Last week, a landmark verdict found Enrique Tarrio and three other Proud Boys leaders guilty of “seditious conspiracy” in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. Federal prosecutors in D.C. successfully convinced a jury of the far-right group’s deep involvement in the Capitol attack, detailing their planning and execution, which included arranging travel, acquiring weapons and tactical gear, and using covert communication channels for coordination. The Oath Keepers, a paramilitary organization, faced a similar verdict recently—prosecutors said Monday that they will seek 25 years in prison for the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes—emphasizing the collaboration between extremist groups in their attempt to disrupt the transfer of power.
The verdicts, obtained using Civil War–era laws, are a watershed moment for American extremism, and would have been unthinkable until recently. But do they mean the Justice Department’s post–Jan. 6 crackdown is working? Extremist violence on the rise. What does that tell us?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University and the head of the school’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, was cautious in answering those questions after the verdict. The author of Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right, Miller-Idriss said the effort to stop the flow of radicalized people into the Proud Boys is only beginning, and while the verdicts are historic, they may distract us from a deeper threat. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: What was the reaction to this verdict in extremism circles?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Everybody feels, and should feel, that it’s a good day for democracy, to see that there’s a real consequence. It’s a serious consequence, and it stuck. They proved seditious conspiracy. That’s amazing, I’m glad that the message is out there.
But at the same time, from the prevention position—I can’t help but think, how many resources do we have to keep putting into the security, the carceral end of the spectrum? After Jan. 6, I think the change in budget was $2 billion just to improve security at the Capitol. We have a tiny fraction of that for prevention. We keep securitizing—lockdowns of the city every time there’s an inauguration, more fencing. Which, once something criminal has happened, obviously you have to go down that path. But I would like to see just as much energy into, like, preventing people from going down these rabbit holes of propaganda. We’re seeing record-breaking hate crimes, a steady rise in every form of domestic violent extremism, and rising support for political violence. More and more people are headed down that pipeline. It takes a tremendous amount of resources to keep locking people up. Where is the effort in preventing it to begin with?
Aren’t the seditious conspiracy verdicts pretty major?
I was really surprised after the Oath Keepers verdict, in which six of them were found guilty of the same charge. I was like, “Oh my God, that’s the first time in decades we’ve seen that.” It’s a charge that goes back to the Civil War. It’s rare. It’s hard to prove. But after those Oath Keepers were found guilty, it was less surprising to see it on the Proud Boys case.
Whether that actually acts as a deterrent to anybody is still an open question. But it’s absolutely important to hold people accountable for what they did, which was trying to stop the certification of a U.S. election. It’s not quite treason, but it’s—the next step would be treason.
How are members of the Proud Boys, or other similar right-wing groups, reacting to the news?
Here’s the thing. I think it’s really important to note that the arrests and the charges didn’t really slow the Proud Boys down. They just pivoted to other opportunistic issues and trends that are out there. So, now they’ve hopped onto the “drag show story hour” bandwagon. They’re showing up, protesting either violently or with the whiff of violence. It’s part of the awful normalization of political violence that they’ve helped bring about. It no longer seems surprising to have violent, potentially armed people prepared to enact violence at a children’s story hour at a library. This stuff has spilled into every domain of our public lives—libraries, school board meetings, local bookstores, etc. They’ve been active over the last several months. They’re just moved on to other things.
One of the important stories here, I think, is that there’s a lot of focus on the seditious conspiracy charges and the nature of the Jan. 6 attack. But it’s really important to remember that at heart, they are a supremacist organization. They call themselves Western Chauvinists. They’re bigots, they’re homophobic, they’re Islamophobic, antisemitic. Many of their members post awful, racist things online. That doesn’t come up in this trial because that’s not part of what they’ve been charged with. But their members are a part of the toxic cultures online. Both Canada and New Zealand consider the Proud Boys a terrorist group. They’re not just a handful of guys who plotted something on Jan. 6. And if this isn’t deterring them, we have to think about it in a much more upstream way. Like, what is it that makes people join these groups? And how can we prevent that from happening to begin with?
Some extremist groups have adapted and gotten smarter after the Fed crackdown after Jan. 6. Could this verdict have a similar effect with the Proud Boys?
All of these groups adapt really quickly. We saw this with the “Boogaloo movement” changing their name to, like, “Blue Igloo” or “Big Luau.” And then they all start wearing Hawaiian shirts because it represents luau. There’s this constant morphing, game-playing, and changing of codes or symbols. That militia group in the kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer in Michigan used emojis in texts as a communication strategy because stuff gets really hard to prove in court when you’re arguing a series of emojis means that they were planning to blow up a bridge. We’ve seen data showing that when the KKK was banned from Facebook, they migrated to VKontakte, and then they started using Cyrillic letters, and then they were able to get back onto Facebook using Cyrillic letters. All of these groups constantly do it. I actually think it’s part of what makes it fun for them. Like, it’s getting around the bans, figuring out ways to subvert power with secrecy and game-playing. It’s especially fun for young teenagers in online spaces who do it with codes, memes, symbols, or whatever. And I think we see the same thing here. Not only does it not act as a deterrent to join the groups, they think they have to get better at not getting caught, and moving on to other targets. The Proud Boys are kind of agnostic right now about their targets. They’re just causing mayhem. They’ve moved on from political targets to social ones.
But couldn’t that reduce their reach in recruitment efforts?
Yes, it might. We saw that with The Base. We’ve seen with other groups, that when they’re disrupted, they become less powerful. But I think it’s really important to remember that only somewhere between 7 and 15 percent of all the violent terrorist attacks come from the far right. The vast majority of violence that we see, including on Jan. 6, is not tied to anybody who’s a member of a group. As a society, we tend to focus on the groups, partly because for 20 years after 9/11, we were obsessively focused on Islamist forms of terrorism with really clear hierarchy and a chain of command.
You can disrupt a group if you can go after the leaders. We’ve done it in Charlottesville. We’re doing it here. It’s one way to tackle it and give us a sense of efficacy. But it’s not the majority of the problem. I think it’s great if it prevents people from joining this particular group. But just one group getting disrupted doesn’t make me feel any better about the state of extremism. Because there’s always another one to come take its place or reassemble it.
What do you expect will happen with the Proud Boys now that their leadership seems to have been severed?
I think that’s an open question still. With other groups, we’ve seen them maybe go dormant for a little while and then different leaders step in to reassemble it. But it also depends on how long people are in prison for. They come right back out after a few years, sometimes, and they’re right back plotting other attacks, as we’ve seen often. These groups get disrupted. They get arrested. They go in, depending on how many years they’re in for. They have time to plan and to plot, and then come right back out. That is the historic cycle. These sentences are probably going to carry much longer periods of time in prison. So hopefully we won’t be seeing that kind three-to-five-year cycle where people pop right back out. But I think it’s still an open question to see what happens with the leadership vacuum.
Do you expect any surprising broader implications of this verdict on the far-right extremist movement as a whole?
It’s just a reminder to me that the carceral/securitized/surveillance model as our only strategy for countering violent extremism is not only inefficient and ineffective, but can also cause all these potential backlash effects down the road. Either because people think it’s part of a conspiracy, which deepens the distrust of the government, or because you’re locking guys up who become further radicalized in prison, and we’ve seen that repeatedly. So, we don’t know if that’s going to happen here or if these guys are going to get sentences that are long enough that it actually doesn’t matter. To me, it’s just a reminder that this can’t be the best and only solution that we have. Obviously, we have to pursue it when something illegal has happened. But there’s got to be something more.
