Alleged Patriot Front members wearing white masks and matching outfits sit handcuffed after being arrested near an Idaho Pride event on Saturday. Reuters The mom of an alleged Patriot Front member says she has kicked her son out of her home over his beliefs. “It’s not who I am and it makes me sick to listen to it,” Karen Amsden told CNN.
Amsden’s son, Jared Boyce, was among the 31 men arrested near an Idaho LGBTQ Pride event over the weekend. The mother of one of the alleged members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front — who was arrested near an annual Idaho Pride event over the weekend — says that she has kicked her son out of her home because his beliefs make her “sick. “Karen Amsden told CNN that she had hoped being arrested in Idaho would be a “wakeup call” for her 27-year-old son, Jared Boyce, who had been living in the basement of Amsden’s Utah home.
“But when he came back on Monday, I went out to the house to talk to him and he believes in what they did, he was standing by it,” Amsden said in the interview, which was published on Thursday. Amsden said that was the last straw. In an interview with the Daily Beast, Amsden said she told her son to choose between the Patriot Front — which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “a white nationalist hate group that formed in the aftermath of the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, of August 12, 2017” — or their family.
When he refused to quit, she said she kicked him out. “I felt like he was even more entrenched in it and so that’s when I said, ‘You need to- we can’t do this, you can’t live at my house and be doing this kind of stuff and putting this kind of hate out into the world, and putting yourself in danger — you just, you need to move out of my house,'” Amsden recalled to CNN. Amsden added, “I just can’t believe he believes all this ridiculous conspiracy crap and wants to blame people for all these things and hates groups of people .
. . It’s not who I am and it makes me sick to listen to it and sicker to know that this is coming from my son who somewhere inside has a loving, loving heart.
“Boyce was among the 31 alleged Patriot Group members arrested near Saturday’s Pride in the Park event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The alleged members of the extremist group were arrested after a concerned citizen reported that masked men who “looked like a little army” were loading riot gear into a U-Haul truck, police said. “They were all wearing similar attire.
They had shields, shin guards, and other riot gear with them, including at least one smoke grenade,” Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said during a press conference. Each of the men was charged with a misdemeanor count of conspiracy to riot and was later reportedly bailed out of jail by anonymous donors. The arrests have already sparked baseless conspiracy theories claiming the men were secretly federal agents or anti-fascist protesters.
White shot down those conspiracy theories during the press conference, adding that police officers in his department have faced death threats since the arrests were made. Amsden told CNN that when Boyce came home after being bailed out, he defended his actions. Amsden said that she has been warning her son “for years” about the Patriot Front group.
However, “He always just brushed that aside and dismisses it,” said Amsden, who explained that her son “tries constantly to get me to watch their documentaries and read their reports and show me how they’re right. “”He has really dug into their philosophy and really believes it,” she said. Amsden told The Daily Beast in an interview earlier this week that Boyce has tried to fill “a void” in his life ever since his father came out as gay and left the family years ago.
Read the original article on Insider.
From: insider
URL: https://www.insider.com/mom-of-alleged-patriot-front-member-kicks-out-son-2022-6
