Maybe you’ve heard the story, a police officer in Fresno, CA, has been suspended because he was once a Proud Boys member. His fate will be decided on Wednesday.
Recently, Newsweek’s Ewan Palmer posted an exhaustive propaganda hit-piece, complete with a video full of carefully chosen violent images superimposed with misinformation and hyperbole to make the Proud Boys appear to be as dangerous as they want you to believe they are.
“Legal problems are likely to follow the shock of the discovery that a Fresno police officer was a member of the extremist group,” ABC’s Corin Hoggard piled on, being sure to reiterate that the Proud Boys were designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Adding every reference to the Proud Boys or any other conservative organization is carefully and without exception, prefaced by words like “extremist group” and “a far-right, anti-government militia movement.”
The narrative was set. Now they needed a specific target, a name, and a face at which to aim the hatred they have so carefully fomented.
Enter Rick Fitzgerald, whose only mistake was deciding to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, in an exclusive interview with The Free Press, the former Proud Boy and suspended Fresno officer speaks out.
“We have a policy in the department where you don’t talk about IAs (Internal Affairs investigations),” Fitzgerald confessed. I understand. I understand it technically. But I don’t know what the charges are. So, what exactly am I not supposed to talk about?”
“And it’s not like this hasn’t been all over the newspapers,” Fitzgerald noted.
“I don’t know if you know what’s happening over here,” Fitzgerald explained, adding context to the uproar. “But a local church wants to buy the Tower Theater. It’s in an artsy part of Fresno, where they have a large LGBTQ community. They were protesting the sale of the Tower Theater to the church because if the church buys the theater, it will impact the liquor license for that area.
Indeed. On March 18th, organizers with the Save the Tower Theatre Demonstration Committee posted a lengthy manifesto of grievances aimed at Adventure Church for the sin of attempting to purchase the building, specifically complaining that turning the theater into a church – even for one a day a week – will create “a high likelihood of jeopardizing the liquor licenses and conditional use permits of over a dozen businesses.”
According to reports, there have been problems with illegal pot sales in the Tower District, and they’re afraid a church will derail their plans to turn the district’s iconic buildings into legal pot dispensaries. It is a battle they are losing, and now they’re angry.
Someone must pay, and they have chosen Fitzgerald. Now they must scour his life for anything they can use against him – however, egregiously, they must distort reality – to paint Fitzgerald as a danger to all society.
“A friend of mine, Dennis, wanted to go down there and check out the protest,” Fitzgerald recalled of the day he went to the protest at the Tower Theater, “and it wasn’t very big. It was maybe like 100 people, if even that, and they were primarily the LGBTQ community. So we went down there and stood on the opposite side of the street. We didn’t have any signs, didn’t have a flag. We were wearing our uniforms, but there were only two of us and a third friend, Damon, in regular clothes. We literally just stood there.”
Fitzgerald explained that the Proud Boys had gotten there before he arrived with his friends, and he saw them across the street in the mix of all the protesting. When the Proud Boys decided to gather their ranks to join Fitzgerald, he decided it was time to leave.
“I don’t have an association with them anymore,” Fitzgerald explained. “I left them five months ago and aside from the very occasional call from one of the members I don’t talk to them. We don’t organize events together. I don’t do anything with them. It’s a month-old affiliation and once I left, that was it.”
But that hasn’t stopped the hate mongers from fabricating a connection.
“One of the right-wing counterprotestors (sic) at last Sunday’s Save the Tower demonstration was City of Fresno police officer Rick Fitzgerald,” the Community Alliance Newspaper stated on their Facebook page “who has been identified as a member of the Sons of 76 far right extremist group and an affiliate of the Proud Boys.”
No. The Sons of 76 are not affiliated with the Proud Boys, according to Fitzgerald.
“Not even a little bit,” Fitzgerald said, “Yes, we have members that were prospects in that group. But we have no affiliation with them.”
“The officer has also referenced his profession in other posts, including an Instagram photo from 2019 showing him wearing a Punisher mask while pointing a gun,” the New York Post’s Joshua Rhett Miller wrote March 15th.
MIller also made sure to add something that Fitzgerald reportedly wrote to paint Fitzgerald in the most dangerous of light possible, “S–t is a lot easier when you can kill people.”
“What he didn’t do is look at the rest of my Instagram page, which is dedicated to CosPlay for Charities with all the pictures with me and the kids,” Fitzgerald explained, “They are looking for the thing that confirms their bias and skipping over the stuff that’s factually against that. How do you even approach people like that?”
What Miller also failed to include in his diatribe of misinformation, is what Fitzgerald reportedly wrote, is a quote from Frank Castle in Marvel’s The Punisher from Season 1: Crosshairs.
The Fresno Bee reported that legal analyst Tony Capozzi says, “Fitzgerald’s appearance in Proud Boys gear at a November 2020 protest in Sacramento will likely create big problems in the court system.”
Capozzi should know, he was recently cleared of wrongdoing when it could not be proven he “intentionally smuggled” some “cell phones and medication” into the Fresno County Jail in the “false bottom” of a “cardboard box full of documents”, that he brought to his client, gang leader, and inmate Trenell Monson.
Gabe Stutman of the Jewish and Fearless Forward added to the misinformation campaign that “two swastikas were found scrawled on businesses in Fresno alongside the words “Real Will” about a month ago in the wake of protests that brought Proud Boys and other right-wing extremists to the city as well as left-wing counterprotesters.
He provides no proof these “two swastikas” were scrawled on businesses in Fresno by Proud Boys, nor any explanation of what “Real Will” means. No. Just rub more malicious accusations in the wound they’ve laid open and let the infectious implications sink in.
“I spoke with my lawyer yesterday and he said: “The department doesn’t know what to do with you because I haven’t done anything wrong,” Fitzgerald shared with TFP. “You haven’t broken any laws. This is solely a political goal. You used to be a Proud Boy so let’s give a knee–jerk response by yanking your badge and gun, which is exactly what they did.”
“I’m not a racist,” he insisted, “You won’t find anything on any of my social media posts or in my emails. In fact, I received an award two months ago for de-escalating a situation with an armed black kid who had a 9mm. Most anyone else in the department would have shot the kid. But I managed to talk him down and tackle him and took his gun out of his pocket. But they don’t mention that because it doesn’t fit the narrative that I’m a racist.”
“The DA is saying they will have to review all of my cases and I’m like, go ahead,” Fitzgerald encouraged, “My cases are solid. You’re not going to find anything for them to try and pin me as something like a crazy racist.”
“My suspicion is they are going to go through and try to find any little thing minor policy violation” Fitzgerald surmised, “You know, the sort of stuff everybody does. But then they’ll say: “Oh, he did it. So now it’s something.”
As ABCs Hoggard shared almost gleefully: “The public defender’s office tells us they’ve identified more than 20 active criminal cases involving Fitzgerald and they’ll examine every one of them for any hint of bias.”
“People on the left are always talking about how they won’t tolerate hate,” Fitzgerald noted, “But they perpetuate that more than anybody I know.”
And what about the Southern Poverty Law Center? A far-left organization with an obvious bias designates its political enemies as hate groups and destruction targets.
Their tactics seem always to be the same: Make up a narrative and turn public opinion against them, so their destruction is approved by society.
Ultimately, the part that offends Fitzgerald the most in all of this, is how his own department turned against him.
“I have nothing but animosity for my department right now,” Fitzgerald confessed, “I gave them 18 solid, compassionate years of police work, and now they sacrifice me at the drop of a hat.”
“I was planning on retiring as a cop because I really love what I do,” Fitzgerald lamented, “But I don’t want anything to do with this department, and I know nobody else will hire me because a simple background search will have me linked to racism forever because of this.”
“There will be legal action,” Fitzgerald promised.
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And the sheep are quietly grazing in the pasture, blissfully ignoring the truck waiting to take them to the abattoir.
Go get ’em, Officer Fitzgerald. I hope nothing but the best for you.