On Jan. 6, Jackie Speier was one of dozens of members of Congress threatened by the mob of violent Trump supporters and white supremacists who stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the results of the presidential election.
She and her peers were told to wear a gas mask and lie on the marble floor while the noisy crowd banged on the room door and the sound of gunfire pierced the air. The terror of that day caused a flashback in her to the events that brought her into politics in the first place as she was bleeding from five gunshot wounds in the jungle of Guyana, not knowing whether to live or die.
It was November 18, 1978, and she had traveled to Guyana as part of a congressional investigation into the Jonestown Settlement and its cult leader, Jim Jones. The investigating group of 24 was ambushed by cultists on a jungle runway; the congressman for whom Speier was working then, Leo Ryan, and four others were murdered.
Speier, shot five times and left for dead, had to wait 22 hours for help. As she lay on the tarmac, she told herself she would devote herself to public service if she survived the ordeal.
That dedication, born of her gunshot wounds, can be traced in a direct line from the Jonestown massacre, through the Capitol uprising on Jan. 6, to her renewed efforts today to protect the United States from the threat of violent extremism. She is determined to bolster protections from cults – be it the Jonestown or Donald Trump variety and the white supremacy he unleashed.
“Jim Jones was a religious cult leader, Donald Trump is a political cult leader,” Speier told The Guardian. “As a victim of violence and as a cult leader, I am sensitive to behavior that smacks of that. We must be wary of anyone who can have such control over people that they lose their ability to think independently. “
Speier ran for her first election shortly after the Jonestown massacre. Since 2008, the Democratic congressman has represented most of the California district that served her gunned-down mentor, Ryan, before his death.
The formative experience that gave rise to her political career gives Speier an unusually keen perspective on the danger of the Capitol uprising. She considers it “groupthink” and says that “if groupthink is about overthrowing the government, we have a serious problem.”
Since January 6, Speier has used her political clout as a member of the House’s armed forces and intelligence committees to push for urgent reforms to bolster protections against white supremacy and extremist violence. Last month, she wrote to Joe Biden and his recently confirmed Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, calling for a “new sense of urgency” after the “terrible events at the Capitol.”
In her letter, Speier told the president and defense secretary that she had become “increasingly alarmed” about the links between violent extremist groups and military personnel. She warned them that current efforts to contain the problem were “insufficient to withstand the threat from these extremist movements.”
In her Guardian interview, Speier said the current crisis of white supremacy and the military has been brewing for many years. “I thought it was urgent a year ago when I held a hearing on violent extremism in the military and I was amazed at the number of soldiers being partially recruited for their training for these extremist groups.”
She added, “It’s not like we didn’t get a heads up.”
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