A Philly woman’s Proud Boy harasser heads to prison. Will Trump set him free?

The threatening late-night visits to her Philadelphia home. The strange men, one with a visible firearm, walking up and down her residential neighborhood, calling out her name. The goons who once rallied in the park across the street and called for her to be kidnapped off her front porch, and the time they placed flyers on telephone polls with the ridiculous false allegation that she was a registered sex offender. The constant online harassment.

For Gwen Snyder, a veteran political organizer and writer who researches and exposes right-wing extremism, the years of harassment by the violent, notorious Proud Boys are over.

For now.

It should have been the final chapter last month when the leader of the Proud Boys’ Philadelphia chapter, Zachary Rehl, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for his role — with other leaders of the right-wing paramilitary group, including ex-national leader Enrique Tarrio — in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill.

Snyder told me that Rehl was one of the many Proud Boys who took part in harassing her over those crazy years leading up to Jan. 6 — showing up on the group’s online Telegram channel to whip up support for their rally outside her home. Although she has complicated feelings about Rehl’s sentencing, Snyder obviously feels some relief that Rehl is currently behind bars, and that his Philadelphia outfit is in a state of disarray. (A suspected Proud Boy, Kyle Boell, pled guilty to harassing Snyder in 2022, according to officials.)

“I personally feel it’s a safer time if people who have a personal grudge against me are behind bars,” Snyder told me this week. But the activist is also well aware that Rehl could be a free man — and that right-wing radicals could be empowered and emboldened — in just 16 short months if Donald Trump regains the presidency.

The all-but-certain GOP 2024 presidential nominee has made it clear in no uncertain terms that he will use — or abuse, according to most experts — his pardon powers to free most of the hundreds convicted so far on criminal charges stemming from the insurrection, almost immediately upon a possible return to the White House on Jan. 20, 2025. There is every reason to assume that would include Rehl, Tarrio, and the rest of the Proud Boys leadership convicted of seditious conspiracy.

“I know he’ll pardon me,” Proud Boys higher-up Joe Biggs, who was sentenced to 17 years behind bars on that same day as Rehl, told right-wing radio host and Jan. 6 attendee Alex Jones in an interview last week from his jail cell. “I believe that with all my heart.”

“These are the stakes.” That was the tag line from one of the most famous political TV ads in U.S. history — Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy” spot that superimposed a mushroom-cloud explosion over a flower-picking 3-year-old girl, to claim that a Barry Goldwater victory would risk a nuclear war. Sixty years later, the stakes are just as high — except a Trump victory threatens a metaphorical neutron bomb that will destroy the American way of justice, and democracy itself.

The first step to saving the American Experiment, launched right here in Zach Rehl’s hometown in 1776, involves making sure voters understand the stakes on Nov. 5, 2024. Those stakes include Trump’s plans to implement Project 2025 — a PowerPoint for demolishing democratic governance in the guise of undoing “the administrative state.” Voters must also understand Trump’s plan to surrender to fossil-fuel interests in the war on climate change, right as wildfires and floods are threatening our way of life. And, of course, Trump’s threats to unleash the U.S. justice system to avenge his political enemies.

In that context, Trump’s pardon promises to the Jan. 6 defendants ― including roughly 500 convicted so far, many of them by juries of their peers — might not be the most serious consequence if the 45th president also becomes the 47th. But it might be the most outrageous.

» READ MORE: Proud Boys’ only ‘idea’ is violence. Penn State is wrong to give its leader a platform

“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump said at a May town hall hosted by CNN in New Hampshire. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.” In 2022, Trump even promised that his government would apologize to those who have been prosecuted for storming the Capitol in a riot blamed for five deaths and scores of injured police.

Trump may have lied more than 30,000 times during his time in the White House, but there’s no reason to doubt that he’s telling the truth about this. His abuse of the president’s constitutional pardon powers — intended as an olive branch to federal felons who have truly reformed — as a get-out-of-jail-free card for his corrupt friends and cronies like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, or ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was one of his first forays into American dictatorship.

What’s more, the unrepentant Trump even spoke at a couple of fundraisers on behalf of the Jan. 6 defendants — one of them just two days before he surrendered to Georgia authorities on felony charges stemming from his own election interference efforts. The ex-president loaned his voice to a recording of the Star Spangled Banner, rebranded as “Justice for All,” made by a group of jailed insurrectionists calling themselves “the J6 Prison Choir.”

It’s no wonder that Rehl, the Philly Proud Boy chieftain, called from jail into a show hosted by the right-wing Infowars in May and begged for mercy from a would-be Trump presidency. “If you get back in office, President Trump if you’re listening,” Rehl was recorded pleading, “please look into this and really look into pardons and everything like that.”

Rehl’s warped dreams could come true. A new CNN poll on Thursday showed Trump, with his massive lead among GOP primary voters, would currently defeat President Joe Biden by 1 percentage point in a head-to-head matchup. That reflects both Trump’s sway as leader of an authoritarian movement on the right, and the electorate’s chilliness toward a second term for the 80-year-old Biden. The impact of a Trump victory, and the likely pardons of right-wing extremists, would be enormous.

Andy Campbell, author of a recent book on the rise of the Proud Boys, wrote this week for HuffPost that already the Jan. 6 prosecutions have done little to slow the inroads that members of the paramilitary group have made within the Republican Party, or to prevent appearances at school boards or LGBTQ events, or to undo the notion that violence has a place in U.S. politics. “The fact that [political violence] is now normal and standard, such that every election is a crisis, means that our democracy is in ... potentially the worst political and constitutional crisis in over 150 years,” professor Erica Chenoweth of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government told Campbell.

We need to be sounding the alarm about these sweeping threats to the American Republic. But I also worry that sometimes we overlook how an authoritarian Trump presidency will affect actual people like Gwen Snyder in Philadelphia, who’ll surely be gazing anxiously out at the streetlights if Rehl is released and his legion of goons are again empowered. But ditto for the undocumented immigrant trying to support his family in a dusty Texas town, the veteran EPA scientist facing the unemployment line, or the homeowner in mostly-Trump-voting eastern Oregon who lives on the edge of a wildfire tinderbox.

These are the stakes. There is zero chance that Cornel West or Joe Manchin or Nikki Haley will be the next president. The only choice is between Biden — an old man who occasionally mumbles the wrong word when defending democracy or offering aid to the middle class — or Trump, a bitter and almost-as-old man who plans to go all Scar from The Lion King and unleash the pathetic hyenas known as the Proud Boys as the brownshirts of his dystopian regime. And your neighbors like Gwen Snyder are depending on you to make the right decision.

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