“As a person whose parents came from a — fleeing a socialist country, that came to this country looking for the American Dream,” Tarrio told Fox News, “it’s kind of appalling that these Democrats and liberals are calling for socialism.”
Despite the lower third identifying him as Venezuelan American — in keeping with the geopolitical focus of Trump’s speech — Tarrio’s parents immigrated from Cuba.
Whoever selected Tarrio’s comments for inclusion in the “Fox & Friends” package could be excused for not identifying the branding of Tarrio’s baseball cap. At the time, in early 2019, the Proud Boys were still largely unknown, and their black-and-yellow aesthetic (also visible on the MAGA-hatted guy behind Tarrio) was unquestionably more familiar to extremism researchers than daytime cable-news scouts.
They might have asked Tarrio about his shirt, though. It read, “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong.”
Roger Stone is one of Trump’s oldest advisers, having not only encouraged him to run for president in 2016 but also advocated that he do so more than once previously. Stone, alongside his partner Paul Manafort (whom Stone encouraged Trump to hire on his 2016 campaign), was for decades a fixture in D.C., where he gained — and fostered — a reputation for being cutthroat.
At the time, Stone was facing federal charges of lying to Congress stemming from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He’d been arrested less than a month before Trump’s rally. To spot someone not only intimately familiar with Stone but also to the extent that they would wear a pro-Stone shirt to a rally would seem like it might warrant some probing. Fox’s team didn’t.
There was a reason Tarrio was wearing the shirt, though: He and the Proud Boys had gotten close to Stone. By early 2018, Stone, joined by Tarrio, had sworn fealty to “Western chauvinism” in keeping with the Proud Boys tradition. When Stone traveled to Oregon that March, he brought the Proud Boys with him. In May 2018, Proud Boys joined Stone in the green room of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. A few months later, Stone offered a message of support that the Proud Boys shared on their website.
As Trump’s reelection bid gained steam, so did Tarrio and the Proud Boys. Tarrio became the Florida state director of Latinos for Trump. He appeared at several Republican Party events, landing photos with prominent Trumpworld figures including Donald Trump Jr.
Meanwhile, the activities of his organization, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project reported, had become “strongly correlated with the fortunes of former president Trump.” Of the 150-plus events in which Proud Boys had a public presence in 2020, ACLED tallied, two-thirds were explicitly supportive of Trump’s reelection.
Most of those events came after Trump failed to repudiate the Proud Boys during a presidential debate. Moderator Chris Wallace asked if Trump — who’d been hyperactively demanding Joe Biden disown left-wing violence — would do the same of extremists on the right by asking them to stand down. Trump asked who he should address and Biden suggested the Proud Boys.
“Proud Boys,” Trump said: “stand back and stand by.”
This may have simply been Trump mangling the request to “stand down,” but the Proud Boys took it as a call to action.
When Trump subsequently lost the election, the Proud Boys stepped forward. In both November and December 2020, D.C. hosted pro-Trump protests that devolved into violence involving members of the Proud Boys. The December events in particular are noteworthy. Stone spoke to the crowd, conferring briefly with Tarrio at the scene. Tarrio managed to post a photo from the White House, something the Trump administration said was a function of his participating in a public tour. He also ripped a “Black Lives Matter” flag off of a church and set it on fire — leading to his arrest when he arrived in Washington on Jan. 4, 2021, for the protest at the Capitol.
Like the extremist members of the right-wing group the Oath Keepers, Tarrio and the Proud Boys followed Trump’s cue to view Jan. 6, 2021, as a pivotal moment in which to defend his presidency.
Internal Proud Boys messages offered a preview of the group’s approach to the day. On Jan. 4, Tarrio sent an internal group a voice message, including one bit of advice: “you want to storm the Capitol.” A bit later, another participant in the group wondered “what would they do [if] 1 million patriots stormed and took the capital building. Shoot into the crowd? I think not.”
Proud Boys — though not Tarrio, given his Jan. 4 arrest — were among the first people to attack police officers on Capitol Hill the day of the riot and to make entry into the building. Afterward, they celebrated.
“Jan. 6 will be a day in infamy.” — Joe Biggs in a selfie video presented as evidence in the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial this week. pic.twitter.com/K80Us4tD0c
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) January 21, 2023
About a year after the riot, after hundreds of people including members of the Proud Boys had been arrested for their roles in the day’s violence, a federal judge drew a remarkable line between the group and the former president.
“[T]he court concludes that the Complaints establish a plausible §1985(1) conspiracy involving President Trump,” D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote. “That civil conspiracy included the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, Tarrio, and others who entered the Capitol on January 6th with the intent to disrupt the Certification of the Electoral College vote through force, intimidation, or threats.”
This was just an expression of plausibility and centered on a civil conspiracy, which is more loosely bounded than a criminal one. But it nonetheless connected Tarrio and Trump in working toward a shared outcome: blocking Trump’s ouster from the White House.
On Thursday, Tarrio and three other members of the Proud Boys were convicted on federal charges of seditious conspiracy, plotting to use force to halt the finalization of the 2020 presidential electoral vote count. They aren’t the first to be convicted on such charges; that dubious honor goes to members of the Oath Keepers.
Tarrio’s conviction, though, also does something else: It brings a sedition conviction much closer to Trump’s inner circle. This wasn’t a random Trump fan caught up in the day’s fervor. It wasn’t even an extremist plotting with his allies to disrupt congress. It was a friend-of-a-friend, someone who’d tried to intertwine the White House with the fringe — with some success.
He now faces up to 20 years in prison.
