Remember those hoax rumors, concocted by right-wing extremists, about “antifa buses”—supposed busloads of violent leftists from urban areas eager for destruction organized to descend on unsuspecting rural towns to engage in violent protests—and how it inspired a flood of armed vigilantes to roam those towns? Those rumors, of course, eventually morphed into similar hoaxes about “antifa arsonists” setting wildfires on the West Coast, inspiring a similar vigilante response from armed “Patriots.”
These rumors weren’t simply hoaxes: they were also pure projection. Because for the past three years, busloads of right-wing thugs eager for violence from rural and exurban areas have been organizing to descend on unsuspecting liberal urban centers—primarily Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco—in order to engage in faux “protests” primarily designed to spark violence.
A recent Washington Post feature about the man who organized a “Cruise for Trump” rally in Portland described in clear detail how this all works: A nonresident of a liberal urban center organizes a protest ostensibly around the right-wing cause du jour, which then attracts a horde of other nonresidents, whose supposed purpose is to come tell people who live in those cities how terrible their politics are—but whose underlying purpose, betrayed by the weapons and defensive gear they bring along with an attitude of eagerness to punch “leftists,” is to engage in violence.
In this case, the August 29 event through downtown Portland—in which Trump supporters drove en masse down Interstate 5, through the center of the city, with banners waving: American flags, Trump banners, yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flags—was organized by a man from Meridian, Idaho, which is a seven-hour drive from Portland. At the rally’s end, participants drove directly into downtown Portland, plowing their pickups through crowds on the streets and shooting paintball guns at pedestrians on the sidewalks. Proud Boys who had been in the procession brawled on the streets with protesters, wielding paintball guns and baseball bats.
The ugliness culminated late that evening with the shooting of a far-right Trump supporter, Aaron Jay Danielson, 33, by a self-described antifascist (who later claimed he was acting in self-defense, shortly before he was shot dead by law enforcement officers). The shooting sparked broad calls among far-right activists to declare “civil war” against left-wing activists nationally.
Alex Kuzmenko, the 33-year-old Ukrainian immigrant from Meridian who put the rally together by organizing it on Facebook with members of his family, insisted afterward that the rally had not been intended to go into Portland’s downtown. He disavowed the Trump supporters who had done so, as well as the violence that followed.
Kuzmenko is a political novice who first organized similar rallies in nearby Boise this summer, then decided to target Portland. He and his family members insisted that the intent was simply to show support for Trump: “Nobody’s paying us to do any of this,” said one brother. A Portland-based videographer named Oleg Volkov, who posted widely shared videos of the rally, told the Post that he was “not affiliated with any groups or anything like that.” However, his rally soon being promoted by groups linked to the Russian American community and with likely ties to the Kremlin, notably the Facebook group Russian-Americans for Law and Order.
In short order, his rally was picked up and promoted by right-wing activists across a broad spectrum, including the Russian state-owned RT outlet. Like similar pro-Trump rallies in the Portland area, both preceding and following, the August 29 event was primarily designed as far-right street theater whose entire purpose was to create a “violent left” bogeyman for media consumption—mainly through the presence of violence-seeking far-right activists. In the process, the lines between mainstream Republicans and the right-wing extremists was blurred, if not erased altogether.
Alt-right provocateur Jack Posobiec—who has deep links to white nationalists and neo-Nazis, as well as a Twitter following of over a million—enthusiastically promoted the rally:
“MAGA is heading into Portland,” he wrote. Trump shared the tweet the next morning, adding: “GREAT PATRIOTS!”
The Kremlin-financed RT website tweeted out videos of the caravan’s entry into Portland, including footage of armed men driving large pickups through clusters of pedestrians on the streets crossing with the light at an intersection. The text on the tweet read: “Portland rioters try to block pro-Trump caravan.”
“Oregonians tired of riots organized a mass car rally in support of Donald Trump,” read the Russian caption on the video shared on Facebook by Russian-Americans for Law and Order.
Kuzemenko insisted that the caravan route was supposed to avoid downtown Portland, but that renegade elements—mostly members of the street-brawling Patriot Prayer, American Guard, and Proud Boys organizations—went anyway. Danielson was a member of the first group.
Indeed, those three groups have been responsible for the vast majority of the far-right rallies organized around the nation for the past three years, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. These street-brawling groups—which themselves went through multiple upheavals due to the volatile nature of their respective memberships, frequently erupting in vicious infighting—claimed each event’s purpose was focused on some political grievance or another, often handily capitalizing on issues being widely disseminated in such mainstream-right media as Fox News at the time.
The series of right-wing protests began in the spring of 2017, coming on the heels of a couple of appearances by alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos on West Coast college campuses. The first, in Seattle on Inauguration Day, erupted in violence between antifascist protesters and alt-right Milo fans, and ended abruptly when a couple of the latter shot and nearly killed an antifascist peacekeeper. Another Milo speech scheduled in Berkeley a couple of weeks later also erupted in violence, resulting in the speech’s cancellation.
In response, a number of far-right groups organized a “free speech” protest in Berkeley on April 15, 2017—dubbed “the Next Battle of Berkeley,” and promoted on Facebook and other social media as an opportunity for revenge for the earlier Berkeley protest—that became a massive day-long riot with multiple injuries and arrests. Among the most violent right-wing protesters present were members of the white-nationalist groups Identity Evropa and the Rise Above Movement, as well as two activists who would go on to establish major street-brawling groups: Kyle Chapman, cofounder of the Proud Boys, and Joey Gibson, founder of Patriot Prayer.
The next month, Gibson—whose outfit would play host to a long parade of white nationalists and violent extremists—organized the first Patriot Prayer event, including an April 29, 2017, march in southeastern Portland, protesting the cancellation of an event. One of those marchers was a man named Jeremy Christian, who wrapped himself in an American flag, complained about the police separating the two sides, and loudly called one of the antifascists a “white nigger”—which brought a quick shutdown from the bikers who were acting as security for the march. Eventually, they ejected Christian from the march for being too far right-wing.
Three weeks later, Christian first verbally assaulted two women of color on a Portland MAX commuter train and, when three men tried to intervene, he slashed their throats with a knife. Two of the men died; the third, a young man named Micah Fletcher, had been one of the antifascists who had confronted him in April. At his arraignment, Christian shouted the kinds of slogans used by his fellow far-right marchers: "Free speech or die, Portland! You got no safe place. This is America! Get out if you don’t like free speech! Death to the enemies of America! Leave this country if you hate our freedom. Death to Antifa! You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism!"
Patriot Prayer, as it happened, had scheduled a large “free speech” rally to take place the following Sunday, June 4, in downtown Portland. Ignoring the pleas of local officials to delay the event until things had cooled down after the MAX murders, Gibson (who denied any connection to Jeremy Christian) and a group of several hundred alt-right figures—including Chapman and other far-right luminaries, such as Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes—held their rally but were badly outnumbered by a massive crowd of several thousand counterprotesters, most of them local Portlanders. It, like most future Patriot Prayer events, eventually devolved into violence.
Gibson’s rallies continued to flog variations of the “free speech” cause as he continued to organize his street-theater events, though he also showed how flexible Patriot Prayer’s organizing philosophy could be when large numbers of his group showed up in Seattle later in June for a “March Against Shariah” organized by the anti-Muslim hate group ACT! For America. Another June rally entailed bringing his motley crew to the campus of Evergreen State College in Olympia after a national controversy erupted—primarily on Fox News and other right-wing outlets—over a planned campus exercise in race consciousness was portrayed instead as an exercise in anti-white bigotry. Again, violence was the course of the day at the protest, sparked by an assault on an antifascist by a mob of Patriot Prayer members.
After that, the events became increasingly generic in themes: An August 2017 rally in Portland again touted free speech as the cause, but was again clearly an attempt to troll leftists for violence. Gibson organized a “free speech” rally for San Francisco that turned out to be mostly a bust, but he and his cohorts were able to spark violence the next day in Berkeley. A September “Peaceful March for Freedom” held across the Columbia River from Portland in Vancouver, Washington, was largely peaceful, except for the Patriot Prayer members who cruised the city’s downtown afterward and assaulted several counterprotesters, nearly running over a couple with their pickups. And a February 2018 rally in Seattle again championed free speech on college campuses, and again attracted a substantial contingent of white nationalists and neo-Nazis, while also devolving into violence at the end.
After that, the organizing cause for these events began to vary widely, signaling clearly what had already become obvious to observers: Namely, the designated cause was just a beard for right-wing outsiders to wear while planning street violence in the urban centers they loathed.
- A May 2018 rally in downtown Seattle was officially a protest endorsing “open carry” firearms laws, after the city had attempted to pass an ordinance disallowing firearms in city parks and other public spaces.
- A June 2018 rally in Portland—previewed by a vow from a Proud Boys leader to “cleanse the streets” of the city—was organized to protest the city’s pro-immigrant “sanctuary city” status. This protest eventually broke down into extraordinary violence by members of the Proud Boys.
- A November 2018 event in downtown Portland was dubbed “HimToo”—a reference to the anti-sexual-assault #MeToo hashtag, but in this case turned on its head into a rally in favor of men’s rights, held shortly after the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in which allegations of sexual assault played a major role.
- And sometimes, the Patriot Prayer/Proud Boys contingent would simply organize “flash marches” in downtown Portland with no official purpose, other than to create opportunities for violence—as one such rally in October 2018 did.
- Finally, the marches became causes unto themselves, such as when hundreds of out-of-town Proud Boys gathered in Portland in August 2019 and paraded through the town, sometimes with a full police escort—while more than a dozen counterprotesters were arrested by police.
The evolving violence in Portland emanating from Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys also took its next natural step when the groups began organizing smaller incursions into what they considered enemy territory, such as a May 2019 brawl at the antifa-friendly Cider Riot pub. The ensuing violence resulted in multiple criminal charges against the right-wing participants, including Gibson himself.
This did not, however, slow down the brawlers, who found their political intimidation tactics were useful for multiple purposes well beyond free speech. Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys members turned up in significant numbers at a Salem rally in June 2019 to protest an attempt by the Oregon Legislature to pass cap-and-trade legislation. They also were a primary presence at a Seattle rally organized by “III Percent” militiamen (who hailed, as always, from rural and exurban areas) to protest the “domestic terrorism” of antifascists being enabled by Seattle politicians—as well as to defend far-right Republican legislator Matt Shea from charges he had been involved with domestic terrorists.
Joey Gibson once explained on Facebook, prior to a Seattle event, the ideology behind the protests:
The West Coast has slowly been infected with communist ideologies throughout our entire culture. It is a belief that the individual is weak and that we are all victims. This is the lie of the century. No matter who you are, we are all amazing people with the ability to do anything that we put our minds to. These liberal strongholds run off of hatred and negativity. Patriot Prayer will bring in a positive message to Seattle that the people are starving for. With light we will change the hearts and minds of those who are surrounded by darkness.
The strategy Gibson and his cohorts developed—organizing right-wing activists primarily from rural and exurban areas to invade liberal urban centers and intimidate them with thuggish behavior and ample weaponry—having proven both flexible for application across a range of right-wing issues and successful in the far-right campaign to create a violent antifa/leftist bogeyman narrative that could translate readily on friendly right-wing media such as Fox News, began showing up nationally in the context of other scenes of right-wing conflict.
In Richmond, Virginia, a horde of some 22,000 mostly armed men from around the nation descended on the state Capitol in January to protest looming gun-control legislation, amid bubbling social-media chatter about a “Boogaloo” civil war response to such laws. Donald Trump tweeted out his encouragement for their cause.
However, the strategy is now being applied in variety of ways, all responding to the various national upheavals that have befallen the American landscape in 2020:
- Protests arising from anti-COVID-19 pandemic measures, mainly stay-at-home order and business closures, have brought out scores of armed “Patriots” angrily opposed to the supposed abrogation of their freedoms. Among the protesters have been “Boogaloo” fanatics itching for a civil war. Michigan militiamen who showed up with weapons at the state Capitol intimidated legislators into attempting to cut off the state’s anti-pandemic measures. In Idaho, armed protesters managed to break into legislative chambers and disrupt proceedings while lawmakers were considering COVID-19-related policies.
- The anti-police-brutality protests that erupted nationwide after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman May 25 also proved to be a rich opportunity for far-right intimidation tactics, primarily on behalf of police, featuring gun-toting militiamen clad in body armor. This reached its apotheosis when a teenager using a semiautomatic rifle while hanging out with a local militia group opened fire on anti-police protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the shooting of a Black man by police there; three people were wounded, two fatally.
- The wildfires that swept much of the West Coast became a playground for far-right conspiracy theorists—who had already primed their rural social-media audiences with a hoax claiming that “antifa buses” full of violent leftists were heading to rural areas to wreak havoc, prompting a flood of armed vigilantes into the streets of those towns—claiming the fires were actually the work of nefarious “antifa arsonists” planning to indulge in burning and looting their homes—with a boost from Trump and Fox News. Predictably, armed vigilantes began organizing “citizen patrols” and rural checkpoints, stopping and intimidating drivers passing through.
Perhaps most ominously, the “Cruise for Trump” and other pro-Trump rallies in Oregon featuring Proud Boys and other far-right extremists have become more than mere attempts at intimidation—they are becoming massive conduits for the full absorption of extremist politics into the mainstream Republican Party. Indeed, whatever line existed between them appears to have vanished with a flourish of semiautomatic weapons and camo gear.
The stakes could not be higher in 2020, and the Trump-loving right—seeing the polls manifesting their leader’s massive failures, particular in mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic—is increasingly sounding desperate and angry. If this is a strategy that has worked in Oregon, we can probably count on it being applied in many other locales before the year is out.