Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

In Fox & Friends’ ongoing quest to smear anti-fascists protesters as a collection of violent extremists, a Monday morning segment of the show glossed over the history and activities of the group anti-fascists had turned out to protest against. Over the weekend in Seattle, WA, heavily armed members of far-right groups Patriot Prayer and the anti-government militia group Three Percenters protested, along with several men wearing the insignia of the violence-prone, men-only organization Proud Boys. Rally-goers were protesting a gun-control initiative that, if passed, would raise the age for buying semi-automatic rifles to 21.



As the show aired clips of counter-protestors shouting “Nazis go home,” Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade described the Three Percenters, Patriot Prayer, and Proud Boys as “pro-gun demonstrators.” “Where is the outrage from Democrats?” he asked, seemingly indignant at the idea that these far-right groups could be cast as extremists. The Three Percenters and the Proud Boys had strong presences at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which culminated in deadly violence.

The Three Percenters is named after the historically inaccurate claim that only 3 percent of American colonists fought against the British government during the American revolution. It is a loosely organized group that insists it is not a militia but aligns with the goals and practices of the American militia movement. Over the past few years, the group's members have developed a reputation for providing heavily armed security to white supremacist groups. The Three Percenters have also engaged in their own political activities in alignment with right-wing and extremist groups. A Three Percenters rally in 2015 protested refugee resettlement in Idaho, decrying “radical Islam”; some group members also showed up at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge standoff with the aim of serving as a “buffer” between the anti-government Bundy clan and law enforcement. In 2017, a man claiming to hold the Three Percenters ideology was arrested for a bomb plot explicitly meant to emulate the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. While a popular Facebook page for the Three Percenters features dozens of explicitly anti-immigrant memes, the group has also organized offline armed operations to go after immigrants near the U.S. border.

So when Kilmeade asks, smirking, if they are “Nazis or pro-gun demonstrators” -- there may be more to the question than what the sanitizing frame of Fox News allows.