Ohio Proud Boy Arrested for Shouting Racial Slurs, Assaulting Black Woman

     The Proud Boys give the world enough of a reason to hate them. They hate women, they hate Muslims, they hate immigrants, they hate the LGBT2SQIA+, etc. However, they vehemently deny being racist. They even have their token minority in the form of leader Enrique Tarrio, who was one of dozens of Proud Boys arrested on conspiracy charges related to the violent January 6th insurrection; five Proud Boys have pleaded guilty in the past year (four of them in a span of 72 hours) while many more await trial. They can deny being white supremacists, but that's 90 percent of the element they attract. An anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim militant domestic extremist group isn't going to make sure its members draw the line at skin color.

     We got ample evidence of that on February 27th, 2022, when Andrew Walls, the vice president of the Akron-Canton Proud Boys, was charged with three crimes related to harassing patrons at a bar. I like when people try to pull the alcohol defense. I've worked in the bar industry for years. My grandfather was a painter, so I can paint a wall like nobody's business; my grandmother owns a bar, and I can tell you quite a bit about the positives and the negatives of alcohol. Alcohol does not change who you are; it merely removes the social filters, or at the very least severely inhibits them. You're not going to drink and then suddenly start shouting the n-word because of the alcohol. That's exactly who you are on the inside; you've just had enough sense to realize that good people frown upon that sort of thinking and keep the hate to yourself.

     It didn't stop at harassment. The real kicker came when Walls punched a man in the face. The black female who tried to stand between the two was subsequently punched in the face, with Walls calling her the n-word on video. He is currently charged with three misdemeanors, which is completely inappropriate for an obvious hate crime. When you punch somebody and call them a racial slur, you have made it about their race. The verdict in the Gregory and Travis McMichael and William R. Bryan hate crimes trial made it perfectly clear that even racist tendencies not put on full display at the time of the incident are enough to prove racial bias.

     Two very distinct groups of people have come to Walls' defense. One is, obviously, the Proud Boys, who claimed that the man Walls punched had called him a gay slur (probably THAT one) and that what he did was an appropriate response. So, according to the Proud Boys, even assuming what the white supremacist, anti-government militants say is true, punching a woman in the face and calling her a racial slur is appropriate because a man she had zero connection to other than trying to prevent from being assaulted called him a gay slur. Of course, according to the Proud Boys, being gay is on par with being a woman as the worst thing you can be.

      According to the second group coming to Walls' defense, The Wides Legal Group of Akron, Walls is indeed a member of the Proud Boys, but that couldn't possibly have anything to do with what happened. According to Andrew Wides, Walls is the victim of this case, the victim of the media sensationalizing his story. Walls has no hate in his heart, Mr. Wides declares, even if every single shred of video evidence points in that direction. Either Mr. Wides is a racist who sympathizes with terrorists or he is a money-grubbing attorney who doesn't care about justice or the truth as long as he gets his $1.50. Perhaps it is a bit of both.

     The FBI is saying they are investigating the case, but I doubt much will come of it. The sad fact of the matter is that, even when the DOJ and FBI make hate crimes a top priority as the Biden administration has done, they simply cannot prosecute all of the tens of thousands of hate crimes that are reported alone in the United States every year (not even counting those that often go unreported). I hope that, given the agency's unprecedented focus on domestic extremism, this case will be different. Rather than letting him plead guilty to a misdemeanor or two and get some probation and community service, the FBI has a chance to kill two birds with one stone and get a hate criminal and a high-ranking leader of a domestic terrorist group off the streets and into a federal prison.