“Trump 2020: Because Fuck You, Twice.”
At the age of forty, Pickles, whose
real name is Piccirillo, is a bit old to call
himself a “boy.” But, along with thou-
sands of bearded and balding men in
dad jeans, he headed to Washington to
take part in what he called “kind of a
last hurrah for Trump, who put so much
on the line for us.” Asked whether he
was among those who rampaged through
the Capitol, Pickles said, “No comment.”
Then he noted, “I’d never been to the
Capitol before—and I have now!”
Before January 6th, he said, the Proud
Boys, who are known for their misogy-
nist, racist, and anti-Semitic views, had
“no organized plan” that he knew of to
storm the building. Pro-Trump chat
groups had been ablaze with incendiary
talk for weeks. But, he said, “the Proud
Boys were just marching around the city
before this started.” As Trump addressed
the rally, Pickles and his crew stopped
for some halal chicken and rice. “We
couldn’t really see the President, so we
were listening on our phones,” he said.
“And when we heard him say, ‘Go to the
Capitol,’ we all were, like, ‘Yeah!’ It wasn’t
a direct order, like a Mafia boss. But it
was, like, ‘Go to the Capitol’!” So directed,
Pickles and his group began marching.
Trump had made it sound as if he, too,
planned to march to the Capitol to stop
Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.
Instead, he retreated to the safety of the
White House.
At the Capitol, the scene turned cha-
otic. “It happened in the moment. There
was just so much momentum,” Pickles
recalled. “We felt compelled to storm the
Capitol. There’s nothing rational about
it when you’re caught up in something
like that.” He kept his phone’s video cam-
era on through the ensuing hours of oc-
cupation. “I felt like a war correspondent,”
he said. (Pickles hosts a podcast.) “We
were trying to smash the cops to get in,”
he added. “This old dude on top of a
cranelike thing in the middle of a big
stand, who had a bullhorn, was saying,
‘Come forward! Come forward!’” A n
older woman urged the rioters on, call-
ing them “patriots.” “She was funnelling
people in through the windows,” Pickles
said. Nearby, “a dude with tattoos all over
his neck and face” smashed glass.
Pickles found the media’s suggestions
that police hadn’t mounted a serious chal-“No, I ordered the lifetime of doing whatever I want.”lenge insulting. “It wasn’t easy!” he said.
“We were hit with pepper spray and tear
gas. They were trying to keep people out.
But we were rushing them.” As if to dem-
onstrate the group’s valor, he exclaimed,
“Someone got shot. And someone got hit
with a pepper ball in the cheek! It left a
big hole. And someone got hit in the
eye.” (This he found particularly scary,
he said, because “one of my grandfathers
had a glass eye, and it’s my biggest fear.”)
Pickles acknowledged the unfortu-
nate optics of a group that claims to be
devoted to law and order ransacking a
federal building. “I know it looks hyp-
ocritical on our end, because of the
whole B.L.M. thing,” he said, referring
to Trump’s slurs against Black Lives
Matter protesters. “But if you seriously
believe your country’s getting taken over
by fraud, you’re going to get nuts.” (Pick-
les can be seen online wearing a shirt
saying “Kyle Rittenhouse Did Nothing
Wrong,” about the suspect in a double
murder of B.L.M. protesters.)
Pickles has a comfortable relationship
with nihilism. He is happy to discuss his
criminal record for grand theft (cashing
a forged check) when he was eighteen,
and his days as “a juvenile delinquent.”
“I grew up in the punk-rock scene,” he
said. “And Trump was like punk rock.
It’s, like, anti-establishment.” He attended
the University of Florida, where he was
an English major and a liberal. “I’ve taken
basket weaving and read about the Black
prison experience,” he said, with a snicker.
(In his shop, Fat Enzo’s, murals of Mark
Twain and Hunter S. Thompson share
wall space with Huey Long.) He ex-
plained that after his father died, in 2015,
he sought out new male camaraderie.
The Proud Boys filled a vacuum. He
claims to have joined not because they
are a hate group (as designated by the
Southern Poverty Law Center) but be-
cause “they were seeking something.” He
said, “I came to the realization that Trump
was awesome, and that I had been brain-
washed.” From right-wing podcasts and
YouTube, he said, he has learned that “the
pandemic is a scam,” and that “we live in
an inverted dictatorship run by the Deep
State and globalists.”
Still, Pickles claims to be rattled by
what happened at the Capitol. “A lot of
people were talking crazy stuff,” he said.
The mood among his fellow-insurrec-
tionists was “getting to be a bit like that