THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 13
“It’s 2021, but I’m still writing ‘yearlong fever dream
of chaos and despair’ on my checks.”• •
sealed room. You’re not supposed to be
able to get in. Well, at some point
you start hearing: Bang! A couple of
members were there. They were going
to protect our colleagues, protect our
friends, and protect the chamber.
Capitol police decided we’re evacu-
ating. They opened one of the doors
into the Speaker’s lobby and started
pushing people out. But up in the gal-
lery there’s no easy way out. It’s literally
like an obstacle course. I’m pointing
and yelling, “Go, go, go! That way! Get
through!” The banging on the front
door is intensifying. It sounded violent.
All of a sudden you hear a crack. It
sounded like a gunshot. The police had
their guns out. And I just sprinted out
of the chamber.
We ran down some stairs, under-
ground into these old, old spaces. Some
older folks can’t move all that quickly.
It took us a while, but we finally got to,
essentially, a holding area.
We looked around the room. We
didn’t know what was happening, but
we knew the Capitol had been overrun.
Someone would say, “We’re missing
someone!” The Capitol police would
try to find them. And then you have
this din, the mechanical filter of a hun-
dred and fifty gas masks—this high-
pitched whirring. It sounded like a hun-
dred and fifty kazoos.
It was a weird mix. Remember, this
was everyone who’d been on the floor.
In one corner, you had all the Republi-
cans who think we stole the election.
You can see people looking, thinking,
The people outside are here because of
what you’re doing. We were also con-
cerned about the fact that many of them
don’t wear masks. Some of them were
saying they were glad the “protesters”
were there. Everybody else, including
many Republicans, was figuring out
what’s happening, what’s going on with
our institution, with our society, with
our democracy. And how do we get
back? We knew we had to finish that
night. It was never a question of if—it
was how. That’s part of my job. I can’t
really get into this, but we have alter-
natives to the House chamber, if we
need them.
Someone said, “Where are the boxes?
Do we still have them?” One of the par-
liamentarians came over to me and said,
“The ballot boxes are safe.” If they’d
been stolen or destroyed, to be honest,
I don’t know what happens.
We started to go back around seven.
There was this powder everywhere, a
film everywhere. Broken glass. The same
doors that the President comes through
for the State of the Union—when they
say, “Madam Speaker, the President of
the United States!”—you could see the
holes where they’d broken through.
The workers did the best they could
to clean up. Who knows where they went,
and how they came back? They’re scared,
too. They brought in one of those indus-
trial cleaners you see at the mall at, like,
five in the morning. One congressman,
Andy Kim, a real nice, soft-spoken man
from New Jersey, was helping.
The fact that the Capitol was invaded
did not defuse tensions. When the Vice-
President announced that Joe Biden is
now the President-elect, people cheered.
There was relief that we got this done.
But it wasn’t joyousness. There was a
profound sadness afterward, and exhaus-
tion, on the faces of my co-workers. All
the trauma hit. This is the people’s build-
ing. Every time a security threat makes
it harder for someone to get in and see1
APROUDBOYSPEAKS
CRETINHOP
A
s federal law-enforcement officials
consider investigating the Presi-
dent’s role in instigating the deadly as-
sault on the Capitol last week, they may
want to check in with a heavyset ex-
punk rocker who calls himself Bobby
Pickles. Last Thursday, Pickles, the pres-
ident of the West Palm Beach branch
of the Proud Boys, described his expe-
rience of the uprising over the phone
from Florida, where he runs a shop that
sells T-shirts bearing such sayings ashow our democracy works is just sad.
But the fact that they’d attack democ-
racy—physically and literally attack it?
I never thought it would happen.
When I headed home, it was about
four. The sun was still down.
—Keith Stern
(as told to Zach Helfand)