The Proud Boys have been convicted of sedition for their role in the January 6th attack on the offices of the US Capitol. In this episode, I discuss the implications for the future of the case, and what it means for the alt-right movement as a whole.
00:00:00.000Hey everyone, this is Richard, and I am going to talk about the Proud Boys and the more general trajectory of the alt-right or dissident right or alternative politics or whatever you want to call it over the past five to seven years.
00:00:20.840So, as you probably have heard, the Proud Boys leadership was convicted of sedition today for their role in the January 6th attack.
00:00:37.520Uh, this comes after the Oath Keepers, a similar group, uh, maybe a little bit older, maybe more of the 90s militia types than the Proud Boys, uh, but they also faced these same charges and they also are going to prison.
00:00:59.060Now that these charges have stuck, and I presume they will stick, although the Proud Boys will surely, uh, appeal this, but these charges will stick.
00:01:14.300First off, it might open up prosecutions of other people involved in the, let's say, planning or kind of middle management of January 6th.
00:01:27.200Um, and it's also going to obviously affect how we think about that event and the narrative that will eventually win out.
00:01:38.400Um, with regard to the first point, one thing that I have found rather troubling about the prosecution of January 6th is that some 1,000 people have been prosecuted, sentenced, or faced jail time.
00:01:56.520There have been quite a bit of, um, law enforcement with regard to this matter, as there should be.
00:02:06.220Uh, but what I've noticed, and, and, and this is something I've talked a lot about in, in my discussion podcast with the group,
00:02:15.440is the, the, the fact that they, they seem to go for a kind of high, low enforcement of the law against people involved in January 6th.
00:02:26.440And I think the January 6th commission was actually integral in this.
00:02:32.600So, what I mean by that is that all of the people, more or less, who entered the Capitol, broke a window, punched a cop in the face,
00:02:45.200pooped in the corridors of power, whatever, have been prosecuted and have served time to some extent.
00:02:54.600And the, you know, again, this is hundreds of people at this point.
00:02:59.920I, I think the, the arrest total is over a thousand actually.
00:03:04.460On the other hand, uh, the January 6th commission seemed to focus like a laser beam on Donald Trump.
00:03:13.320Now, they, they certainly talked about all sorts of people.
00:03:17.820They showed images of the violence and mayhem, but it was, in effect, a show trial to convict Donald Trump.
00:03:26.860And I don't say show trial in the sense that it was meaningless, um, or corrupt.
00:03:32.240Uh, I, I say show trial in the sense that it's not an actual trial, although it seems like one.
00:03:37.420It has all the trappings and the mechanism of the trial, but no one is actually convicted.
00:03:43.840But it, it was a show trial in order to convict Donald Trump, which is fair enough.
00:03:48.780But to be honest, um, I don't feel that sorry for Trump, but I do actually feel sorry for the hundreds of people who have been arrested
00:03:59.500and who are, have FaceTime already served it or may be facing something worse and had their lives, uh, upended at the very least by the whole process.
00:04:12.640And, and by the whole stop the steal movement and by the whole Trump movement, to be honest.
00:04:18.300Uh, if I were Joe Biden, I actually would have seriously considered pardoning all of these people.
00:04:26.020And basically just said, listen, you did something really wrong and you need to face that reality.
00:04:33.840However, I'm not sure spending some time in jail is going to help you break out of that reality.
00:04:42.440Um, and in a way you were a victim of this thing just as much as the police at the Capitol were.
00:04:56.320These people were the aggressors, of course, but they were also victims in the sense that they were progressively brainwashed over the course of years by QAnon propaganda,
00:05:07.500by stop the steal nonsense, by Trump himself through his tweets, uh, through his call for a wild rally on January 6th and all this stuff.
00:05:18.020They, they, they, they acted almost like automatons, uh, an army of robots, uh, if you will, um, in order to achieve a political objective of Donald Trump and his team.
00:05:33.520So in a way they are victims and in a way I feel sorry for them.
00:05:38.120And if I were in a position of power, I might very well have pardoned them.
00:05:41.660It would have been a, an interesting gesture, a kind of Nixon goes to China gesture, which I think is, are usually the most successful ones.
00:05:49.560Now, what has frustrated me, what I find troubling is that the middle management of January 6th hasn't really been held to account.
00:06:02.280So we have all of these loons and goons who have been arrested properly and we have this, you know, specter of a prosecution against Donald Trump, but for January 6th to take place, there's a whole middle group of people who in effect have gotten off scot-free.
00:06:25.040And I think in so many ways, Jane, the January 6th committee was an attempt to whitewash the conservative movement.
00:06:34.920You know, in a way, the January 6th committee was the exact opposite of what Tucker Carlson depicted it as.
00:06:41.960He depicted it as a partisan witch hunt along with Donald Trump.
00:06:47.880It was a, it was a partisan whitewash.
00:06:50.200It was Liz Cheney's attempt to, you know, like whitewash all of her friends, the good Republicans who weren't exactly MAGA, including Mike Pence, to demonize Trump, deservedly in many ways, and to basically demonstrate that there were violent actors.
00:07:09.600The fact is, the entire conservative movement was kind of headed in this direction, and that includes many people who Liz Cheney likes and admires and wants to work with in the future.
00:07:23.140But let's, that's the background, I guess.
00:07:25.220Let's, let's start to focus on the Proud Boys themselves.
00:07:28.600Uh, so, um, four members, including Enrico Terrio, who became a leader of the Proud Boys, are going to prison.
00:07:41.900And, uh, in fact, uh, looking at this case, we haven't gone through sentencing yet, of course, but looking at this, I mean, they, they are in a whole heap of trouble.
00:07:51.480Uh, this is, according to the New York Times, the Sedition, the Sedition Charge, which is rarely used and harks back to the Union's effort to protect the federal government against secessionist rebels during the Civil War, was also used in two separate trials against nine members of another far-right group, the Oath Keeper, the Militia.
00:08:10.100Six of those defendants, including Stuart Rhodes, the organization's founder and leader, were convicted of sedition.
00:08:15.420Each of the others were found guilty of different serious felonies.
00:08:19.800On the conspiracy counts alone, the men could face a maximum of nearly 50 years in prison, and they were found guilty of other felonies as well, as well.
00:09:04.380Um, I think it's worth revisiting the Proud Boys because they're a unique group.
00:09:10.420I think if, in, in the public's imagination, and here I'm talking about the broader public, I, I think if they hear Proud Boys at this point, they probably think of them as a violent white supremacist gang.
00:09:24.000Um, that meme has been inculcated and, in many ways, it's accurate.
00:11:29.260So, Gavin, at the beginning, was currying favor with white nationalists, basically telling us that, ah, it's more or less white nationalism.
00:11:40.420You know, but America is a diverse place, so we're going to let some based African Americans and Hispanics on board, etc.
00:11:48.760That was Gavin's image of the thing as it began.
00:11:52.300Now, I was on Gavin's show many times during 2016 and even into 2017.
00:12:31.160I mean, I think he had written an article for the American Conservative or something at some point in, like, 2005, let's say.
00:12:40.060And I actually recruited him, and that recruiting meant meeting him at various coffee shops in Williamsburg, going full hipster, you know, embedding myself in hipsterville in order to get him to be a writer, kind of a columnist.
00:12:57.440So, he wrote a number of articles for me while I was editor, and then he became a kind of regular columnist after that.
00:13:07.180And I don't know what his status is at the moment.
00:13:10.060So, I think he moved on and kind of focused on doing talk shows.
00:13:17.260But anyway, by 2017, Gavin was basically denouncing the alt-right.
00:13:25.140So, he had gone from, in 2016, you know, being like, hey, guys, listen, we're on your side.
00:13:31.820Just let us do our thing, and so on, which, of course, I was fine with.
00:13:36.260And then he moved to, we're not white supremacist, we're not the alt-right.
00:13:42.480I can't believe they call you, call us the alt-right.
00:13:47.360Look, our leaders have black wives, and look at this Hispanic guy, and blah, blah, blah.
00:13:53.540So, they thought that they could gain something by basically claiming they're not racist.
00:14:02.360Now, this is something that's very typical.
00:14:05.420This is something you see among almost every conservative group for the past 50 years.
00:14:10.780But, again, the trajectory of the Proud Boys proved to be quite ironic in this regard, because I would say that even today, I bet if you found someone who's still a member of the Proud Boys, they're still going to be saying that line.
00:14:30.780Just as they're convicted of sedition against the government, they're still going to be saying, well, but we're not anti-Semitic, or we ain't white supremacists, you know, we're just American patriots.
00:14:42.220They're going to still say that line as their leadership goes to prison for 50 years.
00:14:47.500Well, they got into hot water in 2018 as well, and there was a violent altercation in New York City, and Gavin made a rather cagey and strategic decision to step away from leadership of the Proud Boys.
00:15:10.160He was, of course, the founder, and he said,
00:15:13.220As of today, I'm officially dissociating myself from the Proud Boys.
00:15:19.400And I'm reading here from an article in The Guardian, referencing the New York group as the NYC-9, McGinnis said,
00:15:27.760I am told by my legal team and law enforcement that this gesture could help alleviate their sentencing.
00:16:02.320Secondly, I don't think it really, I don't know, you know, whether there's a top guy or not, the question is whether it's a gang or is it not.
00:16:16.540If you act like a gang, you are a gang.
00:16:18.480Like, if you walk like a duck and you quack and walk like a duck, you are a duck, effectively.
00:16:22.940So it was basically a way of Gavin getting out from this group and avoiding any kind of criminal prosecution while claiming that he's doing it in support of the boys, you know, kind of thing.
00:16:37.440And from 2018 on, the group basically became one mini Charlottesville after another in Portland, Oregon.
00:16:50.180And they were kind of having these battles over nothing, in effect.
00:16:58.220The Charlottesville protest was inspired by a defense of the Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues.
00:17:07.560On some level, by 2018 and 2019, the Proud Boys were just the Proud Boys.
00:17:12.960They were going to fight Antifa basically over nothing.
00:17:16.180Now, Gavin also bragged about avoiding Charlottesville and not wanting to be involved with those white supremacists there.
00:17:26.620As it turns out, Jason Kessler, who organized Charlottesville, was a member of the Proud Boys.
00:17:34.840And yet, again, the ironic trajectory of this group is that they continue to denounce white supremacism as if that's going to gain them favor in the media, while they increasingly become an actual violent gang and eventually involve themselves in an insurrection against the U.S. government.
00:18:01.060Now, it was a buffoonish, clownish insurrection, there's no doubt, but that doesn't mean it's not an insurrection.
00:18:07.740I think there's also this kind of, like, weird quality to the alt-right of the past five years, where they want to present themselves as kind of ostensibly ridiculous, as if that will change the essence of who they are.
00:18:24.240So, you know, Gavin will say, like, we're Western chauvinists, we're, you know, the West is the best, and, you know, we invented the modern world and all this kind of stuff.
00:18:37.300And then they'll also, you have initiation rituals where you have to name five cereals while people are punching you.
00:18:44.320The Proud Boys themselves isn't named after gay pride, as I first thought, it's actually named after a song from Aladdin called Proud of Your Boy or something like that.
00:18:55.700So there's just this kind of ironic absurdity to the whole thing.
00:19:00.460And it's presented as a face on a group as if that changes the essence of what they're about.
00:19:05.840This is something you definitely saw in the alt-right in 2016.
00:19:10.880And I think the Proud Boys, which were clearly inspired by the alt-right, just kind of continued it.
00:19:16.600And they kept feeling like this game would work.
00:19:21.440This relates as well to the optics matter of post-Charlottesville 2017 and 2018,
00:19:28.980where it's all about, oh, if we just wave a flag, then, you know, this is the one weird trick that allows us into the corridors of power or something.
00:19:38.920It's this weird kind of, like, obvious deception attempt.
00:20:48.140There are super cuts of Gavin on Joe Rogan, on other podcasts, or on his own show, just directly calling for violence and directly calling for non-defensive violence.
00:21:03.880Just saying, if you see someone who looks like Antifa, punch them in the face.
00:21:07.460He said that and things like that all the time.
00:21:11.200So, again, you have this weird, like, dichotomy between, you know, thinking that you're going to get off scot-free by claiming you're not the alt-right,
00:21:23.480while you're directly calling for violence at the same time.
00:21:28.180And it just becomes ridiculous, and it ends up in a situation like this,
00:21:35.520where the leadership of the group are going to spend 50 years in prison.