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.
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.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a comment from Gov. JB Pritzker’s office.
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.
