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.

• Author: Roberts, Zach D.
• Position: Augusto Pinochet

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 wrote them off as 'a cost of doing business.'"

The modern love of Pinochet seems to have grown out of "chan culture," that vile part of the Internet where anonymous users create memes for the purpose of offending. Years before the Proud Boys were formed in 2016, users would "jokingly" threaten to "take someone on a helicopter ride." And like most terrible things from the past decade, the 4chan meme started appearing in real life.

I first came across the far right referencing "helicopter rides" at a May Day rally in New York City in 2017. There was a small group of young men heckling the mostly Latinx demonstrators in Union Square, pouring milk on a Hillary Clinton flag, and sporting 4chan-related shirts and flags. They started chanting the phrase at the press.

It's hard to track where the Pinochet memes go from there. Andy Campbell, the author of the definitive book on the Proud Boys, We Are Proud Boys, first saw it appear in Portland, Oregon, in 2017; other sources tell me the helicopters meme made it to commercially produced flags in San Bernardino, California, in June of that year at an anti-Sharia-law protest.

Wherever the meme emerged in real life, the Proud Boys were the ones that made it go national. Samantha Kutner, an expert on the Proud Boys and co-founder of Glitterpill, an intelligence company that is "dedicated to preventing terrorism and keeping communities safe," told...