“I didn’t hear this voice note till now,” he responded on Jan. 4, 2021, with his own audio file. “You want to storm the Capitol.”
“Minecraft”? They used their own lingo.
The Proud Boys, like any gang, have long had an internal lingo, communicating together in a kind of collective code. One of their common slogans — “Proud of Your Boy” — was adopted ironically from a song from the Broadway musical “Aladdin.” Another catchphrase — “Uhuru” — is the Swahili word for “freedom.”
On Wednesday, Conor Mulroe, a prosecutor on the case, said that the word “Minecraft” — a reference to the popular video game — appeared frequently in the Telegram chats as a cipher meaning “violence.”
“It’s a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tagline they put at the end of a statement when it’s a facially incriminating statement,” Mr. Mulroe told Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who is overseeing the case.
On Thursday, the government showed the jury several examples of how the Proud Boys used the term.
On Oct. 6, 2020, Mr. Rehl, the president of the group’s Philadelphia chapter, posted a message to the “Official Presidents Chat” complaining about restrictions put in place because of the pandemic.
“I really hope to see people start fighting back against these tyrants, in minecraft,” he wrote.
Five days before the group marched on the Capitol, Mr. Stewart used the term in response to a post about the police in Washington closing roads on Jan. 6.
“Let’s quit playing games and oblige them … in Minecraft,” he wrote.
Then, on Jan. 4, 2021 — the day Mr. Tarrio was arrested after an act of vandalism at a previous pro-Trump rally in Washington — Mr. Wolkind posted a message in which he seemed to be advising his fellow Proud Boys not to communicate openly about criminal activity.
“If you’re talkin about playing Minecraft,” he wrote, “you just make sure you don’t use your phone at all or even have it anywhere around you.”
