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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today could be another important day in the accountability in court era of what Donald Trump has brought down upon the nation personally or existing dark forces that he helped to empower. In this case, it's the latter. The dark force is the white male nationalist group The Proud Boys. A jury is deliberating the fate of five leaders of The Proud Boys in connection with their alleged leadership roles in the violent parts of the January 6th insurrection.

There are several specific charges in this case, nine altogether, going all the way up to seditious conspiracy but, in essence, they're being accused of planning the use of force to prevent Congress from certifying the election. Now, this trial has gotten remarkably little press coverage considering the stakes and that it took four months to hear. Now it's in the hands of the jury. Interestingly, one of the defenses being used in this case, from what I've read, is that Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio didn't cause the violence at the Capitol on January 6th. Donald Trump himself did.

The defense claims Tarrio is being tried as a scapegoat for Donald Trump. Let's get more now, including indications yesterday of some trouble the jury may be having in reaching its verdicts with Marcy Wheeler, a journalist who writes about civil liberties and national security and runs the website Empty Wheel, which is doing in-depth coverage of the Proud Boys trial. Empty Wheel is also Marcy Wheeler's Twitter handle. Marcy, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Marcy: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Could we start with some of the basics, which I think many of our listeners probably don't know as little coverage as this trial has gotten. This is being called The Proud Boys trial. Wikipedia defines The Proud Boys as an exclusively male, North American, far right, neo-fascist organization that promotes and engages in political violence in the United States. Has the jury heard any description like that of the group and its aims?

Marcy: It has heard unbelievable amounts of the Telegram chats and Parler posts that they sent leading up to January 6th. They talk a lot about violence. They talk about picking fights. They do talk about wanting 1776, we see that kind of language from a lot of January 6th defendants. They're different because they are accused not of attempting to obstruct the certification themselves, but really setting in motion the larger mob even before Donald Trump stopped speaking on January 6th. As you mentioned, the Tarrio defense, which is that he's a scapegoat for Donald Trump, it doesn't make any sense because the Proud Boys kicked off the riot before Trump finished speaking.

They actually most of them didn't even go to his speech. They showed up at the Capitol before that and they started the riot, basically, to time with the finish of Trump's speech. The logic behind the charges, especially the seditious conspiracy charges, is that they used other Proud Boys and what Proud Boys call normies, which is people who showed up, Trump supporters who have no self control they claim, and the Proud Boys riled them up and the normies then in turn started assaulting cops and tearing down barricades and so on.

Brian Lehrer: Well, how much do they allege or does anybody allege in the context of this trial that Donald Trump knew about or even engaged in the planning with what the Proud Boys were doing there? We all remember his line in that presidential debate in 2020 when asked by the moderator to denounce the Proud Boys, he just told them to stand back and stand by.

Marcy: That comment showed up in both the opening and closing arguments from the prosecutors. It was very much prominent in the trial which is another reason it's surprising how little coverage this trial has gotten. That led to a huge surge in recruiting for the Proud Boys and in the wake of that, there was a shift in how the Proud Boys were approaching rallies. That's the logic of it. Just as important is Donald Trump's December 19th tweet, which said, "Wild protest, be there January 6th." That's true of hundreds of January 6th rioters. That tweet was the kind of the tweet that kicked everything off.

In the case of the Proud Boys, on that day, they start a Telegram chat that again is taking a different approach, is handpicking the people who are going to belong, is trying not to be a men's drinking group anymore, but instead a rally group. That's the logic of how Trump shows up. Interestingly, two people who could show up more prominently in this case haven't and those are Alex Jones and Roger Stone. Both have very close ties to these men. Alex Jones was actually in touch with several of the Proud Boys as they kicked off the rally and as Alex Jones brought a mob to the Proud Boys to use at the Capitol.

Prosecutors, for whatever reason, didn't get into that dynamic very much, which means the wake of this trial, one way or another, may be where they go from here, I think will be very interesting.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions welcome here about the Proud Boys and the Proud Boys January 6th related trial, which is in the hands of the jury after four months of testimony with Marcy Wheeler from the civil liberties and national security issues website Empty Wheel, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. If you have any questions or comments for that matter, or if you're a Proud Boy who wants to do two confessions, anything like that, 212-433-WNYC. The leader of the Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio. Are the most serious charges against him?

Marcy: All five men are charged with seditious conspiracy and Tarrio actually, interestingly, might be one of the ones who might not be convicted of seditious conspiracy because he wasn't there that day. Listeners may recall that he was arrested on January 4th for an attack on a church in December and also for trying to bring in weapons into DC. He was released on the 5th and told to leave DC. He watched the riot from Baltimore, though he was texting back and forth with the participants. Who knows how the jury will respond to that.

There's Dominic Pezzola who listeners may recall is the long haired man who took a shield and broke open a window and that was the first breach of the Capitol itself. He wasn't in some of the planning chats. He got added to this group later on and added to, in fact, the indictment later on. Then there's a guy named Zach Riehl from Philadelphia who wasn't as much of a leader as Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Enrique Tarrio. Those are the five and how the jury may be looking differently at the five people. They've listened and looked at a tremendous amount of evidence.

Two of the defendants testified on the stand. It didn't go very well for either one of them. The Proud Boys' defense is basically, we didn't have a plan. Where's the plan? Where is the plan for us to go and incite the crowd and attack the Capitol? Prosecutors argue they don't need that. They just need to prove that the men agreed to attack the Capitol or agreed to stop the certification of the vote count and the means by which they did that as it evolved on January 6th. It doesn't matter that it was opportunistic, I guess.

Brian Lehrer: Well, some of the evidence for where the plan was, just from my reading of the articles on your site, is contained in text messages that have been entered as evidence. Text messages sent by some of the defendants that the prosecution is using to try to prove violent intent, such as one that said, "Live free or die hard politics ain't working for nobody. It's time to effing rage." One of them posted an anti-police message that said, "We the People will treat your thin blue line like you do Antifa." Meaning the police treat that far left group with kid gloves. "We'll knock you to your senses and bypass your unconstitutional asses." That seems pretty direct.

Marcy: There's even more direct and more racist language in there. Through all of the prosecutions of January 6th it's a really important question where First Amendment protected speech ends and where rioting or where planning an attack on the Capitol begins. Again, that's one of the reasons why what the jury is considering right now is so interesting because are they going to view those comments as just frustration at the cops going back to this December event where one of them got stabbed? Or are they going to view that as a statement of intent to take on the Capitol? We don't know. We may find out as soon as today. It seems the jury is in the nitty gritty of deciding charges. The question is whether they'll come to agreement on all nine of the charges.

Brian Lehrer: Nick in Brooklyn has a basic question about the Proud Boys trial, I think. Nick, you're on WNYC with Marcy Wheeler from Empty Wheel. Hi, Nick.

Nick: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I had two questions. One was, why you think that this trial is not getting a lot of attention. It's very strange to me. Then the other question is whether you think the Proud Boys' defense are going to pose the picture of Trump using the Proud Boys as their hitman and possibly using Roger Stone as the connection as Roger Stone is- it's well documented he use uses the Proud Boys like a bodyguard force.

Marcy: Let me take on the Roger Stone question first. As I mentioned, Roger Stone isn't showing up in this trial in the way that he did in the Oath Keepers trial, where there's a list called Friends of Stone that Tarrio and Joe Biggs but also Stewart Rhodes and another Oath Keeper were on. In the Oath Keeper trial, it was part of the conspiracy. It's not here, interestingly. One of the interesting things about Roger Stone not showing up in this trial is he is showing up in a different Proud Boys trial that is on hold this week, but a guy by the name Christopher Worrell who attended an event with Stone on January 3rd, and that event is actually a key part of the proof against him. It's almost like there were two strands of Proud Boys, one who actually were working with Stone in Florida the days before and then the national group. Remind me of the second question, please.

Brian Lehrer: That was just basically why it's getting such little press coverage.

Marcy: Oh, one, because it's so long. Two, because you can't have cameras in the courtroom. Three, because discussion of seditious conspiracy doesn't sell detergent. I think some cable companies don't want to focus on the fact that The Capitol was attacked and on the fact that it looked pretty well orchestrated. Another reason is that there are a handful maybe 20 reporters who have been really doing tremendous work in the courthouse in DC and it has been a sprint for them since January 6th. It's hard to describe the tidal wave of information that they've been dealing with since January 6th.

A lot of them are being pulled off for maybe another case to cover in New York, or one was on book leave, or there were people who life events were intervening. I think that you're seeing just the exhaustion of covering this case, covering the larger January 6th investigation. Most of the reporters who covered this four-month trial also covered the two-month main Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes trial that was last fall. That's six months of seditious conspiracy trials in less than a year.

Brian Lehrer: That's not a sprint, that's a marathon. Why did the presentation of witnesses and evidence in this case take four months?

Marcy: The defense attorneys were very obstructive. It's their right. They're trying to defend their clients aggressively and that's what they're supposed to do. They challenged prosecutors over and over and over again. Again, this goes back to the First Amendment question, should prosecutors be able to introduce a camera angle that shows a Confederate flag? Does that unfairly prejudice their clients? Every time a piece of evidence came in like that, there would be a long fight about it. There would be a long fight about who counted as a co-conspirator of the Proud Boys.

Some of the Proud Boys who it ended up were counted as co-conspirators were quite violent in the tunnel fight which was one of the most violent parts of the Capitol that day, or Christopher Worrell that I told you about. He was spraying toxins at cops. Defense attorneys rightly fought every little bit of this evidence because it's the cumulative effect I think that they were trying to avoid coming in. Ultimately, it also at least the people who were in the courtroom, I think, argued it kept the prosecutors from really getting a rhythm up to tell their story. That's one of the reasons. There were interruptions to argue about the law. There were some health related interruptions. Four months, lots of things came up and so they kept having to take days off.

Brian Lehrer: Ron in Manhattan has a question about the leader of the Proud Boys and one of the defendants in this trial Enrique Tarrio. Ron, you're on WNYC. Hi, there.

Ron: Just one second, please. I just wanted to know that, how can an African American become a leader of a white supremacist gang? This guy is African American. Is anybody looking into that?

Brian Lehrer: Ron, thank you. Sounds like Ron's practicing some unusual percussion instrument in the background while he's making his call. Seriously, Marcy is Enrique Tarrio Black?

Marcy: He calls himself Afro-Cuban, yes. There were two Black defendants in the Oath Keeper's case, a couple of Latinos. It is the case. One of the witnesses that testified was a rabbi and he tried to claim that these weren't bigots. The purpose of his testimony was to claim that there wasn't any bigotry going on. Ultimately on cross, it was shown that he failed to get Tarrio and others to start policing the antisemitism that showed up on threads and ultimately, he left the group. You would see over and over again and they actually would call him the n-word. They would call another Proud Boy who's disabled other derogatory terms. They would even call themselves these very bigoted terms in private.

Brian Lehrer: Affectionately?

Marcy: In the case of the disabled member of the Proud Boys, no. They used the language, and this is the man who videotaped them, and they treated him as a snitch. They said, "Why did he take these video of us and load it? We should blah, blah, blah, do violence against him and his scooter." He needs a scooter to get around. There's a lot of very ugly language that went on in those chat rooms. Again, this is a question about where First Amendment ends and where sedition begins.

Brian Lehrer: I've seen the Proud Boys described elsewhere as not a white supremacy or white nationalist group, but a Western nationalist group which suggests a certain set of values rather than race. I feel maybe misogyny is even more of a thing for the Proud Boys than anything nationalistic. The term real men comes up in quotes in one of the articles on your site about the trial. Do they call themselves real men?

Marcy: Yes. That's actually, Tucker Carlson News, he was watching what maybe a Proud Boy video and talking about the way in which real men fight. They emphasize men, they emphasize and they speak badly of everyone. I think what really changed with this trial because under Bill Barr, the FBI believed that Proud Boys could make good informants about Antifa and that was the priority of Bill Barr's DOJ. The Proud Boys tried to make much of the fact that there were eight FBI informants who were part of the Proud Boys, some of whom actually participated that day.

One of them was put on the stand and it turns out it's actually two, one was not a member of the Proud Boys, it was a woman, were put on the stand, and it turns out these were really rabid Proud Boys supporters who were being asked by the FBI to report on Antifa, which suggests there's a problem with the FBI's informant handlers, but it also is a testimony to the fact that until very shortly before the attack on the Capitol, FBI really didn't get that these people were inciting violence. You can actually go back to 2019 when Roger Stone was on trial.

Enrique Tarrio and three other Proud Boys were part of a threat that Roger Stone posted against the judge in that case, and they were investigated. When it came to sentencing Roger Stone, Bill Barr's DOJ intervened and said, "Well, we consider that threat against the judge, basically, a technicality." Bill Barr's DOJ was treating these violent effectively gang members as a technicality, their violence as a technicality. That's what brings you to January 6th. That's the kind of culture that leads the FBI to treat these people as potential informants rather than as potential mobsters that you should be wary of before they start an attack on the Capitol.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You mentioned the connection with the Tucker Carlson News that's just out today, the latest revelation about an email that may have contributed to his firing about his reaction to seeing a group of Proud Boys or some kind of white right wingers, you say they're Proud Boys, beating up--

Marcy: They may be Proud Boys. There was a video that shows what he described that was circulating in the wake of the December march in the Capitol which is the same one that led to Tarrio being arrested and led to another one of the Proud Boys being stabbed.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, three of them beating up what he calls an Antifa kid and Carlson denounces the three on one attack by saying, "That's not how white men fight." Well, that's obviously racist to assert that white people fight fair than other people, but there's this white male nationalist idea of real men that's also traditionally macho and homophobic. When the Proud Boys invoke real men, it's a lot about that, right?

Marcy: Yes. Again, many of the exhibits from the trial are available circulating, and I invite people who are interested in this to read them, because you basically were given a snapshot of how these men acted with each other in private and the no holds language that they used, the celebration of violence. That came out. Regardless of what verdict comes out today or this week or whenever, I think that we've seen a side of the Proud Boys that they had previously really succeeded in suppressing or pitching or they had really good PR.

Brian Lehrer: Are they a males only group per se, another sign of their misogyny?

Marcy: Yes. Although there were a few women who marched with them, and as I said one of their defense witnesses was a woman, so there are women who are kind of hangers on, but that you would see discussions about whether they would allow any woman to march with them or what have you. A western chauvinist organization emphasis on male, I think, or a men's drinking club, a men's rally club. Those are the kinds of languages that even as packaged up, they refer to themselves as.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. If they even have to debate whether women are allowed to march with them in a political protest, well, there you go. We'll continue in a minute with Marcy Wheeler from the national security and civil liberty site Empty Wheel. More of your phone calls, we'll talk about particular questions that the jury in the Proud Boys case has been asking the judge that Marcy's reporting on that are very interesting and some good caller questions coming in. Lynn in Portland, we see you. Myat in the city, we see you with your good questions. Stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we talk about the Proud Boys January 6th trial, now in the hands of the jury with Marcy Wheeler, a journalist who writes about civil liberties and national security and runs the website Empty Wheel, which is doing in-depth coverage of the Proud Boys Trial. Empty Wheel is also Marcy Wheeler's Twitter handle. Lynn in Portland, Oregon, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lynn. Thanks for calling in.

Lynn: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I actually was in the same room with you at the Apollo years ago when you did your Martin Luther King event.

Brian Lehrer: Ah, great you were there.

Lynn: Thank you for taking my call. My question is, did the Proud Boys actually exist en mass before Trump? If so, what were their activities? I know that in Portland during the protests, especially the Black Lives Matter protests, they definitely were involved in making it a more violent and destructive protest.

Brian Lehrer: Lynn, thank you. Yes. How old are the Proud Boys and by how much do they precede Donald Trump, if at all?

Marcy: I think it's best to think of them as a parallel track to Donald Trump. I mean, they did exist in a form, but they really changed significantly after 2016 and turned to more violence. There was even some discussion in the chats about Joe Biggs's malign influence on that process. In fact, a number of the Proud Boys didn't want to be involved with Joe Biggs, and he really got involved in the organization in 2017, 2018. Some of these men really haven't been involved in it all that long. It really, at least as prosecutors presented it, continued to get more and more violent, and the key players that are on trial, or at least some of them are a key part of the increased violence of Proud Boys that you see in these earlier events.

They did succeed in keeping out the fact that Ethan Nordean had gotten famous within the Proud Boys for a punch he had given at one of these protests. That's the short recent history that really didn't come in as much as you might have seen in the Proud Boys, but it was in the background for the whole trial.

Brian Lehrer: A good follow up question to that, I think, from Myat in the city. You're on WNYC, hi, Myat.

Myat: Yes. Good morning, everyone. I want to thank the both of you for your insights and coverage. I have a point of clarification and a main question, and I'll listen over the air. First clarify if the Cable Court TV is covering this at any level and your reflections and thoughts on journalist Stephen Marche's book The Next Civil War. In a radio interview when he was asked what would avoid it, he said that if you could get to the military and the police and get the white supremacists out. Another aspect of it is that an Iowa rally that Trump had probably early last year on the radio, I heard it, so I imagine her as a 50th white woman coming out of the rally and telling the press, she's looking forward to a civil war, and I'll listen over the air. Thank you so much for this segment.

Brian Lehrer: Myat, thank you very much for your call. Where would you like to start on that?

Marcy: I'm not familiar with the book. I am beginning to read Jeff Charlotte's book, which is on a similar topic and would highly recommend it, but I think there very much is this sense that the Proud Boys are, and yes, the white supremacists, the far right members of the cops. There was a former FBI agent who the New York Times reported this morning also has ties to Project Veritas. He was arrested for just trespassing on January 6th, but it's a testament to the fact that he was in the FBI until 2017, that these are the kinds of people you see a lot of former police officers or even active duty of police officers who are part of the attack as well. It's a real problem.

With regards to how this is being covered from the courthouse, there are no cameras in the courtroom. The journalists you are seeing cover it, and Brandy Buckman who was associated with our site for the trial, Roger Parloff, they did some really great live tweeting. They're doing that from a media room where they're allowed to have laptops and other devices. You are not allowed to have laptops or devices in the courtroom itself, so journalists who are covering it from the courthouse are always making this trade off. Do I want to go in and see how the jury is responding to the defendants or seeing how the defendants are interacting among themselves or do I want to be able to do live coverage from the media room?

They actually got shut out of the media room one day because a report that got out that wasn't supposed to get out. You are able to cover it live, which is not possible for a lot of federal courthouses, and some of the other federal courthouses, it's a lot harder to do, including the two New York City ones. There's not video. The court staff are very serious about preventing any video from the courthouse.

You're really quite constrained about how you do cover it and how you deal with the sheer volume of the information that's coming out. The video that gets shown as exhibits does get released on a bit of a delay. What you do see from the trial is coming out through reporters who are credentialed to cover this kind of stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Wayne in Philmont, who wants to respond to the earlier caller who asked, how can you call it a white supremacist organization if its leader is Black? Wayne, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Wayne: Hello, Brian. How are you? Great show.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Wayne: I want to say this. Just because a person is a person of color, does not negate them from being a white supremacist. We have plenty examples of that all throughout history. Every group that oppressed other people you had people in the oppressed group collaborating and actually being smoked before the oppressor [unintelligible 00:31:42] in World War II. Nowadays you got, I don't know if I want to mention that name, but they got some Black people that's without a doubt pro-white anti-Black nowadays. Being a white supremacist, you have to look deeper than the color of their skin, Brian. I'm surprised you missed this. It's also a state of mind.

We need to be vigilant when assessing people's state of minds, a state of mind that brought those people to do what they did. If you listen to a lot of the Black press, we've been saying this for years, these people don't care anything about the Constitution. They'll burn down the country to retain power. You're going to have some people that are afraid to step up and for their community and think they going to ride along with that vote. You are the man, Brian. I love you. I listen to your show just about every day. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much, Wayne. Call us again. Great context there from Wayne in Philmont parallel to what you were describing before, Marcy, but well put by Wayne. I'm still thinking about your exchange with the previous caller Myat on The Next Civil War and other books like that. In the intro part of my premise at the top of the hour was that Donald Trump didn't launch the dark neo-fascist forces in American life, even if he empowered them.

Maybe neo-fascist, white, straight, cis male, nationalism, and supremacy are going more mainstream. We could say Ron DeSantis is cultivating it now, for example, even if not promoting Proud Boys' style violence in the streets like Trump with a wink and a nod did. Is it a distraction to talk too much about Trump in your opinion as opposed to the existence of these beliefs in a meaningful enough percentage of the American people to be really dangerous to the people they hate because politicians can come along and surface them?

Marcy: Your mention of DeSantis in the last caller's comment, I think it's important to note how important South Florida is to this movement. Some of these very same people were people who were kind of rent-a-rioting in 2018 for DeSantis's first election. That tie is actually quite strong. This is an undercurrent of American history. I think the conditions that led to Trump's election in 2016, particularly some very deliberate efforts that the alt-right made to take their views more mainstream to lead to this conspiracy thinking that fed their recruiting is part of getting Trump elected and getting Trump elected is part of making these views more acceptable in the mainstream.

I don't think you could dismiss Trump's role in it. It's incredibly important. As we've already talked about, he refused to condemn the Proud Boys in the first debate. That led to a big surge in membership in the group. It ultimately led to their role in the attack. Trump's ties to Alex Jones and Roger Stone and therefore through them directly with this group, are very real. We may be hearing more about that in the weeks ahead. It's part of the same movement. That's where we are.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Kitty in Manhattan. Back to the trial itself. Kitty, hi.

Kitty: Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for taking my call. My question fits in with what you're talking about now. Who are the Proud Boys? Who are their lawyers? Who's paying the bills on that? That's what we never get into enough, just as we don't get into the fact that Peter Thiel is paying the bills over for the big lie. Could you talk a little bit about the funding and where these guys are getting their money from? Who's sponsoring the fascist?

Brian Lehrer: Funny enough. Peter Thiel is going to come up in our later segment in the show with Ben Smith who writes about the downfall of BuzzFeed and Gawker. Who is paying the bills of the Proud Boys? Who's funding their defense?

Marcy: For their defense, at least two. Ethan Nordean and Zach Real have CJ appointments. We're paying for their defense. They do have fundraising and many, many of the January 6th defendants are monetizing being martyrs to this cause. There are a number of attorneys. There is some overlap with these attorneys. There is a number of attorneys who are themselves grifting off of defending, not Proud Boys, but including Proud Boys but they're making a big fundraising push off of defending January Sixers to include Proud Boys. One of the defense attorneys in this trial, which I love to talk about, is Norm Pattis, who is Alex Jones' attorney. He's representing Joe Biggs, which is interesting given what I keep talking about Alex Jones.

He most recently famously got in big trouble in the Alex Jones lawsuit where he sent plaintiff's private evidence to another state. Those are the lawyers that you've got. You've got some good mainstream lawyers, and you've got some lawyers who are movement activists themselves. That's what we're seeing. There's no evidence that Trump is funding these guys' attorneys though Trump actually had some overlap with one or a couple of the oath keeper's defendants. He shared a lawyer with them. It's a fairly close-knit fundraising community between the people who are defending Trump and the people who are defending the Proud Boys.

Brian Lehrer: Well, it's in the hands of the jury.

Marcy: It's a very good question though, because those of us who cover this very closely are aware of how much grifting there is that goes on. I mean, one of the really great grifting attorneys also spends time at Mar-a-Lago and is buddies with Don Jr. On the right, they are really trying hard to make all of the January 6th defendants martyrs. Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing that. It's the same grifting fundraising that you saw leading up to January 6th on the fake election, the false election claim.

Brian Lehrer: Calling them political prisoners. Well, to close then, I mean, you report on national security and civil liberties. Those are your two main topics. This is a case where national security and civil liberties collide. Does it present any tension for you between those two things? Or is it black and white in this case as you see it?

Marcy: I don't think it's black and white. One of the things that was a real problem during the War on Terror is that because there was a foreign nexus to a lot of the alleged terrorists in the United States, they didn't get a lot of the same protections that the Proud Boys have gotten. When I talk about the import of free speech in this trial, which really is important and really is a sensitive issue many war-on-terror Islamic defendants, didn't get the same kind of protections.

It's important to understand that this tension we're seeing in the Proud Boys case about whether it's fair to show signs of White supremacy in exhibits are the kinds of things that really don't get discussed at all if somebody is labeled an Islamic terrorist with ties to a terrorist group overseas. I prefer to think that the success that the FBI has in prosecuting, we'll see whether the Proud Boys are convicted or not, prosecuting people like the Oath Keepers for doing things like disrupting the transfer of power rather than for doing things that are labeled as terrorist acts, suggests maybe we were doing it wrong during the War on Terror. Maybe we can shift everything closer to what we're seeing in the wake of the January 6th investigation.

Brian Lehrer: The Five Proud Boys January 6th Trial, now in the hands of the jury. It's been a week, so maybe we'll even get the verdicts today. Marcy Wheeler, a journalist who writes about civil liberties and national security and runs the website Empty Wheel, which is doing in-depth coverage of the Proud Boys Trial. Empty Wheel is also Marcy Wheeler's Twitter handle. Thank you so much. You've given us so much information today. Thank you.

Marcy: Thanks for having me on, and thanks for the great call-in questions.

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