Justice served. The Proud Boys are guilty and will likely receive long jail terms; they earned and deserve them. After all, the only way to deter right wing, fascistic violence is to severely punish those responsible for it. Attempting to make nice or find common ground or find a language of reconciliation with the likes of the Proud Boys and the larger MAGA movement is the worst kind of illusion. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions!

The movement and its most violent protagonists have to be decisively crushed at the ballot box and in the court of law and every other social setting where they are encountered. In the post Civil War South, the insurrectionists only partially and only briefly paid a price for their seditious actions to maintain an indefensible system of racial and class exploitation and oppression. As a result, we are still paying a steep price for those half measures. Let’s not make that same mistake again.