Whether it was protesting Covid lockdowns, attending school board meetings, or facing off against Black Lives Matter protesters, the far-right Proud Boys were always on hand to support Donald Trump’s first term in office.
When Trump left office in 2021, the group’s leaders languished in jail for their role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. With reported infighting destabilizing the movement, it looked like the group’s glory days were behind it.
But Trump’s return a year ago, and his release of all January 6 prisoners, signaled that a Proud Boy comeback could be in the cards. And while there have been intermittent signs that the group could return to the levels of activity of its heyday, the reality is that Trump’s militarization of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the Border Patrol, together with the administration’s embrace of white nationalist rhetoric, has left the Proud Boys without a role to play. There is little incentive for Proud Boys to leave their homes when heavily armed representatives of the Trump administration are already picking fights with left-wing protesters.
Never has that been more evident than over the course of the last week, as anti-ICE protesters have flooded the streets of towns and cities across the country since a masked federal agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.
Instead of taking to the streets to face down the protesters and defend Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown, the Proud Boys have been relegated to posting incendiary memes while promising to provide personal security for right-wing influencers who track every part of ICE’s anti-immigrant raids.
A WIRED review of hundreds of Telegram channels run by Proud Boy chapters across the country, as well as other far-right extremist and militia groups, reveals that there are no public calls for members to mobilize and defend ICE from the protesters.
Instead, members of the Telegram channels are posting deeply misogynistic and homophobic images, videos, and AI-generated content featuring Good and her wife, with one extremist expert telling WIRED that the channels in recent days have been almost giddy in response to the shooting.
“They are very enthused about what’s happening, because for many of them, [ICE and the DHS are] following what their blueprint would have been anyway,” says Wendy Via, cofounder and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, adding that there is no reason why the Proud Boys need to be on the ground. “When you’ve got law enforcement that seems so willing to abuse their powers, why get in trouble.”
The Proud Boy channels, in between celebrations of Good’s death, are also praising the work of ICE in the city.
“You’re an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Five and a half years after George Floyd, in the same city, you subdue a prisoner with your knee. Imagine being that based,” a member of a North Carolina chapter of the group known as the Cape Fear Proud Boys wrote in a Telegram post this week.
There have been some promises of action, however. After right-wing influencers Nick Sortor and Cam Higby claimed to have been attacked while filming content in Minneapolis this week, former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio claimed he wanted to help. “I reached out to both [Nick] and Cam with an offer for personal detail,” Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sent to prison over his role related to the January 6 riots at the Capitol, wrote on X on Monday. Tarrio still claims to lead the Proud Boys. “Waiting for a reply. We have a great solution for both of them,” he added.
