Bomb Threats and Proud Boys

Not the Best Way to End the Conference I Was Attending

From Left to Right: Former Capitol Police Officers Harry Dunn, Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell and Daniel Hodges of the Metropolitan Police Department

The conference had seemed like the kind of required gathering that has come to define Washington's post-Trump political landscape. Moderate conservatives mingling with centrist liberals in the carpeted ballroom of a downtown hotel, exchanging insight and anecdotes from a conference room stage, while the lighthouse logo of the "Principles First" organization made clear the claim to the moral high ground. For a fleeting moment, as I scribbled notes on solemn invocations of constitutional guardrails and earnest paeans to the rule of law, I permitted myself a whisper of optimism. Perhaps we might, after all, panel-discussion our way out of this national predicament.

Then the Proud Boys arrived

"You guys were brave at my sentencing when you sat there and laughed when I got 22 fucking years," Enrique Tarrio shouted, his voice echoing against marble columns. "Now you don't want to look in my eyes, you fucking cowards."

The Principles First Summit had honored several Capitol Police officers who, on January 6th, had faced down the very mob that Tarrio had helped mobilize. The irony—that the recently pardoned Proud Boys leader would track these officers to this sanctuary of moderate political discourse—was both jarring and somehow inevitable. Michael Fanone, who had been dragged into the frenzied mob and repeatedly tased during the insurrection, engaged with Tarrio in the manner appropriate to a bully. "You're a traitor to your country," he yelled.

"So are you," Tarrio expertly countered, echoing the "counterpunching" tactics of his political patron Donald Trump

Former Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone tells Enrique Tarrio “You’re a traitor to this country.”

The following day brought the bomb threat, delivered through a dark web account calling itself "Enrique T." The conference temporarily evacuated, participants cooled their heels in an atrium. Afterward, Capitol Police Sergeant Harry Dunn—whose testimony to Congress about being called racial slurs while defending democracy had made him a particular target of right-wing ire—took the stage, his massive frame towering over conference organizers, Fanone, and former US Representative Adam Kinzinger.

"This is our life now," he said after the all-clear, when attendees had filtered back into the building. "But I won't be intimidated out of speaking the truth."

Tarrio, for his part, denies sending the threat. And perhaps it strains credulity that a man under such intense scrutiny would sign his name to a death threat. Then again, this is the same man who, just the day before, had been arrested for simple assault after knocking away the arm of a woman filming him. The same man who, flush with his newfound freedom, had announced with carnival-barker enthusiasm his intention to sue the Justice Department for $150 million.

What struck me most wasn't the chaos Tarrio brought to the conference, but the casual confidence with which he staked his ground that should have been forbidden to him, by dint of his 22-year sentence. He and the other conspirators, newly released and emboldened, have assumed the air of men who know they are untouchable. These defacto government-sanctioned paramilitary groups have announced themselves as permanent fixtures of American political life. They aren't hiding in the shadows—they're itching for confrontation in the hotel lobbies where the remaining institutional forces gather to wield the instruments of reason and civic obligation against the forces of thuggish intimidation.

As dusk fell over Washington, the unspoken question hanging in the air was not whether things would come to a head with these forces, but when. And the signal from the highest reaches of power seemed clear: when that moment arrives, the executive branch will side with Tarrio and his confederates, not with those who stood in their way.