Copyright washingtontimes
[SADLER] Why were you at the Capitol on January 6, 2021? What were your intentions? Take us through the events of that day. [LANG] Like millions of Americans, I was extremely upset about the stolen election. And you couple that on top of the COVID lockdowns, this draconian police state that I lived in, New York City, right? We had this especially crazy crackdown where you couldn’t go to restaurants, you couldn’t do anything that I was used to doing for my whole entire life. And so we had this pattern of tyrannical oppression, including our voices actually being taken from us, the most important sacred part about being in America. [SADLER] The internet, especially if you disagreed with the COVID-19 lockdown mandates, having to take the jab, sometimes churches were shut down. If you question the science, a lot of people were censored off of the internet at that time. So when you say our voices were taken away, they definitely were during that era. [LANG] 100 percent, they snowballed. This circumstance and then President Trump — you know our greatest president of our generation — in his final moments in power, tells us to come to protest, to come and stand with him, to try to tell our elected officials, “Hey, let’s get a recount. Let’s send this back to the state legislator.” He used the words “peacefully and patriotically.” So me, and a million other brave American patriots, showed up at the Capitol to do just that, to have our voice heard, to redress a grievance with our government. They had taken what was a sacred, human right of an American, our vote, from us. And we wanted to make sure that our elected officials knew that we wouldn’t stand for that, that we were revoking our consent there. And as history shows, the Capitol Police turned their weapons on an unarmed crowd of American citizens. And this was not a young crowd. We had a lot of Vietnam War veterans there, elderly people, families, and four people ended up losing their lives to police brutality that day. Defenseless, unarmed Americans exercising their First Amendment right. [SADLER] So what did you do exactly on that day? How did you get arrested? Take us through the story. [LANG] January 6th was a day where I just showed up because I love my country. And from the Ellipse, where President Trump was speaking, we walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. By the time we got down there, there was already some dynamic conflicts that were happening. All of the people that were at Trump’s speech and then, you know, hundreds of thousands of them had arrived. We had no idea that there were already police officers that basically got into some confrontations with the protesters. So we walked in blind, right? We walk in thinking there’s going to be some speakers there because there were scheduled speakers that were happening that day, like permitted speakers. We thought that there was just going to be kind of like a “Trump rally part two” just outside the Capitol. Meanwhile, all of a sudden, tear gas, concussion grenades start getting lobbed into the middle of the crowd that I’m standing in. People are panicking. Women are being shot with rubber bullets and with pepper ball bullets, and these are high-velocity ammunition rounds. I actually physically saw with my own eyes, people’s holes in their faces, the rubber bullets pierced through their cheeks. And so, we were just dropped into a warzone that we didn’t want to create, that we didn’t start. One of the things that I say proudly is we’re Americans, we’re not going to be bullied regardless of the circumstances. That’s the people’s house. We had a right to redress a grievance there. Just because these Nancy Pelosi stormtroopers, they were told by her, “We don’t want the National Guard. We want our Capitol Police officers that we have kind of this say-so over. If we tell them to start lobbing munitions into a crowd, they’re going to listen to us.” The National Guard would never do that. And so, we found ourselves, myself, inside of an absolute melee, having to defend our own lives and defend our country versus this tyrannical oppression.
