WHAT'S NOT DEPLORABLE ABOUT TRUMPISM?:

[A]s prosecutors move ahead with charges, the all-male Proud Boys group is in disarray. Ten members have been arrested in connection with the violence, charged with riot and attempted assault as part of an investigation into their activities.

The Proud Boys have been widely condemned as a hate group. Facebook and Instagram have banned the group. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it a "hate group." An organization called New York City Antifa, whose members describe themselves as "anti-fascists," has named the Proud Boys who were involved in the violence and has posted details about their lives on Twitter.

Even the founder, Gavin McInnes, has distanced himself, announcing on YouTube in late November that he was quitting the group "in all capacities, forever." His departure left the Proud Boys without a figurehead, though the group has since said in an online message that, "We're not going anywhere."

Though Mr. McInnes has said he disavows racism, he wrote that the prominent white nationalist, Richard B. Spencer, "comes across as perfectly reasonable in conversation," and he said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who is black, is "kind of like Sambo." When he quit the group, he blamed "rumors and lies and terrible journalism" for undermining "the greatest fraternal organization in the world." [...]

At the same time, previously unreleased video, obtained by The New York Times, shows that the Proud Boys initiated the attack in Manhattan against a handful of anti-fascist protesters, not the other way around, as Mr. McInnes had initially said.

Prosecutors said at court appearances for some of the accused Proud Boys members that video evidence will prove that the Proud Boys started the fight. [...]

The people who turned out to hear Mr. McInnes speak at the Metropolitan Republican Club in October represented a cross-section of New York's far-right subculture: libertarians, conspiracy theorists and nationalists who have coalesced around their opposition to Islam, feminism and liberal politics.

Irvin Antillon, 49, who is accused of kicking protesters on the ground, is a member of a Latino skinhead group, Batallón 49, who traveled to Charlottesville last year for the "Unite the Right" rally, where an anti-racist protester was killed, experts said.

In one online photograph, he poses shirtless, showing off tattoos of Nazi symbols.

Mr. Hare, 26, of Harrisburg, Pa., was filmed in early October punching leftist protesters at a "Resist Marxism" rally outside the statehouse in Providence, R.I., and traveled to another far-right rally in Portland, Ore., in August, where Vice News Tonight filmed him wearing what appeared to be a bulletproof vest.

Mr. Young, 38, of Rockland County, N.Y., who is accused of punching and kicking three people, has called Muslims "a virus" who "feed off the host nation until it's dead" in an online video.

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