Part Two: Patriot Prayer: The Street Gang That's Tearing Portland Apart

Robert Evans sits down with two members of Rose City Antifa to talk about the most dangerous street gang you've never heard of.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, Hello everybody. I'm Robert Evans, and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Now Here once again, I'm away from
my company recording studio in Los Angeles and in Portland, Oregon.
Tomorrow there's going to be a rally by a group
called Patriot Prayer, who if you haven't heard about, we

(00:20):
will be talking about them at length today but with
me today, our two guests, and how would you guys
like to identify yourselves? My name is David and I'm
a spokesperson for Rose City Antifa. My name is Isaac
and I'm a spokesperson for Rose City Antifa as well. So, yeah,
you guys are anti fascist activists. Fox News would chi
run you as Antifa in uh in square quotes and

(00:41):
that's probably fair to say, right yeah? Um so yeah,
Today we're going to talk about a guy named Joey
Gibson and a group called Patriot Prayer, which I'm gonna
guess a lot of listeners probably haven't heard of, but
they've kind of turned the city of Portland into a
battleground over the last almost two years. Now um at
a pretty regular base this. So that's who we're talking
about today. I know you guys are coming at this

(01:03):
with a bit of a bias, obviously based on your position.
I'm coming at this with a bit of a bias
two because I've just spent the last two weeks reading
about Joey Gibson, and it's kind of hard not to
when you read the receipts. That's what we're gonna do
today is read some receipts. So you'all ready to get
into it. Sure, let's go for it, okay. Joey Gibson
is a one time failed Republican Senate candidate. He's the
founder of Patriot Prayer and either thirty three or thirty

(01:25):
four years old. Wikipedia does not seem to know one
way or the other, but we'll get that information out
of him someday. I would say he's probably the canniest
gangster in our new weird age of right wing street gangs.
He certainly seems to have more on the ball than
a guy like Kevin McGinnis. And I'm gonna guess Gavin
McGinnis is probably more well known by most people listening
to this right now. Yeah, I would think so. I mean,

(01:46):
I think Gavin McGinnis is probably more well known across
the country, whereas Joey Gibson is much more of a
regional figure here in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, and I
think that's a little bit dangerous because I think that
that Joey represents a significantly your threats. So the Proud Boys,
you know, they assaulted a bunch of people in New
York pretty recently. They're going to be holding a rally
as well on the seventeenth and Philadelphia. But they're kind

(02:08):
of fundamentally absurd in a lot of areas, which you know,
has maybe helped to make people not take them as seriously.
But I also think there's kind of a limit to
the sort of coverage that a group that like the
Proud Boys can get. You know, mainstream news talking about
a group where all the members refused to masturbate and
punch each other while naming breakfast cereals and stuff. It's
a little hard for someone sitting in their house watching

(02:29):
a Fox News report to see that person as like, oh, well,
this is the good guy. I mean, they think they
think those people are kind of weird. Patriot Prayer has
taken a very different tactic towards their activism, and I
think it's probably one that's going to prove more successful
in the long run. While the Proud Boys have been
widely de platformed and widely condemned after the attacks in

(02:51):
New York, although not totally, Patriot Prayer still has most
of their platforms and access to most of their platforms.
They've been kicked off of Facebook, I don't think they've
been kicked off of Twitter. I think they're still on
PayPal as well, if I'm not mistaken. I know that
some of their financial campaigns were shut down fairly recently
over the last few weeks. I can't remember exactly which platforms. Um,

(03:11):
I know. I think t Spring was one that they
sold their merchandise through, and a few others, but um, yeah,
I'm not sure about PayPal specifically. Yeah, let's talk a
little bit about Patriot Prayer. They build themselves as a
non partisan free speech activism group. Joey's usual spiel when
asked about Patriot Prayer goes something like this. I'm gonna
quote Joey here. This isn't a political thing. I'm not

(03:32):
out here to tell you who to vote for. That's
not what patriot prayer is about. Patriot prayer is about
trying to build a healthy culture and to stand out
against the hate. You stand against Antifa and the communists,
stand against the white supremacist, the Nazis, whoever it may be.
You stand against all these people who think that they
run the streets, who think that they can control people
with fear. And so patriot prayer has always been about
going into these areas where people are too afraid to
speak up. I mean, that's just absurd if you look

(03:55):
at what Joe Gibson does, what he really is is
part of the entries movement of fascism into more conservative circles.
That's what he's done since his first public demonstration in Montevilla.
What he really does is take much more far right

(04:16):
ideas and spread them in a much more mains from
conservative circles. That's why you see people like Tiny, his
kind of right hand man, wearing a pinocheted nothing Wrong
right wing death Squad t shirt at a march. Yeah, exactly,
And uh, we'll get into a little bit more of
that later. I think what's important now is that, regardless
of it's inaccuracy, the branding does seem to be effective

(04:38):
in that it seems to be accomplishing several of his goals.
No national media organization would ever be openly sympathetic to
Nazi skinheads, obviously, but a group like Patriot Prayer, who
goes around wrapped in the flag and who builds themselves
is against all forms of extremism, is a little bit
easier to uh, you know, get positive media coverage out
of and I think Joey has been somewhat successful in

(04:59):
engineering a little bit of that. For example, here's how
Fox News covered in October thirteenth Patriot Prayer rally. Patriot
Prayer Rally in Portland turns bloody American flags saved from flames.
That's a title. That's that's that's that's the whole. Now.
Were either of you there at that October rally? Um
oct that was this year in Yeah. I think that

(05:21):
was the flash mob thing that he threw together. Yeah right.
I was not personally there, No, but there were people
from our group. They're observing and seeing what was going down. Yeah.
It was built as a flash mob for law and order,
which you're kind of two weird things to hold together,
And it was I think one or two days after
the Proud Boys assaulted a bunch of people in New

(05:41):
York City, And in fact, it seems like they often
time their rallies together. I don't know how much I
know there is that a number of Patriot Prayer members,
including Joey's right hand man Tiny, are also Proud Boys,
and you'll see a lot of them in Proud Boys shirts.
And I know that the Proud Boys are holding a
march in Philadelphia on the same day that Patriot Prayers
holding their mark in the seventeen. Yeah, but I don't
know how much coordination there is between them. Yeah. I

(06:03):
think the deal with that event on October thirteenth was
there was actually a vigil being held to memorialize a
African American man who had been shot by the Portland police,
and because of an altercation that had happened at that
vigil earlier in the week, Patriot Prayer decided to come
down there and confront the people holding the vigil. So
that was really the reason that they went out there.

(06:25):
And they had a whole lot of different sort of
descriptions of what they were out there doing. You know,
that the law and order thing, the whole they were
protesting against the mayor. They also at one point said
that they wanted to pay their respects at the vigil,
even though they went and attacked people who were at
the vigil. You know, so they really like have this
whole library of different descriptions of what it is that

(06:48):
they're doing, um when in actuality, what they're doing is
they're coming out looking to intimidate people and fight people.
But yeah, if you if you spend any amount of
time reading the news articles written about Jolie Gibson or
talk to Joey Gibson, you get the same handful of
basic biographic bullet points about the man. He grew up
in Camas, Washington, with quote good parents and strict rules.
He describes himself as a rebellious team who had a

(07:09):
lot of run ins with the law. Here's a quote
from an article about him in The Colombian. After his
senior football season, Gibson, a quarterback, got in trouble with
the law. There was alcohol probation violations and a break
in at a restaurant in Washingle. He spent some time
in jail, which led to him dropping out of school
for a time. Gibson was homeless, living in Portland, Seattle, Mexico,
Hawaii and making bad decisions, he said, which it reminds

(07:31):
me a lot about if you've if you've gone to
like evangelical tent revivals, the preachers and stuff at those
revivals always have you know, I was, I was doing
l s D. I was running around with gangs. You know.
I was a high rising and low slide and popping
reds and busting heads, kicking indoors and banging whorrors. It's
it's the way they all. I don't know, and I
think it is something on the far right where if

(07:53):
you're going to portray yourself a sort of this inspiring figure,
you start by talking about and I know Tiny does
the same thing. He always will say like I used
to be like the anti fig guys filled with anger
and you know, crime and all this stuff, and then yeah,
that's actually a lie on Tiny's part, by the way,
he has this whole narrative about how he used to
be on the left and be anti Trump and then
what's converted over But he actually never was. He was

(08:14):
actually Republican before Trump was even running for office. That's
something that we've uncovered, the same thing with Joey Gibson.
I mean, I think there's this whole narrative of you know,
rebirth or um, you know, recovery that he wants to
push out there. But you know, I mean, dude broke
into a locally owned restaurant and stole fourteen hundred dollars
worth of checks in cash, you know, and that's that,

(08:37):
you know, I don't know how you spend that as
being like a youthful rebellious phase just so or what.
But he's also stolen money from other Patriot Prayer members.
There was a a long running sort of monetary dispute
between him and a member called Justin Harrington, where you know,
Joey admitted that he owed Justin I think it was
more than a thousand dollars, but that he was never
going to pay it back and Justin was trying to

(08:58):
get this money back from him, and it was the
thing in that group for a little bit. Yeah, with
with Joey Gibson, you know, he has a lot of
these sorts of narratives that he tries to tap. And
I think that's the thing you're you're saying is that
he's he's seems to be able to kind of pluck
these strings of these national narratives of politics in a
way that resonates with certain conservative news agencies. But you know,

(09:20):
it's really very paper thin. You know, you look beneath
the sort of his spiel, you look beneath his words
that he puts out there, these few sound bites, and
you start looking at what he does, and you just
see how duplicitous he is. I mean, the whole idea
that you said in your first quote, he said he
wasn't trying to get anybody elected. The patriot prayer events
that he had in Portland over the last year were

(09:40):
specifically build a campaign events for his senate campaign in Washington.
Of course, Yeah, so he's running for he's running for
Senate in Washington, throwing these campaign events here in Oregon
and then saying that he's not trying to get anybody elected.
That it's just like there's no end of the ridiculousness
for this guy. And that's the thing. One of theficulties
that I can say as a journalist trying to cover

(10:02):
this is that you are expected and the job is
to try to tell both sides of it, to try
to present things as objectively as possible. But in order
to present someone like Joey objectively. If you just put
out what he says and you don't dig in any
deeper into it, then you will come across with him
looking the way he wants to look, essentially, like that's
the thing. When you've got thirty seconds and a news
broadcast to be like, here's what patriot prayer is, here's

(10:24):
what antifa is. A lot of people are going to
wind up thinking Joey's the guy on the right side
of this, yeah, or or at least that there's some
sort of equivalence, you know, as a narrative that we
see a lot, and you've seen that here in the
local media here in the Portland area where it started
out with this narrative of both sides, you know, this
kind of like oh, two different extremist groups facing off
in the street, etcetera, etcetera. But over time the local

(10:46):
media has really come around and seeing like, actually, these
two sides are incompletely different There's one side that brings
out all these white supremacists to Nazis and violent people,
and then there's the local community based groups that are
organizing in order to defend in their community against this,
and really the two sides have nothing to do with
each other except for the fact that one is trying
to defend the city against the other. And it's it's been, um,

(11:10):
you know, gratifying on our part, I think, as those
community activists organizing to defend the community, to see the
local media kind of realized, you know, for the first
time Joey comes out and does his speel, they might
repeat it word for word, but over time as they
see the evidence sort of building up, they see these
sorts of receipts piling up about Joey Gibson and the
people in his groups and what they actually do. Then

(11:31):
we see this kind of awareness starting to build. We
see the media kind of learning that the narrative is
only skin deep and looking for the actual truth. And
there's actually been some pretty decent investigative reporting in the
local area digging into patriot prayer and and who these
people actually are, and that's gratifying to see. The national media,
on the other hand, hasn't quite got there yet. Yeah.

(11:52):
I think the issue is that the national media doesn't
have quite this this timeline and like kind of soaking
in Joey Gibbs and stream of stream of the local
media can catalog at each event, you know, the fights,
the people throwing up Hitler salutes, the slurs. Whereas the

(12:13):
national media comes in, sees one event, sees Joey's speech,
and then leaves. And so it's really that that time
spent with Joey's vileness that allows you to like really
understand what he is and what he does. Yeah, and
his his speeches. I was just listening to one when
you guys walked in and it was all and I

(12:33):
think a lot of them are about getting past hate,
moving past it will address the crowd of counter approaches
just and be like, you know, you guys have so
much hate in your hearts. That's what we're trying to, like,
you know, fight against is all this this hate and
anger that the far left has against America. And yeah,
it's when when you have the receipts you can see
how hollow it is. But speaking as someone who grew

(12:53):
up in Deep Texas and who comes from very conservative background,
it plays with a lot of people. Let's get back
into his background just a little bit more before we
move up to the present day. So we just talked
about his bad days when he was committing fraud, robbing, places,
but then his middle school pe coach asked if he
wanted to coach football, and Joey claims to have used

(13:14):
that as the inspiration to sort of clean his life up.
He says he got his g e d. And he
went to Central Washington University. I know he got caught
up in trying to flip houses during the market crash
in two thousand and eight, and in general, he seems
to have had a pretty normal road up until about
the two thousand sixteen election. Now, he claims he was
always passionate in politics, but says that quote, it's always
been sitting in my house complaining like everyone until on

(13:36):
June two, two thousand sixteen, he says he watched coverage
of violence outside a Trump rally in San Jose. He
claims this made him worry that people would be put
off from taking part in politics if they saw violence
at political rallies. Quote, Yeah, that put a fire in
me that I never experienced in my entire life. Something

(13:57):
changed in me at that moment in time, because at
that point I had a site at our country is
not America anymore, and that was the first time I
saw that. Yeah, So this is Joey Gibson's origin story
courtesy of Joey Gibson. Yeah, that's that's pretty it's pretty
hilarious when you think about the number of videos of
violence that have occurred at his rallies that he's shared
on Facebook, the number of speakers that he's invited to

(14:19):
his rallies that specifically have a message of hate and
intolerance and encouraged that sort of violence. He had a
speaker at one of his rallies that suggested that anti
fascist activists and immigrants should be put on the curb
and have their heads stomped in, you know, like, where's
the peace and love there, Joey, Well, but can you
can you imagine though, if we lived in a country
where that guy felt unsafe to talk about curb stopping people, Like,

(14:41):
that's not America, you know, you know, and this is
this is a thing that you know that we feel
like the media has really kind of gotten over this narrative,
But this narrative of free speech is really entrenched in
a lot of people's minds here in the United States
that this people have this right to say whatever they
want at any time, and they should be given a
microphone and a stage. Jenna lectern in order to kind

(15:02):
of spit out that um sort of vile rhetoric. But
you know, the thing that we always say is really
it's like the actions. You know, the speech is not
separated from the actions. And everything that Joey says, even
these you know, very kind of mild ecumenical messages that
he's putting out there, you really can't unlink that from
the violence that occurs because of what he does. So,

(15:23):
you know, he always tries to keep his hands cleans,
he always steps back when the fight breaks out, and
then he just posts the video later on Facebook. He
tries to insulate himself from all that so he can
continue to have this message um and and try to
make that message sound sincere and genuine. But but really
you can't separate these two things. And anybody who's lived

(15:43):
in Portland or been to any of these rallies, they
have that that connection between him and the events that
happened at his rally is very cemented in their mind. Yeah, Now,
Joey claims that that this watching this violence on T's
and sixteen in San Jose is what, you know, inspired
him to buy a ticket to the Republican National Convention

(16:04):
in Cleveland, which was apparently his first time traveling for politics. Now,
I was at the RNC that year too, and I
covered most of the major demonstrations and street actions and
protests at that point. And this was before there were
Obviously anti fascist activists have existed since the twenties or thirties,
but anti fall was not a term that people used
at that point. There was some black block stuff going
on then, but that's a I think it's fair to

(16:24):
say different. It wasn't popularly know and I would say
people are definitely using the term, but yeah, it wasn't.
It didn't have the sort of media recognition that it
does now. Yeah, the earliest I can find it in
mainstream media is about early two thousands. Seventeen. Yeah, it
really exploded into the national consciousness with the Milo Unapolis Rally, Berkeley,
i'd say, and also um the j twenty demonstrations in

(16:47):
in Washington, d C. So right in the beginning of
seventeen is really when it started to to become a
national term, get that recognition, and the demonstrations and protests
at the r n C were I'm not going to
say they work home, but I would not qualify them
as bloody. You know, I was on the ground pretty
much the entire time. I didn't see tear guests deployed
in the areas I was in. A couple of people

(17:08):
got injured at a scuffle that broke out over a
flag burning. A biker attacked some people burning a flag,
and a couple of people get injured. But it was
it was really, considering it was the r n C
and what everybody was expecting, it was a pretty mild event,
or the protests were relatively mild. It was. It was
fairly peaceable, and actually, I think a lot of us
were really relieved by that, because everything leading up to

(17:28):
the r n C had led a lot of people
to expect that it was going to be kind of
a blood bath, and when it wasn't, most people were
kind of relieved. Joey Gibson was not relieved. He saw
this lack about rageous blood letting and decided he needed
to do something about it. Quote. I noticed that the
left owned the streets. So I came back committed to
getting people involved, to getting people on the street, the
libertarian the conservative. So when Joey got home, he put

(17:51):
together some flags and he started marching around in Clark County, Washington.
At least that's his description of sort of his origin
or the origin of Patriot Prayer quote because I didn't
know to do. He gradually attracted people in October sixteen
Patriot Prayer through a rally in esther Short Park in Vancouver, Washington.
It was in support of Donald Trump. That's his claim
sort of as the origin of Patriot prayers rallies. As

(18:13):
he went to the r n C, he saw the
left own the streets and he just started marching around
in Vancouver until people glommed on around him. Basically, I
think that's a much more accurate sort of description of
what his motivation is is, you know he and you
see that in their in their discourse and their rhetoric,
especially from the followers more than Joe Gibson himself a

(18:34):
lot of times, this idea that the streets of a
particular city have to be reclaimed from the left, reclaimed
from the their sort of demonized notion of communism taking
over the streets of Portland or Seattle or whatever city.
It is. Because from where I'm sitting, what I saw
at the r n C, which is like protests where
you know that we had. There were a bunch of

(18:55):
dreamers who dressed up as pieces of a wall and
sort of peacefully walled off the r n C for like,
you know, a number a number of minutes, and there
were you know, speeches and stuff, and there were some marches,
but there wasn't street fighting. The violence I saw was
in line with like someone pulling a sign out of
another guy's hand and stopping it on the ground. I
saw that kind of thing a couple of times, but
nobody was like beating each other bloody, And I guess

(19:16):
that's what it looks like when the left down the streets,
and that's Joey wasn't a fan of that. So when
we come back, we're going to talk about the rise
of Patriot prayer and the increasingly bloody rallies and how
the city and the police have responded to them. But first,
you guys wanna before we we go to the ads

(19:37):
that paid us, you want to give free ads to
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(19:59):
advertise on their show. We're back. We're talking about knowing
how to do things, which the editor of this podcast
does and thank god, because otherwise it would sound terrible.
I don't edit these podcasts. You guys ready to get
back in the Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer and his
Magical Journey. Okay, let's talk so and most of the

(20:22):
articles you read about Joey you'll run into a story
about him at an early Patriot Prayer rally in two
thousand seventeen, he got into a shouting match with the
counter protester, stole the protesters sign and tore it up
on camera. Then Joey apologized and gave them in twenty dollars.
Most recitations of this story, and with a variation of
the line they parted shaking hands. Now, I think the
point of this anecdote is to make Joey Gibson look

(20:43):
like a ge. Shucks. He's just a decent guy, gets
a little passionate at times, but you know, he's a
He's a good man at his heart. He he doesn't
want this sort of any sort of violence. Um, and
I've I've run across the story a lot, so I
think it has to be one of the major anecdotes
he tells about himself to reporters. Again, as you out
that I've run into this less in the more recent coverage,
but certainly the stuff from like mid two thousand seventeen,

(21:05):
this story is dropped a lot. Here's another quote from
an article about him in The Colombian. On Facebook, videos
and YouTube, he preaches hatred. It is a disease. He
counts the Reverend Martin Luther King among his political heroes.
He once invited a transgender person to speak in one
of his rallies because he said it's time all people
were accepted, which is a legitimately smart I guess, I

(21:27):
don't know, like it's it's an interesting tactic to be like, Okay,
we had this one trans person speaks, so it's okay
that I have guys talking about curb stomping to everybody
gets to speak. Yeah. I mean, I think with every
one of these little anecdotes, there's an obvious and overwhelming
counter example of something that he's done. Like, for example,
in two thousand and seventeen, he personally provided security for

(21:49):
the hell Shaking Street preachers when they came down to
protest the trans march at Pride. So he's like, I'm
letting transgender people speak at my events, but I'm also
supporting these violent people who attack Transpride. Yeah, everyone gets
to say the people who want to live and the
people who want to kill them both of their opinions

(22:09):
are valid. Now. Joey Gibson is an Asian American man.
Patriot Prayer has several non white members which they regularly
point to in order to prove that they aren't a
hate group. And I definitely agree that it's unfair to
call them Nazis because nazis very specific political ideology that
I don't see shared by Joey. I do, however, think
after pretty intense research, that it is fair to call

(22:30):
Patriot Prayer and Mr Gibson fascists, and I think that
they're lying when they claim not to be. Now, I guess,
first off, what do you think about that. I don't
think most of them are fascists. I think they are
like facilitating fascist entryism. I think there's obviously a lot
of members of Patriot Prayer who are white nationalists, who
are white supremacists, who are fascists. But as for whether

(22:53):
Joey himself is, I think he's probably more of a
like extreme like paleo conservative. Maybe yeah, I think. Um.
You know, something that they try and say about us
a lot of times is that everybody that ANTIFA doesn't
like is a is a Nazi and a fascist. And
for us, the typology is actually really important, the distinguishing

(23:16):
between the different types of fascists that are attending these
events and the different sorts of nationalist politics that are
in play, especially right now in our in our current
times in this country. So I think I think most
people in Patriot Prayer I would call them white nationalists.
You know, they definitely have a racial component to their
to their language. They are promoting, you know, this idea

(23:38):
of anti diversity, um, this idea of this kind of
reactionary anti anti diversity, anti feminism, all these sorts of things,
promoting this this sort of vision that this country is
for particular people and those people are the most important people,
and they want to use that to bolster their um
idea of like a strong nationalist government. Men. However, as

(24:01):
Isaac was just saying, yeah, definitely, the entry of them
is something that's particularly concerning is the fact that making
these arguments, which they can kind of hide and sneak
into the mainstream. Um, they are also attracting what are
we would call like actual Nazis, you know, the sorts
of people who you know, lionized Hitler believe in killing
the Jews and genociding other at risk populations. Um. You know,

(24:25):
all all of these things can be seen coming into
his rallies because he attracts it like a magnet. Well,
and I do think it's this is part of why
it's important to have a deep understanding of kind of
what went on in Bimar, Germany for the rise of
the Nazi Party, because a lot of the people who
were early supporters of Hitler and the supporters of the
Nazi Party, we're not necessarily people who could cleanly be

(24:46):
described as fascists like Auto. Strasser was a major thinker
in the early Nazi period and a guy who near
the end of his life before he was executed in
the Night of Long Knives, had actually changed in a
lot of his attitudes. He was definitely very far extreme right,
but he was also at one point courted by the
German government as a guy who they thought could split
the Nazi Party in half because he was much more
moderate than Hitler. And we lose a lot of that

(25:06):
nuance in history. But I do think it's important that
like a group can achieve fascist ends without everybody in
the group being an avowed fascist. We try not to
refer back to, you know, the pre World War two
Germany example all the time, because there's plenty of other
up examples of fascism that are also important to recognize,
and that one kind of gets brought up a lot

(25:26):
and kind of built up into this, you know, and
all be all example of what a fascist government looks like.
But I think, I think to your point, you know,
the fact that there were a number of right wing
political parties that were in coalition in order to bring
the Nazi government into power is an important thing to note. Yeah,
this is what we've seen actually in Portland. You know,
Joey's events will attract you know, the Daily Stormers, Identity Europa.

(25:49):
Um he'll be working with Kyle Chapman Um and becoming
of Resist Marxism. Who's the transwoman that he Um had
speaking his rally who is I think in a white
nationalist or white supremacists um and has identified herself as that.
So he is able to sort of build this white nationalised,
white supremacist fascist coalition. He's able to bring the Proud

(26:09):
Boys and the Daily Stormer people into like the same
rally space. Yeah, and it's like there's there's a we
talked about in a previous podcast. There's a long history
of fascist groups bringing in in America, particularly bringing in
sort of diverse people to a like a the German
American Bund in the Silver Shirts had a guy named
Chief Red Cloud who was a Native American who wore

(26:30):
swastikas on his head dress and talked about sort of
the alliance of Native Americans and Arians against the Jews
and stuff like that. And that's there's a long history
of sort of a diversity within fascist movements. Yeah. And
and you see them talking about this and constantly relying
on this as a talking point. You know, we have
a semi one person, so we clearly can't be racist.
And you know, Jason Kessler, the guy who organized the

(26:52):
Unite the Right rallies and Charlottesville and some of the
leak chat logs that came out about the organizing for that.
He specifically said, like, we need to get some people
of color to kind of be our argument for the
fact that we're not actually racist, even though in the
same chat logs they're making tons of anti Semitic and
racist comments. And for Unite the Right too. I think
he actually pointed to Tiny as an example of someone

(27:15):
they wanted to bring yea to that exactly he did. Yeah. Now,
there's another couple of other reasons I think to see
a lot of fascism in Patriot Prayer. One of them is,
as you stated, the Pinocheted Nothing Wrong shirts, which seemed
to be fairly popular with at least a certain subset
of Patriot Prayer members, including Mr Tiny. The back of
these shirts often has the graphic of a helicopter with
people being flung out of it and the text to

(27:37):
make Communists afraid of rotary aircraft. Again, now, if this
seems a little bit obscure to people listening, Augusto Pinochet
was the Bruder dictator of Chile. He executed thousands and
tortured tens of thousands in addition to raping nuns with dogs.
His men were famous for their death flights, which is
of course when they would take suspected communists and other
insurgents and fling them out of helicopters to their deaths.

(27:57):
Pinochet shirts and other right wing apparel one by pay
Prayer members also often includes the phrase r w U
d S, which stands for right wing death squads, although
I know at least one time when Tiny has been
confronted about the fact that he had this on his shoulder,
he claimed not to know what the letters stood for. Yeah,
the Pinot example is actually really interesting because it's kind

(28:18):
of an example of this fascist creep in the Patriot
Prayer movement. If you look back at like early or
mid seventeen, some of the waterfront rallies in June, July,
and August, there were you know kids at those rallies,
kind of four chan edge lords. Um, who would you
be there with like a free helicopter rides sign? Be

(28:38):
doing like chance, like you can't run, you can't hide,
you get helicopter rides. We saw that, I think in
early December at the Kates Steinley rally to then seventeen,
and then you see that creep into people like Tiny,
other people who now wear you know explicitly like we
s part Pinochet shirts. So that's kind of what the

(28:58):
trajectory of fascist idea is in the Patriot prayer of
movement in general, is like they kind of get introduced
and then they get adopted at large. The fascist creep
point is really a pretty salient one and an important one.
Just the fact that it seems like things have gotten
more visibly extreme over the last year or so of rallies. Um,
would you say that's accurate based on your experiences, Yes, yeah, definitely.

(29:18):
I mean the violent aspect is is certainly one aspect
of how things have gotten more extreme, but also the
discourse and the language. You know that quote we were
discussing earlier about Patriot Paris saying they were going to
cleanse the streets of Portland. You know, we didn't hear
that kind of discourse happening back in early two thousand
and seventeen, but over time that sort of thing has

(29:39):
become much more common. We're seeing the instances of references
to Pinochet and other violent dictators sort of stepping up. Um,
with that language comes the actual physical violence as well. Yeah,
and and Tiny has been particularly pictured in and around
a lot of explicit fascists, including he's He's posted pictures
on Facebook with the logo of American Guard, which is
a fair the far right group run by a klansman

(30:02):
that Joey actually himself has disavowed. Like a day before
his right hand man wound up posting on Facebook with
their you know, logo on him. There's a picture of
him I've got shaking hands with a guy wearing a
son and red tattoo on his his inner form, which
is essentially what knatzis like to wear when they got
to pick something a little bit more subtle in a swastika.
You know that man is y'arall rock Hill, who's um

(30:23):
was a Patriot Pray attendee for a long amount of time,
several months, and you know we had the receipts on
that the whole time. Joey can have not known that
this guy was a Nazi and that he was also
convicted of statutory rape. Yeah, well, so it was in
fact that that got him finally kicked out, even though
he Joey had known about this statutory rape charge for

(30:43):
for a couple of weeks and then finally had to
kick him out over it. But it wasn't the naziason
that got him kicked out? Well? In the the video
where in Tiny has seen shaking hands with this guy,
which was posted by Justin Media, which I understand are
affiliated with with Patriot Prayer, would that be yeah? I
believe so. Yeah. The title of the video is Tiny
shaking hands to piss off Antifa, which is again like

(31:04):
we're being friendly with Nazis because it triggers them or
something like that. I guess yeah. Now. On August seven, seventeen,
Joey hosted a rally in Portland. Patriot Prayer members marched
with members of the white nationalist organization Identity Europa u
I E was also present at the first Bloody Unite
the Right rally. They're pretty extreme. I think it would
be fair to say Tim to Baked Alaska NA. He's

(31:24):
a fascist entertainer who regularly professes open admiration for Adolf Hitler.
He was also a headliner at the first Unite the
Right rally. He was on a lot of the posters
and stuff. Jason Kessler really bragged about having him as
a get. Baked Alaska is not the kind of guy
you hang out with if you weren't cool. Being identified
as someone who hangs out with fascists, and on October two, seventeen,
Joey Gibson let Baked Alaska give a speech at a

(31:45):
Patriot Prayer rally. During that rally, Baked Alaska also live
streamed himself getting other members of Patriot Prayer to repeat
the fourteen words neo Nazi slogan about securing the future
for white children. Essentially, Um, it's not hard to find
these connections, is the point. There's more. Yeah, we could
we could get into where they're more time, And I think,
you know, that's that's really like a lot of what

(32:06):
we do actually as activists is dig that up and
do the research on that and then make sure that
we document that and put that online in articles on
our website, because you know, that's the sort of stuff
that Joey isn't going to tell you, and that's the
sort of stuff that we really feel that it's important
for people to know about him so that they can
counteract the things that he says with those kinds of

(32:27):
evidence of activity. Yeah, and I do think that's an
important point that these sort of people marching in the
streets with their faces covered are one aspect of anti
fascist organization, and in terms of like time spent, probably
a larger aspect is research and you know, the the
trying to make these connections. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Now, another

(32:47):
man who marched with Patriot prayer was Jeremy Christian. He
showed up at Gibson's March for Free Speech rally on
April twenty nine, two thousand seventeen. I'm not aware of
other times any march with Patriot prayer. That's the only
time that we're aware of. He wore a very large
chain around his neck and an American flag as a cape.
Will have a picture of him on our website behind
the Bastards dot com. Uh. He also had a Portland
Police Bureau T shirt. He looked like the kind of

(33:09):
guy you would sort of write off as a harmless
kok at a rally. I've seen a bunch of guys
not very differently attired, but he was not a harmless kok,
as you guys know very well. Less than a month later,
on seventeen, Christian was on a Portland max light rail train.
He started shouting racial slurs and anti Muslim slurs at
two teenage girls and three very brave men. Ricky John

(33:31):
Best Talis and Murden, nam Kai Mesh and Micah David
Cole Fletcher confronted him in an attempt to protect both
young women. Christians stabbed best In Namkai Mesh to death
and badly wounded Fletcher. When he was arrested, Jeremy Christian
told the police, I just stabbed a bunch of expletive
in their neck. I hope they all die. He later added,
that's what liberalism gets you. Now. Christian had a pretty

(33:52):
long and involved criminal history. Prior to this. He'd been
arrested for armed robbery and spent a large chunk of
his adult life in prison. He regularly made death threats
on Facebook uh and in general showed very obvious signs
of being a dangerous person. Gibson claims that Jeremy was
just some nut who showed up at one of his
rallies and interviews afterwards, he made it clear that he
views himself as a victim in this tragic mas stabbing.
As well. He told CBS that his political enemies are

(34:14):
unfairly using the fact that he played host to a
white nationalist terrorist. Quote. That's the frustrating part. They're trying
to use it to control me, to make me stand down,
and I won't do it. I cannot ensure that some
crazy person is going to show up and make a
horrible decision. I can't control everybody. You know, not only
did Jeremy Christians show up at his rally, he also
posted tons of violent threats on the Patriot Prayer event page,

(34:38):
and you know, talked about demasking and attacking Antifa, and
all of Joey Gibson's followers were gung ho about it.
They were like in the post, they were commenting um
affirmatively to that, and and Joey Gibson allowed that to
remain on his post without any problem because it was
consistent with his message and consistent with the beliefs of
his other followers, who he isn't going to to disavow

(35:00):
in that way. Well, and it's consistent with the messages
that we've seen posted, or at least one of the
messages that we've seen posted in advance of the rally
that's going to happen tomorrow. Some guy named Jacob's Ladder
posted in the Facebook group for this another opportunity kicks.
Some anti fi ass is as good as any other day.
Count Me in Portland has a plethora of lunatics from
left who need a whooping. Yeah, and you see it,

(35:22):
you know, just all the time. It's a constant feature
of Patriot Prayers Facebook page, the threats against the left,
against really anyone who disagrees with Patriot Prayer. Just recently,
you know, the Council on American Islamic Relations and Oregon
got um the web funding page for Patriot Pressure. I
think it was maybe giving steam or something like that. Um,

(35:44):
they got it shut down, and immediately the threats like
we should burn down care offices was posted on Patriot
Prayers page. So Joey can't really disavow Jeremy Christian because
it's also that online environment that Joey creates that leads
you the violence in the streets, the slurries, the attacks
on people on the max. It's just as much that

(36:07):
as it is the street rallies. Yeah. And and you know,
at one of Jeremy Christian's hearings, you know, court hearings,
he likes said he said out loud death to Rose
City Antifa. And then Joey Gibson before one of his
August rallies this year in two thousand eighteen, was selling
T shirts to raise money that had a tombstone that

(36:28):
said Rose City Antifa, and so really their messages are
exactly the same. Yeah, and we will continue to talk
about that after the break, because there's another Patriot Prayer,
remember who's made some explicitly knife based threats that Rose
City Antifa exposed pretty recently. So we'll get into that,
but first it's time for an ad pivot. We're back.

(36:52):
We're talking about Joey Gibson Patriot Prayer, and uh, right now,
what we're talking about is sort of Gibson's claims that,
in spite of the fact that a guy who attended
one of his rallies and posted violent threats on his
Facebook page stab to people, Patriot Prayer is not a
violent organization. He has repeatedly said that he will not
tolerate any of his members advocating violence. I don't want
them at the rally and they'll be kicked out. And

(37:13):
it is possible, theoretically that somebody hosting mass gatherings regularly
like Joey Gibson, would purely by accident, draw in a
single crazy and dangerous person. That's anyone who hosts a rally.
It's a potential word you know it could happen once.
But as we've already talked about, this is not a
one off. And there's examples of other people who very

(37:33):
much frightened me that seemed to have the kind of
potential to be someone like Jeremy Christian, and one of
them is very recently exposed by someone at Rose City
Anti Fuck because I found this on y'all's Twitter page.
Joshua Sintel is a Patriot prayer follower and someone who
will likely be on the rally at the seventeenth. Here's
something he said in a live stream video. I don't
need no firearms because I like knives. God, I hate

(37:54):
these s JW's and I can't wait to get up
to Portlands and see them in fucking person, because I will.
I've already talked to this guy in the Proud Boys.
You want to do away with whatever the funk you
want to do away with Antifa, I'm going to fucking
come up to Portland and murder your fucking asses. So
it certainly seems like the kind of potential to be
another Jeremy Christian, and that and that guy, Joshua Sentell

(38:19):
was at the rally on and he was right there
on the front lines. He was shouting racial slurs, giving
Nazi salutes, and he never got kicked out of their rally,
so apparently they're cool with that. Yeah, it does seem
to take a pretty long history of open support of
fascism before you get kicked out of the rallies. But
I guess we'll see. Maybe he won't be there tomorrow. Now.

(38:41):
In the immediate wake of the Max stabbings, you might
have expected Joey Gibson to lay low for a little while. Instead,
he used the tragedy as an excuse to host He
had another rally. The mayor begged him not to, but
he held his march anyway. It was obviously ended in
a very messy brawl. Fourteen people were arrested. The Colombian
interviewed him in the aftermath of that rally and caught
him in an apology sort of mood. So here's that

(39:04):
Columbian article. Gibson called throwing that rally one of the
tougher decisions he's had to make. He's unsure of why
extremist attaching themselves to him. Some he thinks might be
looking for a home or a place to recruit. I
didn't do a good enough job of speaking out against it,
he said, adding that when left wing groups contacted him
and pointed out with photo evidence specific extremists at his rally,
it was an eye opener. I mean he he had

(39:25):
to know that ahead of time. He he brought um
Tim Jeannette Baked Alaska to speak of that rally, and
then the history of his anti Semitic statements was very
well known, and he had already been exposed with that
on the internet. It was common knowledge. He was being
cited as an in a semi in news articles at
the time. So the idea that Joey didn't know that
ahead of time is frankly just bs. Yeah. It certainly

(39:48):
does not seem he would have had to not read
anything about Baked Alaska to not have known that. Maybe
he thought he was a dessert efficient audo. Anyway, this
eye opener, as Joey said, did not inspire him to
hold off on further rallies. Patriot Prayer has continued to
regularly rally mostly Important, but also in Berkeley and at
one point in Austin to support Alex Jones when he

(40:09):
was banned. This one seems to have more or less
fizzled out. Some of Patriot Prayers rallies have been relatively peaceable,
but tremendous shocking violence is an extremely regular occurrence. Now
y'all may disagree, but from how it looks just researching
this as an outsider, it seems like the bloodiest single
rally was June eighteen. UM, I would agree with that. Yeah.
Patriot Prayer had built it as a rally to quote,

(40:31):
promote freedom and courage in opposition to the terrifying Antifa menace.
Portland Police Bureau declared it a riot. One man had
his skull fractured when the police opened fire on counter protesters.
There's a video of the altercation, which will link on
the site. Looking into it, you see nothing being tossed
by the crowd until the police began firing into the crowd,
at which point you see the crowd throwing water bottles. Again,

(40:51):
we'll link it. It happens about seventeen seconds in as
when you seek the fun was kind of Patriot Prayers
response to a rally they held on June three, which
was built as Tiny's going away rally. Tiny obviously did
not leave. He's still in Portland and Washington. UM, and

(41:12):
at that rally, it was kind of very small with
maybe like but mainly Proud Boys and the ani fascist
counter demonstration, and the Proud Boys really just went around
looking for people to assault. That was kind of like
a big yeah. They just all the kind of random
people with helmets, with their fists with sticks, um. And

(41:32):
I think at that rally the police actually said, hey,
we can arrest you, but you guys should just leave instead.
There's a video of that incident. June was kind of building.
They think they came off worse in that June third rally,
so their June rally was really their response to that
to kind of pump up their machieves, mom really make
them feel good about themselves again. And what we saw
at that rally was kind of a really big confrontation

(41:55):
between a really heavily Proud Boy group of Patriot Prayer
that was planning on marching, that marched and then charged
an anti fascist line. The skull fracture in that case
came from a Proud Boy named Ethan Noordine who um
fraction anti fascist skull. August fourth was a month later.

(42:16):
This was the next Patriot Prayer rally. This was you know,
two thousand anti fascists came out to oppose about three
Patriot Prayer attendees, and at that one, the police kind
of acted as Patriot Prayers enforcers, keeping people away, but
allowing Patriot Prayer to have weapons, allowing them to march
even though it wasn't permitted, and then firing and fracturing
someone's skull, and also giving separate people chemical burns when

(42:39):
they wanted to get back to their police cars. And
we and that's with the videos from that, but yeah,
in the video about seventeen seconds and you can see
the police fire and then you see water bottles being
tossed essentially, And there's other video of that as well
where you can hear the cops saying are those squad
cars back there in the crowd, And then that was

(43:00):
what catalyzed the decision to the fire, and then they
lied about their being objects throne. Yeah, and there's a
class action suit currently on going against the police department. Yeah,
there's a number of them. Yeah, well we'll get into
that once that's all resolved, I'm sure. But yeah, so
I think if you dig into the matter, it's hard
to avoid the conclusion that Patriot Prayer are the agitators

(43:23):
here from one thing, many of them aren't Oregonians. Vancouver
is part of the Portland metropolitan area. You can almost
viewed as like a suburb of the city. Would that
be fair to say, probably, I'd say that's accurate. Yeah,
it's across the Columbia River in Washington, but a lot
of people commute down I five into Portland from it.
And in fact, most of the Portland police officers live
in Vancouver. That half of them live outside the metro area,
and a lot of those live in Vancouver. And it's

(43:45):
a more conservative area and very different in culture than
sort of the Portland that is more famous to people
listening to this who know about Portland from the show
Portland or whatever. Like, Right, Vancouver's a rather different place
culturally than a lot of Portland. So it seems like
you could make the case that some of these folks
are essentially invading what they see as a liberal enclave.
And there is some evidence to back that up, including

(44:08):
what we talked about a little earlier, a post made
on the Patriot Prayer Facebook page by guy named Jay Harris,
and I'm gonna read a little excerpt from that, and
this was an advance of the June eighteen rally. This Saturday,
June eighteen, the stinch covered in liberal occupied streets of
Portland will be cleansed, cleansed, I say, the streets will

(44:28):
be flowing with freedom, The air will be filled with patriotism,
the cloud show part, the darkness will fade, and the
glory of America will shine forth. The cheers of celebrations
shall bless the ears all around. Young children will dance
as the praises of our great nation will be exclaimed
without regret. Yeah. So he it's some purple pros right there,
some very purple pros. But clearly some of these guys

(44:49):
seem to see what they're doing as something of an invasion.
Well that's certainly because what Joey considers that, you know,
we have Joan Cameron saying we're going to keep going
into these he's called them places of parkness. And when describing,
you know, coastal cities that have like kind of a
left wing liberal tradition, Portland, Berkeley, San Francisco, he really

(45:10):
does see himself as kind of this invading force that
is planning on cleansing the city of the left. Yeah,
and um, I did find one example of Gibson kicking
someone from a rally, Raoul Gonzalez, who sounds like he
did not get to march with him at least on Junet.
And Gonzalez is a racist skinhead and was essentially coming
and he had the red suspenders on. He had I

(45:31):
forget the band shirt that he had on, but it
was a swastika knife. Yeah, he is known to wear
a Hitler youth knife. He has the son and Rod
symbol on a necklace that he wears. And when he
tried to march with Patriot Prayer, Gibson told him quote,
if you supported us, you wouldn't be here because you
give us a bad name, which I think is pretty
telling because it's not saying I reject you because you're

(45:53):
wearing a swastika, I reject you because you're wearing explicitly
Nazi paraphernalia. It's I reject you because you're being us
a bad name. And after after he said that, he
actually let Raoul stay because Raoul refused to leave. So
Joey was like, well, I can't do anything. I wash
my hands of this because I have no ability to
keep people out of my own rally. Apparently yeah, which

(46:15):
is also counter to what he claimed to Jeremy Christian
because an interviews who always say that he kicked Christian
out of the rally right. Yeah. I also want to
get into one other subject here, which is sort of
the claim of this group that they are free speech supporters,
that that's the and then you'll often hear that in
sort of Joey talking to mainstream news that like that's
his his anglers. I'm supporting free speech where free speech
advocates to Sitala tiny Tozie has been so far accused

(46:40):
twice of assaulting people who screamed at him, like there's
one case from the Vancouver Mall, and one from the
Vancouver Mall in Northeast Broadway, and twelve or so Portland
and the Vancouver Mall. One was a seventeen year old
shouted an obscenity to him in Several Proud Boys as
they drove past in a truck with had a Donald
Trump fled on it and the Proud Boys got out

(47:02):
and assaulted this young man, and Tocy wrote on social
media afterwards, we are not your average victimized Trump supporters.
We fight back and we know how to throw our hand.
You get smacked and now you're the victim. You asked
for it, added another member who was there. And then
of course there was a separate assault. Mr leadwith when
that was the one on in Portland. Yeah, yeah, Um,
so that's that's again, this guy who's often build at

(47:24):
least as Joey's right hand man, has two credible cases
of assaulting people for exercising their freedom of speech, which
doesn't seem super consistent, but anyway, it really is consistent
for what they do. Know, I mean, when we're if
we're kind of building this idea of what they're doing,
which is they want to assault the left. They want
to come in and make the left afraid again, you know,

(47:47):
as his T shirt has said, you go to make
communists afraid again of murder basically, so like they used
violence in this language as two tools in order to
rally more people to their cause, including uh, you know,
overt white supremacists and Nazis, and also to try and
intimidate the public. And that's one of the reasons that
we do what we do is we want to be

(48:09):
able to have the community be able to stand up
and defend itself against this kind of incursion, and we
don't want people to live in fear people who you
know are are they kind of at risk people, whether
it's their politics, their gender or sexual identity, the color
of their skin, their religion, any of these things. We
don't want people to have to be afraid in their
own city of these kinds of groups coming in and

(48:31):
using them as an example, using them as a scapegoat
for the gratification of these violent politics. Well, I'd like
to close out by quoting an article written on medium
by named justin Wards. Essentially, multi racial fascists was the
key phrase in the title, and he he's really getting
into sort of patriot prayers claims about itself and what

(48:53):
they actually are, and he provides a pretty salient point,
so I'm gonna quote him here. Patriot prayer is a
prime exam of a cult of action for action's sake
that Italian writer Umberto Echo described in his essay or Fascism. Echo,
who grew up during the rule of Mussolini, said fascist
believe action is beautiful in itself and that it should
be carried out with little or no contemplation, because thinking

(49:14):
is emasculation. When patriot prayer holds a rally, it rarely
has a purpose beyond being patriotic or supporting free speech.
He obviously puts the little thought into the titles, giving
them ridiculous orwellian names like Peaceful Vancouver Freedom March or
most recently, the Portland Freedom and Courage Rally. I do
think this sort of attitude of action for action's sake
and everyone is a hero, This cult of the hero thing,

(49:34):
I think is um maybe the most direct line you
can draw between sort of old school fascist movements and
what's going on with a group like this. This attitude
of of portraying yourself as a hero and putting yourself
in a physical position where you can show yourself as
being a warrior almost is like, I think that's that's
really key, um to understanding these people, in understanding sort

(49:54):
of their place within this broader cosmology. It's definitely a
part of the patriot prayer Mythos his group used to
call itself. There are two names, American freedom Warriors and
Warriors for Freedom, and some of them still have that
tattooed on them despite they're kind of not using that
name anymore. So, this this idea of the kind of
warrior for freedom that crusader that Joey kind of sees

(50:17):
himself as is definitely a huge part of the drive
behind their movement. Yeah, well, guys, I think that's most
of what I got here, So I'm gonna I'm gonna
close this out before we roll out. Do you have
anything that you all would like to plug? I would
say if you're if you're interested in more information or
seeing some of these receipts of the sort of violence
of Patriot Prayer and associated groups, definitely visit our website

(50:39):
because we have up there a plethora of articles, um
kind of detailing in and going into um extreme detail
about the sorts of things that these groups do, and
and it's all documented, and we feel like, really that
is the best evidence. You know, we can kind of
talk about it and discuss it, and that gets the
ideas out there, but like really people should go look

(51:00):
for themselves and then be able to judge once they've
seen the aspects of what Patriot Purse says that Joey
Gibson doesn't want you to see when he's talking to
the camera. Yeah well, all right, guys, that's gonna be
it for today. Thank you both for coming by and talking.
Thanks for having us time. Yeah, thank you. So this
has been behind the Bastards. I've been Robert Evans. You
can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Bastards Pod.

(51:22):
You can find us on the internet at behind the
Bastards dot com, where we will have all of the
receipts for this episode, including some stuff that we didn't
quite have time to get to, but there's a lot
of information out there, so please check it out. And yeah,
until then, we'll be back soon with another thing, so
check it out listening and uh, I love about forty
percent