MAJORITY OF CAPITOL RIOTERS WERE IN FINANCIAL TROUBLE

 

                                         …This is the Trump Rioter, Jenna Ryan

 

A quarter of the rioters had been sued for owing money to a creditor, and 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home.

 

Here’s an interesting statistic:  Nearly 60% of the people facing charges related to the Capitol Riot had prior money troubles.  Their problems included bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades.  This is according to the public records of the first 125 of the defendants charged for the Capitol riot..

The trail of bankruptcies, tax problems and bad debts raises many questions for researchers trying to understand motivations for violent attack

As an example, Ms. Jenna Ryan, who seemed like an unlikely participant in the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.  She was a real estate agent from Texas. She flew into Washington on a private jet. And she was dressed that day in clothes better suited for a Winter tailgate than a war.

Yet Ryan, 50, is accused of rushing into the Capitol past broken glass and blaring security alarms and shouting: “Fight for freedom! Fight for freedom!”

But in a different way, Jenna fit right in.

Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years.  She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that, and she filed for bankruptcy in 2012 while she faced another IRS tax lien in 2010.

She’s been described as a conservative radio talk show host. But she wasn’t a budding Rush Limbaugh. Her AM radio show each Sunday focused on real estate, and she paid for the airtime. She stopped doing the show in March, when the pandemic hit.

Twice divorced and struggling with financial problems, Ms. Ryan developed an outlook that she described as politically conservative, leaning toward libertarian.

But politics was not her focal point until recently. She recalled being upset when President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012. And she preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton four years later. But she said she wasn’t very strident in her support for Trump.

That changed as the 2020 election approached.

She said she started reading far-right websites such as Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit. She began streaming shows such as Alex Jones’s “Infowars” and former Trump campaign manager Stephen Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic.” She began following conspiracy theories related to QAnon including a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology. She said she didn’t know if the posts were true, but she was enthralled.  “It was all like a football game. I was sucked into it. Consumed by it,” Ryan said.

She attended the first protest in her life in April, going to Austin to vent about the state’s pandemic lockdown orders.  That was followed by a rally for Shelley Luther, who gained national attention for reopening her beauty salon in Dallas in defiance of the lockdown.

Ryan said she traveled to Trump’s “Save America” rally on a whim.  A Facebook friend offered to fly her and three others on a private plane.

They arrived in Washington a day early and got rooms at a Westin hotel downtown, Ryan said.

It was her first trip to the nation’s capital.

The next morning, Jan. 6, the group of friends left the hotel at 6 a.m., Ryan said. She was cold, so she bought a $35 knit snow hat with a “45” emblem from a souvenir shop. They then followed the crowd streaming toward the National Mall.

“My main concern was there were no bathrooms. I kept asking, ‘Where are the bathrooms?’” she said. “I was just having fun.”

They listened to some of the speakers.  But mostly they walked around and took photos.  She felt like a tourist. They grabbed sandwiches at a Wawa convenience store for lunch. They hired a pedicab to take them back to the hotel.

She drank white wine while the group watched on television as Congress prepared to certify the electoral college votes. They listened to clips of Trump telling rallygoers to walk to the Capitol and saying, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

They decided to leave the hotel and go to the Capitol.  Ryan said she was reluctant.

But she also posted a video to her Facebook account that showed her looking into a bathroom mirror and saying, according to an FBI account of her charges: “We’re gonna go down and storm the capitol. They’re down there right now and that’s why we came and so that’s what we are going to do. So wish me luck.”

She live-streamed on Facebook. She posted photos to Twitter. She got closer to the Capitol with each post. She stood on the Capitol’s steps. She flashed a peace symbol next to a smashed Capitol window. The FBI also found video of her walking through doors on the west side of the Capitol in the middle of a packed crowd, where she said into a camera, according to the bureau: “Y’all know who to hire for your realtor. Jenna Ryan for your realtor.”

The FBI document does not state how long Ryan spent inside the building. She said it was just a few minutes. She and her new friends eventually walked back to the hotel, she said.

“We just stormed the Capital,” Ryan tweeted that afternoon. “It was one of the best days of my life.”

She said she realized she was in trouble only after returning to Texas. Her phone was blowing up with messages. Her social media posts briefly made her the infamous face of the riots: the smiling real estate agent who flew in a private jet to join an insurrection.

Nine days later, she turned herself in to the FBI. She was charged with two federal misdemeanors related to entering the Capitol building and disorderly conduct.

Last week, federal authorities filed similar charges against two others on her flight: Jason Hyland, 37, of Frisco, who federal authorities said organized the trip, and Katherine Schwab, 32, of Colleyville, Texas.

Ryan remained defiant at first. She clashed with people who criticized her online.

This group of losers, their bankruptcy rate was 18%.  This is nearly twice as high as that of the general American public.  A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point. This is all according to the court filings.

Their financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters, many with professional careers, but few with violent criminal histories.  However, they were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president’s rhetoric that painted Trump and his supporters as undeserving victims.

While no single factor explains why someone decided to join in, the experts say, “Donald Trump and his brand of grievance politics tapped into something that resonated with the hundreds of people who descended on the Capitol in a historic burst of violence.”

“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity.  It is a deep-seated feeling of psychological unwellness that is adversely affected by a lack of regular or secure income.” This was said by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the: Polarization and Extremism Research Lab at American University.  “And that situation, combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away, it mobilized a lot of people that day.”

The financial missteps by the defendants in the attempted Capitol insurrection ranged from small debts of a few thousand dollars, to unpaid tax bills of $400,000 and homes facing foreclosure in recent years. Many of them once stood very close to the edge of total ruin.

Ms. Ryan had nearly lost everything. And the stakes seemed similarly high to her when she came to Washington in early January.  She fully believed Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen and that he was going to save the country, she said in an interview with The Post.  But now, facing federal charges and abandoned by people she considered “fellow patriots,” she said she feels betrayed.

“I bought into a lie, and the lie is the lie, and it’s embarrassing,” she said. “I regret everything.”

Ms. Cynthia Miller-Idriss said: “These are people who feel like they’ve lost something,” Miller-Idriss said.  Going through a bankruptcy or falling behind on taxes, even years earlier, could provoke a similar response.

“They know it can be lost. They have that history,  and then someone comes along and tells you this election has been stolen,” Miller-Idriss said. “It taps into the same thing.”

“Trump’s false claims about election fraud, refuted by elections officials and rejected by judges, seemed tailored to exploit feelings about this precarious status,” said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who studies political extremism.

“It’s hard to ignore with a Trump presidency that his message is that ‘the America you knew and loved is going away, but I’m going to protect it,’”Don Haider-Markel said. “They feel, at a minimum, that they’re under a threat.”

Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police when she tried to leap through a door’s broken window inside the Capitol.  She had struggled to run a pool-service company outside San Diego and was saddled with a $23,000 judgment from a lender in 2017.  This is also according to court records.

Copyright G. Ater 2021