Proud Boys sentencing shines a light on a decaying media culture
The sentencing of Enrique Tarrio supposedly marked a significant moment in the prosecution of those involved in the January 6 riots. The former leader of the so-called “Proud Boys” was given 22 years, the heaviest sentence handed down to anybody involved in the 2021 insurrection. Yet it was also an event quite at odds with the prevailing political trends.
Accountability has become the rarest of qualities in these divided times. We’re seeing that with the various prosecutions of Donald Trump which fail to affect his polling. He might be the only politician whose conviction on rape charges could earn him a cheer from a CNN audience. The example of Tarrio might suggest otherwise but it remains unlikely that the former president will see the inside of a jail. It’s a reminder that what is happening to figures like Tarrio has little to do with what’s going on in the broader political sphere.
The Proud Boys are just a manifestation of deeper ideological (if they even deserve that specific term) currents. Its members believe in a variety of white supremacist ideologies, some old like antisemitism and racism, others new like the beliefs of QAnon. Yet whilst membership of the Proud Boys is a demonstrative thing, easy to identify and therefore prosecute, the thinking behind these groups is significantly more sinister in the ways it has entered the public space. QAnon are heavy into conspiracy, most famously being their belief that the world is run by an elite who engage in Satanic practices, such as the smuggling of children to extract their adrenochrome. It’s a mazy web of pop culture references and nonsense; adrenochrome being, for example, an organic compound that figures as the ultimate taboo drug in the writings of Hunter S. Thompson but which has no actual medical use. But that fact hardly matters. Conspiracy theories have a certain compulsive quality, as do many of those unchallenged “facts” that fill the ether.
This week, less reputable “news” outlets have been running a story about a Tucker Carlson interview with Larry Sinclair, a convicted con man who has alleged that he smoked cocaine with former President Barack Obama in 1999 and then engaged in sex. It is the sort of story that warrants no attention and should not be repeated without a very big warning: It’s another political smear operation leading into 2024, attempting to destroy Biden’s credibility because of his association with Obama. Sinclair is a convicted fraudster who has now achieved a high media profile through these claims. Clearly, he has a lot to gain by sounding convincing. Merely abstracting the whole sorry business by saying “Larry Sinclair told Tucker Carlson” isn’t enough. Yet we’re in that school of “journalism” whereby falsehoods are artfully floated for their sensational content knowing full well that they will attain the status of facts to many people.
And, make no mistake, this isn’t a by-product of simply reporting what’s out there. This is Donald Trump’s trick of claiming “many people are saying…” to drop a slander into the national debate. These hacks understand the game and the two ways we can read a line like “A spokesperson for Obama’s personal office did not respond to a request for comment”. There’s the innocent way and then there’s the guilty way, and they make sure which their readers will choose.
How a lie or a prejudiced fact achieves this level of penetration in the public psyche is not difficult to understand but it is as fascinating as it is depressing to witness. On Wednesday morning, a caller into LBC casually threw in a “fact” about wind turbines and bird deaths, alongside the belief that electricity “is in the air”. Both might be true in some sense but only in some sense. One statistic suggests that, indeed, up to 100,000 birds are killed each year by wind turbines, but 55 million are killed in the UK every year by domestic cats. Yet no political party is going into a general election suggesting we do away with the nation’s favourite fuzzballs. The Tesla story, meanwhile, is itself one of those urban legends tied into the idea that cheap energy is being suppressed by the fossil fuel industry. The host, Nick Ferrari, politely brought the call to an end but the two statements were left unchallenged, to be repeated uncritically in pubs and supermarkets and those places where politics now operates.
And it really is everywhere we look these days. You feel slightly embarrassed whenever you hear one of these statements out in the wild and you don’t have the data on hand to counter it immediately. You instead let it slide because you’re ashamed that you’re not a PhD epidemiologist with a particular interest in spike proteins. Instead, Andrew Bridgen, expelled from the Conservative Party, manages to land a high-profile spot in PMQs this week (to the credit of Tory MPs, he was greeted with much barracking) to repeat the kinds of allegations he’s been making recently on QAnon affiliated outlets.
Take also, the example of The Sound of Freedom, the film currently being lauded (and rightly condemned) as a QAnon-adjacent film that’s now in UK cinemas. Irrespective of its qualities as a movie, it is a fascinating cultural object because of how it replicates many of the instincts behind America’s popular nationalism. This, after all, is the film celebrated by people like Mel Gibson and Elon Musk. It was also given a special screening by Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
The film doesn’t quite map directly onto British sensibilities but an elderly couple behind me spent half an hour before the movie talking about the reasons “we never visit the cinema”: the ads, the volume, the trailer for The Nun 2 (I’m sure they might have a point about the latter)… But it was intriguing that they found themselves there. The Sound of Freedom is that kind of movie: parasitically feeding off something working away inside our culture.
Over the end credits, the lead actor, Jim Caviezel, gives an impassioned lecture about the evils of modern slavery. He points out there are more people in slavery now than when slavery was legal, which is a staggering fact for the approximately ten seconds it should take a critical thinker to contemplate it. It’s a bit like the earlier fact about cats (why aren’t we talking about cats?!). Yes, there is more slavery now in a world of 8 billion than there was in a world of 1.2 billion in 1865 (to take the US as the benchmark for emancipation). That’s not to deny that the world has a slavery problem, but it should highlight how we’re dealing with a movie that is at no point straightforward.
It certainly wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a well-made, deeply earnest, and often moving film. But a different description can also be applied: it is cynical, sentimental, exploitative, and deeply problematic. It is a film of very large brushstrokes, essentially a Christian revenge fantasy, and a few of those gestures play to some deep cultural biases.
Whilst it professes to be a true story and an accurate portrayal of sex trafficking, its second half seems to argue for American military involvement in South America as Caviezel’s character journeys into south Columbia to become a latter-day Rambo to recover a girl trafficked to a Columbian rebel leader. But the fact the real Tim Ballard didn’t do any of these things is lost in the noise, the spectacle, and the neo-mythologising. It felt true and that’s all that matters. This is the QAnon mindset. Paedophiles, FARC guerrillas, viruses, wind turbines, and black former presidents of the United States: they’re all just bad so we can say what we like about them. Who really cares about the truth anymore?
Well, the answer to that might just be Enrique Tarrio. “On November 3, 2020, something that I never expected happened – my candidate lost. I felt like something was personally stolen from me,” he told the judge before he was sentenced to 22 years. “Every media channel that I turned to told me I was justified.”
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life