West Palm Beach, FL – On Sept. 26, the film “American Martyrs” premiered at the Kravis Center’s Cohen Pavilion in West Palm Beach, Florida. 

The subject of the film, presented by the far-right media outlet Gateway Pundit, was the Proud Boys – specifically the “seditious five,” whom a federal jury found guilty of seditious conspiracy to stop the presidential transfer of power for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

The five Proud Boys presenting the film were chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola. In reality, the actual fifth member of the “seditious five” is Jeremy Bertino, not Pezzola, who pleaded guilty and testified against the others during their trial. 

In August 2025, Bertino appeared on an episode of Tarrio’s Substack podcast titled “Kiss of Judas,” where the “government star witness” allowed the permanently sunglasses-clad chairman to humiliate him for the twelve people who liked the post. Despite this entreaty to re-enter the flock, Bertino did not make the cut as an “American martyr.”

Besides Tarrio, who received a full pardon, the others had the sentences commuted by executive order during President Donald Trump’s first day back in office on Jan. 20, 2025. 

The film premiere, held less than four miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, was graced by numerous right-wing characters, including leading “Stop the Steal” figure and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, QAnon digital warrior and former U.S. Army general Michael Flynn and convicted fraudster George Santos.

Led by right-wing media figure Lara Logan, the event opened at 7 p.m. with an open bar that overlapped with a 10-minute window set aside for “prayer, national anthem and pledge.”

After the 80-minute film concluded, the Gateway Pundit presented Tarrio with a Gateway Pundit-branded award created specifically for the occasion recognizing him “as an American Martyr and Hero.”

“It’s not an Emmy,” Tarrio wrote on X two days later. “But it’s so much better.”

Despite the obvious connections to the Proud Boys organization, the premiere lacked any of the recognizable branding belonging to what it depicted as a persecuted “drinking fraternity.”

Even on Tarrio’s person, the golden cock and abbreviated name have given way to the branding for his streaming outfit, “War Boys,” which has gained a whopping 700 followers on Rumble since the channel was created in April last year.

And on Tarrio’s merch website – where the Afro-Cuban now in his 40s markets just about any idea as apparel, including a t-shirt reading “Enrique Tarrio Eats Cream Pies” with an AI illustration of Tarrio licking an over-sized cream pie – reveals a distinct absence of Proud Boys related merchandise.

Tarrio’s ability to capitalize on Proud Boys merchandising, which once characterized his merch store, hit a setback last year when a D.C. Superior Court judge awarded the brand to a historically-Black church following a years-long legal battle set in the wake of the 2020 Presidential election.

At the beginning of 2025, the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal (MAME) church was the only place one could purchase official Proud Boys merchandise, re-branded to signify Black pride, with proceeds going toward the church’s community justice fund.

In April 2025, the church’s hold on the brand was tested on the Hudson Valley Proud Boys, who were sued in the Southern District Court of New York for their continued usage of the Proud Boys branding and merchandising.

The court reached a default judgment against the Hudson Valley Proud Boys, a chapter associated with Tarrio, earlier this year on April 8, awarding MAME $75,000 for trademark infringement and nearly $200,000 in attorney’s fees.

The judgment against the Hudson Valley Proud Boys is only a small part of the church’s pursuit to be fully compensated in the amount awarded by the court, which continues to be a major struggle to this day and sees all related parties continue to be wrapped up in the ongoing court battle.

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On the night of Dec. 12, 2020, the streets of Washington were thronged with black shirts and red caps.

Beneath the hazy yellow glow of street lights, the death rattle of the defeated president, who lost his reelection campaign the previous month and was doing everything he could to cling to power, took the form of hundreds of Proud Boys and others, shouting and pushing against lines of armored riot police, looking to fight anything they could vaguely describe as “Antifa.”

That the Proud Boys were violently swarming the capital city’s streets was not completely random. 

“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said during a notorious moment in the first debate of the election on Sept. 29 of that year, in response to a prompt from then-presidential candidate Joe Biden to condemn the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist organization that sprouted in the shade of Trump’s personality cult.

The cryptic statement gained the attention of the national media, occupying a prominent place through the rest of the election.

The four words were quickly adopted into Proud Boys marketing and merchandise, and the cryptic response “exponentially” increased the group’s membership, according to Bertino in his testimony before the J6 committee in April 2022.

Their relevance at the debate followed the mass popular uprising across the country, and globe, in response to the Minneapolis Police Department’s murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The Proud Boys, along with other far-right groups, responded to these protests by organizing counter demonstrations that often resulted in street fights, advocating in advance on social media for members to carry weapons.

The looming threat of violence is a core component of the Proud Boys. One month into Trump’s first term in 2017, the Proud Boys functioned as street brawlers in Berkeley, California, during the dramatic culmination of far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopolis’ “Danger Faggot Tour.”

It was March 4, 2017, in Berkeley where Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman was recorded attacking anti-fascist protesters with a stick and was subsequently brought into the Proud Boys by founder Gavin McInnes to form the group’s paramilitary arm, “The Fraternal Order of the Alt Knights.”

From 2017, to Jan. 6, 2021, the Proud Boys engaged in numerous street battles against left-wing protesters, with some of the most violent appearances occurring during the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in June of that year.

But it didn’t end with fights at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The group maintained a presence throughout the year and took a more visible roll in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. One of the group’s largest showings after the Nov. 14 “Million MAGA March” in Washington, D.C., during that short period before Congress would convene to certify the vote on Jan. 6, 2021, was on Dec. 12, which is when things really began to unravel for the belligerent “drinking fraternity.”

Looking for an enemy to physically destroy that balmy winter night in the nation’s capital, several mostly-masked Proud Boys returned to the writhing mass of Fred Perry polo shirts at the intersection of 11th Street NW and E Street NW – only several blocks from the White House – carrying a massive banner reading “#BlackLivesMatter.”

This banner, stolen from the nearby Asbury United Methodist Church, the city’s oldest historically Black church, would serve as a totem for their abuse.

After posing for pictures with the captive banner, they laid it out in the middle of the road, doused it in lighter fluid and lit it on fire.

“Fuck Antifa!” members of the neo-fascist paramilitary organization began chanting as a plume of black smoke engulfed the crowd gathered around the spectacle. Many raised their hands in the “OK” gesture, a dog whistle invoking white power.

A senior pastor of the church reacted in a statement the next day, comparing the act to a Klan-style cross burning.

Shortly afterwards, another crew of Proud Boys approached the mass carrying another Black Lives Matter banner, this time in a manner reminiscent of a parade. The banner was stolen from the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church more than 20 minutes away by foot.

One Proud Boy broke from the crowd to charge them, assuming they were counter-protesters, until another stopped him and presumably explained the odd juxtaposition to him.

“Oh you motherfuckers,” one said in a thick drawl. “We thought we’d gotten something to steal.”

This specific banner was paraded around and stomped on earlier in the night, after several Proud Boys scaled the church’s fences and cut the zip ties securing it in place.

This banner, like the last, was also destroyed, according to local news reports.

The night ended with more than three dozen arrests, multiple stabbings and four churches vandalized. The banner burning was charged by police as a hate crime, and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio took responsibility for the incident in an interview with the Washington Post roughly one week later.

Two days before the January 6, 2021 attempted insurrection, MAME Church sued Tarrio and Proud Boys International, the parent company of the violent “drinking fraternity.” Tarrio was banned from the city, explaining his ultimate absence from the storming of the Capitol building, where members of his organization played an out-sized role.

Less than one month later, Proud Boys International manager Jason Lee Van Dyke – now an instrumental part of the white supremacist outfit Patriot Front – moved to terminate Tarrio’s license to use the Proud Boys trademark, citing the Dec. 12 incident as the motivating reason. In a related move, Van Dyke also moved to disband Proud Boys International and to surrender the registration for the Proud Boys trademark.

On June 30, 2023, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia ruled in favor of MAME, granting the church more than $1 million against the Proud Boys, in addition to interest and nearly $2 million in attorney fees.

To get this money, the church filed another action on July 2, 2024, in pursuit of the Proud Boys’ most valuable property: the brand itself. On Feb. 3, 2025, the court reached a default judgment – a familiar pattern later echoed by the Hudson Valley Proud Boys – ordering all of Proud Boys International’s “interests in the trademark ‘Proud Boys’ […] transferred to” MAME, according to court documents.

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The Proud Boys brand was not nearly enough to compensate the church, and, since the ruling, Tarrio and his group have paid approximately $7,800 of the more than $3 million owed to the church, according to court documents.

Because of this, the case remains open in the D.C. Superior Court system as the church continues to pursue any money from the defendants that could fulfill their obligation. This includes obtaining a default judgment against alternative fund raising platform GiveSendGo in 2025 and having the D.C. Superior Court place a lien on any funds paid to Tarrio by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Anti-Weaponization Fund or its successor or replacement programs earlier this year.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund was a proposed billion-dollar payout from the federal government to J6ers who Trump pardoned or had their sentences commuted at the beginning of 2025.

“Faced with the Defendants’ unwillingness to engage productively in post-judgment discovery, the Church has been forced to find creative workarounds,” the church wrote in a motion to subpoena third parties in May this year. “The Church must seek discovery from these third parties because the Defendants have either refused to respond to the Church’s discovery altogether or have produced incomplete records that can be supplemented with information from the third party.”

On Sept. 11, 2025, the court ordered Tarrio to turn over for review all Telegram chats with information related to advertising or fundraising activities. Tarrio refused to comply, and a similar request was made the following Oct. 10.

On Dec. 19, it evolved into an order that Tarrio turn over his electronic devices for forensic examination, and on Jan. 27, 2026, following further non-compliance, the court issued a bench warrant against him and found him in contempt of court.

On Sept. 28, the first weekday after the premiere of “American Martyrs”,” Tarrio filed his second motion to vacate the default judgment – the first filed in December 2022 – including the $3.2 million award to the church, accusing the court of “massive fraud” and “near-total denial of due process.”

A significant part of Tarrio’s ploy to escape his and the organization’s legal debts is the Justice Department’s April 21 grand jury indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which charged the organization with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

More specifically for Tarrio’s purposes, the indictment against the SPLC identifies several field sources, employed by the organization to infiltrate hate groups. For many in the far right, it was a quick leap from “the SPLC is funding infiltrators” to “the SPLC is directly funding and operating those hate groups.”

Tarrio’s motion relies on a theory that Jason Kessler, the primary face behind the 2017 Unite the Right rally, was one of the informants paid by the SPLC, an accusation Kessler denies.

“If [the informant] is indeed Mr. Kessler […] this means that a fundamental component of this Court’s multi-million-dollar judgment is based on manufactured fraud, paid-for by the SPLC,” Tarrio’s motion reads.

Heidi Beirich, an expert on far-right extremism and the former SPLC executive who oversaw hate group monitoring, cited the Unite the Right rally in her testimony before the D.C. Superior Court against the Proud Boys to portray the “drinking fraternity” as a white supremacist hate group, according to the motion.

On Aug. 12, Beirich was criminally indicted in a superseding indictment against the SPLC on federal charges of financial misconduct in the Middle District of Alabama, a fact that is frequently mentioned in the motion in regards to Beirich.

“Of course an indictment contains allegations only,” the motion reads, relying almost entirely on indictments to build its case against the default judgment. Tarrio’s motion uses the indictment to impugn Beirich’s character and call into question the Proud Boys’ ‘hate group’ label, which played a part in the default ruling against the group.

Tarrio’s motion is undersigned by his newest attorney on the case, Roger Roots, who frequently runs for office in Montana on the Libertarian Party ticket. His website still seems to advertise excerpts from these campaigns, generalized for whatever office he plans on running for in any given year.

“ONE-QUARTER OF ADULT MALES ARE CONVICTED FELONS,” the website reads under a top issues section. “AS I WRITE THESE WORDS IT IS AN ACTUAL QUESTION AMONG POLICYMAKERS WHETHER THERE WILL SOON BE CONCENTRATION CAMPS FOR AMERICANS ON AMERICAN SOIL.”

Roots has also previously represented other Proud Boys, as well as anti-government militant Ammon Bundy and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. In a separate case representing Dominic Pezzola – the first J6er to breach the Capitol building, using a stolen riot shield to smash open a window – Roots compared Pezzola’s actions to “desegregation demonstrators who performed sit-ins at Woolworth lunch counters in the 1960s.”

The next court date in the trial is set for Dec. 1 of this year.

Cover image contributed by L. Cam Anderson.

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