On the MAGA Right, The Proud Boys Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys Like Pride

In the wake of Enrique Tarrio sentencing, everyone doubles down

Sarah Palin went on Eric Bolling’s Newsmax show this week to express her displeasure at Enrique Tarrio being sentenced to 22 years for his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. For Palin, Tarrio’s sentence is an outrage for a fairly simple reason: he and other January 6 defendants are the good guys. 

Palin:

It makes the populace lose a lot of faith in our government, and that’s an understatement. Unfortunately, what this leads to, when we recognize the examples that you just gave, the two-tiered different justice systems that apply according to politics, you know, it makes the good guy think, ‘What’s the use in being a good guy? We’re gonna be punished, you know, we’re picked on, is what we are under this system.

Palin’s argument is perfectly in step with how extremist nationalism operates. The people acting on behalf of the nation cannot be doing wrong. They’re by definition heroic figures. If they’re not that, they’re redeemed by their sheer everydayness.

This is typical of January 6 apologia. The insurrectionists were some combination of patriotic, harmless, and understandably outraged people, united by being normal Americans. 

At worst, they were people who got carried away and committed some minor offenses like scuffling with officers and damaging property. At best? It was 1776.

What’s important is that these are the good Americans, the good guys. Their actions don’t deserve or necessitate the use of the state’s powerful capacity to apply justice. In fact, doing so delegitimizes the state because no good government would treat them like the real criminals who are deservedly punished by our police and courts every day. 

So, we have to ask, who is worthy of being on the receiving end of the justice system? Who is it legitimate for the state to pursue and punish? Who are the bad guys?

Who Are The Bad Guys?

I want to contrast Palin’s semi-heroic portrait of the MAGA movement with some of the other hard right responses to Tarrio’s sentence.

Michael Knowles opened his Wednesday show with a monologue about the injustice of the sentence. And he was happy to offer up just the sort of people compared to whom Tarrio is hardly a criminal at all.

Knowles: 

The average sentence for rape in the United States is less than 15 years, meaning that Tarrio faces 50 percent more jail time than the average rapist. But really, he probably faces more than that. Because, while right-wingers have had the book thrown at them in recent years, most non-political prisoners don’t spend anywhere near their full sentence behind bars. Do you know the average time served by convicted human traffickers here in the United States? Less than 10-and-a-half years. How about the time served on average by child traffickers? Sixteen years. How about the average time served by murderers in the good ol’ U-S-of-A? Just 17-and-a-half years. But the guy who ran the right-wing drinking club is getting 22 years for sending politically incorrect texts and social media posts. Is texting out protest messages from a hotel room really worse than rape, human trafficking, child trafficking, and murder? Objectively, no. But subjectively, from the perspective of a regime that is struggling to maintain legitimacy among a public that on both sides … trusts the system less and less each year, yes, it’s much worse. And our rulers are going to make sure that it is punished accordingly.

Matt Walsh made the same basic argument, also tweeting out a story about a “serial child rapist” receiving a comparatively light sentence. Rape, child abuse, and human trafficking are reprehensible crimes, and it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to argue for heavy sentences for the perpetrators and for better prevention strategies. 

But that’s not really what’s at play here. Hard right nationalism is frequently obsessed with purity and innocence, and it’s fully in step with the extremist views that Knowles, Walsh, and others like them promote to inject their attempts to obscure the significance of January 6 and Tarrio’s involvement with reminders that too many such deviants are now walking free. 

This is because Knowles, Walsh, and many other far right commentators have spent years labeling LGBTQ people as predators and rapists and alleging all manner of complicity in child trafficking and abuse by liberally-inclined Americans. Tarrio’s sentence is excessive, their argument goes, and it’s particularly heinous when we focus on the sexual and predatory crimes being committed across the country—crimes both hosts consistently link to the LGBTQ community and the liberal establishment writ large. 

It’s the Biden administration—a struggling and illegitimate regime, mind you!—that overlooks human trafficking and a porous border. It’s liberals who are indifferent to if not complicit in the trafficking of children. And it’s gay and trans people we should see as lurking sexual predators, rapists, and “groomers.” These are the criminals we are failing to punish while perfectly normal Americans are sentenced to years in prison for an insurrection that didn’t really happen anyway. The record here is extensive. 

Walsh has suggested trans rights advocates support pedophilia and has said that a “child who is put on hormones and who has their body being mutilated is being sexually violated in a way that is just as depraved or damaging as molestation or rape.” As for his stance on harsh sentencing, Walsh has posted admiringly about other countries’ use of the death penalty to manage drug dealers. 

When it comes to chastening trans and LGBTQ people, Knowles has said “the law is a teacher.” He has also argued it would be chastening for society to bring back public executions. And while he refrained from calling for their execution, Knowles declared earlier this year that “transgenderism” needs to be “eradicated.” In response to criticism of the film The Sound of Freedom, Knowles said, “I’ve always been skeptical of the notion that the liberal media are full of pedos, until I saw the mad vitriol with which the media have been attacking Jim Caviezel’s new movie about child sex trafficking, The Sound of Freedom.” Knowles is merely a tireless warrior for victims of sexual violence, no matter the context. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note Knowles’s well-documented attacks on the notion that such a thing as campus rape culture exists. 

There’s a two-step here of downplaying the reality of what January 6 was while reminding their audiences that much worthier recipients of the application of state force exist. When Sarah Palin asks what’s the point of being a good guy anymore, she’s stating unequivocally that being on the side of Trump and MAGA—even when it comes to the insurrection—puts you on the side of the righteous. So when Knowles and Walsh disparagingly compare Tarrio’s treatment at the hands of the criminal justice system to that of sexual predators and child abusers—criminal categories in which the two men have regularly placed queer, trans, and politically progressive Americans—there’s little room for doubt that the people they would like to see locked up and punished are not restricted to the traditional legal definitions of those crimes. 

For these figures, legal actions against Tarrio and the other January 6 defendants are illegitimate. They are illegitimate both because the Biden “regime” has no legitimacy and because, in Knowles’s view, the prosecutions themselves are a showy attempt to claim that legitimacy through force. 

Extremist nationalism is of course defined by all of these tropes: heroic narratives, obsessions with purity and deviance, and, when challenging the government of the day, a sense that some other set of forces and actors are thwarting the national will. But January 6 wasn’t merely a series of low-level infractions and political thought crimes. It was a real, violent event that left multiple people dead, threatened the democratic transfer of power, and was at least partially planned by men like Enrique Tarrio. In this case, he’s the bad guy. Duh.