The Daily - The Proud Boys’ Path to Jan. 6

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

This episode contains strong language.After a nearly yearlong investigation, the congressional committee examining the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will begin holding televised hearings on Thursday.One focus of the hearings will be the Proud Boys. The trajectory of that group, which grew out of a drinking club in New York City for men who felt put upon by liberal culture, has now led to charges of trying to overthrow the United States government.Guest: Alan Feuer, a reporter covering courts and criminal justice for The New York Times. Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: A federal indictment has charged five members of the Proud Boys, including Enrique Tarrio, its former leader, with seditious conspiracy.How Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys founder, went from Brooklyn hipster to far-right provocateur.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. After a nearly year-long investigation, the Congressional Committee examining the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol will begin holding televised hearings this evening. One focus of those hearings is expected to be the Proud Boys, a right-wing group that was just indicted on federal charges of trying to overthrow the government for its role in the attack. in the attack.

Today, my colleague, Alan Foyer, on the Proud Boys' path to January 6th. It's Thursday, June 9th. So, Alan, what is the story of the Proud Boys? Where did this group come from?

The Proud Boys was founded in 2016 by a guy named Gavin McInnes. McInnes, who is a Canadian by birth, ended up moving to New York City where he helped co-found a company called Vice. If you recall, back in the day when Vice started, it was a kind of sex, drugs, and rock and roll magazine that sort of reveled in being adventurous and highly offensive. And McGinnis came out of that edgy, hipster Brooklyn culture. Got it. McGinnis came out of that edgy, hipster Brooklyn culture. Got it. So he ends up leaving Vice under bad circumstances with his co-founders. And if you ask McGinnis how the Proud Boys came into being, he will tell you that when he left Vice.

Hello, everyone. My name is Gavin McGinnis. Welcome to the Gavin McGinnis Show. He started a podcast-y kind of thing called the Gavin McInnes Show. We're bringing back hedonism, stupidity, ugliness. We're getting rid of taboos. We're getting armed, and we're having fun. And I hope you'll join me. And he would get together his friends, sometimes in the studio or elsewhere out in New York City,

and they would sort of have a drinking club of like-minded men. And we started an organization here at the show called the Proud Boys. And we have these meetings where there's, we just did one on September 11th, 50 guys show up, we take over the whole bar. Who get together, as he once described it to me, like the Shriners or the Elks might do. We lock people out who aren't proud boys, cheer USA, read from Pat Buchanan's Death of the West.

To sit around free of female companionship, drink beer and sort of grouse about their position in the world. And you feel this tsunami of patriotism going on here, especially with young men, where they go, we tried being ashamed of ourselves. We tried this sort of sabotage society thing.

I think I'm going to enjoy my greatness now. And that's what I love about Trump. But this idea that the Proud Boys are merely a drinking club, it obscured something more serious. I'm a Western chauvinist. I think the Western culture is the best. McInnes creates this slogan where he says, you know, if you're going to join the club,

you have to say, I am a Western chauvinist and I refuse to apologize for helping to create the modern world. Isn't it amazing that that's controversial? Well, what does that mean? So, McInnes' view of the world is that Western culture has been wrongfully derided as sexist and racist by a kind of Marxist liberal view of the world. And he is out there to tell men, Feminism isn't about equality anymore. It's about taking masculinity away from men. They shouldn't be ashamed to be manly men. I mean, Western culture is pretty darn white.

Sorry. He's out to tell white people they should not have any kind of, like, racial guilt for being who they are. I'm just really talking the way you talk, but I'm not being shy about it. This world's becoming a dangerous place, and the only way to navigate it is by not being careful, not watching what you say, and being really fucking offensive. So, you know, in some sense, you could think about all of this

that I'm describing as phase one of the Proud Boys. Certainly that's the way McInnes has described it as this kind of informal drinking club for dudes who feel put upon by modern liberal culture. Got it. But what he does is he manages to tap into a larger angry male grievance. And that is kind of how the Proud Boys begin to develop a real-world following.

Mm-hmm. And when you say male grievance, I immediately think of Donald Trump. So it's no coincidence, right, that the Proud Boys are essentially formed as Trump is in the midst of his presidential campaign. And what brings the Proud Boys out of their phase one informal stage into a much more politicized and frankly, much more violent iteration is when right-wing celebrities like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter do these pro-Trump conservative speaking tours, and a lot of them are provocatively designed to appear on college campuses, and there is a counter-response to them by students. Violent protests erupting overnight at UC Berkeley. Before this event could even begin, response to them by students.

Violent protests erupting overnight at UC Berkeley. Before this event could even begin, it was shut down because... Campus lockdown as more than a thousand people rallied against the appearance of a controversial editor from Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos. And Gavin McInnes actually has a run-in with a leftist crowd himself. He has a speaking engagement at NYU. Crowds show up to protest. There's a lot of chaos. And so he personally decides that it's time

as sort of self-proclaimed tough guys to get involved. And what ends up happening is that he and members of the Proud Boys fly to wherever Ann Coulter is speaking or Milo Yiannopoulos is speaking, and they just form a phalanx around the speakers as they come and as they go. around the speakers as they come and as they go. What happens after these college campus skirmishes is under the rubric of protecting conservative speech, the Proud Boys grant themselves license to become what amount to street vigilantes.

And they are not shy to use their fists and their bodies to get involved in those situations. So they say, we are doing a march for free speech. Come join us in this liberal bastion, whether it's Portland, whether it's Berkeley. in this liberal bastion, whether it's Portland, whether it's Berkeley. I personally believe that we should come back every single week until they understand what America is about, and it's about freedom of speech. They are kind of joining with a coalescing coalition of other right-wing groups to be proactive in getting out in the street, mobilizing under the guise of free speech,

thumbing their nose at the people in those communities. And frankly, you know, expecting to get a response. Racist! Transgression! And the inevitable happens. These provocative street events attracts leftist counter-protesters, and there is conflict and violence in the streets.

So they're evolving from acting as security guards for conservative speakers to now becoming provocateurs, going to liberal cities and staging these so-called free speech rallies. And it sounds like intentionally courting conflict with liberal activists in those cities. That's right. It happens in the spring and summer of 2017 over and over and over again. And it was around that time when I started to see these things happening almost week in, week out that I reached out to McGinnis for the first time to sort of see, like, what are you guys doing? And his answer was really something along the lines of, we are fighting the tyranny of the left. They, the Proud Boys, and he saw himself kind of as a Trump supporter being attacked by leftist activists and bearing the brunt of an angry left wing.

And he saw himself as a kind of vanguard on the right, fighting back against that. Got it. So then, okay, so that was his take on all of this. But I pushed him a little bit on this. And his answer was very telling. He said, well, we just like to fight. Hmm.

It's interesting. I remember around this time, there's this concept on the right in the Trump era of owning the liberals. The phrase was owning the lips. But it was rhetorical. And it sounds like what the Proud Boys are up to at this moment is we're going to own the lips physically. We are physically going to get into fights with America's left.

Yeah. It's a hyper macho culture geared toward expressing politics through a fist. So obviously, what all of this conflict and chaos leads to in 2017 is the extremely disturbing and bloody events that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of that year. And if you recall, what happened was... One people, one nation, and immigration! There was a rally... That was here.

That was billed as Unite the Right, that brought together the most toxic elements of white nationalists, neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate groups. Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Nominally to protest the removal of a Confederate-era statue in Charlottesville. Right. Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! So that event was organized by a guy who was a member of the Proud Boys. Now, McInnes himself did not go to Charlottesville. Uh-huh. did not go to Charlottesville.

In fact, he made a public plea for people in the Proud Boys not to go. Why? There was a genuine debate at that time on the right about sort of how much to embrace overt white nationalism. There were clearly groups, those at Charlottesville amongst them, who were perfectly fine with declaring themselves to be white nationalists or neo-Nazis for that matter. McInnes made a public declaration that he himself did not want to be associated with those particular groups, and he didn't want the Proud Boys to be

associated. He tried to draw a line in the sand, however successfully or unsuccessfully, between himself and those groups, even though some of his own membership was clearly involved in the events of Charlottesville. Right, which became known primarily as a white nationalist kind of showdown, and a violent one that ended up killing a counter-protester. Absolutely. It was the high-water mark of white nationalism in many senses, publicly speaking, right? But it is absolutely after Charlottesville that things begin to gradually change for McGinnis and his involvement in the Proud Boys. Explain that. So he really no longer wanted to be the face of the Proud Boys sort of after the debacle of not only Charlottesville,

but a sort of continuing series of violent episodes that were just sort of disastrous for the group. Interesting. And what he ultimately does is he consciously steps back from the leadership of the group and more or less appoints his successor. And the guy that he chooses really couldn't in many ways be more different than himself.

He chooses a guy named Enrique Tarrio. Do you want to describe your ethnic background so they understand? So my parents came, my grandfather came from Cuba back right after the revolution. And they're definitely not white. Tarrio is a guy from Miami. He is of Afro-Cuban heritage. And of course, that is notable in the year that followed Charlottesville to appoint a guy who is not white to run this group.

Right. Many organizations and institutions have labeled you all as a hate group or white supremacists. So how does that make you feel? As you can see, that white supremacy thing, I don't even have to argue that. 90% of the people sitting in this room are of Latin descent. I mean, there is within the Proud Boys, it should be said, a kind of large contingent of Latino men who come from countries that experience communism. And so they come at it with a very anti-communist point of view.

And so they join the group sort of through the lens of anti-communism, but yet conflate that anti-communism with kind of like a fear and loathing of your ordinary American liberal, right? So it's like that all gets compacted together. And so it is Enrique Tarrio who very much ushers the Proud Boys into what you could think of as the kind of third phase in the group's development. And what I mean by that is that despite, or in some sense, because of all of the negative headlines that the group has gotten, its membership starts growing, right? You have Proud Boys chapters in like, you know, rural Tennessee at this point. And they start to kind of have a more militaristic look to them. You know, the Proud Boys had always kind of

had a uniform of these black and yellow polo shirts. But now you start to see guys in like paramilitary gear, flak vest-y, body armor kind of stuff. Interesting. Some are carrying weapons, you know, in ways that you didn't quite used to see. And the way that this third phase kind of reaches its fullness is at the moment when

President Trump's re-election campaign, right, leading up to the 2020 election, kind of collides with the massive street protests and racial reckoning that emerges from the murder of George Floyd. Right now in Portland, in addition to the violent Antifa, the Proud Boys, a violent right-wing group, has shown up. You start to see Tarrio and his lieutenants leading these kind of marquee marches. marches, counter protesting the Black Lives Matter marches. You see them with shields here. Both sides have been throwing things back and forth, launching projectiles, paintballs being shot back and forth.

projectiles, paintballs being shot back and forth. It just seems like every time there is a Proud Boys event, it ends with some people getting beat up. If our mere presence causes people to want to commit acts of violence, we're not afraid to defend ourselves. And then you also see the same thing on a very, very local level in places across the country. In Salem, Oregon, meantime, there was a quick physical battle between some supporters of President Trump and counter demonstrators. We saw it in Georgia with the Proud Boys protesting. In Michigan, fistfights and violence as members of the Proud Boys, labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center,

were confronted by anti-racism protesters. Police there saying that there were some fistfights and a couple of people were arrested. fistfights and a couple of people were arrested. So as this hot summer of 2020 turns into the fall, the election coming nearer and nearer, there is a push by the Democrats to kind of have Trump disavow these groups that are kind of clearly fighting in his name. You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left-wing extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups? And the Proud Boys find themselves in the white hot center of that argument in a presidential debate in September of 2020. Give me a name. Give me a name. White supremacist and white supremacist.

White supremacist and white supremacist. Stand back and stand by. But I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. And the Proud Boys, almost in real time, respond to Trump's words on social media, essentially saying things like, standing by, sir. I mean, Trump's words were read internally by the Proud Boys absolutely as a validation and perhaps as some sort of invitation.

What kind of invitation? Well, I mean, basically to keep on doing what they had been doing since Trump was elected. And of course, what they ultimately are standing by for is this crazy, unprecedentedly chaotic post-election period that results in January 6th. We'll be right back. So, Alan, take us from this defining moment where Trump seems to endorse the Proud Boys to January 6th?

Sure. So the Proud Boys end up placing themselves very front and center in these massive street rallies that take place almost immediately after Trump loses and the election is over. And in December, things turn particularly violent. I mean, after the daytime rally ends, the Proud Boys stay on the street and they end up at an historic black church in Washington. And a group of them pull a Black Lives Matter banner off the church and they set it on fire right there in the street. And then there's a clash with leftist counter-protesters, and people end up getting stabbed, Proud Boys amongst them. And one of the things that comes out of this is that Terrio goes to Washington on January 4th, and essentially, as he steps off the airplane, he is taken into custody, charged with

burning the banner. He also happens to have on him two high-capacity magazines with the Proud Boy logo. He's charged, and a local judge, as he awaits the disposition of his case, essentially essentially bans him from Washington. This is two days before the huge January 6th event, and he will not be there that day. Got it. So what exactly is the role of the Proud Boys, sans its leader in Washington, on January 6th? Sure. So the Proud Boys, interestingly enough, do not go to President Trump's speech near the White House at all. literally moments before the joint session of Congress is to meet to certify the final results of the presidential election.

One of the Proud Boy leaders is intimately involved in sort of the first conflict that occurs between a protester and the police. There's a guy who's no evidence that he's involved with the Proud Boys. He is seen on video talking with one of the Proud Boy leaders. Within one minute, that guy separates himself from the crowd, walks alone up to a metal barricade where the police are arrayed, and starts to sort of agitate and shake the barricade, he's joined by others, and within minutes, that barricade falls. Boom. The riot has begun. Hmm.

So, what do you make of that? Well, that guy's name is Ryan Samsel. He's a barber from Pennsylvania. And he was interviewed by the FBI. And he told the FBI that when he went up to this Proud Boy leader, his name is Joe Biggs, Biggs said, I want you to go agitate with the cops, go confront the cops. And when Samsel said he was hesitant and didn't want to do it, Samsel claims that Biggs flashed a gun,

questioned his manhood, and said, do it. Whoa. Now, Joe Biggs adamantly denies that story, and Joe Biggs has not been charged with flashing a gun or anything like that. Nonetheless, that is Ryan Samsel's account of how that whole thing unfolds and what is really the tipping point

of the entire riot on January 6th. Now, that interaction that I just described, it's kind of emblematic of how the Proud Boys operated writ large that day. What do you mean? Well, for example, there are messages that the Proud Boys were exchanging in real time that the government has seized as part of its investigation that show members of the Proud Boys sort of talking about riling up the normies, you know, sort of like getting normal people, you know, hot and bothered and ready for action that day. I mean, that's apparently what happened with this guy, Ryan Samsel, that we were just talking about. Right.

And there are other instances in which the Proud Boys can be seen encouraging others to move forward at key moments, removing barricades so that crowds have a clearer access to the building. And this kind of happens over and over again throughout the day. But, of course, there are members of the Proud Boys that sort of take the initiative themselves. Most famously, there's that guy with long hair and a beard. He's got a plastic police riot shield. And he's shattering the very first window of the Capitol that leads to like the first breach of the building itself. That guy is a member of the

Proud Boys. Wow. But the lawyers for the Proud Boys will adamantly, fiercely deny that there was any sort of prearranged plan to storm the building. They say the evidence is not there. Regardless of that, we have spent hours looking at videos of the day, and they speak for themselves in many ways. And you can see the Proud Boys engaging in this behavior at different moments, at different parts of the Capitol, over and again. It sounds like you're saying you don't really have January 6th play out in quite the way that it did

without the Proud Boys doing what they did. Well, I certainly expect that when the January 6th committee holds its sort of first public hearing tonight, that we're going to hear some version of just that argument. The committee is poised to put two witnesses at the very least in front of the cameras. One of them, fascinatingly enough, is a documentary filmmaker who was embedded with the Proud Boys in the entirety of the post-election period and, of course, was with them on the ground on January 6th. The other witness is a Capitol Police officer who suffered a terrible concussion in that very first struggle at the barricade

with Ryan Samsel that we were talking about before. I'm curious, Alan, how you think the January 6th committee will be thinking about and talking about the Proud Boys in relation to Donald Trump, the interplay and the links between the two. Because from everything you've laid out, those links are very meaningful. So I would expect that the committee will attempt to draw some sort of connection between things that Trump said and things that the Proud Boys did. And I think one of the instances they will point to is that three weeks before January 6th, December 19, 2020, Trump gets onto Twitter. And for the very first time, he announces the January 6th rally. The operative words in the quote are,

be there, we'll be wild. Literally within a day, according to court records, the Proud Boys react. One Proud Boy leader says to the other something along the lines of, we need to get radical and get real men together for this January 6th event. Now, look, there's no evidence to be clear of like direct connection between what Trump was saying and what the Proud Boys did. Trump was not on a secret cell phone texting Enrique Tarrio in the dark. That said, if you kind of float up in the air about 30,000 feet, what you can see is that January 6th speakers were there and the Proud Boys responded by protecting these speakers.

There was this kind of mounting unrest and tension in the country over Trump's policies and swirling issues of white identity and all that kind of stuff. And the Proud Boys inserted themselves into those battles. And of course, they're front and center on January 6th. Right. The Justice Department will sort out the details in the end, one hopes. But you can just see a kind of like big block pattern emerging. Right. An interplay, a kind of call and response between Trump and the Proud Boys.

Yeah. Or the Proud Boys. Yeah. Or the Proud Boys and Trump. Sure. So, Alan, where does the fallout from January 6th leave the Proud Boys? What is the state of that organization since January 6th leave the Proud Boys? What is the state of that organization since January 6th? Well, the Proud Boys found themselves as a chief target of the Justice Department's investigation almost instantly after January 6th. And there was a series of indictments that were rolled out through 2021 that literally are continuing as recently as a few days ago. And they have kind of become increasingly more serious, the latest of which accuses Terrio and four other Proud Boy

lieutenants or leaders of seditious conspiracy. And that is the most serious charge that the Justice Department has lodged against any of the more than 800 people total who have been charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol. And can you explain why is Tarrio himself being charged with that? You said he was not in Washington on the 6th. That's right. So the Justice Department acknowledges that Tarrio was not there, but they have accused Tarrio of kind of creating the command and control structure, their words, that went into January 6th,

being on the private encrypted communications with the Proud Boys in real time, and ultimately celebrating what unfolded that day by texting his group after the Capitol was breached saying, we did this. Wow. Yeah. And so that's why he has found himself in this seditious conspiracy indictment. But what the Proud Boys have done in response to all of this pressure by the Justice Department is they have essentially undertaken a purposeful

strategy of lowering their profile. And they have decided purposefully to engage in politics at the local level. What do you mean? Well, so it looks like a couple of different things. You will find Proud Boys in the last, call it, year plus, have been very involved in local protests against mask and vaccine mandates. You will find Proud Boys involved in repeated protests that have taken place at school boards against critical race theory and the teaching of LGBTQ curricula. And you will also find Proud Boys making a concerted effort to run for local office in their hometowns. One of the most glaring example of that is in Miami, Enrique Terrio's hometown. And the Proud Boys have essentially created a foothold of power on the leadership committee of the county Republican

organization. They have a small group of people that have gotten elected to what's essentially the steering committee for the county operation there. And what's remarkable about that is that two of those people are facing criminal charges. They've been indicted in connection with the attack on the Capitol. Wow. And don't forget, the irony here is that this Miami-Dade County Republican organization was created or, you know, recently built up by Jeb Bush. And so it was the kind of premier country club loafers with no socks Republican organization. And now it's essentially been infiltrated by members of the Proud Boys. So Alan, a group that says it started as a drinking club and clearly evolves into something

far more menacing and violent. A group capable of assaulting the U.S. Capitol and trying to block a presidential transition is now trying to start a new chapter in which its members are engaging in the traditional political process. I'm curious what you make of that. Well, look, you know, on the one hand, it's a good thing when a group that has spent nearly half a decade embracing violence on the streets, you know, culminating in the Capitol attack, has at least nominally put that aside and given the political process itself a chance, right? Less violence, more politics is sort of, by definition, a good thing. That said, it's pretty clear that the Proud Boys haven't abandoned violence and intimidation as a tactic altogether.

I mean, what's undoubtedly true is that this group has decided that their next goal is to get a seat at the table. And so the question that raises, for me at least, is what's more dangerous? Having an extremist group staying out on the fringes and wreaking havoc in the streets, or having them with a seat at the table and having access to real political power? Well, Alan, thank you very much. Thanks, Michael. Thank you. The first televised hearings of the January 6th Committee will begin tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern

and continue throughout the month of June. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to another day. We don't want you to think of Lexi as just a number. She was intelligent, compassionate, and athletic. She was quiet, shy unless she had a point to make. But she knew she was right. She so often was. She stood her ground. She was firm, direct,

voice unwavering. On Wednesday, parents of the children killed during a mass shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, delivered emotional testimony about their experience to members of the House of Representatives and demanded action from the lawmakers. So today, we stand for Lexi. And as her voice, we demand action. We seek a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. We understand that for some reason, to some people,

to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns, that guns are more important than children. Among those testifying was Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter, Lexi, was 10 years old. Somewhere out there, there's a mom listening to our testimony, thinking, I can't even imagine their pain.

Not knowing that our reality will one day be hers, unless we act now. A few hours later, the House voted to pass some of the most aggressive gun control measures in years, including raising the minimum age for the purchase of most semi-automatic rifles to 21, and banning high-capacity magazines. But the legislation has little chance of being adopted by the Senate, where lawmakers are negotiating a far more modest piece of legislation focused on creating a federal red flag law and expanding background

checks for gun buyers. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Muj Zady, Diana Nguyen, and Michael Simon-Johnson. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Lisa Chow, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landferg of Winderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.