Billboard promoting far-right group Proud Boys springs up in southern
Illinois
[August 19, 2025]
By Molly Parker
BREESE, Ill. — A billboard rising from a Clinton County cornfield near
Breese that appears to be a recruiting tool for the Proud Boys — a
far-right extremist group tied to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol
— has touched off outrage in the small southern Illinois community.
The sign is located at Old U.S. Route 50 and St. Rose Road, about 1,000
feet from the entrance to Central Community High School. It lists a
local phone number for people to call. Repeated calls to a phone number
on the recruiting billboard went to a voicemail that is full.
Federal prosecutors secured seditious-conspiracy convictions against top
Proud Boys leaders for their roles in the Capitol breach, including
former chairman Enrique Tarrio, who received a 22-year sentence; he was
pardoned by President Donald Trump along with others involved in the
insurrection when he returned to office for a second term in January.
Originally the billboard was sitting atop another sign for Hospital
Sisters Health Systems of Springfield, which has hospitals in southern
Illinois, including Breese. At 4 p.m., a worker for Lamar Advertising
was moving the Proud Boys billboard to the other side. A spokesperson
for HSHS acknowledged that the billboard was placed above its existing
hospital advertisement.
“An external company sells these billboards individually and we
appreciate that the public and our patients understand there is no
connection between HSHS and any message or organization represented on a
billboard above ours,” the company said in a statement.
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Proud Boys as a hate group,
and the Anti-Defamation League describes them as extremist; Canada
designated the Proud Boys a terrorist entity in 2021. The United States
does not maintain a domestic “terrorist list,” but FBI memos have
described the group as an “extremist group with ties to white
nationalism,” according to media reports.
After the Proud Boys were found guilty of vandalizing an African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., during a December 2020
pro-Trump rally, the church sued the group and Tarrio for hate crimes,
vandalism, and conspiracy. A Superior Court judge in Washington granted
the church a $2.8 million judgment and the rights to the group’s
trademark. But the far-right group has continued to use the name anyway,
according to news reports.
Clinton County Board Chair Brad Knolhoff told Capitol News Illinois he’d
received calls and emails and had asked the county state’s attorney to
review what, if anything, the county can do.
“I have forwarded to our state’s attorney just so he can look at it,” he
said. The county, he explained, typically regulates “the size and the
location” of a billboard, “but the language, we don’t … and I would
estimate, the reason that that’s never been the case is just because
we’re not really the arbiters of speech. The U.S. Constitution is pretty
clear on freedom of speech. I think a billboard really falls in that
lane no matter what it says.”
Knolhoff said some residents were expected to raise the issue at Monday
night’s county board meeting, though the agenda was already finalized
last week. “It’s not an action item that we have,” he said. Still, he
encourages anyone to speak during the public comment period.
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A billboard promoting the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group,
appears in a cornfield in Clinton County, Illinois. (Molly Parker,
Capitol News Illinois)
Breese resident Drew Kampwerth, who lives about a mile and a half from
the billboard, said she first saw it at the end of last week. “It is
sickening that they are putting it in front of a high school,” said
Kampwerth, 30, who has four young children.
She said she’s concerned that the billboard “is putting out feelers” to
impressionable teenagers in a predominantly white community. “They are
letting people know there is a safe space for hate and I think that’s
wrong,” she said. “This shouldn’t be made normal in our community,”
Breese Mayor Kevin Timmermann repeated multiple times that the billboard
is on county land, though his city is the closest to it. He said the
city’s legal counsel has cautioned him to “watch what we are saying
about it.”
“For me personally, I am very opposed to this. I am totally opposed to
it,” Timmerman said. “I am concerned about it, yes. But right now I have
no authority over that sign.”
Gov. JB Pritzker’s office denounced the placement of the billboard,
saying it has no place in Illinois.
“A few wasted advertising dollars will not change the fact that there
are millions of Americans who, regardless of political affiliation, know
them as an extreme fringe organization that does not reflect who the
people of Illinois are,” governor’s spokesperson Alex Gough said in a
statement.
Bill Freivogel, a journalism professor with a media-law background at
Southern Illinois University, said the law gives governments little room
to police billboard content, meaning the county “can’t force the Proud
boys to take down their billboard,” he said. That doesn’t mean they
can’t protest the content, he said, adding, “they could buy a competing
billboard.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has long set limits on when offensive or
incendiary speech can be restricted. In Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, the
Court ruled that speech is protected unless it is intended and likely to
incite imminent lawless action. In that case, Ku Klux Klan leader
Clarence Brandenburg invited television cameras to a rally where
Klansmen burned a cross, carried weapons and delivered racist,
anti-Semitic speeches. That precedent has been tested repeatedly since.
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government
coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily
by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
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