An Interview with Andy Campbell - Author of "We Are Proud Boys"
It’s the holiday season and you might be wondering what to buy your favorite anti-fascist activist. May I recommend, “We Are Proud Boys: How a Right Wing Street Gang Ushered In a New Era of American Extremism.” by Andy Campbell.
Full disclosure, I’m mentioned in the book but only in a couple of paragraphs near the end. Campbell has had a long history following this group and he wrote a highly informative and entertaining book. I highly recommend it.
The following are some excerpts from the interview I had with Campbell in late October.
The book is called “We Are Proud Boys: How a Right Wing Street Gang Ushered In a New Era of American Extremism.”
Jeske: I've known Andy since a about 2017. I think, I'm not sure exactly. I was referred to him from Amanda Marcotte at Salon.com, she's amazing. If you don't follow her, you should follow her. She was one of the first to see all the red flags for the Proud Boys and to know that they were a serious, serious problem.
This interview is going to be a little unusual in that Andy and I know each other very, very well, and we know this group very, very well.
So it's a little inside baseball, so I'll try to break it up. So I'll explain some of the inside baseball as we go. But one of the things is at the time, there was a time in my journey with this group.
Andy supported me through some of my roughest times with this group so I am very happy to help share him and his book with my readers and listeners.
So here we go. I'm going to just start it and we'll go through it as it goes. I just can't say enough good things about this book. You will fly through it. I read it in three days.
The Interview
How did you go from just regular journalists to extremism?
Campbell: Yeah, well, I was a crime reporter for HuffPost. I've been there for almost 11 years now. And so I was, you know, covering mostly mass shootings. Basically, I'd show up to your community on its worst day. And, you know, between 2012 and 2016, it was it was mostly mass shootings. And I'm sure you remember that was a terrible time for mass shootings.
But but I've moved into extremism during the rise of Trump because we were seeing increasing acts of violence at MAGA rallies and starring these really wacky groups and figures, you know, dressed in makeshift body armor, makeshift weaponry, and the proud boys stuck out as as more concerning than the other guys because they wanted to be lionized for their violence.
They wanted to talk to the press. They didn't hide behind anonymity. And so, you know, we were we were very concerned that this was going to be a group that rose above the others. And that's turned out to be a good bet, because here we are. And the boys have been in the orbit of every act of, you know, domestic terrorist violence since Trump took office.
I want to explain this next question I'm about to ask Andy to give you a little bit of context. Journalists who work in covering extremism face a lot of pushback from editors kind of all the time, because the attitude is we don't want to amplify these voices. And so you have to be very careful about when you report on extremism. It’s a delicate balance.
Jeske: What was the first article that you wrote about The Proud Boys and did you get any blowback for that?
Campbell: That is a good question. I'm not sure exactly what the first article we wrote, but certainly the first couple of events we covered starring the Proud Boys. They were in Portland, Oregon, and that became a huge battleground, but they were joined by a number of other extremist groups like Patriot Prayer and peculiar to us. They were also joined by everyday conservatives.
I spoke to a woman in Portland, Oregon, standing next to a neo-Nazi, and she was wearing, you know, different garb. He didn't have swastikas on him. He had sort of Internet memes that he was draped in. But I asked her if she knew she was standing next to a Nazi, and she said, no, I don't know who those guys are, but I'm just happy to be here with other conservatives.
So in the early days, it was just us trying to suss out, you know, who all of these groups were, what their deal was. And, you know, the Proud Boys immediately, you know, were excited about talking to us. They weren't giving us too much blowback because they wanted to push their ideology out there.
Jeske: That is that is very true. I think it's one of the things that I personally found, like you kind of have to have gallows humor if you're on this beat. And one of the things that I, I mean, I was laughing all the time when I would talk about it in grad school. But the one thing that I found very humorous was how Enrique Tarrio in the January 6th committee hearing, evidence is turning right to a camera of a documentarian going, “Well, this is what I'm planning, right?”
Campbell: And you know, it's funny because Gavin McInnes is certainly like that. A lot of the proud boys are like that where, you know, they want the cameras on them, they want to be seen as this patriotic force and they want to joke around and seem less serious than they are. But but what's interesting and you know, you can relate to this because you provided so much video research, this book that ends up biting them in the ass because these guys are saying everything that they say publicly and recorded.
So, you know, if and when the proud boys come after me legally for my book, I mean, I have 350 citations and you have provided hundreds of hours of video. So there's just no inaccuracies here and think, you know, thank God they recorded all that stuff.
So again, to give a little bit of context of what Andy was just referring to there, I have collected all 407 episodes of the Gavin McInnes show and that's they're all captured, which you have to do that in real time. You can't download them and then go through them and watch them and cut them up and turn them into clips. I did that for all 407 episodes. When people ask how I can watch so much Fox News, “The Gavin McInnes Show” was much worse.
Jeske: This is just a kind of a tangent, but it is funny when I was researching other people that would sort of like they would appear on Gavin McInnes show and then I would follow them down a rabbit hole or try to find them or whatever.
I'd find like B-roll stuff, stuff that wasn't on his show, like oddball stuff on YouTube. What I found was so amazing about a camera, is it turns into a confessional for so many people.
Campbell: Absolutely.
Jeske: They would say things like, I probably shouldn't say this on camera. And then look around as if someone's and then whisper it. Right. You just said it into my camera.
Campbell: Gavin McInnes literally describes them as a gang, as, you know, he on camera, he described them as having white supremacist tenets on camera. He said all this racist stuff. And, you know, Enrique Tarrio caught on camera in Portland saying we're going to come back to Portland every day to fight people and waste the city's money. All of these things they threatened to sue you for when you print them.
And it's like, dude, you said it right to the camera.
Jeske: You said it. You said you said it right to the camera. It was like the joke that I started laughing about it when I did an interview with Jared Holt about when Gavin was we'd say, Don't worry, we're behind a payroll paywall. Don't worry, we're behind a paywall. And I would laugh and I'd go, you really think $9, that’s what the charge was at the time, $9 is going to keep someone like me, the press or antifa from capturing all of this?
He would encourage his guests to get even worse and say even crazier stuff. And I would. And so I have a file in my archives that is labeled ‘paywall’ it's all the times he said it because I thought it was funny that he's like, “Don't worry, we're behind a paywall.”
Campbell: Well, you know, they think paywalls are going to stop them, think about their texts in their telegrams, which showed up all over the place, and Justice Department filings which will be used during their sedition trials.
Jeske: I love how you called him a Muppet in the book. I have a note for this interview. McInnes is a Muppet. For my listeners, Andy Campbell is a very funny writer. So it's not to like slapstick, goofy, but there's enough humor throughout to keep you reading, to keep you going through the book. It's not just like, here's a group and they're horrible people.
Campbell: And, you know, I wanted to I wanted to sort of show the line where they are ridiculous. They have embarrassing rules that they follow, like the no masturbation rule. Yes. They're they're you know, they are worthy of ridicule. But, you know, at the same time, you've got to go back and and show the threat that they pose despite that.
But I think that's a lot of the GOP. There's there's there's a lot of people to make fun of who also wield a whole hell of a lot of power.
So this next section is definitely an inside baseball section, meaning I'm talking about things that your average person may not know about the proud boys. Very briefly, Gavin McInnes had a book that he said red-pilled him and the name of that book is “Death of the West” by Pat Buchanan. And I explain in the clip why this book is so important to The Proud Boys.
Jeske: Gavin McInnes kept calling “Death of the West” his Bible. He'd say he would recommend everybody who came on a show. You got to read this book, Death of the West, Death of the West, Death of the West. It was published over 20 years ago. Pat Buchanan is the author. And it is, in my humble opinion, straight up white supremacy.
It's The Great Replacement, before The Great Replacement was a thing, which is basically Pat Buchanan is saying over and over and over again, we're not having enough white babies. We're not having enough white babies. We need more white babies. And it's just this panic. So, yeah, I was just wondering because I know that it got mentioned in your book a little bit.
How do you think somebody like Pat Buchanan was able to get away with being that blatant and nobody called him on it? And again, it was over 20 years ago, but he just like slipped under the radar. He would still do appearances on CNN. He would still do as if he was like a normal, legitimate political pundit.
Campbell: Yeah. I mean, he is a, you know, a thought leader among far right conservatives, but he also appeals to a broader base without getting too explicit about the racism, you know, bigotry and the great replacement stuff. A conservative columnist in the early aughts wrote that he is red meat for white supremacists and racists because he you know, is able to feed this to them without saying I'm racist, I'm white supremacist.
And so it's you know, it was called a good tactic by even conservatives. And certainly Gavin McInnes follows that rubric very well. And that's probably why, you know, a lot of his tenets follow Pat Buchanan's. And a lot of the way he speaks follows Pat Buchanan and he reads Pat Buchanan out at the bar when the proud boys gather to drink and do coke.
Jeske: So which is really wise to do at his age. Let me tell you, the cocaine is incredibly it's really smart to do it when you're in your fifties. I'm being very sarcastic with that. If you want to die, do cocaine in your fifties.
Campbell: I think about it to heart attacks that are going to take down Proud Boys is off the charts, I believe. But, you know, it's it's the the plausible deniability factor of Pat Buchanan is really embraced by so much of the GOP. I mean, you know, the Kanye West stuff with this antisemitism, I think, you know, when when the GOP has other vectors than themselves to say the things that they believe they use them.
And Kanye West is a great example of that. But but Pat Buchanan showed them how to do that. And that's why racists love him.
Jeske: I'm so happy that it's finally in print is the origin of the name Proud Boys, because Gavin McInnes lied about that and nobody challenged him on it because they figured it wasn't a big deal. And the original, the version that Gavin tells everyone is that his assistant loved musicals and he was trying to get his assistant laid.
And so he created this group called The Proud Boys for his assistant. Now, you know the real version, because I sent you the clips, right? The real version. And it's in the book. Why don't you tell my listeners what the real version is?
Campbell: Yeah. And first of all, thank you so much for watching all of those hours of TV so that we didn't have to I mean that's to drive anybody insane is Gavin is on his show describing his his children's music recital that he had to go see and I should say had because he was very pissed off to be there in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
His son and daughter had already played their instruments and a young child with brown skin takes the stage. Gavin says on his show that he's decided this kid, as a father, was Puerto Rican, maybe 12 years old. And he is incensed by what he's seeing specifically because this kid decided to sing a musical. And that musical number was from the Aladdin Musical called Proud of Your Boy.
Gavin goes on a racist tirade against his kid, makes fun of him and his mom, and then, you know, says, like, this is abhorrent, proud of your boy becomes a sort of call in joke for his first callers where they say, “Proud of your boy,”instead of, you know, “first time caller, longtime listener,” like other shows might say.
And so through that joke became a running gag. And then, of course, the name eventually when they put together the gang, it got shortened to Proud Boys but but you know I think the reason why Gavin wants to diffuse that story and put it on his assistant or whatever is because of the racism element. I mean, the Proud Boys were a product of him being racist toward a little kid.
Jeske: Yeah. And it's so evil because it's a child. Like, you're that upset about a child. You know, he's that guy.
Campbell: I mean, he he, you know, he he joked about that and he joked about raping his wife. You know, all of this all of this stuff is a joke. At the same time, you know, the difference between him and, you know, in Alex Jones or Howard Stern is that he formed a gang out of his audience. And so everything that he says, joking or not, tongue in cheek or not, is not just counterculture shit.
It is marching orders for a whole bunch of angry men.
Jeske: Well, he also this is a weird thing that I noticed. I try to explain it to someone. I said one one story he he told is he once missed his train from Westchester to the city. Just missed it. It's you know, it's like a transit train that would take you in like a like a train to anybody who doesn't understand this.
It's like when you go from the suburbs into a city that kind of train like a commuter train, he missed it. And he was on the platform with a total stranger. And McInnes got mad because the stranger was it angry? I mean, what is that? I mean, and he this wasn't a minor thing. He went off about this for like 20 minutes.
He was like, that guy was just sitting there on the bench. He wasn't mad. And I was like, Come on, grow up here, you big loser. And he just, like, went off. And I just sat back going, Are you okay?
Campbell: He wants to push his anger on to other people? And he does it really, really well.
Jeske: Yes. Yes. And it's also interesting, because I have also described him I have another folder. I do this for humor. I do this for my own to keep my because I do it with Fox, too. I have crazy folders. It'll probably never use, but I have a folder for Gavin that was just called dumb and it was dumb things he said, like the English alphabet has 25 letters.
The population of Canada is 50 million. You know, it's like it's about 30 million. But he would just say things one thing she said is he was talking about the Civil War and he said nearly all the casualties were Confederate like actually. No.
Campbell: Well, yeah. And it's a good point that, that that most of the stuff he says is total bullshit and, and, you know, including the masturbation thing which they you know, he and other shock jocks touted as it's going to raise your testosterone but it's based off of a study with a sample size of ten and found that testosterone rose when you didn’t masturbate and of course there are more serious studies that find the opposite is true.
Jeske: Really bad for the prostate too, apparently to not masturbate.
Campbell: Well well, but they you know, they use it to scare men about the feminization of of of, you know, men. And they also use it to sell products. It's why you'll find testosterone powder and T-supplements on every one of these guys websites.
Jeske: Yeah, no, I know. It's, it's. What was the other thing? Oh, like, so what I was going to say about Gavin is he's just a ball of charisma. Like that's the thing that scares me is I would say this all the time because I would watch other people who are like quote unquote big names in the far right or people who just have like a big following.
And I'd watch their stuff and I'd be like, They're not bright. They're not coming up with anything new. This is just machismo and charisma. That's it. That's all he's got. And I think in some ways, we're lucky that Gavin's a little bit too gross or he'd have a bigger audience like the butt plug incident that you mention in the book.
There's an incident where Gavin shoves a It's a bite. I said, you say dildo, I say butt plug. But this same an instrument. He shows this a black latex thing up his own anus on camera. What, like? And he's like and then he gets naked a lot and he would whip his penis out a lot. He would flashes anus.
I saw all of this and I would go well in a way, this is good because this kind of shrinks his audience because even his creepy followers are like “enough.” And they would call and they'd say stuff like, This is really gay, your show is getting really gay. Because they would talk about those exact incidents and he would still just you know, there's if anyone thinks that Mr. McInnes is so funny that they just called him, Mr. McInnes is some sort of mastermind, he's not. It's just charisma and . . .
Campbell: Well, and, you know, I think he plans to bring that charisma to court later this year for Enrique in the gang’s sedition trials, he's scheduled to be a character witness, which, you know, it sounds ridiculous, but you can expect that Gavin's going to show up and say, you know, first of all, total lies about the gang, but that they've cleaned up somehow since January 6th, that he's helped them find their way again because he pretended to step down in 2018 and doesn't take any responsibility for everything that happened after.
But it's that that charisma that you have to worry about in court, because unless prosecutors use some of your research, Juliet, they're going to have a hard time combating that. I think a lot of people don't really see the threat.
So again, here's another section where I was getting way too inside baseball with Andy, because we just know each other too well. We know this group too well. So 2018, couple of weeks before Halloween, the Proud Boys have this event at the Metropolitan Republican Club. After the event Gavin was supposed to reenact during the event, let's just reenact a murder of a Japanese socialist. He thought that was going to be hilarious. After the event, he leaves and the group, they were convicted for this. So I can say they did this to a group of Proud Boys sees some counter-protesters which they referred to as Antifa. They charge them and beat the crap out of them. Now, at the trial, the thing that did them in was the video evidence, because it was very clear from multiple angles who started this and who instigated this fight.
They were unarmed. Everybody was unarmed. But it was pretty brutal. The person who got the footage that basically did them in is senior age photojournalist. She's absolutely brilliant. Her name is Sandi Bachom. And she this woman in her seventies is like chasing them with a camcorder.
McInnes used to work with Vice Media. He helped found Vice Media. In 2007 Vice Media and Gavin McInnes parted ways and they have nothing to do with each other since trust me, there's not. There's no love on Gavin's end towards Vice in Vice's end towards Gavin.
But because of Gavin's past, Gavin still knew how to like pull favors and we don't know how he did it, but Gavin is a wealthy white man who lives in a posh suburb and he was able to score somehow a very softball interview on ABC Primetime right after this happened. And I will tell you now that all the researchers who worked extremism and all the reporters who worked this beat were absolutely livid over this.
Jeske: He had this speech, this meeting kind of at the Metropolitan Republican Club in the Upper East Side, which is this is kind of there's another level of humor here, because it was one of the ritzy est zip codes in the city.
So like big, big, big time money. So he has this like meeting. He does a speech. He reenacts the murder of a Japanese socialist and he thinks it's really clever. And then some of his proud boys get busted beating up some counterprotesters and they were caught on camera. It's indisputable. They ended up being convicted and got four years in prison.
Right. And then right after this, Gavin McInnes somehow manages to get this insanely stupid segment on ABC. It was like Nightly News. Was it nightly news?
Campbell: I think so.
Jeske: And it was with a woman named Paula Faris and it was just complete softball. So your thoughts on that?
Campbell: Yeah, I mean, so so Paula Faris, she's no longer a host with ABC. She, you know, goes into Gavin's home for an interview. And and this in my book is an example of what not to do when dealing with extremists as members of the media, just letting them take the reins of your show, which is what she does.
She goes into his home, put soft lighting on him. His wife is making sandwiches in the background. And in fact, he lets him and his Gavin and his wife talk together about how Gavin's not violent. She supports what he's doing. She allows him to deflect the entire time. And I found out through a little bit of research after the fact that Paula Faris, the reporter who did that segment, her kids go to the same school as Gavin.
She lives right near him. And so there is, you know, certainly evidence that they have a closer relationship than just, you know, happenstance. She did that interview. And so that was immediately concerning. She claims that the president of ABC wanted her to do it at the time. Either way, it's a really bad segment because, you know, this goes back to all media responsibility, which is that, you know, I have, you have Juliet, hundreds of hours of evidence of Gavin being violent and calling for violence.
And this reporter sitting there going, well, are you violent? Do you take responsibility for your violence? And it's like you don't if as a reporter, you don't have to ask questions and allow them to lie on your huge, huge network show when you have the evidence already that is allowing somebody to take your story away from you and lie.
Now, whether or not she did this on purpose to sort of help McInnes out, I can't confirm, but it certainly makes him look fantastic. Even after his Proud Boys had been on, you know, two years, three years of violence. By that point.
Jeske: It struck me and I remember we were all very angry about that interview. I think every researcher and journalist that was on that beat was just livid. And it struck me as the classic, like, rich, white, well-connected male being able to say he's to weasel out of anything he possibly could get into and it was enraging because I kept going, if he was black, this I don't think that he'd still be walking around.
Campbell: Like, you know, and he lives in he lives in Larchmont, New York, which is one of the richest neighborhoods just outside of the city, alongside a whole bunch of media executives. So, you know that he's knocking on doors and he doesn't have support from everybody up there for sure. But but, you know, he's knocking on doors and trying to gather as much support as he can from the local community.
And it certainly seems like in this case, he he found some.
Jeske: Yeah. Because even if he was like because I kept saying like this is it, this is just so enraging because had he been like, let's say The Proud Boys was a Black group and everyone in it was Black, and he lived in Flatbush, which is kind of a I used to live in Flatbush. That's why I instantly thought of it.
And it's kind of a rougher area in Brooklyn. It's now gentrified, but it wasn't when I lived there. And so he's like Jamaican, okay? And he lives in Flatbush and he has a gang that he starts, but they're not violent and they just drink beer and they have a show on YouTube, right? This is all plausible. And then they start getting in fights.
Campbell: No freaking way.
Jeske: There's no freaking way. He'd be doing an ABC Nightly News interview and they would be like, “Oh, you poor thing, you're misunderstood.”
Campbell: He wouldn't have been allowed to get off the ground and Trump and Company certainly wouldn't have supported them.
Now, now this next section I want to give a little context on again, this is about a group of people who I think meant well but gave money to the Proud Boys because they kind of misunderstood with the Proud Boys were all about. And I just want to preface that because I genuinely think that they thought they were doing the right thing.
Jeske: But and then I have another this went just I just couldn't believe it. I read it and I went, wow, damn, damn. Campbell okay. The Chinese donors. Right. That blew my. How did you find that?
Campbell: Well, I think that's particularly that particular anecdote was a I believe a Will Carless article, USA Today article, anyway. And, you know, they found that, you know, I think it was like 80% of donations to several specific GiveSendGo’s for the Proud Boys were you know you know members of the Chinese diaspora and these guys were you know, just regular people who saw the proud boys as the defenders from communism and communist China.
And so the really striking thing from all that was, was that, you know, this is everyday people not mega-donors, not big time politicians who were doing the majority of the donations to these guys and man after their crimes, after they get arrested, these Guys are making hundreds of thousands of dollars on, you know, one or two GiveSendGo campaigns.
They can raise funds quickly. And we all assumed, or at least I did, that at least some of that was coming from mega-donors and men. It is it is hundreds or thousands of $10, $20 donations.
Jeske: That's just insane. And I will say this, I this is a weird piece of my history that I went to the Soviet Union when I was in high school in 1990 with an exchange group. We were it was musical theater, musical theater, exchange group. And I was there for six weeks. I stayed in a pioneer camp and I lived in Soviet flats.
And I kind of get why somebody who grew up under communism would be that terrified of it. But of course, the United States is like hyper capitalist. We're nowhere near communist. It's just very strange that Chinese immigrants would view the Proud Boys . . .
Campbell: As you know, it shows how good the Proud Boys have been at positioning the racism, the fighting, the violence as something patriotic, something that we need, because law enforcement and politicians aren't doing it. And so, you know, where a swath of Americans also believe that you can understand why the Chinese diaspora might might come in and say, well, there's a whole bunch of people who support these guys.
Trump named them on on on the debate stage. You know, why? Why shouldn't we believe that that these guys are out there fighting communism when that's what they say and that's what half the country believes? The Proud Boys have done a really good job of obfuscating the violence as something more political and more patriotic.
Jeske: I also wanted to ask you very quickly, because this story is just so it's still crazy. It was crazy when it broke. It's still crazy that Jason Van Dyke, the lawyer who may have killed someone, we still don't know. And you called the human manifestation of a hand grenade, which also caused me to buckle over laughing. But explain him as briefly as possible, because I think he's such a great character, even though I think he's a horrible, horrible person.
Campbell: He is. Jason Lee Van Dyke is. And not to be confused with the officer, Jason Van Dyke, but Jason Lee Van Dyke was the proud boys former lawyer. He is super litigious. He worked pro-bono for the proud boys and he would just filed paperwork against anybody who pissed him or the Proud Boys off. He filed paperwork against me and Talib Kweli at the same time because of Internet comments or stories that I wrote.
And to me, I have, you know, I have legal backing from HuffPost and my publisher. But for regular bloggers, it may not be as easy to fight back against that. So he was a a sort of lethal weapon in that sense. But he's also a total buffoon, hyper violent. I mean, this guy is on Facebook, on Twitter before he was banned, threatening people's lives, you know, saying the N-word, calling, you know, he threatened to kill a Black family and hang them awful, awful dude.
So this story in the in this book is is about him and Thomas Retzlaff who was a guy who decided basically I'm just going to fuck with Jason Lee Van Dyke and I'm going to file a complaints against this Texas State Bar where he works over and over and over and over again. Because I can and because I want to show them his violent rhetoric.
So they're in a years long spat. Jason Van Dyke gets caught in an FBI probe in 2018 plotting to assassinate Thomas Retzlaff slashed by way of Proud Boys in Arizona. And that didn't work out. Jason wasn't charged because it was a different case, but fast forward to I'm writing my book and I'm like, well, I'll reach out to Thomas Retzlaff
You know, he's certainly been reaching out for years about Jason Dyke. I'd like to see what he has to say. And it turned out that Thomas Retzlaff had been murdered, stabbed in the neck in the same apartment that Jason Van Dyke was scouting out. Now, there's no evidence yet that Jason Van Dyke is even a person of interest in that case, because the police department investigating it has gone completely silent.
I'm not sure exactly what that means. But, you know, it remains to be seen whether he's a suspect in that case is certainly, you know, their names are in the same same spot. And he tried to assassinate him prior. So we shall see.
Jeske: And the quotes in your book are great about that, where he basically was like, Jason Van Dyke is flat out saying like, “I'm going to kill. I will kill you. I will kill you. I will hunt you down and I will kill you,” and then the guy ends up dead and murdered with stab wounds to his throat.
And the police are like, “I don't know.”
Campbell: Well, yeah, well, you know, the police are being silent. And I'm wondering and again, I can't say that this is true, but I'm wondering if that means that, you know, maybe federal agents are involved and the case has been moved somewhere else or, you know, there may be other people that they're looking into. I'm just not sure. But it is peculiar.
Jeske: It's really nutty. And then finally, like you kind of wrap up your book by saying, like, this group's not getting any better. They're getting worse in some ways. What do you think? And I get this question a lot and I never know how to answer it. People say, Well, what do you think like your average person should do?
How can we fight back? Just a normal Joe who you know, read stories. It might be a little bit curious. I want to just say to get his book because it's really a very entertaining read I I'm in the book briefly but that's not why I'm telling you the book. It is a very good book. But no, what would you tell like your average person who's, like, concerned about the rise of fascism in the United States?
Campbell: Well, look, I mean, the the communities I spoke to that have been under siege by these guys want a full culture shift. And and so, you know, we need auditing within law enforcement. We need law enforcement to look at their own ranks and say, who among you are Proud Boys who share the same ideology? We need auditing in the media.
We need people to, you know, understand what is disinformation and what's not, because they have a whole media landscape behind them that's pushing forth this rhetoric and normalizing their violence. And then, of course, it goes back to to voting. People need to be very hyper vigilant about their candidate, see who is extremist tied and vote them out. But all of those three things taken together rely on people talking to their local communities about it, talking, you know, demanding from your local law enforcement that they spend time and energy rooting out extremists within their ranks because they have a lot to do with their budget, but they rely on people to tell them.
Same goes with voting, right? I think the last thing I would say is, is that we need to remove the stigma, the stigmatization of of activism in this country. I think a lot of people are scared to join activists, whether it's researching online, putting together dossiers or joining people at protests out on the street because they're compared to Antifa and people's idea of Antifa, which is wrong, is like this black clad leftist holding a molotov cocktail, which just isn't true, that, you know, there are certainly militant leftists out there.
But the majority of activism going on is local people going out there with signs showing that, you know, they don't want the extremists in town. And as we saw, you know, at Penn State, it when you activate, it can work. You can drive the extremists out and show the community that you actually care. And so join your local activists and vote the right way and pay attention to your community.
I mean, if you if you see an officer or a politician on Facebook, a 3% logo, send it to one of us.
Jeske: Really quickly. Basically, is there a part of you? Because there's a huge part of me that just wants to scream, I told you so, because nobody took us seriously back in 2016 to 2018 is I mean, I just constantly have that in me.
Campbell: Yeah. I mean, we've been screaming it from the hilltops since day one, you especially and and you know, the problem is, is that law enforcement and politicians are just now finding out about the Proud Boys, about these extremists because of January six. An outgoing DHS official after January six told The Times, We thought they were just a fraternal drinking club.
And so clearly we're just getting to the identification of this is a problem on the national level. We need to move to a response mode now where we actually respond to the problem and stamp it out. We have a long way to go.
Jeske: Because I had the Alan Feuer, I'm going to forget his last name from New York Times. I kind of got a little cheeky with him once on a tweet because he was he posted something. I said, Yeah, I sent you tons of stuff and you ignored me. And he he actually called me and apologized.
Campbell: So nobody should ignore you, Juliet. I know.
Jeske: Because I'm just a maniac. I will work myself into the ground, dammit.
Anyway, so yes, that is sort of the weirdo inside baseball to people who know a lot about the Proud Boys talking about the Proud Boys interview, I probably asked Andy questions that nobody else did because I know it's just like I'm asking weird details instead of broad strokes. So anyway, you know, it's a good book.