The news will probably come as a relief to the citizens of Portland—not to mention their beleaguered mayor—but Joey Gibson is bidding the city adieu, for now, as he pursues new heights in the far-right political career of his Patriot Prayer organization.
In a recent video posted on Facebook, Gibson laughingly mocked the furor that arose over reportage about text messages Portland Police officers exchanged with him around the series of violent rallies he has been organizing in the city for the past couple of years. “I’ve been so focused on other things,” Gibson boasted. “Portland is like the last thing on my mind right now. I am running around the state of Washington doing all kinds of rallies, doing indoor stuff, all this safe, positive rallies, right? Just great stuff. I love where Patriot Prayer’s going right now. Patriot Prayer is becoming more influential in terms of politics. And it’s becoming more influential in getting people to stand against certain laws, like [Initiative] 1639.”
However, the signs that Gibson’s street-brawling outfit is in disarray—manifested by the departure of his onetime lieutenant, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, along with the faction of Northwest-based Proud Boys who been aligned with Gibson’s rallies for the past year—continued apace.
Toese, in a video he posted to his own social media account, added to the cloud of violent rhetoric that hovers constantly around Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys, to whom he now vows allegiance, by announcing, in crude terms, his plan to inspire an anti-LGBTQ movement. “Tiny’s gonna start a new movement,” he said, slurring his words. “But I’m gonna start a new movement. It’s called the Anti-Faggot movement. OK? Anti-Butthurt movement. The Anti-Buttfucking movement. But the real Patriotic American movement. … Anybody on the left is watching, you all can suck it. Red, white and blue all the way. OK?”
In the meantime, another regular participant in Patriot Prayer events named Rob Cantrall (nickname: “Based Hobo”) posted a Twitter video telling Gibson he was being forced out of the group’s leadership, and that Cantrall would be “taking up the mantle” in his place.
If the scene appears to everyone to be devolving into a potentially violent circus, however, Gibson appears in the latest chapter of his career as a far-right political provocateur to be utterly oblivious to the sound of an organization crumbling. As his video proclaims, he’s currently in the midst of touring small rural counties around the state of Washington and urging local politicians to join the fight against the tyrannical urban Left, and especially the gun safety measure I-1639 that was approved by a 60-40 margin in the 2018 election.
Like most far-right “Patriot” zealots, Gibson vehemently loathes any form of gun regulation as an attack on the Second Amendment. But the message he has been bringing to local counties has gone beyond that. Gibson has been spreading the far-right “constitutionalist” gospel of radical localism that’s best known as the ideology behind the Cliven Bundy and Malheur Refuge armed standoffs of 2014 and 2016, respectively.
Gibson has been arguing that county officials can declare their precincts “gun sanctuaries” where local authorities will refuse to enforce the dictates of I-1639, on the grounds that the laws are nakedly “unconstitutional.”
“I’m willing to do everything—I’ll put the work out, I’ll sacrifice everything so that my children can continue to be free,” he told Pierce County commissioners in Tacoma. “And I know everybody in the state of Washington who believes in the Constitution—sometimes they can be looked at as if they are extremists, but it’s not true, it’s just the brainwashing is so bad right now that people don’t put their focus on freedom.”
Gibson said “Patriots” like himself are leaving the state for places like Idaho and Wyoming because they’re “losing faith” in Washington’s gun laws. “What I’m saying is that we can bring faith back to the constitutionalists if they have politicians who actually believe in the Constitution,” he said. “You can vote for it at the local level and you are not saying that you are going to break the law. What you are saying is that I’m going to honor the law—the Constitution. It’s being a citizen first and a politician second.”
In Gibson’s narrative, the liberal voters of Seattle and urban King County are tyrannically forcing their draconian gun laws on rural Washingtonians, who have a “constitutional” right to resist by refusing to enforce them. “Your population is small, so unfortunately your votes don’t matter when it comes to the 1 million voters in King County. Right?” he told an audience in Stevenson, in rural Skamania County. “I believe you guys have an opportunity to take something that you can control. Take your county back. Take it back—for you guys, and not be outlaws, and say ‘do whatever you want,’ I’m saying take it back and say, ‘We’re going to follow the law of the land, we’re going to follow the Constitution.’ OK?
“This isn’t like building a sanctuary city, where they illegally don’t help out the feds with illegal aliens. You’re just going to say, ‘We’re going to follow the Constitution and we’re going to ask our sheriff not to break the Constitution. We’re going to ask our city council members to protect the Constitution in our county.’”
Gibson so far has not had a great deal of success in getting county commissioners to jump aboard his “constitutionalist” bandwagon. Despite touting high hopes in places like Cowlitz and Kittitas counties, commissioners there voted down proposals to create “gun sanctuaries,” even while passing resolutions announcing their opposition to enforcement of I-1639.
However, a number of rural sheriffs in Washington—a total of 20 so far, with more possibly on the way—have announced their intentions not to enforce the limits of the gun safety initiative until, at the least, it has passed its inevitable court tests. The gun measure, which limits the ages for certain gun purchases as well as ammunition quantities and magazine sizes, has become a flashpoint in Pacific Northwest states’ culture wars between their rural, more conservative eastern halves and their more liberal western halves. The measure passed with a substantial 60-40 split, with nearly 80 percent approval in urban King County. However, it actually failed in 27 of the state’s 39 counties.
Gibson also plans a rally this weekend in his home county, Clark, at a park in Woodland. His tour of rural Washington has had relatively few hiccups, though he encountered a bit of one at the Greenbank Farm in rural Island County, in the middle of Whidbey Island. The gun safety initiative actually had passed handily in the traditionally liberal county, 56-44 percent. Gibson’s gathering had attracted coverage from the local weekly paper, as well as a letter to the editor from a group of local residents who acutely noted that wherever Gibson went, trouble had a habit of following.
Gibson had a mixed audience on the island. He explained why he led rallies by right-wing outsiders in downtown Portland: “Because I wanted the people to see what was happening in Portland. I wanted people to see that if you show up to pray in Portland, you will have a thousand people masked up with weapons, wanting to kill you. It’s OK, ladies and gentlemen, to believe in God, it’s OK to say I believe in Jesus, anywhere in this country, anywhere on the West Coast, and that’s why I did what I did.”
He sounded his recurring paranoid themes about assaults on the U.S. Constitution by various nefarious conspirators: “These forces are constantly chipping away at the Constitution. Every single day. These people do not sleep. There are people, OK? And it doesn’t matter who they say they are, they could be Republican, it could be a Democrat, I don’t care. There are so many liars out there.
“There is, without a doubt, there is an attempt to destroy this Constitution, and there is nobody in this room here today that would argue with me on that fact. So if you know that your Constitution is under attack, you know that, you have no excuse but to get involved.”
However, there was at least one audience member who challenged Gibson on his frequent associations with white nationalists and other bigots at his rallies (noting that “you disavow them, but then they show up and they’re your buddies”), but she was greeted by loud Gibson supporters who shouted her down. “I am not a white supremist! We are not white supremists!” they told her.
Gibson later described the scene in his Facebook video by noting that Whidbey Island is visited annually by neo-Nazis who hold a commemoration there of the 1984 death of Robert Mathews, leader of the criminal gang The Order. “Nobody protests the actual white supremacists! Nobody!” he told his audience. “But guess what, I came to Whidbey Island four weeks after the actual white supremacist rally there, and the whole island has a meltdown, everybody says, ‘Oh, white supremacists are coming, you need to protest Gibson, you need to go down there.’“
“Come on, this isn’t about racism,” he said. “Everybody knows. Stop pretending. This isn’t about racism. This is about furthering your political game. This is what it is: Distract the people! Distract them with the big boogie, white supremacist! Distract! Distract!”
He continued his complaint later: “Oh, but supposedly, there’s a bunch of white supremacists in Portland. Right! What white supremacists are you talking about? Where are they? Where is this white supremacist problem that they have in Portland? Where is it? Because I want to know! I’ll go protest them! I’ll stand against that in a heartbeat! Where are they? Show me!”
Of course, Patriot Prayer events have included a number of white nationalists as both speakers and participants. Among the figures who have populated Gibson’s stages are neo-Nazi Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet and street brawler Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman, as well as Identity Evropa organizer Jake Von Ott.
Gibson does note that he’s not entirely shaking the dust of Portland from his feet: He is planning an event (originally scheduled for the town of Battle Ground, Washington) at which he plans to reveal how “some dark stuff is happening in Portland,” apparently related to a nefarious “pedophilia ring.”
Rob Cantrall’s video—prefaced with a warning: “Listen, guys, I haven’t got long, since the end of the world may come at any moment. So I want to be ready when Jesus, you know, gets here. Also, I think my battery will die before too long”—took a decidedly different view of Gibson’s leadership. “This is a shitstorm, and it’s not going to be resolved, and I cannot allow my brotherhood to be destroyed by this,” Cantrall said. “So I’m going to ask you, Joey, to step down from Patriot Prayer. I will be taking up the mantle until we can figure it out. OK?”
Cantrall added that the remaining “Patriots” in his group had already voted on the matter. “So I’ll be taking up the mantle during this government shutdown of Patriot Prayer. While we rebrand,” he said.
For his part, Gibson has his eye on bigger things. “Portland, I got some stuff to do, so you don’t have to worry about me for a while, but you guys want to keep talking about me, go ahead!” he cheerfully told his audience. “All I do, all I’ve been doing this whole time, is promoting love. Love, freedom, and God. That’s it!”
