When Enrique Tarrio picked up the phone, the first thing he wanted me to know was that he was pushing through a four-day hangover. This was on Monday, and he had just returned to Miami from WestFest, an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas in which Proud Boys from around the country gather for hard drinking and general debauchery, basically a “frat party,” he said. But with that out of his system, Tarrio—who has long been one of the far-right group’s key leaders—found himself stirred by a more pressing preoccupation: all the people he wants to get fired.

Over the past several days, Tarrio told me, he has activated an “extremely effective” network of Proud Boys to scour the social web, find posts celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, identify the individuals involved, and persuade their employers to fire them. In many of these groups, people celebrate over growing tallies of firings, which they refer to as “scalps,” he told me. “It’s funny because this was a tactic that was used on us from 2017 forward. We got deplatformed, debanked,” he told me. “It sucked for us. I always said I wouldn’t do it back to anybody. But since then, I’ve been incarcerated for something I didn’t do,” Tarrio said, referring to his conviction of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. “So I’m in a different mindset right now.