“Your kiddies are quite a nuisance,” he wrote in another tweet. “My advice: run and hide. If I find you, I WILL kill both you and your family.”

Anti-fascist activists who follow the Proud Boys’ movements wondered how the apparent leadership change might shake up the gang. After all, it still counts members across the country who are ready and eager to congregate and fight. Even though its leader is trying to bail, its members are in jail, and the government is on its tail, it’s unclear how the Proud Boys might evolve now that their ranks are crumbling.

“Will the leadership of white nationalist J.L. Van Dyke stymie their organizing? Maybe,” wrote one such activist, using the name AntiFash Gordon, on Twitter. “But only if we stop treating them like a fraternal organization and start treating them like what they are. An ultranationalist hate group led by a white nationalist.”

UPDATE: Nov. 29 — On Thursday, just days after he was named their leader, the Proud Boys dropped Van Dyke as a member and their lawyer, according to a press release on their website. The nature of his departure wasn’t immediately clear, though there were reports that he had inadvertently doxed his own members and threatened several people who reached out to him this week.