They can’t arrest us all,’’ a future defendant had posted days before, and this was the vibe in the moment, the ecstatic invulnerability that leads someone to smear feces on the floor of the building in which the most powerful country on earth writes its rules. The worry set in later, when the swarm resolved into 9,000 separate bodies in separate homes in separate beds. At first it was just a feeling, watching the news, as the word rally gave way to the word riot, that the mood of the day had not carried onward into the present. The FBI was at the airport, someone heard. A friend had been arrested. One hundred arrests in the first two weeks. There were photographs on the FBI’s web page and online sleuths trawling for clues. There were tipsters calling in names of old classmates. When a man was arrested in Washington, the FBI had footage from a camera planted on a telephone pole near his front yard. Three hundred by March. Arrests would be made in nearly every state. There would be FBI raids, battering rams, guns-drawn SWAT teams terrifying small children in the night. Five hundred by August. If you were paying attention, you were waiting for them, and the thousands who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were people who took immense pride in paying attention.
I did storm the Capitol, a rioter named Robert Chapman messaged someone on Bumble. We are not a match, said the recipient, who then sent the message to the authorities. Rioters looked about and wondered who among their acquaintances had the motivated malice to dial 1-800-CALL-FBI. They were betrayed by co-workers, and they were betrayed by exes, and they were betrayed, very often, by former classmates. Someone who worked at Circle K pointed out that an assistant manager had requested time off to go to this. It was not unusual for six, seven, eight people to take it upon themselves to identify a single man. Thanks for your tips! tweeted the FBI.
Here was a crime to which people loved to confess. I STOLE SHIT FROM NANCY POLESI, wrote Riley Williams on Discord. At a dentist’s office, Daniel Warmus bragged that he had smoked marijuana inside the Capitol; someone in the office turned him in. Just broke in this bitch! said Cole Temple in a video of himself that he posted on Snapchat. Rioters had given interviews to the Baker County Press, the anti-abortion publication LifeSiteNews, and the Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, a Finnish reader of which contacted the FBI. Rioters were identified because other rioters tagged them on Facebook. As part of an Instagram Story, Edward Lang posted a picture of the crowded Capitol entrance, to which he added a pointing-finger emoji and the words THIS IS ME.
Hundreds of people caught on-camera committing what was arguably sedition went home to families that feared them, strangers who admired them, federal agents already setting up surveillance. Over a year’s time, many of their lives would be transformed. They would discover the dark state of American prisons. They would be fired and divorced and bankrupt and subject to extraordinary kindness from strangers. They would become fodder for the kind of conspiracies that had summoned them to D.C. in the first place. They would become a price paid for the right to stand on a dais and say You’ll never take back our country with weakness.
Gina Bisignano would lose her salon, Guy Reffitt would lose his freedom, and Rosanne Boyland would lose her life....
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