The Proud Boys' Hilarious Slow-Motion Disintegration Continues

The Proud Boys, as you have likely heard, are doing great.

The “Western chauvinist” organization—a shambolic group of drunken extremist bullies in discount Fred Perry shirts and MAGA hats—are continuing to generate a series of headlines this week for explosively shitting the bed they’ve all made together. In the latest development, the group has released a statement clarifying that their chairman of just two days, Jason Lee Van Dyke, isn’t their leader any longer, a member of the organization, or their legal counsel, which they desperately need.

Several members of the Proud Boys are facing charges for an October brawl with anti-fascist demonstrators in New York, and their founder Gavin Mcinnes recently staged a hasty supposed resignation as soon as the FBI started expressing a keen interest in the group. On Wednesday, the Proud Boys released a new set of bylaws with the help of Van Dyke, a technically still-licensed but non-practicing attorney in Texas who’s been their legal counsel for a couple years. It was immediately and hilariously apparent that the PBs had failed to actually redact those bylaws, doxxing the names of the group’s “Elders” for all to see.

Now, in a statement issued on Thursday at 4:44 a.m. from Proud Boy Magazine, which is a real thing, the group announced, “Jason Lee Van Dyke is no longer a member of the Proud Boys fraternity, and will no longer be representing the fraternity in any legal capacity.”

On the surface, that’s perhaps a wise decision for everyone. Being connected to the Proud Boys is a fairly obvious liability for a licensed attorney, and Van Dyke was perhaps also a liability for the Proud Boys. He’s best known for tweeting both death threats and racial slurs, and was arrested in September for allegedly lying to police about items being robbed from his truck.

None of those things were what triggered his departure from the group, though; Van Dyke insisted to Mediaite that his lightning-fast appointment and departure were all very normal: “I occupied the position of chairman for a grand total of about 36 hours and that was only to pass the bylaws that are attached here. Now that they have been passed, I occupy no position with the organization.”

Per the post on the Proud Boys Magazine’s site, further questions about the group’s exciting future plan are to be directed to the “Elders” and specifically to Enrique Tarrio, the group’s brand-new chairman, who’s also been president of the group’s Miami chapter. At the same time, records show that the Proud Boys have rather ambitiously filed paperwork to become a registered business in Texas—Proud Boys International LLC—using Van Dyke as their registered agent.

Sadly, however, their paperwork is still not quite in order: we’ve also found that last year, a company using the address of Van Dyke’s law office and his initials —JVLD Holdings, LLC—tried to trademark a version of the Proud Boys’ slogan, “West is the Best.” (Their slogan is usually written as “The West is the Best,” but Van Dyke’s office tried to trademark it without that first “the.”)

As of August 2018, however, that trademark shows as “abandoned,” meaning it’s now available for anyone else to use. Why not found a masturbation-obsessed men’s organization of your own?