MY WEEKEND GETAWAY WITH THE BOYS

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.

- Story and photographs by Jen Golbeck

The Cape Fear Proud Boys at their chapter clubhouse with the author (center).

I'M SITTING ON THE TAILGATE OF A PICKUP. TWO MEN ARE WITH ME.

One leans against the bed of the truck; the other stands at the rear corner. Our conversation is friendly, but they’re here to ensure I stay where I belong. We're in a thickly wooded swamp near the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. The late-afternoon sun draws long shadows from the tall pines.

A deep voice echoes from up the road as a third man approaches: “Jen, you ready?” I stand.

“We might sit you down and ask you some questions real quick,” he says.

The four of us walk down a narrow path and quickly reach a cabin. The clubhouse, raised off the ground on cinder-block piers, smells of fresh timbers. The interior walls and ceiling are unfinished. A handmade, L-shaped bar dominates one corner, a shelf of whiskey bottles behind it.

The men have just finished a meeting. I am directed to sit in an overstuffed red leather armchair on one side of the room. The chapter members, all dressed in black and yellow, form a large circle around me. They’ve been drinking.

“Today you are going to have a rapid-fire session of anything-goes questions,” Bam, the chapter president, announces.

With that, I am reintroduced to the group that I’ve been with all day: the Cape Fear chapter of the Proud Boys.

“We have Dr. Jennifer Golbeck,” says Johnny Ringo. He is six-foot-one, in his mid-forties, with a smoothly shaved head and military posture.

“Doctor like Jill Biden doctor?” someone else asks with a chuckle.

Kind of. I’m a professor. I study radicalization, extremism, and violence in groups that are political, religious, or nihilistic. I spend a lot of my time in their online spaces, but I also go looking for them in person wherever I can find them, from conflict zones to shopping malls.