Four Proud Boys leaders convicted of sedition for Capitol assault

A jury convicted Thursday Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, and three other members of the ultra-right group. for seditious conspiracy for attempting to thwart the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2021 U.S. election. This is the most significant conviction arising from the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Jurors also convicted the four men – who also include Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl- for conspiring to obstruct congressional proceedings on Jan. 6 and wreaking havoc on government property. The jury did not agree on the seditious conspiracy against a fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, but found him guilty of obstructing congressional proceedings on that now-black date in U.S. history, as well as several other felonies.

Proud Boys is a neo-fascist and supremacist organization. created by Canadian journalist Gavin McInnes, founder of Vice, and which in recent years has been noted for attacks on indigenous peoplepeople of color, Muslims and women. McInnes was born in the UK in 1970 but grew up in Canada and in 1994 founded Vice magazine in Montreal along with Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith. Seven years later, McInnes settled in New York where, from being a politically incorrect provocateur who had founded an alternative punk magazine, he became an extremist who tattooed the word Destruction on his back.

In 2003, in an interview in The New York TimesMcInnes uttered a phrase that would later become the foundation of Proud Boys: “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of.”said the Canadian writer. A year earlier, in an interview with The New York Press, McInnes, then a symbol of the hipster movement, had already made his racial preferences clear by declaring his satisfaction that Vice’s office in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) was in an area of white population and not of “fucking blacks or Puerto Ricans”.

“In favor of love, diversity and tolerance? That’s hippie.”McInnes added in a derogatory tone while insulting racial minorities, homosexuals and transgender people. His misogynistic thinking was also soon portrayed when he reduced the phrase “‘No’ means ‘no,'” the basis of the concept of sexual consent and one of the slogans of the feminist movement, to “puritanism.”