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Of all the moments that occurred during the tense debate, in the early hours of Wednesday, between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the two candidates for the presidential elections in the United States that will take place on November 3, there was one that stood out given the moment that crosses the country. lives.
After an hour of moderation, the moderator, journalist Chris Wallace, brought up the issue of political violence and racial protests that have been wreaking havoc in the country. When asked if he condemned the far-right groups and militias that pose as his supporters and would tell them to stop acting, the president of the United States fled the issue, asking before they give him specific names for movements of this nature. and defending that the groups responsible for the violence are from the left.
The suggestion did not come from Wallace, but from Joe Biden, who replied “Proud Boys.” Then Trump said “Proud guys stand back and wait,” adding that “someone has to do something about Antifa,” an anti-fascist movement linked to the far left and which the president has already deemed a terrorist. But who did Donald Trump address?
Created in the middle of the campaign for the 2016 presidential election by Gavin McInnes, a former Canadian journalist, one of the founders of Vice magazine, who has since become an activist, the Proud Boys are a related group with the extreme right and who has been involved in the violent confrontations that have occupied the streets of the United States over the years, and with particular virulence in recent months.
The all-male group, whose name, inspired by a song from the movie “Aladdin”, “Proud to Be Your Boy”, started as a joke, is said to be proudly “chauvinist” and a defender of traditional Western values. that he believes. being endangered by left-wing feminist movements and advocates of integration and immigration. The Proud Boys are considered by the FBI as “an extremist group”, while the human rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center labels it a “hate group” for its anti-immigration, anti-Islamic and misogynistic rhetoric.
Despite not having a well-defined ideological line, the group professes libertarian ideas against the social state, is in favor of the property rights of weapons – armed members are often seen in concentrations -, glorifies violence, declares itself against gender equality and has shown strong support for the Donald Trump administration.
Although it admits non-white members to its ranks, the group has been associated with the white supremacy movement, having participated side by side in far-right demonstrations with groups of this nature. An example of this was the presence at the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017, when hundreds of far-right activists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they clashed with anti-racist protesters. The confrontation resulted in contempt, with a neo-Nazi sympathizer advancing into a crowd with a vehicle, killing one person and wounding 19.
Their initiation rituals go through violent practices and whoever joins the group has to profess to be “a Western chauvinist who refuses to apologize for having created the modern world,” as reported The Guardian. His dress code includes red Trump caps that say “Make America Great Again” and black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts. This choice led the British brand to stop selling these models in the US to not be associated with the group.
credits: AFP or licensees
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Although it is estimated to have only a few hundred members, the group has been noted for the violent nature of its actions, often participating in attacks on left-wing activists and attacks on anti-racist protests that have multiplied in recent years. Last year, two of its members were sentenced to four years in prison for beating anti-fascist activists in New York, and hours after Trump’s message, a member was arrested by pointing a revolver at a group and shooting a paintball gun.
A phrase that became a slogan
After addressing the message to the Proud Boys during the debate, Donald Trump sought to distance himself from the group the next day in the face of the wave of criticism that was felt.
“I don’t know who the Proud Boys are. All I can say is that they need to step back and let the police do their job,” said the president, assuring that he “always denounced” supporters of white supremacy and maintaining the tone that those responsible for political violence are on the left.
The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., had directly told the CBS that the father had made it clear that “he would be happy to denounce the extreme right”, recalling that he had “denounced the Ku Klux Klan as a national terrorist organization last week.”
What is at stake is the fact that the English expression “back off and wait” can be interpreted literally as “walk away and wait”, but also as “go out and get ready”.
However, despite the Trump administration’s attempts to soften what could be construed as an appeal made during the debate, the reaction of some Proud Boys was immediate, showing enthusiasm for what they saw as declared support for the president, with the phrase “Stand Back, Stand By” to be shared among group members like a new motto.
“President Trump told the Proud Boys to wait because someone has to deal with Antifa … well sir! We are ready.” says Joe Biggs, one of the Proud Boys activists on Parler, a social network similar to Twitter that does not block extremists: Facebook, for example, banned the group in 2018.
The current leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio -McInnes left the leadership in 2018, despite remaining connected with it- wrote on Twitter who did not view Trump’s words as explicit support for the group and denied associations with white supremacist movements, but said the president’s call to “prepare and wait” is what the group has always done.
This episode resurfaces the controversy that has overshadowed the tenure of Donald Trump, often accused of implicitly supporting far-right movements by refusing to denounce them. In one of the most notorious examples, following the aforementioned outrage at the Charlottesville rally, the president was severely criticized for saying that there were “good people on both sides” in these clashes.
In the face of the movement of outrage against racism and police brutality against African Americans that has plagued the country since the end of May, when George Floyd was killed by politics, Trump has mainly denounced the violence perpetrated. according to him, by radical left-wing activists.
* com AFP
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