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The Vigil Keepers of January 6th
Tami Perryman was glad that her boyfriend, Brian Jackson, was going to Washington on January 6, 2021. His plan was “high-school friends! whiskey! D.C.!” Her only condition was that he not end up in jail. “I absolutely told him, If you get arrested, I’m leaving your ass, and I’m not going to sit around for this bullshit,” Perryman told me. Jackson thought it might be his last chance to finally see a Trump rally. On the sixth, he started drinking in his hotel room early in the morning before attending Trump’s speech at the Ellipse; by late afternoon, he was on the lower west terrace of the Capitol, throwing a flagpole at a line of police officers. “I was super pissed,” Perryman said. “The moment Trump said, ‘Come to D.C.,’ I felt like it was a fucking setup. This is what the Democrats want you to do.”
Jackson flew home, to Katy, Texas, the next day. He and Perryman got engaged. The following summer, they were six weeks away from getting married when the F.B.I. came to the door and arrested Jackson for assaulting law enforcement. “I knew quite a bit of what he had done, because he filmed it and posted it,” Perryman told me. Jackson’s brother Adam, who attended the rally with him, stole a Capitol Police riot shield and charged a line of officers trying to keep the crowd out of the building. “Adam got a goddam shield, stole it from the fuckin’ popo!” Jackson filmed himself saying on Facebook. (Perryman: “Is my husband a fucking idiot? Yes.”) Photographs of Jackson at the Capitol show him smiling in selfies and making a white-power hand sign.
Perryman, a bartender, first met Jackson, an electrician, when she was a teen-ager. When he went to jail, Perryman was about to sign the paperwork to buy a house. Her mother, who had been sick for several years, had just died. “Then, when my boss found out why Brian got arrested, I got fired, and that was pretty much the nail in the coffin of my life,” Perryman said.
Jackson was denied bond and ordered to remain in federal custody, alongside dozens of other January 6th defendants. When I called him at the D.C. jail, where he’d been since last year, he told me that he hadn’t been interested in politics when he made the trip to Washington. “I wasn’t trying to achieve anything,” he said. (He recently pleaded guilty.) “I wanted to see the monuments and the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump rally. All the people we see on TV, I wanted to see in real life.” He headed for the Capitol after he heard rumors that anyone wearing a backward MAGA hat might be Antifa in disguise, ready to fight. “I didn’t know the acronyms—I didn’t know what G.O.P. or D.O.J. meant, I didn’t know the difference between the House of Representatives or the Congress or any of that stuff,” he said. “I learned all that stuff since I’ve been in here.” (His interpretation of his trip—“I went to D.C. a tourist and came back a terrorist”—diverges from the portrait drawn in court. He “proudly viewed his actions as part of a violent civil-war narrative,” the judge wrote.)
After Jackson’s arrest, Perryman decided that she would pack up her life in Katy, a town of twenty-five thousand people, and drive to the nation’s capital to try to make sense of her new reality. At first, she said, she “was annoyed this was where his actions had put me.” She soon focussed her frustration on the government and the justice system, whose response she found overblown. “As his wife I felt compelled to do something,” Perryman wrote on a crowdfunding page. “He is being persecuted as if he is a terrorist for being there. This is the case for hundreds of other defendants from that day.” Americans who supported Jackson’s actions at the Capitol sent Perryman prayers and hundreds of dollars; they thanked Jackson for being a patriot. “Our confidence in the justice system is zero,” Perryman wrote. “I realized very quickly this fight is much bigger than me and my husband, it is a fight for our nation.”
In the wake of January 6th, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. embarked on what has become the largest criminal investigation in American history. Around a hundred and forty police officers were assaulted during the attack. As of this month, more than fourteen hundred people have been charged for their participation in the riot, and some nine hundred have pleaded guilty; nine have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, a Civil War-era charge that was devised to prosecute Southern rebels. In 2022, advocates of those involved in January 6th began to suggest that Trump ought to do something to help his most loyal supporters; some were disappointed that he hadn’t just pardoned them all before leaving office. The next year, Trump spoke at a fund-raiser for January 6th families held at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. (According to a book about January 6th by the reporter Ryan J. Reilly, Trump had previously expressed interest in possibly bailing people out, until he learned that the federal system has no cash bail.) Then Trump himself was indicted, in four criminal cases, and he soon took to highlighting his own victimhood and martyrdom—comparing himself to Jesus on the Cross, with wounds on his “beautiful” body. Before long, he was also casting himself as a savior who would bring justice to these unfairly maligned patriots.
Trump opened the campaign for his second Presidential term in Waco, Texas, the site of the infamous F.B.I. siege of the Branch Davidian compound. He put his hand on his heart and played “Justice for All,” a version of the national anthem in which his own voice is spliced with January 6th participants singing as a choir from the D.C. jail. He often refers to Jackson and the approximately five hundred other riot participants who are now incarcerated as hostages or political prisoners. The braiding of his own cause with theirs became a centerpiece of his bid for office. He has promised to “free the hostages” as soon as he is reëlected—and to enact retribution on those who put them away.
As the January 6th investigations unfolded, some members of prominent militia groups, such as the Proud Boys, were convicted in high-profile cases. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, was sentenced to more than two decades in prison; Stewart Rhodes, of the Oath Keepers, got eighteen years. Several of the more garish participants, among them the QAnon Shaman, with his horned headdress and American-flag-painted face, became minor celebrities. Many Americans are still being arrested and charged in cases that continue to play out almost every day at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. Court documents reveal the myriad ways these participants narrate their pilgrimages to the Capitol. (One man: “It was what the founding fathers intended.” Another, per his lawyer’s filing, “returned home in a haze and . . . quickly identified the pernicious roots of his participation: his internet addiction, his alcohol abuse, his social isolation.”)
At rallies, Trump has connected his own legal fate to that of the J6ers, as they are being called, and of everyday citizens. “They’re not after me,” he says. “They’re after you. I just happen to be standing in the way.” Recent events have complicated that narrative. In one of Trump’s cases, he was charged with “obstruction of an official proceeding” for disrupting the certification of the 2020 Presidential election. Hundreds of January 6th participants have been charged with the same crime. On June 28th, the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors had overstepped in using the obstruction charge; Trump deemed the verdict “BIG NEWS!” and shared a post on Truth Social that called it “a massive victory for J6 political prisoners,” many of whom, like Trump, are now likely to have the charge dropped. But the vast majority of rioters convicted of obstruction were also charged with other felonies, meaning their sentences won’t materially change.
Then, in early July, the Supreme Court gave Trump broad immunity from prosecution for official actions he took while in office, suggesting that he may never be held to account for anything that happened on January 6th the way his supporters have been. Despite the former President’s recent legal winning streak, Brian Jackson and others like him remain incarcerated. They feel that their futures are in limbo, contingent upon the outcome of the upcoming election. If Trump wins, will he undo the Justice Department’s biggest investigation ever in order to set them free?
For more than seven hundred days, Perryman stood outside the D.C. jail for a nightly vigil, where supporters of the J6ers gather to take calls from inmates, pray, and sing the national anthem. Micki Witthoeft, whose daughter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot by police while climbing through a window of the Capitol on January 6th, started the vigil. When Perryman first arrived in D.C., she had nowhere to stay and no plans, but someone had sent her Witthoeft’s number. “My mom had just died, and when Micki came to the door and just gave me this big hug, I was, like, Here’s my mom,” she told me.
This spring, I fell into the habit of going to the vigil, which convenes at the dead end of a residential street behind the jail. When I arrived the first time I was greeted with “Hi, patriot!” A few other regular attendees were there: a Chinese American family from the area; a woman from a nearby homeless shelter, who dances with an American flag; a live-streamer who lives in a van. Just before 9 P.M., they joined hands in a circle. “We pray for our patriots that are being denied freedom,” Perryman said. “This country will return to you and to the rule of law, where justice is blind.” The group read a roll call of every incarcerated J6 participant, following each name with a chant of “Hero.” I leaned against the stone wall of the Congressional Cemetery, the first national burial ground, which borders the makeshift gathering; Capitol Hill residents sometimes walk their dogs among the tombstones as the vigil goes on. Floodlights shone down on us.
Several thousand viewers regularly tune in to live streams of the vigil, the second-longest-running in Washington. (The protest at the nuclear-disarmament tent outside the White House, which has been around since 1981, holds the record.) Trump has called in to the vigil to talk to Witthoeft; Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who died with a bloodied Trump flag wrapped around her as a cape, has become something of a MAGA martyr. “We’re with you,” Trump told Witthoeft. Congressman Matt Gaetz once came to pay his respects (and to seize on the opportunity to connect with the base). When he arrived, Perryman was on the phone with one of the “hostages.” Gaetz told him, “I just want to say how sorry I am that there are any Americans that are having to endure this two-tier justice system.”
Every evening, Perryman, Witthoeft, and Nicole Reffitt—whose husband, Guy, a member of the anti-government movement the Three Percenters, was the first rioter to go on trial—fielded calls from the “hostages” and speculated about their futures. (By the time I visited, the three women had lived together in Washington, in a rented house northeast of the Capitol, for a year and a half.) On most nights, just a few other people would come, unfolding flimsy camping chairs in the shadow of the jail. They would smoke cigarettes and huddle around a folding table littered with snacks and bottles of soda and self-published books about pardons.
Listening to Perryman and Jackson talk to each other on the phone was a nightly ritual; he’d call in and she’d hold the phone up to a microphone connected to a loudspeaker. His voice blared into the night in fifteen-minute increments, until an automated voice announced that the call was ending. Sometimes they’d just chat about their past, in Texas—“Remember that armadillo we saw?”—but frequently Jackson brought up Trump and his Presidential campaign. “The guys feel like this election is their lives hanging in the balance, because it truly is that way,” Perryman told me. “They could be either coming home in eight months, or they’re starting a twelve-year bid.” She looked down at my notebook. “It is our last stand,” she said. “If we don’t win in November, then there’s going to be an eruption. There’s no point being peaceful if democracy’s gone.” I watched what appeared to be a nearby surveillance van get a food delivery from a man on a moped. A local mother, walking out of the jail with her children after visiting a family member, stopped by the snack table; she didn’t seem to know what the gathering was about. Reffitt handed the kids oranges and cookies.
Perryman, Witthoeft, and Reffitt’s house had become something of a central node for a quixotic network of families connected to the January 6th cause. Perryman asked me over several times but would always rescind the invitation, when it turned out that a January 6th participant who hadn’t been caught might be stopping by, or that a mother whose son was about to be sentenced, and who was staying with them before the hearing, wanted to be left alone. On Sunday, after church, the three women would sit down to plan the week—what’s on the court docket, what hearings they want to go see, which families coming to town for trials might need support—and then make dinner. Afterward, Witthoeft and Reffitt watched British crime dramas downstairs; Perryman watched American crime procedurals upstairs. When they’re running errands, Reffitt sometimes gets recognized from media coverage of Guy’s trial. “Neighbors see my car now and they’re, like, She’s just grocery shopping, she’s not trying to insurrect,” Reffitt said.
The mood outside the jail sometimes came across as a bit desolate, as if I were at a protest for a lost cause or a book reading where only a few people had shown up. The evening that Trump’s guilty verdict came down, on thirty-four felony counts related to hush-money payments made before the 2016 Presidential election, the mood was jubilant. “Welcome to the club, Donald Trump,” Perryman said.
“The guys feel like it’ll energize and activate people,” Reffitt said. She pulled out her phone to show me a message Guy had sent her that afternoon, from his federal-prison cell in Oklahoma: “DJT is one of us now.”
Perryman lit a cigarette. “Trump absolutely is in the same situation as our husbands,” she said. “He just has more resources. He’s not going to lose Mar-a-Lago. His trucks are paid off. He doesn’t have a public defender.” She was blasting “Indicted We Stand,” a song by Loza Alexander, one of several popular MAGA rappers, from a loudspeaker: “After Trump / I believe they after us all / had enough / the justice system is about to fall.”
Brian Jackson called in to the vigil, his voice crackling through the speaker. “These people are shooting themselves in the foot,” he said, of the judge and the jury in Trump’s case. “It’s gonna be you one day—now they can crush their opponents by jailing them.” That night, additional police officers were on duty across Washington, and there were extra guards in the D.C. jail, in case the January 6th defendants rioted inside. According to Jackson, he and his fellow-J6ers were actually resolute and hopeful—help was on the way. “Trump told us, Sit back and wait, he’s coming for us,” he said. “Reparations are coming. It’s coming together when we get out. Our lives are going to be amazing.”
By the time I met Perryman, Witthoeft, and Reffitt, they had attended more than five hundred days of January 6th hearings, sentencings, and trials. “I was a stay-at-home mom for seventeen years before this,” Reffitt told me. “I was in shock and awe, sitting there in my first trial. It’s very intimidating to hear your last name up versus the government, and you need a support system.” The day after Trump’s verdict, I went with Perryman and Reffitt, both in pink blouses, to the sentencing of John Todd, a former marine from Missouri whom a jury had convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting an officer. (“We’ve exhausted every fucking legal route,” Todd had shouted after entering the Rotunda with a flagpole.) Todd’s aunt, mother, sister, and grandmother—who was in a wheelchair and using an oxygen machine—had travelled to Washington for the hearing.
Todd’s lawyers were John Pierce—who has represented more than twenty January 6th defendants, and was briefly on Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense team—and Roger Roots, a libertarian activist based in Montana who has founded an online anti-government university and helped to defend the Bundy family after their armed standoffs with federal agencies. Pierce has said that he believes élites stole the 2020 election from Trump; last year, he tweeted at the Justice Department to drop all charges against January 6th defendants. “If you do not, I will destroy your careers and any remaining institutional legitimacy you may have. You have been warned,” he wrote. Perryman and Reffitt rolled their eyes when they saw him. (Before taking on the January 6th defendants, Pierce had never tried a criminal case.)
On January 6th, Todd and a police officer had struggled back and forth with Todd’s flagpole. The pole snapped, and Todd jerked it out of the officer’s hand, cutting the officer’s finger, which required seven stitches. “Many people get a cut of the same size and don’t get stitches,” Roots said, arguing that it was barely an injury. “The flagpole could not be a weapon by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a trick of conceptualization that the government is doing.” The judge, Beryl Howell, responded, “Mr. Roots, your view of reality is so different that it is sometimes difficult to have a conversation.”
Todd was ordered to pay two thousand dollars in restitution for property damage that occurred on the sixth; Roots asked the government to provide an itemized bill for the estimated $2.9 million of total damage to the Capitol. The government lawyer thumbed frantically through his binders. Howell, visibly annoyed, suggested that prosecutors had squandered an opportunity “to explain to the public what happened to the Capitol building.” She went on, “There are still people who believe—possibly sitting in this room—that nothing happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” She looked at Todd and his family. A lawyer for the government said, “I would suggest that some of those people aren’t persuadable by facts.” Reffitt caught my eye and mouthed, “Wow”—here was the two-tier justice system, weaponized against ordinary Americans, that she and Perryman kept telling me about.
Todd’s aunt and sister delivered statements about his character to the judge. Todd put his head face down on the table as they each approached the bench and described physical and sexual abuse that had occurred in his childhood, repeated suicide attempts, P.T.S.D. from serving in Afghanistan. “He has never had a father to teach him when to speak or when to be silent,” his aunt said. “He has always been a pawn in somebody’s hand.” She said that Todd had suffered from undiagnosed vitamin deficiencies for many years and had recently started taking supplements for them. Without these problems, she theorized, perhaps his life could have had a different outcome. “What you see may not look like a patriot, but he was willing to give his life so that we could all sit in this courtroom and have this democracy,” she said.
Howell countered that Todd wanted to “stop democracy in its tracks” and had shown no remorse. “I haven’t seen a change of perspective on what happened,” she said. “You believe that the Presidential election was stolen.” She went on, “Potential continued belief in that is of very great concern to me, requiring specific deterrence.” Later, when I caught up with Roots, he told me, “John Todd speaks for half the population of this country.” The prosecution’s sentencing memo notes that each January 6th conviction is designed to “send a message about the importance of democratic values,” but Trump and a large portion of the electorate see Todd and his fellow-defendants as the ones who protected democracy. (Republican sympathy for the rioters has increased in the past three years; more than half of self-described conservatives say that January 6th was an act of “legitimate political discourse” rather than a “violent insurrection.”)
Howell sentenced Todd to five years in prison. She denied Roots’s request that Todd be allowed to hug his grandmother. A U.S. marshal escorted him out of the room as his family cried. At almost the exact same time, the former President was at Trump Tower in New York giving a post-verdict press conference, in which he called the judge in his own case a devil and said that the only verdict that matters will come in November. Hordes of fans had attended Trump’s trial each day, and his campaign had raised more than fifty million dollars in the twenty-four hours after the verdict was announced. Todd’s last stand was this empty courtroom. He was granted a reprieve from paying any fines on top of the previously ordered restitution, owing to his lack of funds.
After previous uprisings in American history—the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War—Presidents granted amnesty to members of the losing side. Perryman, Witthoeft, and Reffitt aren’t in favor of such blanket pardons for the J6 rioters. This is partly because they think pardons could curtail further investigation into what they believe really happened—Democratic setup, “fed-surrection,” etc.—but also because they think some violent offenders shouldn’t be let off the hook. Despite increasingly frequent invocations of the “hostages” on the campaign trail, Trump has specifically committed to pardoning only one rioter, Matthew Perna, who killed himself after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct, among other charges. (“The justice system killed his spirit and his zest for life,” Perna’s family wrote in his obituary.) Trump’s campaign has said that he will make further decisions “on a case-by-case basis when he is back in the White House.” During much of the summer, the campaign seemed to be distancing itself from the more aggressive actors. But, in late July, when asked if he would pardon rioters who assaulted officers, Trump responded, “Oh, absolutely I would, if they’re innocent.”
In 1863, Abraham Lincoln indicated, in his annual message to Congress, that the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War would include amnesty terms for former Confederates. Two years later, President Andrew Johnson did extend amnesty to most Confederate soldiers and officials, on the condition that they first take an oath to “henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Stephanie McCurry, a historian at Columbia University who specializes in the Reconstruction period, told me that the Civil War-era pardons and loyalty oaths were more about reunification than accountability. “It started to look like there would be a gentle peace, not a peace of retribution,” she said. “But the gentle peace completely backfired. Though the war was over, the conflict was ongoing as a low-grade political and paramilitary war—none of those issues died, and there was unresolved, festering grievance.” (The Confederates who were pardoned by Johnson after signing their loyalty oaths had, of course, taken an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy just a few years before. “You would have had to remake human subjectivity for most of them to mentally accept Emancipation,” McCurry said.) The judges in the January 6th cases have focussed on countering the very ideas that brought the defendants to the Capitol in the first place—namely, that the 2020 election was stolen and so its certification had to be stopped. “Political violence rots republics,” one judge wrote, in his sentencing notes. “January 6 must not become a precedent.” Whether it does is an open question, given how firmly many of the rioters hold on to their beliefs and how many Americans continue to align with them.
Taylor Johnatakis, a septic-system installer from Washington State who called out “One, two, three, go!” from a megaphone as he led a crowd that pushed past a police barricade on January 6th, and later exclaimed “It’s 1776 again,” was recently sentenced to more than seven years for assaulting law-enforcement officers. Johnatakis, who represented himself at trial, maintained that he is a “sovereign citizen,” meaning that he doubts the legitimacy of the federal government, and as such isn’t subject to federal laws. “I chose to get rowdy,” he wrote on his Web site. “At that time I felt it was a right born of necessity.” At the recent sentencing of a geophysicist from Colorado who maintained that he was motivated by “patriotic rage” to answer a “call to battle,” the judge said, “It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine a similar call coming out in the coming months.”
Others have said that they are sorry and renounced their views. Elias Irizarry, a student at the Citadel military school who was nineteen when he entered the Capitol and walked around for a few minutes, wrote a letter of apology to Judge Tanya Chutkan, saying that his participation brought shame upon himself and his country. (Chutkan is also presiding over Trump’s January 6th case.) “This is not who you are,” she told Irizarry, before sentencing him to fourteen days in jail. She later wrote a letter of recommendation in support of his readmission to the Citadel, in which she quoted the civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Irizarry went on to launch a failed bid for Congress in South Carolina; it was unclear whether his participation in the riot benefitted or detracted from his candidacy.
Jamie Raskin, the Democratic congressman from Maryland, met with J6 participants as part of his work on the January 6th Committee hearings. When I called him recently, he brought up Pam Hemphill, a grandmother who had stormed the Capitol, pleaded guilty, gone to jail for two months, and recently apologized, as a case that inspired him. “She said, ‘Stop talking about me as some victim of injustice. I went to jail because I deserved it, because of what I did,’ ” he told me. “She totally rebukes Trump now.” Still, Raskin admitted that someone like Brian Jackson might need a cult deprogrammer to see things the same way. “There are some who break, and there are some who just become more ardent true believers,” he told me. And the prospect of pardons was deeply troubling. He went on, “In the past, Trump was basically pardoning his inner political coterie—Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone. When he says he’s going to pardon hundreds of January 6th convicted felons, he is pardoning the political shock troops for the next round of mass violence.”
Now more than ever, the political coterie and the shock troops are aligned. Peter Navarro, a former Trump White House adviser who was convicted for refusing to testify before the January 6th Committee, served four months in federal prison and emerged defiant—he travelled straight from prison to the Republican National Convention. (Steve Bannon is now also in prison for defying the same subpoena.) For months, I had heard Navarro’s name read aloud with the other “hostages” at the vigil; at the Convention, he was received onstage during prime-time coverage as a hero and a martyr. “I went to prison so you won’t have to,” he told the delegates. He brought his fiancée out to give him a kiss. “When they put people like me in prison, and they fire figurative and now literal bullets at Donald Trump, they also assault our families. On Election Day, America will hold these lawfare jackals accountable.”
Many J6ers remain similarly resolute. “I think Guy feels more strongly now than ever that he was right in going, because of everything that has come out since January 6th,” Nicole Reffitt told me. “A lot of people have been broken and begged for forgiveness and denounced Trump. I don’t want them on my side. To denounce everything—there is no integrity in that. I’m sorry if it broke them, but it’s not fair to blame Trump.” But even within J6 families there are fissures. The first time I went to the vigil, I met Reffitt’s daughters, Sarah and Peyton, who are both in their twenties now. “I’m sorry,” Sarah said to me, when I told her I was from D.C., “about what happened here.”
The prosecution argued that Guy, who had stood on the Capitol steps with zip ties, body armor, a megaphone, and a handgun, had “lit the match that started the fire.” It was Guy’s son, Jackson, who turned his dad in to the F.B.I., then testified against him in court and on CNN; the news media held up the Reffitts as the embodiment of a shattered, post-insurrection American family. “We really ended up despising Trump more after January 6th,” Sarah told me. “After slowly seeing so many people like my dad get charged with what they’re getting charged with . . . I know Trump also got charged, but it just seems like the effect isn’t there as it would be on smaller families or on families without as much influence or power or money. I really started hating him then.”
After Guy’s sentencing—five felonies, seven and a half years—Peyton told reporters outside the courthouse that Trump deserves life in prison. “I could really see how my father’s ego and personality fell to his knees when President Trump spoke,” she wrote, in a letter to the court. “I just mean to convey that the language used by the President of the United States has real effects on American citizens.” In jail, her father receives trash bags full of letters of admiration for his heroism on January 6th. Sarah told me, “Some of these letters, I read them and they’re just, like, ‘You’re the next forefather of this country,’ and it’s, like, a kid writing it.”
Years before Tami Perryman got together with Brian Jackson, he was arrested for a string of violent crimes, including assault causing bodily injury and aggravated robbery. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, where he joined the White Knights, a white-supremacist prison gang, and got their symbols tattooed on his eyelids and all over his body. Jackson has said that he’s since left the group. “Mr. Jackson’s body, unfortunately, is covered with reminders of the sins of his past, and while his preference would be for those not to exist, he at this time cannot afford to rectify it,” reads a filing from his attorney in his January 6th case. He “wants to remove his tattoos, just like the beliefs,” the filing says. He hasn’t.
Andrew Taake, the owner of a pressure-washing business in his early thirties who had made the trip to the Capitol, went on the dating app Bumble not long afterward, and flirted with a match by sharing photos of himself in the action. (Taake sprayed police officers with bear repellent; he was also on pretrial release for a child-solicitation case.) His potential date pieced together his full name and sent it to the F.B.I.; Taake was later charged with assaulting law-enforcement officers, and recently sentenced to more than six years in prison. After January 6th, some Americans who felt helpless and at loose ends, many of them working remotely because of the pandemic, took part in similar online activities, which came to be referred to as “sedition hunting.” They would pore over hours and hours of video footage from the riot, zooming in on faces of their countrymen in the crowd to try to identify participants. “The more I watched, the more I felt like I had lost control over what this country was supposed to be,” the D.C. woman who caught Taake on Bumble has said. Identifying him gave her a sense of productive civic duty. (“Knowing what I do now, I probably would have hung back,” Taake told me by phone from the D.C. jail, before he was sentenced. “I was not in love with Trump, and now my future is tied to him.”)
One of these so-called sedition hunters built a facial-recognition engine and used it to match an image of Taylor Johnatakis, the septic-system installer, to an F.B.I. “Wanted” poster. Johnatakis had for years recorded a podcast called “Peasant’s Perspective,” about living off the grid with his family. “The premise of the podcast was that no matter what the government does, we peasants have to stay focussed on our families, and in many cases, survive day to day,” Johnatakis wrote. I spoke to his wife, Marie, who told me, “We saw ourselves as not really polarized. We just felt like, Rome will come and go, the United States will do whatever they do, but we still have to make a living and feed our families.” When Johnatakis went to prison, Marie started reading “The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, which argues that people make decisions based on moral intuition, not reason. “People have these principles that are righteous for them,” she said. “We’re all rational in our own minds.” When we spoke, she was in the process of selling their house so that she and their five children, whom she homeschools, could downsize and try to move closer to the Missouri prison where Johnatakis is serving his sentence. She maintains her complete support for her husband’s actions and cause, but also recently wrote on her blog that she has no hate or judgment for those on the jury who convicted him.
Not long ago, I talked to the sedition hunter who identified Johnatakis. During the pandemic, he was working as a health-care technologist; as soon as he finished his telework job, he would turn to sedition hunting, sitting in front of three monitors in his apartment and working until four in the morning. Johnatakis was the first person he caught, but the rush of excitement that came with solving a puzzle quickly turned to guilt. He had started listening to Johnatakis’s podcast to find information for the F.B.I., but then he kept listening. “I just really got to know him from afar, understanding how he thinks, and I developed this sense of, I don’t know, empathy, and sorrow for having him get arrested,” the hunter, who goes by the moniker Patr10tic, told me.
The picture that emerged from the podcast, Patr10tic said, was “the family man, the hardworking American. I grew up in a pretty Mormon population, and so did he. I think, in general, this is somebody who loves his country, and somebody who believes that he was doing the right thing. . . . A lot of these people, they think that not only are they doing the right thing, they think that they have been asked by their Commander-in-Chief to do something for him.” Early on, the term “sedition hunter” hadn’t been coined yet, and so the sleuth just referred to himself as a patriot. Of his moniker, Patr10tic told me, “I’ve had to come to the hard realization that a lot of these people use the same word to describe themselves, and that, if anything, has driven a lot of the empathy that I have.”
One day, I met Perryman and Reffitt at Union Market, a gleaming, gentrified food hall in Northeast Washington. Perryman ordered red beans and rice and a vanilla ice cream; Reffitt drank an Aperol spritz from a plastic cup. They had come to Washington because they wanted their husbands to be released, but now they found themselves interested in reforming the judicial and prison systems they’d seen up close. “Everyone can relate to having a family or friend in jail and just wanting humane treatment while waiting for their trial,” Reffitt told me.
“We’ve sat in Jim Jordan’s office to talk to him about the Bureau of Prisons,” Perryman said. They wanted him to pay attention to the psychological danger of solitary confinement and the importance of family visitation.
The “hostage” situation at the D.C. jail has led to an investigation of the conditions in the facility, which criminal-justice activists have for many years called inhumane. (Last year, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability toured the jail, though they only visited the wing where J6ers are held.) Perryman, Reffitt, and Witthoeft have also attended congressional hearings; the committee they’re most interested in, they told me, is probably the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which purports to root out corruption in the Biden Administration, the D.O.J., and the F.B.I. “There are a couple of people on the Democratic side we want to have conversations with,” Reffitt said. “Remember that woman on Oversight who wanted to talk about reform?”
“No, I think she wanted to say how traumatized she was by J6,” Perryman said.
Part of their newfound civic engagement grew out of the notion that a blind faith in Trump isn’t enough. Reffitt told me, “What’s happening to me is bigger than Trump. He’s not a savior. We can’t expect him to come in and fix everything.” They didn’t presume the former President to be the ultimate hero—in their minds, the populist grassroots movement that Trump spurred would have to live on without him.
“He uses us—they all use us,” Perryman said.
“What if Guy doesn’t love me anymore when he gets out?” Reffitt asked, ordering another Aperol spritz. “Before, I was always just this enigma of positivity.”
“You mean, what if he doesn’t appreciate this strong woman that has come out of the fire?” Perryman said. “It’s a legitimate fear, because you’re not the same person you were when Guy went in.” She added, “Thirty-five per cent of marriages fail because of incarceration.”
Another evening, at the vigil, Reffitt told me, “January 6th reunited the American spirit that was dwindling. You and your countrymen have so much faith in this beautiful experiment that we’ve all been part of for over two hundred and fifty years. The systems are set up really amazing. Our system of government is so beautiful. It’s better than anything else that has come about in the world. But you have to participate. You have to be present.” Perryman said, “We can’t have a revolution by being nice, but there are so many ways to become activated. It doesn’t have to be extreme—poll-watching, flag-waving, paying attention to local politics, like your sheriff and judges, letter-writing campaigns.” Perryman would often make comments like this, about her reverence for American democracy, and then proceed to ask, “What if the next thing the Biden regime does is go after people like us?” She told me that an uprising was coming if Trump loses in November, but also expressed confidence in the country’s electoral processes, flaws and all. Neither she nor Reffitt seemed to register any tension between these ideas.
Brian Jackson was sentenced last week. At the hearing, the prosecutor read a text that Jackson had sent to his brother the day before the riot: “they are saying civil unrest is gonna happen. I can’t fucking wait!!” Jackson’s lawyer promised the judge that, going forward, “you will have an apolitical man who is aware of consequences.” He went on, “God forbid something like this happens again in 2025, but he will not be there.” Then Jackson addressed the judge, crying. Of January 6th, he said, “We didn’t have the wives there to tell us we couldn’t do things. It was a free-for-all.” The judge sentenced Jackson to thirty-seven months in prison. “I don’t know what’s in your heart,” he concluded. Jackson waved and blew a kiss to Perryman as he was escorted out by U.S. marshals.
I left the courthouse with Perryman. She was driving back to Texas that afternoon, where she planned to look for work, maybe cleaning houses or laying floorboards. “I will become more involved in prison reform and judicial reform than I’ve ever been before,” she told me. By the time we walked outside, she was saying, “We’re done using the system. I think that if there were a way to light a fire and burn the system down, I would do it happily. Maybe even gleefully. ” When I asked her about the promise that Jackson had made to remain apolitical, she told me, "There’s a certain amount of wordplay that has to happen in these courtrooms—you kind of have to play a little bit of a game.”
On Memorial Day, I had met up with a group of several dozen January 6th families and supporters who came to D.C. for the Ashli Babbitt Memorial March, from the Capitol to the D.C. jail. Perryman was wearing a hat shaped like Trump’s hair. I fell into step with a man I’ll call David, who, lowering his voice, asked me to promise not to turn him in. “I haven’t been caught yet,” he said. The humidity was thick, and residents of Capitol Hill, cooling off on their stoops, watched as the group made its way down Constitution Avenue, chanting “U.S.A.” and waving Trump flags. They were flanked by police on motorcycles and a counter-protester with a bullhorn who shrieked “Ashli Babbitt died a traitor!” into a megaphone.
When we arrived at the jail, we gathered under a tarp, next to a buffet of hot dogs and sheet cakes from Whole Foods with Babbitt’s face printed on them. I stood with Ben Pollock, whose thirty-three-year-old son and twenty-four-year-old daughter allegedly assaulted law-enforcement officers on January 6th. Both are in jail, in D.C., awaiting trial. (They both have pleaded not guilty.) Pollock and his wife had driven nineteen hours from Florida. “My children wanted somebody to look at election integrity, that’s it,” Pollock said. “We just wanted equal justice.” A woman whom he referred to as his manager interrupted us. “The New Yorker is very liberal,” she said. “Are you going to call his children insurrectionists?” She started to film us but walked off mid-conversation. Pollock was telling me about the time the F.B.I. came to his house to make the arrests. “We were raided,” he said. “They came in at 5:30 A.M. on a bullhorn. We live in a small farming community. All the neighbors heard so many flash-bangs go off they thought they killed us. I thought P.T.S.D. was a joke, but we all had it.” In D.C., the Pollocks had parked their truck on the street outside Perryman’s house, and locals smeared feces on it. “Now, write this down,” he told me. “I was born in 1962, the year they took prayer out of our schools. The next year they took the Bible out. My whole life is seeing America decline.” He continued, “Those who defended truth need to be pardoned.”
It began to rain as Perryman read out the list of “hostages.” “Today, we commemorate all those who gave everything for us. We cannot forget their sacrifice. You patriots are amazing,” she said. Pollock stared up at the sky, into the downpour, and waved an American flag. The group chanted “Hero” as thunder and lightning started, then joined hands as Pollock led them in prayer. Someone held an umbrella over me as he preached about the existential stakes of the election. “Father, we know you’ll open up the heavens and our people will be let go,” Pollock said. “Father, wake them up—2024 is it.” The protester was still screaming “Traitor!” into her bullhorn. Pollock went on, “If we don’t get it right, right now—Lord, I don’t want to see this country go. I want to see this country stand for truth.” ♦
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