\n<\/p>\n
When Enrique Tarrio picked up the phone, the first thing he wanted me to know was that he was pushing through a four-day hangover. This was on Monday, and he had just returned to Miami from WestFest, an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas in which Proud Boys from around the country gather for hard drinking and general debauchery, basically a \u201cfrat party,\u201d he said. But with that out of his system, Tarrio\u2014who has long been one of the far-right group\u2019s key leaders\u2014found himself stirred by a more pressing preoccupation: all the people he wants to get fired.<\/p>\n
Over the past several days, Tarrio told me, he has activated an \u201cextremely effective\u201d network of Proud Boys to scour the social web, find posts celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, identify the individuals involved, and persuade their employers to fire them. In many of these groups, people celebrate over growing tallies of firings, which they refer to as \u201cscalps,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s funny because this was a tactic that was used on us from 2017 forward. We got deplatformed, debanked,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt sucked for us. I always said I wouldn\u2019t do it back to anybody. But since then, I\u2019ve been incarcerated for something I didn\u2019t do,\u201d Tarrio said, referring to his conviction of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. \u201cSo I\u2019m in a different mindset right now. An eye for an eye right now.\u201d In 2023, when officials announced that Tarrio had been sentenced to 22 years in prison, they emphasized that \u201cno organization put more boots on the ground\u201d on January 6 than the Proud Boys, who were, under Tarrio\u2019s direction, \u201cat the forefront of every major breach of the Capitol\u2019s defenses, leading the on-the-ground efforts to storm the seat of government.\u201d (In January, Tarrio was released from prison as part of Trump\u2019s blanket January 6 pardons.)<\/p>\n
In recent days, Tarrio told me, he and the rest of the Proud Boys have been mostly focused on targeting employees in government and higher education, but his white whale is far more prominent: the left-wing influencer Hasan Piker. Tarrio told me that his campaign to get Piker kicked off Twitch wasn\u2019t about anything \u201cin reference to Charlie.\u201d As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber recently wrote, Piker condemned the shooting and anyone who attempted to justify it, though he has at times used his own violent rhetoric in the past. Piker was temporarily banned from Twitch earlier this year, when he said people who truly oppose Medicare fraud should \u201ckill\u201d Senator Rick Scott. Still, Tarrio seemed to sense that the post-assassination cultural climate would be friendly to an attempt to go after Piker. \u201cI was banned\u201d from Twitch, he told me, \u201cand I didn\u2019t say half the shit he did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tarrio told me that he and other Proud Boys have teamed up in a group chat with other right-wingers who all want to get Piker kicked off Twitch by running a bigger and more sustained version of their other active mass-firing campaign. They have been circulating Piker\u2019s past controversial statements to companies that advertise on Twitch, in an attempt to pressure the streaming platform, he told me.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s one more federal agent that\u2019s coming after me,\u201d Piker told me over the phone late on Tuesday night, joking about Tarrio\u2019s reported history as a federal informant. (Tarrio previously told Reuters that he did not \u201crecall\u201d ever having worked undercover in this way, but today he told me that he \u201cnever denied it.\u201d He added: \u201cAs a matter of fact, I said it on my podcast.\u201d) In May, Customs and Border Protection briefly detained Piker, a natural-born U.S. citizen, when he returned to the country from an overseas trip. He did not seem particularly concerned by the Proud Boys\u2019 campaign against him. Piker said he has weathered attacks from groups with \u201ca lot more institutional persuasive power than the fucking Proud Boys.\u201d (I also asked him about the comments that got him booted from Twitch earlier this year. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a call to assassination,\u201d Piker said. It was an attempt to say that Rick Scott shows that Republicans \u201cdon\u2019t actually care about Medicare fraud.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The Proud Boys\u2019 efforts are part of a larger campaign to punish Kirk\u2019s critics, and those who have celebrated his killing. \u201cCall them out, and hell, call their employer,\u201d Vice President J. D. Vance said on Monday while guest-hosting an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show<\/em>. Based on a rough tally of companies that have publicly confirmed Kirk-related firings and disciplinary action, dozens of people have lost their jobs in recent days: A pilot for American Airlines was \u201cremoved from service,\u201d according to the company. The operator of a Texas Roadhouse in Florida. An employee of Freddy\u2019s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers. Many observers have pointed out the resemblance of the firing campaign to online mobs circa 2020, and the entire episode has reignited debates over the difference between free speech and social censure. Tarrio told me that these efforts have resulted in more than 100 people being fired and counting.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, across the right, militias and similarly styled groups have reacted to Kirk\u2019s death by turning it into a recruiting opportunity. Hours after Kirk was shot, last Wednesday, the Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes said on Infowars that he was \u201crebuilding the Oath Keepers\u201d to do \u201cprotection\u201d work. \u201cIf my security team had been at that event, if they had been up there on the high point, looking for potential threats, they would have saved Charlie Kirk from being shot,\u201d Rhodes said. He claimed that he was writing a proposal for the Trump administration on how he could activate militias across the country, Wired<\/em> reported. (My attempts to reach Rhodes were unsuccessful. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.)<\/p>\n Other far-right groups have been more visible in recent days. Members of the white-supremacist group Patriot Front marched through a vigil for Charlie Kirk in Orange County, while its leader spoke at a vigil in Texas. (Patriot Front achieved minor notoriety in recent years when some of its members were arrested. They had crowded into the back of a U-Haul truck en route to a LGBTQ demonstration, local law enforcement said at the time, and five of them were later convicted of conspiracy to riot.)<\/p>\n Amy Cooter, who tracks militias as the deputy director and a co-founder of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, told me that after Kirk\u2019s death, she has also witnessed an uptick in calls to action among smaller, less formal militias. Such groups can be brittle; however, they can be \u201cmore extreme and more comfortable with violence than what we see from a typical militia unit,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Whether or not the Oath Keepers, Patriot Front, and similar groups will actually benefit from Kirk\u2019s death is an open question. Although Kirk veered into extreme positions that sometimes overlapped with such groups (Kirk aligned with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on election denialism and flirted with rhetoric on race that echoed Patriot Front), far-right militias have been firmly relegated to the political fringes.<\/p>\n Patriot Front has held many marches over the past several years, similar to their tour through the vigil for Kirk in Huntington Beach, to limited results. It has been operating since 2017, but experts estimate its membership to be in the low hundreds.<\/p>\n The Oath Keepers have fared even worse in recent years. In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that there were only five remaining Oath Keepers chapters, after finding 79 just two years prior. Some members and former members remain divided on Rhodes\u2019 role in orchestrating the Capitol insurrection, and his leadership more broadly. \u201cAmong the groups I\u2019m following, they aren\u2019t paying attention to him whatsoever,\u201d Cooter told me. But, she noted, the thing that has caused so many Oath Keepers to depart from the group is what attracts others in. \u201cI can never rule them out,\u201d largely because of \u201cRhodes\u2019 ability to come off as somewhat close to Trump.\u201d That perceived proximity to the president is still a draw for some potential recruits.<\/p>\n Yet many of these groups don\u2019t want to associate with one another. \u201cI just think they\u2019re retarded,\u201d Tarrio said after I asked him about Patriot Front. \u201cDon\u2019t go to a vigil and try to make it about you,\u201d he said, claiming that \u201cmy guys confronted them\u201d after Patriot Front members walked away from the event.<\/p>\n While Proud Boys still operate on the ground at physical events, they roam the streets and get into fights much less than they used to, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), a nonprofit that tracks political violence. Some extremism experts have told me that the real reason the Proud Boys have become mellower is because the organization has lost momentum and energy. Tarrio claims otherwise. \u201cThe culture has shifted dramatically,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like We won. We\u2019ve got what we wanted<\/em>.\u201d Just last month, I posed the question of why the Proud Boys had seemed somewhat absent compared with their boisterous presence throughout Trump\u2019s first term. One answer seemed to be that the second Trump administration had taken on the mission of the Proud Boys from within the federal government. Now the Proud Boys are \u201cfocusing on other things,\u201d Tarrio said, shifting to behind-the-scenes work such as their ongoing cancellation campaign. \u201cI guess it\u2019s kind of hypocritical of us after saying, \u2018oh free speech\u2019 or whatever,\u201d he acknowledged, \u201cbut the problem is the right isn\u2019t good at fighting dirty.\u201d Now \u201cthey\u2019ve figured it out,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s working.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Enrique Tarrio picked up the phone, the first thing he wanted me to know was that he was pushing through a four-day hangover. This was on Monday, and he had just returned to Miami from WestFest, an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas in which Proud Boys from around the country gather for hard drinking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2866,11803,3337,13557,4014,2658,9529,13556],"class_list":{"0":"post-22102","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-boy","9":"tag-dirty","10":"tag-enrique","11":"tag-figured","12":"tag-maga","13":"tag-play","14":"tag-proud","15":"tag-tarrio"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}