Department of Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem’s ability to convert her agency into a home for an army of masked, predominantly white men willing to grab and brutalize people on the streets of the US owes a debt to proposals made by one of the founders of the Proud Boys back in 2016, according to one analyst.
According to a Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, it should come as no surprise that ICE has had no problem attracting recruits despite nationwide revulsion over their tactics because Noem is reaching out to what she called “America’s loser population.”
As she noted, in 2016 Vice magazine and Proud Boy founder Gavin McInnes started ramping up anger over the state of affairs in the U.S. and suggested the path forward was to bring together those who felt as aggrieved as he had become, stating in an interview, “Fighting solves everything. We need more violence from the Trump people. Trump supporters! Choke a motherf-----. Choke a b----. Choke a t-----. Get your fingers around the windpipe, if they spit on you. That’s assault.”
Those words mirror recent events in Minnesota after Noem flooded Minneapolis-St. Paul with heavily armed agents in the last week and a half which has resulted in one death, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, so far.
According to Marcotte, McInnis was onto something a decade ago, which Donald Trump and Noem have put into play.
“Before Johnny-come-latelies like Elon Musk started assembling mediocre white men who are low on intelligence and high on resentment, McInnes was reeling them in with a steady patter of assurances that he had the secret to restore them to level of social status and respect the modern era had supposedly stolen from them,” she wrote before adding, “McInnes’ views were swiftly turned into action by his followers during Trump’s first term. In 2017, the Proud Boys started targeting liberal cities full of people they believed needed to be ‘slapped,’ such as Portland, Oregon. They roamed around waving flags and shouting insults at the locals, hoping to draw a reaction that they could claim justified lashing out at people with violence under their ridiculous views of ‘self-defense.’”
Writing that recent events have likely fulfilled McInnis’ “wildest dreams,” Marcotte observed, “Trump’s invasion of Minneapolis and the violence inflicted on the residents is being justified by the administration and their allies with the exact same concepts McInnes used to build up the Proud Boys in its early days: that racial diversity is a poison, that white male violence is purifying and heroic, and that it’s ‘self-defense' to beat or even kill anyone who stands up to the right.”
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