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Proud Boys Dealt Another Blow As Feds Crack Down

Talking about being dealt a blow? Canada declared this ter­ror­ist group, well “A TERRORIST GROUP’ , some­thing the United States refus­es to do.

The far-right Proud Boys have been thrown into a tumult in the after­math of the Jan. 6 riot, with the group’s lead­ers fac­ing crim­i­nal charges, their chair­man exposed as an infor­mant, and law enforce­ment inves­ti­gat­ing what role Proud Boys had in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Now, amid a brew­ing trade­mark dis­pute with their for­mer lawyer, they might even lose the right to use their name.On Monday, for­mer Proud Boys lawyer Jason Lee Van Dyke, who holds the “Proud Boys” trade­mark, released a let­ter revok­ing Proud Boys chair­man Enrique Tarrio’s right to use the name. Van Dyke’s rea­sons for revok­ing the trade­mark rights includ­ed what he sees as the Proud Boys’ asso­ci­a­tion with Nazi groups, as well as Proud Boys burn­ing a church’s Black Lives Matter ban­ner in a December march in Washington, D.C.

Van Dyke doesn’t fit the pro­file of a typ­i­cal Proud Boys oppo­nent. Van Dyke has an elab­o­rate­ly check­ered legal his­to­ry him­self, includ­ing a tem­po­rary sus­pen­sion from prac­tic­ing law after threat­en­ing to kill one of his legal foes. Police claim Van Dyke once used Proud Boys to sur­veil his legal oppo­nent, and was alleged­ly record­ed by an infor­mant lay­ing out plans for a vio­lent ter­ror cam­paign against the man.

Van Dyke’s com­plaints that the Proud Boys are too close to white-suprema­cist groups is espe­cial­ly bizarre, giv­en his own his­to­ry. As recent­ly as 2019, Van Dyke was report­ed­ly caught on tape attempt­ing to join The Base, a neo-Nazi ter­ror­ist group, before being reject­ed by its mem­bers as a “huge lia­bil­i­ty.” In the mem­ber­ship inter­view, a per­son iden­ti­fied by Vice News as Van Dyke can be heard prais­ing neo-Nazi writ­ers and dis­cussing a crack­down on Jewish immigration.

“There’re plen­ty of peo­ple in the Proud Boys who don’t believe that Jews have a place in this coun­try and they want to put a stop to it,” Van Dyke report­ed­ly said in the recording.

Despite that, Van Dyke is now posi­tion­ing him­self as the defend­er of the Proud Boys name, accus­ing Tarrio of using the trade­mark to sell sub­stan­dard Proud Boys mer­chan­dise and let­ting Proud Boys cre­ate fas­cist-style graph­ics using the trademark.

“Your license to uti­lize the ‘Proud Boys’ trade­mark for any pur­pos­es is ter­mi­nat­ed, effec­tive imme­di­ate­ly,” Van Dyke wrote in the let­ter to Tarrio.
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