Jonathan Giusto, circa late 2023
Defashsac would like to thank Jeffrey Perrine for his contributions to this exposé.
Please be aware, Jonathan James Giusto shares a name with his son, who we do not suspect of harboring the same kinds of beliefs as the elder Giusto.
Jonathan James Giusto Sr. is a violent and cowardly Proud Boy, white nationalist, and part-time neo-nazi supporter from Antelope, CA. Within the Proud Boys, Giusto serves as president of the “Cap City” splinter of the Sacramento Proud Boys chapter. He is notorious for his pattern of unprovoked violent attacks before immediately retreating to avoid repercussions.
Place of work
Business filings show Giusto’s repeated efforts to get Solution One (previously One Solution) Insurance Services up off the ground, starting in 2014, and most recently with renewed filings in June of 2022. Giusto’s license with the state insurance board shows that he is currently licensed to deal in casualty and property insurance. Archive links from a webpage showing an insurance license number matching Giusto’s company show that he offered General Liability and Worker’s comp insurance. Records also show that Guisto accepted two PPP loans for his business, one under his own name and one under the One Solution business name. In addition to his personal business, a Linkedin profile for Giusto lists him as a field rep for Smart Choice Agents, an independent insurance agency network.
Violent Attacks
Jonathan Giusto on 11/21/20, with casts on both hands. He would later change from black and orange casts to orange and yellow.
Giusto has a long and well-documented history of violent and unprovoked attacks on protesters, streamers, and bystanders. Giusto was apparently radicalized during the Covid-19 pandemic and began to appear in Proud Boy colors in 2020, when he was seen at “Stop the Steal” rallies in Sacramento and Washington DC. His recklessly violent nature was apparent from the get-go, and a comical video from the “Million MAGA March in Washington DC shows him swinging a punch, missing, and falling to the ground in an unprovoked attack on a demonstrator. The next week he would appear in two hand casts. Medical professionals have told us that this specific kind of cast is used to treat a “boxer’s fracture” (warning: mild medical gore), which is typically cased by punching a hard object with poor form.
Jonathan Giusto, along with Robert Sunday and several other Proud Boys, attack a trans teenager in Cesar Chavez park in Sacramento, 11/21/20
At a rally in Sacramento the following week, Giusto was caught on video committing three more unprovoked attacks: one on a streamer with the media group Black Zebra, a second on someone who seemed to be a fellow MAGA rally-goer, and a third on a trans teenager in Cesar Chavez Park, alongside Proud Boy Robert Sunday Jr. On December 12, he returned to DC, where videos captured him bloodied from his participation in street brawls there. On January 3, 2021, Giusto assaulted several protesters in Vacaville with pepper gel (initially believed by some to be wasp spray).
Giusto attacks a counter-protester at the California capitol, 6/5/21.
On June 5th, 2021, Giusto again committed a series of unprovoked assaults on protesters at a rally put on by white nationalist Chelsea Knight at the CA Capitol. At this event, Giusto was caught on film committing four separate assaults. In at least three, he was in full view of CHP officers (and in one case, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with an officer), but faced no repercussions, yet another stark reminder that police should never be relied on to protect us from fascism.
On February 20, 2022, two streamers with local outlet Black Zebra attempted to film a banner drop held by Proud Boys on a bridge in Rancho Cordova. Giusto attacked both streamers with a pole and chased them from the bridge.
Jonathan Giusto wipes tears and pepper spray from his eyes after being repelled from his attack on Mojos, 6/30/22 in Woodland, CA
Through 2022, attacks and harassment of pride events and other public displays of queerness became a priority for Proud Boys. On June 25th, Giusto, along with a group of Proud Boys including Tyler Greenhalgh and Brandon Revering joined the white nationalist group White Lives Matter CA to harass a children’s pride event in Rancho Cordova. Five days later, Giusto, Greenhalgh, and Revering, along with a group of Proud Boys–including at least one armed with a large knife–tried to force their way into a drag event in Woodland, only to be met with a cloud of pepper spray and repelled. In August, he was documented among a group of Proud Boys who were repelled from the would-be site of the so-called “Straight Pride” white nationalist hate-fest in Modesto.
In October of that year, Giusto and seven other Proud Boys attacked a protest against Stephen Davis, a TPUSA contributer who was scheduled to speak at UC Davis. During a 20-minute battle that saw Giusto and other Proud Boys throwing metal barricades at the crowd, Giusto sucker-punched multiple people, including at least one young woman. Two of the attacks were captured in footage from the event, showing Giusto punching unsuspecting victims in the head. One victim was not visibly associated with the protest. Medics at the event reported one woman who was carried to the medic area after being assaulted by Giusto.
Jonathan Giusto reaches the “finding out” stage at a Drag Queen Story Hour in Sacramento on 4/16/23.
Giusto finally faced consequences for his actions at an April 2023 drag story hour in Sacramento. Shortly after arriving at the event, Giusto charged a line of supporters, throwing a punch at one of them. The strike failed to connect and the single blow that was returned sent Giusto off in an ambulance. According to other Proud Boys, Giusto was drunk at the time of the event, 11:00 am on a Saturday, and photos of Giusto from the hospital showed him bleeding profusely from the head (CW: Blood, facial injury). In November of that year, a group of antifascists reported seeing Giusto among a group of Proud Boys at a gas station in Davis, following a speaking event at UCD by anti-trans bigot Riley Gaines. Giusto was reported to be bleeding from the head and missing a shoe, with one of the window on his truck broken.
Outside of direct violence, Giusto also has a history of harassment and attempted doxxing. Archived deleted tweets (which we are not reproducing here to protect those whom he attempted to dox) show that Giusto has engaged in numerous dox attempts, including at least one failed attempt to dox an author of this write-up. When other groups have also attempted to dox local individuals, Giusto has been enthusiastic about joining the harassment campaigns. When a local schoolteacher was doxxed and subjected to a harassment campaign by the right-wing disinformation outlet Project Veritas, Giusto was caught on video both at the School Board’s next meeting, where the public harassment campaign hit a crescendo, and he also showed up to harass and threaten a press conference put on by the teacher’s legal team alongside fellow proud boy and Neo-Nazi arms dealer Brandon Revering. As Proud Boys continued their harassment campaign, Giusto’s truck was seen alongside Proud Boy Jeffrey Perrine’s van while they bullhorned the teacher’s neighborhood and painted a Proud Boy logo in front of the house.
When an LGBT-affirming youth pastor was similarly targeted by Project Veritas, Giusto was again active in the harassment campaign. The Sacramento Proud Boys telegram channel continually posted content related to the campaign, including threats to show up at the pastor’s home. Giusto was there on at least one night outside the pastor’s home, when Jeffrey Perrine was cited for disturbing the peace.
Group Fractures in the Proud Boys
One thread that has continued to surface through the history of far right organization in the US is a tension between centralized and decentralized tactics. Early neo-nazis such as William Luther Pierce of National Alliance and George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party emphasized a top-down, hierarchical approach to organizing, which materialized in large, national White Supremacist organizations. After long struggles with internal strife and infiltration, KKK Grand Wizard Louis Beam advanced his own approach of “Leaderless Resistance”, in which the movement should be organized through independently operating cells without a hierarchical structure giving orders. This approach has been typified through the popularization of so-called “lone-wolf” attacks by members of the white nationalist movement, starting with the Oklahoma City Bombing only a few years after Beam introduced his concept at a Christian Identity conference in 1992.
This same tension has been running through organizations like the Proud Boys in the wake of the repercussions they have faced for their role in the January 6, 2021 attacks on the US Capitol. These repercussions were also fueled by the revelation that the Proud Boys’ national leader, Enrique Tarrio, was a “prolific” informant prior to joining the Proud Boys, and that several other prominent Proud Boys officers in the group were revealed to be regularly liaising with federal law enforcement. The resulting fallout has caused rifts in the Proud Boys organization as some members and chapters reject the national structure in favor of a more decentralized approach.
In California, a similar drama has played out, seemingly starting when the presidents of several chapters attempted to oust Central Valley (Modesto) chapter leader Sean Kuykendall. This, along with accusations of other chapters cooperating with federal investigations, has resulted in the Sacramento chapter declaring itself “autonomous”. For a while, both the Sacramento and Modesto chapters were de-listed from the Proud Boy’s listing of chapters on telegram. More recently, it appears that a new Sacramento chapter, the “Sactown” Proud Boys, featuring some members of the old Sacramento chapter, as well as some from the Placer County-based “State of Jefferson” chapter, has sprung up to challenge the offending “Cap City” faction. Both chapters consider themselves to be the “legitimate” Sacramento chapter and the other to be “fake”.
Giusto is President of the “Cap City” splinter, and his clique (comprised of members of the Cap City and the Modesto-based Central Valley chapter) aggressively pursued a campaign of violence and harassment against the LGBTQ community in 2022-23. This was a short-lived arrangement, however, and Cap City-Central Valley coalition broke ranks after anti-fascist opposition to their poorly planned attack on an April 2023 drag event saw Giusto carted off in an ambulance while the Central Valley Proud Boys’ vice president was photographed on the ground in the fetal position with his bare buttocks hanging out of his pants.
Jonathan Giusto (gray shirt) and a member of WLM-California harass a children’s Pride event in Rancho Cordova, 6/25/22
The Sacramento Proud Boys had also previously maintained ties to the closely-related white nationalist groups White Lives Matter California and NorCal Active Club. Sacramento Proud Boys would frequently share these groups’ content on telegram and joined them to harass kids at a children’s pride event in Rancho Cordova in June 2022. This alliance has broken as well, in the wake of in infamous fight between Proud Boys and an Active Club-aligned group in Portland, OR. After Giusto gloated about the Proud Boys’ victory in that skirmish through the Sacramento Proud Boys telegram channel, his posts became bombarded by nazis and he eventually turned off comments for all posts on the channel. From this and other incidents, it is clearly evident that Giusto’s personality makes him a pariah even among his far-right peers.
Ideology:
Giusto’s ideology is incoherent at best. At times, he seems to claim “anarcho-capitalist” politics, a form of right-wing libertarianism. Through the Sacramento Proud Boys telegram channel, however, Giusto has also posted in favor of protectionist policies and restrictions on free speech that fly in the face of an-cap politics. Giusto also describes himself as rejecting white nationalism in favor of “civic nationalism”, an ideology that professes nationalism for one’s current state, rather than ethnic origins. However, his chapter’s culture is overtly white supremacist, and the Sacramento Proud Boys telegram channel is littered with white nationalist content, including posts about the perceived inability of Black Americans to coexist with Whites.
The Sacramento Proud Boys telegram channel posts a quote by American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell
In the past, the Sacramento Proud Boys telegram channel has also made numerous posts quoting Adolf Hitler, other Nazi Party officials, and Gerorge Lincoln Rockwell–the founder of the American Nazi Party. In addition, the channel has promoted imagery featuring swastikas and sonnenrads (another neo-nazi symbol) and has promoted numerous explicitly neo-nazi groups, such as NSC-131 and Misanthropic Division (a Ukranian neo-nazi paramilitary group). In particular, The Sacramento Proud Boys telegram channel enjoyed a close relationship with White Lives Matter California–an explicitly white nationalist group–and NorCal Active Club, it’s neo-nazi fight club spinoff. Ties between Sacramento Proud Boys and these two groups are now severed – not because of any ideological conflict, but due to a nationwide split between Proud Boys and Active Club groups stemming from a previously-mentioned brawl that broke out between Proud Boys and Active Club members at an event in Oregon. The OR brawl itself was also less about ideological differences and based largely on existing drama between the leaders of the groups.
Giusto’s record also reflects the deeply conspiratorial mindset that is endemic within the far right. Footage from the 11/14/2020 “Million Maga March” in Washington DC shows Giusto as a prominent member of notorious conspiracy-grifter Alex Jones’ security retinue as he marched through the city, campaigning for the overthrow the 2020 general election in favor of Donald Trump. Posts on Giusto’s twitter account show his belief in “sheriff supremacy”, a pseudolegal concept that is a hallmark of the terminally conspiratorial Sovereign Citizen movement. Through the Sacramento Proud Boys telegram channel, he has also shown wide and deep conspiratorial leanings ranging from flat eartherism to the asinine belief that pyramids are an ancient source of free electical energy or that Stonehenge was built in the 1950s to “great replacement” theory and holocaust denial.
Video captured on 12/12/20 shows Giusto was present as Proud Boys presented the “Black Lives Matter” banner that they had torn off the historic AME church in Washington, DC.
Posts from the Sacramento Proud Boys channel are rife with every imaginable kind of bigotry. One post calls Jews “parasites” and “the cancer of the world”. Another proclaims “NEVER FORGET. The Jews did 9/11”. Video from December 12, 2020 also show that Giusto was present at the infamous burning of the Black Lives Matter sign that was torn off a historic Black church in Washington DC.
Giusto’s online interactions paint a picture of a narcissistic, capriciously defensive man who jumps to hostility as the smallest slight. His temperament has earned him few friends within the Proud Boys, as all neighboring chapters have cut ties and his own chapter’s membership is rapidly dwindling. Rival chapters in California have put out hit pieces on Giusto, albeit ones that simply halfheartedly reproduce the work already done by antifascists. Giusto has also become a laughing stock in Proud Boy circles after his embarrassing defeat at the a Drag story Hour in April 2023. Despite his repeated claims that others simply wish they could be him, Giusto remains a sad, garbage excuse of a human being who is deeply disliked even among those who share his repugnant views.
Proof of ID:
Jonathan Giusto loves his SF Giants hats. So much so that he often appears in the same hat in photos from his appearances with the Proud Boys (Top Row, 11/14/20; DC, 4/7/22; Davis, CA, and 8/27/22; Modesto), as in his relatives’ social media posts.
Giusto’s ID can be confirmed by matching multiple articles of clothing worn in photos sourced from social media to clothing that he’s been seen wearing at Proud Boy rallies. This includes shoes, glasses, and three different baseball caps. In Addition to this, Jon Giusto’s 2019 Ford F150 truck, which has been documented at at least 4 Proud Boy events, was also seen parked outside the Antelope address listed as Giusto’s in the business filings [pdf link] for his insurance agency. Lastly, We note that his name, “Giusto”, is most likely the source for his nickname, Juice.
Jonathan Giusto wearing the same pair of shoes in a photo taken from a relative’s social media (left) and a video taken on 11/21/20 in Sacramento (right)
Jonathan Giusto’s Ford F150 with plate number 25948E3, parked outside a Davis Board of education meeting that Giusto was documented at.