While leaders vie for pardons, Proud Boys struggle but movement remains strong

As Donald Trump reenters the White House on Jan. 20, scores of Proud Boys and others charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection hope to receive a presidential pardon.

At least 100 Proud Boys were charged with crimes related to the insurrection, and four leaders — Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl — were convicted of seditious conspiracy. The lawyer for Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, sent a letter to the president-elect on Jan. 6, 2025, asking for a pardon and characterizing his client as “nothing more than a proud American that believes in true conservative values.”  

Trump has signaled that he plans to honor at least some of these requests. His campaign’s transition spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said the president-elect would “make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis for those who were denied due process and unfairly targeted by the justice system.”

If the Proud Boys leaders currently imprisoned do receive pardons, they will emerge to find an organization that is a desiccated shell of the one that helped organize the assault on the U.S. Capitol. The group now has far fewer chapters than it did the year when it helped lead the insurrection. Its activism, in turn, has declined steeply. While members can still be occasionally found at demonstrations targeting leftists and, especially, the LGBTQ+ community, the group is nowhere near as active or galvanized as it was before Jan. 6, 2021.

This precipitous decline of the largest hate group in recent history does not necessarily reflect a corresponding strengthening of American democracy. Many of the ideas core to the Proud Boys have been wholly absorbed by the MAGA movement: that the country is full of internal enemies, that those enemies need to be purged, and that extreme measures outside of democratic norms — including violence — are justified and even necessary to set the country back on track.

The Proud Boys may continue to appear on the streets as far-right foot soldiers, especially with Trump back in the presidency. But in many ways, they have already served their purpose. While the group once pined for permission to carry out a campaign of violence at Trump’s behest, it not only succeeded at storming the Capitol, but may have convinced many Americans, as well as the holder of the highest elected office in the U.S., that they are heroes to be revered and emulated. If Trump issues pardons for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, it is a clear signal that the Proud Boys’ retribution-centered ethos has swallowed the American right.

The rise of the Proud Boys

Founded in 2016 by far-right media personality Gavin McInnes, the group quickly made its taste for violence clear. “We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you,” McInnes said on his Compound Media show that year. At the time, far-right groups were increasing their on-the-ground activism, and the Proud Boys eventually became the group that could most consistently bring their members to the streets. They followed an established pattern: host a demonstration held under a generic banner (“free speech” was a favorite), aggressively confront antifascist counterprotesters, claim they had been victimized, and plan another demonstration in retaliation. Images of clashes between Proud Boys and antifascists, like when Proud Boy Ethan Nordean knocked out a counterprotester in Portland, Oregon, in 2018, drew more people into the street and whetted the group’s appetite for violence.

By 2020, the group had grown to 43 chapters and shown it could successfully bring hundreds of far-right activists, decked out in protective gear and carrying weapons, out for rallies. The group became a staple at the “Stop the Steal” protests that formed around the country as part of an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It had also received what it saw as signals of approval from Trump, most notably his command from the stage at the first presidential debate of the 2020 election that the group should “stand back and stand by.” On Jan. 6, 2021, the Proud Boys were, along with the Oath Keepers, one of the primary groups that led the assault on the Capitol.

Despite conspiracy charges against the organization’s leadership in March 2021, as well as lesser charges against others, the Proud Boys did not pull away from public activism. They merely changed tactics. Rather than hosting large-scale protests that took weeks or even months to plan, as they had in the past, the group gravitated toward small, local actions.

Proud Boys appeared at city council meetings, school board meetings, and small protests alongside other local groups, amounting to what reporter Tess Owens estimated to be 114 total uniformed appearances across the country in 2021. The next year, they participated in at least 121 demonstrations and their chapters rose to a historic high of 78. The group focused its ire on the LGBTQ+ community, much like the right more generally. Proud Boys invaded drag queen story hours for children at libraries, protested Pride events and demonstrated at drag brunches.      

The Proud Boys’ shrinking stature 

The post-insurrection shift in the Proud Boys’ activism reflected a broader strategic trend within the American right: increased organizing at a local level to gum up the gears of democratic institutions and the use of protests, threats and even violence to intimidate people and communities they deplore. Always opportunists, the Proud Boys became even more reactive, latching on to protests and actions fueled by a variety of far-right grievances that were often spearheaded by other local groups.

The Proud Boys were also more apt to follow the lead of other groups because their own lacked national leadership structure — something they did away with after the insurrection. While that change could make it harder for law enforcement to come after the organization as a whole, it also left the Proud Boys rudderless. Soon, they plunged into infighting. Tensions that had percolated internally for years came to the surface, including whether individual chapters should openly embrace racism and antisemitism or present their bigoted ideas with a wink and a nod, as McInnes had long done.

The organization also split over their loyalty to Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, when a federal prosecutor revealed in late January 2021 that he had acted as a “prolific” federal informant. In a movement that sees the government as one of their primary enemies, acting as an informant will often get a person blacklisted. Many chapters immediately dissociated from Tarrio, declaring themselves “standard” chapters who believed they upheld the group’s original tenets. Those chapters disparaged the others that still showed some loyalty to Tarrio, labeling them “national” chapters for their interest in upholding the organization’s national leadership.      

Additionally, the Proud Boys were deterred from organizing by the charges federal prosecutors continued to bring against those who participated in the insurrection. Fearing actual state action against them for their activities — something the organization rarely faced before the insurrection — many chapters increasingly shied away from the protests that have always been core to the Proud Boys. By 2023, the group appeared at just 44 public events — about one-third as many as the prior year.  

“2/3 of our members have sworn off activism and basically wont [sic] leave their houses,” Indiana Proud Boy and longtime white nationalist leader Brien James posted to his Telegram channel in late 2024. Despite their loyalty to Trump, members of the group were largely absent during the recent presidential election, despite rallying online in support of the Republican candidate and, in some cases, claiming they would watch polling places on Election Day.

The Proud Boys may also simply be victims of time. Like in any political or social movement, trends, organizing styles, and aesthetics come and go. The Proud Boys are now nearly a decade old, and their style lacks the allure it once had. Among a younger generation of far-right activists, the group looks stale — their age and uniform making them not elder statesmen in the movement, but out-of-touch activists of a bygone era. 

‘Proud Boys did nothing wrong’

Over the last four years, the right has dramatically shifted its view of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Lawmakers who laid blame for the insurrection on Trump went on to endorse his candidacy in the 2024 election. Many right-wing personalities and commentators have suggested that the insurrection was a conspiracy orchestrated by antifascists, the “deep state,” or government agencies. These include Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has intimated that the FBI itself helped plan the insurrection. Trump has helped to glorify insurrectionists, often playing a version of the national anthem sung by the “J6 Prison Choir” at his rallies.

Some elected officials suggested insurrectionists are not guilty of any wrongdoing and have been unfairly targeted by the state. “The FBI has been more interested in tracking down people who protested the election on January 6, 2021, than focusing its efforts on its true enemies,” U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X on Jan. 2. “Our true enemies are terrorists who want to kill Americans, not Americans who want to hold their government accountable.”

As the right shifted to cast insurrectionists as patriots and martyrs, they also made it clear that they intend to enact revenge on those who prosecuted them. “Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, the guy Bratt, Matthew Graves, all of you,” Trump loyalist Steve Bannon said on his “War Room” show on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025, listing Department of Justice officials: “We are going to torment you and destroy your lives because you deserve to have your lives destroyed like you’ve destroyed patriots from Jan. 6. Yes, patriots.”

Even as the Proud Boys drift into the political background, their watchword made in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection that the “Proud Boys did nothing wrong” seems to have become a truism within the right.

Picture at top: Proud Boys members including Zachary Rehl, left, Ethan Nordean, center, and Joseph Biggs walk toward the U.S. Capitol in Washington, in support of President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster; Illustration: SPLC)