Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison on charges related to January 6. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)
Proud Boys' Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison on charges related to January 6.
Say this for the Proud Boys: They abide by their own creed. “Fuck around, find out!” members of the group, with Joseph Biggs in front, chanted as they marched down the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.
Over the last week, they’ve found out. Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, was sentenced Tuesday to 22 years in prison on charges of seditious conspiracy. Tarrio, who was not physically present at the riot after being kicked out of Washington the day before, was convicted in May. It’s the longest January 6–related sentence yet, and follows a series of long sentences announced last week for other Proud Boys: 17 years for Biggs, 18 for Ethan Nordean, 15 for Zachary Rehl—all of whom were found guilty of seditious conspiracy—and 10 years for Dominic Pezzola, who was acquitted of sedition but convicted of six other felonies. In May, Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years for sedition, in his capacity as head of the Oath Keepers, another group involved in the insurrection.
Seeing these long sentences levied now, more than two and a half years after the insurrection, is heartening. Hundreds of people have been sentenced for violence and more minor offenses committed at the Capitol, but the Proud Boys’ sentences, along with Rhodes’s, are more important, because they punish not just spontaneous violence but also a concerted, planned attack on the government.
The convictions and stiff sentences are a message about what the United States will tolerate. Juries have proved willing to convict even though the charges in question are rare and even though the likely sentences are strong. They also show that juries and judges, and not just prosecutors, are unwilling to treat the insurrection the way too many Republican elected officials have—as just a rally that got a little out of hand.
Political scientists call laws that defend democratic institutions from authoritarian threats—and the enforcement of them—“defensive democracy.” “American laws against seditious conspiracy and against advocating for overthrowing the government are quintessential defensive democracy,” Michael Signer wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year.
The Proud Boys leaders have received serious, hard-time sentences, not slaps on the wrist. This is true even though the prison terms are short of both the federal guidelines and what prosecutors requested (33 years for Tarrio and Biggs, 30 for Rehl, 27 for Nordean, 20 for Pezzola). Such sentences would verge on draconian, given the crimes involved: The conspiracy was dangerous and appalling, but also feckless and obviously doomed. (For comparison, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was jailed for two years before being released without trial.) And it’s true even if the men don’t end up serving the full terms, as is common—though their unrepentant attitudes suggest that they’re banking on pardons from a restored President Donald Trump, not early releases.
Notably, for the purposes of a sentence enhancement, Judge Timothy Kelly ruled that the Proud Boys’ actions represented terrorism, even as he gave them less time than the guidelines would stipulate. The defendants were aghast. “I know that I messed up that day, but I am not a terrorist,” Biggs protested at his sentencing. But Kelly, and common sense, said otherwise. Americans may be accustomed to the idea that terrorists are foreigners, most likely Muslims, but what the Proud Boys did on January 6 amounted to “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government or civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives,” which happens to be the FBI’s textbook definition of terrorism. It doesn’t matter that they were American-born or believed that they were in the right.
Speculating about the deterrent impact of the strict sentences and terrorism label would be premature, but the long sentences will take a direct bite out of the groups. The Proud Boys have since January 6 seemed to shift their efforts into grassroots involvement in local government, which could give them a lasting grip even with their top leadership locked up. The Oath Keepers, which centered around Rhodes, may be in more dire straits.
These are positive indications about the strength of American defensive democracy, but they are not the final answer. Another test will come in the trials of the many people involved in what I call the paperwork coup—the series of extralegal (though often lawyerly) attempts to subvert the 2020 election. Recent indictments from Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis demonstrate how the various tendrils of this effort were intertwined. They add up to a scheme that was less blatant and less violent than the January 6 riot, but also a greater threat to the integrity of the election system. Will juries and judges recognize that peril, or will they treat it as bumbling paper-pushing?
Also unresolved is the larger question of Trump. If Tarrio and other Proud Boys deserved to have the book thrown at them, and if the rank-and-file rioters are serving their time, the justice system still hasn’t proved whether it can sufficiently hold the man all of this was designed to benefit—and who, if the prosecutors are to be believed, orchestrated much of it. Even as the highest-profile Proud Boys cases are finishing, Trump is only now facing charges in Washington and Fulton County for his own role in the election plot.
While those cases slowly ramp up, though, Trump remains the strong favorite for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and would enter a rematch with President Joe Biden with something near even odds at victory. As my colleagues Quinta Jurecic and David Frum have recently pointed out, the best and perhaps only way to contain the danger Trump still poses to the American system is to defeat him at the ballot box—in other words, putting the democracy in defensive democracy.
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