BERKELEY, CALIF. — As white supremacists go, Joey Gibson makes for a lousy one. For starters, he’s half Japanese. “I don’t feel like I’m Caucasian at all,” he says. Not to be a stickler for the rules, but this kind of talk could get you sent to Master Race remedial school.
And it gets worse. The founder of Patriot Prayer — a Vancouver, Wash.-based operation that sponsors rallies and marches promoting freedom and First Amendment rights along with all-purpose unity — also spews hippie-dippie rhetoric like “moderates have to come together” and “love and peace [are] the only way to heal this country.”
For his late August “Liberty Weekend” in the Bay Area, which was to include a free-speech rally in San Francisco followed by a “No to Marxism” rally in Berkeley (headed by a local “transsexual patriot”), Joey advertised that “no extremists will be allowed in. No Nazis, Communists, KKK, antifa, white supremacists . . . or white nationalists.” (So much for free speech.) Likewise, the advertised docket of speakers was to include “three blacks, two Hispanics, one Asian, one Samoan, one Muslim, two women and one white male.” Despite all this, you’d have thought from the avalanche of alarmist walk-up stories that Gibson and friends would be dancing in a “Springtime for Hitler” kick line.
In the wake of the recent white-supremacist hoedown in Charlottesville — a cesspool of racial hatred that resulted in the death of anti-racism activist Heather Heyer when a Nazi fanboy drove his Dodge Challenger into her and 19 others — opportunistic leftists/Democrats have been on the prowl to paint everyone to the right of Angela Davis as a dangerous racist lunatic.
They seem to have forgotten that the far right hardly has a monopoly on political violence. Just a couple of months before Charlottesville, a Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire on a baseball-field full of Republican congressmen, almost killing Rep. Steve Scalise. And this, of course, has been the year of antifa, the masked anarchists in black ISIS pajamas who advocate violence while battling “fascists,” defined loosely as anyone they don’t like (including run-of-the-mill Trump supporters).
Antifa have shown up at one right-leaning gathering after another this year to administer random beat-downs with everything from metal poles to bike locks to bear spray.
But when it came to Joey Gibson’s Liberty Weekend, enter Nancy Pelosi, who seems to be pining for girlhood activism days, as she’s billed this “Resistance Summer.” Gibson secured a permit for his free-speech rally to be held at Crissy Field, a former Army airfield next to the Golden Gate Bridge. But Pelosi loudly suggested the permit be pulled, saying the National Park Service should reflect on its “capacity to protect the public during such a toxic” event, which she termed a “white-supremacist rally.” The fact that over two-thirds of the event’s scheduled speakers were minorities, that race wasn’t being discussed and that the event was billed as a “day of freedom, spirituality, unity, peace and patriotism” didn’t seem to cut much ice with her.
Properly whipped into an anti-racism frenzy, the Bay Area did what the Bay Area loves doing most. They planned counterprotests! Lots of them. The events list ran to multiple pages.
Joey, worried that his rallies would come to resemble Altamont, a hellscape of dark and eruptive violence, canceled Liberty Weekend. I heard the news on TV during my flight. But when I landed, he told me there was no need to board a return flight home. He was still going to pop up around town, and “there will be craziness — they will still come after me.” He wasn’t kidding.
I meet up with Joey and his ever-present sidekick, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, in front of their budget hotel on San Francisco’s Lombard Street. Tiny, you might have guessed, is named ironically. He’s a 6′-foot-6″, 345-pound Samoan. His favorite food, he says, “is food.” Grabbing a bear paw’s worth of his own flesh, he says, “I ain’t fat, I’m stab-resistant.”
We pack into a rental Toyota. Joey always buys the full-insurance package, since antifa has done everything from slash his tires to douse his car in degreaser to strip the paint.
He has been punched, pepper-sprayed, hit in the head with Silly String cans and choked. (“He looked like a dolphin,” Tiny mocks, making limp flipper motions with his hands.)
All of this sounds like the Crips versus the Bloods for white people (or for Japanese and Samoans, as the case may be). Joey is fully aware of the ridiculousness. Never particularly political — he detests labels, but allows that he’s a moderate libertarian with a strong taste for freedom — Joey came to activism through anger, as most people do these days.
A Washington state house-flipper, Joey counted himself a vague Trump supporter. Like many people, he enjoyed watching someone upset the establishment. But he was radicalized after watching online the aftermath of the June 2, 2016, Trump rally in San Jose, where departing rally-goers were hunted down, egged and beaten in the street by vicious mobs.
For those who thought Trump rallies got violent — and they occasionally did, with hecklers getting decked and candidate Trump sometimes rooting on the deckers — there are hours of online footage of Trump supporters catching sustained abuse from “liberals,” assuming that term any longer applies.
Joey believed that a person should be able to attend the political rally of his choice in America, or to wear a MAGA hat in a place like Portland, Ore., without worrying about getting hit in the face.
So he started Patriot Prayer in 2016 — it has no employees, and he takes no money from it. He began throwing rallies and marches in liberal cities on the West Coast.
In the early days, his rallies had overtly pro-Trump themes. These days, mentions of Trump have mostly been scrubbed from his own rhetoric, as he knows even invoking the name can be alienating. Instead, his emphasis is on freedom and unity. When I ask him to distill his message, he says, “Unity, peace, love, truth — these simple things,” sounding not at all like your average Trumpkin. “People get mad when I say that, because they say that’s not good enough. They want more specifics, like ‘What’s your view on abortion?’ They want all these political messages.”
But politics, as the last several years have evidenced, are by definition divisive. They have both amped up and divided us as a people. “We have to focus on the division first,” Joey says. “The division is allowing extremists to be involved.”
Joey admits he’s not some perfectly pure-of-heart missionary, that he’s also a bit of a provocateur. Though how provocative should it be, he wonders, to attend your own free-speech rallies in liberal enclaves in a free country without wishing to be physically attacked? When Joey draws antifa out to show themselves, it’s not really conservatives he’s trying to reach. Conservatives already loathe antifa, he says. Rather, Joey’s interested in appealing to good, honest middle-of-the-road liberals. He likes them and believes there are plenty of them still out there. They’re just not terribly vocal at the moment when it comes to suppressing their own extremists.
“I don’t care who you vote for,” Joey says, as long as you’re pro-freedom.
In Berkeley, a small band of Patriots decide to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, where the “No to Marxism” rally was to be held. It has now been appropriated by thousands of impromptu protesters. The Patriots will make a stand for free speech, without actually expecting to be able to talk.
From the jump, it’s a goat rodeo. On the walk up to the square, Joey’s several paces ahead, seemingly in another zone, not even noticing the protester in the “Nasty Woman” shirt who starts filming him, as though she’s doing surveillance.
From the moment we hit the square, the “Nazi” catcalls start. Whatever’s happening on the stage seems to cease to exist, and the energy around us turns very dark, very fast. Joey and Tiny start walking with greater purpose, on the balls of their feet, almost like fighters entering a ring or Christians entering the Coliseum, except instead of facing one lion, they’re facing thousands. As the chants rain down (“Nazis are here! . . . F–k you! . . . F–king fascists!”), we near the stage. Our progress is halted when we run up into a small clearing snug up against a barrier.
And behind that barrier, a hundred or so masked-up antifa ninjas and affiliated protesters seem to simultaneously turn. Joey and Tiny raise their hands high in the air, and flash peace signs, a conciliatory gesture. But nobody here wants peace. Not with fascists on the scene.
As Joey nears the barrier, one of the ninjas swings and misses. Then the barrier topples, and they pour over, chanting, “Fascists go home!”
Joey catches a slap in the head, then someone gashes him with something in his ribs. He keeps his hands up, as though that will save him, while he keeps getting dragged backwards by his shirt, Tiny trying to pull him away. Not wishing to turn their backs on the crowd, a half-speed backwards chase ensues, as Joey and Tiny are blasted with shots of bear spray and pepper spray. They hurdle a barrier, crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Way while antifa throw bottles at them.
The mob stalks Joey and Tiny all the way to an Alameda County police line, which the two bull their way through. No arrests are made. Except for Joey and Tiny, who are cuffed. A Berkeley cop tells me they were arrested for their own safety (and weren’t charged).
I wheel around on some protesters, asking them if they think it’s right to beat people down in the street. “Hell, yeah,” says one. I ask them to cite anything Joey has said that offends them. A coward in a black mask says, “They’re f–king Nazis. There’s nothing they have to say to offend us.”
A squad car rolls up on the mob, but the black masks block it. The cop throws his car into slow reverse, inching backwards, as if to say, “Please don’t hurt me,” while an antifa member yells “F–k you, pig!”
Finally, I start hearing whistling smoke grenades fired by the otherwise useless police, dispersing the crowd. I watch antifa retreat in every direction, some jumping fences and cutting through yards.
Later, I pick up Joey at the hospital and ask him how he feels about what happened today. “I’m starting to love this town,” he deadpans. “It’s starting to be my playground.”
Then he gets serious. “We can’t just shut up, just be quiet, and let this evil continue. The darkness continues to get bigger and bigger in our country, and it will be gone. The country will burn, I’m telling you, if we don’t do things to stand up against it.”
His eyes well as he takes a long pause, looking out on the shimmering San Francisco Bay. “We can’t stand by, we’ve gotta stand up. And we’ve got to do it together, or it’s gonna be gone.”