Although we imagined that the barbarians crossing government barricades would arrive from the edges of empire, the edges from where the acting President had been mapping threats of their arrival for five years, imagining the crossing of caravans from south of the border with near anticipation, these barbarians arrived from all over the nation, from outside of the gridlock of Washington, DC, but to the Capitol building, to reclaim it for the people. We represent by flared arrows the arrival of marchers who left the Stop the Steal Rally, the rally that promised to Save America, combining the craziness of hellfire preachers promising redemption and national will, as if to render it reborn by going back in time and undoing the election, as Inauguration Day approached, and the deep right fascism of an almost entirely all white crowd of raving men and some women carrying signage whose starkly ideological raving seemed to throw civil society out of balance. Did this have to do with the eery spiking of the word “insurgent” in New York Times articles from around 2000, when the start of the Forever Wars on Terror reintroduced the concept of an “insurrection” that had suddenly come home to roost, or been staged for national television, as the term that had not been used so often since before World War suddenly again loomed large again in people’s minds.
We really cannot map the flow of the crowd by spatial lines, if the coalescing of the spatially removed crowds congregated at the Washington Monument gained a greater density and unity, indeed assumed new coherence and surplus energy and rage, as they approached the Capitol building, and stormed its barricades, dismantling fencing, breaking down doors, and entering the halls of government. The new unity of the crowd, the moment of “discharge” or release of surplus energy that it gained, may be mapped in the increased coherence of the vectors by which they moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, as the outgoing President had instructed, down the National Mall, as if a negative image of the crowds that were present at his own inauguration. But the crazy signage that they were bearing, the surplus energy of the flags, secessionist symbols, or historical imaginaries and imaginaries of historical reenactment they held up for television or live-streamed, created a surplus signification of demands for a government that was white, male, Christian and powerful, that denied plurality and diversity, in way that the visualization below cannot represent.
They gained energy as they approached, forming new bonds of social cohesion that were hoped to fill the Capitol building with a new air of direct democracy as they advanced. They grew more energized as the possibilities for discharge grew to cross the boundaries of police barriers, locked doors, and the border of the Capitol with a heady combination of the sense of preserving freedom and instinctive desire for submission, entering a multitude of diverse constituencies beneath the identity of Trump, and Trump’s new claim to Keep America Great and Save America Again.
The invaders of the U.S. Capitol defined themselves by their tie to the outgoing President, but as an army not levied by the commander in chief in words, but responding to an invisible call and response that had anointed them the MAGA Army. This new identity was not as a crowd of disparate individuals, but a contingent or a battalion of Special Ops troops, activated by Psy Ops tools, subsuming personal identities not only as “Trump supporters,” from across the nation, but as “Trump’s MAGA Army.” A rag tag group of militants seeking to find the authority of the dead leader restored, they charged across inauguration stands, fighting off the near-inevitability of the future, as they readied to defend an imagined nation on January 6, 2020 that led reach catharsis as they entered the U.S. Capitol grounds to seek clarity on representational democracy. The heavily armed crowds arrived at the Capitol in an tactical gear and climbing gear as a sea of placards that echoed campaign signs who had arrived from across the nation, but had now found meaning in Washington DC, where they wanted to make the US Congress hear what they felt deep down, in their guts, and what Trump felt in his gut too.
The crowd that masqueraded as the electorate, and the common voters, had arrived in full force as a river, channeling energy off the internet and podcasts washed up not only the detritus of the 2020 election. They filled the Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue with alternate signs, an array of declarative statements of national identity substituting for the Constitution, marking a return of the repressed in telescoping the darkness of American history to short slogans of defiance–the Tree of Liberty; the lynching post; the Confederate States of America; QANON; 3%ers; Betsy Ross flags and 1776 paraphernalia; the AK47. The white identity of this truly “white space” was striking, but even more was the weird, almost child-like absence of “whitespace” in their signage, clotted with abstruse symbols of resolute posturing, refusing to leave empty almost every inch of their placards and the signs held to call the nation to arms by urgent calls for government reform, imagining themselves to be victorious, amidst calls for lost causes, unable in that moment to stop speaking, shouting, and affirming the ideological battles they hope would not die. By resurrecting images from a rich historical imaginaries, as if to declare they were not dead. Not yet.
They subsumed all individual identity, beneath victorious ravings, brandishing flags trumpeting multiple allegiances of identitarian origin seemed a nervous breakdown of the nation, as well as a telescoping of American and world history, refracted through online merch bearing the imprint of PSYOP origin and design. Ranging from Second Amendment Flags of gun owners to libertarian Gadsden Flags to Confederate flags to Knights Templars, to the twentieth century perversion of the old Lacedomonian cry, “μολὼν λαβέ,” taken by Texan revolutionaries to stake intentions to keep a bronze swivel canon that arrived to defy Mexican sovereignty, and since 1831 to defend a church remade as a garrison at the Alamo. Reborn, it was not only confined to Texas, but a cry to refuse to surrender weapons embossed on handguns and personal arms before the Trump era.
Trump was central to the staging of this new heterogeneous identity that was forged perhaps in the 2016 Presidential campaign, or in the months of ongoing rallies of the Trump Presidency, which seemed is own form of never-ending tour. By revving up the crowd by threateningly noting that if they did not act, “weak Republicans would turn a blind eye to Democrats as they “threw open our borders and put America last,” and he would be replaced by a President who had only just the other day promised to “get rid of the America first policy” after committing “the most brazen and and outrageous election theft , . . in American history.” He urged the crowd to fight for the future of America, and a vision of American history, and the creation of a wall between Mexico and America to protect American jobs from being lost by those not defending the nation.
The implicit charge was to fight for the nation, and subsume themselves to Trump’s desires, as the crowd gained newfound identity. As they some two hundred crowd members were already advancing on the Capitol by 12:33, before Trump had finished his speech, they were drawn to cross its protective barriers. The first rioters had left for the U.S. Capitol two minutes before Trump began to speak–at 10:58–but after the crowd had been warmed up by his lawyer and others; telling news reporters that “We’re taking our country back,” they moved past inauguration stands, police blockades, and officers who were not outfitted with shields, setting momentum for a crowd that would gain new coherence before the Capitol building as they arrived to fill its halls. Was it any surprise they shouted with near exultation,“Hey! We’re breaking the wall!”? The crowd cohered as it entered into the Capitol: the rioting crowd of armed protestors waving banners and bedecked by separatist insignia broke barricades and overwhelmed the police by 12:53, less than an hour after Trump had asked them to march to the Capitol, down Pennsylvania Avenue, along the Mall, to shift to a second rallying site planned before the Supreme Court that was being asked to overturn the vote, rioters skirmished with police around the Capitol, entering the building’s chambers soon after 2:12, having overwhelmed Capitol police forces who were ill-equipped to contain the human wave, bearing TRUMP flags they hoped to see flying from the top of the Capitol Building.
The members of the crowd might be said to have been both were at the Capitol and not there. They were subsumed into a mass listening to President Trump empower them and the talismans they bore proudly to an alternate source of sovereignty. Yet they moved to flood the U.S. Capitol in ways that the knew were to be streamed across the nation, and world, both on social media and alt right news, as well as global airwaves. They would dominate the airwaves with the long repressed heterogeneous icons of “rights” and false precedents, not sufficiently represented on global new media.
In doing so, they were emulating the “increasing reliance on sophisticated, near-real time media dissemination methods” advocated in PSYOPS manuals that insist that the most powerful medium of audiovisual communication is the face-to-face, not following a script, to get the build rapport and create response in the targeted audience. The planned storming of state, local, and federal government courthouses by armed protests over the coming week and Inauguration Day had been planned to culminate on Inauguration Day, per FBI reports, a sequence of civil riots and armed uprisings across all fifty state capitols “if Congress attempts to remove POTUS via the 25th Amendment,” law enforcement had learned. Despite the strict laws against using PYSOP techniques against American citizens,”information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul had targeted American senators and congressmen, using tools “to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” from 2009, –Flyn was director of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command from June 2004-June 2007, shaping counter-terrorism before he began the Flynn Intel Group on retiring from the military, offering “Target Audience Analysis” techniques honed in the military on display the day of January 6, 2021 by insinuating the objectives and line of persuasion.
Did not Flynn, and later speakers on January 6, not insinuate a need to intervene themselves within the institutions of democratic government that were at risk of departing from their own influence, speaking by defining centers of gravity, using “key communicators” by which to achieve the greatest impact to which the audience were especially susceptible? Flynn warmed up the audience the previous night by urging ralliers to realize that the very future of the “constitutional republic” was at stake if they accepted the announced election results, impressing on them the need to fortify themselves to “fight back against this fraudulent election” and never to take their fresh air of liberty for granted. Flynn touched patriotic nerves, telescoping the nation’s history: more dead voted in the 2020 Presidential election than had died at the Battles of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, or Normandy, telling the audience to develop the moral fiber to fight for patriotism and truth on the Mall the very next day, impressing upon them the consequences of a change in government over which they would have little or no control if they did not act the following day to actualize their needs, by calling into question fundamental PSYOP appeals for legitimacy before danger of inevitability and the need to preserve their own deep self-interest by creating a sense of historical continuity. In PSYOPS, facts are reduced to either good or evil, even if simplifying complex problem, and by fostering increased suspicions of individuals and groups through insinuations and suggestion to lead the audience to draw their own conclusions.
After the long evocation of the dangers that migrant posed to the state and nation, the danger to the nation was defined as in the Capitol building, and by the recognition of electoral votes that were falsely determined, and needed to be called into question, as Josh Hawley and had already promised to “highlight the failure of some states . . . to follow their own election laws,” joining Rep. Mo Brooks in demanding that the U.S. Congress investigate voter fraud before proceeding with the certification of electoral votes for the Presidential election and create a vote to affirm the electoral college on which protestors might, by invading the Capitol, apply needed pressure that Donald Trump still desired–and a decisive moment of determining who was a friend or enemy. This would be a decisive moment of sovereignty, and of political order, forcing a new political order along lines of friend v. enemy. The march may not have been designted to go to the Captiol, but the target of the Capitol was defiend by “Stop the Steal,” a group with designs to march on the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying electoral votes, whose non-permitted march to the Capitol would piggyback the rally on the Ellipse of Women for America First. “Stop the Steal” had advertised the final chance to “fight back against this fraudulent election” to continue the Presidency of Trump as a patriotic act, needed to ensure continued safety of the country as a decisive moment as national borders.
The sinister iconographic telescoping of history in the flags, insignia, and placards at the Ellipse motivated the crowd of “soldiers” to fight for the outgoing American President. The crowd realized it was moving both at the Capitol, and providing, in its heterogenous range of militant emblems, a polyvocal script that might radiate to new audiences across the nation to signal that all hell had broken loose. The principles and allegiances to demand the U.S. Congress to reject the election results that were in the act of preparing to certify. Dressed for the event as the “vox populi” of the people prepared to call representatives to account, they had huddled together for warmth since early morning, arriving from across the country to find needed reassurance that Trump was still President, and his Presidency would be preserved, and the threats to democracy that had infiltrated the election, as they had threatened to cross the border, would be repulsed, once the symbolic center of the US Capitol was secured.
They were, as well, performing both before the Capitol and in a global conflict. Believing that this was a decisive moment of action, they crossed three layers of barriers around the Capitol and breached its chambers, releasing tear gas into the Rotunda as they entered congressional chambers with urgency, working methodically as if invested with power to resolve the latest and most urgent national emergency, the greatest ever, as larger crowds moved toward the Capitol, chanting, calling for the vote to be overturned at the top of their lungs, surrounding all entrances to the Capitol, and menacingly confronting Capitol police with their weapons. And when President Trump praised their patriotism, at the end of the afternoon, before electoral certification, affirming the fraudulence of the election and continuing to perpetuate a destabilization of the election in a range of online forums, podcasts, and rallying speeches. The recommendations for procedures of using direct address to stir up crowds by face-to-face communication, but enforced through online disinformation, leaflets, and placards.
The crowds assembled form across the nation consolidated into a mass, individuals recently arrived in caravans from across the country had arrived to become part of the final drama of the Trump Presidency, newly energized to defend national sovereignty as if without Trump in office, the center could not hold. They marched as America needed to be saved, mobilized more by honed methods of psychological operations of destabilization than the U.S. Constitution, fighting as if to protect republican government at that very moment lest it be abandoned in the Capitol building. The emergence of a broad threat of social media posting, automated bots, and systemic spreading of false and fabricated misinformation via social media and online by non-state actors had come home to the United States. If such strategies had long preceded the internet, the seedbed that routers, chatrooms, and podcasts provided suggest a far more data-rich, fast-moving, and difficult to attribute, as well as fast-paced as it proliferated online.as a form of psyops on steroids pinned to persuasive hashtags and conspiracy theories: the very psychological tools used to demonize migrants as national threats were turned against the opposition party, deeply damaging democratic debate.
The urgency of this army grew. For the center could not hold, without the charismatic center that threatened to disappear, this time for real, in this very moment, due to a massive act of fraudulence, and that the crowd would be able to cast its ballot for the final time for Trump and check the box beside his name. In a cathartic moment of response to the call and response calls of an outgoing President, who was calling his supporters from across the land to “be there and be wild,” as “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” If they ostensibly arrived to protest election integrity and transparency peaceably, they were armed to the hilt and prepped to advance down Pennsylvania Avenue in consent.
The energized crowd surged over barriers to cross the perimeter of the U.S. Capitol lest forces of globalization from entering the nation to undermine its sovereignty, but entered the capitol only to venting their rage and vandalizing the government building. The barbarians entered the gates of government to prevent the erosion of the nation and follow the call to Make American Great Again–national integrity was in danger of being undermined, insisted online misinformation, detailing how nefarious foreign forces had shifted the result of the 2020 vote, as the software of electronic voting threatened to disenfranchise Republicans and end democracy. The danger of the subversion of the vote would require complete auditing of votes, lest ballot counting systems be allowed to maliciously delete over 2.7 million votes by voting systems in twenty-eight states, from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Georgia–
The image of a usurping of the popular will had gained new traction in 2020 in online news media. While votes had been increasingly audited to ensure that votes were regularly tabulated-and audits were expected and required in twenty-four states after the 2020 election, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, and “Risk-Limiting Audits” in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The fears of foreign interference in vulnerable electronic voting technologies gave nagging credibility to the destabilization of democracy and the popular will that suggested the national emergency of destabilizing a status quo. The use of hand-marked ballots only in light and dark green regions broached fears of a deceptive undoing Republican institutions created to a crisis endangering the state’s charismatic center.
The crisis of representational democracy was imagined to be the result of a fatally flawed tallying system without transparency. The fears of widespread use of paperless voting machines run by independent companies gained new currency in the claims of Trump’s lawyer at the Ellipse on January 6, just before Trump spoke as a theory of election fraud on a scale that necessitated the invasion of the Capitol building. As the latest attack on the nation’s sovereignty by Dominion Voting Systems that while baseless had been nourished in alternative news sources, linked to global boards of management for voting machines, to Venezuela, antifa, and Asia, and to restore their transparency.
To preserve that transparency, they entered the halls of government to fill an apparent fracturing of the republican project. If Trump claimed the deletion of 2.6 million votes in the fall, alt right social media promoted the “transfer’ of 8.1 million “excess” votes by August 3, 2022, across seven states, as a retired Army intelligence captain who vaunted his expertise in elections data released a “USA Election Fraud Map” of unclear statistical methods, alleging little vote tampering in the “heartland” states but “rampant” fraud in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, Atlanta, and North Carolina, as well as California and the Atlantic northeast due to “insecure” electronic voting machines.
The recent spate of “America First Audits” alleging “sloppy record-keeping” or intentional fraud, as charges of “Russian hacking” morphed into manipulation of votes by machines with “foreign DNA” able to change votes electronically led to charges of widespread irregularities in the manipulation of ballots resulting from electronic voting machines lead votes not to be counted, undermining the popular vote by their software’s vulnerabilities.
The map of red and blue states was warped by the canard of electronic voting machines and and election systems software that was blamed to have undermined the will of the people. Concerns over “election integrity” morphed from a rallying cry of the GOP to query how shifting demographic patterns no longer left Republican candidates dominants: self-declared cybersecurity experts, often former military, amplified rumors of inconsistencies of electronic ballots Trump repeatedly identified on the Ellipse as having “cheated” and “defrauded” his supporters in a rigged election whose vast “criminal enterprise,” Trump’s lawyer insisted, led local election officials perpetrating fraud on electronic machines by using software programs to adjust final vote tallies to push Trump’s opponent Joe Biden to victory after the polls closed.
The fear that digital “ballot marking devices” would undermine representational democracy and republican government, the audience on the Ellipse was told, was a real fear of the information age. The danger of distorting the practice of direct democracy had been rehearsed and repeated on podcasts, cable news, and radio in a misinformation campaign that was rooted in a desire for psychological destabilization. At the rally Trump cast his loss in the election as in fact a crisis of political representation that only confirmed a rigged economy. in which globalist and leftist computer programs shifted votes to undermine the republic, a result of the destabilization of direct democracy that was akin to a global invasion of offshore ballot-counting that had actually subverted representational institutions, shifting the tally of the votes in a new way of stripping Trump’s own constituents–the American people–of a voice.
But the alleged alteration of the vote totals by malicious software to ensure Donald Trump’s defeat painted a picture of extraterritorial servers and transnational corporate malfeasance with the knowledge and participation of local state election officials who broke state laws. This was the invasion of the imagined sanctity of the American republican tradition that had long ben conjured as lurking outside our borders, in a globalist fantasy of the erosion of the integrity of the nation.
We had all been waiting for barbarians for some time. The President had, for over six years, mapped the threat of the barbarians advancing from across borders as a security threat. but these barbarians came not from Mexico. For those ready to accept a wall between the United States and Mexico as a function of good government, it made sense to breach the Capitol, lest that border wall not be built . The fear that the charismatic leader who had been elected against the mainstream media’s prediction, and the interests of political elites, was about to be removed from office, and the borders of the United States in danger of opening to immigrants, gangs, and drugs, in the imagery of Trump supporters who feared the rising tide of globalism that Trump had staunched about to overwhelm the nation. This national emergency was the threat of a sudden loss of a charismatic center. With YouTube channels live-streaming fake projections as maps of election results as polls closed to hundreds of thousands, framing the narrative of the electionas a theft of the nation, as self-made maps proliferated and confused all clear consensus and interpretation of electoral results, it made sense to enter the halls of government to force the issue of Presidential succession in a decisive manner.
The poster and invitation didn’t specify a time or location at first, when issued online, but the meme generated energy from across the nation, with an energy that evoked not only the fear of the end of a Trump Era, but the fears of an end to the collapse of a vision of globalization, maintained by that charismatic center, a wall built around the nation against immigrants more than against Mexico, a defense of unfettered wealth, and white privilege, a call-and-response rally able to generate a massive dynamo of popular wildness and will to secure America’s red, white, and blue whose philosophy was all there in black and white set the terms for the license of January 6.
This would be an event of truly direct democracy, staged by the government that had, in mid-December, considered the impounding of all voting machines from across those states where the President needed to “find the votes” to overturn the election results, “to seize evidence in the interest of national security for the 2020 elections,” as a group of militant self-proclaimed defenders of the Trump Presidency, among them Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Lt Gen. Michael Flynn, who as military intelligence veterans trained in psychological operations to undermine public opinions and objective reasoning–“PSYOPS”–had manned the front lines to challenge the legitimacy of America’s Presidential election.
Veterans of Afghan and Iraqi wars, veteran intel experts as Col. Phil Waldron and Gen. Flynn with expertise in clandestine operations to undermine adversaries by targeting “their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of . . . individuals” turned their sites to the national election. The rag tag PSYOPS folks were second cousins of reality television, and the fit was clear: they helped erode Americans’ trust in democratic legitimacy and institutions, alleging election fraud, auditing votes, and working to destabilize public trust by evoking primal fears of the illegitimacy of an election. The claim that voting machines were being undermined by offshore Venezuelan interests, big tech, or Chinese hackers of voting machines rumors were claimed to destabilize the election; more, to be “rigged to elect only those who care nothing for the people,” often even with the complicity of election officials.
The fears of a rigged election echoed those Trump had already stoked in 2016 in threatening not to abide by the announced results of the election. Trump never openly undermined the legitimacy of the 2016 election, but had refused to respect its results. His victory reflected a very narrow shift among 37 million individual voters from the very states–Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania–but was converted or transmuted into a landslide; the legitimacy of votes in many of the same states he now questioned, alleging the subversion and erosion of democratic principles he had already evoked, when telling supporters in rallies that the 2016 election was “rigged” against him, and querying the decentralized tabulation run by individual states he called into question for a second time in 2020. This time, he also seeded fears of overseas interests–not Russia, but Iran, Cuba, Lebanese Hezbollah militants, servers in Frankfurt, Germany, or Italians in the Via Veneto Rome embassy, by using software to shift votes to Joe Biden for global interests outside our borders, that suggested a betrayal of national integrity and “the people” to global interests endangering American institutions.
Trump’s refusal to honor results of the 2016 election had prepared supporters to contest future electoral results. After promising to “keep [television viewers] in suspense” in 2016, he went on to claim a “massive landslide victory” and “one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history” without grounds, concealing his opponent’s greater votes, reframing the election as a massive defeat for the Democratic party; by fetishizing the dominance of red in a county-by-county map as confirmation of the scale of his victory as if a margin of victory, he defining his own reporting of votes as more consequent than its official tabulation.
If the election hinged on painting pure red several states divided around the sharp edges of national population density–Florida; Michigan; Nevada; Pennsylvania among them–his claim to “Make America Great Again” affirmed hopes to secure the unstable status of many who congregated at the Capitol, many from the redder counties on the map, ready to contest the terrifying fear that the charismatic leader they had elected who had wrestled the specter of globalism, immigration, and pluralistic diversity might be absent from national scene.
The fear of the loss of that charismatic center had brought them to Washington, DC to challenge the insecurity of democratic institutions. The attempt to breach the wall of government in the moments before Trump’s successor would be formally recognized by the tabulation of electors, weeks after the election had itself occurred, votes tabulated, and the states had ratified their votes, per constitutional practice, as an act of separatism and an act of restoration of a republic. Those attending had been personally invited to restore the imagined of Donald Trump, which they proclaimed by flags of the former President’s former candidacy for the office he no longer held; this wall would be breached, as the walls around the U.S. Capital would be scaled by men in MAGA hats, demanding that they not be disenfranchised and disrespected.
President Trump had personally invited them to Washington and incited them to enter the U.S. Capitol and climbed the inaugural stands that surrounded it, crossing a boundary of the U.S. Government with a rapidity that the Border Wall had never been breached. In the hours after Trump evoked the imminent crossing of the U.S. border by migrants, a danger of which the nation was long warned as imminent, the walls were scaled by the excluded, in an attempt to affirm democracy, that they deemed righteous. For those who scaled the wall were trying to affirm tyranny.Breaking down barriers, planting American flags atop it, lest U.S. Senators abandoned their oaths and certify the Presidential vote.
If we were stunned by later pictures of the Capitol flooded with a cloud of tear gas and bemused rioters pausing in its galleries that transformed the staid neoclassical architecture to sites of raucous violence–
—we have yet to fully map the routes by which eight points of breaching of the U.S. Capitol building were achieved, or the heightened passions that led to the august chambers being demeaned, and, as if in a charivari of an upside-down world of early modernity, or the arrival of farmers into Versailles, the building itself attacked as if it was a representation of the lack of attention of government to local needs–bread prices; the fear of the border’s vulnerability; low wages–and the growth of a widening wealth gap that most Americans experience as greater than ever before.
Temperatures among the rioters had risen before calls of trial by combat, as the crowd took new coherence as it followed the map Donald Trump had verbally announced to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” “going to the Capitol,” as if this were the final moment to disrupt the civil process by a range of crowbars, arms, and an escalation of violence. The ecstasy of violence at this wall was democracy on show, direct democracy against the members of the U.S. Congress as they were attacked by the police, entering the Capitol and smoking weed, wanting to chill in the chambers of government and find the allies they knew must be on their side. Indeed, the allies were soon found: many members of the Capitol Police who guarded the legislators as they readied to vote seem to have been eager to have selfies taken with the rioters. Even though the police were tipped that the crowd forming on January 6 had made it clear in preparations that “[the U.S.] Congress was itself the target,” even before the spectre of crowd violence, police officers were requested to refrain from deterring the crowd by stun grenades or aggressive means, even if they were warned that the event of January 6 would be sure to “attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike.”
The men who arrived were akin to the vigilante groups that patrol the United States border, in search of migrants they might apprehend, although here they were taking justice into their own hands to prevent the transition to a new President from formally or even smoothly occurring, in a last gasp of authoritarian reveries. And without any weapons to push back or deter the rioters, the terrifying scene of an invasion of the Capitol was able to unfold on national television and be streamed live, all of a sudden shifting attention from the pro forma tabulation of electors in the U.S. Capitol to the raging mob that was assembled outside. Without riot shields, without stun guns, and virtually unarmed, the Capitol Siege was able to occur with cameras rolling, live-streamed by participants, in an event that would disturb the national media ecology more than anything else that Donald Trump had ever done. It was a swansong, or a fantasy game, or an ecstatic transferral of the energy of a Trump rally to the organs of government themselves. But it was also a call to action, broadcast across the country as it was live-streamed to ensure the transition of power would not be forgotten, or that the time for a true reckoning about American government was at hand, more real than any border disturbance at the southwestern border, but a needed occasion of national purification. It may have been theater, but the rioters were warned: “Bring guns. It’s now or never;” “Overwhelming armed numbers is our only chance.”
Vigilantes had patrolled the border for years, animated by an ethos of defense of national borders, and mobilizing within the Customs and Border Patrol to find meaning in the slogan to defend deportations of migrants that “we need strong borders,” and “we have no country if we have no border,” as if he were defending American families, and the “blood” of those families, and celebrating his defense of borders and accusing his opponents of open borders. But the border of the U.S. Capitol was rendered open on the morning of January 6, 2020, as the Congress was about to confirm the electoral votes as barbarians entered, as if invited, into the Capitol, to make their voices heard.
After a long, hot summer of mass arrests of “violent mobs” who charged with intent to “desecrate” hallowed federal property, mob tactics were adopted to enter the U.S. Capitol. Despite the escalation of invocation of “national security” as the basis for building the border wall, the border between the Capitol and the approaching protestors who sought to turn back the electoral tally seemed as if it lay wide open. The President had urged his audience to “walk Pennsylvania Avenue,” as if knowing that they would do so full armed, bearing banners with his name emblazoned prominently on them, as the flags from a concluded campaign became battle flags. The urgent need to securing the border was distilled into the platitude “a nation without borders is not a nation” after the 2020 election.
But if the question of shoring up the border became the basis on which Trump was elected, the busload of flag-waving supporters of the President became a revanchist cry for the former President, as on the eve of his formal exit from office. He animated a crowd to break down police barriers, doors, and windows of the United States Capitol was not from outside the nation, but bussed in from multiple domestic states. Calling a reprisal of his earlier rallies to question the reported tabulation of the 2020 election, Trump encouraged his base to refuse the certification of the election, rallying the barbarians to the gates to destabilize the democratic process by fighting for him. Whereas the violation of constitutional principles had long been feared to be coming from the security state, the questioning of votes in states that were expected to vote Trump and deemed “red” led many to buy tickets to Washington, for the final paroxysm of a Trump rally, a large contingent of armed men, many in tactical gear, arriving to break the security barriers, doors, and windows of the Capitol itself to ensure that their candidate continue to Keep America Great. Was it any surprise that of the 1,200 Capitol Police working at the site, only about 7% had access to the riot gear they would need to repel them?
The setting seemed an inside job to invite protestors to act out their fantasies of direct democracy, setting a stage for the dangerous faux populism in which Trump revels. Calls for a strongman President emerged in the late morning insurrection of January 6, Trump’s surrogates had been calling for the adoption of martial law in swing states December 18, 2020, on Newsmax, if not seize voting machines to invalidate the results of the election he had lost: the military mode to which protestors adopted was facilitated by the cataclysmic invocation of a fear the Republic would be destroyed, if the Electoral College Vote, tainted with suspicion of foreign intervention, was not suspended by the delaration of martial law. The militarism was improvised, with home-made tools and recycled banners, but the increased normalization of martial law as an alternative outcome electrified the crowd, and placed its members outside normal comportment even at an electrifying rally, offering justification for advancing with newfound energy and purpose with eerily united intention.
Donald Trump has been rumored to be convinced of his program of overturning the election’s results as he promoted the continued “audits” of votes in several states from Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia, long crucial electoral puzzle pieces for Trump’s Presidential campaigns, carefully calibrated to manufacture victory. If the focus on “audits” that were unprecedented as able to overturn the election, that have reverberated in the online forums of QAnon and other outlets of a revisiting of the outcome of Election Day. The crowd-sourcing of a final protest that overran the Capitol building, cast in insurrectionary terms as a struggle for governmental control, and rooted in the false populism social media has magnified, perhaps with the acknowledgment only declaring a state of emergency or provoking an insurrection would enable the results of the election ever to be overturned.
The proliferation across the nation of pro-Trump “caravans” promised a direct sense of access to government. They offered to carry protestors to Washington, D.C., to fight the aftermath of the election were a new register of group think, rooted in the fear of an end of a “Trump Era” posed an earthquake of political proportions rarely recognized in full, moblizing multiple caravans before and after the election, in a show of force to prevent Trump from loosing the election, and waving MAGA flags from Michigan to Florida to Oregon to North Carolina, seeking to mobilize swing states by a show of force on the road, honking horns, and sharing images of themselves on social media, often rebroadcast on the Russian funded RT television network as public shows of patriotic gore, reveling in thumbs up.
This time, they were promised to arrive in DC, to participate in the greatest call and response chant ever, an interactive overflowing of communal energy that would crystallize and energize the crowd that assembled on the Ellipse before a moment of massive discharge as they moved down Pennsylvania Avenue into the Senate Chambers, arguing to restore them to their former dignity and to show their disbelief and discontent at the certification of a vote that was declared fraudulent and corrupt.
The very invitation to Washington, DC was a way of responding to the President’s Call. Did those who boarded busses consciously appropriate the approaching “caravans” in response to which Donald Trump became a National Emergency in November, 2018, and prepared for the National Emergency of February, 2018? Trump had presented the migrant caravan as a specter of globalist proportions as a threat to the nation, whose numbers were fleeing countries who “have not done their jobs” from Guatemala, Honduras, to El Salvador in halting cross-border immigration, nations he blamed for the crisis of refugees of global proportions, but potentially including among them “unknown Middle Easterners” tied to terrorists or affiliated with ISIS.
Trump supporters oddly appropriated the “caravan” as a term of force and extra-ordinary circumstances of crisis that called for collective action. Was the assembly of such “caravans” not communicating a sense of the impunity of moving across space, demonstrating patriotism by flags that almost celebrated separatism from a rule of law? These caravans served to confuse global geography, and created an instrumental crisis of unprecedented proportions as Trump sent the troops to halt an unprecedented 1,000 Central American migrants applying for refugee status in three days. Proclaiming the need for “bringing out the military for a National Emergency” led over 5,000 active-duty troops to arrived at the border lest the “caravans” enter American territory, a specter that seemed only to reaffirm the need for $8 billion for a continuous border wall. The specter of these invading migrant caravans from afar grew as a vulnerability, as the mythic migrants of the Golden Horde known by the hue of their tents: migrant traffic triggered subsequent declarations of national emergencies in Central America, rippled through Guatemala against Hondurans, and triggered fears of compromised border security.
Michael Arellano/AP
And when they did arrive on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the picture was not clear: ten thousand had entered the grounds, and some had scaled the scaffolding set for the inauguration two weeks off; even if the border was fortified by a complex system of defense, informed by threats a border that without adequate defenses would leave the nation facing an existential threat, the grounds of the Capitol were breached to protest the transition of that the Presidential election had determined. Waving confederate flags, the rioters may not have only been inspired by the outlandish claims of fraud and failure of governance in Trump’s speech that morning, but of insurrection. Was the logic of the men who attacked the U.S. Capitol, live streaming the siege as a similarly mediatized event?
The crowd that assembled to hear Donald Trump at the March to Save America Rally were animate with a level of urgency to save the nation that they viewed in danger if Joseph R. Biden’s Presidential victory was certified, and the electoral college victory long announced by the Mainstream Media came to pass. Their world was about to shatter. The recourse to a siege became the only option for an audience of Trump supporters existentially uneasy at the fear of the compromise or end of an old order where Fox News would be the dominant voice reporting White House actions to its 4 million viewers. The action was extreme, but the logic of insurrection was embodied in the confederate flags so many held, trumpeting rights by evoking the logic that the South had a right to separate the union–a “sacred right of insurrection” that excused their disturbance of civil peace. The march promised to be a reiteration of earlier marches for Trump and a reunion of sorts to invade the capitol by actual “caravans” that would arrive from across the country, shunning mask mandates, and posing as Patriots, from Florida to California to Arizona. They announced their imminent arrival to one another exultantly as they made their way to protest the election in Washington, DC, boldly announcing their imminent arrival on social media to the world. “DC Hear We COME!!!!! #StoptheSteal” [sic] above emoji of American flags; when they arrived, they waved the same flags that melded their identity as “Trump supporters” and “Trump’s MAGA Army from across the nation” with defense of an imagined nation, boasting solidarity by brandishing the same flags to again reject the election’s loss.
This was all staged. While invoking such a “right of insurrection” was not central in the impeachment proceedings House managers presented, and not articulated in President Trump’s speech, the rights to perpetuate a distasteful drama was one that he delighted in amplifying in his final day as U.S. President–and scarcely needed a map to do. Donald Trump loves a drama, and reprised his role as dramaturge in the month long aftermath of the election. The seeds of doubts placed in the vote tally over multiple months had occurred in local audits amidst charges of rigged voting, reprising the power of “rigged” as a rallying cry in 2016, animating his base and motivating believers with the false news that there were 1.8 million dead voters, already registered, who would be casting ballots in 2016.
The decisive votes of such voters were argued to have thrown the election, in terms that the largely white constituency of Trump voters were likely to better know from the odds of betting on a horse or sports game: they were not only registered but, Trump assured Sean Hannity, “some of them absolutely vote,” and the image of zombie voters helped kill the promise of representative government. Wth 2.5 million voters that were cross-registered between states, and voting twice, the uncertainty of legitimacy became a narrative of injustice, crafted to disorient and impassion.
The suspension of anything like a neat conclusion of the Presidential election was already primed for uncertainty and indeterminacy in 2016, so that it was almost in the eye of the beholder: while the numbers may be credible,–they were wielded to disorient, suggesting a desire for massive voter fraud able to be attributed to “bad actors” that seemed a scheme to sow division and uncertain outcomes, exploiting potential animosity in the electorate to defray any conclusion in the Presidential election, as if exploiting divisions among parties in an increasing tribal sense. Despite the increasingly disturbing division of the nation into the ‘red’ and ‘blue’ division of electoral votes from states, by far the greatest shares of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol came not from “red” states, at all, but Trump voters from those large urban areas where the votes swung to Biden in the end by a narrow margin indeed–they were from spaces, or counties, that had perhaps themselves felt or experienced the sense of being robbed and the very swing of pendulum in the reporting of electoral votes that Trump had himself felt so aggrieved: his narrative of a shift in voting patterns made sense to them and echoed their isolation. While rioters hailed assembled a broad extent of America, they were most ratcheted up and angered by Trump’s narrative, and most likely to coalesce on January 6, 2021.
We imagine, thanks to news photography in no small part, that the rioters were embodied by the Angry White Man, affiliated with a local separatist militia-style groups, and feeling they were fulfilling an oath with righteousness:
But the scraped metadata from mobile devices who visited the U.S. Capitol on January 6–far more dense than on previous Wednesdays–that provided a picture that was particularly illuminating of the overlap between social media devices used in the Capitol census block with those posting videos on Parler: if few were from Maine, Montana, and North Dakota, the densely isolated tagged locations from southern Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona and Atlanta correlate onto a sense of outrage and no doubt betrayal by the final reporting of vote tallies, and commitment to forestall the feared results of the election, particularly dense near the US-Mexico border in southern California.
Arcs traced from the metadata of folks who uploaded videos to Parler from that census block on January 7, 2021 traced the sourcing of the crowd for the March to Save America, the final potlatch after six years of MAGA events, protests, counter-protests and festivities that delivered the rage of the nation during the final certification of the electoral votes after the tabulation of the votes from each state: while each was presented as a threshold of deception by Trump supporters and online news sites–from the false voters who deceived the nation by voting by mail to the counting of votes without adequate oversight or by potentially shady ways to the electors’ selection in each state, this was presented as the final moment to preserve a MAGA culture and retain a news dominance and social media presence in the nation: MAGA bastions as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers–long present in anti-government activities from the standoff at the Bundy Ranch, the Three Percenters, and other “Patriot” movements that had been founded in the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Seeing the end of the Trump Presidency as an era marked by widespread Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests, the anger at an end to the Trump /Presidency was presented as an end to sovereignty and a threat to sovereign defense against a deeply illegitimate Presidential election. The overlap between the local disappointment in the Presidential election’s results intersected with the narrative of an illegal gaming of the ballots that expanded fears promoted of a “rigged” election in 2016, by investing the tabulation of an actual election with deep and pervasive illegitimacy.
As the 2016 contest heated, it was notable that Trump’s campaign website appealed in all caps echoing social media to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” by inviting citizen groups more akin to vigilantes monitor irregular voter behavior, he created a logic for political involvement in a coming election. The faux populist movement of the Trump Candidacy would culminate in its aggrieved calls for rectifying injustices done to The Donald into the Biden Presidency, and after the date of inauguration, with the former President issuing, in late February, 2021, Trump proclamatory statements lamenting the “Continuing Political Persecution of President Donald J. Trump” that refused to separate himself from the nation, playing with the tally of votes cast; even if he had decisively lost the election by over seven million votes, Trump let the world and his followers know, of their danger of disenfranchisement. Trump warned, as voting rights were being stripped of African Americans, of how “attacks by Democrats willing to do anything. to stop the almost 75 million people (the most votes, by far, ever gotten by a sitting president) who voted for me in the election,” not being able to remind his readers that this was an election many moreover “feel that I won.”
Was Trump referring to the attempt to stop them from staging a siege of the U.S. Capitol? As they arrived to rally behind the outgoing President who resisted admitting his electoral loss from across America, with a large share from Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and southern California, did they realize that the Capitol building where they were taking their protest had been largely constructed by enslaved laborers, rented from their owners enslaved laborers to quarry sandstone and complete the construction, unable to attract skilled construction workers to Washington, DC, to construct a hall that the U.S. Congress would move from Philadelphia in 1800? The assertion of a right to preserve Confederate traditions of dissent, separatism, and grievance in a misguided defense of alleged liberties and rights to defend a status quo ante Trump. Archeologists speak of the “haunting” of a place by evidence of the remains of past civilizations or cities that survive underground–as a “city within the city,” erased by time–and one has to wonder at the ghosts of the enslaved who constructed the U.S. Capitol that the protestors faced with their confederate flags raised. Did they encounter the ghosts of enslaved laborers who cleared land for the building, haul sawed lumber and stone to the site ceded from two slave states, Maryland and Virginia?
Slaves of men paid for their labor had been conscripted into labor from clearing the site for building to carpentry, stonecutting, and bricklaying from 1795 to 1800–only one hundred and twenty two are known, by first names, from slaves of the White House architect, “Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry” whose owner was paid for their labor, or “Negro Dick,” whose owner received five dollars a month–and the enslaved Philip Reid, from the foundry that cast the Statue of Freedom for the dome of the U.S. Capitol in 1855, and devised a pulley and tackle system to raise the allegorical figure to its peak. When Michelle Obama described her husband’s Presidency as an overcoming of this past, was a presumption that electing a woman or a black person would be grounds for electing a U.S. President, who should be elected for their own–as if it disguised the claim of an elite that her candidate could bring he nation redemption.
Perhaps few of the protestors who invaded the U.S. Capitol knew the history of its construction in detail, even if Congress had finally recognized in 2012, ten years previous, and Michelle Obama reminded the nation in 2015, in her call to nominate Hillary Clinton as a Presidential candidate; for many, the line was a dog whistle painting a picture so stock to be evidence of their arrogance and sense of entitled self-righteousness. Were they aware of being used to stage a siege they felt reflected their own populist interests of direct democracy? When flag-wavers descended to sites of ballot counting in 2020, waiving campaign flags, American flags, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags to endorse state-wide audits of paper ballots and absentee ballots to review machine tallies with a skepticism bordering on alarmism. But the destabilizing of confidence, deployed in 2016, extended to alleged irregularities warranting voting machines demanded certification as “fraud-free” that threatened to undermine a democratic process, unleashing a river of groundless skepticism in of an alternative media universe of the filter bubble of FOX news, NewsMax and OANN.
The narrative of a stolen election was crucially deployed by Donald Trump in his speech at March to Save America to dovetail with the energy of protests that contested local ballot tallies that had grown increasingly contested as a demand to reveal a hidden or gamed truth. Such staged assemblies that proliferated at state capitols in the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election seem almost an amping up of the populist rage that reached a crescendo in the license of crossing police barricades, the steel pipe reviewing stands recently assembled on the Capitol’s west front, to break down doors and windows in invading the U.S. Capitol, and proclaim it the “people’s house.” Breaking down the barriers, and flooding the Capitol, was almost a projection of the fears of migrants storming the nation, but this time the barbarians arrived fully armed, asserting rights–freedom of assembly; freedom to won guns; freedom to form a well-armed militia–that migrants never claimed. Back in 2016, public intellectual and linguist Geoff Nunberg observed ‘rigged’ came to be a “keyword” in the national political discourse, but extended the corruption to the mechanics of vote counting. The exposure of a “rigged” politics undermined civic participation in unprecedented skepticism: ‘rigged’ described the uneven economy, the tax system, and increasingly deferred any outcome of the election and injected the news cycle with faux populism replicated in social media to escalate that “built-in biases, so that losers may feel that the system is rigged against them,” by using a term expressing anger at unfair business practices or fraudulent investment into the arena of politics as only Trump could.
The new charge of incompetence of elected officials and claims of widespread fraudulence disrupted the resolution of any outcome. In the past, Trump feigned honesty when telling rallies “the election is going to be rigged–I’m going to be honest!” By late summer he implied to mainstream media he would not even accept a victory by Hillary Clinton in September, pushing the limits of a candidate’s sense of grievances while acting as if airing grievances as just another victim of fraud, mirroring the charge of a “rigged economy” many felt, and boosting his won support. The 2020 Presidential vote was itself “rigged,” involving dead voters, rigged voting machines, a massive scam of democratic principles discounting rights, demanding protest on the grounds of patriotism, that made the flag-waving demonstrators in the mob feel immune to charges of insurrection as they were waving American flags, many the very flags waved at stage capitol buildings months previous with similar megaphones, to assert American values that were under attack. Crowds protested as patriots in Detroit, Philadelphia, Portland, Las Vegas and Atlanta, bearing similar flags outside of arenas and capitol buildings, asserting liberties and demanding and end to improper practices of tabulating votes. At the end of a Summer of Protests, to which the Capitol Riots are oddly assimilated, the demand to Stop the Steal was cast as a petitioning of justice, designed as if to address the Supreme Court. The extension of doubt preceding the Capitol Riots fanned populist grievances as if they were infringements on constitutional rights, deferring acceptance of electoral results by extending a narrative that had no happy end. The protest rallies that sprang into action as lawsuits proliferated in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan with recounts demanded in Arizona and Wisconsin to prevent states from “flipping” and electoral votes to be claimed by Joe Biden.
Musings on Maps 