Welcome to the Groundhog Day edition of Pueri Superbi.  You, dear reader, are now trapped in a never-ending scroll of the final installation of my extremely niche writing until you learn to play the piano, carve ice sculptures, speak French, develop poetic sensibility, purchase life insurance, befriend an entire small town and seduce a news weather show producer played by Margaret Qualley’s mother.  

In case you were wondering, the topic of this writing that you shall now endure for all eternity, to mix metaphors, is a pro bono prix fixe comprised of four courses, à la Mightor, The Herculoids, Shazzan and Space Ghost, which are as follows: 

I) the Roman Mithraists who referred to one another as ‘Syndexioi’, as well as Mithraic antecedents and affiliated tendencies in Europe, Asia and North Africa

II) the self-described Western Chauvinist Proud Boys, the militia group with the most specific premeditated plan to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, who I've referred to as the ‘Pueri Superbi’, their name in Latin: language of the Roman Empire which defined “the West”

III) the MAGA regime which emancipated the Proud Boy rank & file and leadership and still appears headed on a horrible trajectory towards funding the group to the tune of $100 million and turning it into the paramilitary force referred to as “Trump's army”

IV) the tragic and petra genetrix-like emergence of fascism from the history and culture of “the West” along with its dangerous modern-day perseverance, which unites all of these elements

Ancient Benchmarks of Hyper-Masculinity, Monarchy and Transactionalism

According to Dr. Ashton Kingdon’s The World White Web: Uncovering the Hidden Meanings of Online Far-Right Propaganda, ancient Rome can serve as an imagined historical benchmark “for the hyper-masculine, racially pure, and militarised models for the totalitarian ethno-state that contemporary white nationalists seek to bring into existence.”  Rome appeals to the far right for “representing the apex of artistic and cultural achievement, thus providing a nostalgic foundation for the modern world”, serving as “a source of inspiration for the white racial consciousness, that white supremacists believe must be restored if the white race is to survive” despite distortions of the historical record “that these epochs were admiral, timeless, and most importantly white.”

While Americans have been staging ‘No Kings’ demonstrations reviving their country’s anti-monarchical and republican origins nearly 250 years ago, pro-monarchist sentiments favouring the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran may wind up playing a role in the transition to a less theocratic authoritarian regime responsible for the deaths of a minimum of several thousand protesters and which, according to TIME Magazine, could top 30,000 casualties.  This in turn may provoke strikes from the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and lead to who knows what for Iran.  In 1971 the Shah paid lip service to his country’s Zoroastrian and polytheistic pre-Islamic history for the Persian Empire’s 2,500th anniversary celebrations complete with costumed Immortals setting out from Cyrus the Great’s tomb at Persepolis.  Published not long after this celebration, photographer Roloff Beny’s tome Iran: Elements of Destiny edited by Shahrokh Amirarjomand featured a preface by the Shah and an article by scholar Mohamad Moghdam who wrote that “the largest near-eastern Mithraeum was built in western Persia at Kangavar, dedicated to 'Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras’” (Beny, p.37).  

Virgin births must have seemed so far-fetched to the Romans prior to the empire's 4th century conversion to Christianity that upon appropriating Mithraic worship they altered the myth to describe Mithras as born of the petra genetrix; hyper-masculinity requiring the negation of all things female, even pregnancy and child-birth.  Pre-Roman Mithra was a god of the handshake, whose name is a cognate of mit (‘between’ or ‘with’ and the root of ‘middle’ and ‘mediate’), and his Anatolian/Levant prior-form and predecessor Mitra was a deity invoked in the Hittite-Mitanni Treaty of Suppiluliuma I and Shattiwaza in 1380 BCE.  This was less treaty than imposition of a client-state relationship and an ancestral form of today’s transactional politics (I’ll give you x if you vote for me, donate to my campaign, or bring me a literal gold tribute) and of the real estate transactions of modern geopolitics, case in point: Trump’s Galactus-like appetite for Greenland.

Proud Oath Boy Keepers 

The future looks bright for the American paramilitary right.  Stewart Rhodes, violent wife-abuser, founder of the militia group the Oath Keepers, security provider for Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Ali Alexander and Michael Flynn and previously sentenced to 18 years for sedition during the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, plans on relaunching the Proud Boy-allied group.  Trump has always been quite fond of their friends the Proud Boys, who led the charge against the Capitol and are receiving a $100 million service fee in compensation for their efforts.  Ending what he called “a grave national injustice” Trump released the group's members and their leader Enrique Tarrio from prison and subsequently met with Tarrio and his mother at Mar-a-Lago.  Shanlon Wu, the former federal prosecutor and counsel for the 78th U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, has argued that the Proud Boys’ $100 million lawsuit against the U.S. government has an “excellent chance of a successful outcome”.

Kill the Babbit

Their chance of legal success is similar to that of the ridiculously successful outcome to the $5 million wrongful death lawsuit by the family of Ashli Babbitt who climbed through a barricade and a broken window towards the Capitol Building House Chamber during the January 6th coup.  It would have been preferable to not have killed the manic Ashli Babbitt (why not shoot an arm or a leg as a warning?), but had the Capitol police allowed her entry through that window, the result would have been a torrent of additional putschists following her through.  This would have given the mob the ability to carry out their stated intentions to lynch former Vice President Mike Pence, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and anyone else in the way.

Money Money Money Money (money)

Who knows what system the Proud Boys will use to distribute their winnings given their history of infighting.  Do only formerly imprisoned members receive compensation, or will the money be given to a single representative of the entire organization such as Enrique Tarrio?  While it's probable that the Proud Boys will blow at least part of their lawsuit earnings on sex workers and hard drugs as has been their true modus operandi despite their phony “venerating the housewife” rhetoric, it also seems likely that they’ll invest whatever money remains by setting themselves up for a lifetime of street-level far-right political advocacy.  Kissinger said that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" and according to Kim Stanley Robinson "money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government"; perhaps they’re both right.  

My name is Bondi, Pam Bondi

Current 87th U.S. Attorney General (and Matt Gaetz replacement) Pam Bondi is unlikely to put up much of a fight against the Proud Boys lawsuit given that she’s a former $115,000/month lobbyist for Qatar’s Al Thani monarchy's murderous kafala labour system and for The GEO Group which is the U.S.’ largest private prison corporation, a staunch MAGA loyalist and an illegal Trump donation recipient.  Bondi has made unfounded allegations about cheating in the 2024 elections, of siccing election deniers on the secretary on Philadelphia's Board of Elections, and of prosecuting NGOs with RICO charges in an anti-antifascist (fascist) witch hunt.

The Fox Guards the Henhouse

In a Kafkaesque judicial twist of fate, former F.B.I. agent Jared L. Wise - charged with encouraging the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to kill police officers - is currently responsible for the Justice Department’s official effort to exact revenge against those who tried to hold him and his fellow rioters accountable.  

Come Not In That Form!

Boldly declaring that the only limit on his global powers are “my own morality.  My own mind.  It’s the only thing that can stop me.  I don’t need international law” and appearing to be at his wit’s end after being forced by the Supreme Court to withdraw National Guard troops from Portland, L.A. and Chicago, Trump stated “we will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again".  Perhaps he was alluding to ICE here, or the military, or a National Guard chapter brought in from a Republican state, but he has also suggested that there could be a place in American politics for the Proud Boys.  ICE’s January 9th recruitment ad featuring images of a cowboy and a B-2 bomber utilized the phrase "We will have our home again", referencing the German Völkisch Männerbund anthem "We'll Have Our Home Again" which is quite popular with the Proud Boys.  

More Doom and Gloom, Hurray! 

Historian Dr. Craig Johnson - whose show and book I quite like - makes several rather dire predictions for 2026 (at about 00:05:17) including “a spike / a wave of paramilitary violence in the United States around this upcoming midterm election” (which Trump has hinted at cancelling) and that there “will be no consequences for this wave of paramilitary violence”.  More specifically Johnson refers to “bomb threats against polling places, threats of assassination against the people who count ballots, people trying to interfere with the actual counting of ballots, people trying to steal ballots which are on their way to be counted”, as well as voter suppression in Democrat swing states via ballot theft and arson with immunity for Republican operatives.  Everything that Johnson predicts has been carried out in the past by Proud Boys, so feel free - dear reader - to call me (or Johnson) Cassandra on this.  Other than the $400,000 Polymarket winner who was extremely either lucky or a regime insider, nobody accurately predicted the covert operation seizing Maduro and his wife and killing his thirty two Cuban military guards.  Perhaps nothing will come of the Proud Boys lawsuit other than fear and anxiety; Trump’s blustery threats to annex Greenland did lead to cautionary reinforcements of troops from France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and the UK, but no actual military skirmishes.   

Still, it's always good to be prescient of negative outcomes in political and cultural trends.  “That could never happen here!” people will say, until it does.  “No organization put more boots on the ground at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, than the Proud Boys, and they were at the forefront of every major breach of the Capitol’s defenses, leading the on-the-ground efforts to storm the seat of government” according to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves.  What shenanigans could they get up to with a $100 million budget?  That’s a tiny percentage of ICE's post-One Big Beautiful Bill Act $85 billion budget, but $100 million isn’t chump change for America’s loser population.  Brian C. Taylor argued in Proud ICE Boys: The Radical Transformation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (2025-2026): A Workforce and Ideological Assessment that “the evidence from NGOs, whistleblowers, and extremist group communications indicates a significant intersection between the agency’s current mission and the goals of far-right organizations like the Proud Boys.”  

Molly Conger’s recently pointed out how nobody should be surprised when the state comes down on moderates and pluralists, stating that: “for decades the federal government paid Klanmen to do their dirty work.  They've used Klansmen and neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists of all stripes to disrupt progressive movements. They've ignored credible intelligence about murders and bombings they could have stopped and they looked the other way when their informants participated in violence against people they thought posed a greater threat to the status quo, and they've always thought liberty equality, freedom, tolerance, diversity and civil rights were far more threatening than bombs in church basements and lynchings on dark abandoned highways.”  That said, while ICE may appeal to Proud Boy aesthetics and demographic in its online recruitment campaign, there’s still no smoking gun suggesting a literal absorption of extremist organizations into its ranks, despite Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin’s unsuccessful efforts to ascertain this information from Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem. 

According to Wired’s David Gilbert, “Trump’s militarization of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the Border Patrol, together with the administration’s embrace of white nationalist rhetoric, has left the Proud Boys without a role to play”.  I agree with Gilbert here; the Proud Boy role is now limited to harsh memeing because everything they're in favour of is being implemented by ICE, the DHS and the broader Trump/Miller/Noem regime.  At the same time, Proud Boy social media advocacy is still a forceful act of pro-ICE propaganda, even if their presence on federal payroll was limited to the past.  It may also be an incorrect assumption that ICE violence and inhumanity has peaked.  The MAGA regime has often expressed its wishes to accelerate the pace at which it arrests, imprisons, deports, injures and kills its political enemies with even less transparency, accountability, answerability, anonymity and plausible deniability.   ICE/DHS has already reached the point of recruitment saturation, making the regime likely to form a brute squad.  Who better to recruit for paramilitary adventurism than the Pueri Superbi / Proud Boys to both supplement and supersede ICE’s goonery? 

Anniversary of a Putsch

The fifth anniversary of the January 6th coup came and went along with the expiry of the statute of limitations for prosecuting the supposed “deep state set-up” that reality-deficient American conspiracy theorists believe were responsible for setting up the putschists to take the fall.  The way things played out was truly a colossal failure on the part of the “lawmakers, civil society advocates, activists, journalists, and others who contributed, in some small way, to researching, exposing, or prosecuting those responsible for the riot”.  Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio received the January 6th coup "1776 Returns” plan from his ex-girlfriend the crypto advocate Eryka Gemma Flores, who in turn received it from the former State Department and Special Operations official and crypto advocate Samuel Armes.  On the event’s anniversary he led a small group of marchers to the Capitol to honour putschist Ashli Babbitt.  Michael Flynn and Roger Stone both pleaded the Fifth when questioned as to their roles as conduits between Trump and the Proud Boys.  Considering how Trump has already used the office of the presidency to profit $1.4 billion at minimum, it seems likely that Flynn and Stone have or will receive financial compensation for their efforts from Trump, unless they simply see him as a gateway for their ideological goals.  Angela Nagle points out how Alt-Right founder and white nationalist Richard Spencer “sees Trump as a gateway to further infiltration into mainstream US politics by first harnessing anti-immigrant sentiment, then escalating to mass deportations, which will finally result in a white ethno-state” (Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right in Enough Already! A Socialist Feminist Response to the Re-emergence of Right Wing Populism and Fascism in Media, p.58).

The Donroe Doctrine

The Noriega-like extraction of Venezuela's Maduro was met with much condemnation by world leaders, some opposing who (an authoritarian socialist) was snatched, some more generically opposing the act of violating another country’s national sovereignty, and others ill-advisedly advocating of the retaliatory kidnapping of other heads of state.  Trump stated that Venezuelan oil revenue “will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America” and “we are going to run the country” as part of a reinterpreted Monroe Doctrine.  I assume that the spat over Greenland was merely an overreach negotiation strategy followed by the usual TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) behaviour; if not then Greenland’s next followed by Canada if Trump’s January 20th edited post of last year’s Oval Office meeting with European leaders is to be believed, with possible future interventions in Columbia, Cuba and Iran along the way.  All loosely defined anti-fascist dissidents within the United States itself can also now be preemptively targeted via the National Security Directive NSPM-7: a sort of Patriot Act on crack designed to “stop political violence before it occurs”, with ‘violence’ given extremely broad definitional leeway, and assuming that it’s enacted exclusively by those on the outs with MAGA.

Trump, who has said that “Hitler did some good things” and that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, initially suggested remigration as the method to “save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America" in a September 15 2024 Truth Social post viewed by 50 million people, followed by plans made in June 2025 to create an “Office of Remigration” in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.  He supported the Department of Homeland Security in advocating for the deportation of 100 million Americans and has suggested increasing the military budget by 50% to $1.5 trillion at the same time that the minimally-taxed wealth of 900 American billionaires has increased by 18% to $6.9 trillion this past year. 

Minnesota Goddam

Vice President JD Vance thought it was a good idea to share the cellphone video taken by ICE shooter Jonathan Ross of his victim, the 37-year-old mother of three and poet Renée Good whose final smiling words to him were "I'm not mad at you” before she was shot three times in the face.  Ross, an Iraq War vet and “committed, conservative Christian” who appears to have defended white supremacists online, was heard cursing “fucking bitch!” after shooting Good, which fits Faith Agostinone-Wilson’s pattern of yet another “dominating warrior who establishes authority while also being simultaneously a victim of feminism, reverse racism, liberalism, and global corporate capitalism” (Enough Already! A Socialist Feminist Response to the Re-emergence of Right Wing Populism and Fascism in Media, p.50).  Ross’ killing of Good was followed two weeks later by the ICE killing of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old patriotic VA nurse who worked in the intensive care unit.  Good and Pretti weren't the first people killed by ICE; thirty two were killed in 2025, and more will likely follow based on the current trajectory.  However, they were white-skinned, had citizenship documentation and were free of criminal records; not the expected victims of ICE or of police violence more broadly, so the backlash has been substantial, up to and including a general strike with potential to spread beyond Minnesota.

Good sought to avoid verbal (and vehicular) confrontation, but unlike Ashli Babbitt her family is unlikely to receive a $5 million wrongful death settlement from the U.S. government.  The key difference: “Babbitt was committing violence on behalf of the regime; so she was justified, even if that violence was directed toward government agents. And because Renée Good was opposing the regime, violence against her—this time carried out by government agents—was likewise justified.”  Appearing at a pro-ICE demonstration in Minneapolis, the right-wing extremist GOP Candidate Jake Lang, a pardoned January 6 2021 putschist running for the Florida Senate seat held by Marco Rubio who stated that the Proud Boys should be deputized in order to hunt migrants, was chased away and had his tactical vest stolen.  All things considered, he's fortunate that's all that was taken away from him by those observing and resisting the arc of tyranny’s bend toward degradation.  Due to the uproar Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has been replaced by border czar and head of Trump’s immigration policy Tom Homan who’s held multiple meetings with Proud Boy-linked activist Terry Newsome, including a closed-door Chicago session to coordinate deportations. 

Will Homan’s next move be to replace ICE with something with even less government oversight like an overt paramilitary group? Either way, on this Groundhog Day remember: the deeper the shadow, the greater the light.