A friend of a friend sat across the table from Leslie Gray and said she and all those like her should’ve been shot in the head.

The 59-year-old Floridian readily admits, and regrets, that she was boisterous and uncharacteristically belligerent to law enforcement at the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But she and others there that day are hardly the traitors or insurrectionists the government and media have painstakingly painted them out to be, she says.

The pitiless prosecutions and vitriolic propaganda – as well as the gun-to-the-head guilty pleas – have reached the point where she’s been threatened with death, ambushed by reporters while walking her dog – and told she should’ve been executed instead of thrown in prison for a one-year term for entering the Capitol with so many others that day.

The truth is, this country doesn’t really know the people who protested what they truly believed was a stolen 2020 election. And we need to know them. We need to hear from them, see their faces as they tell their stories, take the full measure of them.

Most importantly, we need to question absolutely everything a weaponized government and its lapdog media have told us about that fateful day.

It won’t be easy. But it should include abnormally objective and introspective media coverage; panel discussions and similar events; oral histories captured on video; full government transparency; and perhaps an official – and fair – investigation of the government itself.

At this point, however, we’ve done a worse job of understanding and healing this deep divide than the nation did after the Civil War itself.

Does the punishment fit the crime?

Having dipped merely the leading edge of one toenail into the J6 waters, I can tell you with authority that one could make a living for decades to come reporting solely on the treatment of J6 defendants.

Gray’s isn’t even the worst case scenario from Jan. 6 – others have been SWAT-teamed, charged and put in prison, often for much less than she did. One served three years, including a year in solitary confinement. Another talked of leaning on concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s legendary book Man’s Search for Meaning for hope and survival. Others leaned on a deepening relationship with Jesus Christ.

Former J6 inmate John Strand told Glenn Beck of having been thrown into four months of solitary confinement for having broken an obscure rule the prison system somehow failed to advise him of – after the official in charge made it exceedingly clear that he, not the Constitution, was the law on the inside.

“Faith is what allowed us to survive these last four years,” one J6er told a collection of fellow defendants in a recent Spaces event on X.

Not everyone did survive, though. One speaker on the Spaces event told of a man who wasn’t even charged for being at the Capitol on Jan. 6 but was dogged online by self-styled “insurrectionist hunters” – and eventually committed suicide.

Still, Gray’s experience was harrowing enough – from her guns-drawn, drug kingpin-worthy early-morning SWAT team arrest that “terrorized my neighborhood” to the massive shadow of 28 years in prison hanging over her for months.

Asked why all the guns pointed at her were necessary, one arresting officer said it was because she was a concealed carry permit holder – as if that automatically makes someone dangerous, and even though she was wearing only a nightgown at the time.

Federal prosecutors initially insisted her plea include a bizarre, untrue admission that she went to Washington, D.C., that day solely to impede Congress. She refused, ultimately entering a plea she could live with and serving just over 10 months in a prison and halfway house.

Do we really know what happened?

One of the smartest things that smart people ever do is admit what they don’t know. The smartest thing Americans can do at this point is to acknowledge that, even after all this time and publicity, we really don’t know much about what went down on Jan. 6., 2021.

Why were so many undercover federal operatives there? Who is Ray Epps, and why is he one of the biggest Jan. 6 provocateurs but the government went so easy on him? Who were the other agitators, and where did they appear from?

For her part – and she was there – Gray says she believes wholeheartedly Jan. 6 was a false flag operation, a setup to entrap and smear Trump supporters.

“I absolutely do, 100%,” she tells me.

“I believe they took advantage of the genuine Stop the Steal rally to then create an atmosphere that made Trump and Trump supporters look bad.”

What began as an upbeat demonstration filled with camaraderie and patriotic songs suddenly changed, she says. In hindsight, she now sees “a coordinated effort to stir up the crowd. All of a sudden, men with bull horns came out – I don’t know where they came from. They just suddenly showed up.

“And then they started screaming and hollering and practically demanding that the crowd ‘go inside, go inside the Capitol, go inside the Capitol, you have to go inside the Capitol!’

“So, we have these men on the bullhorn stirring up men, riling up men, speaking to their masculinity, telling them – and pardon my French, I’m going to say exactly what they said – ‘You’re pussies if you don’t go in the Capitol!’”

Gray says she’s certain she saw a man who had earlier been wearing law enforcement-style black outside the Capitol later emerge from the building dressed in Trump gear and trying to stir up a mob.

She says she believes the agitators were “agent provocateurs” representing the government and the far-left Antifa group. “We know that there were Antifa people there who were sent to infiltrate the crowds.”

Before entering a plea, when she saw in writing the United States of America v. Leslie Gray, “it literally was the most gut-wrenching thing that has ever happened to me in my life. I’ve had some gut-wrenching things happen. But that was literally the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my life, is ‘the United States of America versus’ — and there’s my name.”

‘People have to find out who we are’

Then, of course, locals took to disparaging her in the worst terms online – prompting her to meet up with the administrator of one such Facebook page.

“We talked and she asked me some questions and I answered her. And she said, ‘You are not at all the person that I thought you were.’”

Therein may lie the key to truth and reconciliation: Americans need to know the J6ers and their stories, if not their shattered hearts.

But it will require the rest of us to forget just about everything the media and government have told us about that day.

“I think people need to hear our testimonies. They need to see who we are, and everything just needs to be exposed to the light of day,” Gray says. “I think when people begin to see and hear who we really are in our everyday lives, they’re going to realize that they’ve been gaslighted. 

“But it’s hard when you’ve grown up with an institution or media that you believed and that you trusted – that the media couldn’t lie, you know? – and you’ve been gaslighted your whole entire life, to come to terms with the fact that you can’t trust what the media says anymore …

“I think that people have to be able to find out who we are.”