January 6th 2021 was one of the most dramatic
moments in recent American history. Supporters of Donald Trump stormed Congress in a
bid to keep their man in power. And the consequences continue to reverberate today…
A jury in the US finds members of the Proud Boys group guilty of seditious conspiracy.
But the man who has been given the longest sentence for his part in the riot wasn’t even in
Washington that day. Enrique Tarrio was the leader of a far-right group called the Proud Boys.
No
body will understand the Proud Boys until you’re in it. I think it’s a regular group of
men that are just tired of being trampled on. I’m Mike Wendling and in this week’s episode
of Trending’s Extreme series, we’ll hear extracts from exclusive interviews with Tarrio -
including from behind prison bars - as we take a look at the extremes of American politics.
From this point forward enough is enough. Force will be met with force.
We’ll hear from others who belong to extreme political grou
ps, and
look at how they rally, recruit, and spread their messages on social media.
Even social media is becoming quite polarised, and quite political, and I think that's
something that we're going to see a lot more of. This call is from a correctional facility
and is subject to monitoring and recording. Hello. Hey. Hey, how's it going? Oh, hey. I first started speaking to Enrique Tarrio
back in early 2020. I was covering people on the far right and the far left and spent
some time with a
nti-fascist protesters, and then with militia groups. but there was this
one group, the Proud Boys, they were starting to pop up in headlines and newspaper reports. And
every time there were TV reports about protests, it was something about the Proud Boys, and
I kept hearing this name Enrique Tarrio. So how have you been feeling since the sentencing? I mean, I think I'm still like, it's
unrealistic to me. That number’s just ridiculous. I'm sorry for what those people
went through, but I'm n
ot responsible. Last month Enrique Tarrio
was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the riot
in Washington on January 6th 2021. And the reporter he’s talking to is Maxine Hughes, one of our colleagues who’s been covering
extremist groups for nearly a decade. She’s had a front row seat as Donald
Trump’s presidency divided the country, embedding with some of the leading figures
on the violent fringes of US politics. Ladies and gentlemen repeat after me. I am a
Western chauvinist. I
am a Western chauvinist. The Proud Boys were one of the main far-right
groups present at the Capitol riot and, until recently, Tarrio was their leader. We’re all Proud Boys. We’re all Proud Boys. They’re a club that began in the white-hot
heat of the 2016 presidential election - the one that Donald Trump actually won. Since then,
they’ve become known for their street violence, their heavy drinking, and their hatred of
left wingers. They claim to be upholding traditional values and they call
themselves
freedom-loving ‘Western chauvinists.’ Last month Maxine and I were in the
courthouse when Tarrio received that 22 year sentence for his role in the Capitol riot. During his sentencing hearing we
watched as he said he felt ‘shame’ and admitted that even before January
6th he had doubts about the so-called ‘Big Lie’ - Donald Trump’s claim
that the 2020 election was stolen. Yet it was that claim that prompted people to
storm the Capitol, and Tarrio has been named as one of the mai
n instigators. What do we know
about this man and what led him to this point? When you get to know about this guy, you learn
that he's an Afro-Cuban who's grown up in Miami, he still has family in Cuba and strong
links there. He didn't ever look like the other far-right leaders. Tarrio initially told me
that his raison d’etre was about stopping Antifa, which is a leaderless far-left protest
movement who often counter and clash with far-right groups both online and offline. The Proud Boys fe
lt that America was under attack,
that it was under attack from the far left, from socialism, from communism, and
that they had to get out and defend it. And when I spoke to Tarrio about Antifa
in 2020 he compared the movement to domestic terrorism - which is an accusation
I’m sure they would strongly reject. I believe Antifa does have the right to free
speech. I’d be contradicting my own views by saying that they don’t. I think they do need
a voice in this conversation. I think every Amer
ican needs a voice in this conversation, but
the line is very simple where we draw it. It’s violence. Acts of vandalism, burning down private
businesses, shooting people in the street. That’s terrorism, what you’re trying to do. You’re trying
to enact political change through violence, acts of violence. That’s exactly what terrorism is.
I was sitting with him a few years ago in Florida. And this was at a point where he had said
he was going to stand back from the Proud Boys, and he wanted
to go into mainstream politics.
But he was never really able to do it in the way that he really maybe wanted to.
And he’d taken this route that had led him to this path of extremism.
Nobody will understand the Proud Boys until you’re in it for a good amount of time and
start understanding what it is. I think it’s a regular group of men that are just tired of being
trampled on. They feel like they were forgotten. And once he got a taste for it, that was it. He kept just going
further and
further down this hole. Well I think all of us are
silenced for the most part. The media is never going to portray us properly. “The media is never going to portray us
properly” - it’s a complaint you hear often from groups and individuals on both
the far left and right. Groups that often claim to represent the mainstream of American
politics. And sure, things like “traditional values” or “anti-fascism” can seem like
common-sense political views. But there is one thing that marks these grou
ps out from the
mainstream - their willingness to use violence. While Tarrio insisted the Proud Boys
were just a ‘regular group of men’ who drew the line at acts of violence,
in places such as Portland, Oregon, demonstrations involving the Proud Boys would
frequently descend into brawls and beatings. That’s not to suggest that the Proud Boys were the
sole instigators of violence at these events. But according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event
Data Project, in the year the Capitol wa
s stormed, 2021, nearly a quarter of all demonstrations
attended by the Proud Boys included violence. These men may have felt forgotten,
but their activities garnered enough attention to warrant a mention by Joe Biden and
Donald Trump during a presidential debate in 2020 in a response to a question about
white supremacist and militia groups. Proud Boys, stand back and stand
by, but I’ll tell you what. Before the debate stage mention, we had
22,000 Proud Boys worldwide. And it's not hard to
see that our numbers
have been doubled since then. From my conversations with Enrique Tario, I’m not sure whether he truly believed
the election was stolen or that it was possible for it to be stolen. But the majority
of the group he was leading did believe that, and I think he felt pressure to stick to the
narrative. I think he was in a position where he had no other choice in a way - and Donald
Trump kept reinforcing this line too of course. Tarrio himself wasn’t actually in Washington
DC on January 6th - he’d been arrested and ordered to leave the city two days before.
But prosecutors used messages he posted on Telegram and another social network, Parler,
to argue that he both planned the Proud Boys operation and encouraged people to join
in the violent assault on the Capitol. A group Tarrio set up on Telegram
was called “the Ministry of Self Defence”. On the day of the riot Tarrio
wrote: ‘make no mistake, we did this.’ At the trial of Tarrio and four other Proud Boys
e
arlier this year, prosecutors introduced into evidence an enormous stash of messages
demonstrating how they planned to show up in Washington, and talked for weeks about
violence and civil war. Tarrio was convicted of a number of felony crimes including seditious
conspiracy, a charge just short of treason. And while messages were instrumental
in the prosecution of Tarrio, Proud Boy chapters around the US show no sign
of slowing down their online activities. On Telegram there are at least 36
different US
Proud Boy chapters. That’s not the full picture, because some chapters aren’t active on
the platform and other channels may be private. But the ones we can see have a
total of tens of thousands of followers. We looked through some of the
recent messages across these groups, and found posts in support of the Proud
Boys being sentenced for the Capitol riot, calls to free them and descriptions
of them as “political prisoners”. When I spoke to Tarrio recently from prison, he was p
retty clear that whilst he was
sorry for what had happened at the riots, because he wasn’t present in Wahsington DC that
day, he won’t apologise for his role in it, he says he didn’t do it. I think that what his
sentencing shows is, regardless of whether he was there on the day or not, activity online
can have offline, real-world consequences. And the ongoing investigations into the
events of January 6th aren’t contained to what happened on the day of January 6th, but
events both offline a
nd online around it. In the call I had with Tarrio from prison, he
made an allegation that prosecutors and the FBI offered him leniency if he would help
them prove that he communicated indirectly with President Trump during the build up to the
attack. This wasn’t the first time he’s claimed this either - the Washington Post and New York
Times have also recently reported this claim. They wanted to offer me a plea. Oh, I see. But what did they offer you? They didn't tell me because I didn't
v
erify their version of the story. What's their version of the story? They wanted me to confirm that I was communicating
with the president through three degrees of separation of people. Somehow we're communicating
together to coordinate whatever the **** it is that happened at the Capitol. Again, it sounds
like a cool Tom Clancy novel, but it's not true. Trump says he didn’t know who
Tarrio was until recently. I contacted the US Department of
Justice about this claim and they told me they a
ren’t able to
comment on ongoing matters. I also contacted Tarrio’s lawyer to ask
if he could corroborate the story. His lawyer said that he could confirm
that this meeting did take place, but he wasn’t able to comment
on what was said in the meeting. We do know from court records that
Tarrio was offered a plea deal, but Trump wasn’t mentioned in the official
documents. And if the former president did come up, maybe it was just an example of
prosecutors pushing for more information. But i
t certainly suits the narrative
Donald Trump is trying to build that he is the victim of a witch hunt… is that why
Tarrio is so keen to tell reporters about it? We’ve heard how social media was instrumental in
helping Tarrio and others plan the Capitol attack, and we’ve seen how social media
helps glue together and galvanise different Proud Boy chapters, even
as their leaders face long prison sentences and Donald Trump faces
his own laundry list of legal woes. But what about the role socia
l media
could play in not only facilitating the organising of violence but also in enabling
the recruitment of people to extreme groups on either side of the political spectrum - and
pushing their views and actions even further? As well as the Proud Boys, Maxine also
followed other organizations operating at the extremes of US politics - a movement
called the three percenters on the right, and a loose collection of anti-fascist “Antifa”
activists on the left – both of which were actively i
nvolved in organising and recruiting
on social media. And both sides are armed. The militia itself is a well-armed populous.
We’re citizens, you know, one. Two, we have the right to bear arms, so you bring those two
components together and that is the militia. Chris Hill was the leader of the Three Percent
militia in Georgia - the name of the movement, which includes many disparate groups,
refers to a shaky historical theory, that just three percent of the
population of the American coloni
es actively resisted British rule during the
Revolutionary War in the 18th century. At one point, Chris Hill was a pretty popular
guy who was getting large groups of people to give up their free time, dress up
in military gear and spend weekends in the forest training for what they
thought was going to be a civil war. We have treason happening in the United States of
America, so I want my country back. We will defend ourselves in our communities and our fellow
Americans from what we see is
a communist you know act of terrorism being perpetrated on the
people from these left leaning organisations. Chris Hill was prolific on Facebook at one time,
back in 2019 and 2020 - it was what Chris Hill was using to get his message out and recruit people.
And I think it was successful in reaching a wider more mainstream audience. I was there in a
forest in Georgia at one of their training weekends back in 2020 and there were several
new members who had come along who said they’d seen the
postings on Facebook and decided
to join. But Chris Hill became increasingly concerned about using Facebook so he started to
demand the group stop using Facebook messenger to discuss plans for protests, and move to
what they deemed would be safer platforms. While Chris was initially using social
media to bring members into the fold of the Three Percenters, on the other side of
the political spectrum social media videos of George Floyd protests were prompting a
woman named Emily to become
more involved in the political activism of Antifa.
Antifa are against oppression. That’s why Antifa are involved in the Black Lives
Matter movement. It’s kind of interesting to watch the way my own views of it have changed. I
remember saying the words ‘I’m not a crazy person’ because of the way the media has decided to spin
Antifa or the way it has been spun in the past. Emily is from Portland and she’s always been
very left-wing. She started to adopt Antifa as an identity for herself and
she got more and
more involved. It just completely took over her life to the point she lost her job. And she
herself describes herself as being radicalised. When I am not there, I feel
like I'm letting my people down. And if something were to happen to
somebody that I love, and I wasn't there, that would be heartbreaking. On nights off,
I think we all do it, just like furiously scrolling through social media or watching live
streams to make sure that our friends are safe. As Emily and Chri
s traveled further
down their social media rabbit holes, being fed content confirming their
realities and feeding their frustrations, it would only be a matter of time before
clashes between their respective groups came to a head - as we saw in August 2020
at a protest that took place in Georgia. Atlanta Antifa, we got your banner.
We’re gonna meet you August 15th, Stone Mountain Georgia. You’re traitors to the
constitution, you’re traitors to our way of life, and from this point forward e
nough is
enough. Force will be met with force. I think for me the scariest experience that
I had was when there was a protest at Stone Mountain in Georgia. It was militia groups there
mostly the Three Percenters against the far left anti-fascist protesters. And both groups on that
day were armed. And we got to a point where they were close and started shouting at each other,
hurling insults at each other. And at one point, somebody from the left side pulled a gun out.
He didn't point it, b
ut he did pull it out in quite a threatening way. As soon as he did
that, all of the militia lifted their guns, and these are, you know, AR rifles. And there we
are standing right in the middle of both sides. I think largely a lot of anger is because
people feel that they're not heard. Hi Chris, it’s Emily. How are you? Chris. Nice to meet you. Likewise. Shall we? So just the day after these Stone
Mountain protests in Georgia, you decided to bring Chris and
Emily together. Tell me about the
backstory of getting them to meet
and what happened when they did? I think that came from these comments
that both sides would say they don't want to talk, they don't want to communicate,
they just want to protest. They just wanted to fight. And both sides would say that
about each other. And so I thought, well, let's try to get them together,
and get them to communicate. A while back, you were talking about, you
know, anti-fascists arming themselves, and that you took issue with that. Wh
at makes
that different from you and your militia? They're arming themselves because they want
to shoot people that don't agree with them. As someone that's close with
the anti-fascist movement, I would express to you that it's about
protection. You know, we see how heavily the right has armed themselves. How is that not
supposed to want us to arm ourselves as well? Well, yeah, I feel like from that
one point of view, then yeah, you will use the second amendment to defend
the voice of the
people. But those two voices are totally different. And it comes down
to this, which side is going to uphold and defend the Constitution from all enemies,
foreign and domestic? Which one is going to try to tear the country down and bring
about some sort of socialist, communist, Marxist anarchy utopia, governing system? You’re
trying to change our constitutional republic. They were able to have a reasonable discussion.
I think they both obviously, were aware of the cameras on them and so th
ey didn't want to come
off as the more unreasonable one. But essentially, I think they both wanted the dialogue. I
think that they both went into it knowing that they couldn't change each other's
mind, but they still wanted to be heard. I hope that this conversation maybe helped
you to understand that we're not terrorists, and to maybe humanise anti-fascism. Understood and I’d reciprocate. I would hope
that out of this conversation you would see that, you know, a constitutional militia
is
not a racist organisation. There's obviously a big election
coming up next year in the United States. You've seen these people up
close at various extremes. What kinds of roles do you think they might play
as America chooses its next president? I think the next few months are going
to be very interesting. You do have a bit of a split with Republicans now because
you have the very far right, you have MAGA, and then you have the kind of more old guard
Republicans who wouldn't necessarily go
out on the streets and defend Donald Trump. And that
to me is almost more dangerous in a way because it kind of ignites and allows the more niche
extreme groups to be able to organise as they feel like they're really fighting the fight. I
think we saw that with the Proud Boys. They felt like they were defending patriotism, they were
fighting for Donald Trump. And when Donald Trump didn't win the election, they felt they had to
get out there and try and do something about that. And how do yo
u think they’ll use social
media to continue to advance their agendas? I think what is really interesting to me is that,
just like the media, social media in America is now very partisan and polarised. So you have
people on the right who will probably go to Telegram and obviously, they go to truth social
to talk to Trump fans, and then you'll have more people on the left who may still be on Twitter,
for example. So even social media is becoming politicised and I think there's something
tha
t we're going to see a lot more of. Let’s remember that both the far left and the far right
mobilised because of Donald Trump’s presidency, and with Trump running again, that could
easily mean the potential of more civil unrest. That’s it for this episode of
Trending, thanks for listening, I’m Mike Wendling and my thanks to Maxine Hughes
for bringing us this story and to our producer Kayleen Devlin and our editor Flora Carmichael.
If you want to get in touch with your thoughts on this or any
of our other programmes you
can email me michael.wendling@bbc.co.uk
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Regular group of boys! That's why they're called the proud boys. because their kids.
قرآن میں لکھا ہے کہ اچھا انسان کبھی مسلمان نہیں ہوسکتا اور مسلمان کبھی اچھا انسان نہیں ہوسکتا۔
If you like Chocolate comment here
Who trampled you! You might be better off if you would back off with the hate.
Peaceful americans ✝️
Trampled on by? If you think it's too tough to live in America then move to Gaza,see how good life is there