Proud Boys' reputation in shambles with extremists after 'drunk' Capitol riot faceplant
As Americans look forward to the 2024 election that will likely be a rematch between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, an organization that supported the former president and took part in the Jan. 6 insurrection has all but disappeared because they have become a joke among far-right extremists.
According to a report from Vice's Tess Owen, the Proud Boys, once a force among extremists, have seen their ranks thinned -- in part due to jail sentences.
As Vice's Owen suggests, it appears that the Proud Boys organization is "circling the drain."
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Noting that four of the group leaders, including former chairman Enrique Tarrio, are now sitting in jail for their efforts related to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, the report notes, "The Proud Boys have now been around for eight years, and the recent decline in their public activity could suggest they’re following similar trajectories of other American extremist groups who came before them."
According to Jon Lewis, of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, the new generation of extremists see the Proud Boys as both ineffective and yesterday's news.
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"The younger, more online, more extreme edges of these movements are always going to split off from the ‘older’ core,” Lewis explained. “The Proud Boys effectively become like the ‘normies,’ the guys who aren’t really hardcore enough to be terrorists, or overt white supremacists and whose legacy is that they got drunk and tried to storm the Capitol and then didn’t.”
The report adds, "Other more extreme groups and movements have cropped up in recent years, and have been successful in drawing in younger members. The network of neo-Nazi fight groups known as Active Clubs, for example, combines the machismo bluster of the Proud Boys with overt white supremacy, and have ramped up their activities in the last year. Explicitly antisemitic and hardcore neo-Nazi groups such as Blood Tribe, Goyim Defense League, and NSC-131, also formed in recent years, have made themselves increasingly visible by holding rallies around the country."
You can read more here.