While even the Proud Boys, a violent hate gang, are hesitant to openly revere Adolf Hitler, they do not have the same hesitation about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Pinochet took power in a violent military coup with the support of the U.S. government on September 11, 1973. The coup ended with the death of Salvador Allende, the country’s democratically elected, socialist president. In the following years, Pinochet had more than 27,000 people tortured for allegedly being leftists working against his dictatorship. The military junta murdered more than 2,300 people—at least 120 of whom were dropped from helicopters into the ocean, lakes, and rivers—their bodies often never to be found.
The horrors the Pinochet regime committed over three decades are something the American far right dreams of emulating. The investigative journalist Greg Palast, who was an “embedded” student in the rightwing economic group “the Chicago Boys” at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s, says he “didn’t remember Pinochet defenders celebrating the killings—they mainly just wrote them off as ‘a cost of doing business.’ ”
The modern love of Pinochet seems to have grown out of “chan culture,” that vile part of the Internet where anonymous users create memes for the purpose of offending. Years before the Proud Boys were formed in 2016, users would “jokingly” threaten to “take someone on a helicopter ride.” And like most terrible things from the past decade, the 4chan meme started appearing in real life.
I first came across the far right referencing “helicopter rides” at a May Day rally in New York City in 2017. There was a small group of young men heckling the mostly Latinx demonstrators in Union Square, pouring milk on a Hillary Clinton flag, and sporting 4chan-related shirts and flags. They started chanting the phrase at the press.
It’s hard to track where the Pinochet memes go from there. Andy Campbell, the author of the definitive book on the Proud Boys, We Are Proud Boys, first saw it appear in Portland, Oregon, in 2017; other sources tell me the helicopters meme made it to commercially produced flags in San Bernardino, California, in June of that year at an anti-Sharia-law protest.
Wherever the meme emerged in real life, the Proud Boys were the ones that made it go national. Samantha Kutner, an expert on the Proud Boys and co-founder of Glitterpill, an intelligence company that is “dedicated to preventing terrorism and keeping communities safe,” told me that the “Proud Boys like to gamify how much they can get away with in media coverage of the group.” The Pinochet memes certainly did that—threatening to throw your political enemies out of a helicopter was extreme, even for 2017.
A screenshot from the social media account of the Texas shooter shows a plate-carrier vest that bore the RWDS patch.
Like the Right Wing Death Squad patches the Allen, Texas, mass shooter wore during his murder spree on May 6, multiple online stores sold Pinochet-related wares. One of them—likely the most popular—was run by Joey Biggs, a Proud Boy and January 6 insurrectionist. His store carried the “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” iteration of the meme that was so popular it had its own spinoffs: Roger Stone, Enrique Tarrio, and others all “did nothing wrong.”
Kutner also explained to me the origin of the “did nothing wrong” phrase used by the far right: It was the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000. Magnus the Red, a character in the game whose past recklessness and arrogance is constantly discussed by players, was the original figure who “did nothing wrong” before the phrase jumped to the Internet and eventually made it to the shirts of violent racists clashing in the streets of America.
Kutner offered another reason that it might be popular: the similarity to the racist slur “dindu nuffin.”
I’ve asked Proud Boys and other far-right provocateurs questions on the origin of the memes—especially the one that shows people being thrown out of helicopters. The only answer I’ve gotten so far is “free helicopter rides—it’s pretty self-explanatory.”
The point of all these memes, shirts, and patches is to desensitize people to the violence that they want to happen to their perceived enemies. They’ll say the Right Wing Death Squad patch is “just a joke!”; that the patch of a bullet saying “I want to be inside you” is dark humor—you’re taking this all too seriously.
Seven years ago, the Proud Boys came for black-clothed anti-fascists in the streets who were at least ready to fight back. Then they came for the Black Lives Matter protesters. Now, the violence has come to children’s hospitals, school boards, and drag shows. The “commie” that they want to throw out of a helicopter keeps evolving and expanding.