Storming Of The Capitol Quotes

By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?

As the historian Appian records: “So perished on the Capitol, and while still tribune, Gracchus, the son of that Gracchus who was twice consul, and of Cornelia, daughter of that Scipio who robbed Carthage of her supremacy. He lost his life in consequence of a most excellent design too violently pursued; and this abominable crime, the first that was perpetrated in the public assembly, was seldom without parallels thereafter from time to time.

tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens.

He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens.

Ghost Dancers Rise: At the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing, tribal leaders gathered in Washington, DC, for a ceremony in front of the Capitol. They could have dwelt on the catastrophes that were Columbus's legacy, but instead they closed the ceremony with these words: We stand young warriors In the circle At dawn all storm clouds disappear The future brings all hope and glory, Ghost dancers rise Five-hundred years.

Perhaps the best statistical evidence for this shift lies in the 2021 Pew Research Center survey that found a growing tendency among white supporters of Donald Trump to newly adopt an evangelical identity.7 “In the end, their own movement was redefined as a reactionary, angry, white Christian, storm-the-Capitol movement,” Gushee said. “People who don’t have any idea about classical evangelical doctrines, but by God, they like Trump and they’re white, so therefore they’re evangelical. That is a complete collapse of moral and religious identity that evangelicals brought on themselves.

He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.

He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games. The

I’m not a Black Nationalist, because I believe the Reconstruction and Nineteenth Amendments could redeem this whole bigoted and misogynist enterprise. But white people won’t let them. It really is that simple. I say the fifteenth Amendment must mean that the votes of Black people cannot be suppressed by voter ID laws, and white people tell me no. I say that Black political power cannot be gerrymandered away by racist white legislatures, and white people tell me no. I say that the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of equal protection of laws must protect me from racial harassment by the cops, and entitles me to equal pay for my talents, and promises me that my peaceful protest will be treated with the same permissiveness the cops accord to a mob of white insurrectionists storming the nation’s Capitol, and white people tell me no, no, no. These amendments are a tonic white people refuse to drink. They can cure the Constitution of its addiction to white male supremacy, if white people would just take the medicine.

Wall Street: I’d start carrying guns if I were you.      Your annual reports are worse fiction than the screenplay for Dude, Where’s My Car?, which you further inflate by downsizing and laying off the very people whose life savings you’re pillaging. How long do you think you can do that to people? There are consequences. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But inevitably. Just ask the Romanovs. They had a nice little setup, too, until that knock at the door.      Second, Congress: We’re on to your act.      In the middle of the meltdown, CSPAN showed you pacing the Capitol floor yapping about “under God” staying in the Pledge of Allegiance and attacking the producers of Sesame Street for introducing an HIV-positive Muppet. Then you passed some mealy-mouthed reforms and crowded to get inside the crop marks at the photo op like a frat-house phone-booth stunt.      News flash: We out here in the Heartland care infinitely more about God-and-Country issues because we have internal moral-guidance systems that make you guys look like a squadron of gooney birds landing facedown on an icecap and tumbling ass over kettle. But unlike you, we have to earn a living and can’t just chuck our job responsibilities to march around the office ranting all day that the less-righteous offend us. Jeez, you’re like autistic schoolchildren who keep getting up from your desks and wandering to the window to see if there’s a new demagoguery jungle gym out on the playground. So sit back down, face forward and pay attention!      In summary, what’s the answer?      The reforms laws were so toothless they were like me saying that I passed some laws, and the president and vice president have forgotten more about insider trading than Martha Stewart will ever know.      Yet the powers that be say they’re doing everything they can. But they’re conveniently forgetting a little constitutional sitcom from the nineties that showed us what the government can really do when it wants to go Starr Chamber. That’s with two rs.      Does it make any sense to pursue Wall Street miscreants any less vigorously than Ken Starr sniffed down Clinton’s sex life? And remember, a sitting president actually got impeached over that—something incredibly icky but in the end free of charge to taxpayers, except for the $40 million the independent posse spent dragging citizens into motel rooms and staring at jism through magnifying glasses. But where’s that kind of government excess now? Where’s a coffee-cranked little prosecutor when you really need him?      I say, bring back the independent counsel. And when we finally nail you stock-market cheats, it’s off to a real prison, not the rich guys’ jail. Then, in a few years, when the first of you start walking back out the gates with that new look in your eyes, the rest of the herd will get the message pretty fast.

In an interview years later, I asked Anita Hill whether and when it was appropriate to give up on the legal system, to walk away and claim that it was a force for more harm than good. So many of the women in this book shrugged and told me that the law is an imperfect solution at best, but Anita Hill recoiled when I suggested as much: “Without law it’s chaos, right? Because we will lose. We will lose with chaos. We will always lose.” Perhaps more than anyone else she articulated the special relationship that exists by necessity between vulnerable communities and the legal system. “Chaos,” she told me, “allows for behavior you could not anticipate. With institutions, if you understand an institution, you know how things work. They may not work perfectly for you, but you know how they work. Chaos, you don’t know how it works, and it’s survival of the fittest. And people can really act on their worst instincts. That may be true, to some extent, in institutions. But there is something that you can navigate.” Women have a special relationship with the law, because the next best alternative is violence. Women have a special relationship with the justice system, Hill believes, because it is something we can navigate. But for the law, she told me, January 6, 2021, the day on which rioters stormed the US Capitol seeking to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election, “could have been passed off as just like any other day in the White House or in the Capitol.” So we rely upon the law, she explained, because without it we have far less. And perhaps because we are so vulnerable to its failures, we tend to be especially vigilant, maybe even hypervigilant, when it feels as if it were sliding away.

The consequence of these conspiracies became manifest on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of Trump supporters, encouraged by right-wing media and Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly insurrection aimed at overturning the election. There was a time in the United States that such startling violence would have bought at least a few days of unity. But with blood still drying on the Capitol floor, more than one hundred Republican members of Congress voted to overturn the election and spread conspiracies about a “false-flag” operation that had already begun to circulate within right-wing media. Over the next twenty-four hours, hosts went on air to denounce the violence, then immediately began to argue, falsely, that left-wing agitators and Antifa were responsible for the insurrection.

remember sitting silently still, wishing I could transport myself home. This very same feeling is triggered again, when I see a mob of white supremacists storm the Capitol building, unhinged with racist rage. American terrorists in normcore who’d attack a Sikh or Muslim, totally ignorant of how the turban or hijab are symbols of devotion, marking a person as a believer, as equal under a higher power. Beauty that evades the white supremacist. Back then, my parents told me: Don’t tell anyone your last name is Islam.

Trump having the ability to trick a mob of rubes into storming the Capitol wasn’t a reason to stop enabling him, it was more evidence that his mob must be obeyed.

There’s still a lingering afterglow here from the euphoria earlier. A feeling that maybe some great victory has been won and there is a reason to be optimistic. On the other hand, I see a guy tying a hangman’s noose when I get closer to the monument. He grins maniacally as he ties it. “Traitors get the rope,” he says in a hollow, emotionless voice that sends chills down my spine. “Hey man, you’re gonna do whatever you want to do, I’m not going to try to stop you. I’m just gonna say that I think that might backfire.” I say, pointing at the tied rope in his hands. “I think that if anyone in the media sees that they’re gonna say it’s racist. I think you’re running the risk of making your whole movement look bad. This isn’t my fight, but you might want to think about that. OK, I spoke my piece.” There is a pause, he stares at me, his expression unreadable. “Traitors get the rope,” he says in a hollow, emotionless voice that sends chills down my spine. It’s like he’s a recording. He just says the exact same thing, in the exact same way, every time anyone tries to talk to him. Why do I even care if these people make themselves look bad? They’re not my people. At least some of them look bad because they are bad; right? Do I really think the guy with the hangman’s noose is just misunderstood? In my travels, I’ve seen many instances where the media was unfair to Trump supporters, but I’ve also met some damn creepy mother-f*ckers, especially in the last few weeks. Maybe the old protester in me just hates to see all this effort go into an anti-government demonstration and have nothing good come out of it.

I overhear a guy say that if you see Anderson Cooper (one of the primary anchors for CNN) up close, he looks totally different. And so, I ask, “What’s different up close?” That’s all I ask. And he somehow goes on this long diatribe about how rich Anderson Cooper is and maybe he’s taking Adrenochrome, the chemical in the blood of tortured children which grants youth to those who drink it, (according to InfoWars and QAnon forums). The same few things just keep coming up.

Now the crowd is chanting, “ALL-COPS ARE BAS-TARDS!” That’s definitely a BLM chant. I’ve heard that at multiple BLM events in that exact cadence. Immediately after someone shouts “pedophile protectors!” which of course, BLM would never say, because it’s only the right wing who are convinced everyone is a pedophile. All of which begs the question: who even are these people?

agreed? I would later hear that Congress and staff spent the next month utterly terrified that a protester hid inside the building during the confusion, and in every supply closet, just beside the extra toner, a lunatic with a pitchfork was waiting to murder them. If you ask me, that mentality explains a lot of my government’s behavior over the next few months.

The main reason we went in was because we were getting pushed.” One guy tells me. “There were thousands of people behind us. We had no way to stop.” When the sun was up, I heard bragging and celebration; but in the dark of night, storming the Capitol is something to be explained away.

He tells me that very early in the conflict today before anyone got inside, a group of men scuffled with the cops, then turned and ran. The police chased after the retreating assailants, which turned out to be a mistake because it left the entrances unguarded and other people flooded in. Dumb move by the police, or clever strategy by The Event’s Hidden Mastermind?

We were inside for a good 30 minutes and the cops mostly just stood there. Then finally the cops started pepper spraying people and we left.

He teared up a little bit when remembering the Sea of People. That does seem to be central to our story. Was the Sea of People the apex of the MAGA movement’s power, never to be reached again? Or is it merely a benchmark to be surpassed a few years later, when they’re even more angry and a little better organized?

NOTE: I think he’s 100% right about the effect the Sea of People had on the police. It doesn’t matter if it was “one-point-two-five-million” or a hundred thousand. And it doesn’t matter if even only a tiny, tiny fraction of the crowd actually fought the police. The fact is there was a flood of people, as far as the eye could see, all flowing into one building ... I wouldn’t blame the police inside that building for being intimidated when they looked out and saw that. me: OK.

... so, for those keeping score at home, he wants a guerrilla war where Americans shoot and hang other Americans. It will be very easy to tell who they need to kill because they will be the ones telling you to wear a medical mask and get a vaccine. Even after I gave him the first food he had eaten in two days, he still was not willing to listen to me for just a few seconds and explain that “socialism” actually means using taxes to pay for hospital visits, instead of running up huge medical debts. Rather than letting me talk, he threatened to hang me, all while still eating my food. On most days, I might dismiss a conversation like this as nothing but the rantings of a homeless guy whose mind has been pushed too far. But today he’s just come from the Sea of People who stormed the Capitol and forced Congress to flee for their lives. On a day like today, I think this interview merits more consideration, especially when so many others I interviewed concurred with parts of what he said. I believe

Joe Biden himself, in a presidential debate, called them “an idea, not an organization.”[62] But that’s … not true. When I was in Philadelphia, it took me five minutes to google the local Antifa chapter’s website, where they were busily organizing to take pictures of people at Trump events and sending those pictures to the people’s employers, to get them fired for being white supremacists.

heard stories of political violence that sent chills down my spine. One guy nostalgically recalled how he crippled a man he considered a “Nazi,” first beating him into submission and then jumping on his spine, all based on unacceptable opinions the man had shared at a bar. A law student working his way up the Democratic Party told me that periodic beatings of opponents to spread fear in the population were key to any political victory. I tried to talk him out of it, tried to say the entire point of democracy was to have a nonviolent way to transfer power, but he just kept smiling and reminding me that he was already actively organizing campaigns and his candidates always won.

It was hard not to think the Proud Boys and Trump had some kind of nudge-wink arrangement, similar in some ways to Biden claiming Antifa was only an idea.

when the president of the Philadelphia Proud Boys told me they couldn’t be white supremacists because of the Black members standing next to me and because their president was Afro-Cuban, it felt like he had a point. It does seem strange that an organization that The Media consistently said were white supremacists had non-white members and a non-white leader. That’s weird.

came to believe that Antifa and the Proud Boys occupied a sort of parallel place in each other’s imaginations. MAGA crowds claimed the Proud Boys were defending them from Antifa, BLM crowds claimed Antifa was defending them from the Proud Boys. Each justified their actions using fear of the other. They had many differences of course, but they shared one crucial similarity: both built up what might almost be called a class of professional street brawlers and created a sort of arms race with the other side.

Together, they gave birth to a generation of guys in their late teens and early 20s who owned little “kits” complete with body armor, gas masks, and clubs, who regularly took them out to go fight each other. Imagine that for a moment! Imagine your personal body armor and helmet sitting in your closest, where you see them every time you get dressed, and imagine fondly remembering how brave you felt the last time you put on that armor to literally “fight evil.” Imagine, almost without noticing, you find yourself thinking up new excuses to put it on again and get those good feelings back. I will go out on a limb and say that leads to an unstable civilization.

NOTE: Contrary to popular belief, I always saw at least a few Black people at every MAGA event. It was hilarious to watch all the white people trip over themselves to buy the Black people food and drinks and to take selfies with them. Black people were instant celebrities at MAGA events, everyone was desperate to disprove the media-narrative about them being racists.

Trump has to do one thing right now, declare the Insurrection Act and fucking fix this. Now, the Congress, Nancy Pelosi was eating ice cream while we were fucking ... I was ... I was fucking depressed in New York. Before I went campaigning. Stuck in an apartment, she was fucking eating ice cream on fucking late night TV. NOTE: As we’ve discussed, at the time of The Event, poor people were feeling the cumulative effects of nearly a year of being locked down in their shitty apartments because of COVID. During this same time, Nancy Pelosi made the brilliant decision to conduct a tour of her lavish home on Late Night TV and spent special time going over her collection of exotic ice creams.

Biden should be the first motherfucker that wants to fucking make sure the audit ... he came on TV, fucking addressed the nation in fucking said we were extremists. Why don’t you just say, “hey, maybe these guys want to be heard?” We’ll talk to ... we’ll talk to Joe Biden. We’re not, we’re not fucking the NBA players that won’t even talk to Trump. We’ll talk to Joe Biden and we’ll talk to him. me: Who ... exactly would do that? Who would do the talking to Joe Biden? Like, is there an organization for what’s happening here? Dominican Guy: (proudly) I’ll talk to Joe Biden myself.

with the first police officer that spoke with me, they said that I needed to turn around ‘cause it wasn’t safe after, ‘So, OK this is, know that’s safe for ya.’ So, but that was at the point that they were beginning to walk-walk-walk us down and walk us out, or push us out, as they’ve been doing so, uh, anyway ... NOTE: This gives us a glimpse of what the interactions with the police were like, from the protesters’ point of view. While there are well-documented cases of fights between the police and the stormers, there were also a lot of cases like this. To be clear, this doesn’t somehow excuse what the trespassers did, but it’s also not something the historical record should just ignore. Try to imagine it for a moment; imagine if you broke into a building and inside the police were calmly giving you advice about which areas were safe for you to break into next. For some people, that really happened.

one guy emerged from the MAGA crowd and stood between the battering ram and the door and started giving the speech of his life. He said he knew how angry they felt because he’d “been fired from every job he ever had, because he was a white guy,” but this wasn’t the way. He promised they could build a better future full of equality for all humans, and aliens too, but they had to back down and stop attacking the building. And that pocket of the crowd listened to him and they did back down. The man who showed me the video lamented that it was so dramatic it would surely go viral, but he couldn’t post it anywhere because everybody in it would wind up in jail. me: I think I saw that. Did you witness any, like, other altercations between the police and the protesters? Instant Replay: Other than what I saw up here? No, I mean, I saw that, saw them hitting that one girl with uh, uh, that billy club, whatever that thing is that they have.

goes on about how frightened he is because it looks like all the elections going forward might be rigged and he has no way of knowing if the results will ever be real ... As I said, I believe this guy gives us useful insight into the minds of the people who stormed the Capitol. Try to imagine how it felt to be this guy; not knowing if the election outcomes were real or rigged. He’s frustrated at probably justified accusations of unfair media coverage. On the other hand, he genuinely believes that the police were “the aggressors” after he twice broke into a building under their protection, so I can’t say I have much respect for his judgment. Mentally, this guy’s a mess. It’s like he can intuitively sense something unfair is happening, but he lacks the logical tools to differentiate between statements that have evidence and statements that don’t ... which puts him about even with most people these days.

This time period I live in is hyper-partisan, so I’m sure both sides will accuse me of unfairly attacking them in this book. However, I tried to be, if not “fair” to my subjects, then at least “accurate.” It’s not my job to make anyone look good,

Julius Caesar was a public official, extremely popular with the common people, who started breaking the rules and amassing more power than the government’s checks and balances were supposed to allow. The common citizens felt the government had always failed to tackle the rampant problems of poverty and corruption, and they felt no matter who they voted for, the government ignored them. The citizens of Rome had reached a point where they didn’t care if Caesar overthrew the Republic, so long as he did something to help them. Caesar, for his part, claimed he was the one person trying to solve the big problems his Republic faced; he claimed that out-of-touch elites were not giving him a fair chance, nor giving him the credit he deserved for being, essentially, the most terrific, amazing guy ever.[15] So, if anything, I raise my voice and pause dramatically for effect, Trump is the one who seems like Caesar in any Roman Republic metaphor! So, these two women are basically waving a sign saying their own leader should be stabbed to death.

As I gaze up at a grey and unforgiving sky, my mind turns to you, future generations. Will you end up like these women? They think the people who killed that republic actually saved it; will you be equally fuzzy about what killed my republic?

Grumpy Old Man: (shouting and waving hands) Then why isn’t the Democrats here then?!!!! me: Because this is a protest against what’s happening! And the Democrats are happy with what’s happening. So, they have no reason to protest. They have no particular reason to gather here. Grumpy Old Man: OK, what about on the 20th? NOTE: January 20th is Inauguration Day, when a new president actually takes over. me: We’ll see. We’ll see, probably ... they’re big on the coronavirus. So, they’ll probably say that that’s why they’re not gathering. I mean, me personally, I don’t think that many people would show up to begin with because I don’t think many people ... uh ... actually like Joe Biden. But my point was originally, legally, I don’t think this crowd of people has the legal right, or even the moral right to relieve the Congress of their position.

Trump’s own lawyer finds the courage to cut him off, but by that time he’s laid out so many accusations that it’s impossible to even remember them, much less respond. So Raffensperger ignores 95% of Trump’s accusations and mostly just says that his numbers are all wrong. Which hey, they probably are, but I wanna hear WHY they’re wrong! How is an engaged citizen in a decaying republic supposed to analyze who’s the bigger liar if this is all they give me?

that, but at a minimum, it seemed worth looking into. Yet the State Farm Video was mostly downplayed by the mainstream media, and when the story was mentioned at all, it was oddly easy to catch the media contradicting each other. ABC News, for example, confirmed the election workers were sent home because of the burst pipe, reporting, “... the election department sent the State Farm Arena absentee ballot counters home at 10:30 p.m.”[18] Whereas the independent fact-check website Politifact rated President Trump as “pants on fire lying” for his claim that election workers were sent home, reporting: “Those officials have said there was never an instruction for election observers to leave.”[19] Obviously, those can’t both be true, and I really did want someone, anyone, to dig into the story for me.

This isn’t my movement. What do I care if they’re made to look bad? Maybe it’s ‘cause this reminds me of the early days of the French Revolution, when a march led by lower-class women stormed the palace of Versailles so they could go yell at the royal family. Even though their revolution ended tragically a few years later, there’s something endearing about the downtrodden standing up to their spoiled rulers.

Without meaning to, I’m flowing in with them. I see the empty window looming in front of me. It’s getting closer. Closer. Inches from my face. On the other side is destiny, everyone feels it. The window alarm shrieks in my ear like a rabid siren, calling to me with an insatiable lust for glory: Be a legend! She implores me. Be part of history! Take your place in the pantheon of heroes who stood up to tyranny! You’ve come this far, do it! Do it NOW!!! My hands tremble over the window frame, ready to pull myself in. I suddenly realize this is one of the most important decisions of my life. I step aside.

Nobody here seems to remember about security cameras, but I do. Even as this confusing experience is unfolding in real time, I suspect that the people who set foot inside the building will be in a drastically different legal category. I don’t want to expose myself to that risk. I’ve pushed this pretty far already; this is where I draw the line. This isn’t just a crime, it’s a crime they’ll almost certainly get caught for.

this guy broke open the doors of the Capitol and bum rushed the police, thinking it was for a good cause, and he never thought he’d get in trouble for that. He bragged about it! He didn’t realize the videos of him breaking things and fighting cops might be incriminating. How the hell do you talk yourself into that?

A lot of MAGA people I talked to in the weeks after The Event claimed that the police must have opened all the doors for them and that it was all a setup. That was a popular theory on the internet. But it’s just not true. The Linebacker was shouting in a state of euphoria that he broke the doors open; I can’t imagine he was lying. The theories about the police opening all the doors are wrong because the initial opening of at least four doors was done by him and his teammates. And don’t forget about those flanking maneuvers! He described how the crowd repeatedly forced police to bunch in certain areas, then ran to other, less defended areas. Crowds don’t do that organically. Someone with at least decent tactical instincts was directing their behavior, someone whose goal was to get people inside the building itself. But who? Who would want the crowd to break into the building?

As far as anyone living through this knew, at any moment, the Sea of People might have flooded over and trashed everything in sight. And that, more than anything else, might explain why the police didn’t do the obvious thing and just shoot the trespassers.

We have to HOLD not only for our CHILDREN, for our COUNTRY, but for our WORLD! THIS ISN’T ABOUT TRUMP! THIS NEVER WAS ABOUT TRUMP! HE WAS SIMPLY THE CATALYST THAT BROUGHT ALL OF US LIKE-MINDED, SANE-THINKING PEOPLE TOGETHER! HE IS THIS ... epicenter. (pause) And they are pushing us back again.

For four long years that they’ve been censoring us and keeping us isolated! Goddamn coronavirus! It’s a farce! Keep us out of the churches, the bars, the stores. Put our little masks on so that we don’t know who each other are. It’s one big FARCE! We’re fucking tired of it! I left my mother, the last statement I had ... she’s home crying right now because she thinks I’m not coming back. NOTE:

many of the Trump supporters who came to D.C. left messages to their loved ones explaining that they might never come back.[47] This is important because it implies what happened was at least somewhat planned in advance by at least some of those involved, and those people were anticipating violence might happen.

We can also see here that he believes that the entire pandemic is a “farce” staged for political purposes. He also thinks The Media has been censoring and misleading since at least the beginning of the Trump presidency. These aren’t just his beliefs; they’re the reasons why he stormed the Capitol. People argue a lot about what peoples’ real motives were when they stormed the Capitol. He just told you.

I spend some time talking to a guy who has a remarkably calm voice, considering he’s only a few feet away from the line of police shields. “I hope that today is kind of the ... the catalyst for the Trump supporters and the populist right to, to realize that the populist left, the Antifa and the BLM movement, we all have a very common enemy, and that’s the establishment politicians,” he says. Ah! How often did I dream that dream in my idealistic youth? Then he calls out the government for “giving us back six hundred dollars after they close all of our businesses and stuff.” He argues for a “peaceful divorce” between the states, in which the federal government still handles dealing with foreign countries and a few other important matters, but individual states were free to have vastly different laws that fit their own culture. So, Texas could have unrestricted gun access and California could have Medicare For All, they just couldn’t force other states to do things they didn’t want to do. Which, for the record, is pretty much the way America used to work, during the 70 years between the ratification of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War. This guy has actual plans! He’s thought of solutions beyond signaling how angry he is and hoping everything takes care of itself after that! I don’t agree with all his ideas, but at least he has them. “But what I’m saying is,” he goes on, “All the people here today, and all the people who have been protesting throughout the year, for the BLM and Antifa and the populist left, all want the same thing.” He eyes the line of black body armor with a troubled look on his face and walks off. NOTE: Let’s just cut through the noise and dwell on that for a minute. Breathe. Stop and Think. What did he just say? Just when I think these people are all nuts, I meet that one. Who the hell was that guy? Why can’t there be more like him?

no one’s ever really stormed the U.S. Capitol Building before. You know, no one’s ever done that. So… NOTE: Nitpicking history teacher moment: the British Canadians stormed the U.S. Capitol in 1814, set it and most of the city’s landmarks on fire, but then retreated the next day when they were hit with a rainstorm and tornado.[75] True story. :-) me: It reminds me ... uh, tangent, it reminds me of how early in the French Revolution the common people stormed the French Palace, the Royal French Palace, and they didn’t really do anything then. They just kind of pushed their way in so they could yell at the royal family.[76] It wasn’t until a few years later that people started getting their heads chopped off. Wolf Patch: Yeah. me: So ... but that’s a tangent.

Trump is Caesar,” he says. “That’s what I keep saying!” I gush. “I’ve been saying that for years.” “He’s gonna lead us across the Rubicon,” he says. “I think he already crossed the Rubicon,” I say. “I think this is him getting assassinated.” There is a pause and then he looks at me. “All of these politicians,” he says slowly and evenly, “They don’t understand that they’re paving the way for somebody so much worse than Trump. This movement isn’t going to go away. I’ve already talked to people who say things crazy, things like they want to overthrow the government. People who hadn’t been saying that three years ago.

... so, for those keeping score at home, he wants a guerrilla war where Americans shoot and hang other Americans. It will be very easy to tell who they need to kill because they will be the ones telling you to wear a medical mask and get a vaccine. Even after I gave him the first food he had eaten in two days, he still was not willing to listen to me for just a few seconds and explain that “socialism” actually means using taxes to pay for hospital visits, instead of running up huge medical debts. Rather than letting me talk, he threatened to hang me, all while still eating my food. On most days, I might dismiss a conversation like this as nothing but the rantings of a homeless guy whose mind has been pushed too far. But today he’s just come from the Sea of People who stormed the Capitol and forced Congress to flee for their lives. On a day like today, I think this interview merits more consideration, especially when so many others I interviewed concurred with parts of what he said. I believe men like him represent a much larger segment of the population than those mesmerized by The Media want to accept. Based on the miles I’ve driven and the conversations I’ve had while Chasing History, I’d say men (and women!) like him are a large minority of the population and they ain’t going away. And unless some modern-day messiah manages to re-open political dialogue in this country, I see more trouble in the years ahead.

there were “instigators” of some kind when the Capitol was being stormed. People breaking windows even when others told them to stop, people with megaphones shouting “MEN! Line up behind me!” ... I witnessed that stuff myself, that stuff was real, and I’d like to get to the bottom of it. But when the MAGA people heard one rumor they liked, they became so desperate for it to be true that they swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. “There’s the scapegoat!” They shouted. “I knew it was someone else’s fault, I just knew it! And now I have proof.” Their insistence on seeing fake BLM instigators everywhere makes it a lot harder for me to find out who the real instigators were, BLM or otherwise. Their compulsion to instantly believe the things that comfort them makes it very, very difficult to sort through their beliefs and figure out what’s real and what isn’t ... which I guess puts them about even with all the other Americans I meet these days. Such times I live in, eh?

found a pocket of forlorn, former conquerors, huddling under un-heated heaters in the bus station. They bitterly informed me they’d tried being “peaceful” today, and that hadn’t worked, so now it was probably time to use bombs, guns, and nooses to exterminate people with different ideas than them, including elected officials and civilians such as myself. They weren’t terrorists of course, they were “patriots,” it’d be ridiculous to suggest people who “blowed up” houses and hung corpses from trees for political reasons were terrorists, right? In the spirit of fairness, I will concede that I’m just one man, and I can’t claim to have been everywhere at once on this day, so if defenders of MAGA want to claim “not everyone was like that” yeah, that could be true. Maybe I got a skewed sample. But being on the ground and witnessing the whole day, I did see a theme about a terrorist guerrilla campaign develop that was a real thing, however widespread.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had scored points during the BLM protests by writing a letter opposing additional law enforcement and National Guard deployment,[108] and on the night before Trump’s gathering was planned, she sent out a similar letter, saying flatly that, except for the small deployment of 340 unarmed National Guard to direct traffic, “the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without notification.”[109] In fact, federal agencies had offered to reinforce security at the Capitol for the 6th, but they were rebuffed.[110] The mayor of D.C. has mostly escaped blame for The Event, but I have to wonder how history might’ve been different if she’d accepted the additional security instead of sending that letter.

At any rate, I think it’s fair to say the anti-police protests created a political atmosphere where politicians were afraid of appearing pro-police, so they overcompensated and left the D.C. police undermanned.

The corporations silenced the president. I, for one, had not realized that was how the system worked. And I am not a little concerned about what that precedent will mean for future presidents, presidential candidates, and candidates running for any elected office. All of them literally cannot win elections without social media and they apparently can be kicked off social media whenever the owners of the companies get mad at them. Even if the outcome in Trump’s case might seem reasonable on the surface, what system led to that outcome? This move puts private, for-profit social media companies in a position to control what any politician can say, not just Trump. But hey, that won’t contribute to the collapse of my democracy later on down the line, right?

In the spirit of accuracy, I think it’s fair to note that Trump also sent out two tweets throughout the day telling the mob to stay “peaceful,”[116] and then when he told the mob to “go home,” they did, almost instantly. Trump’s supporters want to give him credit for that, but while I suppose it’s better than nothing, it’s not so great when you really think about it. If Trump had the power to stop them at any time, why the hell didn’t he call them off the moment they broke into the building? During his second impeachment, a member of Congress, a Republican no less, recounted a story that Trump was on the phone with one of them as they begged him to call off the mob, but even though he knew the building was overrun he just said, “I guess these people are more upset by the election than you are.

As I’ve mentioned before, unlike a better planned “march” there was no one on the ground who could make the mob stop, Trump was the only one on earth who could stop them, and instead of doing that, he spent his time trying to get concessions from Congress, as they fled the building and begged him for help. Surely THAT’s a crime, isn’t it?

Even if Trump wasn’t a criminal mastermind who planned everything three steps in advance, he still took advantage of the situation. It stands to me as a testament to the Democrats’ stupidity that they failed to charge him with that eminently more provable offense, as well as his criminal negligence in planning his “march.” Instead, the Democrats concocted a much harder-to- prove accusation about Trump knew in advance everything that was going to happen. But that too falls outside the scope of this book. So, Trump belatedly did the right

What really happened that day? Well, if you listen to the internet, behind every corner there’s an evil genius who masterminded it. Trump! Antifa! The Proud Boys! The Police! They’re all brilliant strategists who knew exactly what would happen months in advance! But you should never bet on genius when stupidity explains just as well.

When I look at this day I see a stupid mayor who passed up federal reinforcements for cheap political points, a stupid president who told a crowd the election was “stolen” then directed them to walk across the city with no recognizable supervision, a stupid crowd who believed getting inside the building would give them magic powers but hadn’t planned beyond that point, and stupid police who, despite some individual bravery, utterly failed to present a coordinated response to the obvious and predictable threats they faced. Stupid at every level. A Perfect Storm of Intersectional Stupidity.

The Event was created by our overlapping stupidity. And all the stupid people learned nothing, by the way. On both sides of the great political divide, they continued to double down on their stupid ways, doing their same stupid things that were, in the words of the guy I watched the certification with, “paving the way for somebody so much worse than Trump.

I spent a lot of time with the MAGA movement for the Chasing History Project. I mingled with them for months. I interviewed church-going moms who babbled incoherently about life changing videos of politicians performing Satanic rituals, which they freely admitted they’d never actually seen. I felt their pain as they talked about real problems: jobs disappearing, poverty running rampant, swarms of drug-addicted homeless people sleeping in every park, and schools that taught kids almost no useful skills.

The MAGA mob’s self-destructive stupidity in Storming the Capitol probably obliterated any remaining chance the country had of coming together to solve the very problems that had upset them in the first place. Because now the other side viewed them as not just wrong, but also insurrectionary terrorists, hell-bent on murdering and kidnapping the lot of them. And the leaders of the Democratic Party, the elected members of Congress, were the ones most emotionally traumatized and had the most legitimate reasons to think that’s what happened. Who’s gonna work together after that?

There is little doubt in my mind that historians 100 years from now will point to that moment as a handy dividing line, after which America’s dysfunctional political system was beyond saving. I think I get why the MAGA mob was angry, and while parts of that were the disturbing fantasies of paranoid children, parts were valid concerns about our declining republic. But chasing Congress out of the building didn’t save our republic at all, it hastened our decline.

weird for the news to be so deliberately misleading,” I said. “They knew what impression they were creating, they knew that ‘wiping off algae’ isn’t the same as ‘carving,’ but they kept repeating it anyways, knowing it was making people mad.” “Yeah,” he nodded. The blue-hairs looked away.

... I include this anecdote here because I want future generations to understand just how easy it was to catch the mainstream media lying during my time period. Everybody who cared to apply even the slightest skepticism could see that television, newspapers, and internet news outlets lied and exaggerated all the time. And every lie hurt Trump’s movement and helped Biden’s, it never went the other way, unless you checked the conservative media like Fox News or AM radio stations.

obvious that breaking into the Capitol and finding flex cuffs inside is still a crime, but see, the narrative of the “sinister kidnapping plot,” is helped much more if they brought their own flex cuffs with them, and that narrative persists regardless of its lack of support.

The ones who stormed the Capitol were criminals sure, but they never beat anyone to death. Eventually The New York Times, the newspaper that first broke the story, quietly issued an “update” on their website, but they never issued a full retraction, and they only corrected some of the news stories that claimed the protesters killed a cop by beating him over the head with a fire extinguisher, other stories making that claim stayed up, even though they had already admitted they were false. None of the other news sources that ran with the “beating to death” narrative seemed to feel any strong inclination to correct what they published. All those stories are still out there, still part of the official record, despite being disproven just as easily as the pictures that “proved” the QAnon Shaman worked for Antifa. No less than the homeless MAGA people in the bus station, trying to blame everything on the “horned Antifa double agent,” the mainstream was repeating an unproven story that they simply wanted to believe.

If people in my time period actually read this, they would have long since worked themselves up to a righteous fury and gone off to the internet calling for my head because I was “defending the insurrectionists.” But that’s not the point. Accuracy matters. Getting the details right matters; it’s the only way we’ll ever be able to put the pieces together and make accurate guesses about what pieces we’re missing.

them for months, was a lie. The bottom line is this: When your society forces members of Congress to walk past a dead body on display in the center of the Capitol, but nobody bothers to call the guy’s family and ask what killed him, it speaks to a deeper issue. It speaks to a culture where narratives are pushed so enthusiastically, that accuracy is a distant afterthought. These are not people I trust to leave accurate history lessons for future generations. That’s why I decided to do it myself.

conference room or something of that sort, the big table in the middle, uhh, and I went in there and actually sat in a couple of chairs because I figured that was my only chance I’d ever have to. NOTE: Everybody wanted to sit in the chairs ... me: Mmm hmmm. Instant Replay: And uh, there was talk of yeah, they were talking about the different things that there’s ... there’s this ornate stuff that there’s like plates and things. And it was a real quick thing of “do not touch anything. Do not break anything. That’s not what we’re here for. That’s what we’re about.” So uh, I don’t think anybody took anything and I don’t think ... I know nothing was broken.

Do you believe that Biden is a communist?” I ask. “I believe he’s an idiot,” he answers. “I believe he’s an old man who they put in that position so they can manipulate him and have him do whatever they want him to do.” ... and, you know what future generations? That part might just be true.

I often get asked, “Ben, why write a book talking to future generations; why not talk to your own people?” Well, maybe it’s because I’m a jaded history teacher who’s finally snapped and thinks his own civilization is collapsing, just like the ones he used to teach about. Maybe it’s just a satirical framing device I use to pretend to talk to the future while winking at the present. Or maybe my own generation just kinda ... sucks. Maybe the last several generations in a row have lacked most basic cognitive and emotional skills.

NOTE: “Discussion” with people in my time period is oddly unsettling because instead of listening, they scan conversations for a few keywords and regurgitate three or four bits of text they memorized from Twitter; they struggle to tell if this text is related or not. My contemporaries think “debate” means reciting scripts louder or meaner than their opponents; they never try to understand the other side, they just cut and paste on top of each other. These people aren’t controlled by algorithms, they are algorithms!

Besides which ... both sides are controlled by corrupt bureaucrats who take bribes from billionaires. They report the money on their tax returns, it’s not even a secret! They just call them “speaking fees,” or “campaign contributions,” or “awarding government contracts to your brother’s company!” (gasps for air) ... and now you know how I feel about politics.

Even though I’m not on Trump’s side, I feel the media consistently downplays the size of his crowds.

Even those of us who didn’t get sick or get sucked into poverty were prisoners in our own homes during the lockdown. There were no bars, no movie theaters, no sports, no concerts, no public entertainment of any kind. If we left the house to buy food, we had to wear medical masks. No one had a face anymore! No one could smile at you. We were a giant, soulless blob with a thousand vacant eyes. Our entire population was cut off from everything that gave us joy and everyone around me succumbed to insanity ... they spent all their time bragging about arguments they’d won on the internet with people they had never met.

During the lockdown, my contemporaries got so used to going on the internet and spewing obscenities at those they disagreed with, that they started doing it in person too. I felt like I was wandering through a world where everyone had turned into flesh-eating zombies. The slightest disagreement could send anyone around me into an apoplectic screaming fit.

I do understand why a destitute shopkeeper from Kansas, who never met anyone with the disease, might question the official story. For example: how the hell did the government decide whose businesses got locked down and who stayed open? What system did they use? By the time the MAGA crowd assembled on January 6th, it seemed like every small business I’d ever seen had declared bankruptcy. But giant corporations like Walmart were declared “essential” and posted huge growth.

The government said they locked down everyone’s livelihoods to prevent large groups from spreading COVID, but the largest groups were in Walmart, they always had been! How could forcing large groups into big stores full of sick employees possibly stop the spread of COVID better than having much smaller crowds go to smaller stores?

Having lived through COVID myself, the government’s reaction felt so buffoonish that it was hard to believe anyone was dumb enough to do it on accident.

I couldn’t blame people for being angry. We’d been pronounced “nonessential,” stripped of our dignity, and sentenced to unemployment and poverty; all for the crime of having no pull with the politicians. And at that same time, we watched giant corporations stay open and spread the disease, all so they could post record profits. None of it made any sense! Someone must have been lying about something. If only a leader would appear and tell all the pissed-off, Twitter-zombies where to direct their anger.

When BLM protesters took over several blocks of Seattle and turned them into some kind of “Autonomous Zone” where the laws had no power and police were forbidden, I was there. I slept in the park. I took notes. I wrote a book. I got beaten so badly I needed surgery, and I listened to a guy get shot to death,

he mentions that the buses taking the Vietnamese to MAGA events across America are all free. I ask who pays, but he doesn’t know ... interesting. Some rich benefactor is paying to send busloads of South Vietnamese to Trump events, presumably so they’ll talk about fighting communism. But who? Who’d think that was the best use of their limited resources?

my own generation protested the Iraq War in the 2000s. As I stroll through this flowing mass of humanity, I find myself carried away by nostalgia. Seventeen years ago, I marched through this same city, down these same streets, against this same corrupt government. I think ... I think I even envy these marchers for their fresh-faced belief that they’re part of a noble movement, fighting for a good cause.

A passing woman says the news is calling us all terrorists, so I hope I don’t go to jail for this. But is “terrorist” the right word for these people? What did they come here to do?

the proportion of people wearing quasi-military body armor with gas masks and goggles has shot up. Hey, look! There’s that guy with a flag pitchfork, again.

stickers promoted InfoWars, one of the QAnon-like websites heroically sounding the alarm about movie stars drinking tortured children’s blood to stay young. The people who stormed the Capitol seemed to think advertising that website, in the middle of their assault, would somehow advance their cause. In consideration of the fact that I am poking conspiracy theorists with a stick, I will add that these 2 photographs are from windows next to each other. Those who wish to confirm that the InfoWars stickers were indeed on the Capitol window can view a video I took

Wait a minute, there’s some police over there!! They’re just chillin’ too, as if this really is a regular day for them. Protesters are walking behind and in front of them. I think ... wait, are the protesters emerging from the building itself? I think they are! And the police aren’t arresting anyone, they’re not even yelling at people to leave. They’re ignoring the crowd and the crowd’s ignoring them. What the hell is going on?

I’m a frustrated citizen with an above-average understanding of the system, who disagrees with Republicans but is exhausted by the impotent hypocrisy of the Democrats, not to mention their startling lack of social skills.

they show no signs of comprehension. I gesticulate wildly with my hands as I explain in excruciating detail that the men who stabbed Caesar to death while the Senate was in session thought it would make things “go back to normal,” but in reality, all it did was spark massive unrest, riots, and civil wars that finished off the last vestiges of democracy and set up a tyrannical dictatorship. The women continue to nod along.

For those of you in future generations who’ve never seen “Trump, Live in Concert,” the experience is ... uncanny. His voice is oddly nasal, and just slightly higher pitched than most other men; not pleasing, yet impossible to ignore. He sounds somehow self-confident and whiny at the same time. He often speaks without a teleprompter, which is unheard of in my time, he just makes up 90-minute rants on the spot. And although the results can be unconventional and even bizarre, it also feels more like a real conversation than any politician I’ve ever seen.

He smiled on camera with movie stars for decades when he was a reality TV star; maybe he really did believe they were his friends, but now they won’t even talk to him. It’s like he traded all his old friends for this crowd, and now it’s all he has left. It almost sounds lonely. Well, at least he and the crowd have each other. At every event, they literally chant, “We love you!” and he insists they promise to love him more than any other politician. They have a co-dependent relationship.

he’s the President of the United States; would he really give all these numbers “proving” the election had been stolen if he didn’t believe them? More importantly, does he understand the impact hearing this will have on this crowd that literally loves him?