According to a federal agent’s affidavit, Ryan Taylor Nichols, of Longview, Texas, wielded a crowbar and large canister of pepper spray while surging into the Capitol on Jan. 6 alongside fellow Texan Alex Kirk Harkrider. Images and videos of the two men attempting to enter the Capitol building along with the mob were included in Justice Department documents.

In one video, Nichols uses a bullhorn to direct the crowd, yelling, “If you have a weapon, you need to get your weapon!”

In another video recorded from his hotel room in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, Nichols, speaking in the third person, advocates using violence, according to the WUSA9 report.

“Ryan Nichols is done allowing his country to be stolen,” he says in the video. “And I understand that the first Revolutionary War, folks, it was violent. We had to be violent and take our country back. Well guess what? The second Revolutionary War, right now, the American Revolutionary War that’s going on right now, it started today on a Wednesday. It’s going to be violent.

“So, if you want to know where Ryan Nichols stands, Ryan Nichols stands for violence,” he continues. “So, yes, today, Ryan Nichols … Ryan Nichols grabbed his f—ing weapon and he stormed the Capitol and fought for freedom.”

Social media accounts belonging to Nichols and Harkrider were reported to the FBI by two separate witnesses within weeks of Jan. 6, according to the affidavit. Court documents noted that both Nichols and Harkrider documented their experiences that day on Facebook.

Nichols was arrested on Jan. 18 and was subsequently held in Smith County Jail in Tyler, Texas, before being moved to house arrest. He and Harkrider were originally charged with an array of criminal counts, including conspiracy and unlawful entry with a dangerous weapon, violent entry or disorderly conduct, civil disorder, assaulting a federal officer using a deadly or dangerous weapon, and aiding and abetting.

Those counts were narrowed to the aforementioned two following the prosecution’s superseding criminal court filing on Thursday.

Nichols was originally expected to begin a jury trial in November. Sentencing in Nichols’ case has yet to be determined.

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The order was met with criticism by some, and it remains a point of contention on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers are set to debate this fall a measure in the 2024 defense policy bill to defund the Pentagon’s anti-extremism efforts.

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What was your role in the stand-down? What was the experience like? Did you learn anything new? What do you think resulted from the stand-down? Get in touch with us to share your first-hand account.

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The order was part of the White House’s new national strategy to counter antisemitism, which includes 100 steps President Joe Biden’s administration and its partners plan to take to address the recent rise in antisemitic incidents. Antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault in the U.S. reached a historic high in 2022, according to a report released in March from the Anti-Defamation League. Nearly 3,700 antisemitic incidents were reported that year, the most since the ADL began tracking them in 1979.

Biden’s strategy, outlined in a 60-page document, urges Congress to pass legislation that would create new laws against bias-motivated violence, as well as hold social media platforms accountable for spreading antisemitism and other hate speech. The administration also called on state and local governments, schools, the technology industry and religious communities to help stop the spread of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The White House included several mandates to federal agencies in its plan, one of which instructs the Defense Department to study antisemitism and Islamophobia in the ranks. The administration plans to use the Pentagon’s findings to establish programs or policies that could help put an end to those biases in the military or prevent them.

“The White House would say this is an important domestic issue, but the existence of antisemitism is also a threat for national security,” said Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, in a briefing to reporters Thursday.

“These are not just nice words. There are dates in the plan for when these issues should be addressed,” Lipstadt said. “The White House is holding the agencies accountable.”

The sweeping document requires the Defense Department to analyze existing research to better grasp the prevalence of antisemitism and Islamophobia across the military. The Pentagon is required by November of this year to provide that estimate and review its current training for gaps in identifying those biases. It’s the first analysis of its kind to specifically address antisemitism and Islamophobia across the armed forces.

The plan also asks local and state governments provide training to its security and law enforcement personnel about Jewish culture to help them understand and counter antisemitism.

Effective immediately, all federal agencies must formally acknowledge International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Jewish American History Month, the plan states. Federal agencies acknowledging specific cultural heritage months aligns with the Pentagon’s efforts to celebrate diverse backgrounds across the force.

The White House ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to develop educational programs by September that highlight the diversity of the veteran population, as well as the contributions of Jewish veterans and VA employees. The agency is expected to share those programs with local veterans groups across the country.

Along with sharing that message, the administration wants the VA to encourage veterans to use their credibility with the public to speak out against antisemitic violence and other hate-fueled attacks.

As part of the White House plan, the VA is expected to expand its chaplain partnership by this summer to include multiple faiths. VA chaplains will receive training beginning in September about how to counter antisemitism, anti-Muslim bias and anti-Sikh bias. The agency was also told to determine whether it’s possible to track incidents of religious discrimination against VA employees.

The national strategy was announced following an alarming spike in antisemitic sentiment and hate crimes across the country. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said the organization saw antisemitic sentiments increase 500% among the U.S. population in the past decade – an indication that the rise in antisemitism in 2022 was not an outlier, but a troubling trend.

Greenblatt spoke in detail about the plan on a week that also marked the start of court trials for the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Penn., which claimed 11 lives in an alleged hate-motivated antisemitic attack.

“This type of plan…it’s precedent setting,” Greenblatt said. “It’s a type of framework that is nothing short of a quantum leap forward on the issues that we care about.”

The strategy outlined by the White House is a multi-year effort that in theory would extend past the 2024 presidential election. When asked about what would happen if a new administration took over in 2025, Lipstadt said she hoped the strategy would be viewed as apolitical and accepted by a new president.

The ADL made recommendations to Biden’s administration about the contents of the strategy, many of which were adopted. Greenblatt said his organization would continue to work from the White House’s plan, regardless of whether there’s a change in administration.

“You had better believe we are not going to let this go,” Greenblatt said. “This is the roadmap we’re going to use no matter who is driving.”

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Conservatives have blasted Pentagon’s efforts so far, which started in earnest after the January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, decrying the training on how to spot hateful ideology as an effort to politicize the military and tarnish the public image of the armed forces. But Democratic lawmakers — and senior military officials — say teaching troops to identify and eschew extremism is necessary to prevent the few troops with radical views from poisoning the wider force with their hateful ideology.

“White nationalism has no place in our armed forces and no place in any corner of American society,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the chamber’s floor Thursday. He urged Senate Republicans to make a similar public pledge, in response to controversial comments by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., earlier this week.

Tuberville was asked if he thought white nationalists should be allowed to enlist and serve in the military.

“Well, they call them that,” Tuberville told NPR local station WBHM in Birmingham. “I call them Americans.”

Schumer said any support for such extremist views in the ranks is “utterly revolting,” but Tuberville’s office said the quotes have been taken out of context, insisting in a statement that the Republican senator “was being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military.”

Tuberville, and many GOP colleagues, have criticized the Defense Department’s 2021 extremism “stand-down,” a military-wide training on the potential signs and dangers of extremist ideology. Critics said the training – part of diversity, equity and inclusion education embraced by the Biden administration – wasted troops’ valuable time, while military leaders said it amounted to only a few hours of extra work for each individual.

As Schumer delivered his Senate speech on Thursday, House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., introduced legislation which “prohibits the use of appropriated funds to investigate extremism in the military” and would require an audit of all diversity programs currently active across the services.

The measure is sure to be a key point of contention in the committee’s upcoming debate over the annual defense authorization bill, expected to be drafted next month.

Supporters of the Defense Department training and the broader anti-extremism efforts point to recurring issues of violent ideology among individuals linked to the military.

For example, in the eight months following the mandated stand-down, defense officials reported 100 cases of servicemembers engaging in prohibited acts of extremism, according to committee documents.

And last month, National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, 21, was arrested for leaking online classified documents related to U.S. support to Ukraine and other foreign allies. The Associated Press reported that the airman frequently posted racist and violent comments in online chat rooms.

And only days ago, a Texas man who years ago was booted after only three months of Army basic training, gunned down eight people in an attack investigators believe may have been spurred by his racist and pro-Nazi views.

In the wake of the Texas attack, members of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism are meeting with lawmakers, urging them to adopt the group’s recommendations to address extremism in the military, co-founder Wendy Via told the Military Times.

The group proposed about a dozen measures it wants the Pentagon to implement, including bolstering its tattoo database to keep watch for hateful insignia, investigating the social media activity of prospective recruits, and creating an intervention program for service members after they’ve been forcibly removed from the military and are vulnerable targets for extremist groups. So far, the group has experienced pushback in Congress, Via said.

“There should be more opportunity for members of the military to have this kind of extremist training, just like they have sexual assault training,” Via said. “Just because they have sexual assault training doesn’t mean that every member of the military is prone to commit sexual violence.

“Nor is training about extremism meant to say that every member of the military is racist.” But Via said that’s what lawmakers are saying of the training, “in order to justify their refusal to address any kind of white supremacy.”

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