A serious political lesson to be learnt from down in Florida

A recent episode highlights the inroads groups such as the Proud Boys are making in American life, writes Holly Baxter

A Black Lives Matter supporter confronts members of the Proud Boys as they protest near the Friendship Torch, where people gathered to remember George Floyd on the first anniversary of his death (AFP/Getty)

Over the weekend, a local newspaper called the Sarasota Herald-Tribune published a piece written by a “concerned local mom”. In it, Melissa Radovich wrote that “attacking Proud Boys does a disservice to caring school parents”.

“When I think about the Proud Boys, I think of fathers, business owners and veterans,” she added. “These fathers have spoken at many school board meetings. They are concerned about the direction their local schools are heading in, and I commend them for coming to school board meetings.”

Radovich may think of fathers and veterans when she thinks about the Proud Boys, but most people think of a white supremacist hate group populated by self-described “western chauvinists”. Radovich outlines why she thinks so positively of the men in her community who identify as Proud Boys, stating that they are anti-abortion, stand against homosexuality being included in sex education, and oppose mask mandates.

She also mentions in her op-ed that she doesn’t like the idea of teaching about racism in history lessons. As a Bulwark columnist put it, in a heavily sarcastic tone, on Twitter: “The Sarasota Herald Tribune is running an oped from a nice regular mom who wants you to know the Proud Boys are just a friendly normal group of well-intentioned dads.”

Sarasota is a city in southwest Florida populated by mainly white conservatives. That includes so-called “snowbirds”, ie older Americans who have moved to the state for its year-round warm weather (and perhaps its zero per cent inheritance tax). There’s a Ritz hotel on the sand, and a number of beautiful beaches that tourists love to visit, but a sizeable proportion of the population – just over 15 per cent – lives below the poverty line. Like a lot of Florida (bar a couple of Democratic enclaves such as Miami and Fort Lauderdale), the city leans Republican.

Leaning Republican, however, is very different from embracing the Proud Boys. Indeed, the Proud Boys are seen as so extreme that even when I interviewed far-right agitator Jacob Wohl outside the Supreme Court in Washington DC, he refused to associate himself with the group. At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 – where progressive counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer was killed – men identifying themselves as Proud Boys marched alongside neo-Nazis and explicitly declared white supremacists.

Online, people who call themselves Proud Boys tend to share memes that often lean toward the violently misogynistic, antisemitic and racist. These are not the kind of people you would ordinarily want at a school board meeting dictating what your child should learn in the classroom.

Until now, Proud Boys have mostly been described as angry young white men. Indeed, “angry young white men” has become a catch-all descriptor for a lot of people across America pushing far-right movements: rioting Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021; school shooters; incels. But, as Radovich has shown us, they have deep roots in suburban communities, where their views have become increasingly normalised.

They really are fathers now; people who turn up to school board meetings to pressure teachers into changing their curricula, who shout about their time in Iraq. They are probably politically engaged, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were fans of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who fought lockdowns and dismissed mask mandates during the pandemic and now rails against critical race theory and general “wokeness”. His “Don’t Say Gay” bill restricted the discussion of LGBT+ issues in Florida primary schools, and he promised to “expand pro-life” legislation in his state after the overturn of Roe v Wade, before bringing in a ban on the procedure for pregnancies past 15 weeks.

However radical that makes DeSantis sound, there’s a reason he hasn’t gone as far as other loudmouth Republican politicians, such as his counterpart in Texas, Greg Abbott. The majority of Floridians – like the majority of Americans overall – are pro-choice, at least in some form, even if a lot of them lean right. And while Abbott doesn’t seem to have ambitions beyond his state right now, DeSantis clearly has an eye on the 2024 presidential nomination – if he can manage not to get destroyed on the way by his former mentor, Donald Trump.

As for Radovich, her article was taken down by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune 24 hours after it was published, and they issued a statement that read: “The Herald-Tribune opinion page will not provide a forum for support of the Proud Boys, an extremist group that promotes white nationalist views.” Other online publications that had aggregated it took their version down not long after.

Many on social media were glad to see such a mind-bending article scrubbed from the internet. But what this episode told us – that the Proud Boys are increasingly making inroads as “community-minded dads” these days, and that they are not just rage-filled college kids but organised grown-ups – shouldn’t be forgotten.