On January 6, Jackie Speier was one of the many members of Congress threatened by the crowd of violent Trump supporters and white supremacists who stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the results of the presidential election.
Together with her friends, she was told to wear a gas mask and ordered to lie down on the marble floor while the scurrying crowd knocked on the room door and the sound of gunfire rents the air. The horror of that day brought back to her the events that had brought her into politics in the first place when she lay bleeding from five gunshot wounds in the jungle in Guyana, not knowing if she would live or go die.
It was November 18, 1978 and she was traveling to Guyana as part of a congressional inquiry into the Jonestown settlement and its cult leader, Jim Jones. The fact group of 24 was overrun by a cult member on a jungle country track; the congressman for whom Speier then worked, Leo Ryan and four others were killed.
Speier, who was shot five times and left for dead, had to wait 22 hours for help to arrive. As she lay on the tarmac, she told herself that if she were to survive the ordeal, she would dedicate herself to public service.
The devotion, born of her bullet wounds, can be traced in a direct line to the Jonestown massacre, through the uprising at the Capitol on January 6, to her renewed efforts to protect the United States from the threat of violent extremism. She is determined to strengthen cult protection – whether from the Jonestown or Donald Trump variety and the white supremacist riot he has 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 behaviors that go hand in hand. We need to be careful of anyone who may have such control over people that they lose their ability to think independently. ”
Speier presented her first election shortly after the massacre in Jonestown. Since 2008, the Democratic congressman has represented most of the district in California that served her supposed mentor, Ryan, before his death.
The formative experience that led to her political career gives Speier an extraordinarily sharp perspective on the danger posed by the Capitol uprising. She sees it as ‘group thinking’ and says that ‘when group thinking overthrows the government, we have a serious problem.’
Since January 6, Speier has used her political muscle as a member of the House’s armed services and intelligence committees to urge urgent reforms to secure protection against white supremacist and extremist violence. Last month, she wrote to Joe Biden and his newly confirmed Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, asking for a “new sense of urgency” following the “horrific events at the Capitol”.
In her letter, Speier told the president and secretary of defense that she had become “increasingly concerned” about the links between violent extremist groups and military personnel. She warned them that the current efforts to curb the problem were “insufficient to threaten these extremist movements”.
In her Guardian interview, Speier said the current crisis of white supremacy and the military has been going on for many years. “I thought it was urgent a year ago when I held a hearing on violent extremism in the military and was amazed at the number of service members being recruited in part because of their training to these extremist groups.”
She added: “It’s not like we’re getting a head start.”
Read more: