An excellent, horrifying, heartbreaking, and illuminating piece from The New Yorker. So much trauma, so much grief, so much work to be done to fully face, heal, and transform the deep, deep wounds to ourselves and our nation which have always existed and are now forcing themselves to the surface for all to see. We ignore this opportunity and vital need for radical systemic change to the peril of us all. — Molly
 |
| The attack on the Capitol was a predictable culmination of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry and shouting things like “Treason!” and “Let us in!”Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker |
The Capitol was breached by Trump supporters who had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep the President in power. A chronicle of an attack foretold.
By the end of President Donald Trump’s crusade against American democracy—after a relentless deployment of propaganda, demagoguery, intimidation, and fearmongering aimed at persuading as many Americans as possible to repudiate their country’s foundational principles—a single word sufficed to nudge his most fanatical supporters into open insurrection. Thousands of them had assembled on the Mall, in Washington, D.C., on the morning of January 6th, to hear Trump address them from a stage outside the White House. From where I stood, at the foot of the Washington Monument, you had to strain to see his image on a jumbotron that had been set up on Constitution Avenue. His voice, however, projected clearly through powerful speakers as he rehashed the debunked allegations of massive fraud which he’d been propagating for months. Then he summarized the supposed crimes, simply, as “bullshit.”
“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the crowd chanted. It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half gleeful excitement at being licensed to act on it. The profanity signalled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms had survived the past four years. In front of me, a middle-aged man wearing a Trump flag as a cape told a young man standing beside him, “There’s gonna be a war.” His tone was resigned, as if he were at last embracing a truth that he had long resisted. “I’m ready to fight,” he said. The young man nodded. He had a thin mustache and hugged a life-size mannequin with duct tape over its eyes, “traitor” scrawled on its chest, and a noose around its neck.
“We want to be so nice,” Trump said. “We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. We’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.”
About a mile and a half away, at the east end of the Mall, Vice-President Pence and both houses of Congress had convened to certify the Electoral College votes that had made Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the next President and Vice-President of the United States. In December, a hundred and forty Republican representatives—two-thirds of the caucus—had said that they would formally object to the certification of several swing states. Fourteen Republican senators, led by Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, had joined the effort. The lawmakers lacked the authority to overturn the election, but Trump and his allies had concocted a fantastical alternative: Pence, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could single-handedly nullify votes from states that Biden had won. Pence, though, had advised Congress that the Constitution constrained him from taking such action.
“After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the crowd. The people around me exchanged looks of astonishment and delight. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”
“No weakness!” a woman cried.
Before Trump had even finished his speech, approximately eight thousand people started moving up the Mall. “We’re storming the Capitol!” some yelled.
There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current. Everyone seemed to understand what was about to happen. The past nine weeks had been steadily building toward this moment. On November 7th, mere hours after Biden’s win was projected, I attended a protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol, in Harrisburg. Hundreds of Trump supporters, including heavily armed militia members, vowed to revolt. When I asked a man with an assault rifle—a “combat-skills instructor” for a militia called the Pennsylvania Three Percent—how likely he considered the prospect of civil conflict, he told me, “It’s coming.” Since then, Trump and his allies had done everything they could to spread and intensify this bitter aggrievement. On December 5th, Trump acknowledged, “I’ve probably worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever have in my life.” (He was not talking about managing the pandemic, which since the election has claimed a hundred and fifty thousand American lives.) Militant pro-Trump outfits like the Proud Boys—a national organization dedicated to “reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism” in America—had been openly gearing up for major violence. In early January, on Parler, an unfiltered social-media site favored by conservatives, Joe Biggs, a top Proud Boys leader, had written, “Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung.”
On the Mall, a makeshift wooden gallows, with stairs and a rope, had been constructed near a statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Some of the marchers nearby carried Confederate flags. Up ahead, the dull thud of stun grenades could be heard, accompanied by bright flashes. “They need help!” a man shouted. “It’s us versus the cops!” Someone let out a rebel yell. Scattered groups wavered, debating whether to join the confrontation. “We lost the Senate—we need to make a stand now,” a bookish-looking woman in a down coat and glasses appealed to the person next to her. The previous day, a runoff in Georgia had flipped two Republican Senate seats to the Democrats, giving them majority control.
Hundreds of Trump supporters had forced their way past barricades to the Capitol steps. In anticipation of Biden’s Inauguration, bleachers had been erected there, and the sides of the scaffolding were wrapped in ripstop tarpaulin. Officers in riot gear blocked an open flap in the fabric; the mob pressed against them, screaming insults.
“You are traitors to the country!” a man barked at the police through a megaphone plastered with stickers from “InfoWars,” the incendiary Web program hosted by the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones. Behind the man stood Biggs, the Proud Boys leader. He wore a radio clipped onto the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. Not far away, I spotted a “straight pride” flag.
There wasn’t nearly enough law enforcement to fend off the mob, which pelted the officers with cans and bottles. One man angrily invoked the pandemic lockdown: “Why can’t I work? Where’s my ‘pursuit of happiness’?” Many people were equipped with flak jackets, helmets, gas masks, and tactical apparel. Guns were prohibited for the protest, but a man in a cowboy hat, posing for a photograph, lifted his jacket to reveal a revolver tucked into his waistband. Other Trump supporters had Tasers, baseball bats, and truncheons. I saw one man holding a coiled noose.
“Hang Mike Pence!” people yelled.
 |
| On the day Joe Biden’s win was projected, hundreds of Trump supporters protested at the Pennsylvania state capitol. |
Soon the mob swarmed past the officers, into the understructure of the bleachers, and scrambled through its metal braces, up the building’s granite steps. Toward the top was a temporary security wall with three doors, one of which was instantly breached. Dozens of police stood behind the wall, using shields, nightsticks, and pepper spray to stop people from crossing the threshold. Other officers took up positions on planks above, firing a steady barrage of nonlethal munitions into the solid mass of bodies. As rounds tinked off metal, and caustic chemicals filled the space as if it were a fumigation tent, some of the insurrectionists panicked: “We need to retreat and assault another point!” But most remained resolute. “Hold the line!” they exhorted. “Storm!” Martial bagpipes blared through portable speakers.
“Shoot the politicians!” somebody yelled.
“Fight for Trump!”
A jet of pepper spray incapacitated me for about twenty minutes. When I regained my vision, the mob was streaming freely through all three doors. I followed an overweight man in a Roman-era costume—sandals, cape, armguards, dagger—away from the bleachers and onto an open terrace on the Capitol’s main level. People clambered through a shattered window. Video later showed that a Proud Boy had smashed it with a riot shield. A dozen police stood in a hallway softly lit by ornate chandeliers, mutely watching the rioters—many of them wearing Trump gear or carrying Trump flags—flood into the building. Their cries resonated through colonnaded rooms: “Where’s the traitors?” “Bring them out!” “Get these fucking cocksucking Commies out!”
The attack on the Capitol was a predictable apotheosis of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry. In April, an armed mob had filled the Michigan state capitol, chanting “Treason!” and “Let us in!” In December, conservatives had broken the glass doors of the Oregon state capitol, overrunning officers and spraying them with chemical agents. The occupation of restricted government sanctums was an affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to the occupiers themselves that they were still in charge. After one of the Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol, he insisted through a megaphone, “We will not be denied.” There was an unmistakable subtext as the mob, almost entirely white, shouted, “Whose house? Our house!” One man carried a Confederate flag through the building. A Black member of the Capitol Police later told BuzzFeed News that, during the assault, he was called a racial slur fifteen times.
I followed a group that broke off to advance on five policemen guarding a side corridor. “Stand down,” a man in a maga hat commanded. “You’re outnumbered. There’s a fucking million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump—your boss.”
“We can take you out,” a man beside him warned.
The officers backpedalled the length of the corridor, until we arrived at a marble staircase. Then they moved aside. “We love you guys—take it easy!” a rioter yelled as he bounded up the steps, which led to the Capitol’s central rotunda.
 |
| On an open terrace on the U.S. Capitol’s main level, Trump supporters clambered through a shattered window. “Where’s the traitors?” they shouted.Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker |
Beneath the soaring dome, surrounded by statues of former Presidents and by large oil paintings depicting such historical scenes as the embarkation of the Pilgrims and the presentation of the Declaration of Independence, a number of young men chanted, “America first!” The phrase was popularized in 1940 by Nazi sympathizers lobbying to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War; in 2016, Trump resurrected it to describe his isolationist foreign and immigration policies. Some of the chanters, however, waved or wore royal-blue flags inscribed with “AF,” in white letters. This is the logo for the program “America First,” which is hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, a twenty-two-year-old Holocaust denier, who promotes a brand of white Christian nationalism that views politics as a means of preserving demographic supremacy. Though America Firsters revile most mainstream Republicans for lacking sufficient commitment to this priority—especially neoconservatives, whom they accuse of being subservient to Satan and Jews—the group’s loyalty to Trump is, according to Fuentes, “unconditional.”
The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776—it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. . . . USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert—a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol—had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
When Babbitt was shot, I was on the opposite side of the Capitol, where people were growing frustrated by the empty halls and offices.
“Where the fuck are they?”
“Where the fuck is Nancy?”
No one seemed quite sure how to proceed. “While we’re here, we might as well set up a government,” somebody suggested.
Then a man with a large “AF ” flag—college-age, cheeks spotted with acne—pushed through a series of tall double doors, the last of which gave onto the Senate chamber.
“Praise God!”
There were signs of a hasty evacuation: bags and purses on the plush blue-and-red carpet, personal belongings on some of the desks. From the gallery, a man in a flak jacket called down, “Take everything! Take all that shit!”
“No!” an older man, who wore an ammo vest and held several plastic flex cuffs, shouted. “We do not take anything.” The man has since been identified as Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel.
The young America Firster went directly to the dais and installed himself in the leather chair recently occupied by the Vice-President. Another America Firster filmed him extemporizing a speech: “Donald Trump is the emperor of the United States . . .”
“Hey, get out of that chair,” a man about his age, with a thick Southern drawl, said. He wore cowhide work gloves and a camouflage hunting jacket that was several sizes too large for him. Gauze hung loosely around his neck, and blood, leaking from a nasty wound on his cheek, encrusted his beard. Later, when another rioter asked for his name, he responded, “Mr. Black.” The America Firster turned and looked at him uncertainly.
“We’re a democracy,” Mr. Black said.
“Bro, we just broke into the Capitol,” the America Firster scoffed. “What are you talking about?”
Brock, the Air Force veteran, said, “We can’t be disrespectful.” Using the military acronym for “information operations,” he explained, “You have to understand—it’s an I.O. war.”
The
America Firster grudgingly left the chair. More than a dozen Trump
supporters filed into the chamber. A hundred antique mahogany desks
with engraved nameplates were arranged in four tiered semicircles.
Several people swung open the hinged desktops and began rifling
through documents inside, taking pictures with their phones of
private notes and letters, partly completed crossword puzzles,
manuals on Senate procedure. A man in a construction hard hat held up
a hand-signed document, on official stationery, addressed from “Mitt”
to “Mike”—presumably, Romney and
Pence. It was the speech that Romney had given, in February, 2020,
when he voted to impeach Trump for pressuring the President of
Ukraine to produce dirt on Biden. “Corrupting an election to keep
oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and disruptive
violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine,” Romney had
written.
 |
| Armed militia members attended a Stop the Steal rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 7th.Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker |
Some senators had printed out their prepared remarks for the election certification that the insurrectionists had disrupted. The man in the hard hat found a piece of paper belonging to Ted Cruz and said, “He was gonna sell us out all along—look! ‘Objection to counting the electoral votes of the state of Arizona.’ ” He paused. “Oh, wait, that’s actually O.K.”
“He’s with us,” an America Firster said.
Another young man, wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved undershirt, seemed unconvinced. Frantically flipping through a three-ring binder on Cruz’s desk, he muttered, “There’s gotta be something in here we can fucking use against these scumbags.” Someone looking on commented, with serene confidence, “Cruz would want us to do this, so I think we’re good.”
Mr. Black wandered around in a state of childlike wonder. “This don’t look big enough,” he muttered. “This can’t be the right place.” On January 14th, Joshua Black was arrested, in Leeds, Alabama, after he posted a confession on YouTube in which he explained, “I just felt like the spirit of God wanted me to go in the Senate room.” On the day of the riot, as he took in the chamber, he ordered everyone, “Don’t trash the place. No disrespect.” After a while, rather than defy him, nearly everybody left the chamber. For a surreal interlude, only a few people remained. Black’s blood-smeared cheek was grotesquely swollen, and as I looked closer I glimpsed the smooth surface of a yellow plastic projectile embedded deeply within it.
“I’m gonna call my dad,” he said, and sat down on the floor, leaning his back against the dais.
A moment later, the door at the back of the chamber’s center aisle swung open, and a man strode through it wearing a fur headdress with horns, carrying a spear attached to an American flag. He was shirtless, his chest covered with Viking and pagan tattoos, his face painted red, white, and blue. It was Jacob Chansley, a vocal QAnon proponent from Arizona, popularly known by his pseudonym, the Q Shaman. Both on the Mall and inside the Capitol, I’d seen countless signs and banners promoting QAnon, whose acolytes believe that Trump is working to dismantle an occult society of cannibalistic pedophiles. At the base of the Washington Monument, I’d watched Chansley assure people, “We got ’em right where we want ’em! We got ’em by the balls, baby, and we’re not lettin’ go!”
“Fuckin’ A, man,” he said now, looking around with an impish grin. A young policeman had followed closely behind him. Pudgy and bespectacled, with a medical mask over red facial hair, he approached Black, and asked, with concern, “You good, sir? You need medical attention?”
“I’m good, thank you,” Black responded. Then, returning to his phone call, he said, “I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet.”
“Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?” the officer inquired. It was the tone of someone trying to lure a suicidal person into climbing down from a ledge.
“We will,” Black assured him. “I been making sure they ain’t disrespectin’ the place.”
“O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place.”
Chansley had climbed onto the dais. “I’m gonna take a seat in this chair, because Mike Pence is a fucking traitor,” he announced. He handed his cell phone to another Trump supporter, telling him, “I’m not one to usually take pictures of myself, but in this case I think I’ll make an exception.” The policeman looked on with a pained expression as Chansley flexed his biceps.
 |
| Rioters forced their way past barricades to the Capitol steps, over which bleachers had been erected in anticipation of Biden’s Inauguration. There wasn’t nearly enough law enforcement to fend off the mob. |
A skinny man in dark clothes told the officer, “This is so weird—like, you should be stopping us.”
The officer pointed at each person in the chamber: “One, two, three, four, five.” Then he pointed at himself: “One.” After Chansley had his photographs, the officer said, “Now that you’ve done that, can I get you guys to walk out of this room, please?”
“Yes, sir,” Chansley said. He stood up and took a step, but then stopped. Leaning his spear against the Vice-President’s desk, he found a pen and wrote something on a sheet of paper.
“I feel like you’re pushing the line,” the officer said.
Chansley ignored him. After he had set down the pen, I went behind the desk. Over a roll-call list of senators’ names, the Q Shaman had scrawled, “its only a matter of time / justice is coming!”
The Capitol siege was so violent and chaotic that it has been hard to discern the specific political agendas of its various participants. Many of them, however, went to D.C. for two previous events, which were more clarifying. On November 14th, tens of thousands of Republicans, convinced that the Democrats had subverted the will of the people in what amounted to a bloodless coup, marched to the Supreme Court, demanding that it overturn the election. For four years, Trump had batted away every inconvenient fact with the phrase “fake news,” and his base believed him when he attributed his decisive defeat in both the Electoral College and the popular vote to “rigged” machines and “massive voter fraud.” While the President’s lawyers inundated battleground states with spurious litigation, one of them, during an interview on Fox Business, acknowledged the basis of their strategy: “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court, of which the President has nominated three Justices, to step in and do something.” After nearly every suit had collapsed—with judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats alike harshly criticizing the accusations as “speculative,” “incorrect,” and “not credible,” and Trump’s own Justice Department vouching for the integrity of the election—the attorney general of Texas petitioned the Supreme Court to invalidate all the votes from Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (swing states that went for Biden). On December 11th, the night before the second D.C. demonstration, the Justices declined to hear the case, dispelling once and for all the fantasy that Trump, despite losing the election, might legally remain in office.
The next afternoon, throngs of Trump supporters crowded into Freedom Plaza, an unadorned public square equidistant from the Justice Department and the White House. On one side, a large audience pressed around a group of preppy-looking young men wearing plaid shirts, windbreakers, khakis, and sunglasses. Some held rosaries and crosses, others royal-blue “AF ” flags. The organizers had not included Fuentes, the “America First” host, in their lineup, but when he arrived at Freedom Plaza the crowd parted for him, chanting, “Groyper!” The name, which America Firsters call one another, derives from a variation of the Pepe the Frog meme, which is fashionable among white supremacists.
Diminutive and clean-shaven, with boyish features and a toothy smile, Fuentes resembled, in his suit and red tie, a recent graduate dressed for a job interview. (He dropped out of Boston University after his freshman year, when other students became hostile toward him for participating in the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and for writing on Facebook that “a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”) Fuentes climbed atop a granite retaining wall, and someone handed him a megaphone. As his speech approached a crescendo of indignation, more and more attendees gravitated to the groypers. “It is us and our ancestors that created everything good that you see in this country,” Fuentes said. “All these people that have taken over our country—we do not need them.”
The crowd roared, “Take it back!”—a phrase that would soon ring inside the Capitol.
“It’s time for us to start saying another word again,” Fuentes shouted. “A very important word that describes the situation we’re in. That word is ‘parasite.’ What is happening in this country is parasitism.” Arguing that Trump alone represented “our interests”—an end to all legal and illegal immigration, gay rights, abortion, free trade, and secularism—Fuentes distilled America Firstism into concise terms: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world.” The Republican governors, judges, and legislators who had refused to leverage their authority to secure Trump four more years in the White House—“traitors within our own ranks”—were on “a list” of people to be taken down. Fuentes also opposed the Constitution’s checks and balances, which had enabled Biden to prevail. “Make no mistake about it,” he declared. “The system is our enemy.”
During the nine weeks between November 3rd and January 6th, extremists like Fuentes did their utmost to take advantage of the opening that Trump created for them by refusing to concede. They were frank about their intentions: undoing not just the 2020 Presidential outcome but also any form of representative government that allows Democrats to obtain and exercise power. Correctly pointing out that a majority of Republicans believed that the election had been stolen, Fuentes argued, “This is the opportunity to galvanize the patriots of this country behind a real solution to these problems that we’re facing.” He also said, “If we can’t get a country that we deserve to live in through the legitimate process, then maybe we need to begin to explore some other options.” In case anybody was confused about what those options might be, Fuentes explained, “Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.”
In the days before January 6th, calls for a “real solution” became progressively louder. Trump, by both amplifying these voices and consolidating his control over the Republican Party, conferred extraordinary influence on the most deranged and hateful elements of the American right. On December 20th, he retweeted a QAnon supporter who used the handle @cjtruth: “It was a rigged election but they were busted. Sting of the Century! Justice is coming!” A few weeks later, a barbarian with a spear was sitting in the Vice-President’s chair.
As Fuentes wrapped up his diatribe, he noticed a drag queen standing on the periphery of the crowd. She wore a blond wig and an evening gown with a beauty-queen sash identifying her as Lady maga. At the November D.C. rally, I had been surprised to see Trump supporters lining up to have their pictures taken with her. Now Fuentes yelled, “That is disgusting! I don’t want to see that!,” and the groypers wheeled on her, bellowing in unison, “Shame!”
No one in the crowd objected.
While Fuentes was proposing a movement to “take this country back by force,” a large contingent of Proud Boys marched by. Members from Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oregon, California, and elsewhere were easy to identify. Most were dressed in the organization’s black-and-yellow colors. Some had “rwds”—Right-Wing Death Squad—hats and patches; others wore balaclavas, kilts, hockey masks, or batting helmets. One man was wearing a T-shirt with an image of South American dissidents being thrown out of a helicopter and the words “pinochet did nothing wrong!” Another T-shirt featured a Nazi eagle perched on a fasces, below the acronym “6mwe”—Six Million Wasn’t Enough—a reference to the number of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.
Many of the Proud Boys were drunk. At around nine-thirty that morning, I’d stopped by Harry’s Pub, a dive bar close to Freedom Plaza, and found the street outside filled with men drinking Budweiser and White Claw. “We are going to own this town!” one of them howled. At the November 14th rally, clashes between the Proud Boys and antifascists had left a number of people injured. Although most of the fights I witnessed then had been instigated by the Proud Boys, Trump had tweeted, “ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back.” It was clear that the men outside Harry’s on December 12th had travelled to D.C. to engage in violence, and that they believed the President endorsed their doing so. Trump had made an appearance at the previous rally, waving through the window of his limousine; now I overheard a Proud Boy tell his comrade, “I wanna see Trump drive by and give us one of these.” He flashed an “O.K.” hand sign, which has become a gesture of allegiance among white supremacists. There would be no motorcade this time, but while Fuentes addressed the groypers Trump circled Freedom Plaza in Marine One, the Presidential helicopter.
 |
| The conspiracist Alex Jones dominated a pro-Trump rally on November 14th. “Down with the deep state!” Jones yelled. “The answer to their ‘1984’ tyranny is 1776!” |
No comments:
Post a Comment