(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) The Root, a blog that regularly espouses anti-white and black-supremacist perspectives, became the latest left-wing media outlet to attempt awkwardly to explain the nonwhite leadership of a so-called white supremacist organization.
The rhetorical acrobatics came after Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who is of Afro-Cuban heritage, was charged with “sedition” on Monday related to the Jan. 6, 2021 protest at the US Capitol—for which Tarrio was not physically present, according to the Daily Beast.
A write-up from Root author Keith Reed cited far-left hate and disinformation group the Southern Poverty Law Center, which claimed the Proud Boys were “’known for anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric’ and for leadership that espouses white nationalism, ironic given Tarrio’s Afro-Cuban ethnicity.”
The attack on Tarrio bore similarities to smears against figures like former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, all of whom have been baselessly accused of betraying their race due to their refusal to toe the Left’s racial narrative.
Most notoriously, perhaps, then-candidate Joe Biden said the quiet part out loud during a May 2020 interview with black radio host Charlemagne tha God: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
With Tarrio, however, smear attacks have been particularly vicious as Democrats try to paint his Proud Boys as a fringe organization of violent extremists while avoiding any mention of black violence.
Instead, media outlets like MSNBC have referred to him as the “brown face of white supremacy.”
In the same article, writer Julio Ricardo Varela went on to claim that nonwhite Latino men worshipped “at the altar of white supremacy” and were “providing cover to ensure that white nationalists stay mainstream.”
For his part, Tarrio denied the accusations, Insider reported.
“I’m pretty brown, I’m Cuban,” he said. “There’s nothing white supremacist about me.”
But Varela and others continue to insist that the problem lies with the culture and not with the false labels being superimposed onto it.
“That’s the problem,” he wrote. “Individuals such as Enrique Tarrio (who goes by Henry in written reports) are used to downplaying right-wing racism and white nationalism because they are not white themselves.”
The Root went even farther, gleefully celebrating Tarrio’s indictment and mocking the Proud Boys.
“We’ll see just how proud they are now,” wrote Reed.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.