1. See James P. Byrd, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Philip S. Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Christophe Jaffrelot, “Conversion and the Arithmetic of Religious Communities,” in Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 233–254; Dwijendra Narayan Jha, Rethinking Hindu Identity (London: Taylor & Francis, 2014); Michael Sells, “Crosses of Blood: Sacred Space, Religion, and Violence in Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Sociology of Religion 64, no. 3 (2003): 209–331; Vjekoslav Perica, “Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States” (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2002); Taylor, Christopher C. “Genocide and the Religious Imaginary in Rwanda.” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. eds. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson. 268–279 (2013); Phillip A. Cantrell II, “‘We Were a Chosen People’”: The East African Revival and Its Return to Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Church History 83, no. 2 (2014): 422–445; and Alex Thurston, “The Disease is Unbelief: Boko Haram’s Religious and Political Worldview,” The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World Analysis Paper No. 22 (The Brookings Institute, January 2016); Sverker Finnström, “An African Hell of Colonial Imagination? The Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement in Uganda, Another Story.” Kathara 4, no. 112 (2008): 119–139; Benjamin Schonthal and Matthew J. Walton, “The New Buddhist Nationalism(s)? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar,” Contemporary Buddhism 17, no. 1 (2016): 81–115; Iselin Frydenlund, “Operation Dhamma: The Sri Lankan Armed Forces as an Instrument of Buddhist Nationalism,” in Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Pluralism, ed. Torkel Brekke and Vladimir Tikhonov, 81–103 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017); Mohammed Hafez, “Jihadi Salafism,” in The Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh, 260–276 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021); and Mohammed Hafez, “The Elusive Dream of Pan-Islamism,” in Cambridge Companion to Religion and War, ed. Margo Kitts (New York: Cambridge University Press, in press).
2. Margo Kitts, “Ancient Near Eastern Perspectives on Evil and Terror,” in Cambridge Companion to the Study of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul Moser, 165–192 (New York: Cambridge University Press2017).
3. See #CapitolSiegeReligion for a fuller account of the religious symbolism. Philip S. Gorski, “White Christian Nationalism: The Deep Story behind the Capitol Insurrection,” ABC Religion and Ethics, January 18, 2021.
4. What is a Western Chauvinist? By the Proud Boys. A Western Chauvinist is a proponent of Western Civilization, someone who supports a secular government whose legal code is informed by Judeo-Christian ethics and whose origins lie in the Greco-Roman tradition of the Republic.
5. E. J. Dickson, “The Rise and Fall of the Proud Boys,” Rolling Stone 1353/1354 (July/August 2021): 122–153.
6. Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2020), 127–140.
7. “Proud Boys,” Southern Poverty Law Center; see also Matthew Kriner and Jon Lewis, “Pride and Prejudice: The Violent Evolution of the Proud Boys,” CTC Sentinel 14 (July/August 2021): 26–38, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. “Backgrounder: Proud Boys,” Anti-Defamation League.
8. A choice of song with rather cruel beginnings, in McInnes’s mocking a “little Puerto Rican kid” singing “Proud of Your Boy,” while attending his own child’s recital; see Dickson, “The Rise and Fall.”
9. “Proud Boys,” Southern Poverty Law Center. Gavin McInnes, “America in 2034,” American Renaissance, June 17, 2014.
10. Marisela Burgos, “Proud Boys Chairman Tells 7News Group is Misunderstood; Group Labelled Dangerous,” 7 News Miami, September 30, 2020.
11. Tarisai Ngangura, “White Supremacy is Not Just for White People: Trumpism, the Proud Boys, and the Extremist Allure for People of Color,” Vanity Fair, February 2021.
12. Ben Sales, “A Proud Boys Leader is Trying to Rebrand the Group as Explicitly White Supremacist and Anti-Semitic,” Sun Sentinel, November 11, 2020.
13. Ngangura, “White Supremacy is Not Just For White People.”
14. E. J. Dickson, “Why Is a ‘Christian Crowdfunding Site’ Letting Proud Boys Leader Enrique Tarrio Raise Money?” Rolling Stone, January 5, 2021.
15. Gorski, “White Christian Nationalism.”
16. Dickson, “The Rise and Fall.”
17. Gavin McInnes, “Introducing: The Proud Boys,” Taki’s Magazine, September 15, 2016.
18. McInnes, “Introducing: The Proud Boys.”
19. Adam Leith Gollner, “Original Sins,” Vanity Fair, July/August 2021.
20. Gollner, “Original Sins.”
21. McInnes, “America in 2034”; on the magazine’s “race realist” orientation, see “About Us,” American Renaissance.
22. Berry, Damon T. Christianity and the Alt-Right: Exploring the Relationship (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022), 8.
23. Berry, Christianity and the Alt-Right, 9; and Main, T. J. The Rise of the Alt-Right (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018).
24. “Backgrounder: From Alt-Right to Alt-Lite: Naming the Hate,” Anti-Defamation League.
25. Samantha Kutner, “Take the Red Pill: Understanding the Allure of Conspiratorial Thinking among the Proud Boys,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, September 7, 2020.
26. Cristina Beltrán, “To Understand Trump’s Support, We Must Think in Terms of Multiracial Whiteness,” Washington Post, January 15, 2021.
27. The labels are discussed in Berry, Christianity and the Alt-Right, 7–13.
28. Gavin McInnes, “Ladies, It’s Not the Jocks You Need to Watch Out For, It’s the Nerds,” Get Off My Lawn podcast, episode 58, June 15, 2018, 47 minutes.
29. Gavin McInnes, “The Tragedy of Dr. Who,” Taki’s Magazine, July 20, 2017.
30. McInnes, “Introducing: The Proud Boys.”
31. McInnes, “Ladies, It’s Not the Jocks.”
33. Stanley, How Fascism Works, 6–7.
34. Stanley, How Fascism Works, 6–7.
35. Loretta Ross quoted in Kathryn Joyce, “The Intersectional Right: A Roundtable on Gender and White Supremacy,” The Public Eye, Spring 2019, Political Research Associates.
36. Gavin McInnes, “So Long, Taki!” Taki’s Magazine, August 24, 2017.
37. Stephen Marche, “Swallowing the Red Pill: A Journey to the Heart of Modern Misogyny,” The Guardian, April 14, 2016.
38. Zach Beauchamp, “Incel, the Misogynist Ideology that Inspired the Deadly Toronto Attack, Explained,” Vox, April 2, 2018.
39. “Elliot Rodger: How Misogynist Killer Became ‘Incel Hero’,” BBC News, April 26, 2018.
40. Thea Jacobs, “Rebel Cause: What have Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian Said about Incel?” The U.S. Sun, February 2, 2020.
41. Tim Wilson, “Rightist Violence: An Historical Perspective,” International Center for Counter-Terrorism Research Paper, 22.
42. Rich Lowry, “The Poisonous Allure of Right-Wing Violence,” National Review, October 19, 2018.
43. Tanya Basu, “The ‘Manosphere’ Is Getting More Toxic as Angry Men Join the Incels,” MIT Technology Review, February 27, 2020; and Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998); and Josh McMullen, Under the Big Top: Big Tent Revivalism and American Culture, 1885–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Josephine Jobbins, “Man Up—The Victorian Origins of Toxic Masculinity,” The Historian, Queen Mary University London, May 12, 2017.
44. In Lowry, “The Poisonous Allure of Right-Wing Violence.”
45. Dickson, “The Rise and Fall.”
46. Nick Statt, “Facebook Bans Accounts Affiliated with Far-right Group the Proud Boys and Founder Gavin McInnes,” The Verge, October 30, 2018; and Gollner, “Original Sins.”
47. Gollner, “Original Sins.”
48. Proud Boys in Paradise, from Spring 2021, analysis by Harrison Patino1
49. “Proud Boys,” Southern Poverty Law Center.
50. The Forward and Daniel J. Solomon, “WATCH: Proud Boys Leader Lists the ‘10 Things He Hates the Most About Jews,’” Haaretz, March 18, 2017; see also Ron Csillag, “Rebel Media Star Gets Flak for ‘10 Things I Hate about Jews’ Video,” The Canadian Jewish News, March 17, 2017.
51. Gavin McInnes, “Gavin Mcinnes Best Moments (PART 1 must watch),” posted by Mike Lelito, March 8, 2017, YouTube video, 26:53.
52. Jeffrey Kaplan, “America’s Apocalyptic Literature of the Radical Right,” International Sociology 33, no. 4 (2018): 503–522; and Jeffrey Kaplan, Apocalypse, Revolution, and Terrorism: From the Sicari to the American Revolt against the Modern World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
53. I have discussed these rituals before Kitts, Margo. “Proud Boys, Nationalism, and Religion,” Journal of Religion and Violence 8, no. 3 (2020): 12–32.
54. Sammy Nickalls, “Why the Proud Boys Initiation Ritual Involves Cereal,” Extra Crispy, February 13, 2018.
55. Noe Tanigawa, “Proud Boys in Hawaii,” Hawai‘i Public Radio, January 16, 2018.
56. Jane Coaston, “The Proud Boys, Explained: The Far-right Street Fighting Group Has Embraced Violence—and Donald Trump,” Vox, October 1, 2020.
57. Nickalls, “Why the Proud Boys Initiation Ritual Involves Cereal.”
58. Thomas McBee, “A Sociological Investigation of #NoWanks,” The Cut, December 14, 2018.
59. Dickson, “The Rise and Fall.”
60. Nickalls, “Why the Proud Boys Initiation Ritual Involves Cereal.”
61. David Gilmore, “Meet the Proud Boys, the Pro-men, Anti-masturbation Enemy of ‘Antifa,’” Daily Dot, May 21, 2021.
62. Dickson, “The Rise and Fall.”
63. “Gavin McInnes Quotes,” BrainyQuote.com.
64. Robert A. Pape and Kevin Ruby, “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists,” The Atlantic, February 2, 2021. In fact the majority were married, white-collared workers from counties that have lost their white majorities; see Scott Tong and Serena McMahon, “White, Employed and Mainstream: What We Know About the Jan. 6 Rioters One Year Later,” Here & Now, WBUR, January 3, 2022.
65. Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004), 124.
66. Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity, 111; and Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity, 119–136.
67. Candace Alcorta and Richard Sosis, “Ritual, Religion, and Violence: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson, 571–596 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). For a fuller account of ritual and violence, see Margo Kitts, Elements of Ritual and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
68. Margo Kitts, “The Last Night: Ritualized Violence and the Last Instructions of 9/11,” Journal of Religion 90 (2010): 283–312; Margo Kitts, “Ritual, Spectacle, and Menace: An Ancient Oath-Sacrifice and an ISIS ‘Message’ Video,” Journal of Religion and Violence 8, no. 2 (2020): 133–152; Pieter Nanninga, “Cleansing the Earth of Shirk,” Journal of Religion and Violence 7, no. 2 (2019): 128–157; and Paul Solotaroff, “He Spent 25 Years Infiltrating Nazis, the Klan, and Biker Gangs,” Rolling Stone, January 30, 2022. A goat was inexpertly sacrificed for The Base on Halloween night, 2019.
69. Pape and Ruby, “The Capitol Rioters.”
70. Dickson, “The Rise and Fall.”
71. Gorski, “White Christian Nationalism.”
72. Zach Beauchamp, “Accelerationism: The Obscure Idea Inspiring White Supremacist Killers Around the World,” Vox, November 18, 2019.
73. Mattias Gardell, “White Racist Religions in the US,” in Controversial New Religions, ed. James R. Lewis and Jesper Aargaard Petersen (Oxford Scholarship Online, May 2006); and Damon T. Berry, Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017)..
74. Berry, Blood and Faith, 74–101.
75. Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 13–45.; and Berry, Blood and Faith, 179.
76. Berry, Blood and Faith, 181.
77. Damon T. Berry, “Voting in the Kingdom: Prophecy Voters, the New Apostolic Reformation, and Christian Support for Trump,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 23, no. 4 (2020): 69–93; and Berry, Blood and Faith, 169, 181.
78. Nor has he ever put forward how he envisions the “Greco-Roman tradition of the Republic.”
79. Gavin McInnes, “Gavin McInnes on Religion,” posted by Fundamental Escape Podcast, May 2, 2017, YouTube video, 5:53.
80. Berry, Christianity and the Alt-Right, 19, 184–185; and Damon T. Berry, “Religious Strategies of White Nationalism at Charlottesville,” in Religion & Culture Forum, ed. Joel A. Brown (2017).
81. “A loose set of far-right ideals centered on ‘white identity’ and the preservation of ‘Western civilization’”; Southern Poverty Law Center, “Alt-right.”; and Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2020), 34.
82. “Cucked” meaning cuckolded, liberalized, too soft; what he brands as “Whole Foods” or “take-what-you-will” forms of Christianity. See Berry, Christianity and the Alt-Right, 21–22. On Pepe the Frog, as it has transformed since 2005, see Anti-Defamation League, “Pepe the Frog.”
83. Berry, Christianity and the Alt-Right, 20–22.
84. Jeffrey Kaplan, “The Reconstruction of the Ásatrú and Odinist Traditions,” in Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, ed. James R. Lewis, 193–236 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996).
85. Berry, Christianity and the Alt-Right, 28–29.
86. Berry, Christianity and the Alt-Right, 24.
87. On the notion of a lost Indo-European vigor, we should acknowledge too a few fascist forerunners to the alt-right, intellectuals who lionized the Aryan past as an ideal to be emulated. Julius Evola (1898–1974) in the 1930s pined for an Aryan-Nordic-Roman spiritual race manifesting the strong character of a lost tradition (Cassina Wolff, Elisabetta. “Evola's Interpretation of Fascism and Moral Responsibility.” Patterns of Prejudice 50, no. 4–5 (2016): 478–494. (Routledge Taylor and Francis Group); René Guénon (1886–1951) looked to Indo-European tensions between Indic priestly and warrior castes, in the spirit of Dumézil, to explain dynamics continuing into modernity: see Alain de Benoist, “Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power,” trans. Jon Graham, Counter-Currents, November 15, 2012; and Savitri Devi (1905–1982) admired Hitler as an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu and hoped to help resurrect an ancient Aryan utopia. See BBC, “Savitri Devi: The Mystical Fascist Being Resurrected by the Alt-right,” BBC News, October 29, 2017.
88. Berry, Blood and Faith, 33.
89. Berry, Blood and Faith, 40.
90. See Revilo Oliver, “History & Biology,” American Opinion, December 1963.
91. George Michael, “The Christian Identity Movement,” in Extremism in America, ed. George Michael (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014), 192.
92. Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 104–109.
93. Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham, UK: Duke University Press, 2003).
94. Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right, 51.
95. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 4th ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017), 19–23.
96. Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
97. Kaplan, “America’s Apocalyptic Literature of the Radical Right,” 503–522; and Kaplan, Apocalypse, Revolution, and Terrorism.
98. Kaplan, “America’s Apocalyptic Literature,” 512–515.
99. Philip S. Gorski, “Civil Religion Today,” ARDA Guiding Paper Series (State College: The Association of Religion Data Archives at The Pennsylvania State University, 2010).
100. Bruno Bosteels, “Metapolitics,” in Encyclopedia of Political Theory, ed. Mark Bevir (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE, 2010), 2
101. Massimiliano Capra Casadio, “The New Right and Metapolitics in France and Italy,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 1 (2014): 45–86; and Daniel Rueda, “Alain de Benoist, Ethnopluralism and the Cultural Turn in Racism,” Patterns of Prejudice (2021).
102. Rueda, “Alain de Benoist,” 2–6.
103. Rueda, “Alain de Benoist,” 22.
104. Karl Ekeman, “On Gramscianism of the Right,” Critique and Praxis 13, no. 13 (2018).
105. De Benoist in Arthur Versluis, “A Conversation with Alain de Benoist,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 2 (2014): 79–106, p. 94.
106. De Benoist in Versluis, “A Conversation with Alain de Benoist,” 95.
107. De Benoist in Versluis, “A Conversation with Alain de Benoist,” 88–90.
108. Jane Burbank, “The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War,” New York Times, March 22, 2022.
109. Rueda, “Alain de Benoist,” 19; and De Benoist in Versluis, “A Conversation with Alain de Benoist,” 84–85.
110. Rueda, “Alain de Benoist,” 19–20.
111. Rueda, “Alain de Benoist,” 22.
112. Versluis, “A Conversation with Alain de Benoist,” 90; and Richard Marcy and Valerie D’Erman, “The European ‘New Right’ as Radical Social Innovation,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 13, no. 2 (2019): 65–90.
113. Surmising this animus from “Ten Things I Like about White Guys,” in which McInnes pointed out, “We brought roads and infrastructure to India and they are still using them as toilets. Our criminals built nice roads in Australia but aboriginals keep using them as a bed. The next time someone bitches about colonization, the correct response is ‘You’re welcome.’” Gavin McInnes, “Ten Things I Like About White Guys,” Taki’s Magazine, March 2, 2017.
114. Marcy and d’Erman, “The European ‘New Right’,” 66.
115. Kimberly Winston, “The History behind the Christian Flags Spotted at the Pro-Trump U.S. Capitol ‘Coup’,” Religion Unplugged, January 6, 2021. Interview with Senator Patty Murray on PBS NewsHour, February 12, 2021.
116. Gardell, “White Racist Religions in the US,” 391.
117. Gorski, “Civil Religion Today.”
118. Kaplan, “America’s Apocalyptic Literature of the Radical Right,” 503–522.
119. Bosteels, “Metapolitics.”
