Surprise! The Proud Boys are turning on each other.

Proud Boy Commander Enrique Tarrio leads group through Washington D.C.

It’s never a good sign when, if you’re conspiring to overthrow the government, some of the people you’re conspiring with become known as PERSON-1, PERSON-2, and PERSON-3, because that usually means this transformation of your former conspirators into cooperators with the government you were attempting to overthrow came to your attention in a brand new indictment, and it’s an even worse sign when that indictment is delivered to you in your jail cell where you are already facing a previous indictment. 

This is in fact what happened yesterday to fellow Proud Boys Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola, and Zachary Rehl, when they were served with what is known as “superseding” indictments for seditious conspiracy to “by force” overthrow the government and “prevent, hinder, and delay” the laws thereof, namely, the counting and certification of electoral votes by the Congress of the United States.  The indictment goes on for 32 pages, includes eight other charges, and lists for the first charge alone 12 “manner and means” of carrying out the conspiracy, as well as 79 specific “acts in furtherance of the conspiracy.” 

Among them were such gems as Tarrio creating an encrypted message group which he used to “stress” to members of the Proud Boys that they were expected to “fit in or fuck off.”  Tarrio also appointed PERSON-3 to the leadership of The Operations Council, and PERSON-2 and PERSON-1 to be “Regional Leaders.”  Tarrio also established something called the “Ministry of Self Defense,” also known as the MOSD, and advised all members of the Proud Boys that the MOSD “will have a top-down structure,” with an “upper tier leadership” of three members and a “second tier” leadership of eight regional members.

If any of this is beginning to sound like planning meetings for the student council in your junior high school or perhaps the organizational structure of the Young Socialist Alliance, you are not alone in thinking so.

These guys were also using their encrypted message app to exchange photos of members tagged with names like, “The Lords of War,” and “New Years Revolution.”

On January 4, Tarrio posted a voice note to the MOSD leaders group saying, “I didn’t hear this voice note until now, you want to storm the Capitol.”  Several hours later, Tarrio was arrested for the crime of burning a Black Lives Matter flag that belonged to a local church and was ordered to leave Washington D.C.  Other members of the MOSD encrypted chat group then sent messages instructing each other to delete all the messages of the original MOSD leadership group chat that was chaired by Tarrio and then join a new, presumably “clean” encrypted chat group chaired by a member by the name of Joseph Donohoe, an unindicted co-conspirator who was was cooperating with the government.  The new MOSD chat group would include 90 Proud Boys in all, including, as the indictment put it, PERSONS 1-3.

It's never a good sign when an indictment gets around to listing actions taken “in furtherance of the conspiracy” intended to conceal the conspiracy by an unindicted co-conspirator and obvious cooperating witnesses referred to by names such as PERSONS 1-3, because the presence of evidence provided by unindicted co-conspirators and unidentified witnesses are strong indicators that the indictees have been ratted out.

Oh, boy, were they.  One of the encrypted messages that appears in the indictment exchanges radio frequencies that the Proud Boys would be using on January 6 as they “storm the Capitol” and instructs all members, “cops are the primary threat, don’t get caught by them or BLM (Black Lives Matter), and don’t get drunk until off the street.”

What Black Lives Matter had to do with anything beyond the obvious paranoia of these nincompoops is completely and utterly beyond me, but the delight taken by the Department of Justice prosecutors in writing the indictment is obvious.  The indictment lays out in excruciating detail the movements of all of the indictees on January 6, including the fact that a large group of Proud Boys “marched past” one pedestrian entrance to another entrance where “an individual whose identity is known to the Grand Jury” approached Biggs, one of those indicted, put his arm around him, they whispered briefly, and then the “individual whose identity is known to the Grand Jury” crossed the barrier blocking access to the Capitol Grounds.  The indictment notes this location was where all of the indictees illegally entered the Capitol grounds and began their “storming” of the Capitol.

It's never a good sign when you talk to someone just before you commit a crime and then that someone talks to the Grand Jury, and then his name is omitted from the indictment that has your name on it.  What it indicates is that people who you thought were your buddies, who you thought were in your “leadership group,” who were in your MOSD encrypted chat group – those are the people who stopped chatting with you and started talking to prosecutors and the grand jury.  All these fellow revolutionaries of yours, all of these members who called themselves “Boots on the Ground” and other clever things, what they turned out to be was rats.

As if that weren’t enough, the Proud Boy genius known as Joseph Biggs, after tearing down the police barricades around the Capitol, proceeded to film himself in the presence of his fellow indictees saying the following: “Dude, we’re right in front of the Capitol right now, American citizens are storming the Capitol, taking it back right now!  There’s millions of people out here!  This is fucking crazy!  Oh my God!  This is history!  This is insane!  We’ve gone through every barricade thus far!  Fuck you!”

The Proud Boys under indictment are described as ripping off police officers’ face shields, stealing their riot shields and then – get this – posting to their encrypted chat group, “Got a riot shield!”  And then Biggs is described filming himself and his fellow Proud Boy Ethan Nordeen selfie-style in front of the Capitol addressing the camera and saying, “So we stormed the fucking Capitol!  Took the motherfucking place back!  That was so much fun!  January 6 will be a day in infamy!”

Indeed.

The problem with this sort of teenage gusher of enthusiasm, of course, is that there was one last barricade they didn’t go through, one last part of the government they forgot to overthrow, and that was the one over there in the halls of the Department of Justice which had the power to throw them in cells and then walk up to the cells and hand through the bars the 32 pages of indictments all five of them are now facing, accusing them of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government.  You know the indictments I’m talking about:  the ones in which their buddies are interviewed, recorded, and quoted turning on them.

At 2:41 p.m. on January 6, after several of his fellow indictees and other Proud Boys had entered the Senate Chamber where, as the indictment reads, “the Certification of the Electoral Vote would have been occurring had it not been suspended due to the ongoing attack,” Tarrio posted this on social media (apparently Twitter):  “Proud of My Boys and my country.” 

It’s never a good sign when your “boys” turn out to be PERSON-1, PERSON-2, PERSON-3 and the other unindicted co-conspirators who were once part of your Ministry of Self Defense but who ended up talking to the grand jury that indicted you for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government.