In December 2018, a man named Rinaldo Nazzaro purchased 30 acres of remote land in Republic, Washington, a city of roughly 1,000 people about an hour’s drive south of the Canadian border. The tract was meant to serve as a training ground for a terroristic white power group he founded earlier that year called The Base.
At the protests that have broken out across the country after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, so-called boogaloo bois have been a conspicuous presence. Members of the overwhelmingly white online subculture have shown up to protests heavily armed and clad in Hawaiian shirts – a reference to the “big luau,” an adaptation of the word “boogaloo.”
Protests against state-imposed stay-at-home orders have exploded across the country and attracted a wide array of right-wing supporters, including the Proud Boys.
Far-right extremists believe the intense uncertainty surrounding the outbreak of COVID-19 will aid their ability to recruit new members into their movement.
The domestic terror incident this past weekend in El Paso has energized the growing “accelerationist” bloc of the white power movement, which argues violence is the only way to achieve its goal of creating a white, non-Jewish ethnostate.
Transphobic rhetoric, some of it violent, appears to be increasing among white nationalists and neo-Nazis as the fight for transgender rights gains visibility and public support.
In early April, Congress held its first hearing on white nationalism since the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. What was supposed to be an opportunity to address the rising threat of far-right extremism was, at certain points, upended by conservatives who insisted the real threat came from the left.
Last weekend was marked by another horrifying attack on a congregation. Worshippers at a synagogue in Poway, California, were celebrating the last day of Passover when a gunman, apparently influenced by online white supremacist propaganda, opened fire.
Last Friday, Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes riled up a crowd of supporters at New York City’s Metropolitan Republican Club with what he played off as a comedy routine: the commemoration and celebration of the 1960 televised assassination of a socialist.
