Once a government becomes a dictatorship, the regime has a full range of repressive instruments at its disposal, including the police, the courts, the military, and domestic intelligence services, among others. All of these institutions act in the name of the state and its leaders, and ordinary citizens resist them at their peril.
But aspiring authoritarians, those who are still trying to cow the public and consolidate their power over other movements in society, sometimes rely on volunteers—thugs willing to do violence while denying any link to politicians. Such people are useful in creating a sense of ongoing threat while the actual leaders they support can pretend to deplore their activities.
In the 2010s in Ukraine, these men were called Titushky. Named for Vadim Titushko, a Ukrainian who was part of a group convicted for assaulting two journalists in Kyiv, they were supporters of the pro-Russian president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, and their aim was to intimidate Yanukovych’s opponents in Ukrainian society. Analysts at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2013 described the Titushky as “burly guys dressed in sports gear who act as agents provocateurs,” and who “crack down on protesters or provoke clashes with the aim of tarnishing peaceful protests.”
The Titushky were generally lower-class toughs, and many were recruited for pittances. Some of them ended up in prison. Today, the United States has a homegrown version of its own Titushky: the Proud Boys and other far-right groups that have declared their willingness to engage in vigilantism, some of which include people who were pardoned or had their sentences commuted by Donald Trump for participating in the January 6 insurrection.
One of these now-freed J6ers, the former leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, showed up last weekend in Washington, D.C., to crash a conference hosted by a group called Principles First, a nonprofit organization that holds annual gatherings of disaffected conservatives who oppose Donald Trump. I have been a speaker and participant at most of these events over the past five years, and I was there to moderate a panel on foreign policy with Bill Kristol and Garry Kasparov.
As we returned to the greenroom after the panel, we were told that Tarrio had arrived with some other men and proceeded to confront four well-known figures of January 6: Michael Fanone, Daniel Hodges, Harry Dunn, and Aquilino Gonell, all of whom were police officers during the attack on the Capitol. (Gonell was there to receive an award from Principles First on Saturday afternoon.)
Tarrio’s people filmed the moment as they harassed the four men, insulting them and yelling at them, clearly trying to draw the foul and see who would lash out first. None of these experienced law-enforcement officers took the bait, and eventually, the interlopers left before things got out of hand—a smart play by Tarrio, who had been arrested the day before and charged with assaulting a female protester in front of the Capitol. (Tarrio says that she made contact first and says he is sure the charges will be dropped.) At Principles First, he didn’t cross that line, but his group’s attempts to intimidate other Americans was in the same tradition as the goons in tracksuits who were sent to Ukrainian pro-democracy rallies.
You may wonder, in a busy city full of conferences, how Tarrio and his associates zeroed in on this one particular gathering. Of course, the meeting was hardly a secret: It was a sold-out event attended by more than 1,200 people. Perhaps it was serendipity. Perhaps someone was keeping tabs on the J6 cops or other prominent attendees and panelists (such as Mark Cuban, among others).
Or maybe they were simply following one of the White House–affiliated social-media accounts.
Four days before the conference started, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, quote-posted an announcement from Principles First, which had pictures of the featured speakers and a link to the schedule, with the comment: “Aka the Cuck Convention.” (If you are unfamiliar with the online right-wing-troll vocabulary, many on the far right call conservative anti-Trump apostates “cucks,” referring to men whose fetish is to watch their wives have sex with other men.)
Cheung then later reposted his, uh, wry observation, in case anyone needed a reminder that the conference was soon to take place. In other words, a Trump administration official, on his official account, pointed to a gathering of the White House’s political opponents and applied a label to it that is beloved to its most fringe supporters. A few days later, a group of people led by Tarrio—a man who owes his freedom from his 22-year prison sentence to President Trump—showed up and harassed other Americans in a public venue.
When I told my friend, the journalist and Russia expert Michael Weiss, about the incident, he saw the parallel immediately. “Yanukovych used state-sponsored thugs to intimidate his opponents in Ukraine,” he said. “Trump is using pardoned putschists to intimidate his in America.” I’m sure everyone involved can claim that it’s just a coincidence, and maybe it was. But the Principles First meetings have been taking place since 2020, and the organization’s founder, Heath Mayo, told me that they have never had a serious incident at any of their other events. “We’ve had peaceful arguments and outbursts in the room,” he said. “But this targeted harassment in the hallways from people without tickets was a first.”
The next day, neither Tarrio nor any of his pals returned, but someone using Tarrio’s name emailed a bomb threat that specifically mentioned Fanone—the message included his mother’s address—as well as other targets. (Tarrio denied any involvement.) After security and the Secret Service, who, according to Mayo, responded because they had a K9 unit nearby, sounded the all clear, the proceedings continued and the conference ended without violence.
During the ceremony for Gonell, Fanone told the crowd that what they had experienced was a small taste of what his life has been like for four years. In the audience, much of what I heard was anger that these January 6 heroes are still being tormented, but, by the evening, the sense I found among most of the speakers and some of the attendees was something more like resignation, a recognition that such moments, with the inherent threat of violence, are now part of daily political life in Trump’s America.
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