VENICE — The most chilling scene in director Michael Premo’s “Homegrown” — a verité documentary look at the everyday lives of three supporters of Donald Trump — takes place not on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but in the hours afterward, in an alley in downtown D.C.
By Jada Yuan
Having tussled with police officers in riot gear for six hours, Proud Boy Christopher Quaglin, a New Jersey man whose wife at the time was 8½ months pregnant, calmly tosses back what looks like whiskey and cooks hot dogs and burgers on a grill he brought to the District in his truck.
“Almost victory. Almost,” Quaglin says to friends gathered in the alleyway. He’s unwinding after a long day of being pepper sprayed and gassed, having his head smashed into a police bike rack and getting squeezed so badly in the tunnel leading to the secured area where then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and others were hiding that he thought his lungs would give out.
“My intention was to hogtie [Sen. Charles E.] Schumer and drag him out by his f---ing goddamn coattails,” he says, doing a podcast interview on his cellphone in between assuring his worried wife at home that the cops have better things to do than arrest him for drinking in public. And even when police officers do clear them out, enforcing a citywide curfew, he screams: “We’re cooking steaks. … Shame on you! Shame. On. You!”
(Quaglin was the aggressor in the police encounters they filmed, Premo told The Washington Post in an interview at the Venice Film Festival, where “Homegrown” was the only documentary in the sidebar Critics’ Week competition. The film is still seeking distribution.)
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The media and Democratic politicians tend to portray the “J-Sixers,” as they call themselves now, as bad actors who were involved in a secret conspiracy to overthrow the government. But in Premo’s experience, it’s “a dynamic social movement” filled with people with firmly held beliefs, just like Black Lives Matter and Occupy. They weren’t hiding their plans; they were making them known in right-wing media and in the open planning meetings in D.C. in late 2020 that Premo captured on film.
To Quaglin, Jan. 6 was a protest, another day of exercising his freedom to rise up against the stealing of the election from the man he believes to be the rightful president. Back at the hotel room, he finishes cooking the steaks in the sous vide machine he also brought in his truck.
Premo couldn’t have predicted that Quaglin would take part in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. What made the New Jersey father-to-be an interesting subject was that both his family and his wife’s were Democrats who supported Joe Biden. “But when I met him, the first thing he said was, like, ‘I didn’t give a f--- about politics before 2016,’” Premo says. “And I said, ‘Oh, interesting. Why?’ And he was like, ‘Trump really spoke to me.’”
For the director, he represented someone who was newly politicized, who felt like he had finally found someone inspirational who spoke to his concerns and could motivate him to get off the couch and get involved. The reason he joined the Proud Boys, he says in the film, is because Biden asked Trump at a debate if he would denounce the Proud Boys.
Today, Quaglin, 38, is serving 12 years in a federal maximum-security prison in Indiana for 12 felony counts and two misdemeanors, including assaulting officers and obstructing Congress. It’s one of the longest sentences given to any participant in the Jan. 6 attacks. The prison is also where Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who carried out a 2015 mass shooting in a Charleston, S.C., church, killing nine Black parishioners, is serving his sentence. “[They’re not equivalent crimes] at all,” says Premo, who was “surprised” by the sentence and thinks Quaglin can appeal on the basis of his “string of absolutely horrible legal representation.”
Premo, who is Black, is also an activist, but with very different politics than his subjects in “Homegrown.” He was arrested for assaulting a police officer and found not guilty in the first jury trial stemming from the Occupy Wall Street protests. And he and several friends started Occupy Sandy, a grassroots relief effort after Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
He wanted to make the film, with his wife, Rachel Falcone, producing and capturing sound, to show how the “patriot” movement was making inroads in Black and Latino communities, among others. “Their biggest grievance, that I think dovetails with a lot of public sentiment in the last 20 years, is that the system is rigged in favor of corporations and millionaires and billionaires, and that government is making choices that support the wealthy at the expense of working people,” Premo says.
“There’s so much more to these people than I’m led to believe [from] the media,” he says. “They’re so much more dynamic … and their critiques of the system are very similar to people with more progressive perspectives.”
He and Falcone started researching the patriot movement in 2018, fascinated by the growing number of people who were losing faith in American democracy and who felt willing to use violence to protect their interests if they felt the government was falling short.
“I think one of America’s many contradictions is the idea that violence is just on the fringes, when we know that violence and the threat of violence has been used to create and maintain the structures of our society in many ways,” Premo says. “And it’s back in our political discourse in a way that I don’t think it has been in a generation.”
So, they went out into the country and started meeting people, at bars, at marches, at rallies. In 2019, they began following members of various conservative sects, including libertarian “boogaloo boys.” But as the pandemic hit, some of the people they were following stopped being active. The ones who remained were all Proud Boys, well before that group became part of the national conversation.
What they discovered was a movement that was far more multicultural than often depicted. (They followed many more people than the two White men and one Latino who wound up in the film.) They chose the three subjects because of how they represented that broad appeal and filmed them as they went about their lives, fixing their trucks or their TV sets, communing with their dogs and their families, and in Quaglin’s case, fielding calls from his increasingly agitated pregnant wife — a Chinese American nurse who was adopted by liberal White parents, but whom he says is MAGA like him. Her refusal to appear on camera broadcasts her disapproval with what he’s doing, which includes lying to her about wearing his mask at large protests and then making fun of her covid fears to his buddies. (After filming ended, Quaglin told Premo that his wife is divorcing him.)
Another subject, Thad Cisneros, 42, is a Latino Navy veteran originally from South Texas who says he’s “what other people might consider a conspiracy theorist.” After his service ended in 2005, he saw Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and began reading up on the relationship between the Bin Laden and Bush families. (Surely, Moore never knew that his liberal scream of a film would send someone spiraling into the MAGA movement.)
Cisneros is a paleoconservative, in that he believes America should stay out of foreign wars, and socially conservative, in that he wants to ban abortion and uphold “the nuclear family.” But he supports gay rights. And he was also appalled by George Floyd’s murder and empathizes with the Black Lives Matter movement because of a prior altercation with a police officer. In the film he meets with BLM leader Jacarri Kelley to see if they can find common ground, and shows up to one of their protests and says on a live stream that he and his friends are part of “patriots against racism.” But he also thinks BLM went about their protests wrong (he disapproves of smashing store windows and spray-painting graffiti) and thinks that police reform should be limited to removing “bad apples.”
He’s perhaps the most sympathetic character in the movie. Premo also films him harassing CNN employees and telling them they’re going to hell. When his good friend, Proud Boy chairman Enrique Tarrio, is arrested, Cisneros decides to go to D.C., but can’t get there until the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, and misses the insurrection. (Tarrio is serving a 22-year sentence in prison, and Cisneros, too, is in jail, for aggravated assault.)
The third subject, Randy Ireland, a 49-year-old Air Force veteran in Long Island, is shown doing the nitty-gritty work of keeping the movement going by planning meetings and organizing protests. At an October 2020 rally in Long Island, Premo films Ireland, Quaglin and one of their buddies sing “Proud to be an American” in Quaglin’s SUV, right after they’ve hurled epithets at a counterprotester who they immediately label as “antifa” (a term that comes up a lot).
When a passerby asks what they believe in, one of Ireland’s friends says, jokingly, “Oh, we’re white supremacists.” It’s a ridiculous label, Ireland explains. Half of them aren’t White. Instead, they prefer the term “Western chauvinists.”
“We’re all about Western values, celebrating capitalism, stuff like that,” Ireland tells a passerby who asks. One chant of the Proud Boys is “I refuse to apologize for creating the Western world.” And as Proud Boys, they consider themselves “street fighters,” the people who will “take care of business” when people they call antifa start throwing firecrackers.
Ireland stays out of trouble on Jan. 6, 2021 (he was planning on protesting in Albany, N.Y., a couple weeks later), and is back to organizing after the blow of their big action failing. He, like Cisneros, is a contradiction: He touts that the Proud Boys have gay members and actively calls out his friends who spout antisemitic or racist comments.
The filmmakers chose not to include any outside narrators, instead letting the audience get to know the subjects through their actions. The biggest editorial choice they made was to focus on “I” statements (“I want,” “I feel”), and excise any lecturing or spouting of misinformation or conspiracy theories. They want people to be able to look back on their film in 15 years as a document of this moment.
Premo points out that the fact that he could film all these guys for three years, in the midst of fraught protests, speaks to how the movement is not organized around white supremacy. “I don’t know if inviting is the right word, but we weren’t chased away because of my race,” he says. “And I think that’s one of the biggest learning moments from the experience.”
Beyond the diversity of the movement, what Premo says he wants people to understand from the film is that nothing that happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was a surprise to anyone who was paying attention.
He filmed a nighttime meeting in D.C. on Nov. 13, 2020, when Ireland and other Proud Boys suggested that they needed to stop talking about antifa and instead start focusing on gaining control of city and county election boards. (See: Georgia, whose majority GOP election board Trump praised at an August rally.) As early as two days after the 2020 election, they were talking about a coup on America, with the end result being civil war.
“What was really interesting about January 6 is that it was all planned in public,” Premo says. “It was shouted from the highest roofs and across cable news, and they were beating the drum in public to storm the Capitol.”
When they went to the Capitol the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, the filmmakers already knew there would be fighting. They had brought gas masks and body armor, as had Quaglin — who left his many AK-47s and AR-15s at home but did bring a Taser, plus tampons, because they work great on gushing wounds. Following a group making their way up the steps of the Capitol, they expected to encounter barricades and police in riot gear “in anticipation of this thing that was very publicly announced,” Premo says.
Instead, they were met with plainclothes officers who ran away. “We were absolutely shocked when we didn’t see any sort of preparedness from law enforcement that we felt was commensurate with what was their stated intention,” he says. “I mean, if I know they’re storming the Capitol, surely they [the government] must know. They probably watched the same Fox News that I was watching, right?”
Also surprising, Premo says, was the sense of fellowship in the crowd, people high-fiving, or meeting one another and bonding over where they were from or how far they had traveled or what patch for what organization they had sewn on their bags. “When people think of riots as they’re portrayed on television, it’s just, like, this angry mob with pitchforks,” Premo says. “But the level of camaraderie was really interesting for an assault on the U.S. Capitol.”
It was also important to the filmmakers that they go beyond Jan. 6, to show what the regrouping after defeat looks like. Some Trump supporters have focused on placing Republicans within the mechanisms of the election-certification process.
Project 2025 may have felt like it came out of nowhere, but Premo says he recorded plenty of discussions within the movement about how to take better advantage of their power next time. “It’s often described as a Heritage Foundation project, and that’s the institution that houses it, but … we saw the beginning of that in 2021, where [Trump supporters] were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to learn our lessons of what happened last time [with the failure of Jan. 6, 2021, to install Trump as president] and not miss the opportunity next time.’”
Ireland, in particular, is organizing on behalf of what he calls “political prisoners” such as Quaglin and the other nearly 1,500 people who were charged by the Justice Department. And he’s now organizing protests where participants come bearing paint guns that look like military weapons. “If we were reporting on another country, we’d say the conditions were ripe for increased sectarian violence,” Premo says. “It’s like they are practicing for war.”
