A Parallel Universe: My Year in the Alternate Reality of the Jan6 Rioters
Disinformation led them to the Capitol. Instead of help, these rioters and their families have been surrounded by grifters and propagandists.
“Do you work mostly in the Patriot media sphere?”
I blinked. What the hell does that mean? I thought for a second about my last statement to this man, a self described documentary director, setting up a modest prosumer camera for an interview. I’d just described a recent documentary project I’d worked on about Baby Jessica, a toddler who fell into the national spotlight by way of unmarked backyard well. A pretty neutral piece of filmmaking, I’d assumed. I take a deep breath, knowing the correct answer. This question is a litmus test meant to check my devotion to right-leaning ideology. For my own safety, I should lie. But I feel defensive altruism simmering for the film genre I’ve spent most of my career in, a medium that should try to avoid overt bias. I resist the urge to spit back, “No, I work on the planet earth. Which is round, by the way.” Knowing that will get me nowhere, I say something about being a free agent with no agenda.
I’m standing in a sunny pasture in Rogersville, Missouri, the site of this year’s “Jan6 Truth & Light Freedom Festival”, a 3 day event “of love and support for our J6 community.” There’s roughly 25 people in attendance, moving in and out of the air-conditioned barn, paying partial attention to the steady parade of speakers, inmates appearing via zoom, election fraud “experts”, and piano interludes by a grown man in a revolutionary war costume. It’s a hot and sticky afternoon. I knew when I’d arrived there would be palpable suspicion about a single woman who shows up alone with a camera so I set out trying put the attendees at ease by lending a hand to the small video team shooting a documentary. Filmmakers help filmmakers, after all.
I’m playing at incognito, but not being deceptive at events like this is important to me. While I am here under false pretenses and a fake name, I try not to tell any blatant lies. When an attendee asks why I’ve come, I answer truthfully: “I’m a photographer, I was at the Capitol on January 6th. I feel like very few people in my life know what that experience was like, I’ll come to events where other J6ers attend if I can.” None of those statements are false and as long as no one digs too deep at the spaces between them, I won’t be caught out.
As to my real motivations, it’s hard to say. I’d been part of film crews at plenty of MAGA events since 2018. I’d often said watching the heated crowds “it will take nothing to push these people to violence.” Standing at the West Terrace Tunnel on January 6th, horrified by the scene, I knew I’d been right. The anger was menacing; men were beating officers with aluminum flagpoles, crumpled TRUMP 2020 flags providing the grip. Rosanne Boyland walked past me, brushing my shoulder less than an hour before she died of asphyxiation under the unstoppable sea of bodies. Watching this crowd one thought had boomed through the sickening buzz in my ears: I didn’t do enough to stop this.
Dragging myself to a hotel after the attack, freezing and stunned, I couldn’t believe my eyes: reception heaved with a sea of rioters in red hats making loud declarations that nothing violent had just occurred. I know how partisan internet consumption can convince a willing mind that the video they are watching is altered by ”them”, but we had all just witnessed to the same thing in person. I can’t explain the kind of anger that builds up in you when you stand shoulder to shoulder with someone looking at what is clearly a bowling ball and hear them say emphatically, “banana.” I had exploded righteously at the crowd with tears in my eyes that they were sick, that they had caused a woman to die. I screamed indignantly that they were in a cult and should be ashamed. I convinced no one.
I hurled accusations at stunned rioters until hotel security gently pulled me away, sending me to my room. I stood, fully dressed, in the shower as lukewarm water leeched blood out of my clothes. In Spring of 2023, I still carried around the anger. It simmered below the surface and threatened to boil over at random moments; a seatmate’s inconsiderate actions on a plane, a loud noise invading the tense peace of my apartment.
So in late June 2023, when I saw the flyer for the “Second Annual Jan6 Truth & Light Freedom Festival” I knew I had to go. Maybe I wanted to know if some doubt had burrowed into their unflappable confidence that Trump won. Maybe I wanted to hear guilt ripple in their voices as they retold their version of the day. Maybe I wanted to hear culpability.
I’m not going to hear any of that, it turns out.
Throughout a series of reunions, speaking events, jail podcasts, and interviews, I’m going to form a very different impression of the insurrectionists I had photographed at the capitol. This is a series of essays about the victims of January 6th we don’t like to consider. Not the police, or the politicians, or the ‘fabric of democracy’ — plenty has been written about those permanent scars. This is about lives, many of them bent by trauma, ruined by conspiracy theories and used for profit by a conspiracy economy. I’m not proposing we pardon them all as Trump eventually would. They’ve done something truly harmful to this country and some should pay for that. I’ve come to the conclusion that anger may no longer be the answer, because pushing them away is sending them deeper into dangerous delusion.
It’s late on the evening of July 7, 2023 when I land in Missouri and arrive at my hotel. While eating cold diner takeout, I scan the organizer’s modest website. There are links to several places to donate for legal fees or prison cantina funds as well as a link for the Patriot Mail Project, which gives you a way to write pen pal letters to a current J6 detainee. My mouse hovers over one of the names: David Dempsey. A known right-wing agitator who had famously attacked an anti-Trump protester with bear repellent in 2019 [1], Dempsey was now serving a sentence in DC. I’d filmed Dempsey attacking police on the West Side tunnel during the insurrection [2]. Wearing a tactical vest and a stars-and-stripes gator that covered his face, he grips a flag pole stalking the police inside the tunnel like a predator, preparing to attack. A rioter screams ferociously next to him. They are frozen like this in a photo on my website and in the DOJ statement of facts used during his sentencing. David Dempsey haunts my dreams. I consider a concise Fuck you but close the computer and prep my camera.
The next morning I don an ‘America Land of the Free’ T-shirt procured at LAX and a baseball cap. As I drive to the event, I consider the risk: if my real name — prominently displayed on watermarked photos provided to the FBI and featured as evidence by Sedition Hunters [3] — is discovered, I would at best be ejected from the event. At worst I’d be facing friends and family whose lives have been pulled apart by a prison sentence I played a part in making. I’d be facing them in a remote place, 12 miles away from the closest town. As rioter Guy Reffitt once said to the son who testified against him, “Traitors get shot.”
I’m also filled with grand fantasies about crashing the event, rushing the stage, having my moment in front of the world (2 dozen people tops and 60 or so live stream viewers) to declare that the people who stormed the capitol were traitors to their country, then drop the mic and leave. I savor this unlikely possibility as I arrive.
