The Capitol Riot: How Did We Get There?
How did America get to the Capitol riot? Was it just Trump influence? Was it just a mix of human psychological quirks such as masculinity ritual, peer pressure, and a ball-game-style enjoyment of a like-minded crowd – somehow all “gone bad?” Was it a congregation of what has been called “civil religion” in America?[1]
A place to start is the narrower question: Why were so many military veterans among Capitol arrestees – what overrode oaths to support US government?
Moral Disengagement, Steroids
In Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers routinely adopted anabolic steroids, as a tool – for aggressive response to attacks.[2] Steroids trigger not only rage[3] but also “moral disengagement.”[4]
Veteran Robert Bales likely would have joined the Capitol insurrection were he not in prison for murdering nine Afghan children and their mothers and their fathers in Kandahar Province.[5]
Bales’ army life, a binge of steroids, alcohol, and barbiturates,[6] evidently obliterated his moral judgment.[7]
Veteran Robert Bales, of whom his attorney said, “He’s a broken man. We broke him.”
Bales’ life was troubled before he joined the military. As a stockbroker, Bales avoided legal proceedings that alleged fraud by joining the army, telling a relative that by joining just after 9/11, he wanted to vindicate himself.[8]
In the army, Bales found what fairly can be called “a steroid-supportive community.”
In Iraq and Afghanistan, many or most soldiers formed a steroid habit.[9] Historically, military veterans are known to have a life trouble called “difficulty re-adjusting to civilian life.” After return home from Iraq and Afghanistan, vets seeking camaraderie embraced gymnasium life. This weightlifting culture supported the steroid use that vets brought home.
Additionally, for returning vets, VA clinics prescribed steroids.
US Veterans Administration clinic doctors prescribed the steroid “Preg” (pregnenolone) for post-war maladies – from bad back to schizophrenia to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[10] Even in prescribed doses, Preg can induce rage, especially among those with life issues. A user wrote,[1]
“I’m a man and it made me rage so much that I punched the shower wall – one of my knuckles is still smaller in that hand. I raged for hours, alone. I believe it was just the (steroid ) energy bringing up suppressed emotions.”
VA researcher Gutsen Jasuja found that effectively, the VA’s practice promoted widespread abuse of steroids by veterans.
“Use of (Preg) therapy in VA has been doubling every 5 years,” she found, “suggesting that factors other than clinical need may be contributing to its use.[11]
Only 6 percent of veterans studied had a diagnosis that would justify receiving testosterone treatment,[12] Jasuja found.
Steroid-Supportive US communities
In great numbers, Capitol arrestees came from communities – cities, towns, and states – in which a bodybuilding culture predominates, the record suggests.[13] That is, they came from “steroid-supportive communities” – any environment where peer pressure tends, to some degree, toward steroid use.
Millington, Ohio
The town of Millington, population 10,500, houses 13 gymnasiums, around one for every 220 men. Millington is home to Capitol arrestee Ronald Sandlin, 35.
Ronald Sandlin at the Capitol, inside which he smoked marijuana
After a Millington weightlifter was arrested for manufacturing steroids, bloggers on “IronDen” rallied behind their fellow, one posting a photo of himself, writing,
“Wow! To whomever stayed strong and didn’t talk in these incidents, Excellent Job, you are a man and you did what men are supposed to do. To whomever ratted and tried to set up others, you’re a piece of shit!! You’re a pussy and don’t belong in this game. Get the **** out of this community you nutless scumbag.”
In this steroid-supportive community, Sandlin’s life previous to the Capitol riot was in disorder. Sandlin wrote on Facebook of being dumped by his fiancé, crashing his motorcycle, suffering the death of his grandfather, and owing back taxes of $500,000.
Morgantown, West Virginia
Capitol arrestee George Tanios, from Morgantown, was charged with felony conspiracy to assault and injure a Capitol police officer who was clubbed to death with a fire extinguisher at the riot.[14]
George Tanios at his sandwich shop in Morgantown
Tanios’ sandwich company caters to Morgantown’s non-slim male population – holding trademarks on such sandwich names as “Fat Drunk” and “Fat Bastard.”[15] Morgantown, population 29,000, houses 17 gyms, one for every 420 men.
Huntington Beach, California
The city’s “Muscle Beach” community (members pictured below) is influential enough that it can hold contests inside the city public library.
Orange County Register, July 21, 2018
When news spread promoting January 6, Capitol arrestee Mark Simon was selling drugs, likely including steroids – along with “Trump” caps –from a cart alongside Huntington’s Muscle Beach. Simon has said except for his drug use he would not have been persuaded to go to the Capitol.
Mark Simon videotape of himself rioting at the Capitol.
In Simon’s community, population 197,000, steroid injections are provided at more than 250 medical offices, around one steroid-shot doc for every 70 men aged between 25 and 64.[16]
As such, it is likely Trumpist Alan Hostetter chose Huntington Beach to gain a steroid-prone male audience when he hosted an influential Stop the Steal rally on December 12, 2020 – just three weeks before January 6, 2021.
In days preceding January 6, multiple groups of Trumpers traveled from Huntington Beach, on buses and airliners, to Washington DC.
Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania – Steroid-Supportive Communities – Disproportionately Home to Arrestees
Nearly one quarter of Capitol arrestees hailed from just three states; 73 from Florida, 67 from Texas, and 62 from Pennsylvania, the FBI reports.
Florida: Steroid mill
Three years before the January 6 Capitol riot, Cesar Sayoc of West Palm Beach, Florida, was a bouncer at Ultra Gentlemen’s Club, a striptease establishment just down the street from Trump International Golf Club.[17] Stormy Daniels worked the Ultra club at the time of Trump’s reported affair with her.
Sayoc, who had abused steroids for decades, lived behind the Ultra club, in a van plastered with Trump stickers.[18]
Going to his first Trump rally was like finding a new drug, Sayoc said.
“I was getting so wrapped up in this new-found fun drug,” he said.
In 2018, Sayoc mailed out pipe bombs – to numerous critics of then-President Donald Trump.[19]
Cesar Sayoc
Florida’s “Treasure Coast” is a ‘roid resort. About a year after the Sayoc West Palm Beach case, a news story suggested nearby Fort Lauderdale long had housed a population of steroid abusers.
“FORT LAUDERDALE – Six people are facing federal charges here of participating in a trafficking ring that shipped steroids from China and South Korea to Fort Lauderdale.”[20]
And within months, several Lauderdale law offices advertised specialty in steroid-arrest cases.
Things were the same in nearby Hallandale Beach and Boca Raton.
In those towns, respectively the Modern Therapy company paid dishonest doctors for steroid prescription and the Blackstone company mislabeled controlled substances for “legal” purchase.[21]
Floridians’ purchases of illegal steroids came largely through a powerful ring that also operated in Texas.
Texas Testosterone
Texas has long had a steroid issue. In 1989, researchers found that Texas fathers were asking doctors to prescribe their athlete sons either steroids or “human growth hormone.[22].[23] In the early 2000s, as non-athlete men took to illegal steroids for cosmetic reasons, DEA agents probed a ring run by northern-Texas “personal trainer” Philip Russell Archibald.
Philip Archibald
Archibald’s online messages advocated “guerrilla warfare” by vigilantes – of the Boogaloo militia. Finding this, agents wrote (less than five months before the Capitol riot),
“Steroids and vigilantes pose a threat to the security of our nation.”[24]
Pennsylvania, Puffy
Steroid users call their changed faces “puffy.”
Illegal steroids long have been available at northeastern Pennsylvania storefronts, to walk-up customers,[25] courtesy of multiple steroid rings operating in the Scranton-Wilkes Barre area,[26] including in the Wilkes Barre suburb of Old Forge.[27]
From Old Forge in January 2021, resident Frank Scavo chartered buses to carry eastern Pennsylvania residents, about 200 of them, to the US Capitol.[28] Scavo had persuaded the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader to run a story “previewing” this bus convoy, but Scavo later lied to reporters who asked whether he’d illegally entered the Capitol, a crime for which Scavo was prosecuted.
Frank Scavo
Scranton-Wilkes Barre, population 568,000, has around 60 gyms, one for every 500 men, nearly all dominated by the “Bigness” culture that is associated with steroid abuse.[29]
Some Scranton-area gym locations
The Capitol
VA doctors prescribe steroids for low back pain, for schizophrenia, and for PTSD. Private doctors may prescribe steroids for autism.[30] Approximately one in 34 American men is diagnosed with autism.[31]
Capitol arrestee Jacob Chansley (aka Jake Angeli), the “QAnon Shaman,” is famous for his outlandish dress and behavior during the Capitol riot. Chansley was an autism patient. So was fellow Capitol arrestee Nicholas Rodean.
In the above photo (by Associated Press), from right are Rodean, Chansley, an unidentified man, and the Capitol officer whom the rioters are confronting.
A judge said Rodean was made especially susceptible to mob influence by his autism. Fellow autism patient Chansley after arrest lost 20 pounds, which some said was due to a forced quit of steroids. For the unidentified man next to Chansley, note his leaning-in and piercing, aggressive stare toward the Capitol officer.
As such, it is likely that each of these three determined rioters was influenced by steroid abuse.
In conclusion, while evidently many rallied to the Capitol saying nothing more aggressive than, “We’re MAGA, President Trump has requested we rally in Washington on January 6, and we feel especially good whenever we are rallied around our fellow MAGA,” nevertheless the tension, the rage, and the hyper-aggressiveness displayed by many Capitol arrestees calls for an explanatory factor further than “MAGA spirit” alone.
The record suggests the simplest such factor is “steroids” in driving violent sedition at the Capitol on January 6. This violence failed to topple the government in Trump’s favor, and this, too, fits with steroids, in that steroids are linked with mania and hypomania, which are characterized by “over-believing in a positive outcome” of an action.
Between two US epidemics, the steroid and the opioid, much news reportage has been done concerning opiods, but not much concerning steroids. Additionally, academic research concerning steroid products and their poor regulation and misleading labeling seems to have gained little traction. With this the case, the possibility remains of more ‘roid-related political violence (the insurrection in Ottawa of February 2022 may be a case in point, as may the situation in Brazil, which began in October 2022 with Ottawa-style blocking of highways by pro-Bolsonaro truckers beginning and resumed in January 2023 as, for a number of hours before army troops could dispel them, rioters seized and held the seats of Brazil’s government.[32]
In conclusion, the record suggests this social problem, epidemic steroid abuse warrants action by those who want civility in the future of politics. I urge readers to write local editors, legislators, and police chiefs to say, “Enough indifference to this problem, which is part of your job, which I urge you to do, starting tomorrow.”
[1] “I’m convinced it (‘civil religion’) is ‘the’ story of what happened. Not everyone wore a Guns & God hoodie or carried a Jesus flag but they all shared the psychological safety net such symbols provided.” Peter Manseau, religion curator at National Museum of American History, in “MAGA Jesus at the Capitol,” Guernica, February 21, 2022
[2] Sydney Morning Herald, November 25, 2010
[3] “Anabolic Androgenic Steroid Use and Body Image in Men,” G. Kanayama et al, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 2020
[4] Moral disengagement and associated processes in performance-enhancing drug use: a national qualitative investigation,” I. Boardley, et al – Journal of sports sciences, 2014
[5] “Kandahar Massacre,” Wikipedia
[6] Foreign Policy magazine, August 18, 2015
[7] Washington Post, Jun 2, 2012 — The Army filed new charges Friday – steroid use – against (Bales) accused of killing 16 villagers in southern Afghanistan in March 2012.”
[8] Wikipedia
[9] From the 4th Battalion 23rd Infantry, for example, several vets estimated that more than half the unit’s 700 soldiers, including the unit captain and themselves, used steroids habitually. McClatchyHyde.com news service, November 22, 2010. Concerning the unit captain, Ibid to 2.
[10] Cf. “Proof-of-Concept Trial with the Neurosteroid Pregnenolone Targeting Cognitive and Negative Symptoms in Schizophrenia,” C. Marx et al, Neuropsychopharmacology, April 1, 2009 (the trial was conducted solely on soldier medical patients at Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina).”
In 2013, VA researchers wrote, “The investigators predict that treatment with pregnenolone will decrease Cluster D PTSD symptoms”; “Neuroactive Steroids and TBI in OEF/OIF Veterans,” Principal investigator:Christine Marx, MD.
In 2020, VA researchers wrote, “Veterans randomized to pregnenolone reported significant reductions in low back pain relative to those randomized to placebo… (PREG is) a novel, safe, and potentially efficacious treatment for the alleviation of chronic low back pain in Iraq- and Afghanistan-era veterans”; “Effect of Pregnenolone vs. Placebo on
[11] “Optimizing Testosterone Prescribing in the VA,” G. Jasuja, NIH grant proposal.
[12] A doctor told me that diagnoses sometimes aren’t recorded in prescription cases, so it’s possible more than 6 percent of men that received VA-prescribed testosterone had real need.
[13] One reason that SSC’s have multiplied is an increase in a malady called body-image disorder or muscle dysmorphia or “bigorexia,” increasingly diagnosed among young and middle-aged American men and linked to adopting steroids to obtain a more masculine figure. When left untreated, bigorexia can lead to depression and thoughts of suicide, according to Healthline.
[14] Officer Brian Sicknick. Tanios in a pack carried the bear spray used on Sicknick by fellow rioter Julian Khater. The pair along with former president Donald Trump are named in a wrongful-death civil suit filed by the estate of Brian Sicknick. CNN, January 5, 2023
[15] ConanDaily Web site, July 27, 2022
[16] Many pain sufferers legitimately seek steroid injections, but illegitimate “juice doctors” serving abusers of steroids are common nationally.
[17] The golf course for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, on rented county land at Congress Avenue and Summit Boulevard.
[18] Palm Beach Post, April 23, 2019
[19] Including then-presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, members of Congress, and actor Robert De Niro — days before the 2018 midterm election,
[20] San Jose Mercury News, October 5, 2019
[21]Plea agreement, Modern Therapy, and DOJ, November 19, 2021, respectively
[22] “Anabolic Steroids and Growth Hormone in the Texas Panhandle,” P.S. Salva et al, Tex. Med., 1989. “” Nearly all inquiries about growth hormone were made by parents.” In 2005, DEA agents and educators met emergency-style to counter youth’s steroid use in northern Texas at the North Texas Steroid Summit” held on March 7, 2005,. in Plano.
[24] Fox News, June 15, 2020 The case was filed by the Northern District of Texas US Attorney’s Office.
[25] Department of Justice, August 25, 2021
[26] Wilkes Barre Times Leader, August 10, 2015. Two of these rings employed a local prison guard to display prison-guard identification while making drug transactions.
[27] Wilkes Barre Times Leader, December 16, 1999
[28] Scavo previously ran for a Pennsylvania House of Representatives seat and served as the president of the Old Forge School Board before being kicked out over Facebook posts that were viewed as anti-Muslim, according to WUSA9’s sister station WNEP.
[29] For example, one “judgment-free” gym recently opened to give non-bodybuilders untroubled access to weightlifting, and another advertises “Escape the mainstream gyms!”
[30] Dr. Joshua D. Feder, MD, quoted on PatientPop.com Web site
[31] Johns Hopkins University report, March 26, 2020. Much of it for autism, the steroid prednisone is the 30th most-prescribed drug in the US.
[32] New York Times, January 9, 2023