When she returned, there was a hole in the passenger-side window and the bag was gone. Six months prior to the Capitol breach, she had left her purse in her car and popped out for only a moment to pick up dry cleaning. Gina Bisignano with her dog, Lolli, in December 2020. My name is Gina Bisignano, said Bisignano into the camera as men raved around her. Many at the Capitol that day were motivated by profound distrust in the deep state and big tech, and it was true that Google would hand location data to the FBI and Facebook would deliver reams of messages, but the Capitol riot was among the most-filmed events in history not because the NSA was listening but because the rioters themselves obsessively documented all four hours of it. Gina Bisignano would lose her salon, Guy Reffitt would lose his freedom, and Rosanne Boyland would lose her life. 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. They would become fodder for the kind of conspiracies that had summoned them to D.C. They would be fired and divorced and bankrupt and subject to extraordinary kindness from strangers. They would discover the dark state of American prisons. Over a year’s time, many of their lives would be transformed. 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.
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. Rioters were identified because other rioters tagged them on Facebook. 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. Just broke in this bitch! said Cole Temple in a video of himself that he posted on Snapchat. At a dentist’s office, Daniel Warmus bragged that he had smoked marijuana inside the Capitol someone in the office turned him in. I STOLE SHIT FROM NANCY POLESI, wrote Riley Williams on Discord. Here was a crime to which people loved to confess. It was not unusual for six, seven, eight people to take it upon themselves to identify a single man. Someone who worked at Circle K pointed out that an assistant manager had requested time off to go to this. They were betrayed by co-workers, and they were betrayed by exes, and they were betrayed, very often, by former classmates.
Rioters looked about and wondered who among their acquaintances had the motivated malice to dial 1-800-CALL-FBI. We are not a match, said the recipient, who then sent the message to the authorities. I did storm the Capitol, a rioter named Robert Chapman messaged someone on Bumble. 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. There would be FBI raids, battering rams, guns-drawn SWAT teams terrifying small children in the night. Arrests would be made in nearly every state. When a man was arrested in Washington, the FBI had footage from a camera planted on a telephone pole near his front yard. There were tipsters calling in names of old classmates. There were photographs on the FBI’s web page and online sleuths trawling for clues. One hundred arrests in the first two weeks. The FBI was at the airport, someone heard. 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 worry set in later, when the swarm resolved into 9,000 separate bodies in separate homes in separate beds. 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.