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Since their founding in New York City in 2016, the far-right Proud Boys have cultivated a rough and ready image, often declaring: “We don’t start fights. We finish them.”

But on Monday, jurors in State Supreme Court in Manhattan rejected claims by two members of the group, who had said they had been acting in self-defense last fall on the Upper East Side when they took part in the beating of four people described by the police as anti-fascists connected to a loose-knit group called Antifa.

The two defendants, Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman, were convicted on charges of attempted gang assault, attempted assault and riot for their part in a melee after an appearance by the founder of the Proud Boys at the Metropolitan Republican Club on East 83rd Street.

That brawl mirrored clashes in other cities that had pitted far-right groups, calling for “free speech” or chanting nationalist and racist slogans, against leftists, including Antifa, who have physically confronted those they deem to be fascists or Nazis.