Fringe Groups Revel as Protests Turn Violent

Kyle Chapman expected he might find a fight. And he did — with a teenage girl.

The girl was waving an anti-fascist placard last week at a protest against Shariah law in Midtown Manhattan when a scuffle broke out and she knocked an older woman to the ground.

“Assaulting our people?” Mr. Chapman shouted as he reached across the barricades and ripped her sign apart. “Your days are numbered, Commie!” he called after her as the police escorted her away. “The American people are rising up against you!”

As the founder of a group of right-wing vigilantes called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, Mr. Chapman, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound commercial diver, is part of a growing movement that experts on political extremism say has injected a new element of violence into street demonstrations across the country.

Part fight club, part Western-pride fraternity, the Alt-Knights and similar groups recruit battalions of mainly young white men for one-off confrontations with their ideological enemies — the black-clad left-wing militants who disrupted President Trump’s inauguration and have protested against the appearances of conservative speakers on college campuses.

Along with like-minded groups like the Proud Boys, a clan of young conservative nationalists, and the Oath Keepers, an organization of current and former law-enforcement officers and military veterans, they mobilized on social media to fight in New Orleans over the removal of Confederate monuments; on the streets of Berkeley, Calif., where clashes between the left and right have increasingly become a threat for law enforcement; and at a raucous May Day rally in Los Angeles.

Both sides have issued a call to arms this weekend for an event being billed as a “Trump Free Speech Rally” in Portland, Ore., which is already on edge after a man was charged in the murder of two people who tried to intercede last week as he hurled anti-Islamic insults at two women on a train. “This is a war,” declared the Proud Boys’ founder, Gavin McInnes, in a column this week.

To Mr. Chapman, 41, who on social media goes by the nom de guerre Based Stickman — “based” is slang for not caring what others think, and “stickman” refers to the closet dowel he wielded this spring at his first political skirmish — the Alt-Knights are a frustrated brotherhood of right-leaning soldiers conscripted to do battle with the left and devoted, as he put it in a Facebook post in April, to “defense and confrontation.”

“There’s been a lot of organized violence on the part of the left against the right, so we have to organize,” Mr. Chapman said. “The purpose is to have a peaceful event. But if people are attacked, you have to be ready and willing to defend yourself and your right-wing brothers and sisters.”

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