The document is so weak and formal that it resembles the annual minutes of a company of tax accountants. Its index lists sections on “goals” and “rules of engagement” and includes an “addendum” offering recommendations for hotels and parking lots.
On the cover, two words give a clue to the notoriety of the group that produced it: “MAGA” and “ADVERTIMENT”. That and the date: January 5, 2021, the day before the attack on the US Capitol.
What is not said on the cover and barely mentioned throughout the 23 pages is that this is the work of one of the most violent political gangs in America, the far-right street fighters in the which Donald Trump said to “love each other and stand by” – the proud boys.
The document, first published by The Guardian, offers a very rare insight into the meticulous planning of events organized by the far-right club.
The Proud Boys have been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and are alleged to have acted as key organizers of the violent assault on the Capitol.
In the wake of January 6, which has been linked to the deaths of nine people, the New York march featured in the document was called off, and the strategy so meticulously laid out was never implemented. But the document remains clearly revealing.
It shows the lengths to which the Proud Boys go to prepare for potentially violent encounters and then cover their tracks, something prosecutors have emphasized but never seen in the group’s own words. It exposes the militaristic structure and language adopted by the Proud Boys, and their aspiration to become the front-line vigilante force in a Trump-led America.
It also provides clues as to how the group continues to spread its tentacles across the United States even as many of its top leaders, including its national president, Enrique Tarrio, are behind bars awaiting trial for seditious conspiracy.
The purpose of the document is to provide a “strategic security plan” and call to action, calling Proud Boys members to a pro-Trump Maga march that was scheduled in New York City on January 10, 2021 .This was four days after Congress was due to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, the occasion on which he would be the target of the fatal insurrection.
The document was obtained from a member of the Proud Boys by extremism journalist Andy Campbell while researching his new book, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Insured in a New Era of American Extremism. The book will be published on Tuesday. Campbell shared the document with the Guardian.
The document’s author is Randy Ireland, who as president of the group’s New York branch, the Hell’s Gate Bridge Chapter, is one of the most prominent Proud Boys in the northeastern United States. The document was circulated via Telegram, the encrypted chat app widely used by the Proud Boys as an organizing tool, to at least nine chapters in New York and beyond.
Campbell told the Guardian that the decentralized structure of the group, in what he says are 157 active chapters in all but three states, is one of the Proud Boys’ greatest strengths, as reflected in the autonomous nature of planning from New York.
“Chapter leaders like Randy can create their own events, operate independently of each other,” Campbell said. “Enrique Tarrio and other leaders are in prison, but these guys will continue what they are doing.”
“We will not disappoint”
The language of the planning document is overtly militaristic. Ireland is designated “Security Detail General”, while his subordinates in the chain of command are “VP” of “Recruitment”, “Scout Security” and “Team Leaders”.
The plan is for the sixty or so Proud Boys at the January 10 event in Manhattan to be grouped into seven “tactical teams” of five to eight men each (all men, as one of the group’s core values is misogyny) . Members are asked to wear protective gear, such as “knife/stab protection, helmets, gloves, boots, etc.” and that they use radio channels, walkie-talkies or Telegram to communicate with each other.
They must stick together in groups and under no circumstances allow “Normies” (common Trump supporters other than Proud Boys) or “Women” into their ranks.
“Their presence will endanger the health and safety of everyone involved with security, and it simply cannot be allowed to happen!” Ireland writes
Maps reproduced on the back of the document show the positions that “scouts” and “tactical teams” should take at key points along the route of the march, which was scheduled to begin at Columbus Circle and pass through Trump Tower .
“This place is understood in a very public way to have special meaning for us,” the paper says, referring to Trump’s home on Fifth Avenue. “WE WILL NOT DISAPPOINT!”
Campbell, who has been reporting on the Proud Boys since they started showing up at Trump rallies in early 2017, describes them as America’s most notorious political fight club. In the planning document, he sees equal parts fantasy and danger.
“These guys look like super soldiers, kind of like a military outfit,” he said. “On one level it’s funny because nothing is going to turn out the way they say it will. But on another level it’s alarming because it shows how much thought went into these things.”
In We Are Proud Boys, Campbell traces the group from its birth in 2015-16 to its central role on Jan. 6, when one member, Dominic Pezzola, became the first person to breach the U.S. Capitol united At least 30 Proud Boys have been charged in connection with the uprising, including Tarrio and four others charged with seditious conspiracy, among the most serious charges to date.
The group was invented by the British founder of Vice magazine, Gavin McInnes, who described himself as a “Western chauvinist” and sold it with fanaticism. McInnes posted the name Proud Boys on his online chat show in May 2016, introduced them as a “gang” and came up with a uniform, a black Fred Perry polo shirt with yellow trim.
McInnes was careful to brand his creation as harmless fun, a satirical male-only patriotic drinking club that later joined all things Trump. But Campbell argues that political violence has been embedded from the beginning.
A Proud Boy was an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which an anti-fascist protester was killed. The group has held violent meetings in Portland, Oregon. Outside a Republican event in New York in 2018, several members were arrested and charged with criminal assault.
“Violence in the Street”
Membership of the Proud Boys is structured in four ranks, known as “degrees”, the fourth being awarded once “you are arrested or in a serious violent struggle for the cause”, as explained by McInnes himself . In an interview with Campbell for the book, McInnes denied promoting violence and insisted that the Proud Boys were never proactively aggressive, only reacting to attacks from the left.
This official line is reiterated in the document published by the Guardian. Ireland are careful to portray the Proud Boys as a defensive group.
He writes: “If any violence occurs, all Proud Boys are expected to respond immediately, only to the point of removing and ending that threat to themselves or others. VERY IMPORTANT: Once the threat is neutralized, WE STOP!”
But there is a glaring contradiction: Ireland presents its chapter as a non-violent organization, but it goes out in search of violence. Assign the group, uninvited, the role of vigilante police.
“We are there as the first line of defense for all event attendees,” he writes, then contradicts himself by saying that the Proud Boys’ only role is to play a “supportive role” to law enforcement and “force them to do their work”.
That says a lot. This implies that if the police don’t attack the anti-fascist protesters, the Proud Boys will.
“I’ve reported at Proud Boys events where they stood back and relaxed while the police fired tear gas and other munitions into the crowd of counter-protesters,” Campbell said. “So the Proud Boys didn’t have to do what Randy Ireland is hinting at here: step in and fight back themselves.”
For Campbell, the most disturbing aspect of the document is that, with its soft-lensed double talk and contradictory meanings, it arguably falls within the Proud Boys’ main ambition: the normalization of political violence . Despite having so many leaders behind bars, the group is thriving.
As new chapters emerge, Americans are increasingly accustomed to the idea of heavily armed gangs in public settings. Proud Boys have been deployed as “security detail” at anti-abortion rallies, anti-vaccination rallies, pro-gun protests and, of course, Trump rallies.
“The street-level violence that the Proud Boys helped create is now being carried out by ordinary people,” Campbell said. “You saw it on January 6th, you see it at Planned Parenthood and LGBTQ+ events where people are being harassed and attacked by everyday Americans.”