The American right’s long-running dalliance with the Pr oud Boys

Mark Peterson/Redux

In the wake of Tuesday’s trash fire of a presidential debate, perhaps the biggest news was President Donald Trump’s encouraging callout to the white supremacist group the Proud Boys. This was but the latest in a long series of Trump refusals to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to denounce the race hatreds he’s fomented within today’s GOP, and in the country at large.

But the alliance between the white nationalist gang—officially classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—and the American conservative movement runs much deeper than Trump’s shocking debate-stage directive to his Proud Boys fan base to “stand back and stand by.” As TNR contributors Matthew Phelan, Jesse Hicks, and Elizabeth Farkas report, the Proud Boys have long worked closely with conservative agitprop impresario James O’Keefe, who runs Project Veritas, the storied right-wing clearinghouse of ethically challenged and misleading gotcha videos targeting Democratic campaigns alongside lower-profile federal officials and community advocacy groups. As part of O’Keefe’s “Operation Gold Mine” effort to hoax campaign workers in the 2020 Democratic primary season, Veritas made use of a roster of Proud Boy operatives:

To infiltrate the Biden campaign in Iowa, Veritas tapped an avowed Proud Boy, while a second operative aligned with the Proud Boys tried to infiltrate the Sanders and Warren campaigns. Project Veritas employs a Proud Boy who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct for his part in a brawl following a speech by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. O’Keefe himself has palled around with McInnes for years, and Veritas devoted an entire sting to defending the current leader of the Proud Boys.…

McInnes has repeatedly called for violence against left-wing activists, and the Proud Boys have been caught planning violent “rallies,” most recently in Portland, Oregon.

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Indeed, O’Keefe has long-standing ties to the white supremacist right. In 2006, he was photographed at a “Race and Conservatism” conference headlined by Jared Taylor, founder of the influential white supremacist journal American Renaissance, and counted white nationalist leader Kyle Bristow among his Facebook friends, according to the archive of his account.

But the Veritas–Proud Boy alliance has deeper personal and institutional roots. In addition to the four Proud Boy operatives recruited for Operation Gold Mine, O’Keefe and other Veritas functionaries have joined McInnes and his Proud Boy retinue on various high-profile New York outings. In 2018, the Proud Boys mounted an attack on anti-fascist protesters in Manhattan that resulted in the arrest of 10 Proud Boys. Future Veritas Development Officer Jake Freijo was among those charged; he later pleaded assault and rioting charges down to a single count of disorderly conduct.
McInnes, meanwhile, has frequently been pressed into talking-head duty for Veritas projects—and the media synergy runs both ways, as well as into the broader white nationalist and far-right media scene:

The two have been on camera together as far back as 2013, predating the official founding of the Proud Boys in 2016. O’Keefe was honored as a “Proud Boy of the Month” in 2017 in the group’s official magazine; the two tried to crash the Tribeca Film Festival in the same year. McInnes showed up to O’Keefe’s American Pravda book parties in 2018. O’Keefe has appeared on McInnes’s show, as well as that of white supremacist Stefan Molyneux. In June 2020, both McInnes and O’Keefe appeared on The Alex Jones Show—thereby completing some sort of unholy right-wing conspiracy-mongering trifecta.

So while the Proud Boys have exulted at the abrupt news that they’ve received the imprimatur of the presidency, in reality, they have long set up shop in the diseased marketplace of ideas that has come to claim preeminence on the contemporary right. And their clear imprint on the influential Veritas media brand means that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future: “In its comfortable and long-lasting proximity to white supremacists,” Phelan, Hicks, and Farkas conclude, “Project Veritas simply reflects the present and future of the Republican Party.”

—Chris Lehmann, editor