the proud boys aren't so proud now
their defense for the insurrection: it was locker room talk.
I listened to the Proud Boys testimony for the January 6th trial so that you don’t have to and wow, they did not miss.
If you haven’t been following along, the misogynistic white supremacist far-right group is being accused of engaging in a seditious conspiracy to use violence to thwart the certification of the 2020 election results. Their very complex legal defense can be summed up to a t-shirt that reads “I’m with stupid” that’s pointing to the former president. "It was Donald Trump's words, it was his motivations, it was his anger," the lawyer for the ex-leader of the group Enrique Tarrio told the jury as videos of members of the hate group show them breaking windows, punching a Black woman and pepper-spraying police officers. “We were defending ourselves,” one of the members had the gall to claim after court documents show that he sent the punching video to him mom with the words “Enjoy!”
Blaming someone else for your own terrorist attack is bold! But the Proud Boys did not stop there. When confronted with their own words, which came in the form of very peaceful Telegram chats such as “Let the bodies hit the floor,” or “When do we start stacking bodies on the white house lawn?” to which one of them replied “Jan 7,” they claimed this was just “locker room talk.” If that seems familiar, it’s because it was the same justification used by their ex-lord savior Donald Trump when he was caught bragging about abusing women in the 2016 Access Hollywood tape.
Relying on a trivial “locker room talk” defense when being accused of a crime of the magnitude of sedition, is both stupefying, and revealing of the criminally low expectations we have for men and boys in America. There is just no equivalent excuse for women and girls. We don’t justify explicit violent or abusive actions from women, simply because there were no men around when they said it. Boys are never expected to serve as guardrails for girls, in the way that women are expected to become the equivalent of a human fence for men’s distasteful impulses and proclivities. Isn’t it curious that girls are seen as in need of protection, when they’re the ones burdened with the incalculable task of protecting men from themselves?