How the 'Free Helicopter Rides' Meme Went Viral: Referencing the dark history of the Pinochet regime in Chile, the Proud Boys have sought to desensitize people against targeted violence by making it a joke.

• Date: 01 August 2023
• Author: Roberts, Zach D.

While even the Proud Boys, a violent hate gang, are hesitant to openly revere Adolf Hitler, they do not have the same hesitation about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet took power in a violent military coup with the support of the U.S. government on September 11, 1973. The coup ended with the death of Salvador Allende, the country's democratically elected, socialist president. In the following years, Pinochet had more than 27,000 people tortured for allegedly being leftists working against his dictatorship. The military junta murdered more than 2,300 people--at least 120 of whom were dropped from helicopters into the ocean, lakes, and rivers--their bodies often never to be found.

The horrors the Pinochet regime committed over three decades are something the American far right dreams of emulating. The investigative journalist Greg Palast, who was an "embedded" student in the rightwing economic group "the Chicago Boys" at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s, says he "didn't remember Pinochet defenders celebrating the killings--they mainly just...