It’s easy to write off the insurrectionists, and those who would have been insurrectionists if they had the means to do so, as wholly evil and perhaps irredeemable. For some of them, I think that’s true.
For others, it might be more nuanced. I read an interesting profile on Jessica Watkins, one of the insurrectionists. She’s facing serious charges in connection with the insurrection, including conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, destruction of government property and entering a restricted building. It’s both easy and justifiable to condemn this behavior, but in reading this profile a more complicated background emerges:
- Grew up in Columbus, and was an Obama voter.
- Joined the Army out of high school and proudly served her country in Afghanistan until she was forced out of the military for being transgender.
- Pursued several career paths after the military, including IT and serving as a firefighter and EMT.
- Fell in love, and the couple jumped at the chance to start the Jolly Rodger, a small bar in a small town. They lived in an apartment above the bar.
- Just as their business was taking off, COVID came along and the Jolly Rodger was shut down by government order to stop the spread of disease.
- Facing economic insecurity and with a lot of extra time on her hands, she started reading conspiracy theories and was swallowed up by them. She formed her own militia group affiliated with Oath Keepers and, believing Trump had called them to arms, they took part in the insurrection.
- She now repudiates the militia and Oath Keepers, has been on suicide watch in prison, and says she is both humbled and humiliated.
- People close to her describe her as a good person who was warped by Trump’s rhetoric and associated conspiracy theories.
I am in no way excusing her actions and she will need to face the consequences of them, but I’m having a hard time seeing her as absolutely evil or irredeemable. To me she seems like a person who might otherwise have lived life as a good person, but who responded to a stressful period in her life by making a series of extraordinarily bad decisions and finding refuge with conspiracy theorists who offered a fictional sense of order for a disordered world.
And I think she likely represents millions of other people, including many of the QAnon people, who are not dyed-in-the-wool fascists or white supremacists like the ones who marked in Charlottesville, but rather more ordinary people who went down a very wrong path in responding to stress and insecurity.
How should society react to people like this? People who have been swallowed up by the conspiracies, but are slowly coming around? I’ve read that as the different predictions made by “Q” continually fail to materialize, some supporters of this and other conspiracy theories have begun to abandon them. Do we offer them a path toward redemption and rejoining the society of “normal people,” or will they forever be judged only by that phase of their lives?