Photos shared on social media appeared to show former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and another former Proud Boys leader, Jeremy Bertino, among those who have worn such patches.
Tarrio was convicted last week of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol for what prosecutors have described as a violent plot to keep President Donald Trump in power. Bertino, who was vice president of the South Carolina Proud Boys chapter, previously pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 riot.The Proud Boys aren’t the only far-right extremists to adopt the term.
“It has really become something over the past couple years that has cut across and far beyond any individual group,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “Nobody is going to accidentally have a ‘Right Wing Death Squad’ patch,” she said. “But it’s because of this whole meme culture, and generally the way that iconography is used to signal encoded speech or messages, they don’t always know exactly” what it means.Far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys often point to their Black and Hispanic members to rebut claims that they promote racism or white supremacist ideologies. Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader, is Cuban American, for example.
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