Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs, left, prepares his fellow right-wing marchers to retreat and march to the other side of the Willamette River.

While covering the Aug. 17 Proud Boys invasion of Portland the weekend before last, I took a ton of photos. My camera is in many ways my notebook (especially now that it has video/audio recording capabilities) when I cover these things. This was my 16th such event.

I was struck afterward by the many faces I had captured, and the kind of story they told that can’t be put into words—and how they also dispel a certain mythos around these far-right street brawling groups.

The first thing you will notice is that most of these people came intent on getting into fights. My experience at these events is that nearly all of them are fairly eager about it; it seems in many ways to be their main motivation for getting on a bus and trundling into the downtown of a city they acknowledge hating.

You can see it in the body armor and the weaponry, though I didn’t happen to see any guns that day, as I have during previous rallies. You can see it in their banners and their scowls, and I could hear it in their chants and shouts.

And you can see it in their faces. Not all of them, of course—these Proud Boys were also very much enjoying themselves even without the usual side of street violence. But you can also see the anger, the fear, the paranoia. What you mostly see, to tell the truth, is their utter ordinariness. This is not to normalize their extremism, but to emphasize something those of us who monitor the far right have long known: Namely, that these extremists look and talk and generally behave like everyone else, at least when they are on broad public display. That’s exactly how they succeed at spreading the virus.

In the end, it seems best to let their faces do the talking. Here are 45 of them.