Who are the Proud Boys? A look into the group and its leaders

Asked to denounce violent right-wing extremist groups including the Proud Boys during Tuesdays raucous presidential debate, President Trump only told them to stand back and stand by a response cheered by members.

While the group has been active since at least 2016, it has come to the fore amid clashes over racism and policing that have gripped the nation in the wake of George Floyds death this year.

Members of the gang immediately celebrated Trumps comment Tuesday night in encrypted messaging chats they use to communicate with one another.

Trump basically said to go fk them up! this makes me so happy, one of the members wrote in a chat on the app Telegram, according to screenshots posted online.

Standing by, sir, another added.

The groups Seattle chapter quickly adopted the presidents comment as part of their motto, according to one screenshot, which shows an image of the words Stand Back and Stand By surrounding the gangs crest.

The gang-like extremist group was founded in the lead-up to the Trump 2016 presidential victory. In a number of radio broadcasts, McInnes has advocated for Trump supporters to commit acts of violence against rivals and said members of the Proud Boys would do so.

We will kill you, thats the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you. We look nice. We seem soft. We have boys in our name, but like Bill the Butcher and the Bowery Boys, we will assassinate you, McInnes said in one of his radio appearances.

To join, recruits have to take an oath declaring they are a proud Western chauvinist and refuse to apologize for creating the modern world. After its founding, new members were also barred from masturbating more than once a month, according to the groups bylaws.

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The group claims they are not a racist organization, but the Southern Poverty Law Center considers them a general hate extremist group that espouses misogynistic, anti-Muslim and homophobic rhetoric.

Gavin McInnes rose to fame as co-founder of VICE Media alongside fellow Canadian Shane Smith in the 1990s. Hes since turned to podcasting to promote his conservative ideology and has appeared on the hugely popular Joe Rogan podcast.

Hes drawn criticism for a number of his statements, including a condemnation by Canadas Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs for a YouTube video he uploaded in 2017 called 10 Things I Hate About Jews, in which he said Israelis were obsessed with the Holocaust.

McInnes lives in Westchester County and has whined in a statement about the treatment hes received since founding the Proud Boys.

My family has been attacked and so have my friends, he wrote in a post decrying the SPLCs hate group designation of the Proud Boys.

The pro-Trump mens club I started, the Proud Boys, have been rounded up and arrested facing serious felonies for daring to defend themselves against the radical left. Its not just my circle of conservative Christians. Seemingly countless businesses and careers have been destroyed by this group, he added.

McInnes claimed to have quit the group after a number of members were arrested following the brawl in Manhattan.

Im told by my legal team and law enforcement that this gesture could help alleviate their sentencing. Fine. At the very least, this will show jurors they are not dealing with a gang and there is no head of operations. We are not an extremist group and we do not have ties with white nationalists, McInnes wrote in a statement at the time.

Infamously, the Proud Boys sparked a street brawl with leftists on the streets of Midtown Manhattan after McInnes spoke at the Metropolitan Republican Club in 2018.

McInnes brandished a sword at demonstrators who had gathered to protest his appearance outside the club before getting into a cab prior to the brawl.

Members of the gang have appeared at a number of extremist gatherings, including the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a white supremacist drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one.

Members of the Denver chapter of the group have also marched alongside extremist and neo-Nazi groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League both consider the group a right-wing, extremist organization but one that occupies an unusual place on the extremist spectrum.

In a report on the group, the ADL labeled them alt lite, as opposed to more blatant and extreme alt-right groups.

While the group can be described as violent, nationalistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and misogynistic, its members represent a range of ethnic backgrounds, and its leaders vehemently protest any allegations of racism, the ADL wrote in the report.

The SPLC noted in a report on the Proud Boys that despite McInnes claim the group is not a white supremacist organization, he himself espouses white supremacist tropes.

McInnes plays a duplicitous rhetorical game: rejecting white nationalism and, in particular, the term alt-right while espousing some of its central tenets. For example, McInnes has himself said it is fair to call him Islamophobic, they wrote.

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Who are the Proud Boys? A look into the group and its leaders