"If there was one face — besides that of Donald Trump — indelibly linked to the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, it was the one painted red, white and blue and framed by a fur headdress with black bison horns.
That is the face of Jake Angeli, also known as Jacob Chansley, or by his media moniker “the QAnon Shaman”. Angeli stood out among the mob of Trump supporters with his heavily tattooed bare torso and the six-foot spear he carried bearing a stars-and-stripes flag.
On that day, Angeli strode up to the Senate dais and perched on a seat vacated less than 40 minutes earlier by the then vice-president Mike Pence, and then led a prayer over his megaphone, declaring: “Thank you for allowing the United States to be reborn.”
He was sentenced to 41 months and served 27 for his high-profile antics before being released early in 2023 for good behaviour. President Trump pardoned him on January 20 last year, his first day back in office, along with more than 1,500 others convicted or charged for the riot at the Capitol, also known as the J-Sixers.
During his trial he was remorseful, while his lawyer Albert Watkins said that mental-health struggles had plagued Angeli’s adult life. Watkins also told the court that “he had a fondness for Trump that was not unlike the first love a man may feel for a woman. Trump was very much like his first love”.
Now aged 38, Angeli has decisively rejected Trump and says he will run for governor of his home state of Arizona this November as an independent to fight back against a system that is “at war” with its general population in favour of the super-wealthy elite. “All warfare is based on deception and the American people have had war declared on them,” Angeli said in a phone interview with The Times. He confirmed his legal name is Jacob Angeli-Chansley but he prefers to be known as Jake Angeli.
He says the media named him the QAnon Shaman when he wanted to be known as “the shaman from J6, or just the shaman”.
"Since I’m one of the only people that seem to have their wits about them and understand what’s actually going on in the world, it is up to me, as far as I’m concerned, to do something about these problems,” he added.
Angeli called the Trump administration “a corrupt disaster”, pointing to a series of perceived betrayals including US support for Israel and Trump’s resistance to releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. Asked how he feels about the US military raid on Venezuela, Angeli said that Trump was “essentially using the American military to commit the armed robbery of a nation”.
"It is the antithesis of everything that America needs right now,” he said of Trump’s actions in his first year back in office. “The only thing that he did that I find remotely acceptable is pardoning J-Sixers, which he said he was going to do. What I’ve come to understand more than anything, dude, is that the Trump administration just lies, bro, because they’re Israel First, just like the Biden administration just lied because they were Israel First. We don’t have our own government.”
Five years after the Capitol riot, Angeli isn’t the only former J-Sixer running for office. His former friend Chadwick Twillman, 39, who spent the day making videos of the crowd and was never charged with any offence, is now running as a Republican for a vacant seat on the Michigan Senate.
But Angeli has even more grandiose ambitions.
In September, Angeli filed a $40 trillion lawsuit in Phoenix, arguing that he is the legitimate president of the United States, and he needs the enormous sum to pay off the national debt. In a self-represented lawsuit, which stretched to 26 pages and was written as a single paragraph, he is suing Trump and others including the Federal Reserve, the National Security Agency, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, Israel, Elon Musk’s X Corp, T-Mobile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Warner Bros Studios.
Angeli’s plan, he writes, is to mint a single $38 trillion coin and plug it “into the slot machine that is the Federal Reserve”. Angeli also claims that Trump stole some of his ideas when he was advising him, but there is no evidence that he either advised Trump or that Trump took ideas from him. “I was advising the president, whether you know it or not or believe me or not, I was for, like, a long time,” he said. “I mean, since before his 2024 election, we’re talking way back in 2020.”
Amid an atmosphere of mistrust in authorities that encourages and rewards conspiracy theorists and provides ready platforms through podcasts and self-publishing, Angeli has been given ample opportunity to spread his views. In March last year, the former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson interviewed Angeli for his podcast and reassured him that he did not sound crazy in a post that has been viewed more than 13 million times.
However in 2021, Angeli was diagnosed with “mental-health infirmities” after a court-ordered psychological assessment. The documents revealed that he had a similar diagnosis in 2006 while serving in the navy.
Angeli’s lawyer Watkins told the court: “The path charted by Mr Chansley since January 6 has been a process, one which has involved pain, depression, solitary confinement, introspection, recognition of mental-health vulnerabilities and a coming-to-grips with the need for more self-work.”
Angeli remains convinced that he has unique insight and said he would spend January 6 this year writing a self-published book, Shamanic Apocalypse. “I’m almost about to publish it. It’s fan-f***ing-fantastic,” he said.
Although Twillman, his fellow J-Sixer, stood by Angeli during his stint in prison, the pair have since parted company. Twillman said that they had a “falling-out”.
“I just couldn’t go along with those false illusions,” Twillman said. “By me trying to confront him on some of that, as a friend, to bring him in, he went into further conspiracies. I don’t think he’s a bad guy, I think he’s just a really lost, confused soul.”
It is questionable whether Angeli will follow through on his claim of running for Arizona governor, having talked up a shot at the state’s vacant Senate seat in 2024 when he failed to register the required signatures in time to stand. He said his main goal was to get his message out.
Shortly after our conversation he sent me a text message: “For clarity sake… I am not interested in politics… I am interested in saving my country, humanity & the planet from extinction. That is the direction we are heading if we don’t get new leadership.”"
Trump Devotion....
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Crnr2Crnr ·
