Capitol Offense: Nicholas Languerand's Quest for 'Belonging' Led Him to QAnon, the Insurrection [View all]

Capitol Offense: Nicholas Languerand's Quest for 'Belonging' Led Him to QAnon, the Insurrection — and Now Prison


Finally, Nicholas Languerand was in the thick of it.

He had gone to Washington, D.C., to watch president Donald Trump stand on a podium near the White House and insist that the election was a fraud. He had followed as thousands marched to the U.S. Capitol and through security barriers. He’d looked on, for hours, as the mob transformed a ceremonial tunnel on the lower west terrace into a battlefield that D.C. Police officers would come to remember as the “tunnel of death.”

Now Languerand was on the front line, staring down a row of exhausted officers behind riot shields who were absorbing blows from baseball bats, too outnumbered to fight back but unwilling to cede their ground. It was a minute after 5 p.m. on January 6, 2021. A shirtless “QAnon Shaman” wearing horns and pelts had already walked onto the Senate floor. Elected officials were being evacuated. Even the person Languerand called “Mr. President” had, at 4:17 p.m., put out a video message instructing his “very special” foot soldiers to go home.

Languerand picked up whatever weapons he could find. Sticks, shards of broken Capitol furniture, an audio speaker that someone else had ripped from its mount. The former Army private and amateur boxer hoisted a heavy traffic bollard that had been circulating through the crowd like a beach ball at a Jimmy Buffett concert and hurled it at the police.

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It didn’t take long for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to identify him. By April, he was arrested on felony charges. He eventually pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon, and last week, a federal judge sentenced him to 44 months in prison. His sentence was the third-longest yet for a January 6 rioter.

Read more: https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/capitol-offense-nicholas-languerands-quest-for-belonging-led-him-to-qanon-the-insurrection-and-now-prison/Content?oid=34788228