to do away with Antifa. I'm going to fucking come up to Portland and murder your fucking asses. So, certainly seems like the kind of potential to be another Jeremy Christian. And that guy, Joshua Sintel, was at the rally on June 30th, and he was right there on the front lines. He was shouting racial slurs, giving Nazi salutes, and he never got kicked out of their rally, so apparently they're cool with that. Yeah, it does seem to take a pretty long history of open support of fascism before you get kicked out of the rallies. But I guess we'll see. Maybe he won't be there tomorrow.

Now, in the immediate wake of the Max stabbings, you might have expected Joey Gibson to lay low for a little while, and instead he used the tragedy as an excuse to host yet another rally. The mayor begged him not to, but he held his march anyway. It was obviously ended in a very messy brawl. 14 people were arrested. The Colombian interviewed him in the aftermath of that rally and caught him in an apology sort of mood. So, here's that Colombian article. Gibson called throwing that rally one of the tougher decisions he's had to make. He's unsure of why extremists are attaching themselves to him. Some he thinks might be looking for a home or a place to recruit. I didn't do a good enough job of speaking out against it, he said, adding that when left wing groups contacted him and pointed out with photo evidence specific extremists at his rally, it was an eye opener. I mean, he had to know that ahead of time. He brought Tim Geonette, Baked Alaska to speak at that rally. And then the history of his anti-Semitic statements was very well known. He had already been exposed with that on the internet. It was common knowledge. He was being cited as an anti-Semite in news articles at the time. So, the idea that Joey didn't know that ahead of time is frankly just BS. Yeah, it certainly does not seem, he would have had to not read anything about Baked Alaska to not have known that. Maybe he thought it was a dessert aficionado.

Anyway, this eye opener, as Joey said, did not inspire him to hold off on further rallies. Patriot Prayer has continued to regularly rally, mostly important, but also in Berkeley and at one point in Austin to support Alex Jones when he was banned. This one seems to have more or less fizzled out. Some of Patriot Prayer's rallies have been relatively peaceable, but tremendous shocking violence is an extremely regular occurrence. Now, y'all may disagree, but from how it looks just researching this as an outsider, it seems like the bloodiest single rally was June 30th, 2018. I would agree with that, yeah. Patriot Prayer had build it as a rally to quote, promote freedom and courage in opposition to the terrifying antiphon menace. Portland Police Bureau declared it a riot. One man had his skull fractured when the police opened fire on counter protesters. There's a video of the altercation, which we'll link on the site. Looking into it, you see nothing being tossed by the crowd until the police begin firing into the crowd, at which point you see the crowd throwing water bottles. So again, we'll link it. It happens about 17 seconds in, is what you see. You're confusing two events. So June 30th was kind of a Patriot Prayer's response to a rally they held on June 3rd, 2018, which was built as Tiny's going away rally. Tiny obviously did not leave. He's still in Portland, Washington. And at that rally, it was kind of very small. It was maybe like 40 to 50, but mainly Proud Boys.

And the antifascist counter demonstration. And the Proud Boys really just went around looking for people to assault. That was kind of a big, yeah. They assaulted kind of random people with helmets, with their fists, with sticks. And I think at that rally, the police actually said, hey, we can arrest you, but you guys should just leave instead. Oh, there's video of that. There's video of that incident. June 30th was kind of built. They think they came off worse in that June 30th rally. So the June 30th rally was really their response to that, to kind of pump up their machismo, really make them feel good about themselves again. And what we saw at that rally was kind of a really big confrontation between a really heavily Proud Boy group of Patriot Prayer that was planning on marching, that marched and then charged an antifascist line. So a skull fracture in that case came from a Proud Boy named Ethan Nordin, who fractured an antifascist skull. August 4th was a month later. This was the next Patriot Prayer rally. This was, you know, 2,080 fascists came out to oppose about 300 Patriot Prayer attendees.

And at that one, the police kind of acted as Patriot Prayers enforcers, keeping people away, but allowing Patriot Prayer to have weapons, allowing them to march, even though it wasn't permitted, and then firing and fracturing someone's skull, and also giving several people chemical burns when they wanted to get back to their police cars. Yeah. And that's where the video is from, the August 4th rally. Yeah, in the video at about 17 seconds in, you can see the police fire, and then you see water bottles being tossed, essentially. There's other video of that as well, where you can hear the cops saying, are those squad cars back there in the crowd? And then that was what catalyzed the decision to fire, and then they lied about there being objects thrown. Yeah, and there's a class action suit currently ongoing against the police department. Yeah, there's a number of them.

Well, we'll get into that once that's all resolved, I'm sure, but yeah. So I think if you dig into the matter, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Patriot Prayer are the agitators here. For one thing, many of them aren't Oregonians. Vancouver is part of the Portland metropolitan area. You can almost view it as like a suburb of the city. Would that be fair to say, probably? I'd say that's accurate. Yeah.

It's across the Columbia River in Washington, but a lot of people commute down I-5 into Portland from it. And in fact, most of Portland's police officers live in Vancouver, about half of them live outside the metro area, and a lot of those live in Vancouver. And it's a more conservative area and very different in culture than sort of the Portland that is more famous to people listening to this, who know about Portland from the show Portlandia or whatever, right? Vancouver's a rather different place culturally than a lot of it, Portland. So it seems like you could make the case that some of these folks are essentially invading what they see as a liberal enclave. And there is some evidence to back that up, including what we talked about a little earlier, a post made on the Patriot Prayer Facebook page by a guy named Jay Harris.

And I'm going to read a little excerpt from that. And this was in advance of the June 30th, 2018 rally. This Saturday, June 30th, 2018, the stench-covered and liberal-occupied streets of Portland will be cleansed, cleansed, I say. The streets will be flowing with freedom, the air will be filled with patriotism, the clouds shall part, the darkness will fade, and the glory of America will shine forth. The cheers of celebration shall bless, the ears all around, young children will dance, as the praises of our great nation will be explained to that regret. Yeah, so he, he, it's... Some purple pros right there. Some very purple pros, but clearly some of these guys seem to see what they're doing as something of an invasion.

Well, that certainly echoes what Joey considers it, you know, we have Joey and Cameron saying, we're going to keep going into these, these called places of darkness. When describing, you know, coastal cities that have like kind of a left-wing liberal tradition, Portland, Berkeley, San Francisco, he really does see himself as kind of this invading force that is planning on cleansing the city of the left. Yeah, and I did find one example of Gibson kicking someone from a rally. Raul Gonzalez, who sounds like he did not get to march with them, at least on June 30th. And Gonzalez is a racist skinhead and was essentially coming and he had the red suspenders on. He had the, I forget the band shirt that he had on, but it was a... He also has a swastika knife.

Yeah, swastika knife. Yeah, he's known to wear a Hitler youth knife. He has the son and rod symbol on a necklace that he wears. And when he tried to march with patriot prayer, Gibson told him, quote, if you supported us, you wouldn't be here because you give us a bad name, which I think is pretty telling because it's not saying I reject you because you're wearing a swastika. I reject you because you're wearing explicitly Nazi paraphernalia. I reject you because you're giving us a bad name.

And after he said that, he actually let Raul stay because Raul refused to leave. So Joey was like, well, I can't do anything. I wash my hands of this because I have no ability to kick people out of my own rally, apparently. Yeah, which is also counter to what he claims about Jeremy Christian, because in interviews who always say that he kicked Christian out of the rally. Right. Yeah. I also want to get into one other subject here, which is sort of the claim of this group that they are free speech supporters, and you'll often hear that in sort of Joey talking to mainstream news that like, that's his angle as I'm supporting free speech.

We're free speech advocates. Tussetala Tiny Tosey has been so far accused twice of assaulting people who screamed at him. Like there's one case from the Vancouver mall and one from the Vancouver mall. The Northeast Broadway in 12th or so. Yeah. Portland. And the Vancouver mall one was a 17 year old shouted an obscenity to him and several proud boys as they drove past in a truck with had a Donald Trump flag on it. And the proud boys got out and assaulted this young man and Tosey wrote on social media afterwards.

We are not your average victimized Trump supporters. We fight back and we know how to throw our hand. You get smacked and now you're the victim. You asked for it added another member who was there. And then of course there was a separate assault Mr. Ledwith when that was the one on in Portland. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

This guy who's often billed at least as Joey's right hand man has two credible cases of assaulting people for exercising their freedom of speech which doesn't seem super consistent. But anyway, it really is consistent for what they do though. I mean if we're kind of building this idea of what they're doing which is they want to assault the left. They want to come in and make the left afraid again. You know as his t-shirt has said you know make communists afraid again of murder basically. So like they use violence in this language as two tools in order to rally more people to their cause including you know overt white supremacists and Nazis and also to try and intimidate the public. And that's one of the reasons that we do we do is we want to be able to have the community be able to stand up and defend itself against this kind of incursion.

And we don't want people to live in fear people who you know are the kind of at risk people whether it's their politics their gender or sexual identity. The color of their skin their religion any of these things we don't want people to have to be afraid in their own city of these kinds of groups coming in and using them as an example using them as a scapegoat for the gratification of these violent politics. Well I'd like to close out by quoting an article written on medium by a guy named Justin Ward. It's essentially multi racial fascists was the key phrase in the title and he he's really getting into sort of patriot prayers claims about itself and what they actually are and he provides a pretty salient point so I'm going to quote him here. Patriot prayer is a prime example of the cult of action for action sake that Italian writer Umberto Echo described in his 1995 essay or fascism echo who grew up during the rule of Mussolini said fascists believe action is beautiful in itself and that it should be carried out with little or no contemplation because thinking is a escalation. When patriot prayer holds a rally it rarely has a purpose beyond being patriotic or supporting free speech. He obviously puts little thought into the titles giving them ridiculous Orwellian names like peaceful Vancouver Freedom March or most recently the Portland Freedom and Courage I do think this sort of attitude of action for action sake and everyone is a hero this cult of the hero thing I think is maybe the most direct line you can draw between sort of old school fascist movements and what's going on with a group like this this attitude of portraying yourself as a hero and putting yourself in a physical position where you can show yourself as being a warrior almost is like I think that's that's really key to understanding these people and understanding sort of their place within this broader cosmology.

It's definitely a part of the the patriot prayer mythos his group used to call itself. There are two names American freedom warriors and warriors for freedom and some of them still have that tattooed on them despite they're kind of not using that name anymore. So this this idea of the kind of warrior for freedom that crusader that Joey kind of sees himself as is definitely a huge part of the drive behind their movement. Yeah. Well guys I think that's most what I got here so I'm going to I'm going to close this out before we roll out do you have anything that y'all would like to plug. I would say if you're if you're interested in more information or seeing some of these receipts of the sort of violence of patriot prayer and succeeded groups definitely visit our website because we have up there a plethora of articles kind of detailing and and going into extreme detail about the the sorts of things that these groups do and it's all documented and we feel like really that is the best evidence. You know we can kind of talk about it and discuss it and that gets the ideas out there but like really people should go and look for themselves and then be able to judge once they've seen the aspects of what patriot prayer says that Joey Gibson doesn't want you to see when he's talking to the camera. Well all right guys that's going to be it for today thank you both for coming by and talking.

Thanks for having us. Yeah thank you. So this has been behind the bastards I've been Robert Evans you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at at bastards pod you can find us on the internet at behind the bastards dot com where we will have all of the receipts for this episode including some stuff that we didn't quite have time to get to. There's a lot of information out there so please check it out. And yeah until then we'll be back soon with another thing so check it out listen in and I love about 40%. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. To death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him. He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.