Excerpted from Right Richter, a weekly newsletter on right-wing media.

The first-ever Right Richter Special Report covers the phenomenon that is the Proud Boys adult “Western chauvinist” fraternity. It’s like Old School, but with uncomfortable racial and sexual subtext!

I suspect that the Proud Boys will soon get a good amount of media attention, now that antifascist protesters crashed their founder’s NYU speech last week. Unlike many alt-right developments that have scored press, the Proud Boys actually do have members who show up to real-life events.

Be warned, though: this is a mindbender. As one right-wing critic of the Proud Boys said in a video explaining their rules: “I shouldn’t know about any of this… I can’t relate to anyone in my life anymore.”

Consider the Proud Boy: An angular young white man stands in what looks like a poorly decorated frat house.

“Ready, go…Cheerio!” he says, before getting punched in the face.

A friendly beating ensues. He’s well on his way to being a Proud Boy.

(Update: The Proud Boy initiation video above went private, but here’s footage of a second-degree initiation.)

Proud Boys Origins: Where does a young man looking for fellowship turn to in a world where, according to some, masculinity is a sign of shame? To hear Vice co-founder turned neo-masculine reactionary Gavin McInnes tell it, the answer is the Proud Boys, a “pro-West fraternal organization.”

Launched last year by McInnes, the Proud Boys take their name and #POYB hashtag from “Proud of Your Boy,” a song in the Aladdin musical.

Aladdin apologizes to his mother for his rascally ways. When McInnes heard the song at a school recital, though, he thought that no one could truly be proud of a boy singing such an apologetic song. McInnes, a newly former Fox News contributor who says he quit the network because it wasn’t conservative enough, now looks to move the Proud Boys from his own fan club to something more significant.

The Life of a Proud Boy: Today the Proud Boys’ public Facebook group has thousands of fans, with several requests daily for admission to the private Facebook group.

They’re starting to make news — Proud Boys scrapped with antifascist protesters at one of McInnes’s speeches, and one account from “antifa” activists describes Proud Boys in “Make America Great Again” hats brawling with protesters at the Berkeley riots outside a Milo Yiannopoulos last week. A Proud Boy apparently got roughed up in the action.

The Proud Boys operate on tenets that McInnes has been pushing in his second career as a right-wing provocateur: unapologetically rowdy and pro-Trump, the Proud Boys operate under the credo that “the West is the best.”

The Proud Boys welcome gay and non-white members — as long as people of color who hope to be Proud Boys “recognize that white men are not the problem.” Other Proud Boy doctrines are similarly politically conservative and lame, including “glorify the entrepreneur” and “venerate the housewife.”

What a World: The Proud Boys were thrilled with Trump’s election:

Proud Boy Ethos: Being a Proud Boy seems to be mostly about getting drunk and shoving antifascists. A Politico video shot on inauguration weekend sums up what a Proud Boy meet-up is like: weird pseudo-intellectual stuff and street scuffling with leftists. McInnes reads from Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West, leads the Proud Boys on a march to the Deploraball — and licks a protester’s face along the way.

The rambunctious but socially awkward vibe is very odd-kid-in-middle-school-who-isn’t-really-a-nerd, or guy-who-got-into-a-fraternity-only-because-he’s-a-legacy. Which leads us to…

The Masturbation Thing: A recurring trope on various parts of the fix-your-life internet, whether it’s Reddit’s “nofap” page or pick-up artist forums, is the idea that abstaining from masturbating will bring about a wholesale life change.

McInnes promotes a similar idea called “#nowanks,” saying that masturbating more than once a month drains one’s interest — especially for millennials — in sex. The caveat: Proud Boys can always masturbate within a yard of a woman, with her consent.

Proud Boy Initiation: Proud Boys membership operates on three degrees. The first is just declaring yourself an “out” Proud Boy. The third is getting a Proud Boy tattoo — in a prescribed font, naturally — and keeping with the masturbation regimen.

Getting a shot (or not!) at the third level, though, means running a true gauntlet at the second: the cereal punching. In this initiation, Proud Boys enthusiasts punch a hopeful (albeit not around the face or testicles) while he cries out the names of cereals.

You must get the crap beaten out of you by at least five guys until you can name five breakfast cereals. If you hammer out, “Chex, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, and Special K” in a matter of seconds, you’re free to go. If you get flummoxed by the punches and cannot think straight, well, sorry, you’re going to get pounded.

This sounds like nonsense, but it’s real.

Proud Boy “Culture”: The Proud Boys have a uniform — a black Fred Perry polo shirt with yellow stripes. (Coincidentally or not, Fred Perry is also a popular brand for skinheads.) They have a catchphrase, “uhuru,” a slogan they cribbed from a video calling for reparations over slavery.

They also have a fan song that centers on the “Uhuru” refrain, and it’s weirdly catchy.

Proud Boy Feuds: Naturally, an alt-right, all-male movement is riven with feuds, both internal and external.

Despite how bizarre their politics can look from outside of Trump circles, the Proud Boys actually fall on the moderate side of the alt-right.

On far more extreme sites like the Daily Stormer, writers blast McInnes as a “cuck” for refusing to discuss the “JQ.” That’d be the “Jewish Question,” or the deranged idea that a Jewish conspiracy runs the world.

One video, shot in a mocking take on the Proud Boys usual throwback 1980’s style, summarizes what Nazis don’t like Proud Boys:

“We’re the Proud Boys, we don’t talk about race / I even let a black guy fuck my wife in my place. Don’t talk about Jews. Please, don’t talk about Jews. Please.”

What to Make of the Proud Boys: I think the Proud Boys are too weird to ever become more than an oddball off-shoot of the alt-right. Their name is terrible, and who wants to hand over their sexual activities to Gavin McInnes?

Still, the Proud Boys offer a bizarre, structured look into the new era of white male identity politics. It’s one that’s willing to fight, even if their looks are very bad.