‘The whole thing was a lie’: The QAnon Shaman looks back on Jan. 6

Five years after his horned warrior attire and tattooed likeness became one of the most infamous images of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Phoenix resident Jacob Chansley was at home eating organic gummy bears.

“Forgive me — I have a mouthful. I haven’t eaten very much all day,” he told Phoenix New Times on a call Tuesday evening. “Not the best thing to chew on the phone.”

President Donald Trump’s administration has attempted to promote an Orwellian revisionist history of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, falsely blaming Democrats for staging an insurrection that he egged on. One would think Chansley would be on board with that version of events — Trump gave him a pardon for storming the Capitol, after all — but he’s turned sharply against the president recently.

Known as the QAnon Shaman, Chansley was sentenced to 3.5 years of prison time after entering the Capitol. He was released early after about 18 months and later pardoned, tweeting that he’d go buy some guns. He announced a run for Congress as a Libertarian in the Northwest Valley, though he never did the work to gather signatures to appear on the ballot. Most recently, he claimed to be the rightful president of America and sued “that motherfucker” Trump — along with a dozen entities including the Federal Reserve, the National Security Agency, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, the state of Israel and T-Mobile — for $40 trillion. 

The lawsuit is still pending. Chansley told New Times that he traveled to Washington, D.C., to serve the many defendants in his case. But he didn’t get far. After arriving at his first stop — the Embassy of Israel — Chansley was immediately arrested.

“The guy in looks at me and I go, ‘Hey, are you going to take this paperwork?’ And they close the gate and walk away,” Chansley said. “And I was like, what the fuck? Weird. So I’m just sitting there waiting and waiting. I’m like, all right, screw this. So, I walk up and I just push the paperwork through a slot in the fence and then walk away. And then they called Secret Service, and then Secret Service came, and that was that.”

Chansley stayed the night in a D.C. jail that he said substituted steel plates stacked on top of each other for mattresses and was infested with “cockroaches everywhere, like crawling all over the bed, crawling all over you.” He said when he was released, he had to travel without a phone or any money for four miles to collect his property. His rental car was towed to Baltimore, which cost him $250 to retrieve, and he was charged extra for keeping the vehicle longer than agreed. He also missed his flight home and said his mother had to forward him money.

He said he wasn’t able to serve any other entities in the lawsuit, and now has to return to D.C. for a court date in the coming months.

“Logistical nightmare, bro,” he said. “Nobody responded to the summons — which, I was kind of expecting that — but I didn’t really have the financial backing to send out a bunch of certified mail the way that I wanted to, especially after what happened to me in D.C. That fucking drained my account.”

Chansley said that a judge told him that if there aren’t any developments soon, the case will be shut down. If that happens, Chansley said, “I’m going to just do another one.”

In addition to providing updates on his lawsuit, Chansley agreed to speak with New Times about Jan. 6. For his part, Chansley doesn’t believe Republicans or Democrats are to blame, but rather that events were orchestrated by a bipartisan deep state that has controlled the American body politic for decades.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Have you spent much of today thinking about Jan. 6 and those events five years ago?

My mind is so spread out on such a broad scale that I don’t just think about, you know, I don’t think just about Jan. 6. I think about, like, how did we get here now? How did we get to a place where we could have something like Jan. 6 and everybody not know that it didn’t matter (whether it was) Trump or Biden?

Some people didn’t understand there was no difference between Trump and Biden in that the whole thing was a fucking ruse, bro. The whole thing was a lie.

Can you explain more?

We could talk about the fact that there’s supposedly a bunch of images and footage of FBI dressed as Trump supporters already in the Capitol prior to the breach and that’s why they don’t want to release the footage. They’ve talked about releasing the footage. They have never really released all of it. (Editor’s note: This claim has been widely debunked.)

We could talk about the pipe bomber, you know, and that whole situation and how I think ultimately, whether it be the riot or it be the pipe bomber, one or the other, the whole idea was to disrupt the election, to disrupt the “electoral process” or the Electoral College. And if there was no riot, if that didn’t work out the way that they had hoped, then they would just use the excuse of the pipe bomb.

I’m going to share this with you. It’s pretty bizarre. So on Dec. 21, 2012, I was standing on my roof at like 6:37 A.M. watching the sunrise, tripping on mescaline. And I had this vision of the future where I was in downtown Phoenix, with these tattoos, and I got this face paint on. I got my horns. I got my staff in my hand. I got, like, thousands of people behind me in the streets of Phoenix and then in front of us all, it looked like UN or like military-type people with guns and helmets and police state kind of shit. And then I pound my staff onto the ground, right? I like, do a war cry and then we all charge, and that was the vision. It was a bizarre vision.

On Jan. 6, the image of me where I’m standing next to that guy as he’s talking to the cop, and it looks like I’m, like, screaming. Like, it was like that exact image from my fucking vision, except it was on Jan. 6 and in Washington, D.C.

What was your motivation for showing up in D.C. on Jan. 6?

I’ve been targeted for a while, and that was part of my motivation for going was that, you know, dude, if we don’t do something, we’re fucked. That’s just all there is to it, and we can’t keep doing what we’re doing, and we’re not going to vote our way out of this.

I had been singing down at the Arizona State Capitol and all over Arizona and the country. It’s my religion, bro. I’m just practicing my religion. I was singing my shamanic song in that image that went viral. That close-up where it looks like I’m screaming, I was actually singing. I was climaxing in my shamanic song.

I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have any transportation. I didn’t have any way of really getting there. I had like 500 bucks, dude, and so this is where it gets bizarre — and this is how I know the government is targeting me. (Former Trump administration Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo’s nephew, with a part of this group of people, helped me get to D.C. for Jan. 6.

I didn’t know he was Mike Pompeo’s nephew at the time, but turns out he was. And that same dude, Mike Pompeo’s nephew, went viral in an image from Jan. 6. He was right near the breach where they were handing the weapons inside the Capitol. And he never got arrested. It’s interesting. (Editor’s note: There appears to be little factual basis for the claim about Mike Pompeo’s nephew.)

When did you come to the conclusion that Jan. 6 was a “ruse”?

Well, when Trump refused to release the Epstein files and then we didn’t get the DOGE cuts and then we didn’t get the Fort Knox audit. I think those three together, in combination with a number of other things that happened, were what did it for me. I was all the past year. It all happened so quickly.

What was your opinion of what happened on Jan. 6 while Biden was in office?

Well, look at it like this, OK? Bill Clinton went to Epstein Island. He flew on Lolita Express 26 times, right? Now you got that painting that Jeffrey Epstein had of Bill Clinton in the red shoes and the purple dress, right? He’s got Bill Clinton in his pocket, suffice to say. Same thing with Bush and the Jenga towers and the paper airplanes painting. Yeah, we also got Trump and he is definitely in the Epstein files on the list.

This is what the realization has come to be for me — and I think a lot of people — is that from Clinton all the way to Trump and Biden, Epstein was president.

And that’s why we’ve gotten war after war after war in the Middle East. That’s why America has been getting, like, progressively robbed. That’s why we have the surveillance state that we did after 9/11, which Israel is largely in charge of. 

Any final reflections on Jan. 6?

I’ll say this: 30 seconds into the building, I stopped somebody from stealing. I volunteered to help the police. That’s why they were escorting me around the building.

When I got out of the building, when I heard Donald Trump tell everybody to go home, I stood in front of a violent mob of angry people trying to break into the Capitol, stop them from breaking in and told everybody to go home. I played Donald Trump’s tweet on my megaphone and literally stopped everybody from trying to break into the Capitol.

But none of this was ever really reported in the media at all because it went against the narrative. So I was probably the calmest and the coolest head there that day, and they tried to destroy me because it fit their narrative.