signalmankenneth
Verified User
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security used a song beloved by white supremacists in a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The self-pitying “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which equates living in a diverse community with being oppressed, has long been an anthem for racist terrorists, neo-Nazi groups and, crucially, the Proud Boys — one of the paramilitary organizations that led the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. As a local journalist in California reported at the time, the Proud Boys covered their faces and sang the song at a November 2020 Sacramento event, vowing to “put ourselves on the line” to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 election.
I’m far from the first observer to notice how much ICE, under the leadership of Homeland Security Secretary — and proud dog-killer — Kristi Noem, has come to resemble the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group founded by Gavin McInnes in 2016. As Wired’s David Gilbert wrote in response to ICE’s recent invasion of Minneapolis, the reason we haven’t seen a resurgence of the Proud Boys in Trump’s second term is that the president’s “militarization” of ICE and “embrace of white nationalist rhetoric” leaves the group “without a role to play.”
ICE’s current aesthetics owe much to the Proud Boys, from the masks they use to hide their identity and their corny but racist language about “heritage” to their attachment to the phrase “FAFO,” which is short for “eff around and find out.” But Kristi Noem hasn’t just changed the way ICE presents itself. The tactics the agency now uses and the ideas fueling its mission are eerily identical to the vision of the Proud Boys that McInnes laid out from the group’s very beginnings.
He communicated these views to his fledgling community of wannabe brownshirts through “The Gavin McInnes Show,” which streamed on Compound Media from June 2015 through August 2017. That year, Juliet Jeske — an anonymous activist who has since outed herself and become a journalist — contacted Salon with dozens of clips she’d gathered from watching the entirety of the show. McInnes appealed to a young male audience with shock jock tactics, which included using a butt plug live on camera “to own the libs.” But going through the clips over eight years later, what’s striking is that it was all there from the beginning: the gross beliefs the fueled the Proud Boys, and now ICE and its supporters; the reliance on deadbeats and losers as foot soldiers; and the advocacy of violent tactics we’re now seeing play out in the invasion of Minneapolis.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/amanda-marcotte/115983/how-kristi-noem-turned-ice-into-the-proud-boys
I’m far from the first observer to notice how much ICE, under the leadership of Homeland Security Secretary — and proud dog-killer — Kristi Noem, has come to resemble the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group founded by Gavin McInnes in 2016. As Wired’s David Gilbert wrote in response to ICE’s recent invasion of Minneapolis, the reason we haven’t seen a resurgence of the Proud Boys in Trump’s second term is that the president’s “militarization” of ICE and “embrace of white nationalist rhetoric” leaves the group “without a role to play.”
ICE’s current aesthetics owe much to the Proud Boys, from the masks they use to hide their identity and their corny but racist language about “heritage” to their attachment to the phrase “FAFO,” which is short for “eff around and find out.” But Kristi Noem hasn’t just changed the way ICE presents itself. The tactics the agency now uses and the ideas fueling its mission are eerily identical to the vision of the Proud Boys that McInnes laid out from the group’s very beginnings.
He communicated these views to his fledgling community of wannabe brownshirts through “The Gavin McInnes Show,” which streamed on Compound Media from June 2015 through August 2017. That year, Juliet Jeske — an anonymous activist who has since outed herself and become a journalist — contacted Salon with dozens of clips she’d gathered from watching the entirety of the show. McInnes appealed to a young male audience with shock jock tactics, which included using a butt plug live on camera “to own the libs.” But going through the clips over eight years later, what’s striking is that it was all there from the beginning: the gross beliefs the fueled the Proud Boys, and now ICE and its supporters; the reliance on deadbeats and losers as foot soldiers; and the advocacy of violent tactics we’re now seeing play out in the invasion of Minneapolis.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/amanda-marcotte/115983/how-kristi-noem-turned-ice-into-the-proud-boys
