On 30 June in Portland, Oregon, a rally staged by the rightwing Patriot Prayer group degenerated into a riotous fight with leftwing counter-protesters. The violence was extensive but rightwing media and activists have lavished attention on a single punch.
Ethan Nordean, a muscular 28-year-old from Washington state, was captured on video fending off two baton blows from a masked counter-protester. He then flattened his assailant.
The video has been used to buttress the preferred rightwing explanation for the Portland riot: leftwing aggression. It has also been seized on as a recruiting tool by a group, the Proud Boys, which has risen to prominence on the far right since the 2016 election and which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists as a hate group.
Nordean was wearing a black and gold Fred Perry polo shirt – the uniform of the Proud Boys. Under his alias Rufio Panman, he was named Proud Boy of the week by the organization’s magazine. The article concluded with a group slogan: “They fucked around. They found out.” In the first of many tweets referring to the incident, the same slogan was used by the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes.
Social media accounts associated with the Proud Boys have spread the video. The group’s verified Twitter account has used a still of the punch as its header image; it also incorporated footage into a so-called “sizzle reel” of the violence in Portland.
Since early 2017, a core group of Proud Boys from the Pacific north-west have been active participants in a number of rightwing rallies. Nordean has attended events in Portland and Seattle. Before the 30 June rally, Patriot Prayer founder and Republican Senate candidate Joey Gibson issued a national call for participation. At least 60 Proud Boys answered. Some came from other states, including California and Texas. Many wore body armour, helmets and gas masks.
Keegan Hankes, an SPLC researcher, said the group had “been open and very consistent about using violence as a tool”. Its use of the footage from Portland, he said, showed how “a good bit of this is about attention-seeking as well. They live on the internet to promote their brands, and that includes Gavin McInnes.”
McInnes claims his group does not promote violence at all. In a post in which he denied that his group is part of the “alt-right”, he said it was simply “a men’s club that meets about once a month to drink beer”.
‘Justified violence is amazing’
McInness, who was born in Britain and moved to Canada at a young age, was a co-founder of Vice Media, which he left in 2008. After a stint with the Rebel Media, a far-right Canadian company, and a decade as a columnist for the “paleoconservative” Taki’s Magazine, he is now a host on CRTV, a conservative network. He founded the Proud Boys, which he calls a “fraternal organization”, in 2016.
As well as items from a growing range of official merchandise, members often wear red Donald Trump caps. Their Fred Perry shirts have a history in subcultures including football hooliganism; black and gold are the colors of anarcho-capitalism, a libertarian ideology which seeks to abolish government in the interest of free markets.
The group’s magazine has published a list of its political commitments, which echo talk-radio style constitutional conservatism and add libertarian touches such as opposition to the war on drugs and an antifeminist veneration of traditional gender roles.
The group thus falls in line with McInnes’s views, which are broadly Trumpist. In Canada, the Globe and Mail summarized his beliefs as: “Libertarian politics, father-knows-best gender roles, closed borders, Islamophobia and something he calls ‘western chauvinism’.”
McInnes denies that his group is racist, and he and other Proud Boys point to the presence of non-white members. But in Portland on 30 June, a man in Proud Boys colors taunted counter-protesters through a bullhorn. “Illegals,” he said, should have their heads “smashed into the concrete”. Another man marched alongside the group and yelled racist slurs. Other Patriot Prayer rallies at which Proud Boys have been present have drawn members of far-right groups including Cascade Legion and Identity Evropa.
Nordean was briefly apprehended. A Portland police spokesman later said an investigation “remains open and under review”. Nordean found a place in the limelight. He appeared on McInnes’s CRTV show and the Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones played the video of his punch repeatedly. Last Friday, Jones interviewed him.
Regarding counter-protesters, Jones said: “You try to speak to them as humans, they disregard that and use it as weakness. But they do listen to your fist smashing into their face.”
Nordean agreed. Jones asked: “How good did it feel, at least later, when you saw his head hit the pavement?”
Nordean said: “Like Gavin McInnes says, violence isn’t great, but justified violence is amazing.”
McInnes has claimed repeatedly that “fighting solves everything”. In a podcast last May, he said: “You’re not a man until you’ve had the crap beaten out of you [and] beaten the crap out of someone.”
Last year, after a confrontation with anti-fascist protesters, or “antifa”, at New York University, in which McInnes claimed to have been pepper-sprayed, he said: “We’re the only ones fighting these guys, and I want you to fight them too. It’s fun.”
In early 2017, McInnes stated that to become a “fourth degree” Proud Boy, recruits had to “get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa”. In July last year, in the Proud Boys magazine, he issued a “clarification”, saying Proud Boys should only “[defend] themselves after getting fucked with”.
‘Fucking weak human being’
The Guardian reached McInnes by phone. Asked about the violence in Portland, he said: “You would have to be completely blind, which I think you are, to not see that fight for what it is, which is antifa, fully armed, attacking Joey Gibson and Joey Gibson’s friends.”
Asked if sharing video of Nordean’s punch amounted to the promotion of violence, McInnes called the Guardian a “fucking weak human being”, a “vile little pussy” and a “tepid cunt”. He then ranted about “the media class”, who he said “sit there picking fights, call everyone a Nazi, and then when someone dares defend themselves, and someone else says ‘Yay’, you say: ‘Well you’re promoting violence.’”
Before he could be asked about alleged violent incidents in the Pacific north-west involving Proud Boys members, McInnes ended the conversation.
In one such alleged incident, Proud Boy Tusitala Toese is alleged to have punched a Portland man, Tim Ledwith, in broad daylight in a busy shopping district. Toese and another group member, Donovon Flippo, were arrested on 30 June. The men appeared in court on 2 July but were released with no restrictions. A spokesman for the Multnomah county district attorney said the case “remains open and under investigation”.
In another alleged incident, on 11 May in Vancouver, Washington, Toese, Flippo and another man, Russell Schultz, were allegedly involved in an altercation with Mykel Mosley, a young African American man.
Mosley, who was 17 at the time, said he was walking with a number of friends after a meal when he saw a truck sporting a Confederate battle flag with Trump’s head in the middle of it and expressed his disapproval. According to the Western States Center (WSC), a progressive group representing Mosley: “The three adults in the truck escalated the situation by exiting the vehicle and chasing Mosley, who ran from them.”
Toese allegedly struck Mosley but it was Mosley who was detained, first by mall guards and then by police. Video seen by the Guardian appeared to back up Mosley’s version of events, however, and charges were dropped after the WSC wrote to the prosecuting attorney. A spokesman for the prosecutor would not comment on whether the office was considering charges against the Proud Boys members.
In Facebook screenshots passed to the Guardian by the WSC, Toese appeared to explain his actions with another Proud Boys slogan: “You wanna play stupid games you will win a stupid prize.”