The hottest technology for Hollywood filmmakers is more than 70 years old. It's kind of like starting up a lawnmower. It's like... On the Sunday Story, what this vintage film format can help us understand about Hollywood's past and even its future. Listen now on the NPR app to the Sunday Story from the Up First podcast. Hey, this is Graham Smith, the producer for No Compromise. It's been a while. We dropped this podcast a little over four years ago. Most of the country was still on pandemic lockdown. Donald Trump was president. And we had no idea that some of the things we highlighted in this series, far-right gun groups, cries of tyranny in 1776 and revolution, would come up again just a few months later when rioters attacked the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021. I was there, right outside the Senate building with reporter Tom Bowman, covering the chaos. Now, our friends at the Embedded Podcast have released a new series all about that day and what came after. It's called A Good Guy, and it's the story of an active-duty Marine sergeant who joined the mob looking to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election. But more than that, it's the story of how the military is reckoning with political extremism in its ranks, and why, on the eve of this year's election, January 6th still matters so much. We're bringing you the first episode of this two-part series, and once you finish listening, you're going to want to press play on the next one immediately. So, you can already find episode two over in the Embedded feed. Embedded is NPR's home for ambitious, long-form storytelling, so be sure to follow the show while you're there. And, fair warning, there is some violent language in this episode. Okay, co-hosts Tom Bowman and Lauren Hodges will take episode one of A Good Guy from Here. So it's early 2022. A young Marine hopes to get his dream gig. I try to play it off nonchalantly, like when I apply, it's like, if I get it, I get it. I don't, I don't. I'm not going to be bummed if I don't get it. Yeah. But. Yeah, but I wanted it. His name is Joshua Bate. He's 24, a third-generation Marine. From the time I was in middle school, I wanted to be a Marine. There was nothing else I wanted to do. There was no plan B. It was Marine Corps. Josh looks like a Marine. He's tall and strong with short brownish hair, and he has this tattoo covering his forearm. Full sleeve of my left arm, a rendition of the Four Horsemen from Revelations. But he's a quiet guy, a little bit shy, his dimples and sort of this baby face. Josh made sergeant early, got a Navy commendation medal, and then he got what he wanted, that sweet internship he was applying for. It's kind of like a playground, like a crate drone experience with the NSA. That's the National Security Agency. If you get the internship, you can basically ride that out until retirement if you wanted to, because that's how coveted the internship is. There's just one final hurdle, a polygraph exam. And it's kind of straightforward. The polygrapher asks you the usual questions when you're trying to get a top secret clearance. Like, are you in touch with any foreigners? Do you use illegal drugs? Do you have gambling problems? And also, have you ever tried to overthrow the United States government? And I was like, well, it depends on how you look at it. And he was like, well, what do you mean by that? I was like, well, I was in January 6th, and I went to the Capitol building, I went inside, and I walked around. So this would have been the first time you told anybody about it. Correct, yeah. What was this guy's reaction? I remember him kind of going wide-eyed, like, oh, what kind of nugget did I just uncover? Military polygraphs, you know, they're supposed to be pretty easy. Pretty black and white, yes or no answers. For anybody in the military overthrowing the United States government, it should be hell no. Yeah, so what kind of an answer is it depends, especially with a topic like January 6th? I don't think I could have actually answered that question with a no, just because I knew what January 6th was and how it was associated to so many people. I'm Tom Bowman. I cover the military for NPR. And about a year ago, I saw this little news item tucked inside the Washington Post. It was about three Marines who had been arrested for going into the Capitol. One of them was Joshua Bate. And I'm Lauren Hodges. I work with Tom a lot on these military stories. We covered the storming of the Capitol together and were both really haunted by the fact that there were so many military people out there that day. January 6th, of course, was nearly four years ago, but it's still very much with us. Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes. Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning on it. When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers. And former President Trump, he's campaigning on it too. I think that the people of January 6th were treated very unfairly. He calls them patriots. Unbelievable patriots. And says he's open to pardoning them if he returns to the White House. Oh, absolutely I would. You would pardon those? If they're innocent, I would pardon them. More than 200 of the people charged with crimes associated with the attack on the U.S. Capitol have military backgrounds, almost all veterans. But Josh, he's an active duty Marine who's in line to handle some of the country's most sensitive secrets. Josh says he's not an extremist, that he was swept up in the moment. But what we would learn after we met Josh at his home is that the truth about what he did that day can be elusive. Wow, nice country around here. Look at that old house. Josh lives in a small town in rural Virginia, about 30 miles west of Washington. Come inside. Nice place. That's my in-laws. It's where he grew up, near the Rappahannock River, where he was baptized by his wife's grandfather, an evangelical pastor. Shoes off? Please. Okay. He's quiet, respectful. You know, a lot of times he peppers his statements with sir this and sir that. Yes, sir. Just so military. This is my wife, Ashley. Hi. Hi, Lauren. Nice to meet you. Josh and his wife, Ashley, they met in high school. Ashley's petite with long blonde hair slicked back into a headband, and she's holding their infant daughter. Can you get a smile? That is one happy baby. A small dog is running around the dining room table where we sit down, and it really felt like Josh wanted us to meet his family and get to know him as a person. You know, I think he wanted to convince us in so many ways that he wasn't an insurrectionist. Do you worry this is going to follow you forever? That an employer is going to put your name in Google? and what are you going to tell them? The truth. The same thing I've done the entire time. Whatever question they want to know, I'll answer it. There's no point in hiding from it, you know? The information's out there. They can either find out themselves or they can find out through me. Get it from the source, you know? Josh claims he was just a bystander in the Capitol attack and he didn't even realize he wasn't supposed to be there. But however Josh tries to downplay what he did that day, what was an active-duty Marine doing there in the first place? Josh Abate swore an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So did Josh violate that oath? It's a question that should have a clear answer, but what we found is that for the Marines and for the military as a whole, trying to answer it kicked off its own battle, one that's been going on for years. From NPR's Embedded, this is A Good Guy. More after the break. Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, sparked a movement to warn kids and their parents about the harms of social media. Yes, my claim is that will change brain development in ways that will make you less capable, confident, happy, and sociable as an adult. But what do young people think? Gen Z is just going to think, well, we're cursed. That's on the TED Radio Hour. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's not so much we get to talk to celebrities, it's that we get to talk to celebrities about other celebrities, like we did with actor Nathan Lane. I remember having to tell George C. Scott that I was leaving the show to do this musical, and he said to me, you're leaving me to do a f***ing magic show? Listen to Wait Wait in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. When Josh tells the story of how he ended up inside the Capitol on January 6th, he brings up this text message. Hey, we're going to D.C. to watch Trump speak. It was from two of his buddies at the Marine base Quantico. They were asking him if he wanted to tag along. Their names are Sergeant Dodge Hellenon and Micah Coomer, who's a corporal. Like Josh, they're all in their early 20s. And this was during the height of the pandemic. Yeah, this was the deadliest month up to that point for the United States. Tens of thousands of Americans had died, and vaccines weren't available yet for most people. We got the governor shutting the states down We got the Marine Corps telling us he can go out and do stuff And Josh you know he was really frustrated because of the shutdown And I think his fellow Marines were as well They were basically confined to their base, couldn't go on a planned trip to Norway. They couldn't even go to bars or restaurants. We were just cooped up in our rooms. And, you know, you didn't join the Marine Corps to stay in your bedroom and work for a couple hours a day and play video games. So he's in this kind of little, I don't know, cave of... An anger bubble. I pretty much pipelined Fox News and that was it. Welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. One of these friends that Josh went to D.C. with, he later told a federal court that Fox News was often playing on TVs all around the base. If you want people to believe that our system is real, that our system is worth, say, joining the military and dying to protect, then you've got to get to the bottom of what just happened and you've got to do it. And after the election that November, one of the main messages being broadcast was that fraud had led to Joe Biden's victory over Trump. You can't have fraud in an election because no one will believe in elections and then things fall apart. And Josh says he was also scrolling through these social media accounts that were amplifying these claims. So he was starting to believe them. At the time, I thought there were certain spots that may have had some election fraud, but I don't think it was an overall national crisis. The fact is, there was no widespread fraud. The election was secure. Both Josh and Ashley, they were huge Trump supporters. Very traditional values. Ashley said he's a moral man. I come from a household where religion, manners, work ethic, that kind of thing is very important. The same with you, Josh. You know, you can't really mess with Trump when he was in office. I knew that when he'd come to foreign policy and stuff like that, he wouldn't get his driving to another war or something like that. So Josh says when his two friends invited him to Trump's rally to hear him speak, he said, sure. I knew that it was probably the last time that Trump had a rally that was this close, and I've always wanted to see him speak in person for the last time as his sitting president. We were not able to get comment from Coomer or Helenin, so we only have Josh's version of the events that day. He says they were just going to watch a presidential speech. But Trump had tweeted an open invitation for his supporters to attend this Stop the Steal rally. We'll be wild, he promised. And it blew up. On far-right social media groups, message boards, media platforms like Infowars, this became the rallying cry. January 6th, kick that fucking door open. If you have enough people, you can push down any kind of a fence or a wall. Where were you when history called? Where were you when you and your children's destiny and future was on the line? So on January 6th, Josh says Helen and Coomer picked him up and they drove north to the White House. It's about an hour away. But he says they got there too late to see Trump speak. Traffic going into D.C. was mayhem, so we ended up missing the speech. So he says they ended up driving over toward the Capitol, and they see a huge crowd. They park nearby and decide to follow this sea of people heading in that direction. And that's when they went inside. So you thought it was okay to be in the building? Well, yeah, because we walked right in. We didn't see any signs that, you know, said, do not enter, no trespassing. and as soon as we walked through the door of the Capitol building, there were two police officers standing right across from the door. I figured if we weren't supposed to be there, they would have told us to get out. I covered Trump's speech that day. I got there with a producer early in the morning to find a good spot. Maybe head up to the monument. We'll get a nice view of the whole crowd. I remember walking around the corner and seeing this huge sea of people rising up to the Washington Monument. It must have been 20,000 people there. People had flags and banners. I saw a lot of Marine Corps flags, and there was no anger. It was just, it was almost like a celebration. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 45th president of the United States of America. And then Trump came out. You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. Really started whipping up the crowd. We're leading Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, by hundreds of thousands of votes. Remember, Trump had no proof of any of this. And then late in the evening or early in the morning, boom, these explosions of bullshit. He mentioned fight many, many times. He said, I'm going to go up to the Capitol. Let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. I couldn't hear him all that well, so I turned to my producer and I said, did he say he's going to the Capitol? Thank you very much. Trump ended his speech a little after 1 p.m. I followed the crowd to the Capitol. And the closer we got, the mood, it just felt darker, like a thunderstorm was coming in. That's exactly when Lauren called me. She was already up there. Yeah, I was at the Capitol with our former extremism correspondent, Hannah Lamb. On street! On street! On street! The big crowd that Trump sent over was starting to arrive. Thousands of people. Start the Capitol! Start the Capitol! The stream of people started to tighten around us. We kind of grabbed onto each other and ran sideways, kind of diagonally outside of the crowd so that we didn't get crushed. We climbed up this hill and started looking down. Push past the barriers are now going up the steps to the Capitol. And there were just more and more people coming. It's absolute pandemonium. We asked someone in the crowd, what are you going to do if you get into the building? The people in this house who stole this election from us, hanging from a gallow out here in this lawn for the whole world to see. So it never happens again. That's what needs to happen. four by four by four, hanging from a rope out here for treason. We watched them rush past the police and start pushing against the doors, trying to break the glass, screaming, we need fresh patriots to the front in order to get through. And then we saw the doors crack open and people started to flood through them. They're in. The FBI says the Senate doors were the first to be breached at around 2.12 in the afternoon. And what was it? Seven minutes. Seven minutes later, Josh went in through those same doors. We straight up just walked in the building. and there was no signs. We didn't see any barricades up to print us from walking in the building. You didn't see the break-in? Mm-mm. Okay. No. And he told us he didn't hear any yelling or screaming or breaking glass or anything. Nobody was trying to, like, you know, be rambunctious. Josh said he just stood back and took pictures, and he wasn't chanting, didn't wave any flags or signs. But most importantly, he says he wasn't involved in any of the scuffles with Capitol Police. I'm pretty sure I could see the tear gas, but I was far away. It's hard to imagine Josh simply walking into the Capitol building without noticing that the rally around him had turned into a full-blown riot. After about an hour of walking around, Josh says he and his friends finally saw some cops. The police started coming in to force people out, and we're like, okay, well, obviously they want us out, So we left. At this time in the Capitol, the cops are desperately trying to prevent these protesters from getting into the inner sanctum. One of them, Ashley Babbitt, was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer as she lunged through a shattered window near the House floor. Babbitt was an Air Force veteran. And the lawmakers inside, they're scrambling for their safety, hiding behind chairs, under desks, barricading themselves in offices. These lawmakers, by the way, are supposed to be counting votes to certify the election. But instead, they're running for their lives. According to Josh, around the same time, he and his friends are calmly walking out of the Capitol and back to their car. After an hour-long drive, Josh and his buddies find themselves in a Virginia burger joint. When him and the guys got back, I met them at a restaurant. Josh's wife, Ashley, joins them for dinner at this place called Fatties. They had a really good crab cake burger. And by this time, the Capitol attack is top news everywhere. This is a special report of the CBS Evening News. We are witnessing history and what can only be described as a national disgrace. And they look up on the TV screens and they see the violence. Right now Washington D is under a mandatory curfew And police and the National Guard are trying to restore order It has been announced And we were all just kind of looking at it like, holy crap. Ashley says she turned to her husband, Mid-Burger, and was like, did you see any of the stuff they're talking about? And he told her, no, no, no, no. It was nothing like that when we were there. And at that point, Jar says he and Coomer and Helenin all realized the same thing. Kind of like looking at each other like we should probably not talk about this. He says this is when he took out his phone and started deleting all of the pictures and videos. He wanted no sign of him being there that day. He wanted to disassociate completely from January 6th. And how come? Because you just saw it on TV? I knew that if wind broke that mornings were on January 6th, that it would reflect poorly upon the Marine Corps. And I knew that even though I didn't do anything bad, I didn't cause any violence, I didn't perpetrate any sedition or treasoning like that, I knew that I would just be grouped in to everything. Josh says he never spoke about January 6th with Helen and Coomer again. But keeping it quiet would be a lot harder than they thought. One of them just couldn't help himself. And that's when they found the boogaloo. That's coming up after the break. The Trump administration is deporting Cubans in record numbers. And that's a big shift from decades of precedent. This year, they have had more experience of being an immigrant group like any other immigrant group. Listen to Code Switch in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. When all was said and done, there was nearly $3 million worth of damage at the Capitol. About 140 cops were wounded. Four people died that day. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, he was clearly troubled by it when he appeared before Congress later that summer. What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. And as more information came out on just exactly who stormed the Capitol, it became clear that people with a military background were overrepresented. There were more than 200 of them, according to an NPR analysis. And get this, about a third of them were current or former Marines. That's a disproportionate number, considering the Corps is the smallest fighting force. It is so shocking when somebody that's taken an oath to protect the country is doing something to harm it. That's Michael Jensen. He researches domestic terrorism at the University of Maryland. Jensen says the Marines have one of the highest rates of extremist activity, going back more than three decades. The Army is the largest branch, so you'd expect for it to have the highest numbers. But the second highest numbers come from the Marine Corps. Andy says they don't do a very good job of investigating their own. They are having an outsized impact driving these numbers of cases, yet they're doing the fewest investigations. Investigations into people like Josh. By the summer of 2022, 850 people had been arrested for their involvement on January 6th. It was becoming the largest criminal investigation in FBI history. But at that point, only one active duty service member had been sentenced in federal court. And speaking of Josh, he's thriving. Despite his polygraph admission, he gets that internship at the NSA that he really wanted. And the Marines sent him to a special intelligence school in Florida. Ashley, his wife, gets pregnant. For about two years, it's like January 6th never even happened in Josh's world. By the end of 2022, they move to Fort Meade in Maryland for that internship. But a couple weeks before it's set to begin, Josh gets a text. His sergeant wants to meet up for a cup of coffee. The Starbucks on base. Didn't give any other information. Just said be there in civvies. Civilian clothes. So I'm thinking it's probably something related to the internship. He wants to meet me or something like that. They get their coffee, and then they're driving in the sergeant's truck, and they pull into this other building on base, the headquarters of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The sergeant turns to him. Hey, so NCIS wants to ask you a few questions. Nothing to worry about. Just, you know, just be truth-rule. Hey, what did you think? Well, I thought it was, you know, it's probably by January 6th. Gut feeling, intuition, call it, whatever you want. All of a sudden, these agents come from either side of the building, and get around him. So they had six people to frisk my pockets and put me in cuffs and tell me I'm under arrest for January 6th. And they put you in cuffs? Mm-hmm. And then what did you think? I was like, shit, this is happening. They basically brought me into, like, a stereotypical movie-type interrogation room with, like, a one-way mirror and a metal table. And basically, they showed me pictures of me inside the Capitol building. They showed me pictures of Coomer and Dodge to the Capitol building. Josh spent the night in the D.C. jail, sleeping on a metal bench, a bright light shining from the ceiling, a bologna sandwich for breakfast. So here's how he got caught. Remember that polygrapher, the first person Josh actually told about being in the Capitol? Right, the guy who went wide-eyed. But, you know, it's not just that. Yeah, he went and told somebody. The FBI. This triggered an investigation from NCIS, and not just into Josh, his two friends from Quantico as well. Micah Coomer and Dodge Hellenon. The FBI had actually been on Coomer's case since at least August 2021. I know for a fact they looked into us from Coomer's Instagram post, and that's when they found the boogaloo. The boogaloo. Coomer had been posting photos of himself inside the Capitol, and that's what attracted the FBI to him in the first place. When they executed a search warrant to get into Coomer's Instagram account, they found something else. About three weeks after January 6th, Coomer sent a private message to a friend. In it, he was talking about one of the extremist movements represented at the Capitol that day. And these are the guys in Hawaiian shirts who often call themselves the Boogaloo Boys. Coomer said to his friend, I'm waiting for a Boogaloo. His friend wrote back asking, What's that? Coomer simply replied, Civil War II. Coomer's investigation eventually led back to Josh, who, by the way, says he does not agree with anything Coomer said about a civil war. I don't think there will be a civil war. Why do you want a war? Josh seemed eager to distance himself from Coomer's message. And remember, Coomer and Helenin declined our request for comments, so Josh's account is all we had. But one thing's for sure. All three of them went through those Senate wing doors. And all three of them were charged with the same crimes. Federal prosecutors had them on four charges, from entering a restricted building to disorderly conduct. Over the next couple of months, Josh was placed on administrative duty at work. And as he and Ashley waited at home for the legal case to run its course, the reality of their situation began to sink in. I asked Ashley what she was feeling at that time. Fear. I don't know. Fear for the future, my baby. I don't know. You think all the typical wife and mother things, like, what are we going to do when he loses his job? So you were prepared for him to go to jail? It was a possibility that we were prepared for. Yeah. Josh and his lawyers eventually worked out a deal with prosecutors. They were willing to drop most charges in exchange for a guilty plea on just one misdemeanor. And they were recommending a reduced sentence of 21 days in jail. There's a certain level of ownership that we wanted to take because obviously being there was wrong. And sorry, we wanted to take ownership for what we did. So Josh decided to tell the court, quote, each of the lies circulated by President Trump were incredibly harmful to our democracy and our unity as a nation. But whether Josh went to jail and for how long would come down to one person, Federal Judge Anna Reyes, a recent Biden appointee, and she was assigned to Helen and Coomer as well. We reached out to Judge Reyes, but she didn't want to go on the record. We do know Judge Reyes was stunned that anyone would go into the Capitol on January 6th. Here's what she told Josh during his sentencing hearing. It's scary to think that our active duty military were part of the insurrection. She also told Josh that she was inclined to give him six months in jail. And then this shift happened. Judge Anna Reyes started reading these letters of support. There were more than 50 of them from people in Josh's life. Listen to this one. It's a letter from a Gold Star mom whose son was killed in action in April of 2011. She said, quote, I have met many Marines that are truly good Marines and good people. Josh is one of those Marines. The mother of a childhood friend wrote, Even though I a strong liberal I would never consider Josh to be a threat I truly believe he is just fundamentally good Not everyone was willing to write a letter Josh told us one Marine refused He said I like you, Josh, but not what you did. The others, though, they were basically asking the court to focus on Josh's character, not his actions on January 6th. Judge Reyes says she read all the letters, twice actually, and they changed her mind about Josh. That the crimes I was being accused of and pled guilty to were not the man that I am. And not only that, she said, you've made me a better judge. My gut feeling was like, OK, it's not going to be as bad as we thought. Judge Reyes gave Josh his sentence. 279 hours of community service. One hour, she says, for every Marine casualty in the Civil War. That's the same sentence that Helena and Coomer got as well. So no jail time. Judge Reyes went from condemning Josh for being a part of this violent mob to going out of her way to craft this redemption story for him. She mentioned something about how she's kind of envious of the story that I can tell my daughter and help her learn from my mistakes. And that kind of changed my mind on it, is now it's a tool. It's not a blemish. You can use this to, you know, help others learn and prevent them from making similar mistakes. But were Josh's actions a mistake? We talked to him for four hours since his court case wrapped up, and there were holes in his story. We asked him directly about some of his actions that day. Were you chanting? No, no. I didn't chant. They didn't actually show evidence to prove that I was chanting and picketing. Did at any point you say, this is chaotic, this is a little bit crazy, I get to get the hell out of here? I think if I had actually seen some of the violence, I would have left sooner. The one thing he did tell us was that he helped put a MAGA hat on a statue. I just knew I was definitely the tallest one in the group and could reach. He said there was this kind of small lady struggling to put it up there. So he came over, took the hat out of her hand, and helped her place it on the statue's head. A statue of what? Like, was it someone specific or like an eagle or what? No, I don't remember. Just a person? Yeah, it was a random statue in the rotunda. At one point, Josh called us back for a second interview. When we sat down, he handed me this one sheet of paper. It was part of the FBI's official statement of facts. and he's like, look, this is all they've got on me. They appears in the crowd and then he walks. And it talks about how we walk and walk and walk and walk and walk. And nothing in their summary of our actions is actually, you know, spooky or violent or scary. He kept using the word humorous. I thought it was humorous. But they, in their summary, like my time in the Capitol building, that's all they could really sum it up to was walking. And then I looked at the bottom of the page and it says like one of 45. But there's more to this story than just some missing pages. There's also video evidence. The FBI investigation into Josh relied on these screenshots in the Capitol that mostly came from surveillance footage inside. We didn't have access to that. But a few weeks after we talked to Josh, we got an unexpected assist. House Republicans started dropping some 5,000 hours of security camera footage from January 6th on a public video platform. The security footage is silent, so we're going to talk you through it. Seven minutes after the doors and windows to the hallway are breached, Josh walks in with Helen and Coomer. They slowly make their way to the front of this crowd about 20 feet away from the door to the House chamber. And at one point, Josh cups his hands around his mouth. And when you watch the video, it's pretty clear he's chanting, Stop the steal. Stop the steal. At another point, Josh is holding a Don't Tread on Me flag, just before tear gas starts to fill the space. At that point, Josh and his friends leave that hallway and end up in the Capitol Rotunda in a huge crowd. They help a guy try to put a MAGA hat on a statue. And Josh is the one who finally gets it up there by actually climbing the statue. When Josh admitted to putting a hat on a statue, he told us he didn't remember which statue it was. But Lauren and I have seen this bust up close. In shiny gold lettering, it reads, Martin Luther King Jr. It's hard to miss. It's only when the police, in riot gear no less Form a line and start to push everyone out That Josh, along with Helenin and Coomer Are finally forced to leave the rotunda It's clear that the video doesn't match up with Josh's story Josh said he didn't see any violence It was peaceful He didn't do anything but walk around That's just not true After we watched the surveillance videos, we shared them with Josh's lawyer and asked for a follow-up interview. Josh declined. He was done talking to us. All those months ago, when we interviewed Josh, we kept asking him, how did he see himself that day? Was he a protester, an insurrectionist, an extremist? I would say the line that crosses you from just a peaceful protester kind of just looking around, walking around, and extremist is insinuating violence, being associated with one of the extremist groups. Once you compromise your integrity far enough to hurt someone or hurt, you know, the history behind the building, I think that's kind of what draws that line. Josh's narrow definition of extremism, property damage, bodily harm, conveniently leaves out anything he did that day. But I was there too, and I can say it's hard to compartmentalize like that. What I saw was a mass of bodies pressing their way into the Capitol building. People wielding flagpoles as weapons, hitting cops. It was chaos. The power was in the numbers. The sheer size of the mob overwhelmed Capitol Police, and they burst through the doors just minutes before Josh entered the Capitol. It was a riot, and it disrupted the congressional proceeding to certify the election. What happened that day couldn't have happened without everyone. When we talked to Michael Jensen about his work on extremism and the military, he said it's easy to recognize the worst offenders, the Proud Boys, the homegrown militias. But in his research, he says there's this other, more elusive group. People that are sympathetic to these views, that are promoting these ideas. And that's where we really don't have a good sense of how large that population is. So is Joshua Bate one of them? This is an administrative separation proceeding. And what this essentially decides is, should Sergeant Bate remain in the United States Marine Corps? It's now up to the Marines to decide. As Marines, we take oaths to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We violated that oath that day. That's on the second and final episode of A Good Guy. Head over to plus.npr.org slash embedded. and the NPR Investigations team, whose database of January 6 criminal cases you can find on npr.org. We'll provide the link in our show notes. Gilly Moon mastered the episode. Fact-checking by Will Chase. Episode art by Luke Medina. Liana Simstrom is our supervising senior producer. Katie Simon is our supervising editor. And Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. The embedded team also includes Reina Cohen, Dan Gurma, Ariana Lee, and Abby Wendell. Thanks to our managing editor of Standards and Practices, Tony Kavan, and to Johannes Dergi and Micah Ratner for legal support. Music by Ramteen Arablui. Special thanks to Odette Youssef, Tom Dreisbach, Ali Dearden, and the staff of All Things Considered for their support during the reporting and producing of this podcast. I'm Lauren Hodges. This is Embedded from NPR. Thanks for listening.
