You’ve heard of the Proud Boys, I’m sure. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group, certainly because of their role in Unite the Right back in 2017 and the Capitol Insurrection in 2021. They’re almost mythical, discussed in harrowed, hushed tones. Esquire contributor Jen Golbeck convinced one chapter to let her spend some time with them at their clubhouse, shooting guns and talking politics. Her resulting story, linked below, attempts to answer: Who are these men, really? The answer, as you’d expect, is complicated.
– Chris Hatler, deputy editor
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Who are they really? A dangerous gang of white supremacists? A men’s club that likes to troll the libs? I went to their clubhouse in the North Carolina backwoods to find out.
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On Friday the thirteenth, a cool night in March, Johnny Ringo meets me at my hotel in downtown Wilmington. He walks me to an alleyway and rings a doorbell next to an unmarked entrance. We’re let into a speakeasy. The room is brick walled and shadowy, the air thick with the smell of whiskey and lemon peels. I’m impressed. It’s not the dive bar stocked with PBRs that I expected. This is the kind of place I would show off to my friends if I lived here.
He drinks Vieux Carrés, a boozy New Orleans concoction. I drink Old Cubans, a fancy twist on a mojito. We sit by ourselves in a back patio area and get to talking about violent hobbies, partly because they are on the agenda for my visit, partly because that’s how our conversations seem to lead if I let them.
“Men need a violent hobby,” Johnny Ringo says. “A man should be peaceful, but peaceful doesn’t imply harmless. You still have the capacity for violence, and an outlet for that is healthy.”
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I grew up orphaned when I was a teenager. I take nothing for granted. Failure’s right around the corner.
I found myself at the Monterey Pop Festival about a year after I took the job, and I saw Janis Joplin. I was aware this was a revolution, and this was going to be the risk that I took to see if I could trust my ears.
Billie Holiday didn’t write and Ella Fitzgerald didn’t write. Sinatra didn’t write. Your career can go right down if you have a manager who says you’ll make more money if you write your own songs. If you don’t have a hit, you’ll make no money.
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In a world where short-form video rockets across the world in seconds, journalism is shifting rapidly away from written reporting to “storytelling” on podcasts, and, chrissakes, robots are doing most of the writing, it can be easy to forget that for most of this nation’s history—all of it, we’d argue—what could really command the American culture’s attention was a thing called a book. The original long-form. Tens of thousands of words ejected from an artist’s mind after a lengthy, often painful process of research, meditation, and incessant scribbling.
How would we understand ourselves without Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book (whence come “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and essentially our entire pre-roundball understanding of Knickerbockers), Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America? We wouldn’t. The answer is we wouldn’t.
So for this 250th year of our great nation, Esquire has compiled a list of our Most American Books.
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