New Hampshire
I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in the nearby town of Shelton. My parents got divorced when I was pretty young. My father was an alcoholic; he had two forms of parenting: Either he was mad or he was absent. In fact, there were a lot of heavy drinkers on his side of the family.
I started drinking as a teenager; by the time I left high school I was a pretty heavy drinker. That would be the case for another 15 years.
After a semester at West Connecticut University, I joined the Navy when I was 18. I spent about two years on active duty; I was a quartermaster, which in the Navy is an assistant to the navigator. I served on a cruiser, the USS Anzio, based in Norfolk, Virginia. Once we sailed to Europe to hold joint maneuvers with the British Navy.
I joined the Navy Reserve after my active duty stint. Over my two years in the Reserve, I got kicked out for drinking, only to be let back in later and promoted. This was a time when the Pentagon was trying to boost recruitment.
I joined the Army Reserve after the Navy Reserve. I served about five years as a fuel truck driver in Fort Totten, New York.
In 2011 I started taking classes at Naugatuck Valley Community College. I got an AA in liberal arts in 2013, and then enrolled at the University of Southern Connecticut. I graduated in 2015 with a BA in political science.
The Republican presidential primary race was underway while I was at USC. Originally I liked Jeb Bush, but at the Republican debate where Megyn Kelly confronted Trump about calling women he didn’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” Trump interrupted and said, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” That was when he took control of the crowd and I was really impressed by it. Every time after that when Trump got criticized for his behavior, I felt I related (now I know it was in a really unhealthy way).
I became a big MAGA follower, along with a veteran I befriended at USC. It became a part of my identity. I had a big red Cadillac, and I put a Make America Great Again bumper sticker on it. My friend and I started going to as many Trump rallies as we could.
We convinced ourselves that it was part of our education to drive several states away and stay in a hotel so we could attend a rally. In my mind, going to these rallies was action, it was patriotism, it was love of one’s country. But I realize now I just needed something to be mad at, to rebel against. That’s what I was doing, in a very incoherent way.
I’m gay, and I made a shirt that said LGBT for Trump. That got me on the news multiple times.
At the rallies you felt an instant bond with total strangers. There was a mob mentality, too, especially if someone was getting kicked out. People would band together, embarrass that person, maybe help physically remove them. We never questioned whether it was right.
It didn’t phase me going to right-wing nationalist rallies. I thought I was spreading the word. It turned into more or less of a routine.
In one of our political science classes at USC, most of the students were Bernie Sanders supporters. My friend and I would argue with them all the time. I had 10 years on most of the students, so it was sometimes easy to pick apart their arguments supporting Sanders, rather than explain why I supported Trump. Proving them wrong gave me the feeling that I was right.
I carried my debating style over to social media. I thought majoring in political science lent an air of authenticity to what I was doing. But I never learned anything at school. I didn’t go there to find out what is right; I only went there to argue, to prove people wrong. That’s all I seemed to care about.
I moved to Keene, New Hampshire in 2016. After Trump won, I became a correctional officer, but my drinking got worse and they finally fired me.
The more useless I became, the louder I became about Trump and MAGA. I created my own little world of Trumpism. I started a social media campaign to harass the superintendent of the jail. I would try to mimic Trump, using language he used at the federal level when I talked about local government.
I had 5,000 Facebook followers, and they were egging me on, wrapping my ridiculous behavior in patriotism. I said I was going to run for county commissioner. In my mind, that made it authentic.
Fast forward to the 2020 election. I was delivering mail for the post office. My friend who went with me to all those rallies was unemployed. I had my Bluetooth in my ear while walking my route, and we would talk to each other all day, complaining about what happened, riling each other up.
I knew Trump had lost the election, but I honestly didn’t care. By this point I was a non-functioning alcoholic: drinking when I woke up, drinking on the job, drinking all the time. I came to realize I had a problem but I didn’t know how I was going to get past it, like I didn’t know how we were going to get past Trump losing the election.
I quit the post office on New Year’s eve of 2020, before they could fire me. By that time, Trump had asked people to come down to protest in Washington, DC on January 6. For my friend and I, it wasn’t a question of whether we would go — we knew we were going.
With my drinking, I shouldn’t have been worrying about who was going to be the next president, I should have been worrying about getting sober and getting a job. But because Trump called his supporters to DC, I convinced myself that was something I needed to do, to show support and see him as president one last time. I felt a vague sense of duty.
I was very good at procrastinating. I knew enough that I had a problem but I didn’t know how to deal with it. I somehow associated going to the rally with getting myself through to the next step, i.e., getting sober.
We invited another friend, who also had a drinking problem, to come with us. First, we didn’t know where the speech was going to be. We took an Uber to the White House, but it was an apartment complex with that name. Then I told the driver to take us to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As we passed the Washington Monument, the driver said, “I think you want to get out here.”
We heard Trump speaking on the other side of the hill; we didn’t know where exactly he was. We saw crowds of people walking towards the Capitol, so we thought Trump was speaking over there. So we headed that way. When we got to the first police barrier, my friends stopped, but I kept going.
I will note that I was not drinking that morning, so I don’t have that excuse.
When I saw people storming into the building, my initial reaction was confusion. Wasn’t Trump speaking here? Is he inside? Is he being held hostage? I was also confused by the chants of “Hang Mike Pence.” I didn’t have strong thoughts about him one way or the other.
I entered the building, and I saw people destroying property, throwing papers around. It felt like we were fans of a team that had just won a championship and we were rioting after the game. Although I didn’t really know what was going on, I was euphoric, jubilant.
While I hadn’t had a drink before I entered the Capitol, I helped myself to some wine I found in a liquor cabinet in one lawmaker’s office. I also picked up a leather-bound book that was on a desk — Senate Procedure. I felt I was taking a souvenir to remember the riot. After a while, a cop told me to leave. Outside, I was talking to a guy who saw the book and said, “I’ll give you 40 bucks for that!” So I sold it to him.
This man also told me, “You know, someone got shot in there.” I said, “No one got shot, it’s a party in there.” He said, “No, someone got shot, I saw a woman who got shot being brought out of the building.”
That’s when all the jubilation and excitement, those immature feelings I was having, quickly turned into fear. I started looking at the police differently. Suddenly I wanted to get away as fast as I could. There was no walking away from where I was. Police to my left were starting to make a wall barricading us in, and more rioters were coming from the right.
I walked along the side of the building to find an opening. Once I found one, I started to run, for what felt like an eternity. My phone died during the riot. I found a T Mobile store, charged my phone, and called my friends to come get me.
I was arrested Feb. 8, 2021 and charged with several misdemeanors. I loved negative attention so much. I wanted to piss everyone off as much as I could; it almost became a mission for me. At one point, I posted on Facebook that my only regret was that we gave the Capitol back. That showed up in the Boston Globe. A lot of my family stopped talking to me. Along with the criticism, I got a sprinkling of support from fringe groups and other Trump supporters.
I did a TV interview in June 2021 saying I was going to run for office. But I mixed up the names of my Congressmember and my State House member. It went viral.
Later that year a friend took her life. I was so depressed about it that one day I got drunk, went to her home, and talked about taking my life. After that the court imposed a new condition on my probation: I had to use a breathalyzer twice a day.
That was what I needed to finally get sober.
I entered into a plea agreement in Nov. 2021, pleading guilty to two misdemeanors: theft of government property (the book) and parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol building.
I formally entered the plea in April 2022. I didn’t think I would go to prison; the judge was a Trump appointee and in a couple previous cases she had not sent January 6 rioters to jail. I went to court with bravado, wearing Trump socks.
But the judge sentenced me to 90 days in prison. Starting in August 2022, I served my sentence at Devens, a minimum security federal prison in Massachusetts.
While I was in prison, I became a folk hero, mostly among the correctional officers who cheered me on for having stormed the Capitol building. That made prison life very comfortable.
Meanwhile, now that I was sober, I started thinking rationally. Things Trump was saying no longer seemed rational. I kept my emerging disagreements with him to myself.
After I got out of prison, I signed up to run for Congress. In 2023 I filled out a Ballotpedia survey, avoiding any mention of Trump while still pushing the hero nonsense. I called myself “a recently released January 6th political prisoner with a message of hope…I believe there is room for compromise between Democrats and Republicans and I will fight to find common grounds for all Americans regardless of race, gender, or creed.”
My epiphany came in March 2023, when Trump asked people to come out to protest for him because he was about to get indicted for falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels coverup.
I thought, “How could he do that? There could be another riot, there could be another Ashli Babbitt. Someone else might get killed, how could you do this?”
Then it hit me. I said to myself, “Trump doesn’t know you, and the fact that you’re even thinking about his feelings proves you have an unhealthy obsession. And you’re an idiot for even believing he cares.”
I tried to drop out of the Congressional race, but I learned I couldn’t after the filing period. I deleted all my social media and cut off contact with my Republican friends.
My “campaigning” consisted of a couple letters to the editor I wrote to the New Hampshire Union Leader in which I attacked Trump. This is from a letter I wrote in June 2024:
“Hi New Hampshire, this is your local domestic terrorist…it is a little hard for us to move on from the Capitol riot when the guy who started it is running for president. His lies used to be a source of comfort for me — ‘patriot’ sounds a lot better than ‘insurrectionist’…I went to prison for my role in the Capitol riot, and so should he. I am not asking for your vote; I am asking for your ear. We have a democracy to protect. Make America united again!”
I went to a meet-the-candidates event at the end of August 2024 sponsored by the Grafton County Republican Committee with the intention of delivering a speech I had written in which I called Trump “the head of a neo-fascist movement.” But I got cold feet and backed out at the last second.
After having actively participated in this fascist movement, I felt the need to do more. To not do anything would be to condone what has happened. I donated to the Kamala Harris campaign and voted for her. I even signed up to volunteer, but I thought it might be a hard sell to knock on someone’s door and say, “Hi, I’m a Capitol rioter, vote for Harris.”
When Trump pardoned all the January 6 rioters, I rejected the pardon. I don’t need his pardon. I don’t need his approval.
Besides, it came from the man who started the riot. I find his narrative of January 6 extremely insulting, not just to the police officers who died, but to the rioters who died. Ashli Babbitt was a veteran, someone who loved her country.
Trump’s influence over his followers is scary. It sucks having been part of something so scary, and knowing that I so easily became an enthusiastic supporter.
I’ve been estranged from my dad and his side of the family for some time now; they lean left politically. I’m hoping we can repair those relationships. In the meantime, I’m just so grateful that I now understand how much Trump and MAGA are a danger to our country.
— March 2025
