04 September 19
FOCUS: Garrett Epps | The Proud Boys' Real Target
Garrett Epps, The Atlantic
Epps writes: "I haven't seen Justice Hans Linde in more than a decade, but I thought of him last Saturday, when I found myself locked in a science museum with frightened parents and children while neofascist thugs marched by."
Garrett Epps, The Atlantic
Epps writes: "I haven't seen Justice Hans Linde in more than a decade, but I thought of him last Saturday, when I found myself locked in a science museum with frightened parents and children while neofascist thugs marched by."
EXCERPT:
Although no major political figure has embraced antifa activism, the Republican Party has begun to embrace the Proud Boys. Last fall, the Metropolitan Republican Club invited a Proud Boys leader to speak at a club event. (After the event, two Proud Boys beat four protesters so badly that a jury on Monday convicted two of them on charges of assault and riot.) The Republican activist Roger Stone has said he was initiated as a Proud Boy, and Proud Boys appeared at a federal courthouse when he turned himself in on charges brought by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Stone and the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson posed in the Fox greenroom with two Proud Boys accompanying Stone.
This summer, Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy are sponsoring a resolution that would designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist group.” No mention of the Proud Boys or any of the other neofascist groups who feel empowered by the ascent of Trump.
But the group’s greatest triumph came on the morning of last Saturday’s march. Trump tweeted, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.’ Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!” One Proud Boy leader hailed the tweet as part of the protest’s aim: “We wanted national attention and we got it,” the organizer Joe Biggs told The Oregonian. “Mission success.”
Linde’s life was shaped by gangs of thugs deployed to shatter democratic order and impose racist dictatorship. Portland provided his family a haven and a life as citizens of a democratic nation.
Now the right has targeted Linde’s haven for destruction. The real target, though, is not Portland or antifa but all of us, and our sense of security that we are free citizens of a democratic nation, free to take our children downtown to play or to assemble peacefully to advocate values that the Republican Party does not approve. That party under Trump is now taking sides in the uneven war in Portland’s streets—and it is taking the dangerously wrong side.
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