J6ers at CPAC: MAGAReport 2/25/25

The newly-released J6ers celebrated - and made trouble - at CPAC last week

I spent last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) interviewing hard-core Trump supporters for the first time since the election. It was wild in many ways, and I’m going to bring you some stories about it throughout the week. But I’d like to start with the celebration of the J6ers.

Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all 1,500+ people convicted in the January 6 attack on the Capitol when he took office on January 20. For people who were still in prison on inauguration day, that means they have been out for only a month.

Many of them showed up at CPAC and they were treated like celebrities. People literally had photos of them in the Capitol during the insurrection and were asking for autographs.

In sentencing hearings, many of these defendants wept, explaining how ashamed they were of their actions, claiming that they had just been caught up in the moment, that they never wanted to overthrow the election, and that they wanted nothing to do with politics, organized groups, or protests once they were released. Yet, one month after leaving prison, they were there at CPAC, some sporting the colors or logos of the militias or groups they had been affiliated with back in 2020, calling their prosecutions illegitimate and themselves political prisoners.

On the second day of CPAC, I started asking these J6ers if I could take their portraits. As we spoke, they all had a palpable sense of gratitude about their release. Many of them still seemed to be emerging from the trauma of having been in prison for years. And interestingly, most of them spoke eloquently about the need for prison reform. One man told me that he hadn’t realized how bad it was, but that the whole system was unfair. He explained that black defendants especially would get railroaded and he lamented that wealth seemed to be the main determinant of outcomes.

When this came up, I told a lot of them that these were points I often heard discussed on the left and wondered about what a coalition of traditional prison reform advocates and conservatives led by J6ers might accomplish. That did not get any traction, but hey, I tried.

Throughout CPAC, Ashli Babbitt was held up as a martyr. I saw dozens of t-shirts honoring her and she came up in presentations multiple times a day. Cries of “God Bless Ashli!” would rise up from the crowd at the mention of her name.

It is a world where the Big Lie of the 2020 election is still going strong; the attack on the Capitol was both organized by the government and a peaceful day and perpetrated by antifa; and Biden carried out a massive campaign of political retribution through the courts.

There is no hope here for reaching across the divide.

Portraits of J6ers at CPAC