Making Monsters: Right Wing Creation of the Liberal Enemy

This is my undergrad political science thesis, which centered around a 1.5 years ethnography of far-right group Patriot Prayer between 2017 and 2019. The thesis won the Class of ’21 Award. The award, which goes to two theses per graduating class, recognizes “creative work of notable character, involving an unusual degree of initiative and spontaneity.”

The thesis begins with about 100 pages of history of the far right in America generally and the Pacific Northwest specifically. It then goes into my participant-observation study, in which I spent a year and a half going to Patriot Prayer rallies and events. I was able to conduct what I think are very interesting interviews with nine far-right rally participants. Through this lense, I examine the way Patriot Prayer functioned as a propaganda factory for creating, curating, and spreading far-right videos taken at protests.

The final chapter explores how a community might best combat these practices and push back against far-right propaganda.

If you’d like to hear more about the process of writing this thesis, I talk about it a bit in “How I Got Here”

If you’d like to read 200-plus pages of academic writing on Patriot Prayer, you can do that here. The thesis has been available on this website since the website’s creation in early 2020, and will continue to be available here for free for as long as the website exists.

Read the Thesis

Abstract

This thesis explores Patriot Prayer, a far-right organization that holds rallies primarily in Oregon and Washington. It seeks to answer three central questions. Where does Patriot Prayer fall within the far-right milieu? How are attendees and participants recruited? And what, if anything, do Patriot Prayer rallies accomplish?

Patriot Prayer is an offshoot of the Pacific Northwest Patriot movement, which has evolved over the last several decades from ideologies such as Posse Comitatus, Christian Dominionists, and American white nationalism. In its current form, it is racialist but not racist. Patriot Prayer is closely allied with The Proud Boys, an alt-lite fraternal organization, and uses troll tactics developed by the alt-right.

The group recruits members and fosters group solidarity through what I call the fabling process. Using this fabling process, Patriot Prayer both sanctifies its actions as righteous and demonizes counterprotesters as unreasonable and malicious. The process generates protest violence, which in turn creates group solidarity and generates video fables. Potential rally attendees watch these videos, decide they must act against the fabled enemy, and begin to attend Patriot Prayer events. Hierarchies within the Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys serve to encourage behavior that creates more and better fables. The fabling process breaks down when the enemy fails to show up or when something disrupts either the sanctification or demonization process