"These days, I just sit at home and sleep," he said. "That's about it. [Being a part of the Proud Boys,] it gets me out more. I got to see the White House. I've never seen it before."
Meyer said he was bullied and excluded at school.
"I was tiny," he said. "I barely broke a hundred in high school." When he began dating a girl in high school, they agreed to keep their relationship secret so she wouldn't be teased. He once tried to give her a bracelet in front of her friends at school.
"She had this horrified look on her face," Meyer recalled. "So I said, 'Hey, I forgot to give this back to you, I'm so sorry.' I didn't want to embarrass her."
"Everyone will just say, 'I just want to f*cking kill someone.' It's not out of hate or rage. It's just what was drilled into them for so long, for so many years."
Stefan Meyer, Proud Boy
Meyer joined the Marines after high school.
"I would have liked to go when Afghanistan was still going on," he said. "There were a lot of men out there that are a lot better than I am. It upsets me a lot of people died that I didn't get to take that bullet for.
"Since day one," he said of Marine Corps boot camp, "You're just screaming, 'Kill!' There's nothing behind it. There's no 'Kill this.' There's no 'Kill that.' It's just, 'Kill.' Which is why we're such an effective fighting force. That's our job. To go in and win battles and win wars. At least it used to be. That's how wars were won. Now [the battle] happens on the news. I'm not sure which is worse."
Meyer described how he and other militia members, also veterans, casually spoke of killing people when they gathered at events such as the Freedom of Speech rally in Washington, D.C., in June 2017.
"Everyone will just say, 'I just want to f*cking kill someone,'" Meyer said.
"It's not out of hate or rage," he went on. "It's just what was drilled into them for so long, for so many years."
The Democratic Party blamed its 2016 election defeat on Russian interference in the election, the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta, and FBI director James Comey's decision, shortly before the vote, to send a letter to Congress related to Hillary Clinton's private email server. It refused to acknowledge the root came of its defeat, the abandonment of workers, deindustrialization, the wars in the Middle East, and vast social inequality. The party's rhetoric about watching out for the working and middle class worked for three decades. But it has lost credibility among those it had betrayed. The idea that tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of Clinton supporters read the Podesta emails and switched their votes to Trump, or were swayed by the Comey announcement to abandon Clinton, is absurd. The failure to confront reality is ominous, not only for the Democratic Party, but American democracy.
The malaise that infects Americans is global. Hundreds of millions of people have been severed by modernity from traditions, beliefs, and rituals, as well as communal structures, which kept them rooted. They have been callously cast aside by global capitalism as superfluous. This has engendered an atavistic rage against the technocratic world that condemns them. This rage is expressed in many forms Nativism, neofascism, jihadism, the Christian right, alt-right militias, and the anarchic violence of antifa. The resentment springs from the same deep wells of despair. This despair exacerbates racism, bigotry, and xenophobia. It poisons civil discourse. It celebrates hypermasculinity, violence, and chauvinism. It promises the return to a mythical past.
Corporate elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global anarchy, define the clash as one between Western civilization and racist thugs and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme nationalists, anarchists, religious fundamentalists, and jihadists a baffling irrationality that can be quelled only with force. They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their duplicity, greed, use of indiscriminate industrial violence, and hypocrisy.
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