We should be able to trust media and institutions in a way we no longer can.

It is getting so hard to find factual news.  The errors have always been with us but the blithe oblivion to the apparent contradictions in what is being reported speaks to either an absence of editors or to a monomaniacal ideological conviction.  Or both.  

In this instance, I came across an article in the Guardian (Britain) from several months ago.  I hear occasional reference to the Proud Boys in the New York Times and NPR.  They are supposed to be a white supremacist group defending Western Civilization if I am to believe the NYT, NPR and Wikipedia.  

The Proud Boys is a far-right, neo-fascist, and exclusively male organization that promotes and engages in political violence in the United States.

My skepticism is fueled by the fact that such ideological centers as NYT and NPR (and many editors on Wikipedia) are desperate for there to be mass groups of white supremacist, far-right, neo-fascists in the US and yet they are never able to share pictures of such rare creatures nor names.  Antifa?  Police blotters and arrest pictures are plentiful with both their pictures and their charges.  White supremacist groups and Proud Boys, Nazis, etc.?  Not so much.

In the Capitol Hill riot, according to most news accounts, the Proud Boys were supposed to be central to the planning and execution of the riot.  By the last account that I saw a week ago, seven months after the events, only 6 individuals identified as members of the Proud Boys have been arrested.  The FBI has not been backwards in trying to track down every rioter they can and all they have to show is 6 putative white supremacists.

In the Guardian piece, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant by Aram Roston, I discover that the leader of Proud Boys is supposed to be Enrique Tarrio, an Afro-Cuban, what the New York Times would call a black Hispanic.  Maybe it is true that there is an Afro-Cuban leading the supposedly white supremacist Proud Boys but it seems unlikely.  

Given its leader's ethnic origins, either Proud Boys is not a white-supremacist group or it is an astonishingly tolerant white-supremacist group.  Perhaps they are far-right, neo-fascists as well but that issue with a black Hispanic being claimed as the leader of a white-supremacist group calls all other claims into question.

The Guardian is reporting:

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.

[snip]

Law enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes”. 

Though the article is not clear, it seems as if Tarrio's undercover status predates his election as National Chairman of Proud Boys in 2018 and that his informant status with the FBI was from 2012-2014.  

This FBI linkage is intriguing owing to the many claims of FBI undercover involvement in the riot at Capitol Hill.  Which would seem unlikely save for 1) some apparent documentation of an FBI presence there, 2) this evidence to a past relationship between Tarrio and the FBI, and 3) the reporting now emerging that the FBI-reported kidnapping case targeting Michigan's Governor Whitmer seems to have involved primarily FBI agents and informants.  The last count I saw indicated 14 involved in the plot, 8 of whom were FBI agents or informants.  The allegations emerging are that this was an entrapment effort gone wrong with the FBI providing most the planning and leadership of the plot in order to be able to bring charges against half a dozen ne'er-do-wells.  Perhaps, or perhaps that is just a defense attorney's response but court records seem to be lending themselves to the lead role of the FBI.

I scan through a search of Proud Boy images in the news and while the group does seem predominantly white, there are just too many individuals to be seen who are either Hispanic or African-American for this likely to be a white supremacist group.

The Guardian is a notoriously hard left-wing and hyperventilated new source.  Its credibility in this instance is further undermined by the correction they made to the article.

This article was amended on 27 January 2021 to remove a description of the antifa movement as “often violent”. Violence has been rare.

This is a Baghdad Bob level of willful blindness.  We all watched news footage of stores looted and aflame, individuals attacked and killed, all across the nation.  Peaceful protests did occur but so did these violent riots which we all watched on the television news back in early 2020.  More than two dozen dead and many dozens of injured (both police and civilians).  

This effort to mislead is common in the rest of the media.  Just yesterday, I heard NPR referencing the five people killed in the Capitol Hill riot (which was described as an insurrection; an insurrection without weapons apparently according to the charge sheets so far).  Except there was only one violent death on that day and that was of a female retired Air Force officer shot by the Capitol Hill Police.  There was a heart attack death, a drug overdose death, a suicide, and a stroke death the day after the riots but none of these were deaths directly caused by the riot.  NPR wants there to have been a white supremacy-led attack, a violent  insurrection, on Capitol Hill with multiple deaths caused by the far-right rioters, but that is not apparently what happened based on the evidence that has emerged in charge sheets, FOIA videos and other testimony.

So what are we to make of this welter of self-contradicting evidence?  

I am guessing that the Proud Boys do exist (though they appear to be small and in disarray).  How many of them are there?  I have no idea and apparently nor does anyone else.  I have seen claims of a few hundred up to a few thousand but those are not claims with any evidence or authority.  They appear to be guesses.  I am guessing that there are a few chapters with a few dozen members in those chapters, with probably fewer than 200 overall.  And it appears that while the left and the media characterize them as white-supremacists, it seems as if the only evidence is of them being advocates of traditional values and patriotism (however defined).  

Many in right-leaning circles laugh at the left and observe that the demand for racism in America far exceeds the evidentiary supply.  The Guardian lends credence to this argument.  

There are no doubt those discontented with ideological opponents and no doubt there are white supremacist and racist individuals (of all stripes) but that there is any sort of coherent ideology or sustained organization?  It doesn't seems like there is much evidence of that except in the fevered imagination of journalists.  Or they simply are unwilling to share the evidence, which seems unlikely.  

But the biggest issue is not whether there is racism or not.  The point I am trying to make is that it takes a lot of work to sort the factual wheat from the reporting chaff.  It should not be that hard.  We should be able to trust media and institutions in a way we no longer can.