The Proud Boys: paying the price for attacking the Capitol

"Make no mistake. We did this."

That’s what Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right Proud Boys group, wrote on social media during the deadly riot that overran the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. 

Last week, Tarrio paid the price "for his betrayal of our country", said the Miami Herald, when a judge sentenced him to 22 years in federal prison for seditious conspiracy. 

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'A two-tiered system of justice'

 Tarrio wasn't actually in Washington on the day of the riot. He was in Baltimore, having been arrested days earlier in a separate criminal case. But he was found to have been a driving force behind the violence – a "general". As the judge, Timothy Kelly, noted during sentencing, he had told his followers in the Capitol: "Don't f**king leave."

Twenty-two years is a very long sentence, said Tristan Justice in The Federalist. Days earlier, three other Proud Boys leaders were sentenced to between ten and 18 years in jail for their part in the 6 Jan riot. We didn't see anything like this after the unrest in 2020 over the police killing of George Floyd, which caused far more damage. Far-left demonstrators "went largely unpunished" for those riots, which the mainstream media did their best to downplay. Even while standing in front of a burning police headquarters in Minneapolis, an MSNBC reporter assured viewers that the protests were "not, generally speaking, unruly". No wonder a poll last year found that four out of five Americans think we have "a two-tiered system of justice".

'The day that broke tradition of peacefully transferring power'

The claims of double standards don't stack up, said Maggie Astor in The New York Times. Most of the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 were peaceful. Where violence broke out, people were arrested: an Associated Press investigation found that more than 120 defendants had been convicted on charges such as rioting, arson and conspiracy, receiving average prison terms of over two years.

The average sentence handed down in 1,143 6 Jan cases, by contrast, is 120 days. Besides, there's a huge difference between a riot and a "planned attack on the government", said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. It's "heartening" that the courts are not treating the insurrection the way too many Republican politicians have – "as just a rally that got a little out of hand". (Ron DeSantis called the sentences "excessive".) As the judge put it: "That day broke our previously unbroken tradition of peacefully transferring power." For that, there must be a reckoning.