MAGA Thanksgiving leftovers.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/us/ex-proud-boys-member/?iid=ob_lockedrail_topeditorial

Why do men join the Proud Boys? “Most of it is just to fight,” Schultz said. “They want to join a gang. So they can go fight antifa and hurt people that they don’t like, and feel justified in doing it.”

Schultz, 51, joined the Proud Boys in the fall of 2017 and left in May 2019. He says he quit, but the Proud Boys say he was “kicked out.” His exit should not be interpreted as a total repudiation of all the Proud Boys stand for, or a new enlightened state opposed to all political violence. Schultz still shows up at rallies, and he’s still motivated by antipathy toward antifa. He defends his past actions with the Proud Boys, including violent threats, as justified to fight antifa. Or he dismisses them as just “jokes.”

(Schultz said the word “joke” about three dozen times in the couple hours CNN interviewed him.) It’s harder for someone to be held accountable for what he believes if it’s not clear what, exactly, he believes. And it allows him to try on a persona with the safety valve of being able to say later it was all fake.

In his old Proud Boys videos, he’s menacing. He now says he was just emulating the promo videos of professional wrestlers.

… it just looked like something from ‘Braveheart.'”
They were the Proud Boys. The “first degree” of membership in the Proud Boys is to declare you are one, which Schultz later did.
The second degree is to be punched while reciting the names of five breakfast cereals, which he did, too. “The five breakfast cereals is a joke that’s supposed to emulate getting beat into a gang. You know, it is just a spoof, a parody, but it got taken too far.”

Schultz is Jewish and says he voted for Obama twice before voting for Trump twice. He liked the Proud Boys’ joking and the drinking. But he began to notice some patterns among those who joined. “They join the group now because it gives them a sense of belonging. They have this inner-person side that they want to be, but they’re afraid to be.
“They’re men who’ve never had wingmen before,”

Ahead of what he called a “pro-Jesus march” in December 2018, Schultz posted a video warning antifa not to disrupt it. He says, in part:
“At the last rally I nearly ran over you with a car and I didn’t feel bad about it one bit. You’re lucky I didn’t kill you because I wouldn’t feel any remorse. …
“You shoot me with feces — I can’t prove — you can’t prove you didn’t put something in it like HIV. …
“I am going to shoot you. And here’s where the best part of the odds is, I still have a chance to fight for my freedom in court. You don’t have a chance to fight for your freedom cause you’re f**king dead. See I’m going to shoot you in the chest or your head. Center mass. …
“It might be in your best interest not to show up with feces infested with HIV, whatever it is, and live, live so you can see what we’re planning in 2019. Cause if you shoot us with feces there’s a good chance you might not survive to see 2019.”
When CNN said these looked like violent threats, Schultz defended them. “They are violent threats and it’s for good reason, too,” he said. “Antifa was saying they were going to come over and start throwing urine and feces on us. And so that was my way of saying, ‘OK, if you do that, that’s a threat.’ I don’t know if it was AIDS-tainted. And I made that threat so they wouldn’t come over. And they didn’t come over. So, it worked.”

Schultz, in A.’s view, has “this ‘I’m an operator’ mindset that older right-wing men have. They get really into the idea (that) this is like their war — and thinking through and trying to get into the mind of the opposition.” It’s “very Rambo-y, but it also descends into a misogynistic and creeper vibe by listing all the terrible things they’re going to do to you.

Included in Rose City Antifa’s doxx of Schultz is one of his old Facebook posts, which says,
“Feminism only works on and when there are guys willing to F**K you.” Schultz said this, too, was just a joke, just trolling…they see all these people looking like ISIS.”

The Proud Boys chairman says Schultz was “kicked out,” namely because he would “make a complete ass of himself” in videos on social media. “Scorned ex-girlfriends are the worst. As soon as you break up with them, they want to lie to the world and say how small your equipment is,” Tarrio told CNN, in reference to Schultz. “Currently there is no criminal activity happening in the Proud Boys.”