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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. While we focussed on the crowd assembled at the Rally to Save America as an event announced as an event that “will be wild,” on December 19, as if to make plans before Christmas to attend a final rally in Washington, DC, a final event to “swing victory to Trump” on the eve of the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden. Trump approached the crowd of admirers less as a farewell speech than one energized by being surrounded by MAGA gear, a confirmation of the fact it was “statistically impossible” to have lost the 2020 Presidential election, but rather than a denial of his loss, setting the stage for January 6 as a reversal of the election’s results–and led so many of the MAGA crowd to bring election garb and flags to the event organized to stave off a peaceful succession.

While the January 6 Committee found Trump consciously energizing an armed crowd of supporters to charge the U.S. Capitol–a script that echoed Hitler’s instrumental use of lies to undermine the workings of government by appealing to a love of country and nation to the Nazi party, by casting the incoming President as a criminal, and demanding the saving of country by an overthrow of the government–and perhaps even hoping that if the march on the Capitol was as much of a fiasco as Hitler’s 1926 Munich Putsch, it may have allowed, as David Gumpert excitedly argued, a means to mobilize a politics of grievance. He cast January 6 as an event of retaking the nation, the Save America Rally morphing into an occasion for personal redemption, in ways Trump, even after the insurrection or failed coup, which he recast as not an armed insurrection but one of those “things that happen when a sacred landslide victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long” in a rambling social media tweet.

Trump had staged an attempted coup–or a half-hearted attempt to improvise one–inviting admiring acolytes to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” as a body to halt the joint session of Congress tabulating electoral votes–in an invitation to enter the halls of government with violence to overturn the election on that day, or create a good story of preserving the nation–and capital-“C” Country. The term “Country” invoked over forty times in speech transcripts are not capitalized, but he ad-libbed an invitation supporters to move toward the Capitol, framing the march as an attempt to prevent what “will be a sad day for our country,” urging them to “stand strong for our country, our country [as] our country has been under siege for some time,” invoking opponents eager to “hurt our country,” reminding them, eighteen minutes in, “you’ll never take back our country with weakness.” Trump, impresario of the insinuating ellipsis, mastered the genre at the Ellipse, as if elevated by a sea of MAGA signage more dense than seen since the campaign, reminded the crowd they would not support all senators or congressmen, but only those standing by his claims of election fraud.

Republican Kevin McCarthy squarely blamed Trump for the riots that night, but two years to the date responded to the former President who demanded thanks as “I did the Country a big favor“–using the capital C–to secure votes for McCarthy from election deniers, an act of obeisance McCarthy fulfilled, appeasing Trump’s ego by noting “I don’t think anybody should doubt his influence” in Statuary Hall–where men in MAGA regalia, two years earlier, gleefully carried the Speaker’s podium. McCarthy–the key witness other than Trump who refused to testify to the January 6 Committee–calling it illegitimate and refusing to allow any of the Republican party to participate in what he called “an abuse of power.”

January 6 MAGA Protestor in Statuary Hall/Win McNamee/Getty Images

Telling the rump of constituents that had congregated at the Ellipse they were “protecting the country,” the master of extended ellipses crafted a speech at the Ellipse rich in innuendo and and suggestion of danger to the nation–and mentions of “Country” that the transcripts of the speech cannot fully capitalize. The identity of the crowd that Trump created was planned over the long term–not crafted in twenty days between the call to assemble in Washington DC on December 19 and January 6. We might well map the arrival of energized participants in the culmination of Stop the Steal rallies across the country, a rally that promised to Save America as if to echo the end of times, by flared arrows, as they migrated down Pennsylvania and to the Capitol, as if on the street directions issued by the outgoing President.

Trump was verbally mapping an image of a wrong country, whose barbarians were standing at the gates, not at the Ellipse. Channeling the rhetoric of hell-fire preachers promising redemption and national will, as if to go back in time to undo the election as Inauguration Day approached, the question of whether the crowd gained its unity as the President spoke, urged on by militant groups on the way to the Capitol may be debated. The master of the ellipsis found his stride at the Ellipse, basking in the display of signage and flags, perhaps, to stray from his Teleprompter to improvise an ad-libbed call to advance to the capitol, directing his followers to advance to the Capitol building as if to sanction their unity as a violent group,

The almost entirely all-white crowd of men–and very few women–carried signs of starkly ideological bent that seemed to overflow on television screens, as if designed to throw civil society off balance rather than allow the election to conclude. They mapped their own progress in the name of the multitude of flags they bore, dominated by the flags of the election that they refused to admit they had lost, as if to elevate the claims of election fraud Trump promoted as a crusade for the country. The crowd he assembled so provocatively, heard how a “system absolutely, totally rigged” had led to a stolen election was not only marked by “massive, widespread, total fraud,” as he had insisted since November, but had found the moment to “fight to expose this voter fraud and demand transparency and election integrity” by advancing to the Capitol. The call to erase any gap between political representation and voters was a call to arms masquerading as a call for transparency, mobilizing a crowd as truth-tellers who might invade the Capitol while fully armed as one body. When Elias Canetti pondered the force acquired by a crowd as an entity, and the consolidation of a crowd in terms of an elemental power, he addressed fascism, but also raised questions of the responsibility by which a crowd could be invested that seem to remain on the table after the hearings of the January 6 Committee have ended,.

If the January 6 Committee after exhaustively interviewing the Trump White House staff and campaign associates found Trump consciously assembled and riled up a crowd to enter the Capitol to prevent the ceremonial transfer of power, creating a crowd as the crucial backdrop of consensus to flaunt the election’s results and to rewrite history. The staged coup was a way of marking a final attempt to retain the Presidency, it may have echoed the prominence that Hitler would assign the Bavarian Beer Hall Putsch in his prison memoirs, the forward to Mein Kampf, a book Trump once kept on his bedside, and that echoed the disgust with which Trump queried the loyalty of the American military while in office–“You f—ing generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”–as if to model the subservience of the American military he imagined German generals had for Adolf Hitler, shortly after his election, in 2017. Hitler had commemorated the 16 party members killed by state police as he tried to kidnap government leaders by gunpoint became the propaganda victory for the Nazis, calling them martyrs in the preface to Mein Kampf, and burying them in “temples of honor” in downtown Munich where he staged party rallies to their remembrance on the anniversary of the putsch even after he was elected chancellor, celebrating their devotion to Germany. Trump had not only adopted increasingly violent language by the summer of 2020, but was immersed in these speeches: presidential historian Michael Beschloss set off a social media flurry over Trump’s relation to Mein Kampf or a volume of collected speeches My New Order, a sequel of Nazi propaganda repeatedly cited the Putsch as critical point of the Kampfzeit and sacred history of the Nazi Party– Heilsgeschichte–whose martyrs were commemorated in national parades in the German Reich, its “martyrs” buried in sacred temples.

Did Trump aim at creating a similar moment of national commemoration, akin to the bizarre National Garden of American Heroes he had imagined on July 3, 2020, while attacking the “angry mobs . . . trying to tear down statues of our Founders [and] deface our most sacred memorials”? The announced park would featuring “the greatest Americans ever to live” included Davey Crockett, Billy Graham, Henry Clay, and Antonin Scalia raised eyebrows as currying a cult as provocative as confrontational, if cast in an Executive Order as “opponent of National Socialism or International Socialism.” The calls for a statuary garden of almost exclusively white men seemed to mark an entry into the late era of strong man delusions, increasingly rambling in his speeches imagining visions of grandeur that was slipping away. If Hitler’s account of National Socialist martyrs was known to Trump, the armed confrontation to save the nation was eerily echoed in the Save America rally featured a repeated evocation of Country in ways that similarly concealed his grab for power. It would not have been known to the crowd he assembled, but the script did not matter. The ‘story’ that he told was less important than the need for saving the nation, long honed against the spiking of the word “insurgent” in New York Times articles from around 2000. By 2020, the concept of an “insurrection” that had suddenly come home to roost, or been staged for national television, as the term that had not often used in peacetime loomed large in people’s minds. The nativist tenor of the March on Washington seemed reflective of a weird, old crazy America, reborn to prevent a stolen election, and the dire consequences that from such theft–as if it were akin to a new Original Sin, might ensue. The advance of barbarians were invented by the founders of democracy, the Greeks, Mary Beard argued, animated by the fears that their conquest, either imaginary or real, would be destined to triumph–from Persia or, later, from tribes living in German lands–but the fears were born from the awareness that the true barbarians lay within their midst, even if the fears were projected beyond the borders of the democratic nation or the boundaries of the city-state.

Barbarians Who Attacked and Destroyed the Roman Empire

Barbarian Invaders Filling the Vacuum of the Disappearance of Late Roman Empire, c. 480 AD

The fears of the barbarians had been conjured by Donald John Trump from outside our borders, as in a film like Touch of Evil, that recreated the fears of the danger of gangs and drugs on US-Mexican border in the 1950s, by a film-maker who Trump has described his deep affection for and steadfast devotion to, but the barbarians who sought to defend the Trump Presidency, and the call to Keep America Great, or even Save America, were born within America’s borders, indeed from across America, born by the busloads of flag-waving Trump supporters–they carried their own flags and self-styled garb–to reenact a call from on high summoning “patriots” given the license to “be wild” and to exercise their own rights of insurrection.

Joedson Alves/Anadolu Agency

As if in an appeal to force the representatives they had elected to perform the task for which they had elected them, they sought to clog the machinery of government and stop Congress to achieve by force what the election and their own representatives had not accomplished. In a screenplay and scene evoked in 2022 as supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro mobbed Brazil’s Congress and Presidential office, as Bolsonaro’s claims of another rigged election were amplified on social media by calls for a massive show of crowd force to overwhelm a constitutional frame. In summoning crowds urged on social media to “take their country back” by mobbing capitol buildings, and post social media footage of their entry into government buildings as if to restore the Putsch as a repertoire of politics. One might go farther: if the assembled crowd wearing MAGA garb and clothed in American flags mirrored Trump’s anger, as they were deputized as agents of his rage, pro-Bolsonaro protestors who arrived at the modernist center of Brasilia’s complex of structures wore Brazilian flags that mirrored the self-described crowd of the January 6 riots who advertised their patriotism, as they arrived at the palatial complex to deface its monumental plate glass. They imitated January 6’ers in goal to take back the country, Putsch-style, imitating or reflecting the MAGA election deniers: lauded by former aids of Trump on social media, as “patriots” or “Freedom fighters,” alt right media of election denial had fed calls to retake government from the Capitol Riots, as if they were claiming transparency and a return to values.

If the movie set was quite different, rioters bussed into Brasilia adopted emblems of patriotism to deface the facade of Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist buildings of the Planalto Palace and Supreme Court were akin to a scene from Blade Runner. Trucker blockades had led many Bolsonaristi to stage blockades of the national infrastructure, akin to Canadian truckers’ blockades, waving national flags, the day after the national election that their leader lost, who was supported largely in the smaller villages rather than the large cities of Brazil, as if in an attempt to close national roads to stir up economic chaos by disrupting the winter corn crop in the moments before Bolsonaro conceded, demanding a military coup. Bolsonaro had since fled the nation, but his refusal to recognize his successor as his successor precipitated the emulation of the MAGA crowd as crowds of Bolsonaristi entered the open Niemeyer structure that was a symbol of the nation’s democracy, as if bent on exploding the political process.

Brasilia, January 8, 2023

Issuing heroic calls to action that they tried to perpetuate in social media, the Capitol Riots had in two years morphed from an anomaly to a model sanctioning extra-constitutional political violence to take a country back. The calls to patriotism that echoed on the internet assembled an onrush of a new version of the mob, or, perhaps, an older image of crowd rule, manipulated by a Leviathan or a new nature of a commonwealth, promising to resolve the brute nature of what Hobbes called “the condition of Civill warre”–or that cast a state of civil division as its bogeyman, promising that sovereignty would descend not by a constitutional or hereditary Right of Succession but by social media calls for assembly at emptied halls of governance, filled with new images of the nation that had so successfully appealed as a source of strength. Weirdly akin to the January 6’ers in their lack of any strategy or goal, save defacing buildings to spark a greater revolution or a memory of a struggle for the nation, they incarnated an oppositional politics verging on a return to a Hobbesian State of Nature in the destruction of symbols of political authority. To be sure, the riots of Bolsonaristi recall the largely rural political unrest during the pandemic in 2020, by motorcades demanding an end to the quarantine governors had imposed in the pandemic– the central government had offered no recommendations for health policies–as pot-banging protests intensified outside cities as a form of political dissent for the absence of a national policy. (Were these not akin to the George Floyd riots as a form of national politicization?(

Political Unrest During the Pandemic in Brazil and Nicaragua, March-June 2020/Mapbox; OSM data

The rural Brazilians who had entered Brasilia on busses were deeply analogous to the rioters who arrived on March for Trump busses sponsored by My Pillow executive Mike Lindell. Yet the protest was similarly a new relation between center and periphery, designed to circumvent voting procedures.

How was the contestation of politics as normal, or constitutional political process, begun in Washington, DC, but as a call to identify themselves with the multiple visions of the nation that Donald Trump had been so successful in binding? We fail in mapping the crowd moving from the Ellipse advancing along streets, itineraries or fixed spatial vector lines, heading due East to the Capitol. A simple route cannot track the coalescing of the crowd congregated at the Washington Monument with a greater density and unity as a crowd, what Elias Canetti asked us to interrogate as called the moment of discharge, investing an energy that did not earlier exist, but constituted the crowd assembled by the former President who had summoned them there as he energized their numbers and empowered them as a crowd to act outside constitutional framework, and to assume a status beyond political parties by a call to defend a country.

The on-line call to action triggered the arrival of men with heterogeneous rsymbolic emblems–of minutemen, of pro-police thin blue line flags, even flags of crusaders–dominated by MAGA signage and outdated election flags of a candidate who had lost. It was far less ununited or disunified than it may seem; it incarnated a broad based following that stood in opposition of refusal to accept authority of the tabulated election results, incarnating anger that Trump had invested in them at the Ellipse, and channeling his anger. It was not only a product of social media, but reflected the anger of that moment in a liminal space now in Washington, DC–as Trump supporters were, as he tweeted January 5, in real time “pouring into D. C,” who “won’t stand for a landslide victory to be stolen.” It was the behavior of an unruly crowd with its own logic, a “Trump Team” engineered by personal ties to his feed, energized to preserve a country they mapped by clearly ordered boundaries and one social order.

January 5, 20221

The crowd’s members had assumed a newly energized unruliness and new coherence of surplus rage, as they approached the Capitol building, and stormed its barricades, dismantling fencing, breaking down doors, and entering the halls of government they sought to disrupt and to cleanse or purify–apparently, if necessary, by their own blood, in the ultimate sacrifice as Christian soldiers, to take back the capitol as a site of government. “We will not take the name off the Washington monument,” he told the crowd ten minutes into the speech, and neither “take down ” or “get rid of the Jefferson Memorial, either take it down or just put someone else in there,” calling for a restoration of order, and rejection of fraudulence, giving a direction to the crowd by reminding its members they had gathered “for the very, very basic and simple reason, to take back our democracy,”

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 heterogeneous signage that they were bearing in banners, the surplus energy of the flags, secessionist symbols, or historical imaginaries and imaginaries of historical reenactment held up for television or live-streamed, transcended the drama of inauguration. It 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 sea of 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 on-line 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 March for Trump busses consciously appropriated the “caravans” that formerly feared to threaten the United States. But if the Caravan led Donald Trump to call a National Emergency in November, 2018, and prepared for the National Emergency of February, 2018, the busses now ferried Trump supporters to what was designed as a march to take the nation back. 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.

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.

Protestors mobilized a rhetoric of grievance that sought to expand the electoral map, long after the election. Their doubts were amplified on social media to destabilize the electoral map, creating “grey spaces” as if puzzle pieces that did not cohere, letting the world puzzle by holding narrative conclusion in abeyance into 2021, distending the election’s narrative by sewing deep doubts about secure results and preventing consensus from emerging from the electoral college.

As the problems proliferated from dead voters and cross-registration to how battleground states relied on duplicitous voting machines or made “unconstitutional” changes in voting practices, the narrative of grievance grew, calling into question the distribution of electoral votes that led us to tally up possible distributions of alternative futures, suddenly made palpable on social media and in television news alike.

The waiving of flags from the 2020 campaign as votes were being tallied at multiple cities morphed expression of concern about the tally of votes to questions of constitutional rights. Questions of outrage had suggested a criminal theft was at work, undertaken by elected officials, discounting their legitimacy and treating the tally of votes as an extension of the never-ending Presidential campaign but now leveling charges of broad electoral fraud before federal and state buildings, waving flags to assert the constitutional rights at stake.

The militant-like assertion of flag waving became a basis to assert the preservation of rights, and to “fight for them” to protect them, “fight against big tech, big donors, big media,” “fighting with one hand tied beyond your back,” and collectively “fight like hell and [realizing] if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.” The expansive claims of unconstitutional grievances recapitulated on the morning of the January 6 rally at Freedom Plaza, escalated by a charge they were perpetuated by Big Tech, and announced as the basis for a loss of freedom, and presented as a final chance to fight for their rights. Many believed no other politicians would fight for them.

Trump used the verb “fight” before the men he seemed to sanctify as a militia some twenty times. The repetition of that verb seemed to be more than messaging, but a way of making sure they had heard, letting them know, “now, we’re out here fighting” as if defending constitutional rights that would be taken away, beginning with election security, an election security that was in doubt, and, Trump used the false collective, would be resolved as “we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” and break the third wall between rally and government, “we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to give . . . “ This time, the members of the mob who had arrived for the March to Save America were streaming uploaded videos of the historic event live, as if to spontaneously generate a movement over social media:

Even without the addition of the activating words “them hell,” the crowd was not only activated, filled with righteousness as they waved more flags, hoping to make their voices heard and their rights to wave flags. Congregating before the Capitol as electors were being certified, holding banners proclaiming their loyalty to Trump and refusal to concede the election, lest constitutional rights be sacrificed. And while it is difficult to say where they arrived from, the ones arrested for their role in breaking into the U.S. Capitol Building in later months reveal a remarkably broad concentration from Southern California, near the border, from Texas, and from northern Florida, as well as from counties in the the midwestern heartland for which Trump had described his affection. The besieging of the Capitol was a search for renewed meaning, and a final means of orienting themselves to the nation.

But these scattered sites across the nation, scattered as so many shards of broken glass, seem to have emerged with force from their collective anomie at the call of the departing President. Is it a coincidence that many were concentrated from the southwestern border, in New Mexico, or from southern Texas? Did the weighting of criminal charges against those from Los Angeles, Floridians from Broward County, and northern Florida, and Jacksonville, Oklahoma, or rural Pennsylvania, and Arkansas send a sign about racial hatred or White Supremacy? Were these isolated areas tied to secessionist groups of supremacists, as Oath Keepers, or is it difficult to tell?

Their righteous indignation was animated by the slogan “Stop the Steal,” instead of “Build the Wall,” but the “steal” would be a robbery of the wall, and of security domestic or electoral. Trump exploit the apparent lack of conclusion as if it were an expanded denouement of the 2020 Presidential election, targeting the Capitol building as the culmination of a false narrative of remedying a deep, deep failure of electoral transparency. Presenting the innocuous sounding “march” as a last opportunity to make their voices heard, the unprecedented targeting of Congress and elected representatives sought to interrupt the transition of power, by interrupting tabulation of electoral votes: in questioning the transparency of congress, the march questioned the transparency of how the nation mapped onto the halls of representation, whose organizers pledged in allegedly figurative terms commitment to appear at Freedom Plaza “fight to expose this voter fraud and demand transparency and election integrity” as a civic duty.

Despite confirmations of no evidence any voting system, the combative terms sought to prevent an absence transparency argued to undermine American democracy, in the narratives that President Trump devoted his final months in office to perpetuating. The hopes to continue his claim on Presidential power was almost secondary, after a narrow election both for the Presidency and Congress, than the prevention of a loss argued to be enabled by massive voter fraud, fake news, and dissimulation, and claims for fraudulence that multiplied and perpetuated to erode the very foundations of the alleged democracy for which Congress stood.

If electoral loss was apparently determined by the inclusion of absentee ballots of long-undercounted minority voters, the claims of an erosion of democracy was a claim of a loss of the entitlement of white voters that Trump had come to embody, and protection of their interests, tied to hateful myths of “replacement” of the franchise and white majority status of America, a shattering of a global picture that mapped, in the frenzy of counter-charges of the perpetuation of fraudulent voting, pursued in multiple lawsuits, that seemed to seek to turn back time, literally, to the first returns of electoral votes and the projections of possible Trump victory, rooted in a misunderstanding of voter trends and patterns that would not deviate from early results.

But it was also to turn back time, by whatever means necessary, and not only to a time before the election, and before it was certified. It was to turn back time to white regimes of the past, embodied in the sea of white supremacist flags, confederate flags, MAGA flags, flags of crusaders, and TRUMP 2020 flags, preserving fake dreams in the name of continuing what Amy Kremer, in the two week, cross-country bus tour rallying support for what were literally the troops, claimed would be the second and perhaps more important goal of the March on Washington: “to support one another,” to nourish false fantasies of a lack of transparency, and to hearken back to an era of “electoral transparency” that excluded access to the ballot by many, and to arrive at a moment of apocalyptic truth that remade government by entering into the Capitol itself, once seen as an icon of austerity, and proclaimed as such, even in the years after the Civil War, whose dignity was presided over by a Vice President from a dias.

This was an image of governance, combined with the imagery and logic of impending wrath, designed to take back the coutnry by an occupation of the Capitol from “corrupt politicians” who had distorted the votes, as the true delegates from all fifty states might fight the ultimate reality game, claiming to be liberators and “rightful masters,” a mashup of Lincoln’s famous call to power with the urgency of a playstation episode of Star Trek: Invasion, and a call to summon their skills of combat as the moved to occupy the capitol grounds to remediate the alleged absence of transparency, even if that meant crumbling the pillars of democracy. The brewing battle referenced in Gothic font and brewing clouds implied an apocalyptic battle between Trump and the “Deep State” of liberals, staged in the arena of the U.S. Capitol itself, echoed in increased social media chatter on “battle stations” and “dropping the hammer” and an approaching “war” over stolen votes suggested a destruction of government and appealed as inhabiting a huge exercise of cosplay.

The invocation of a revolutionary mythology, a crowd-sourced lightening storm whose disastrous advance was targeting he Capitol from the heavens, as if it came from a 1930s Hollywood studio, or a recent thriller about the need to save society in a single moment, summoned the associations from early modern medicine of a critical point, but the critical point was in the social body–as the impending advance approached the Capitol, rocking its foundations as never before as the thunder was called down from the heavens, more spectacularly than Avengers: Endgame.

The ESRI story map map of the tunnels underneath the Capitol that in some version appears crossposted on TheDonald.Win conjured a troubling sense of enforcing the transparency of government the protestors had claimed, by luring them through maps of a hidden “sprawling underground world . . . curving like tentacles made of brick,” evoking, if playfully, the logic of secret routes of underground access to restore democratic representation by force in a world gone disastrously wrong and demanded repair lest the tentacles of the opposition party–the Democrats–might gain control of the U.S. Congress, by the double whammy of the previous night’s election of two Democratic Senators from Georgia as well as an African American Vice President.

The moment of crisis became imminent, but the routes to power were made to seem almost present to one’s eyes; it helped that Capitol Police were poorly equipped with old plastic shields that broke on impact, lifting the advancing mob a further sense of the invincibility despite their utterly unfounded claims to power. The image of tunnels that could allow the mob to gain easy access to Senate chambers, in air ducts repurposed in the Cold War as structures of civil defense were not even needed. The advance of members of the rally as Trump asked the assembled crowd to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue Constitution Avenue, to “save the Republic” by taking the Constitution in to their own hands, as he wrapped up his speech, some two hundred crowd members were already advancing on the Capitol by 12:33, moving past bike racks and other obstacles as they took over the inauguration stands, moving past officers who were not outfitted with shields, shouting “Hey! We’re breaking the wall!” with glee or sneaking through fences, entering the capitol from the west and from the east as the police finally declared a riot by 1:46, overwhelmed, according to recent forensics, by about 28 to 1, as over three thousand, four hundred members of the mob exulted in their new identity and success at forcing the police to pull back inside the building by 1:56, no longer able to secure the inaugural stands, as Trump was still speaking. The protestors who engaged Capitol Police and city police grew to an estimated 9,000, obsessed with creating transparency in the electoral tabulation.

As fear of direct access to the Capitol grounds grew, increasing the giddy sense of success as police were waiting for reinforcement, and the mob broke windows to the Senate Chambers climbing on the the mid-terrance, and entering the east and west sides as police defense lines before the White House crumbled by 2:28, leaving many wondering why the guards stationed before the White House were not offered protective shields, and leaving the crowd that rushed into the walls breached by red-bereted Proud Boys members to feel that they were in the process of overpowering the system, and need not have recourse to the tunnels by which they might have intended to breach the Capitol building.

The image of direct access to the chambers of government teased Trump supporters as a promise of transparency, as map of the tunnels underneath the Capitol Building that circulated on TheDonald.Win in anticipation of the event not an image in itself of the failure of electoral transparency. Don Jr., never the brightest bulb but the most eager, seems to have been overly transparent in telling the assembled crowd in Freedom Plaza that the time had indeed come to confront Republican representatives reluctant to support the seating of electors that would confirm the transition of power, claiming “we’re coming for you and we’re going to have a good time doing it,” hours before the crowd attacked the U.S. Capitol to affirm his overly earnest claim that “we have a country to save and [rioting] doesn’t help anyone.”–after urging the crowd, “if you’re gonna be the zero and not the hero” to prevent the transition of power, “we’re coming for you and we’re gonna have a good time.”

They were rather supposed to be having a good time. They advanced to the U.S. Capitol, having been urged on by how President Trump nurtured fantasies of “Making America Great Again” with existential urgency, and had delegated responsibility with urgency by letting them know that it was their turn to fight at the gates: “It is up to you and I to save this Republic! We are not going to back down, are we? Keep up the fight!” The barbarians were brought to the gates, and he all but invited them in, by activating their discharge down Pennsylvania Avenue, to bring a conclusion to what he had long postponed or deferred as a conclusion to the election that he had long argued would decide America’s future was at stake, with President Trump telling his supporters that his opponent would “destroy the American dream,” building anticipation for “the most important election in the history of our country” to magnify his supporters’ sense of a mission; as Trump predicted that the cities would be given over to roaming crowds of “violent anarchists,” and intoning about the existential dangers that immigrants who crossed the border, and failed to show up for court hearings would cross the border en masse–indeed, only by sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol who had become his personal army to find immigrants failing to show up for immigration court hearings could the U.S. Border and the nation be kept secure and we allow “a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny” as a nation.

The barbarians had been summoned to the gates of power, by the logic of claims of lack of transparency. Perhaps they were also looking for violent anarchists, but they acted more like insurrectionists. Trump had cultivated an image of instability, akin to the specter of the invading migrants by celebrating the border wall as a prop for his Presidency, announcing that all difficulties faced by the United States began from its border, not its interior: “if we had a wall, we wouldn’t have any problems.” If the specter of immigrants as a threat to the nation’s sovereignty, tied to electoral transparency, the moment of revanchism had come as the tocsin sounded when the President called his base into action to forestall the transition of power. “They cross the border, and they they disperse across the country,” Trump had long warned of immigrants; but the the many busloads of protestors who arrived in Washington, DC, assembled before the authoritative structure of the prime chamber of American government, ready to cross barricades to target the U.S. Congress, staking a counterweight to its historic representational functions in their own bodies, as they sought to make their voices heard with urgency, least the boundary to the nation be opened, and the security of the state be fully compromised. The barbarians had now crossed police lines, barricades, bicycle racks, and overpowering officers as they invaded the halls of government. The arrived out of a distinct sense of a mission to defend the electoral results they wanted, with a sense of cheering the man to whom they were bonding for a final time, assembling before mesmeric screens that magnified the face of the outgoing President to whom they played homage, and who would instruct them to interrupt the certification of electoral votes, in deeply personal tones, as if it was the final plea to re-litigate the election.

As late as April, Trump has continued to praise the crowd that arrived for his speech at Freedom Plaza as patriots, before fundraisers, boasting about its the size of the January 6 rally as if it offered a testament to his holding power in the party, but quickly claiming “he wasn’t talking about the people who went to the Capitol.” It is difficult to estimate the size of the crowd, or of the mob that besieged the Capitol as Trump spoke: if he claimed a number as large as 250,000; although 100,000 is a likely exaggeration, it was at least 10,000; as they approached the Capitol,  the crowd gained a density of 5 square feet per person, mosh-pit style, that both allowed it to gain a new sense of identity, and to overpower unarmed police. During Trump’s speech, he spent most of his speech acting as if he had been playing out the tallies of votes on an electoral map in a non-stop loop in his head for months describing fraudulence across states–Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and then several counties in Georgia, to conclude in contradictions of an obsessive–“We were ahead by a lot, until within a number of hours, we were loosing by a little”. Trump seemed to have counted on the audience replaying the same electoral maps, tallying cases of fraudulence in comprehensive detail–illegal ballots, never audited; the astounding alleged “error rate” of Dominion Voting Systems in Fulton County–late-arriving ballots in Detroit; dead people voting in Arizona; back-dated ballots in Wisconsin; ballot-harvesting in Pennsylvania, votes received after the deadline, an accumulated variety of dizzying wrongs. They were recited in disturbing detail as if to turn back the clock on the election, and demand that the tallying of electoral votes just not occur, given all these wrongs. All conveyed a deep sense of being wronged, and a vast conspiracy of wrongs, all allowed to exist, if folks did not show righteous rage. Did he imagined we had all visualized the possibility that all states were not called, and the electoral map remained unsettled as more legal cases were pending, or ballots needed to be recounted.

In fact, the lack of clarity in the electoral maps of 2020 flipped, for the first time, the tabulation of electoral votes across the country into what was openly portrayed as a crisis of representation, unable to be resolved by the usual manner of the tabulation of votes, in which despite the clear majority of votes won by one candidate, the final tally of electoral votes were not clear on the map–and some television news stations seemed to expect the block of red states that ensured an electoral victory in 2016 to be repeated, and left Trump deferring any conclusion to the election until January 6, 2021.

Trump affirmed his refusal to concede, and urged the rally to refuse to accept these results as well, stewing in what he portrayed, again, pleadingly, as a crisis in representation that his own Vice President had failed to maneuver around. He taunted the crowed by insisting on the mendacity of Democrats who were all talk and no action, would undercut the America First policy, and fail to defend rights to Free Speech that was in danger of being curbed, with freedom of religion and of owning guns–articulating “rights” that extended from gun control to religious practice. The chaotic jumble of multiple flags dominated by the five letters long used to promote luxury complexes concealed the presence cultivated from white supremacist groups, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, all groups expected to be at the event, heirs to the supposed promises of a Lost Cause who wove separatist flags of different stripes, suggesting loyalty to deep truths. Trump lionized the patriotism of the crowd, which he insisted were “totally appropriate” in all ways, pronounced the election not only rigged, in a keyword of his campaign, and marred by a range of unprecedented “abuses” that can “never happen again,” distinguishing the crowds of 30,000 at the Save America Rally where he promised he would never concede as the crowd already approached the seat of the U.S. Congress in tactical garb before he concluded speaking.

As if hoping for a last-minute reversal of fortune, Donald Trump invited these barbarians into the gates, having granted them honorifics as “patriots committed to the honesty of our elections and the integrity of our glorious republic,” ready to “patriotically make your voices heard.” “I have never been more confident in our nation’s future,” he said in closing, reminding the patriots assembled that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.” These patriots arrived on the perimeter of the U.S. Capitol, convinced that they would present a new ideal of sovereignty, a popular sovereignty, that would overturn not only the certification of electors but the falsity of a tainted electoral process, as if they might replace it with direct sovereignty evoked in the sea of flags that so exultantly if chaotically unified the voices and identity of the mob that rushed the U.S. Capitol, streaming their success on social media, to give a transparency to their own actions that they found lacking in the electoral process. The prominence of defensively waved confederate flags beside TRUMP 2020 banners, American flags, and a range of flags from the Gadsden Flag to the Blue Line Flag to states’ flags, suggested defending an imaginary of the nation greater than the actual nation; they proclaimed a project of patriotism and national reinvention, glorifying as “revolutionary” insurrectionism.

There was something deeply fraught and un-American in the dissonance of the crowd-sourced populism of these men and women who arrived to accomplish what could not be accomplished at the ballot box. But there they were, claiming populist roles for themselves and claiming identity as patriots, taking selfies and filming one another, defending an administration that had signed into law the America CARES Act that offered targeted relief for industries hard hit by the pandemic–whose Title IV boasted relief for airline industries and the financial sectors in the form of massive tax write-offs, and over $25 billion of loans and loan guarantees to aircraft carriers alone and over $15 billion to defense industries–as if it was a populist movement, redefining populism as a mission of unwittingly preserving interests of corporate elites. The huge tax write-offs of the CARES Act that allowed “carry-back” provisions allowing companies to deduct losses from the profits they had recently reported, even if they were unrelated to COVID-19 or the pandemic, boasted the outright gift allowed ultra-wealthy Americans to consolidate their social safety nets by deducting personal losses from non-business income, at a time they were worried about their income security, in a manner demanded by the Americans for Tax Fairness non-profit, bolstering their financial profiles of the wealthiest of the 1%, and ensuring their hospitals, health centers, as hospitals were overwhelmed.

What were these people doing defending their ground at Freedom Plaza? These yahoos were not from the edges of empire, from outside of the borders of the nation, but claiming its heartland. They were crowd-sourced from social media platforms and news sources of political disaggregation, animated by the inflation of abstract values–arriving not from the southwestern border we had been warned of an invasion by gangs, drug lords, child-traffickers, and illegal aliens, but from across the nation. They were different barbarians, promoting popular sovereignty. If the maps of the barbarians that sacked Rome in the late antique period were identified as either the “great invasions” or more neutrally the “migration of peoples” in the early twentieth century–the Völkerwanderung of the third century–the crowd at Freedom Plaza was animated by the continued specter of migrants that would invade America, if Donald Trump was not recognized as the victor of the election. They had come from far and wide, and converged on Washington DC to let themselves be heard, seeking not to overthrow the nation but to represent the völk lest they be destabilized, holding their flags to not be seen as a group of invaders, but to reclaim the state.

The Alexandrian poet Konstantine Kavafy began Waiting for the Barbarians, by imaging the expectation of their arrival as government ground to a halt: toga-wearing legislators, bored, seem to wait something to break the logjam of their work to lift them from their idleness: “Why should the Senators still be making laws?/ The barbarians, when they come, will legislate.” Cavafy describes the legislators “bored with eloquence and public speaking,” as they found that with the specter of the barbarians from across the southern border were hidden behind, senators fled from the specter of the advancing MAGA mob, relinquishing their offices in fear: after four years of affirming the sacrality of the border wall to the nation, they shamelessly cowered from these barbarians without responsibility. The hope those who invaded the Capitol grounds to forestall certification presented the true emergency they would solved by the “four more years” they had demanded–the end of the Trump Era, the fear of losing automatic weapons, immigrant protection programs, and the fear of a fraying of law and order that the Republican party had encouraged them to believe were all too imminent, warranting the emergency sign of flying an inverted American flag.

When Elias Canetti examined the formation of the crowd’s sense of license, tracing it from a moment of ‘discharge’ when they had arrived on the terrace, exulting in sense of short-lived victory. The members of the crowd at the moment of discharge, Canetti argued, sense of bonds to one another solidify. He would have been struck by the theatricality of the formation of a crowd that formed with a clear sense of timing: this crowd was long prompted by an urgent sense that January 6, 2021 was a critical day in the history of democracy, and of the union, and as the final moment of the selection of an American President, not by an election, but the final moment to question that election’s results–a true critical moment in the preservation of a democracy.

The crowd that progressed from the Ellipse gained new clarity as a body as they moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Mall, and entered in waves into the chambers of the U.S. Capitol. They arrived to fulfilled their ambitions to fill the “our house”–occupying the architecture of the ship of state and government. They had arrived with an ease as surprising to many members of the mob as their leaders, as well as the President they would continue to support in his calls for patriotic defense of liberties. The crowd that wanted to preserve the spectral “red map” used as a backdrop of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the highest-rated news program Fox airs, and in cable news history: watched by over 4.3 million on average, the maps orient viewers to the world enough to promote Carlson’s improbable rapid emergence and designation as the hands down “front runner” for Republicans in 2024. The red map that is almost synonymous with the recouping of Trump’s 2016 victory is embodied by the “four mour years! four more years!” cries preceding the approach of the U.S. Capitol. Carlson embodiment of a race-baiting, dynamic figure as Trump would affirm a constellation Roger Stone ha promoted in persuading Trump to run for President in 2000 and 2012.

A young Conservative pillar whose news show began by featuring the backdrop of the electoral map in November, 2016, the most watched Fox News program of the year, Carlson made clear his promotion of Trump from the start, and adopted the conversion of the electoral map from a form of consensus to a declarative statement that Donald Trump was associated in a telling hanging of the map-of 2016 election results Trump had displayed in the White House in a frame–an image he had long given out to visitors to the West Wing, as if in a sign to the broadcaster who had in early 2016 heralded Trump as able “to fight Washington corruption, not simply because he opposes it but because he has actually participated in it” in Politico, able to become “the most ferocious enemy American business has ever known,” as if he were Teddy Roosevelt: Tucker Carlson even went so far as to openly sanction Trump’s vulgarity by his allegedly pugnacious populism, creating a person of the former President struck a clear chord for viewers.

Did Carlson help to inspire the riots? Carlson’s “fighting words” crystallized Trump’s ability to represent the other America Carlson had tapped at The Daily Caller, piling scorn on Washington as a seat of corruption even at CNN, sanctioned Trump’s vulgarity as of a piece with his ability to attack Washington, e exponent he became as founder of the Daily Caller, who left CNN and MNBC for Fox. Trump had never participated in public politics, if he had threatened to since 1996 or earlier, but Carlson’s uncanny knack to converet any position to a pleas to sound like a righteous rebellion against double talk and political corruption anointed Trump as the one able to take on Washington, before Trump had even won the Republican nomination, and was incarnated in the very map of “election results” that magnified the size of Trump’s small share of the popular vote, by making it seem that Trump “big red, using the visual of the county-by-county vote as a proxy of sovereignty which he tweeted out to his 70+ million followers during his second impeachment. An example that might be understood in Trump’s taste for “truthful hyperbole,” it does the trick of showing his victory in 2,626 counties to Hillary Clinton’s 487, but cleverly masked that she had almost three million more popular votes.

The cultic status of the alternative map Carlson long used as a backdrop to tell the news was perhaps a form of brainwashing. It was the map, to be sure, that the crowd in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021 believed to exist, and obstinately refused to stop believing in. Tucker promoted the map as he baited viewers by denigrating social justice protests as the work of “criminal mobs,” and identified the insurrectionary riot as only seeking to promote “justice.” The crowd hoped to turn back the clock on the electoral map, by a license prefigured by interactive tallying electors FOX invited viewers to build interactively and to share in teh 2016 and 2020 elections–

–maps that may have contributed to entitlement to dismiss the electoral maps perpetuated by “Fake News Media.” The fictional maps provided the grounds for the notion that the election was indeed stolen, that the narrative of a fair and free election had been disrupted, that the Trump supporters must act like minutemen with urgency of the fierce, compelling call of now, lest all be lost.

Much as Carlson had spoken from before the map of Trump’s 2016 victory, the same map before which Carlson later dismissed the presence of white supremacists in any responsible role at the rally–and even denied it was an armed insurrection–the spokesperson who has been a major apologist for Trump, promoting the illusion of a “heartland” victory of 2016 across Trump Country, a stretch of the nation that had come into existence in 2016, convincing viewers to keep their eyes on the prize, and imagine “your own 2016 presidential election forecast” as if the election could be personalized to reflect their historical role to promote a Trump victory on the “road to 270.” Their arrival in Washington, DC was bracketed by a sea of blue streamed from red states across the nation, as if to continue the Presidential campaign and to bring it to a final conclusion, as the 2020 electors were being certified.

Were they not an expression and manifestation of Carlson’s own sense of utter indignation at being wronged? This was the need to actually attack Washington, DC, and what better way to do so than by attacking the Joint Session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol? The collective rage of the crowd was cast in righteous terms, and they had been baited by the very categories FOX news had purveyed. Advancing to the U.S. Capitol as Senators and Congressmen stalled for time to prevent state electors from being certified, the crowd aimed to empty the U.S. Capitol of the sacrality it commands. They did not need the government any more, or need its representatives. The argument in early 2016 that “Trump is leading a populist movement” led Carlson to invoke Teddy Roosevelt, while attacking the elitism of Republicans. In a robust attack on his former party for their attention to details of sexism, he attacked “people who were to slow to get finance jobs and instead wound up in journalism” as betraying the Party of Ideas, dismissing Trump’s critics as “fixated on fashion and hair,” and in an explicit sense to effeminate to appreciate Trump’s robust challenge as lying in straight talk and masculine confrontation–as if he were not a Member of the Tribe. Did Carlson indeed give Trump his framed map, or did the chairman of FOX News, Roger Ailes?

Was this a crowd that channeled the righteous indignation that Carlson had summoned over four years, from when he scolded a political caste of “Washington Republican” to let them know that he believed voters “know more about Trump than the people who run their Party,” the attack on the elites who were beholden to vested interests, as only “proof that you live nowhere near a Wal-Mart” in their priggish readiness to call Trump “a ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula.” This wrath of Carlson was in a sense the wrath of the mob, directed by the conspiracy theories he had spun about an attempt to “bypass voters” and the autopsy he delivered from his news desk of a man Minnesota police killed. Carlson’s accusations of “rigging the election” led to the anger of the mob as they targeted that symbol of Washington–the Capitol–to “make their voices heard.”

Were the the true barbarians of whom the United States senators and congresspeople were in fear, and took the place of actual invaders? In a chastening poem that meditates on the dynamic of an end of the Byzantine empire, that evokes the fall of Rome to outsiders, poet and historian C. P. Cavafy drew on his erudition to conjure the dramatic scene of an utter inability of senators as they wait for the arrival of the “barbarians” to see the large picture. They have retreated from the larger consequence of inviting the crowd who posed as “patriots” to enter their very chambers in a perverse attempt to defend their country–or the country of red states and white majority with which they identified.

President Trump had incited the crowd to occupy the sacred architecture of government, in the neoclassical Palladian capitol building that he spoke before–what Joe Biden affirmed, in the hours of the riot, as an unprecedented assault on the very “citadel of liberty” and heart of government, occupying the sacred space of government and “most sacred of American undertakings,” the “sacred ritual” of the certification of the Electoral College vote, by occupying and filling the architecture of government into which they flowed. President Trump talked of the Capitol not as a sacred architecture or citadel, but the arms and tactical gear brought to the rally made clear it was a site to be filled: President Trump described an “egregious assault on our democracy,” a strange collective, as if the Capitol were a site of a wrong, rather than sacred, where the “brave senators and congressmen and women” would be cheered on, as in a sporting event, while not cheering much for others, to “make our voices heard” and in doing so “take back our country,” shifting sacrality from the architecture of the Capitol and making it appear a site to be filled by a cheering and booing crowd, as it had been almost evacuated of sacrality in a Presidency that was committed to the sacrality of the border wall. Teh rioters who affirmed a red-state religion of states rights held many obsolete flags–campaign flags, confederate flags, Betsy Ross flags, crusaders’ flags–not only to create a lineage for their protest but to protest their patriotism during the insurrection.

Only less than a thousand of those attending the Save America Rally on January 6, 2021 forced their way into the doors of the U.S. Capitol, hardly a fraction of the minimum size of 250,000 Trump claimed to face, as the “low number a few hundred thousand, high 2-3 million” that the rally organizers had promoted–but the spark for the crowd was set by the urgent request to save their country, from a threat that was all too real.

The social media whistleblower who urged his followers to “take action” before the Capitol Riots taunted the Capitol police on poor planning for an event he hoped would attract three million American patriots, as if they were woefully underprepared for the reckoning the Save America Rally would create over the coming days. The apparent abdication of the President from his executive responsibility was mirrored in the refusal of Republicans to recognize the danger of advance of militant resisters of a peaceful transfer of power. If only eight hundred entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, breaking police lines and forcing their way into locked and guarded doors, the dissolution of momentum as the crowd could no longer fill the cavernous rotunda seemed to let it dissipate energy, but the insurrectionary force of entrance had already destabilized the workings of government and shocked the nation. It seems probably the organizers expected many more would have followed, as they insurrectionists hung Trump 2020 flags atop the Capitol building, from flags of the Trump campaign to other lost causes, from the Confederacy to South Vietnam–and tore down the American flag from the flagpole, to replace it with a Trump flag. When they entered the chambers of Congress, they cried “Trump won that election!”

They communicated a truly chaotic sense of exultation and arrival, as if that was their purpose. The many flags of imagined nations that no longer exist were on display at the insurrection linked the riots to an imagined heritage by radical telescoping and “umbrella descriptor” able to conjure “utopic” parallel worlds of whiteness. From the assembly of a “new American to the refighting of lost battles–evident in the many flags of the Confederate States of America; Trump 2020; Thin Blue Line–the array of flags suspended on the walls of the Capitol and from its flagpoles and windows suggest realities that were all no longer past, but, as Danielle Christmas reminds us, but synchrony of imaginary spaces which –from the Betsy Ross flag; the Confederacy; League of the South; Knights Templar; Vinland–validated a sense of belonging to a heritage of whiteness, in the attempts to give a national coherence to white nationalism, and even more a sense of authenticity and transparency to their aims. The attempts to untangle the mashup to sanctify their cause in hyper-masculine tropes eliding patriotism and militancy may explain the ebullient apparent chaos in the use of Confederate flags with neo-pagan flags, militant flags of crusaders, early revolutionaries, and diehards of the 2020 election, were images of white strength. Against the backdrop of accusations of failed transparency, an iconography of “lost causes” staked out an authenticity of faith, for all its fakeness and lack of historical accuracy.

While his social media followers may have been unmoored from any stable epistemological ground, the ability to warp the truth over the past five years may have made it incumbent upon them to respond to this lack of truth, to dislodge them from ties to any reality other than his refusal to concede the already decided Presidential race, as he sent his own troops into battle to rally against the reality of his political defeat. The flags pronounced claims to faith in lost causes that both magnified the crowd and its energetic claims to belonging to groups that were more transparent than the alleged “false media” narrative of an election defined, in contrast, by a lack of transparency. The power of belonging in a crowd no doubt attracted many to the Capitol, as it would reprise the many rallies Trump had staged nationwide since 2015.

But after promising his audience that he would accompany their progress down Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump cannily left the rally he had called, gleefully watching the progress to the U.S. Capitol on television from the White House with friends and advisors, as if relinquishing center stage; he abdicated responsibility for inciting the ensuing violence he followed gleefully in the Oval Office with his son and several advisors, and seems to have waited for his Vice-President to summon the National Guard, so ecstatic was Trump in what seemed an Insurrection Party with a soundtrack of upbeat rock. The open transparency of these patriots was on view for all to see, and was being documented live on camera, evident from the map of cel phone signal towers near the Mall and U.S. Capitol as the crowd advanced.

Animated by the defense of a sense of patriotism, if not of the delicate boundaries of the Republic, when Trump vowed “we will never give up, we will never concede,” at the very start of his speech, repeating the useful conceit “we won by a landslide,” he created a bond of collective relation to the crowd, before he affirmed that if “we don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.” The tweet that arrived to the followers who all had brought their phones to stream the event to which they were amassed to follow lit up at 2:24 p.m. with the alarming news the acting President of the Senate failed to question the validity of seating electors, and indeed lacked the “courage to do what should have been done to protect our County and our Constitution” that triggered the mob to form from the crowd, waving a raucous abandon of flags semiotically difficult to process–TRUMP 2020 flags; Betsy Ross flags; Gadsden flags; 2nd Amendment flags thin blue line flags; and, of course, confederate flags–in an abandon of over-signification born of deep desire to destabilize sovereign unity, lifted by an eery undercurrent of red MAGA hats. The guns, explosive devices, and tacitical policing gear as well as hunting weapons were fetishized as a protected”right,” enshrined in the Amendment ratified in 1789, although those rights derived from the English common law notions of preserving the peace–not the libertarian “liberties” of owning guns that span hunting rights or self-defense, rather than the common defense. Yet the keeping of military arms for use in local militia was appropriated with expansion of the very term “militia”, now fetishized as a right of border protection and vigilantism without local regulation.

INdeed, the personalization of rights to “defend” the nation inside the “well-regulated militia” that the Second Amendment affirmed as a right central to preserving “the security of the state” has become delegated to self-run groups, often composed of Border Patrol members or military veterans, designed to preserve their sense of security deemed “necessary to the security of a free state” has increasingly elevated “right” to bear arms into an obligation, staged with theatrics on the very structure of the inaugural stands transformed to grounds of a tactical campaign of defense, whose propulsive energy soon became one of aggressive assault. 

About a sixth of the way through President Trump’s address–and just after he claimed that the voice of the crowd of believers that would not be silenced, martial chanting filled the space that Elias Canetti, who found that history of the twentieth century a history of mass psychology–termed the “acoustic mask” of the collective, more akin to sports events than individual articulation, a subsuming of the self in the crowd, of openly martial tones. Canetti’s distinction between the “open” crowd whose expansion knew no limits and from the “closed” crowd that fills an architectural space to take it over, and fills it while sacrificing its mass size. The crowd at the Capitol combined both aspects, as it was a crowd that had assembled at multiple earlier rallies and online, but was determined to expand to fill the architecture of the Capitol, opening a preserve of government as it was determined to make its voices heard. Architecture provided a stimulus for the crowd to gain its sense of a unity, Canetti argued in his distinction between the “open” and “closed” crowds, echoing the image of the Nuremberg Rallies of Hitler, no doubt, when he claimed that architecture “postpones [the crowd’s] dissolution,” but the limited number of entrances to the closed space where the crowd assembles not only attracts them, as a space that the crowd will fill, harnessing the power of the crowd which realizes with a sense of sudden entitlement that “the space is theirs.”

The transformation of the space outside the Capitol to an architecture of protest, even not able to be entirely filled, affirmation of the stakes of the battle for rights that was at hand. For Canetti, the architecture of the space–here symbolized by the inaugural stands, and by the open architecture of the Capitol dome, becomes filled as it invited mobilization. Indeed, the filling of the space transformed the crowd into a collective surge, whose motion through space “reminds them of the flood” or crucial metaphors of conceiving the crowd as a stream, tide, or waves–metaphors usually based on water, to illustrate its cohesion–that are, mutatis mutandi, the very terms often applied to the migrants on the southwestern border, but are now poised to enter not the country but the seats of government power. In the context of a history of crowds over the twentieth century, Elias Canetti sought to understand the psychology of mass movements of Fascism outside of a Freudian concentration on ego, and relation of self to collective, but as a new configuration of. self to collective. The crowd allowed him to focus on the question of the political fusion of self with crowd as a moment when all inhibitions are overcome by a drive toward greater density and physical proximity; the procession of the crowd as it moved toward the U.S. Capitol became a mob, gaining identity to cross the Capitol’s perimeter, realizing its transformation from the open crowd of online space to the physical space that it might occupy: in this case, the mass of Trump supporters that was assembled before the U.S. Capitol was it fear of the arrival of the barbarians that Trump has himself warned against,–but seemed to seek acceptance as a new political unit. They gained power as a mob as they approached the U.S. Capitol, defining their power by their proximity to the U.S. President, and growing in power as their distance diminished to the Capitol building that appeared within their vision on the horizon, just out of reach of their own pressing raucous popular demands as the mob acted as a militia.

The centrality of gun rights as the crowd outside the U.S. Capitol became a militia itself, was recouped in subsequent call for a “Million Militia March” on inauguration day, a counter-protest in grotesque parody of the Million Mom March, which 20 years ago drew an estimated 750,000 to protest an epidemic of gun violence, or the Million Man March, against the continued infringement of civil rights in America by police violence. The sustained transposition of constitutional originalism as justifying a “right” to bear arms is diffused in claiming the assertion of a full-blown “right to insurrection” should government overstep its constitutional right, distilling the notion of a well-regulated set of liberties to a “well-regulated militia” engaged in aggressive self-defense–far from the founders’ original intent. If the fear of southerners of slave insurrections , affirmation of a “right to insurrection” within the Second Amendment is argued as a basis to keep politicians in line, or a check against arbitrary authority of rulers. A protest on Inauguration Day was planned to include a return, this time “carrying Our weapons, in support of Our nation’s resolve.”

Was not the call to an insurrection the very term that the members of the mob would adopt for themselves, proclaiming an insurrection that was able to The “right to insurrection” was claimed by the mob as they assembled before the inaugural stands, and proceeded to the Capitol.

Drawn toward the Capitol as if to hope to fill its space, the logic of the crowd that had assembled was oriented toward the building where Trump had baited them to disrupt the votes, as if it was within their power to do so, removing and prohibition from entering the property that they were convinced was their own to possess, instructed by the leader to whom their banners all proclaimed fealty.

Many waved an American flag, but far more wove banners of Trump’s campaign slogan, repurposed for insurrection, or adopting other symbols of an allegiance that was more originalist than the members of Congress assembled to certify the electors. The crowd members acted as if they were mobilized as a separate country–the nation of Trump 2020, of Confederate America, or of America Made Great Again, as they pursued the MAGA agenda into the halls of government to finally make their voices heard; this was a country deeply tied to White Supremacy, to the founding fathers, and asserted that the state of affairs had become an emergency, and a new allegiance to foundational principles had to be asserted and proclaimed. From imagined lands to alternate realities, the flags provided an imagined inheritance of precedent–often of mythical nature, as the so-called “Vinland Flag,” repurposed from an old punk band that suggested an original pre-American world discovered by Norse voyagers who had arrived in North America in the eleventh century, repurposed to suggest a mythic white majority nation for extremists, often combining it with the image of a modern semi-automatic AK-47 as if it was a territory worthy of armed defense.

The approached the U.S. Capitol, waving Second Amendment flags and hanging their banners that celebrated the recent candidacy of Donald J. Trump as if it was indeed marked by victory, still with meaning, not able to be consigned to a trash-heap of history. The moment of heightened proximity to one another outside the White House walls marked the transformation of the audience to a mass, identified by professions of patriotism, patches, clothing, hats, and the acoustic mask of any cry they could improvise. They wished they had brought a boom box, and had a soundtrack by which to enter the chambers of Congress in a mask of dignity.

As martial chanting was a mask, a new collective identity by assuming the power to overturn sovereignty, the flags, MAGA caps, and weapons and tactical gear were a mask of identity by which they were made suddenly visible, accountable, and politically powerful, in collective denial Trump had lost the Presidential vote of 2020: as much as perpetuating a big lie that Trump planted, they laid claim to the collective identity that would not be ignored Trump championed. The acoustic mask was mirrored in the mask of signs, flags, demands, and an interruption to politics as normal. The flags were a baiting of power, a refusal of the sovereign power of the Joint Session of Congress, and a denial of its authority to certify electors: the mass of Trump supporters offered a new form of power, a delegitimization of the sovereignty of the U.S. Capitol itself, as the crowd presented a new form of power, ready to supplant it, unassailable by Capitol police, but that had in this moment before the Rotunda assumed an identity of invulnerability, in the new identity they presented as members of a crowd, and took a new sense of their own power as a crowd, attracted to their own ability to “save America” lest it not be “Great” anymore. They had all been, after all, invited to the event.

1. Trump urged the crowd to step into the breach opened by political polarization across the nation, to right the ship of state at the site of government, by going to the U.S. Capitol. This was the dominant trope of the deep risk of the Republic that American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had channeled, as a task of righting the voyage of the Republic lest it plummet into fatal waters. And the crowd approached, as if it embodied the hopes of the Republic and of mankind, magnifying its own power as a renewal of the Union, akin to a new state of civil war, and of democratic dignity, if the collective construction Longfellow called for imagined timbres from across the nation would be used to “bring tribute, great and small/and help to built this wooden wall . . . of oak and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp,” to contain “humanity with all its fears.” For Longfellow, the shore was a site of contact, commerce, and danger of natural forces, rather than the fantasy of native purity Trump mapped as a source of fears to be contained by the still unbuilt border wall as a reimagined architecture of sovereignty. When Schoen read the envoi from “The Building of the Ship” inseparable from American Presidents standing steadfast in the face of disunion from Abraham Lincoln’s admiration of how the verses powerfully “stir men” on the eve of the Civil War to Franklin Delano Roosevelt sending them with Wendell Wilkie to Winston Churchill–“Sail on, O Ship of State!/Sail on, O Union strong and great./Humanity with all its fears . . . /Is hanging breathless on thy fate”–before the United States entered World War II, as a commitment of solidarity the former Lord of Admiralty, desperate for reassurance of an Atlantic alliance, would see “applies to you people as it does to us.” (Churchill would frame the hand-written letter on the walls of his Chartwell home, “I think this verse applies to your people, as it does to us.”

In electing to recite the poem in closing arguments, Schoen’s reading tied Presidential authority and a foundational reading of the constitution to the nation’s fate. His lawyerly reading of the envoi for the ship’s departure summoned an array of Presidential authority in defense of Trump’s accusation of violence that mimicked the exhibition of multiple flags arrayed behind Trump as he addressed the Ellipse on the morning of January 6, 2021, taking the figurative reading as a declaration of the innocence of his client in the face of the violence against the capitol and due process, and even Trump’s own taunting words by which he worked the crowd into a mission to move on the Joint Session. Longfellow’s poem had long provided a powerful topos of national unity, and transnational unity, any sense of the shared collective meaning of a transcendence–and the transcendent role of Presidential authority–were hard to recuperate days after the insurrection incited by an intense partisan opposition of an outgoing President, hard to read as deferring fears of the lack of consensus Trump hammered home in provoking the crowd by insisting the media suppresses “free speech” and urged them “we’re going to have to fight much harder” to prevent a “sad day for our country” of the ship of state hitting the rocky shoals of a smooth Presidential succession. In delegating the defense of the constitution to the crowd he addressed, he summoned a flase populism by inciting crowd members to band together, and gain their unity in order to defend their version of false “freedoms”–freedom of speech without fear of reprisal for hate speech, at a “Free Speech Event” to protest second amendment rights to possess guns; freedom of the”right” to assemble to promote civic disunion.

Schoen’s stilted reading of the trimeter of the envoi beseeched us to place faith over fears–“faith triumphant over our fears”–seemed to steel the nation against the insurrection. Longfellow’s language of righting the course of the ship of state became the language of a mob seeking to make their voices heard, in an insurrectionary slogan that granted license to trespass government property to disrupt Congress before electors were certified. And the mob of rioters who advanced on the U.S. Capitol inspire more fears for the future of the unity of state, than a manufactured by a steel wall of concrete core might stop, impelled by the fear that America as they knew it might suddenly stop if Joe Biden assumed the Presidency, and the America Made Great Again would no longer be America any more.

If the performance seemed theatrical, the summoning of the great bearded poet who crafted Romantic epics of America seemed to suggest the permanence of a society that vested faith in its President, and in the literal reading of the law, whatever deeply disturbing turbulence had almost led to a chaotic picture of the absence of authority in the distress signs that rioters held before the U.S. Capitol as tif to interrupt certification of the electors indoors.

Poetic Intermezzo: the Uncertain Ship of State

The invocation of the timeless precepts of a “ship of state” transcended time, and were hardly rooted in a poetics that Longfellow began: Longfellow was an ardent abolitionist, In a poem that formed the conceit “it is not the sea that sinks and shelves/But ourselves/That rock and rise/With uneasy motion,” the uncertainty of the fate of the ship that forms the dramatic tension in Longfellow’s poem–and about which he was uncertain until the proofs were submitted to the printer–was rewritten as an affirmation of the timeless constancy of the Constitution–the timbers of the ship whose sublime form and graceful design arose from its architect’s model to ensure smooth passage–and nation’s mission.

Schoen intoned haltingly the triumphant trimeter of an envoi to the frigate, but the riots suggested the clear and present danger of the hurricane that in his earlier draft would not defer the catastrophe at sea, but find the ship crashed, “wrecked upon some treacherous rock” despite its “loveliness and strength,” reduced to “rotting in some loathsome dock” despite all of its earlier hopes vested in its sublime design: if the best laid plans may go astray, Schoen distorted the poet’s dramatic focus on a vessel built to withstand stormy tempests at sea as a way to shift focus from the insurrection–the storm that was created by human agency and incitation of the crowd to advance to the US Capitol–to Congress’s ability to right the vessel’s course by following precepts he argued that the founders placed in the Constitution and rights of immunity of former Presidents and protection of “Free Speech.” The addition of the injunction, “Sail on! Sail on! O Ship of State!” which clarified the Horatian metaphor solidified its place in American Presidential rhetoric over the years.

The ship of state–or a ship of diverse affiliations, united as in a new “Unite the Right” rally to support a second term for Donald Trump or to force elected representatives to resist certification of electors–seemed to find a model for perseverance and the continuity of national duty. David Schoen cited the bulwarks of Presidential authority and constitutional precedent, but not “rocking the boat” provided the motif for his stilted oratory. The overcoming of the turbulence of the ocean was a late revision that Longfellow had made to the poem, but the urging of faith and dismissal fears that unruly forces might overpower the American ship of state’s timbers, as the revolutions of 1848 that might cause the ship of state to “with wave and whirlwind wrestle!”

Longfellow’s envoi offered an imprecation for faith in the works of the architect against the tempest’s roar, and “fear [of] each sudden sound and shock” may have tried to quell fear at the abiding chaos of the riotous crowd–whose members bore telling black flags including “2020–the SEQUEL” as they charged the joint session to Make America Great Again by the dramatic force of Trump’s campaign. The call for faith before a “restless, seething, stormy sea” extended beyond metaphor, far from the cosplay social disruption, for faith in how America’s ship of state built on American shores would serve the world. Longfellow suggested security in the stability in the U.S. Constitution, built on clear precepts, e pluribus unum, as the origin of the timbers sent to make the ship’s planks from disparate coastal states of the Republic–Maine, Georgia, Vermont, Virginia–revealed the craft of democratic legislation in 1849, against the backdrop of European revolutions, distinguished America from the instability of the conservative governments who had supported their monarchies, and struggled to meet demands for a constitution.

The design of the ship of state Longfellow evoked, of course, was not in need of displaying a flags so prominently, but revealed its craft most apparently in the harmony of its design. To endure turbulent seas, the “worthy master” who had designed it had regularly enraptured audiences of landlubbers who assembled on shore to wonder at the construction of a goodly ship “shall laugh at all disaster/And with wave and whirlwind wrestle.” What was repurposed as an appeal for stability after the whirlwind of the invasion of the U.S. Capitol adopted Longfellow’s image of he framing of a harmonious ship of state, “Built for freight; and yet for speed,/ A beautiful and gallant craft,” to echo the sturdiness of constitutional precepts apparent in a ship both “beautiful and gallant” and of “larger proportion” whose “silent architecture” could withstand the blows of ocean whirlwinds and rocky reefs as it sailed to the Fortunate Islands without any need for fear. Poised on the coast, where ship-building was a collective spectator event in the maritime coastal region of Portland, Maine where Longfellow grew, the architecture of the ship was praised as a wall that oceanic waves would not be able to ever overcome, on which “all the hopes for future years/ . . . hanging breathless on thy fate.”

Senators were asked to direct attention to the construction of the state rather than the deep turbulence that the riots had revealed. Longfellow had created a dramatic tension between the dangers of ocean travel and the construction of the ship as a metaphor for the craft of his own trimeter and pentameter, but would have long seen the shore and coast as a site of sociability, where he often talked with sailors, and found confirmation of the broader ties to the world when navigation tied the New England coast to global trade, and a romance of the seas: but the Capitol Riots rather stood, festering on the shore, not as confirming the launching of the “goodly vessel . . . safe from all adversity,” but channeled the “boiling, bubbling, seething,/Cauldron that glowed/ and overflowed with black tar,” more than auguring the stability of a ship able to withstand the ocean’s shallows, rocky reefs, and secret currents.

The announcement of the ship’s construction and boasts of its ability echoes the genre of Sailing Cards placed from 1848 in the shops of waterfront ports, featuring elaborately engraved scenes of long-distance travel, offering promises of the possibility of safe passage across a tempestuous windswept sea, that almost echoes Longfellow’s evocation of oceanic peril.

The expression of confidence in the master architect inspires trust in the building of a ship that resembles the Master’s daughter–the figurehead first inspires love for his daughter, the maiden that the young man marries–and culminates in the envoi of the ship. For readers of “The Building of the Ship of State,” the awe of constructing freight ships was a collective event of spectatorship, as well as an investment in commercial ties, attracting crowds of land-lubbers, as an engraving for the poem foregrounds, but also a prospect of fear. As much as praising the architecture of the craft built from native timbers of different states from the Roanoke, to Maine in The Building of the Ship, Longfellow praised the sturdy building a vessel fit to sail to the “magic charm of foreign lands/With shadows of palms and shining sands” that cast foreign seas as sites for open plunder, across the vast ocean that “divides yet unites mankind” as if the ship was a vehicle for national and global unity, in a barely concealed mercantilist fantasy.

But the affirmation of the final envoi that elevates a call to faith in the architect’s design of the ship over our fears–the imprecation to “fear not each sudden sound and shock” as “‘Tis of the wave and not the rock;/”tis but the flapping of the sail,/And not a rent made by the gale!” was such an odd closure for a trial for inciting attempt to incite crowd violence designed to rock the very ship of state. If Longfellow’s poem is essentially a deferral of these fears–and, indeed, he chose to add the envoi in final proofs of the poem sent to the publisher to alter the ending of the ship striking a rocky reef with a call to national unity that would increase its national appeal in the American canon, that Schoen referenced in treating the ship as a metaphor for his constitutional defense.

Longfellow’s affirmation of faith over fear revealed his commitment to the nation, but led to his canonization as a figure of state, in an era when “In God We Trust” was not minted on American currency before 1864, added only after clergymen gave voice to fears that “if our Republic were not shattered beyond reconstruction . . . . .the antiquaries of succeeding centuries rightly reason from our past that we were a heathen nation.” If the Founders kept church and state were kept strictly separate, the motto prominently featured in 1866 on all subsequent coinage-and mandatory from 1908, emphasizing the motto affirming collective faith in God even above the motto, “E pluribus unum,” that described the collective power of the former colonies as a unified state. Longfellow crafted a call to faith, before the Civil War, placing faith in a human architect, but the coining of the motto, a last minute alteration of “In God is Our Trust,” appeared on the two cent piece as a monument to the nation that had been used in the Union army, placed the nation in a form of divine protection later adopted as a national motto at the height of the Cold War in 1956: a Presbyterian pastor hope that the motto “relieve us of the ignominy of heathenism” demanded “recognition of the Almighty God in our coins.”

The director of the Philadelphia Mint, James Pollock, acknowledged that “distinct and unequivocal recognition of the divine sovereignty in the practical administration of our political system” as “a duty of the highest obligation,” and took the mandate to reflect that no nation could be strong without divine favor–and to acknowledge that “trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins,” as Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary reasoned. Longfellow called for public faith in the ship’s construction as a locus for collective “faith” had universalized a patriotic creed in verse, before the currency would provide a monument to collective faith of he nation: if the settling of Acadie had been the subject of Longfellow’s earlier epic poetic project, Evangeline, about the faithful wife among Acadians expelled with Francophones refugees in Le grande Dérangement, set in a primeval forest but during boundary disputes of England, France, and Massachusetts over the island’s future as a story central to the nation. While Longfellow seized on the story of religious refugees to tell by a story of faith in the face of geographical separation, in 1848 the waters of state became truly uneven, leading Longfellow to craft a an optimistic statement of the place of faith for national stability that defined him as one of the first of the future canon of American poets. Longfellow had imagined the need for a new epic for the nation in ways that had placed him in a canon of white American authors that had been crystallized in a literary canon–in an image of Anglo clubbiness–

The Canadian photographer and landscape artist, Eugene l’Africain (1859-92), a Montreal-based artist in the photographic studio who specialized in photo-lithographs of composite collective portraiture, and his images of Union and “Southern Commanders” of the era of Reconstruction marketed as a patriotic calling cards, assimilated the confederacy to the nation, in an eerily echo the persistent commemoration of military bases of Confederate generals that were only recently called to be redressed; the problem of national belonging was raised by the 2020 insurrection attempting to block electoral certification by disenfranchising black and minority voters in Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania–refusing the extension of the franchise that the confederacy had so adamantly opposed. Notman Studios’ 1885 composite celebrated the Southern Commanders, posing in decorated uniforms, before scenes of martial victory and the very confederate flag carried by many at the Capitol insurrection, placed the commanders in a national pantheon in ways still redressed by protests of commemorating confederates in military bases in the summer of 2020.

The colloidal collotype in which Eugene l’Africain specialized was a precursor of photoshop. Years after the war had ended, the studio for which he worked created collective photo-portraits as a surrogate for national memory, that seemed to create was stubbornly homogeneous and preserved a racial hierarchy; the place of Longfellow in the collotype foregrounds the bearded national hero on its far right, in an imaginary library’s fantastic architecture, as if situated near their stately Boston residences–taking advantage of a new medium pioneered after 1855 to replace pasting individual photographs in to books, refined for mass printing in the 1870s and suitable for wall hangings. Did they complete a national memory after the Civil War so eerily present to protestors who bore confederate flags to overturn electoral results that would retroactively forestall black voters’ choices? The photographic technique produced a quite neoclassical constructed memory of a war that had divided the nation as if it was not lost by these commanders, but celebrated the bravery of separatist commanders as heroes in American public memory, a counterpart to the collective portrait that he also created of Union Commanders, a pair of portraits of a healed nation. The same memory of whiteness informed the naming of American military bases.

But it was hard not to declaim the verses of “the poet Longfellow” in the vein of America First. The sense of a collective healing was something that David Schoen seemed to be creating for the nation in reciting the envoi with which Longfellow had concluded his poem. As has been shown, the very verses that were included in elegiac manner in the poem provided a revision of its narrative as a romantic tragedy in which the ship crashed on the rocks, to become a ruin and monument of sorts, despite the architect’s plans: the transformation of the poem by the addition of a heroic envoi invested it with an epic status, and David Schoen selected a poem of patriotic overtones to instill a similar monumental function intertwined Presidential and Constitutional identity with the figure of speech, even if he was not aware of this, reciting the envoi with breath breaking as if its recitation was a coded warning to Congress of the need to move on lest the ship of state be allowed to crash yet again. Schoen theatrically choked as if to express shared reverence for a frame of state authority, an Anglo poetics of global dominance, to be sure, that dignified the form of government, more than Longfellow’s own abolitionist convictions might suggest.

Schoen’s voice patriotically cracked as he read the poetic imprecation to “Sail on, O Ship of State!/Sail on, O Union, strong and great!”as if the incitation of insurrection was but a Republican version of “Move On”–a group founded in response to the impeachment of Bill Clinton For Schoen recited the poem without any argument that this was for the benefit of humanity, but to mask for the venality of pursuing falsified claims of electoral fraud and a failure of electoral transparency. Schoen’s distorted reading of Longfellow’s verse was an appropriation of its jingoistic slogan as an imprecation to respect its sovereign structures even in the face of the incitation of violence, but was celebrated on The Daily Caller as if the recitation was a patriotic act. The neoclassical epic that Longfellow created had to end with a celebratory envoi, indeed, by the poetic logic of patriotic poetry, in good Horatian or Virgilian form, lest it provide a bad augur of the nation that seemed destined to fragment. While Longfellow was an ardent abolitionist, he wanted to modernize the image of the ship of state for a democracy, as “all the hopes for future years/ . . . hanging breathless on they fate,” removing the Horatian conceit of a ship from a philosopher king not to an architect, but to the principles of democratic government and the states that had contributed its wood; it seemed to invoke the precedent of design and foundational status to the Constitution lawyers claimed would void the prosecution’s case, preserving the craft despite evident and willful distortion of the franchise that President Trump had so actively promoted the morning of the riots.

There was no reference to how Trump had incited the crowd as he mobilized it by directing a barbaric level of anger to the US Congress’ joint session, and sanctioning the advance to the U.S. Capitol as an occasion to teach a lesson to the Vice President he described as able to forestall his electoral defeat. Trump was confident the crowed would act as his soldiers and reinforcements in a time of need. As defendant, Schoen invested the reading of the poem with patriotic intent. To be sure, he read against the poem’s grain, but, no doubt unconsciously, mirrored the revision of narrative thrust of a poem Longfellow had altered only at the final submission of galleys to his publisher, to end with an envoi of perseverance, in place romantic consideration of a tragic ending that sent the ship on rocky reefs due to a hurricane, trying to recast the prospect of conviction as a tragedy of state, as Longfellow called for endurance and devotion on which Schoen choked–“sail on, O UNION, strong and great!”–as if the need to transcend the rioters’ violence demanded by the logic of the poem, in ways that could almost seem to sanction their own sense of urgency.

2. Longfellow was.a poet of “America First” long before the term had been coined as a slogan for the 2016 Presidential election. To be sure, as the collective composite enshrined the poet in a pantheon of the nation in a new Athens, Longfellow carefully fashioned his status as an American poet, promising in Hiawatha, a later epic that cobbled Ojibwe languages to fashion the pristine native world that he had imagined as the Acadian setting of Evangeline, a new Edda for the new nation, in a creole of Native American languages of his own creation in trochaic trimeter. As if to map the nation in verse, he perpetuated the myth of the extinction of indigenous culture that established him as a “White Poet” able to meld indigenous and Christian cultures in an American epic emulating indigenous cadences, and champions the Anglicization and conversion of indigenous culture at its close. The canonic role of Longfellow as a Poet of Whiteness recalled the white poetics in seeking guidance from words that predated the Civil War, and became part of a pantheon of White Poets of America, indeed, whose “faith” in an architect’s design seemed to play to Trump’s base as an argument, was probably provided to Schoen as a theatrical closing argument between a final appeal or proof.

There was an element of the perverse in invoking “the poet Longfellow” to defend a non-literate President, who found defense not in law but a pre-Civil War poetics. The lawyer’s poetic performance was perversely exaggerated as it appealed to emotions of his audience, in the very room where the insurrection had occurred, as if to turn back the tide of history by an appeal to patriotic principles that assumed the ship was stable and afloat. Schoen intimated suggested the video show that featured breaking of windows and light fixtures by those who marauded the Capitol they entered in military garb to destabilize the “ship of state” Greek philosophers assigned exclusively to philosopher kings was but an aberration, and that the trust in founding principles would outlast the perils of rocky shoals that were narrowly averted, but openly incited and provoked against the hall of state where he spoke.

As Longfellow extolled he collective faith in the Master builder’s plan, extolling the plan by which the ship of state was built from timbers from across the new continent, and the benefits the ship would bring to the globe–but a ore recognizably Anglo poetics of mastery of the ship’s course, Schoen broke up in closing argument, as if overcome with emotion in concluding his statement–designed to be rebroadcast in clips on the nightly news, if not inspire faith in the party of the impeached President, that the ship was a work of good that would endure. The verses he credited to “the poet Longfellow” of course elided the role of mercantile expansion in appropriating foreign goods, even if he broadcast his abolitionist convictions: the poem grew canonic as it was recited in public for theatrical audiences as an inspiration reverence to the collective project at stunning odds with the sort of separatism of a mob wanting its voice to “not be silenced,” who seemed incited to reject the illusory possibility that seemed to disappear that morning–but never existed–of staying the orderly transition of power.

Longfellow’s canonic poem was an elevation of nation in clear classical style, as the ship of state image of national perseverance before distress that became a canonic image of nation, perversely in Schoen’s closing argument, to dispatch all memory of the violent entry of the U.S. Capitol by the image of a “noble ship” of “goodly frame,” of select “cedar of Maine and Georgia pine,” wood from the banks of the Roanoke, to endure whirlwinds as it circumnavigates the globe to Madagascar and the Fortunate Isles. To place the nation with confidence on a global map, Longfellow shifted the mercantile aims of extracting wealth from overseas to global benefit of the ship–“the entire world “hanging on thy fate”–naturalizing freight ships’ role to to plunder global communities, ferrying “raw” materials to expropriate wealth, as a global benefit of uniting the world commercially in routes of mercantile exchange. If Schoen appealed to national transcendence, the assault on the Capitol was far from a disturbance, mistaken for the flapping of a sail or waves against the hull of the ship, but a real and present danger to the ship of state.

The intimation that intensified national divides might invite Senators to doubt that demanded reverence for the sacred form was less in keeping with Longfellow’s hope that “foul befall the traitor’s hand/That would loose one bolt, or break one band/Of this gallant ship or this goodly land,”lest accusations of incitation lead to a conviction that would assault the structure of government.

Trump’s lawyer did his best to channel the theatrical declamation of the map of the nation in Longfellow’s concluding lines to elevate sentiment to defend the President–its architect?–as if the trial would be an offense to the very work of state, raising the monument of poetry to the level of the monument of the capitol building, drafted in 1793 as a classical temple whose chambers were inviolate and sacred, rather than the mob who had inhabited the structure, and sought to wrest authority from its officials.

But the poem was a masquerade for the venality of inviting license of the protestors to attempt to overturn the electoral vote. Longfellow wrote the pome in 1849, with little sense of the endurance of the union, until he added in last-minute changes to the proof a distinctly different ending of the ship’s enduring fortune, that made the poem so canonical to America in its poetic claims. But the logic of its recitation had far less to do with Longfellow’s intent than political sloganeering–and the need for a mask of sovereign unity after the whirlwind of the Capitol riots that had occurred in the chambers Trump was bing tried. The attempt to invoke a historical prospect in closing the President’s defense against charges he incited the mob was almost perverse conclusion to how Trump summoned supporters on social media to interrupt the workings of government –the very sort of mob the Founders refused to see as endemic to democracy but recognized as perilous to the Republic. For the halting hat concluded a defense of Donald J. Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, choking at the prospect of a national shipwreck conviction might portend, obscured the very violence of the incitation to proceed the the house of government to overturn the franchise on January 6.

Perhaps Schoen sought to evoke the reading of the poem by Abraham Lincoln on the verge of Civil War, describing the accusation of inflaming the mob as the dire national consequences of pursuing impeachment for revenge–or perhaps a Trump ally had suggested the canonic poem of patriotism. Longfellow wrote with fear for the future of the Republic–an earlier version had closed with the far grimmer version of the ship “Wrecked upon some treacherous rock,/Rotting in some loathsome dock“–read against the mob that assaulted the seat government seemed to do violence to Longfellow’s use of the ancient image of the ship of state was violently readopted to present the trial as internecine squabbles among political parties, more than the survival of a government of laws. The “righting” of the ship by interrupting the due course of electoral certification was designed to replace one vision of the nation with another, under the misguided assertion that the voices of Trump supporters were indeed silenced or ignored. But in an era where the purple states seem disappeared, the crisis of the presentation of political or ideological unity was far less apparent than the apparent depth of fractures in the national vote, and the state senators were acting as representatives.

If the crowed that entered the U.S. Capitol acted like a lynching mob seeking apprehension and execution of legislators in an improvised court of popular law that echoed the separatist Klansmen, the myth of a white nationalism emerged in the specter of a lynching of public officials–perhaps lifted from neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce’s dystopian fictional overthrow of a government for being traitors to their race, in the The Turner Diaries, as a retributive measure against traitorous legislators. The prediction of a coming violent conflict of Civil War was long a given in alt right media that asked only “how, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” and predicted the nation was “nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968,” the brimming tensions of which were enacted in the 2019 cartographic meme predicting victory in a coming civil war.

Trump had long predicted that politics were growing increasingly viscious by telling social media followers the “tough people” on his side would bode badly for violent leftists–“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough–until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad.” The multiplication of scenarios of violent conflict of apocalyptic tenor seemed early modern, blown as it was to historical proportions of a battle of crusaders, or of historical conflicts of east and west, with the possibility of a race war, nuclear conflagration, that had magnified fears of disaster that gave a special prominence to migration: as the nation fought memory wars between the 1618 project pointing to the first arrival of slaves in North America as as foundational as 1776 Declaration of Independence, warned the director of the Claremont Institute, noting similarities to post-Civil War elections of 1864 to 2018–or 2020–Democratic victories in Congress would “prevent the President from building the wall and keep him tied up long enough for them to get their demographic transformation of America past the point of no return.” The result, he warned, “might well be game over for the regime of liberty,” the image of the neo-Nazi leader’s novel of a “Day of Rope” s designaated to mark the systematic execution of legislators who promoted programs of gun confiscations and a crackdown on racists lead to a campaign of terror, and its fetishization in alt right tropes, and fears that “firearms rights” might be removed.

3. The violence was long oin coming. Trump was long enamored of architectural symbols of authority, and had used his office to mandate all future federal buildings henceforth would hewed exclusively to neoclassical architectural precepts, all but abandoned by Trump Properties, until the Washington Post Office was converted to prime luxury hotel turf. But fear and shock were central to the storming of the Capitol after the conclusion of what was promoted as a time to culminate the collective energy generated of mass-identity at Trump mass rallies, the staged events of sanctioning violence against those demonized as outsiders tot he project to Make America Great Again, whose target could only be the neoclassical U.S. Capitol whose Palladian dome loomed over the event, an image of sovereignty that had been planned by an open call for designs of stateliness to create an authority worthy of the Republic, but In closing argument, the featuring of a plea for national unity was lawyerly recitation hope national transcendence of the incitation of violence by the outgoing President, hoping to stave off disgrace.

Is it a coincidence that the Trump Presidency had openly targeted ancient sites as targets of destruction, from the city of Palmyra to Iranian cultural monuments, but threatened deliberate violate international law by targeting cultural monuments as official policy? The numerological threat of aggressive bombing that President Trump issued would have targeted 54 cultural monuments in Iran–from Persepolis to Golestan Palace in Tehran to Yazd to historical sites of worship as the the Sheikh Loftollah Mosque in Isfahan or Pink Mosque in Shiraz–a destruction of monuments ostensibly to “avenge” each of the 54 American held in the American embassy-none of whom were killed-provoked international outcry that led DoD to backtrack by issuing a commitment to “follow the laws of armed conflict.” Trump’s bluster recalled nothing so much as Nazi propagandist Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, boasting that the German tourist guides of Karl Baedeker would provide, in a fillip intimating the interface of superior German cultural authority and the technical precision of aerial delivery of incendiary bombs by the German Luftwaffe, as they would hit “every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide” in the Spring of 1942. Only a global outcry produced a de-escalation of a rhetoric of wonton monumental destruction.

.As Trump’s lawyer, Schoen sought to channel such theatrical traditions of public declamation, as if in place of offering any exculpatory proof, in an overtly staged gambit to elevate national sentiment to defend the President–its architect?–as if the trial would offend the work of state. Longfellow wrote in an age where epic and ode provided a national form of mapping, replete with toponymic content of national unity as Vergil, Pindar or Horace, but transferring the muse to American shores; he had edited his own compilation of poetry on places that included how Dante famously evoked the fate of his native Italy as a “home of woe/ship without pilot, in an ocean wild” in the translation Longfellow edited–as W.S. Merwin render “a ship with no pilot in the great tempest”–and seems to have placed the building of the ship as a prayer for reslience in the face of Civil War, in which he had sided with Free Soiler movement on restricting enslavement, and abolitionism–but now found his work a slogan of burying evidence of a crime, as it was recast as a monument–perhaps replacing the Capitol itself–of foundational status in the Republic as a faith in national mission akin to Trump’s own insistence on keeping strong in the face of danger on the Ellipse, as if it was as central to the national tradition as L’Enfant had placed the Capitol building at the heart of the nation’s Capitol–and might replace it.

But in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, all gloves seem to have been pulled off by the men and women in combat gear who scaled its walls on January 6, targeting the domed cultural center that L’Enfant placed at the center of his plan for the American capitol.

Perhaps the very architecture of the state Stephen Hallot had designed in 1793 seemed to these rioters a removed site for the foisting of results of an election that had lacked sufficient transparency, and even infringed on state jurisdictions’ sovereignty, no longer tied so closely to the very red states that had shown their dedication to patriotic identity.

For the online call to assemble on January 6 was the announced day that the unheard would materialize from the regions of Red States on the Capitol, to make themselves heard and to interrupt the counting of electors and the mechanics of sovereignty, as they replaced the once most mundane delegation of sovereignty by electoral delegates in the inner sanctum of democracy? The centrality of the overturning or everting of the seat of power is recognized in the urgency of using the domed building of the U.S. Capitol to call for monitoring domestic terrorist operations.

4. The mob formed in response to escalating fears of the mobs of the undocumented migrants that in caravans were prophesied to overwhelm the sovereign borders of the state, whose arrival was mapped as ineluctable catastrophe in memes as overwhelming the border by tide, river, or flow that plot the migration of 185 million undocumented entering ports of entry in 2016 dehumanized to an “immigrant flow” of arrows or water-based metaphors of an unstoppable movements of population northward–

For as President, Trump had dramatically escalated apprehensions at the border as a sort of personal mission to make American “safe” had opened the U.S. Capitol to an invasion far more destabilizing to the rule of law that would effectively destabilize the scrim of national identity and “homeland” security.

As we watched the mobs entering the Capitol grounds on television, the threat to sovereign identity and security that the mob of rioters posed seemed both more dangerously destabilizing and far more challenging to map as a sovereign threat. Had the invocation of the specter from across the border led law enforcement to take their eye off the ball? We were all disoriented by the spectacle. The sacred defense of the border cast the territory as the primary threat to national security, but the Capitol seemed left unguarded to the costumed and rampaging mobs holding improvised weapons, backpacks with explosives and munitions, as they entered the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, having been urged to “Fight like hell” if they wanted to have a country, and urged this march was a battle to defend the nation’s existence, not against foreign threats of a transnational character, but from inner threats that would destroy the nation that Trump had for years placed at its borders, not within the nation or in political discourse.

The Alexandrian poet Cavafy described the moment of crisis of the toga-wearing Senators without reason to mystify the public with eloquent speeches. Senators seemed to loose reason to stop the crowds that had assembled to protest the certification of electoral votes from entering the U.S. Capitol, and running rampant through its halls to interrupt the course of the ship of state as it moved in stately fashion from one Presidency to the next. These mobs were not technically barbarians sacking a city of laws, as Visigoths, overthrowing Rome, even if they were dressed the parts, but rejected business as usual and what they saw as the suspension of laws and were told abandoned the constitution: they were invited from across the nation, rather than streams migrating from beyond its borders, seeking to uphold its laws; they were holding American flags, in a chaotic jumble of iconography, desparate to defend their sense of a nation whose integrity was being endangered by the electoral process.

Cavafy, who was immersed in history and historical decline, evoked the drama of expecting the announced arrival of barbarians to overthrow government, leaving senators and lawgivers about to lay down their work as the “barbarians are coming today”–and the coming realization, as they fail to arrive, and as there are, in fact, no barbarians any more, a shocked realization that without the barbarians there is no useful solution sense of the rationale of government. Trump had claimed to the crowd that the replacement of his “America First” policy would fail to protect the nation in the future, and the audience, animated by fears of protecting the nation, moving across the perimeter of the Capitol was in ways the clear mirror image of the migrants who Trump had been able to keep out of the nation to “protect our Country” by enhanced border security. Trump had spurred their action, recalling the unspoken words of his repeated claims we must secure the nation’s borders, lest we cease to be a nation, by foregrounding the sacred border wall: the fears of the arrival of migrants who would compromise national sovereignty were viewed as moving almost ineluctably to the border, but mapped in metaphorical terms as a “tide” that transcended their actual routes of travel, but that posed a challenge to sovereignty and national purity in “migrant caravans” expanded the routes of undocumented immigrants.

If the early maps of the invading migrations of barbarians into the Roman Empire and city of Rome announced the arrival by arrows that portended the feared arrival of the inhabitants who lived on the edges of the known world in antiquity–Scythians, Dacians, Goths–

–those who arrived from “silenced” red states, familiar with the show of power of militia at Trump rallies in previous months, felt that they were outside the world that was known and represented by the acting government in process of certifying the electors. While the “shoring up” of the nation by secure borders served to sanction Trump’s call for deportation and anti-immigrant violence in 2015-16, new fears of undocumented migrants materialized as a threat to the very notion of a nation as sanctioning violence against undocumented minorities: by sanctioning violence to prevent the fear of the loss of nation. Indeed, Donald Trump’s public address was a bookend to Trump’s promises to “stop illegal immigration” and to fortify the border.

Trump mesmerizingly claimed escalating “illegal” immigration were ravaging the nation, elevating need to “make America safe again,” demonizing the threat of immigration, increasing the policing of the southern border, encouraging citizens’ arrests to help police and the Department of Homeland Security, which solicited applications to teach citizens their abilities to detain undocumented immigrants. The Trump administration openly accorded legitimacy to archaic legal traditions of posse comitatus as a basis for exercising white privilege on the southern border and the white imagination in recent years–and the mob seemed to be enacting a similar desire to prevent the “breach of peace” lest the borders of the known world, in nineteenth century fantasies which used claims of objectivity to present a collapse of the ur-nation of Rome in an “age of migrations” that was elided with globalization–opening floodgates to outsiders–Huns, Scythians, Bactriians from the borders of the known world–

–and positing a fear of “mutual penetration” that might be seen most likely as one of “contamination” and taboo. If Ferdinand Lot had reprinted his work in August 1945 with a preface stating that even at the very start of World War II, he had chosen not to modify any part of the conclusions or results of his synthetic essay, but impartially and objectively recount the invasion across Roman borders of barbarians without fear of German censorship but to merit the dignity of the French tongue, the fears of non-English speaking migrants animated many of the white protestors who arrived at the U.S. Capitol, waving flags to designate their own identities.

Trump had channeled such rhetoric when he lamented the threat to overturn the defenses on our boundaries, as he addressed the “amazing patriots” he saw as the protectors of liberty, affirming “we are the greatest and we are headed and were headed in the right direction,” as he assured them he would advance to the U.S. Capitol with them to defend the nation’s sacred principles, before he ducked into a waiting limousine. Trump boasted on July 4, 2020 that he had deployed law enforcement to protect monuments, arrest the rioters who defaced them, and pledged Mt. Rushmore would itself “never be desecrated and never be defamed,” but left the Capitol open to invasion on January 6, 2021.

Trump pledged at Mt Rushmore although the “monument” he claimed sacred to the nation was planned as a tourist attraction on land sacred to Lakota Sioux who had called the six granite pillars on the mountain the Six Grandfathers, was apparent; “Mt. Rushmore” was indeed only officially recognized as its name in 1930, six years after the carvings originally planned for The Needles were explored as a site for the monument. But the license of the crowd that approached the Capitol seemed the result of the baiting of the crowds that Trump had, as candidate, defined his unique relation to, and his power over; the relation of Trump to the crowds that assembled to at rallies like that at Mt. Rushmore gained a new height of violence as a mob, reaching an explosive discharge, in the terms of Elias Canetti, who sought argued the power of crowds have gained since the French Revolution and over the twentieth century.

This crowd crossed into the Capitol to prevent the future crossing of borders by greater threats to themselves as individuals, moving as a group with license to abandon. The barbarians that left the Ellipse responded to the fears of the collectivity of the nation being open once more to assault, not only to transnational cartels, but to the threat that the government might be dismantling border security apparatus in certifying a fraudulent election. The idea was maddening. These threats were magnified as the crowd was sourced in chat groups, promoted in multiple Facebook groups, where, in hours after the refusal to accept the results of the U.S. Presidential election had been called in several states, verb tenses became unhinged from reality in the waning hours of election night, as what would be the largest-growing Facebook groups ever in the history of the platform grew online, a virtual crowd, not able, as migrants, to be tracked by GPS or viewed as puncturing our borders, but rather aimed at puncturing sovereignty from within: the boundaries of states were less important know, despite threats of migrants overwhelming those fortified border check-points by rushing them en masse, already assembled before the sun rose to pierce the perimeter of the Capitol as they were given permission to do so, by streaming down the Mall, down Constitution Avenue, down Pennsylvania Avenue, urged “we’re going to have to fight much harder” to reverse how “traitors” in the U.S. Senate were betraying the constitution and adopt rigged electoral maps.

These barbarians advanced not on the edges of empire, on historical routes by which they traveled for over two thousand miles, drawn by economic circumstances and unsustainable wealth disparities–

–but to defend came to express their first amendment rights, and defend second amendment “freedoms” of gun ownership and possession, and to target the betrayals in the halls of Congress as they had come to flout protocols of social distancing and mask-wearing. Flouting normal behavior was the ethos of the final two-day Trump rally that promised the culmination of the liberties and license promised by Trump’s perpetual candidacy, in red MAGA caps and cowboy hats, carrying flags that declared their allegiance to an imagined America, anticipating the moment when Trump would himself assure the assembled crowd, “We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you–we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down . . . we’re going to walk down to the Capitol,” hypnotically energizing the crowd, “You have to show strength–you have to be strong.”

The mobs that assembled, sourced over social media, were not the barbarians of whom we had been repeatedly warned as arriving from without borders, to be sure. The real national emergency was not the national emergency that Trump had long described, as coming from the wall, but occurred as the walls of the government were themselves unprotected, dissuaded from amplifying security, perhaps by the very man who had been mapping the national security threat from beyond our borders in such sombre tones. They proceeded to attack institutions of representational government and march onto federal property, to prevent the certification of electoral votes take the Presidency from Donald Trump. The false sense of equality that Trump bestowed on these white Americans as both equal to him, and allowed by him to act out the sense of personal offense he felt at the certification of electoral votes did not need a rationale or require a logic: the role Canetti gave to the moment of discharge as that privileged moment when all social distances or loosened– “when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal”–and investing them as true patriots, who embodied his America. They were granted license to defend a nation betrayed by discredited representatives, haunted by fears of the dangers of enemies entering the nation.

The true national emergency was the fear of a sense of voting insecurity, and the lack of consensus in the electoral system. They came on March for Trump busses from across its states, carrying not their belongings but the sense of resentment and anger nurtured on the apparently unjust maps of electoral votes, to stall consensus about the end of Donald Trump’s presidency–then were a crowd that had been energized and nurtured on social media, at Trump rallies, and in chat rooms that bewailed the fear of a loss of liberties. The crowd was assembled to realize the Constitutional Crisis that Trump supporters had insisted began on December 15, when the electors met to assign votes to Joe Biden, provoking the very crisis in government that Trump by asserting that the very legality of the current election was compromised, and no winner could indeed be decided who was not under a cloud of illegitimacy. The Disputed Presidency that would later be asserted by pro-Trump plaintiffs in coming weeks would be prevented by a putsch, an auto-golpe in which the base of Trump was invite, encouraged to participate in a ‘march’ to the Capitol that would contest the legitimacy of certifying the electoral vote–a day of wrath that would restore direct participation in democracy that had been so distorted.

Their routes were longer, and were not conducted on foot–but these barbarians were truly at the gate, if they didn’t come as vectors that wold pierce our borders. They were, rather, crowds that were sourced on social media, in reaction to the threats of regime change that would come by elections, by the creation of consensus.

Rather than arriving from outside our frontiers, as we had been warned, this invasion came from within, by those who ostensibly sought to set the Empire right, rather as an invasion in the sort of ur-maps of invasion and historical decline that were framed in the elegant color-coded historical maps of the post-Napoleonic July Monarchy, that looked back on the invasions that eroded political stability.

They came to change a regime, however, that they saw as false, and channeled a mythological past of the defense of the constitution,–more than crossing from “barbarian” lands, to destroy a vision of empire that had promised civilization to the world, they arrived from the red states to the center of corruption in Washington, DC, hoping to stop the change of government, and change the course of history by moving across the inaugural scaffolding that had already been set up for the transition of power, tearing down fencing and barriers that had separated them from a citadel of governance.

5. The leader of the crowd who had come to love them called on the assembled crowd to defend him against the apparatus of power as they accepted Trump’s dissimulation as not a ringleader or a politician, or tactician, but rather the long-suffering subject of attack. Always intent to identify himself with his audience, the grievances Trump expressed with the electoral system, and the apparatus of voting machines or mail-in ballots as a personal compromise of his role as President, transformed the crowd’s motivation from adulation of the President to hostile attack. The timing of the moment of entrance onto federal property and into the halls of Congress were not happenstance, as has been noted, but coincided with Mike Pence’s refusal to realize the extent to which “they’ve rigged it like they’ve never rigged it before,” to “do the right thing, because Mike Pence can do the right thing,” “because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” but, as he tweeted after leaving the stage, “Mike Pence doesn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution,” as he had refused to interrupt the certification of electors. The permission to proceed to the Capitol, to absorb Trump’s own sense of offense, and to prevent the certification, existed as an unmasking Pence as a traitor, and in a moment of unmasking electrify the crowd, if by confirming his own insecurities about Pence, his long time ally, as if he has unmasked Pence’s venality.

The crowd, which continued to be urged on by provocateurs with megaphones atop cars, collectively searched for lawmakers, not legal recognition or asylum, and placed liberty at peril. The actual seizure of the U.S. Capitol was an inside job, utterly unlike the visions of invasions threatened during a series of National Emergencies in recent years–from the migrant caravans, enabled by the “humanitarian visas” given out by the Mexican government, that had made it so urgent to “fix” America’s immigration laws–a pedestrian pilgrimage on a sacred calendar that had necessitated the first $1 Billion to be transferred from the Department of Defense to remedy “critical readiness issues facing our military” as the caravans “thumbed their noses at our drug and immigration laws” as they advanced in four massive caravans “in an effort to enter the US” and threatened to breach borders. If individual psychology cannot explain the motivations of Trump supporters in 2016, the regressive quality of rallies tapped a sense of the collective interests and needs that transcended the individual needs, Freud had argued, based on infatuation with the leader who provoked the crowd: in Canetti’s attempt to “grab the twentieth century by the throat,” the moment of panic that released the crowd lay in the realization that it had no protection as a crowd, that the crowed may not be long for this world, as much as the leader, and faces a threat that even targets its bonds of solidarity: the irrational fear of the opening of borders, and threats that would be impossible to stand down alone–but that can only be resolved by taking power into their own hands, and losing themselves in the permission given to a collectivity to prevent their immobilization by moving suddenly to overturn how a mundane political practice was about to enshrine a vision of power asymmetry they could no longer tolerate.

The sense of greatness of the crowd was correspondingly magnified. For Trump gave the crowd the license to attack to restore the gravity of this offense, not through words, so much as the sense that Pence didn’t want to Make America Great Again. The slogan was of course never about making America great for everyone, but allowing an America of pure self-interest to exist: as Canetti argued that all language worked as a form of masking and baiting, his language was not clear, but a claim to recover greatness that the secessionist banners of the Lost Cause announced as a new crusade. They were given license to Make America Great Again, if “America” was never a discussion of all members of the nation, but a category that permitted itself to be filled by the preservation of self-interest, and indeed the exclusion of all–unemployed; undocumented; homeless; unfamiliar–who were foreign to it.

6. As the motley group of protestors and MAGA-heads headed the Mall toward the Capitol, they were empowered and emboldened by a sense of urgency and license, external dangers as migrants or the undocumented merged with internal dangers as the audience listened on the Ellipse, gaining coherence and purpose as it became where the greatest threat to the nation lay. They had been energized by the need to defend similarly abstract ideals–“our Country and our Constitution”–animated by being full of aggrievement at the prospect of electoral loss. Directing attention at the new scene of electoral loss–the U.S. Capitol–the order of government becomes the target of attention and the destination of the crowd, as it moves past the scaffolding for the Inaugural platforms and proceeded to the site where Mike Pence had failed to unseat electors, seeking to illustrate their patriotism, and to perpetuate the absolute power of Trump as President, allowing him to entertain the ability to transcend his office and the conventions of the transition of power, enabling to claim the honorific that he only part jokingly felt himself entitled of President for Life, half-way through his term, in 2018, at Mar-a-Lago telling Republican donors he would “maybe . . . have to give that a shot someday,” as if planting the seed to claim by April 2019 his base may well just “demand that I stay longer” as President or his term as President might be extended to “at least for ten to fourteen years.”

The audience assembled on the Ellipse became a crowd–and a violent mob–as it reached what Elias Canetti would call its “discharge” and explosion in his study of the inner movements of crowds, in magnum opus, Crowds and Power. President Trump had fired up the crowd’s energy and sense of patriotism, in ways that evoke how Canetti described the relation of authoritarian leaders to crowds, and the role of crowds since the French Revolution. He did so by baiting them, invoking dangers to the nation that a change in administration might bring, and the sense that all he had accomplished in his presidency might fade, and the marauding mobs of antifa that might endanger the cities of the future in the United States: Trump evoked specters of violence, oddly prefiguring what was about to unfold, in threats trans-border migration posed as an illegal presence he elided the illegality of canard of 2016–“if we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country because it’s illegal when the votes are illegal when the way they got there is illegal when the states that vote are given false and fraudulent information”–channeling the baseless fears stoked in 2016 of a rigged election due to illegal migrants, and the need for strong border security.

The crowds that had demonstrated their patriotism all summer long in the election that Trump had criss-crossed the country and aides assured the base that pollsters were making the same mistake of under-estimating rural votes, holding as many pre-election rallies as he could in Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, assuring audiences he would win. “Save America” rallies had since Election Day accelerated in an unending campaign, assembling crowds in need of direction, he took pleasure in incessantly insisting he had won the election, seeking “stay on presidential” before throngs of white supporters.