Sedition Hunters by Ryan J. Reilly

Author:Ryan J. Reilly [J. REILLY, RYAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2023-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Joan (also identified by a pseudonym), a mother and a former teacher from south central Pennsylvania, has a “weird hobby.” She’s a Facebook detective.

“Some people crochet. Some people paint. I look up people,” said Joan. “I’m the go-to person for all my friends if they meet a new man. They’re like ‘Hey, look him up, give me all the details.’”

Joan was at her home in Hershey on Jan. 6, and she found herself in tears as she watched what was happening in DC. “I was so upset,” she later told me. “This is not who we are as a country, or it’s not who we’re supposed to be.” So just over a week after the deadly attack, Joan was thrilled to have a new opportunity for Facebook investigative work land in her inbox.

Someone in the budding Sedition Hunters community reached out through a regional political Facebook group Joan helped administer. The internet detectives were trying to identify the man who invaded the floor of the US Senate wearing a “Hershey Christian Academy” sweatshirt, and they thought she could help spread the word.

Joan got to work. She went to Hershey Christian Academy’s Facebook page and started digging, learning everything she could about the small school with barely a dozen staff members. It’d only opened in 2019, and now—because someone had the bright idea of storming the floor of the US Senate while wearing school swag—it was at the center of the Capitol insurrection.

“I went and started looking at all the likes, all the comments. Then on every single like and comment I would go look on their profile and snoop around and say, ‘Oh, that guy’s too fat, that guy’s too bald, that guy’s too bearded, it’s not him,” she said.

Soon she stumbled on a “pretty vanilla” Facebook profile of a man named Zeeker whose profile photo only featured a snowman. When she dug around a bit more and plugged Zeeker’s name into Facebook’s search bar, she turned up photos that he’d been tagged in. She realized she might just have a match. She took some screenshots, poked around his Instagram, and did a bit of Googling.

“Zeeker Bozell,” she learned, was Brent Bozell IV. He was the son of Brent Bozell III, the high-profile conservative activist, founder of the Media Research Center, and grandson of Brent Bozell Jr., the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater and supporter of Joseph McCarthy.6

Woah, she thought as she went down a Google rabbit hole and read his grandfather’s Wikipedia page laying out his ties to William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review and a man considered the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement.7 I’ve really stumbled onto something.

“I mean, I’m just, like, a mom,” Joan later told me. “It was kind of a holy shit moment.”

Joan dialed up the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center just after midnight. The bureau was completely overwhelmed in the aftermath of Jan. 6, so she was stuck on hold for about forty-five minutes. She gave her info and waited for the FBI to get in touch.

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