GOP Candidate Says Violent, Neo-Fascist Proud Boys Just 'A Group To Scare Left-Wing People'

Washington state GOP congressional candidate Joe Kent told supporters at a recent event that the Proud Boys — the all-male, far-right, neo-fascist organization whose leaders were convicted for seditious conspiracy after trying to violently overthrow the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021 — are really just a bunch of hooligans who scare progressive Democrats.

During a Sept. 21 event marking the opening of a new Clark County GOP headquarters, an attendee asked Kent about ads being run by his opponent , Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, tying him to the Proud Boys. The attendee said she wasn’t familiar with the group, but asked how Kent countered the accusation.

Kent, a former special forces operator and foreign policy adviser in the Trump administration, scoffed at Gluesenkamp Perez for trying to make the Proud Boys “scary-sounding.”

“Look, the Proud Boys are the guys who went and fought antifa,” Kent said, using a nickname for the anti-fascist, left-wing movement that confronts neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.

“So, the left says they’re terror, I don’t know,” he continued. “It’s just, it’s a group to scare left-wing people. It’s like saying antifa to a bunch of Republicans. So really, it’s a scare tactic.”

In fact, the Proud Boys are nothing like antifa and have been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog organization that highlights that the Proud Boys are known for their “white nationalist memes” and “anti-Muslim and misogynist rhetoric.”

But the Proud Boys are perhaps best known for their central role in the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attempt to stop the constitutionally mandated transfer of presidential power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden after Trump lost the