The Just Security Podcast

What the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers Don't Want You to Know

• Just Security • Episode 17

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Two years after the January 6th attack, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – two of the groups that stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn an election – are on a mission. This time, their goal is more subtle but just as sinister. Although individual Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are on trial for conspiracy and a heap of other crimes, the federal government has been slow to call the groups extremists. In courtrooms, on Twitter, and in media reports the groups are trying to clean up their image, and people are buying it. 

Today we’re going to explore how the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers use propaganda – calling themselves a “drinking club,” “patriots,” and “constitutionalists” – to control their own narrative and hide their violent, extremist views. Calling out these lies, and understanding how they work, is key to holding the groups accountable for the January 6th attack and exposing their continued messages of hate. 

Joining us are Meghan Conroy and Jon Lewis. Meghan is a Fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lab and a former Investigator with the January 6th Committee, where she focused on the role of social media in the Capitol attack. Jon is a Fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, where he studies domestic and homegrown extremism. They wrote a recent Just Security piece analyzing the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers propaganda efforts and why they’ve been successful so far.  

Show Notes:  

Paras Shah: Two years after the January 6th attack, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – two of the groups that stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn an election – are on a mission. This time, their goal is more subtle but just as sinister. Although individual Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are on trial for conspiracy and a heap of other crimes, the federal government has been slow to call the groups extremists. In courtrooms, on Twitter, and in media reports the groups are trying to clean up their image, and people are buying it. 

Today we’re going to explore how the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers use propaganda – calling themselves a “drinking club,” “patriots,” and “constitutionalists” – to control their own narrative and hide their violent, extremist views. Calling out these lies, and understanding how they work, is key to holding the groups accountable for the January 6th attack and exposing their continued messages of hate. 

I’m your host Paras Shah. 

Joining me are Meghan Conroy and Jon Lewis. Meghan is a Fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lab and a former Investigator with the January 6th Committee, where she focused on the role of social media in the Capitol attack. Jon is a Fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, where he studies domestic and homegrown extremism. They wrote a recent Just Security piece analyzing the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers propaganda efforts and why they’ve been successful so far. 

Hey Megan, hey Jon! Welcome to the show! So I want to get started with this basic question, which is that groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers use this coded language. They call themselves drinking buddies, they say they're constitutionalists. What are some other examples of how they are using propaganda to describe themselves?

Jon Lewis: I think when we look at the trajectory of those two groups, over the past five, six years, what we see is a persistent effort to downplay the significance of their actions, and the extremist element of their beliefs. So when you look at the Oath Keepers, for example, they will always try and position themselves – and historically have always tried to position themselves – as merely defensive-oriented individuals who are responding to what they perceive as government abuse, government overreach, and standing between the government and the American people.And I think similarly, what we saw in the past couple years, especially with the Proud Boys, is a very concerted effort to minimize the threat that they pose, right, even though there are countless examples of this group engaging in protracted street violence, in several violent plots that we've tracked, and other instances of violent extremism prior to January 6. You still see this effort by the group to obfuscate, to minimize, and to generally downplay the significance of their actions. 

And I think, again, as I'm sure we'll talk about throughout this podcast, it was successful, right? They were able to go to the US Capitol on January 6, with, you know, well over 150-200 individuals and face almost no, you know, immediate pushback, right? Not have a security presence, not have a operational setup in DC that you would expect if there were 200 members of the Islamic State or al Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah, that were marching around the US Capitol or eating at the food trucks before marching to the US Capitol. I think it's important. I think what Megan and I tried to lay out in this piece is, you know, why that's the case. And I think there's obviously a lot of elements to it. But first and foremost is how successful both the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the broader domestic violent extremists landscape has been at attempting to intentionally downplay, obfuscate, minimize how serious of a threat they actually pose.

Meghan Conroy: And a big source of inspiration for this article was the January 6 Committee releasing its treasure trove of documents, many of which were depositions with these folks. And, I mean, just pointing to things that they said in the depositions – which we can easily debunk, and have been routinely debunked by various experts and reporters in this space – but they continue to perpetuate these narratives. And, you know, just specific to some of the transcripts from the depositions we have, describing the War Boys podcast that Tarrio used to run, him saying, you know, it's basically two guys on a couch, we talk about politics a little bit, we talk about pickup trucks, beer, women – like, not exactly, it goes a little bit deeper than that.

And I think, and it's worth noting that Dan Hull, Tarrio’s attorney who was present at the deposition said that, you know, the Proud Boys didn't do an insurrection, it's just not what they do, they drink, they had their picture taken, he did acknowledge they look for Antifa at night, so a broken clock, etc. But he described them as a satirical group – a goofy group of people who have political ideas. And I think that narrative has perpetuated. We saw obviously, heard that in the January 6 depositions, we've heard that in the ongoing trial, and the fact that they have kind of stuck to the scripts even though they did very much do an insurrection, really is telling of the fact that they're going to continue to perpetuate these narratives for as long as they can.

Paras: And just to remind listeners, Enrique Tarrio is Chairman of the Proud Boys, he's been on trial for seditious conspiracy. And so part of what these groups are doing is trying to sanitize their image. What other roles does this propaganda effort play or accomplish for them?

Jon: Yeah, I think, building off of the last answer, I think, we saw what it does for them, right? It it drastically changes the response from law enforcement, and from, you know, even researchers to a certain extent, right? I think as we were seeing the growth of the Proud Boys as an organization, post, you know, the right Charlottesville in that 2018-2019 period, we were also seeing the decline of the Islamic State as an organized territory holding organization. And I think that there were a fair few questions around. What does the domestic landscape look like? What does the counterterrorism apparatus in this country look like post-ISIS, post, you know, the Islamic State as an entity. And I think that in that vacuum, we really saw that question go unanswered, in terms of who are the actors? Who are the big threats? And what should the response look like?

And I think in that period, we also saw a spate of attacks and violent plots coming from those two buckets of largely, I think, which we describe here of in the government's DVE landscape, which are REMVE, racially ethnically motivated violent extremists, and AGABE, or anti government anti authority bound extremists. Now, most of those, I think, successful attacks that we saw, right, Poway, El Paso, Pittsburgh in that 2019 period alone, were perpetrated by more hardcore elements of the REMVE space, neo fascists, accelerationists. 

But we also saw a significant element of the kind of street fighting that we saw with the Proud Boys at the Battle of Berkeley, for example. The Battle of Berkeley, as it became known, were these protests that occurred largely in 2017, really around the kind of figures who framed themselves as alt right. There were a series of speeches that were intended to be going on led by folks like Milo Yiannopoulos, who had, you know, long been a kind of prominent figure in that space. And you kind of had this set of pitch battles between protesters, counter protesters, and Antifa had shown up to try and disrupt this kind of set of speakers. You had Oath Keepers, you had Proud Boys, you had members of the Rise Above Movement all coming together, just as we saw on January 6, in that kind of coalition against a common enemy. 

And I think that too often in that intervening period, because again, because of the propaganda, because of how they were perceived, and because of, I think, you know, some inherent biases and how we look at international versus domestic terrorism, there was a kind of two tiered factor in this where the Proud Boys, I think, by the time we got to January 6, they were looked at by significant elements in law enforcement, and local law enforcement especially, as a drinking club that goes out and has fights in the street sometimes, but not as a group that would be the tip of the spear at, you know, an attack on the US Capitol, as part of an alleged plot to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power. And so I think that, you know, the big challenge that we have here is that their propaganda, for all intents and purposes, worked going into January 6.

Meghan: And I wanted to flag that, especially within the context of the Proud Boys, that propaganda is still working. Unfortunately, many members of the public still view these guys as patriots who are very active in their local communities, and especially in protecting those communities from various forces of perceived evil. So, just in the last few weeks, we've seen everyday folks on Telegram, for example, who are not necessarily in far right chats, and they're celebrating Proud Boys chapters volunteering in areas affected by the Ohio train derailment. And we see people who are thrilled that Proud Boys are protesting drag brunches. And so there is still buy in with regards to the Proud Boys branding, even though again, as John pointed out, even though they literally tried to violently overthrow their own government. So even with these guys currently on trial for seditious conspiracy, the public perception in some circles still conveys that that propaganda is working.

Paras: So these groups are spreading this propaganda, but how are they using social media networks, platforms and traditional news sources to do that?

Jon: So I think one of the big ways that we see the low level spread of a lot of this stuff is just in the way that the Proud Boys are discussed and reported, and the Oath Keepers, if you go back a couple more years. And again, it's the stuff that plays into their framing, it's reporting on incident, reporting on a sort of pitched battle or a sort of conflict between the Proud Boys and Antifa, and reporters who feel the need, as an example, to portray both sides as sort of equal, on level playing fields, and to two sides of the same coin.

I think as a good example, we saw plenty of reporting before January 6 that highlighted the Proud Boys in their own words, or I think gave perhaps very, very flattering coverage or, you know, freely portrayed members of the group as what they described themselves to be right? A fraternal drinking club, or platform to Gavin McInnes, the founder of the group originally or members like Enrique Tarrio, to portray their own worldview in very flattering terms. And I think that this was part of this, this broader challenge that I think we've hit on here, with stuff like the Battle of Berkeley. You had the rise of that alt right, in quotes “right component” of this ecosystem, where minimizing the significance, minimizing the seriousness, and making it seem as though these were just normal, everyday run of the mill policy positions, right? That we're not driven by white supremacy, we're not driven by the desire for a white ethnostate, but just kind of your average American guy who's a bit of a nationalist, and who wants to see America go in the right direction, but just leaves off the part of the end where they want to, you know, kill all the members of the Jewish faith and all minorities, right? 

And so it's just leading individuals into those rabbit holes, into their online spaces, by attempting to soften their message when they talk to reporters, when they're interviewed by researchers, when they're confronted on their views. It has always been this game of obfuscation, of minimization. And I think that again, both through their own external social media posts, through interviews they gave over the years, and through really just the actions of the kind of run of the mill Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in this period, you saw these attempts kind of become the status quo for this group.

Meghan: And I think both the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and just kind of broader, I guess, thought leaders in this space for lack of a better term, would be their ability to both tap into and exacerbate existing grievances. And I think we see this time and time again, with virtually every single perceived crisis or noteworthy newsworthy event. Still today is that anti government sentiment and that anti media sentiment. And both of those organizations, as well as the broader kind of far right movement, really expertly tap into those, and there's obviously a hunger for those narratives. And these groups, like John said, whether it was in their own personal posts and their own personal communications, or when, you know, within their own organizations, or outward facing ones, they continue to tap into these grievances that a lot of everyday Americans already held. And that made their viewpoints that much more palatable to the masses.

Paras: So it's been two years since the January 6 attack, and this might be an obvious question, but to what extent is this still a problem? Are most Americans now aware of the fact that the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys are extremists and fascist groups? Or are these narratives still being perpetuated?

Jon: I think that the big kind of sticking point that we will keep coming back to is the fact that there still exists this massive amount of disinformation, about what took place that day. And it's stirred by groups like the Proud Boys, you know, who are again, as you said, at the top, currently on trial for seditious conspiracy, as part of a plot to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power. I mean, their lawyers are still in court again, acting, of course, in good faith, but attempting to promote nearly every misguided conspiracy theory that's come up around January 6, blaming, you know, shadowy figures that haven't been identified, blaming individuals who they're convinced are government informants, saying that the individuals were let into the US Capitol, relying on, again, edited or clipped footage to, you know, show individuals walking around the Capitol hours after the breach to say that there was no violence that took place.

I mean, in every avenue here, you have a concerted effort across the January 6 ecosystem, from defendants to defense attorneys to media figures to be extremists themselves, who have a vested interest in continuing to promote these discredited conspiracies around just the basic information around what took place that day. And I think one of the big challenges we face, as we've seen, with similar types of issues, years and years and years going back, is that you can't fact check your way out of a conspiracy. You can't, you know, present enough pieces of information, enough documents. You know, the January 6 Committee could release every piece of paper they ever scribbled on over the course of their investigation. And you still wouldn't have individuals who are convinced suddenly of the significance of what took place that day. And so I think it does kind of hit that point where it remains an intractable problem. And it's not immediately clear what levers can suddenly be pulled to change that conversation. 

Meghan: And like I mentioned earlier, the kind of impetus for this article was the January 6 Committee releasing its trove of documents. And what we saw was a lot of folks tweeting out direct quotes from the deposition without critically engaging with them. And like I said earlier, many of those quotes contain claims by people like Enrique Tarrio, or Stewart Rhodes, and those claims could easily be debunked, but the people who were tweeting up the quotes weren't doing that. And you'd think yet, almost two years after the fact, we would all collectively know better. But ultimately, there's been a lot of articles out there that have countered the respective groups' messaging about who they are and what they believe in. And obviously, God knows how many podcasts there are out there where we're basically talking about that, that the Proud Boys are violent extremists, the Oath Keepers are violent extremists, The people who did violence on January 6 are violent extremists. 

And ultimately, I think our article was just kind of the first one to put out there that hey, just a reminder, these guys lie, even under oath. So they clearly don't mind doing crimes and seditious conspiracy, so why do people think they won't perjure themselves? And I think that that was something that was an ongoing challenge within the Committee as well, was differentiating between, you know, we had these hours upon hours of transcripts of depositions with these folks under oath. And it was hard to kind of parse out what was legitimate and what was BS. The public, reporters and our fellow experts seem to continue to struggle with that. Ultimately, the narratives that we mentioned earlier that the Proud bBoys and the Oath Keepers continue – especially the Proud Boys continue – to perpetuate even today, like the public, the media, and experts in our field have all helped to perpetuate those narratives, obviously mostly accidentally. 

But you know, even the narrative as basic as the Proud Boys are Western chauvinists, we still hear people describing them that way. And that's how they describe themselves. And people will say that, oh, the Proud Boys can't be white supremacist, because Enrique Tarrio isn't white. I mean, in 2020, like, we heard trusted experts in our field going on TV and saying that exact thing. Even Elizabeth Newman, former DHS, she admitted in a political interview, I believe it was that even DHS for way too long viewed these guys as just a drinking club. Even though we are two years after January 6, we are continuing to see a fundamental misunderstanding of these groups and the threat they pose.

Paras: I want to hone in on something that we've talked about a little bit or alluded to. So we know these groups are expert propagandists. We know that they lie even under oath. But what is the solution here? How should reporters who cover these groups, government agencies, and experts and researchers like yourselves respond to this? What's the next step?

Jon: I think, at the most basic level, and this is something I think we talked about a bit in the article, I think we like you said, we alluded to here a bit – we sort of treat them like bad actors, right? Like, I think that's a very basic first step. You can go back, I mean, at this point, you know, nine, ten years and look at how reporting has covered, you know, an Islamic state supporter in New York who was arrested trying to commit an act of terrorism. There is no both sides to that article, right? They don't, they don't typically go and interview, you know, the brother of the individual, to hear him say that the guy would have never done anything wrong, or that in some way, shape or form, you know, the group he was supporting was actually, you know, just a conservative religious group that would never commit any violence, right? 

You know, sunlight is the best disinfectant for a lot of this stuff. Actually getting in the weeds, having local reporters who can go back and report that, hey, this guy from North Carolina, he pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. He's a member of the Proud Boys. Here's what he said at trial, right? Here's him admitting that the Proud Boys conspired to go prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power. So the next time someone from North Carolina, you know, is in the news, you can point to those Proud Boys and say, hey, you know, the local chapter here that everyone thought were,, you know, the guys who got drunk and find Antifa in the streets, had a had a conspiracy to go try and overthrow the US government on January 6. And so I think, again, it's it doesn't solve all these problems, but it's a good good first step,

Megan: What we need to hone in on is that very few things in this life are black and white. But I think the fact that these guys are violent extremists is definitely a black and white issue. And I think, like I mentioned earlier, people celebrating the Proud Boys chapter, you know, getting involved on the ground in Ohio and helping out after the train derailment and helping out local communities or getting involved with school boards like to “drill,” you do not under any circumstances, gotta hand it to him, like this is not a both sides-ism thing, like flat out they're violent extremists. And they're part of a domestic violent extremist landscape that, unfortunately, shares the belief systems with, or buys into the same beliefs as large swaths of the American public and many members of a mainstream political party. And that obviously affords them legitimacy that makes it really hard to combat and how to solve that feels above my paygrade. But we're doing the best we can.

And I think also a big part of that, and I know we, in the article, we describe the Proud Boys as fascists. And I think a big part of why that's been tough for people to just flat out say, is because it's been difficult for the various disciplines with which our work intersects to select a definition of fascism that is agreed upon, and so, and especially its manifestations today, in the American context, its manifestations in the modern context and its manifestations in the online context. Shameless plug, currently calling for abstracts for a book that I'm co editing about banal fascism and these everyday manifestations, especially in the online space. So we're working on it. But I think that also it is, you know, this lack of definitions, both scholarly definitions that we use as experts, but also within the law and the confines of the law. I think that that definitely plays a role in why change hasn't been made in a tangible way. 

Jon: Yeah, just very quickly, on the government side, I think this is a hill that I've died on many times. But I think the big challenge that we face when we talk about countering the threat at large is that we have a designated list or a list of designated foreign terrorist organizations, right? And those are the ones that we've all discussed here, the ones we know and love, Islamic State, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah. The challenge we face is that we don't, we don't have a applicable domestic side list, nor should we, because of First Amendment concerns, and arguably, it would be unhelpful, at best, unconstitutional at worst, to try and make a list of all the groups that are operating in the US that we or the government, or law enforcement, thinks fit into a fairly vague at this point, government definition of domestic violent extremism, right?  

But what has been proposed, fortunately, about people smarter than myself, such as Mary McCord, is this idea that we can take the existing statutes as they apply to terrorism that transcends national boundaries. When we look at the charging statutes for conduct by individuals who are engaged in international terrorism, and simply apply that same set of frameworks, those same underlying core charges, to conduct occurring within the boundaries of the United States. And really, I think that the way that's been often described is leveling the playing field, right? If you have two individuals who are both stockpiling firearms, and planning to go shoot up a synagogue, or a mosque or school board, for example, one individual can be charged with material support to the Islamic State. But the other one who is acting in furtherance of a desire to establish a white ethnostate cannot face the same penalties, cannot face the same charges based on the exact same conduct. And I think that has created, that's, you know, a symptom of this of this rot that we've been talking about here, where you do have this kind of two tier system where we are very comfortable calling members of the Islamic State, members of al Qaeda, you know, again, and American supporters, right, homegrown supporters of those groups as terrorists, but because again, because of, you know, kind of inherent biases, because of the way the legal system is set up, because these frameworks, it gets a lot trickier to talk about where those lines exactly exist between drinking club, a group that goes out and gets into street fights, and a group of constitutionalists and domestic terrorists.

Paras Shah

Anything else we haven't touched on yet that either of you would like to add?

Jon: I would just say, and this is a point that other folks, namely I think, emptywheel on Twitter has hit on that I think is worth flagging is that more, more good coverage of these groups is always good. The Oath Keepers trial, I mean, I think every reporter that has ever written on January 6, wanted to talk about the Stewart Rhodes Oath Keepers trial, right? And again, it was the first conspiracy trial. It was the at a time the biggest January 6 trial to date, monumental impact, all of those things. I think by the most recent count that I've seen, I think there are maybe two or three reporters that I'm aware of that I know, who are actively covering every single day, the Proud Boys trial. There has not really been a whole – at least again, based on what I've seen, based on folks I've talked to – there has not been anywhere near the same amount of interest in the trial of a group that again, by all, by all accounts by all evidence has been set forth, played a much more significant role in that day, right? 

I mean, again, based on all, you know, the program on extremism where I am, all the thousands of pages of court records, the Proud Boys were the tip of the spear, right? They were the first ones at the at the bike rack barricade when it was breached. Dominic Pezzola is alleged to have been the one who smashed the window with the riot shield that he stole from a Capitol police officer. They were the first ones in and the Oath Keepers as is, as is their kind of tradition here, kind of showed up late kind of, you know, half assed it and then you know, went to the Capitol in the stack formation that is a now famous image of that day.But arguably, on its face, the Proud Boys were the more significant actors in those key moments on January 6. And I think that yeah, the disparity between how both those trials have been covered is really interesting.  

Meghan: I think it's really important to note that we've seen this, this shift in the domestic violent extremist landscape, which a lot of people have talked about, as we're very much in this post organizational landscape. This is not revolutionary. This is, I think, the pretty much accepted view of the landscape as it exists today. And I think it's important to note that while these groups obviously played a role, they're obviously influential, and they were definitively influential on January 6, they are just kind of two nodes in this much broader network that operates both on and offline and represents kind of this coalition of people who are happy to mobilize around uniting concepts. And I think I've said this in every podcast or article or event I've spoken on about this topic, but I would just urge people to read Brian Hughes and Cynthia Miller Idriss’ work on mobilizing concepts and how a lot of January 6 just represented kind of this uniting moment for a lot of groups and movements, and just everyday Americans who are willing to just show up and do an insurrection and kill members of Congress or kill cops in order to keep President Trump in power. And while of course, like I said, The Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys did play a role in getting us to that event and mobilizing people to that event, the fact is, this is much bigger than them and will continue to be much bigger than them.

Paras: Everyone should read your Just Security piece, share it widely, call out these groups as extremists and call out their propaganda. Megan, John, thanks so much for joining.  

Jon: Thank you. 

Meghan: Thanks for having us. 

Paras: The Just Security podcast is produced in partnership with NYU's American Journalism Online program. AJO trains students to become world class journalists, no matter where they live or work. Find out more about AJO, and how you can apply, in our show notes.   

This episode was hosted by me with co-production and editing by Tiffany Chang and Michelle Eigenheer. Our music is the song “The Parade” by Hey Pluto! Special thanks to Clara Apt, Meghan Conroy, and Jon Lewis. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. 

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