New Zealand Quietly Removes Proud Boys From Terrorist List

The New Zealand government has quietly let the terrorist designation of the American Proud Boys (APB) expire, a status that must be renewed every three years.

A notice in the Government Gazette advised that “any person who deals with the property of The American Proud Boys is no longer liable to prosecution for an offence” under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

Unlike when it was added to the list in 2022, no reason was given for allowing the classification to lapse.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has responded to media enquiries by saying that The Proud Boys remain “on the radar of the Terrorism Designation Working Group,” and that officials would consider any new information that might support a decision to include the group on the list in future.

A spokesperson for the department said a group must be “either knowingly carrying out, or knowingly participating in the carrying out, an act of terrorism” to be added.

Reasons for Terrorist Designation

In the paper justifying the designation of APB as a terrorist organisation, the police said there were “unlinked but ideologically affiliated chapters in Australia, Canada, and Israel,” but didn’t mention New Zealand.

Police had described APB as “cryptofascist” and “extremist,” convincing the government to add them to its list of banned organisations, alongside the likes of Islamic State, Hizbollah, and the New IRA.

“In contrast to other extremist groups currently active in the U.S., and consistent with the ‘slippery’ nature of fascism, the APB do not have a single ideological framework or reference point,” the police said at the time.

“Instead, they deploy a mosaic of overlapping ideological components intended to obscure the group’s fascism and thereby increase their appeal to a broader audience of American men. This tactic … is called cryptofascism.”

The group had both “communicated and demonstrated sustained loyalty to their own ‘strongman’ stereotype of the president” during President Donald Trump’s 2016 to 2020 term in office.

The document (pdf) added that, “while devotion to Trump is not a type of extremism, for the APB it has driven other behaviours and was key to APB’s acceleration of the violence on 6 January 2021.”

It quoted co-founder and leader Gavin McInnes as threatening the group’s enemies, including Antifa, with the words, “We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you. We look nice, we seem soft, we have ‘boys’ in our name, but … we will assassinate you.”

It was the group’s involvement in the storming of the Capitol that justified their inclusion on the list, police argued, because it was intended to “coerce or force a government” and cause death or serious injury.