My Weekend with the Proud Boys: MAGAReport 6/22/26

I’ve had fewer MAGAReports than usual lately, partly because the forums are rather quiet, and partly because I’ve been working on a different, big project.

Back in March, I spent the weekend with the Cape Fear Proud Boys in North Carolina. Today, my story about it is out in Esquire online (and it came out in print last week): https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a71482536/proud-boys-inside-look/

The article will give you a detailed look at the weekend, but as a teaser, here are a few takeaways:

• There are things that surprised me. Given their views on masculinity, I expected there to be some cruelty and bullying in their interactions, but I was surprised how warm their friendships are. They were very kind and supportive of each other.

• The Proud Boys are not a white supremacist group like the KKK or Patriot Front, and they claim to be anti-racist. They have black, hispanic, Asian, and Native American members (though most guys are white). At the same time, the chapter I visited just posted on Telegram today: “Islamic culture is incompatible with Western Civilization. The amount of Muslim males worldwide who believe rape like this [referring to a report on gang rape issued by a right-wing British party Restore Britian] is perfectly acceptable is astonishing. Combine that with the fact that generations of inbreeding leave many of them neurologically underdeveloped. Then, western leaders import them en masse and release them on native underage girls.” So take that for what it’s worth.

• My friends were very worried about my safety, but I was not, and I was right about that. They were kind to me and I felt safe all day.

• As I discuss at length in the article, there are a lot of contradictions in the group. They do not like being called extremists or a hate group or terrorists or nazis, but they do embrace the fact that they intimidate others. And they rely on that intimidation factor to get attention and to be effective in their activism.

I hope you will give it a read. If you are an Apple News subscriber, I recorded an audio version that will also be out this week, so you can listen instead. I also shot the photos for the story, and included some here.