udged by most conventional metrics of political success, the Proud Boys — the far-right street gang whose yellow-and-black-clad members became fixtures of MAGA rallies during the Trump years — have been a colossal failure. Following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, many of the group’s leaders are either in jail or facing federal charges for seditious conspiracy. Sporadic attempts by rank-and-file members to run for public office have mostly come to naught. At least one major U.S. ally — Canada — has officially designated the group as a terrorist entity, along with Al Qaeda and Boko Haram.
But to evaluate the Proud Boys using these more traditional standards is to miss the subtler — yet more consequential — ways that the group has transformed the tenor and tone of American politics, argues Huffington Post senior editor and veteran extremism reporter Andy Campbell in his new book, “We are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism. Campbell, who has covered the Proud Boys since their formation in the early Trump years, instead judges the Proud Boys by the standards that they use to judge themselves — namely, their ability to convince the mainstream of the Republican Party that violence is, sometimes, the answer.
By that metric, Campbell writes, the Proud Boys have been “the most successful extremist group in the digital age.”
The success of the Proud Boys’ effort to normalize political violence is perhaps most evident in the Republican National Committee’s decision to classify the violence of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse.” But it is also apparent in the near-constant threat of violent clashes that hangs over practically every political protest or rally that draws national media attention.
“Can you imagine going to any political protest or event that happens to be on Fox News that evening and not seeing weapons and people fighting?” Campbell asked when we spoke by phone last week. “This is a totally normal thing [now], where it wasn’t in 2016.”
Although it may seem like the legal fallout from Jan. 6 has put the group on its heels, there is a danger in assuming that action by law enforcement will be enough to suppress the Proud Boys’ violence in the long run. Unlike a more traditional political party or activist group, Campbell explained, the Proud Boys don’t necessarily view an indictment or a federal conspiracy charge as a rebuke to their political project. On the contrary, they see it as a reason to fight harder.
“A number of people wrote them off once after Jan. 6, saying, ‘Oh, the Proud Boys are imploding, or they’re going to dissolve after this,’” Campbell told me. “But sure enough, they’re still in action.”
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian Ward: Let’s start at the end. In the last chapter of the book, you write, “There’s absolutely no such thing as lone wolf extremism.” Why is that observation important for understanding the Proud Boys?