I haven’t written about January 6, 2021, but I think about it every day. After a cross-country move from Northern California to New York’s Hudson Valley, I find myself politically in a very different territory. Here, on our rural street, many of the 20-or-so homes play host to multiple American flags and cars with Trump 2024 bumper stickers (or, in one neighbor’s case, “Let’s go Brandon.”)
January 6 has made me wonder who these neighbors really are.
That was the day rioters stormed the Capitol, igniting in me a wave of shock and disgust that only deepened in the following days, as new reports showed how close some lawmakers and their staffers came to the mob’s snarling clutches, while others may have abetted the mayhem.
While many joined me in horror, another huge swath of the country cheered them on and still would. Who these people are, I’m not sure, but they may live on this street. I may smile and say hello as I walk my dog Stanley and he strains at the leash to greet them. And they may smile back and chat amiably, too, their flags draped behind them, staring angrily through the trees.
On January 6, the “stop the steal” rally occurred in the National Mall, during which Rudy Giuliani called for “trial by combat” and Donald Trump gave a lengthy rambling speech filled with prevarications, saying “this year, they rigged an election. They rigged it like they've never rigged an election before” and exhorting followers to action. “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” he said, with grinning doublespeak.
Just after noon crowds began walking down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol building, some (a contingent of the far-right extremist Proud Boys left as early as 11am). Trump promised to march with them, but did not. Later revelations showed another extremist militia group, the Oath Keepers, arrived at the Capitol in full military combat dress. Then we saw the crowds amassing on the Capitol grounds — estimates put their number at over ten thousand — pushing at the barriers and breaching the Capitol at around 2pm. Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda D. Pittman reported that more than eight hundred people entered the building, most of them the now-familiar blend of goons and gawky tourists taking selfies under the rotunda.
Later footage would, of course, reveal the horror inside the building, the groups of congressional staffers hiding under desks, as furious rioters battered their barricaded office doors; the ransacking of offices in search of government documents; the smug invaders kicking back in lawmakers’ offices, feet propped on desks; the parading of the Confederate flag inside the Capitol for the first time in the nation’s history.
As we learned days and weeks later, the clashes were hot encounters, as police were violently overrun by protestors also wearing riot gear, spraying chemical agents, grabbing front-line guards and pulling them back into the punching, kicking mob. We also discovered that pipe bombs were placed at the DNC and RNC headquarters, a successful tactic, officials believe, to divert law enforcement from assisting at the Capitol.
In the weeks and months after the grounds were emptied and order restored, the nation was left with a number of vexing questions: What is the right word to describe what happened — coup, riot, insurrection? Were the Capitol invaders tourists or terrorists?
Both extremes of the January 6 culpability spectrum — the brainwashed hordes obeying Trump et al and the organized white supremacist paramilitary faction — are equally disquieting, if for different reasons.
Let’s look at the militia side of things first. Kathleen Belew — historian, co-editor of the book A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America — offered a cogent analysis of some of the most chilling gestures of the day. She directly relates them to tactics and imagery described in The Turner Diaries, a 1978 American neo-Nazi novel blueprinting a path to a global race war that is considered biblical in white power circles. (Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, distributed it widely.) The novel “really becomes a clear point of reference if you look at the photographs of the action,” Belew told the Los Angeles Times. “Activists erected a gallows outside the Capitol and hung up symbolic nooses … That’s a reference to ‘The Day of the Rope,’ [a scene in the book depicting] the systematic hanging of lawmakers and other people they consider enemies.”
The book, Belew also notes, features an attack on Congress not meant to incur mass casualties:
“Although there are lots of mass casualty attacks in The Turner Diaries, what happens at Congress is instead meant to be a show of force that a group of activists can impact even a highly secured target. So what we see there is a really clear alignment [with] the way it’s imagined in the movement … a plan for guerrilla warfare and domestic terror that involves not only mass casualty attacks but also symbolic attacks that seek to ‘awaken’ other white people to the cause.
Activists successfully stormed the nation’s Capitol. They got into the building. They made legislators cower. They defaced offices. And they delayed the tallying of our election. They actually did carry out a really successful action this week, and I think it will be seen as a green light by many people in this movement.”
Let’s also remember the threatening of state capitols and politicians across the country on January 6. Staffers in the Utah State Capitol were evacuated from the building. Protesters breached the perimeter of Washington State Governor Jay Inslee’s mansion. In Oregon, pro-Trump protestors burned images of Governor Kate Brown in effigy. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was escorted to safety after threats.
Even worse is the cynicism, manipulation, raw drive to power, and dangerous disregard for the truth displayed by media puppet masters in the run-up to January 6. This widespread gaslighting by Fox and other networks had the same somewhat ominous feel of a rehearsal that the April statehouse storming in Michigan or that in Oregon in December did. How much can we get away with?
The ridiculous charade of a stolen election may not have worked this time — thanks in large part to ethical Republican operatives at the state level — but it has already resulted in getting many of said operatives booted from their positions (voting certification boards and such) as well as a passing a raft of state gerrymandering and voter suppression laws. For Republicans, no reaction can be overreaction, because overreaction almost always results in satisfaction. Since the dawn of right wing talk radio and the rise of Tea Party and the other engines of outrage, peddling lies and half-truths, fomenting fury and indignation gets them what they want.
The attack on Congress on January 6 is simply the latest and greatest in an ever-growing list of demonstrations of extra-political power through violence and intimidation. That right wing politicians and pundits are comfortable holding the reins to a bloodthirsty mob they think they control brings to mind dark correspondences, like the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.
Every afternoon, as Stanley and I walk past those American flags on our block, I think about what is to be done. The American flag also represents my nationality, but seeing it fly with all the associated vehemence puts distance between us, as if I have no claim to it at all. Would these neighbors of mine have smashed windows in the Capitol? Would they have cheered as hooded militiamen led a zip-tied Nancy Pelosi to the gallows?
I do wonder why they are so angry. After all, research by The Atlantic showed the average age of people arrested at the Capitol was 40, with two-thirds 35 or older. Forty percent owned businesses or held white-collar jobs. “They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants,” the article posited. These could be my neighbors, people with nice homes and modern SUVs who mow their expansive yards on a Sunday. What are they so pissed off about?
Some sociologists suggest that the lack of external enemies creates internal divisions. Yet, in the last twenty years as a nation we’ve faced crisis after crisis that could have pulled us together — September 11, the 2008 crash, climate change, the pandemic. Yet the dividers always find ways to cleave people apart. Turning ostensible positives — medicines, infrastructure, economic recovery, environmental salvation — into wedge issues seems like a feat of dark magic. That is, unless the country wants to be divided, which seems to be the case.
What drives this division? The only thing I can think of is fear. Fear causes people to do desperate things and act irrationally. That ancient, hardwired fight-or-flight mechanism is our brain’s master switch. These not-desperate people who are angry about everything must be scared, so scared that they contort themselves into believing the most ridiculous conspiracies — QAnon, a stolen election, that the government itself rigged up January 6 — rather than accepting what’s simple and obvious.
The great underlying fear may be the “great replacement theory,” that inexorable demographic shift will be the end of white people. Or maybe it’s fear about facing the devastating truths that problematize American identity — the abusive and genocidal history behind our country’s prosperity, that our current way of life propels global warming, that we are the willing pawns of corporations, that the American dream may be a sham. If it’s not a sham, why are all these neighbors with white picket fences and lawns and nice houses evidently so unhappy that they gleefully cheer on the destruction of democracy?
When we reckon with January 6 as a country, I suggest we start with telling and agreeing upon the truth. I don’t know how to do it. I’ll look around for opportunities in my neighborhood. And I think I’ll hoist my own American flag, and let it silently represent what it means to me.
I’m slow getting to this newsletter. But I too plant an American flag outside my rural wine shop as a reminder to myself - and anyone that asks - that it’s my flag too.
Same here regarding the flag outside our home. As an immigrant, it represents the land of opportunity and inclusion.