Proud Boy JOE BIGGS, “Celebrator of Masculinity” at HB’s Old World, gets 17 years!

Proud Boy leaders Tarrio (22 years) and Biggs (17 years)

Joe Biggs was a Big Man. A Big, Bigg Man. Number two leader of the Proud Boys (after Cuban-American blowhard Enrique Tarrio), he was the “tip of the spear” of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, leading the charge with bullhorn and walkie-talkie. And last week he was sentenced to 17 years in Federal prison for seditious conspiracy. Ouch.

Wait, don’t we know this Joe Biggs guy, here in the OC, even though he’s from Florida? Oh yeah, that’s right! He was the headliner, six years ago, in Deborah Pauly’s “MAKE MEN GREAT AGAIN: A Celebration of Masculinity,” at Huntington Beach’s Old World Restaurant.

What exemplars of “masculinity,” too! Every one of these guys infamous for unprovoked violence.

• Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman, celebrated, canonized even, for hitting leftists over the heads with a big stick – and not much else.
• Augustus Invictus, a Holocaust denier from Florida with a long history of domestic violence, and who “has proposed the repeal of several amendments to the US Constitution, stipulating that only white male citizens should be allowed to vote or own real property.”
• And “Johnny Benitez,” who… well he’s actually hardly a real person, but a hyped-up chameleon going by four different names – I just realized we used to toss around a football on the Irvine City Hall lawn during Occupy OC, but he later gained cred in the alt-right world by ninja-kicking hippies during the “Battle of Berkeley.”

A gallery of very confused but brutal thugs. Also, isn’t this plug from the mad Villa Park hellion Deb Pauly a little – tearjerking, coming so soon after her divorce from that DUI guy…

“We need our men to be faithful husbands.” No, that wasn’t HER DUI, that came a couple years later – that was when her husband got pulled over and arrested, and she tried to drive the car home herself but the cops wouldn’t let her because she was also too drunk. I could go on about my old frenemy Deb, who was always racist, but she used to come to my concerts cuz she loved my music, we often agreed on OC political corruption, and I loved what she had to say about Harry Sidhu masquerading as an Air Force vet… but this story’s not about Deb, it’s about Joe Biggs.

Joe Biggs who is going to prison for 19 years for seditious conspiracy.

Joe Biggs who was the HEADLINER for this “Celebration of Masculinity.”

Joe Biggs who was a very counterintuitive choice to put on a pedestal as an example of what a man should be, when just a few years earlier he’d published more disgusting misogynistic tweets than you can read in one sitting without losing your lunch, celebrating date rape and violence against women and especially “trannies,” all dutifully collected by Media Matters at the time. This is just a modest sampling:

Sounds like Joe was a man on a mission in 2012! Five years later when these tweets and many more were discovered by Media Matters, he deleted them, explaining that they were from a “very dark time in his life,” when he was abusing alcohol and drugs and trying to get a reaction from people. Also he was suffering the ill effects of medications the government had given him to deal with his traumatic brain injury, and that he spent much of his time with a gun inside his mouth, until he stopped taking those drugs.

Yes, Sergeant Joe Biggs served in the army for eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he suffered a TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY, and received a Purple Heart. Suddenly this seems a little more solemn. I wonder how much of his behavior the last 15 years is the result of the traumatic brain injury. And maybe a lot of these crazed violent rightwing chuds have traumatic brain injuries or something comparable. Just asking.

But by the time of this “Make Men Great Again” event, Joe Biggs was a celebrity on the fringe right for his appearances on “InfoWars.” Two of the main conspiracies he peddled there were “Pizzagate,” the belief that Hillary Clinton traffics children through a Washington DC pizza place (which one poor soul took so seriously he showed up heavily armed at the pizzaria to save the kids) and the theory that the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino was a “false flag” operation by the government. For these new obsessions, Joe received a lot more positive attention, from thousands of people, than he ever did for advocating violence against women and “trannies.”

He also became obsessed with “ANTIFA” as the greatest threat to America. By 2019 (two years after “Make Men Great Again”) he was a leader of the Proud Boys, and organized a “End Domestic Terrorism” Rally in Portland Oregon. Wait, what? Yes, this was Biggs’ protest against Antifa. Didn’t end well for Joe and the Proud Boys, who were so outnumbered by counterprotesters that they had to request a police escort so they could get the hell out of there.

I’m going quick, skipping a lot. In Dec. 2020 Joe was one of the Proud Boys who attacked and vandalized DC’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, removing and burning their “Black Lives Matter” flag. Enrique Tarrio was arrested for that and banned from DC (which is why he wasn’t physically present on Jan. 6.) The Proud Boys were fined a million dollars for this escapade.

And so it was left to Joe Biggs to lead the troops to overrun the Capitol on that dark and crazy Insurrection Day. Always a font of excuses, when receiving his sentence last week, he wept, claimed he got carried away by the crowd and his own “curiosity,” and asked if maybe he could not get a 17-year sentence because his daughter “had been molested” and he needed to pick her up from school. Authorities were unmoved.

But WE’RE in Orange County…

… and we like Old World in Huntington Beach, so tell us more about the “Make Men Great Again” event! Naui tells me they kept changing the venue and giving mixed messages on whether it was going to happen or not because nobody wanted protesters there, so Naui gave up attending. But fortunately Stephen Lemons of the Southern Poverty Law Center was able to get in and wrote a thorough and caustic account. I’ll just quote from the JOE BIGGS sections.

The event’s Facebook page had asked women to attend in dresses and heels and men to wear slacks and a jacket, with ties optional. Most party-goers complied, save for a handful of refuseniks, including headliner Joe Biggs, the infamous former InfoWars “reporter,” who defied the dress code, and wore standard beach attire instead: T-shirt, cargo pants and flip-flops. “I don’t like to wear suits, fuck that,” he told the audience as he began.

Best known for hyping the now-debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory about a non-existent pedophile ring operating out of DC restaurants, Biggs talked about how veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated badly by the Veterans Administration, eventually bringing his remarks around to one of the evening’s favorite punching bags: transgender people.

“It’s sick and disgusting to see how our veterans are treated daily,” he said. “But they want to pay $100,000 for some guy to chop his d— off and tuck it in.” Biggs’ bigoted remark calls to mind a number of misogynist and anti-LGBT Tweets by the conspiracy-peddler, published in January by Media Matters for America…

Biggs, an ex-U.S. Army sergeant, told RawStory.com that the offensive Tweets were from “a dark time in my life,” and were, “a cry for help from a guy lost.” During his remarks at Make Men Great Again, Biggs talked about the war in Iraq, and how, after he came home, he would sit around day and night “with a gun in my mouth,” until he realized that all the meds he’d been prescribed were making him crazy. So he threw them all away, and the suicidal thoughts went with them.

Biggs spoke variously about the “war going on” here in the U.S., “chemicals in our food” and people hell-bent on “turning men into women.” He also hit upon one of the main themes of the evening: Low T-levels in American males…

We know that all the progress this nation has made over the centuries causes a real load of BUTT-HURT to all the folks who sense that THEIR privileges are being sapped away. Add the ingredient of endangered, frustrated masculinity to that cocktail, and the encouragement of an Ochre Abomination in the Oval Office, and you’ll see the kind of deadly theater we’ve seen these recent years.

And they call us liberal men who care about economic and racial justice and women’s equality, they call US “CUCKS.” I think these douchebags need to just get laid, and leave the rest of us alone.

And if you’re someone who’s bummed out that Joe Biggs got 17 years, take heart! If you manage to elect Donald Trump next year, or even one of those sad-sack Republican second-stringers, Joe and his friends might be walking the streets again sooner than you think!

Vern out.