Colin Moynihan and Ali Winston

But two months later, as prosecutors move ahead with charges, the all-male Proud Boys group is in disarray. Ten members have been arrested in connection with the violence, charged with riot and attempted assault as part of an investigation into their activities.

The Proud Boys have been widely condemned as a hate group. Facebook and Instagram have banned the group. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it a “hate group.” An organization called New York City Antifa, whose members describe themselves as “anti-fascists,” has named the Proud Boys who were involved in the violence and has posted details about their lives on Twitter.

Even the founder, Gavin McInnes, has distanced himself, announcing on YouTube in late November that he was quitting the group “in all capacities, forever.” His departure left the Proud Boys without a figurehead, though the group has since said in an online message that, “We’re not going anywhere.”

Though McInnes has said he disavows racism, he wrote that prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer “comes across as perfectly reasonable in conversation,” and he said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who is black, is “kind of like Sambo.” When he quit the group, he blamed “rumors and lies and terrible journalism” for undermining “the greatest fraternal organization in the world.”

“This whole idea of white nationalists and white supremacy is a crock,” he added. “Such people don’t exist.”

At the same time, previously unreleased video, obtained by The New York Times, shows that the Proud Boys initiated the attack in Manhattan against a handful of anti-fascist protesters, not the other way around, as McInnes had initially said. Prosecutors said at court appearances for some of the accused Proud Boys members that video evidence will prove that the Proud Boys started the fight.

Asked about the Proud Boys, John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy police commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, confirmed that “incidents like this make it more likely that they’ll be higher on the radar.”

Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the administrative chapter of the Proud Boys, maintained that the group repudiates hate and racism and pointed out it has ordered white supremacists to leave its events in the past.

The violence started on Oct. 12 shortly after McInnes gave a speech at the Metropolitan Republican Club on East 83rd Street, a bastion of establishment conservatism.

Outside a crowd of left-wing protesters chanted “No Nazis, No KKK, No fascist USA.” After the event, police kept the attendees and protesters separate, but a handful of leftists, wearing masks, circled the block and tried to intercept the Proud Boys on East 82d Street, police said.

The security video from a nearby building shows that at 8:19 p.m. two men in Proud Boys shirts, Maxwell Hare and Geoffrey Young, strode briskly east from Park Avenue on 82nd Street toward about six protesters some 100 feet away.

Then, Hare charged the leftists, and a protester threw a plastic water bottle, which sailed past him, the video shows. Hare crashed into one of the protesters, hurling punches.

Just before he charged, another video filmed by a freelance videographer recorded that someone yelled: “Proud Boys! You ready? Proud Boys!”

Within seconds more men rushed down the block from Park Avenue and joined the fray, the two videos show. The brawl lasted about 60 seconds.

A third video filmed by a man who was with the Proud Boys showed Hare and others after the fight exulting about “smashing” the head of a “foreigner.”

Both Young and Hare have pleaded not guilty and claim through their lawyers they were attacked.

One challenge facing prosecutors is that the victims of the attack have refused to cooperate with authorities, which means the case will rely heavily on videos from security cameras and onlookers.

The indictment refers to the victims as “Shaved Head,” “Pony Tail,” “Khaki” and “Spiky Belt.”

“The identity of these Antifa members remains unknown,” Joshua Steinglass, an assistant district attorney, told a judge at an arraignment for seven of the defendants on Dec. 14.

The people who turned out to hear McInnes speak at the Metropolitan Republican Club in October represented a cross-section of New York’s far-right subculture: libertarians, conspiracy theorists and nationalists who have coalesced around their opposition to Islam, feminism and liberal politics.

Irvin Antillon, 49, who is accused of kicking protesters on the ground, is a member of a Latino skinhead group, Batallón 49, who traveled to Charlottesville last year for the “Unite the Right” rally, where an anti-racist protester was killed, experts said.

In one online photograph, he poses shirtless, showing off tattoos of Nazi symbols.

Hare, 26, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was filmed in early October punching leftist protesters at a “Resist Marxism” rally outside the statehouse in Providence, Rhode Island, and traveled to another far-right rally in Portland, Oregon, in August, where Vice News Tonight filmed him wearing what appeared to be a bulletproof vest.

Young, 38, of Rockland County, New York, who is accused of punching and kicking three people, has called Muslims “a virus” who “feed off the host nation until it’s dead” in an online video.

Since McInnes founded the Proud Boys two years ago in New York, the group has sprouted chapters across the country. Its members have clashed several times with leftist protesters at political events and have shown up at far-right rallies also attended by white nationalists and other extremists.

Tarrio said Proud Boys members cannot control who else shows up to large gatherings like “Unite the Right.” He himself said he brought a camera to document events at the deadly “Unite the Right” rally, where hundreds of white supremacists marched unmasked in Charlottesville, chanting anti-Semitic slogans and carrying shields. President Donald Trump later blamed the “hatred, bigotry and violence” on “many sides.”

“I think the president was correct in saying that there were good people on both sides and bad people on both sides,” Tarrio said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/nyregion/gavin-mcinnes-proud-boys-nypd.html" id="1c54714f-8f41-3e39-a7d7-dd39bb5298a8">The New York Times</a>.

Far-Right Proud Boys Reeling After Arrests and Scrutiny

NEW YORK — After his appearance in Manhattan led to a brawl, the founder of a far-right group, the Proud Boys, said it was little more than a “fun, silly, men’s club” that had defended itself against an attack by leftist protesters.

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Colin Moynihan and Ali Winston

Articles written by the author

Far-Right Proud Boys Reeling After Arrests and Scrutiny