Some Proud Boys Are Moving To Local Politics As Scrutiny Of Far-Right Group Ramps Up

The Proud Boys are going local.

The last six months have seen dozens of alleged members of the far-right extremist group charged with actions related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. This was followed by even more marginalization of the group by corporate America. And a late January revelation that the national chairman of the organization was once an informant for law enforcement led some chapters to threaten to splinter off.

Founded in 2016 as a self-described “Western chauvinist” organization, the Proud Boys is defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC’s Cassie Miller described the Proud Boys ideology as focusing on the principles “that politics should be practiced by force, that the country is full of internal enemies, that the United States needs to be reborn or renewed in some way.”