Bay Area Proud Boys Won’t Fall into the Political Rally Trap
It’s official; The Bay Area Proud Boys will not be attending the Patriot Prayer at Crissy field this Saturday. This national trend all started with us buying tickets to see Milo speak at Berkeley and being delusional enough to think we could walk down a street in America chanting “Free Speech.” We were met with an onslaught of bricks, bear mace and bat wielding radical fanatics that beat the living shit out of us. That experience showed us just how violent the left has become. Over the next three Berkeley rallies Americans from all over California stood up to these bigoted fascists and exposed them as totalitarian cowards, culminating in the final rally in April where Antifa didn’t even show up. For a short moment in time you could wear a “Make America Great Again” hat in Northern California without getting into a fight. I am personally grateful for the opportunity to meet amazing patriots and watch them fight for their first amendment rights. But I wish the story ended there.
The Charlottesville rally changed the narrative in a predictable way. Its stated goal to “unite the right” tarnished the freedom movement with radical right-wing elements that sought to move into the mainstream. There is strong suspicion that its organizer Jason Kessler, an active member of the occupy movement and an Obama supporter, was part of an orchestrated plan to discredit the new right. It really doesn’t matter if he is a provocateur or inexperienced activist because the outcome of passing out torches to naive monument protesters is the same. At the end of the day both factions carried flags of egregious ideologies and sought to provoke the other side into violence. However they are not morally equivalent because the UTR organizers had the permit for their event and stepped into the media spotlight. At that moment they assumed responsibility for the lives of the protesters and the image of the new right. They had more control over who they allowed in their march and instead of rejecting white supremacists; they brought them into the tent at the expense of everyone else. We disavow the Charlottesville rally because we believe UTR did a great disservice to a genuine freedom movement.
The reality is that rallies are easy to co-opt. In Charlottesville, we believe Vice Media was paying Nazis to attend a monument rally for a documentary they were filming and we’ve been told Soros funded organizations paid counter-protesters $25/hr to hold signs saying “Nazis go home”. The protest was a scripted reality show that the media gladly presented America. Right on queue the Mayor had the police stand down forcing the protesters to defend themselves against armed Antifa militants. Once the violence started it inevitably escalated to the tragic vehicular murder of Heather Heyer that shook the nation. This recipe for tragedy will likely play out again if the rallies continue.
In San Francisco, the mayor has asked the National Parks service to pull the Patriot Prayer permit which is government speak for “we won’t enforce order.” We saw in Berkley that when police are given the stand down order, emergency medical personnel will not be allowed on the field and demonstrators will be left to do their own triage. The threat is heightened by the fact that Crissy field is Federal land and many protesters will be armed. Gavin McInnes said it best: “Fighting to preserve American history is a noble idea. Protecting speakers from attack is protecting free speech. Unfortunately, recent rallies are getting bastardized both by the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right into propaganda traps that the #FakeNews media happily runs with. This recent Boston rally was an Indian man with “Black Lives DO Matter” signs and 20 thousand people screaming “NAZI” at him. It was a ridiculous shit show that even the president fell for. We believe this rally is going to be another stupid trick that extremists will use to further their agenda. For that reason, we’re out.”
It’s become incredibly obvious over the last few weeks that rallies are not a pragmatic tactic in the culture war. They’re a hoax. We are still all aboard on the culture war and will be here longer than any of the Fashionistas who want to shut down America just to watch it burn. These new Victorians living at home with their parents will never offer any real solutions. We are still organizing and fighting for Free Speech. We are still doing events such as Westfest on Sep. 9th (sorry, you’re not invited). In the mean time we will be drinking Bud, telling offensive jokes, helping our brothers with their marriage, and trying to get Millennials laid. If you want to honor our ancestors by building a future for our grandchildren, you’re welcome. If you want to sabotage hundreds of years of hard work, you’re done.
