The Capitol Siege: The Arrested And Their Stories

More than 250 people have been charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. NPR is looking at the cases. Each provides clues to questions surrounding the attack: Who joined the mob? What did they do? And why?

Transcript

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Investigators are still trying to answer some key questions about the January 6 assault on the Capitol, like exactly who stormed the building that day? And what motivated them to be there? An NPR team has been analyzing the more than 200 cases the Justice Department has brought so far. The defendants include military men, extremists and hardcore Trump supporters. One thing they had in common - they were nearly all men. As Dina Temple-Raston of NPR's Investigations team explains, experts say gender likely played an outsized role in the way the day played out.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, BYLINE: When we look at the video of what happened that day, it's easy to focus on the violence.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: The smashing of windows, the tear gas, the five people who lost their lives in the chaos. But Michael Kimmel, a distinguished professor emeritus at Stony Brook University, sees something a little different.

MICHAEL KIMMEL: A lot of the guys that I watched on January 6 and subsequently in all of the videos that have surfaced is these guys look familiar to me.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Kimmel wrote a book about angry white men and what drives them to embrace extremism. And he thinks traditional gender roles - the notions of being a man - played a part in the violence at the Capitol.

KIMMEL: They grew up believing that if they worked hard, paid their taxes, were good guys, that they would be able to live the lives that their grandfathers lived.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Kimmel said that when that doesn't happen, a kind of aggrieved entitlement takes hold. And that's the kind of dissatisfaction that drew people to former President Trump.

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DONALD TRUMP: Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore. And that's what this is all about.

JESSICA STERN: We often see this notion of a band of brothers. We often see people getting drawn into joining extremist groups at moments when they're feeling confused about their identity or they've experienced a status loss.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That's Jessica Stern, a professor at Boston University. She's been studying extremist groups for decades. And she said that people who were there on January 6 were familiar to her, too. Consider Barton Wade Shively, a burly ex-Marine who was charged with striking police officers as he rushed the Capitol that day. He spoke with CNN outside the day of the protest.

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BARTON WADE SHIVELY: Tried to push them back a little bit until finally, they started getting rough with us. So we kind of pushed them back. So that's what we did. We pushed them back.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Shively seemed angry.

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SHIVELY: That's what we're doing - fighting back.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: And what's the point? What's the endgame?

SHIVELY: What's the point?

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Yeah.

SHIVELY: We're losing our freedoms. What do you mean what's the point?

TEMPLE-RASTON: According to court records, Shively allegedly surrendered to authorities and said he got caught up in the moment. His lawyer did not respond to NPR requests for comment.

Shively wasn't alone in thinking that a greater purpose had brought him to the Capitol. Felipe Marquez of Florida saw himself in much the same way.

FELIPE MARQUEZ: I went to - on the 6 in D.C. to protest against communism and prostitution. This is, like, a Rosa Parks, like, Martin Luther King moment for me.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Marquez, according to court documents, is accused of not only storming the Capitol, but also breaking into the office of an Oregon senator. NPR has examined the affidavits in each case related to the Capitol riot so far. And the words of Shively and Marquez were echoed in dozens and dozens of them.

Diana Mutz is a professor of political science at University of Pennsylvania, and she's studied Trump supporters. And one of the things that animates them, she said, is the desire to return to a simpler time.

DIANA MUTZ: I think it's important to realize that, yes, they're experiencing change and that this is threatening. The advantages that these groups enjoyed aren't there to the same extent.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They have jobs. They have families. But they don't have a sense they're doing really well. To be sure, a group this large defies generalization. There was someone in a Camp Auschwitz T-shirt, and there was a rabbi from Florida. There were far-right militia members and a two-time Olympic gold medalist. Still, an NPR analysis of the records collected on the more than 200 people charged provided some common threads. For example, almost 15% of the people charged so far are either current or former military. About 17% of those charged have an avowed connection to an extremist group. And nearly 11% of the Justice Department's cases included someone who spoke specifically about being inspired to storm the Capitol by former President Trump.

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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) Treason. Treason. Treason. Treason.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That's from a New Yorker video inside the Capitol that captures a sense of the crowd's purpose - that they were there for a bigger reason than themselves. Now, more than a month after the siege, people are starting to ask the next obvious question - where do we go from here? Mutz says one remedy may be just a return to the kind of politics that doesn't require our full, undivided attention.

MUTZ: The fact is when we live and breathe politics 24/7 and it's the first thing you see when you turn on the TV and so forth, it elevates the salience of politics in people's lives in a way that may not actually be healthy for the nation as a whole.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In this case, she said, boring may be a good thing.

Dina Temple-Raston, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.