How Kristi Noem turned ICE into the Proud Boys

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 — contact 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.

From the beginning, McInnes understood that he could access a large, untapped resource that is America’s loser population. Before Johnny-come-latelies like Elon Musk started assembling mediocre white men who are low on intelligence and high on resentment, McInnes was reeling them in with a steady patter of assurances that he had the secret to restore them to level of social status and respect the modern era had supposedly stolen from them. On his show, he portrayed both women and people of color as imbeciles who cannot handle equality or freedom. He claimed to hold the key to restoring masculinity to his viewers, mostly through bigotry, beer and violence. In retrospect, as ICE agents in Minneapolis have taken to kidnapping, beating and even shooting people on the streets, what really stands out is how much effort McInnes put into creating elaborate justifications for right-wing violence.

“Fighting solves everything,” he said in April 2016. “We need more violence from the Trump people. Trump supporters! Choke a m*****f****r. Choke a b***h. Choke a tr***y. Get your fingers around the windpipe, if they spit on you. That’s assault.”

It’s an idea McInnes repeated again and again: that “self-defense,” at least for a right-winger, is so expansively defined that his audience was entitled to meet even the smallest perceived insult from “the left” with maximum violence. If someone spits on you, attempted murder by choking is justified. In one episode from June 2017, McInnes and his guests complained about a “leftist play” — a production of “Julius Caesar” with the dictator dressed as Trump — and how they wanted to “rush the stage.” He said, “I’m sick of this culture where they tell us that we have to be nonviolent and just sit and accept abuse.”

McInnes also preached an elaborate theory that liberalism is basically a mental disorder — caused, of course, by allowing women too much access to the public square — and that the cure for it was beating it out of people. “I used to hate [the left],” he said in October 2016. “Now I just see them as spoiled brats. Or a bratty girlfriend who’s PMS-ing and they want to be slapped.”

In another episode that same month, he said, “Liberals, they’re just dumb. Their hearts are in the right place. They’re just stupid and they need a slap in the face. Well, we’re here to tell you that we’re right, we are proud, and we’re going to give you the slap you deserve.”

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In October 2016, McInnes and his guest delighted in a video of a truck running over leftist protesters, who they portrayed as deserving of injury or death, for saying mean things to the truck driver. “The guy’s so used to talking like that on the internet, he thinks he can do it in public,” he said. After the truck rammed the protester, a laughing McInnes said, “You stood in front of a truck and got hit by a truck, and now you can’t stop crying.” He lamented that the driver might pay a legal penalty for attempted murder.

McInnes’ views were swiftly turned into action by his followers during Trump’s first term. In 2017, the Proud Boys started targeting liberal cities full of people they believed needed to be “slapped,” such as Portland, Oregon. They roamed around waving flags and shouting insults at the locals, hoping to draw a reaction that they could claim justified lashing out at people with violence under their ridiculous views of “self-defense.”

McInnes’ image of “dumb” progressives is rooted in his hostility to racial diversity. He regularly argued that white liberals are too poisoned by political correctness to understand that people of color are a threat to white safety and social order. As Salon documented in 2018, he characterized Black people as “violent” or “toddlers” while arguing, “Dead white guys built this country.” McInnes griped that the largely Dominican-American neighborhood of New York’s Washington Heights — which he kept insisting was Puerto Rican — is “a giant welfare resort, where there’s no cops, no laws and people just do whatever the fuck they want on our dime.”

Tellingly, when I reached out to him for comment on the story at the time, McInnes replied by implying that I was a ninny white lady who had never been to Washington Heights. (I have. I’m also a native of El Paso, Texas, a bilingual, majority-Hispanic city.)

But from all of his rhetoric and stunts, a clear narrative emerged: People of color constitute a threat that white liberals (mostly women) are too dumb to see. Therefore they need to be bullied and physically abused until they surrender to the right-wing truth.

As we’re seeing in Minneapolis, that view isn’t just wrong, it’s also self-contradictory. It wasn’t Latino or Black immigrants who killed Renee Nicole Good. It was a white male ICE officer named Jonathan Ross who was working for an agency claiming it’s here to “protect” white people from these imaginary threats.

Since Good’s killing, there has been an endless stream of videos proving that the real danger comes not from immigrants but from ICE agents beating up teenage Target employees, terrorizing DoorDash drivers and threatening to hurt and kill people who film them. Turns out “protecting” Americans is indistinguishable from raining chaos and violence on their heads to punish them for free speech and dissent.

While he still leads and attends right-wing events, McInnes pulled back from the spotlight after 2018. Ironically, one of the likely reasons is that, as a Canadian citizen, he risks deportation if he’s too closely associated with groups accused of organized violence like the Proud Boys. But it’s hard to deny that he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Trump’s invasion of Minneapolis and the violence inflicted on the residents is being justified by the administration and their allies with the exact same concepts McInnes used to build up the Proud Boys in its early days: that racial diversity is a poison, that white male violence is purifying and heroic, and that it’s “self-defense” to beat or even kill anyone who stands up to the right.

McInnes is no longer needed to push the GOP toward fascism. Under leaders like Trump and Noem, the party is already fully there.