Several Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy in January 6th insurrection

Jus­tice has been served to anoth­er group of domes­tic ter­ror­ists:

For­mer Proud Boys chair­man Hen­ry “Enrique” Tar­rio and three oth­er mem­bers of the extrem­ist group were found guilty Thurs­day of sedi­tious con­spir­a­cy in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

A jury delib­er­at­ed for sev­en days in Wash­ing­ton before find­ing Tar­rio, 39, and oth­er defen­dants guilty on 31 of 46 counts.

The jury returned not guilty ver­dicts on four counts and con­tin­ued delib­er­at­ing on 11 remain­ing counts. The result was anoth­er deci­sive vic­to­ry for the Jus­tice Depart­ment in the last of three sedi­tious con­spir­a­cy tri­als held after what it called a his­toric act of domes­tic ter­ror­ism to pre­vent the peace­ful trans­fer of pow­er from Don­ald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 pres­i­den­tial election.

These con­vic­tions are more than just a vic­to­ry for the Depart­ment of Jus­tice — they are an encour­ag­ing sign for the future of Amer­i­can democracy.

For our repub­lic to endure, attempts to over­turn a free and fair elec­tion by force must be thwart­ed and their per­pe­tra­tors held accountable.

The Irish ora­tor and attor­ney John Philpot Cur­ran once said: “The con­di­tion upon which God hath giv­en lib­er­ty to man is eter­nal vig­i­lance; which con­di­tion if he break, servi­tude is at once the con­se­quence of his crime and the pun­ish­ment of his guilt.” This state­ment has been abbre­vi­at­ed to some vari­a­tion of eter­nal vig­i­lance is the price of lib­er­ty by a num­ber of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal figures.

It’s still mean­ing­ful today: it’s one of those true and time­less maxims.

We can’t be com­pla­cent about the future of our democ­ra­cy. We can’t take our free­doms for grant­ed. We saw what hap­pened on Jan­u­ary 6th, 2021.

We learned from the sub­se­quent inves­ti­ga­tion con­duct­ed by the House Select Com­mit­tee how close the insur­rec­tion­ist mob incit­ed by Don­ald Trump came to find­ing Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence and oth­er mem­bers of Con­gress after forcibly smash­ing their way into the Capi­tol, our tem­ple of liberty.

While jus­tice has been served to many of Trump’s under­lings since that trag­ic and fright­en­ing day, Trump him­self has yet to be held accountable.

Mitch McConnell and Sen­ate Repub­li­cans unfor­giv­ably made sure that Trump was acquit­ted two years ago for his crimes — leav­ing Trump free to run for Pres­i­dent again, which he is doing right now. Spe­cial Coun­sel Jack Smith is inves­ti­gat­ing Trump’s con­duct, but has not yet brought any charges.

Legal experts told The Post they believe today’s con­vic­tions will be helpful:

“The ver­dict empow­ers the spe­cial coun­sel to bring indict­ments for the efforts to over­turn the elec­tion,” said New York Uni­ver­si­ty law pro­fes­sor Ryan Good­man. “It under­scores the enor­mous stakes in mobi­liz­ing Amer­i­cans to believe the Big Lie and direct­ing an armed crowd to inter­fere with the con­gres­sion­al proceedings.”

The con­vic­tions mark “an impor­tant mile­stone on the jour­ney to account­abil­i­ty for the per­pe­tra­tors of the insur­rec­tion on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021 … show­ing that polit­i­cal vio­lence and attacks on our demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions will be tak­en seri­ous­ly by our jus­tice sys­tem and will not be tol­er­at­ed by the Amer­i­can peo­ple,” said Lind­say Schu­bin­er, direc­tor of pro­grams at West­ern States Cen­ter, a Port­land-based civ­il rights group that mon­i­tors anti-democ­ra­cy move­ments nationwide.

Let’s hope they’re right. Grave threats remain to our democracy.

Extrem­ism has flour­ished in Amer­i­ca in recent years, aid­ed and abet­ted by social net­work­ing plat­forms with algo­rithms that help con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and dis­in­for­ma­tion spread like wild­fire. One of our two major polit­i­cal par­ties is no longer com­mit­ted to repub­li­can­ism, despite hav­ing the name Repub­li­can. We remain in dan­ger­ous waters, and we have a ways to go before we’re out of them.