Are Proud Boys growing in Northern California? What to know as one runs for school board
Last December, eight months before he filed papers to run for a seat on board of San Juan Unified School District, Jeffrey Erik Perrine showed up at a school board meeting in Lincoln with a message for board members.
“I’m going to run a boatload of people against you guys,” said Perrine, a member of the right-wing Proud Boys group. “There ain’t going to be no easy-peasy election next time, you understand?
“There’s going to be at least two or three for each position.”
Today, Perrine won’t say whether there other members of the Proud Boys are seeking school board seats in the region, but he is very clear that he would support those campaigns.
“I would assume that there are, but I’m not going to blow the whistle on anybody,” Perrine said in a telephone interview Monday, two days after he and another San Juan school board candidate had a tense exchange at a voter event at Miller Park. “I would like to think that there’s one in every community.
“I can’t verify it, but my dream would be that every school board in America would have one on it.”
Whether that goal is ever realized remains to be seen, but there is ample evidence that members of the Proud Boys, an organization that Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a “designated hate group,” are reaching into school districts nationwide.
Fueled by anger over COVID-19 mask and vaccine policies, as well as concerns over critical race theory and other topics, Proud Boys members protested at school board meetings and other events across California and the nation.
Last October, a school board in North Carolina adopted a resolution opposing “white nationalism and white supremacy” after Proud Boys reportedly began attending its meetings.
In Sarasota, Florida, controversy erupted in June after a Proud Boys activist offered to host a campaign event for a school board candidate.
And news reports nationwide over the past year focused on how the Proud Boys, one of the groups named by the District of Columbia as instrumental in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, branched out to increase their presence at meetings of school boards and city councils.
“Extremists running for office who have been associated with the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, QAnon, there’s quite a lengthy list of candidates nationwide,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
“When you’re getting Proud Boys running for office, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It used to be the Eagle Scout would be the one who runs for office, and now they’re the ones getting run out of office.”
The degree to which that is happening in the Sacramento region isn’t clear. In past years, protests at the state Capitol that included people wearing the group’s distinctive black and yellow clothing frequently included only a dozen or so.
Perrine, who emphasized that he does not belong to a Sacramento chapter of the group and speaks only for himself and his beliefs, said he does not know how many members of the group may be in the area.
Proud Boys around Northern California
But Proud Boys and other far-right groups show up from time to time across the region.
Last August in Modesto, a Proud Boys rally labeled as a “Straight Pride” event devolved into violence between them and counter-protesters, and two people were arrested, including Perrine.
Perrine says he was arrested for disturbing the peace, not violence, and that the case is pending.
A similar event is planned for this Saturday, but Perrine says he will not be attending.
Two months ago, authorities say Proud Boys stormed an Alameda County library to disrupt a “Drag Queen Story Hour” event, and weeks later a Woodland bar canceled a “Drag Happy Hour” event after threats to disrupt the evening were allegedly made by Proud Boys members.
Controversy erupted in Placerville in December 2020 when Proud Boys crashed a holiday toy drive, and an El Dorado County Veterans Affairs Commission member who dressed as Santa and posed for photos with Proud Boys resigned his post in June.
In February, a Black Zebra media crew that went to report on a group of Proud Boys hanging banners on a Highway 50 pedestrian bridge posted video of men attacking and beating them as they recorded the encounter.
And Sacramento attorney Mark Reichel said he has faced numerous threats from Proud Boys since he wrote a Facebook post in 2020 saying a woman who’d been assaulted by members of the group should sue them.
Reichel noted that civil suits in the past have led to the dismantlement of hate groups, including the Aryan Nations group in Idaho that was driven into bankruptcy after a $6.3 million jury verdict.
“When I became vocal in the summer of 2020, I received multiple death threats over the telephone, constant harassment as well as emails and fliers posted everywhere,” Reichel said. “I’m not the only one to receive that harassment.
“I had to leave town on more than one occasion.”
New sheriff concerned about domestic terrorism
Elk Grove Assemblyman Jim Cooper, a Democrat who won his race in June to become Sacramento County’s next sheriff, said the threat of domestic violence from such groups is a focus of his incoming administration.
“It’s of great concern to me,” Cooper said. “The big issue now is domestic terrorism, and we’ve seen some of the incidents they’ve been involved in.
Perrine says the Proud Boys have been unfairly maligned, that it is an anti-racist, Christian organization that was led by a Black man.
His first taste of politics came in March 2020, when he was elected to the Sacramento County Republican Party’s Central Committee.
But he was expelled from the post in February 2021 before being sworn in after The Sacramento Bee reported on his background as a Proud Boy, which included a 2018 incident in Portland, Oregon, when he was recorded on video using a megaphone to suggest that “all the illegals trying to jump over our border, we should be smashing their heads into the concrete.”
Perrine, who subsequently lost a race for the state Assembly, now says his comments in Lincoln in December were not a sign that he was planning to encourage fellow Proud Boys to run for school board seats.
“I’m not running Proud Boys,” he said. “I didn’t mean I was going to run Proud Boys against them in Lincoln.
“My goal was to get people from my perspective on the board. We need common sense Americans, not some progressive extremist agenda.”
Levin, the expert on extremist groups, says the Perrine candidacy and others are a reflection of efforts to make once unpalatable philosophies more acceptable to some voters through disinformation and social media.
“We’re seeing it affecting local offices, sleepy administrative-type offices from schools to elections,” Levin said. “Part of what’s happening is extremism is being mainstreamed.
“The best way for extremists to organize is around hot button topics as opposed to what their actual associations are.”
This story was originally published August 23, 2022 at 9:58 AM with the headline "Are Proud Boys growing in Northern California? What to know as one runs for school board."