THE JANUARY 6 ATTACK on the US Capitol, like Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, was both the culmination of long-building trends and a beginning, the opening salvo in an insurrectionist attack on American democracy: a declaration of their civil war.
The army of insurrectionists who followed Donald Trump’s bidding on January 6 had been cultivated and gradually assembled by Trump during his four years in office—and it has remained fanatically committed to his grand goal of displacing liberal democracy with authoritarian one-party rule since.
Trump’s army had five major components:
• The “Patriot” movement—its primary nexus—with its Oath Keepers and its Three Percent militias;
• The Proud Boys and their associated neofascist street brawlers;
• White nationalists, Christian nationalists, and accelerationists, all fueled by a shared militant bigotry;
• The conspiracists, particularly the authoritarian QAnon conspiracy cult and Alex Jones’s far-right Infowars operation;
• Their mainstream Republican enablers, notably key members of Congress who encouraged Trump’s schemes, amplified them, and inflamed the angry paranoia of the mob that attacked the Capitol, as well as the myriad right-wing pundits and media operations who normalized the far-right extremists and then, after the insurrection, defended, deflected, and excused the violence that day, eventually gaslighting the public by insisting that the insurrectionists had been gulled into committing crimes by the “Deep State,” or alternatively that it was all “legitimate political discourse.”
There is a significant crossover among these components—nearly all Patriots, Proud Boys, and white nationalists subscribe to the conspiracy theories peddled by Jones and others, for instance—but they are all united in their authoritarian devotion to Trump.
All five of these components were present January 6. All five have continued since then to wage their war not just in defense of Trump but on a broad range of American democratic institutions—from voting rights to public education to women’s privacy rights—as well as on the health and well-being of the nation generally—including its struggle to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, worsened exponentially by the American right’s conspiracism-fueled refusal to vaccinate or accept requirements to do so, as well as through outright attacks on the ability of its economy to function through far-right truckers’ protests that briefly shut down the nation’s supply chains.
Trump cultivated this army carefully even before his first day in office: his policy proposals, along with the unrepentant bigotry with which he promoted them (particularly on immigration), and his open embrace of a conspiracist politics that reveled in violent rhetoric attracted right-wing extremists to his campaign beginning in 2015, and that support not only continued throughout his presidency but expanded and metastacized, so that formerly ordinary conservative Republicans became radicalized MAGA fanatics and QAnon cultists—in massive numbers.
Most voluminously, Trump—who was interviewed by Jones on his Infowars program, showering the conspiracism maestro with fulsome praise, during the 2015–16 campaign—trafficked in a broad array of right-wing conspiracy theories, many of them concocted by Jones.[1] His political career was built on his promotion of the racist theory that Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate was illegitimate, which he had embraced in 2011.[2] He kept going avidly even after he won election, from promoting the suggestion that climate change was a “Chinese hoax” to the belief that vaccinations cause autism in children to his insistence that “voter fraud” cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election—all theories that gained fresh life in slightly revised forms in 2020.
As Philip Bump observed in The Washington Post: “Trump is the first president in modern history to make the embrace and propagation of conspiracy theories a central component of his administration.”[3]
Similarly, at every turn throughout his presidency, Trump winked and nodded at white nationalists and other extremists. His most infamous moment in this regard occurred in August 2017, when he normalized the chanting alt-right marchers at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—at which a neo-Nazi murdered an anti-fascist and injured over a dozen more by ramming his car into a crowd of them—by describing “some of them” as “very fine people.”
Asked to condemn far-right street brawlers like the Proud Boys during his only debate with Joe Biden in 2020, he instead proudly encouraged them: “Proud Boys—stand back and stand by,” he said, as though he were delivering them orders. And as things turned out, he was.
Throughout his tenure, he insisted that the “tough” element among his supporters would come to his defense—seemingly in violent ways. At one rally in September 2018, amid the investigations that ultimately led to his first impeachment, Trump told the crowd that his opponents were “lucky that we’re peaceful,“ adding: ”Law enforcement, military, construction workers, Bikers for Trump…They travel all over the country…They’ve been great. But these are tough people…But they’re peaceful people, and Antifa and all—they’d better hope they stay that way.“[4]
As the House was debating his impeachment, Trump quoted far-right pastor Robert Jeffress in a tweet, who said on Fox News: “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Over the next several days, he continued in the same vein, calling the looming impeachment a “coup.”[5]
Trump’s tweet set the “Patriot” world aflame. “Civil War 2” trended on Twitter. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes chimed in: “This is the truth. This is where we are. We ARE on the verge of a HOT civil war. Like in 1859. That’s where we are.”
This was resurrected after Trump lost in 2020, when he claimed without evidence that Democrats had committed fraud to win. On December 19, he tweeted: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”[6]
Here was the green light to the would-be civil warriors. “On January 6, we find out whether we still have a constitutional republic,” one MAGA fanatic tweeted on New Year’s Eve. “If not, the revolution begins. I’d rather fight and die than live in a socialist society. Pretty sure 80 million Americans feel the same way.”[7]
Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Oath Keeper’s Florida chapter, boasted in mid-December:
Well we are ready for the rioters, this week I organized an alliance between Oath Keepers, Florida 3%ers, and Proud Boys. We have decided to work together to shut this shit down.
On December 26, Meggs messaged his cohorts that they were targeting January 6 for an “insurrection”: “Trumps staying in, he’s Gonna use the emergency broadcast system on cell phones to broadcast to the American people. Then he will claim the insurrection act.”
“That’s awesome,” someone replied. “Any idea when?”
“Next week,” Meggs answered, adding: “Then wait for the 6th when we are all in DC to insurrection.”[8]
A woman planning to attend posted a dramatic farewell on the pro-Trump message board TheDonald, shared widely on other social media platforms:
I told my Mom goodbye today. I said I had a good life and I have no kids, no husband. I told her I want it to be peaceful but if our “leaders” do the wrong thing and we have to storm the Capitol, I am going to do it…See you there, pedes, it will be the honor of my life to fight alongside you![9]
When the day itself arrived, they were ready. Some of them wore sweatshirts to the Stop the Steal rally spelling it out: “MAGA Civil War January 6, 2021.” When reporter Tess Owen of Vice asked a group of men wearing them if civil war was what they wanted, they answered firmly: “Yes!”[10]
On the right-wing platform Parler, “civil war” was already a hot topic—and as Trump spoke, it intensified. Mentions of the phrase “civil war” surged to nearly four times the level before it: “civil war” was used forty times in the hour before 12:15 p.m., when he began speaking; in the hour following, “civil war” mentions jumped to 156.[11]
When he told the crowd that “you’ll never take back our country with weakness,” a Parler user responded: “Time to fight. Civil war is upon us.” Another wrote: “We are going to have a civil war. Get ready!!”
THE PATRIOT MOVEMENT COMPRISED the largest singular movement-oriented bloc of people who besieged the Capitol on January 6, in part because it consists of a broad range of participants: independent survivalists, “constitutionalists,” and “sovereign citizens”; members of small, unaffiliated militia groups, as well as militias that identified with the Three Percent and Boogaloo; and members of the Oath Keepers, some of whom also were affiliated with other militia groups.
Two key things united the Patriots: first, the shared belief that a nefarious cabal of ultra-wealthy (and mostly Jewish) “globalists” secretly control America’s political system, its government, and its media; and on January 6, they believed this cabal had conspired to manipulate the 2020 election to dethrone Trump and install a “Communist” puppet in the person of Joe Biden.
The majority of the crowd that day—a classified estimate reported by Newsweek indicated that it may have been as large as 120,000 (while Trump and his followers subsequently claimed—without evidence, as always—that there were a million people in the crowd)—were simply devoted “Make America Great Again” fanatics who had turned out to listen to Trump speak at the Stop the Steal rally and then perhaps to join the protest at the Capitol.[12] But nearly all of the over seven hundred people later arrested for entering the Capitol (authorities estimate that as many as 1,200 people got inside) identified themselves in one form or another as “Patriots.”
Three days earlier, a collection of militia groups from various mid-Atlantic states met in the town of Quarryville, Pennsylvania, to prepare for the upcoming event. Its organizer, a New Jersey man named James Breheny, invited Stewart Rhodes via email, and gave him a briefing about their plans.[13]
“This will be the day we get our comms on point with multiple other patriot groups, share rally points etc. This one is important and I believe this is our last chance to organize before the show,” Breheny wrote. “This meeting will be for leaders only.” However, Rhodes did not attend.
Breheny—who later insisted that the meeting did not involve any plans to invade the Capitol—presented a PowerPoint slideshow to the group on “4th and 5th Generation Warfare.” It explained: “A resistance force to a larger, well equipped military force needs to be light and agile. We are likely not going to be able to compete with money, technology, numbers of troops.” The bulk of the presentation was focused on the technical aspects of communications for various kinds of users, recommending “radios for everyone.” It also noted: ”In order to train for possibilities, we need to stay under the radar of enforcement.”
In the meantime, Rhodes posted a callout on the Oath Keepers website on January 4: “It is CRITICAL that all patriots who can be in DC get to DC to stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup, through the massive vote fraud and related attacks on our Republic. We Oath Keepers are both honor-bound and eager to be there in strength to do our part.”[14]
Rhodes also had a brief meeting on January 5 with the then–national chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, who had been arrested the day before on charges related to his participation in the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner in Washington during the December 12 Stop the Steal protests. They met in the parking garage of the Phoenix Park Hotel, though, according to an Oath Keepers attorney, they only exchanged pleasantries and engaged in no planning.[15]
Another Patriot group involved in both the preplanning for January 6 and with coordinating action on the ground that day was 1st Amendment Praetorian (1AP). The group first drew attention in the summer of 2020 by providing “security” for various far-right pro-Trump events.[16]
The organization, founded in September 2020 by a former US Army staff sergeant named Robert Patrick Lewis, takes its name from the Roman imperial guard—notorious for its violent role in ancient authoritarian politics. Like the Oath Keepers, it has recruited veterans from the ranks of the military and law enforcement, calling itself a “volunteer force of military, Law Enforcement & intel agency community professionals standing up to protect the 1st Amendment and those who use it.”
Lewis tweeted that 1AP would protect Trump supporters from harassment at his rallies, claiming they would safeguard free speech rights from “tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups.”
The group’s members appear to have been stationed outside the Capitol on January 6, while its core members—including Lewis—were huddled with Trump’s “command center” inside the Willard Hotel, coordinating with administration insiders such as Michael Flynn and other Stop the Steal figures. These meetings had been in session since at least January 4, the day that 1AP’s Twitter account posted: “There may be some young National Guard captains facing some very, very tough choices in the next 48 hours.”
Lewis had also spoken the night before the insurrection at the pro-Trump Rally to Revival at Freedom Plaza, where he told the crowd they should not be “intimidated” by the “enemy at the gates.”
On January 6, he was inside the Willard while the siege was underway. Shortly after the Capitol was breached, he tweeted: “Today is the day the true battles begin.” Two hours later, while the mob was still inside, he added: “The cost of Truth is Pain. The greater the Truth, the greater the potential for pain.”[17]
The Oath Keepers, meanwhile, were preoccupied with a different kind of logistics: the paramilitary kind. Central to Rhodes’s scheme was the quick reaction force (QRF) he had mentioned on Infowars—teams of armed men prepared to come to the city to back up their fellow Oath Keepers in the event of violence. Rhodes had chosen the Comfort Inn Ballston in Arlington, Virginia—a fifteen-minute drive to the US Capitol—as their “base of operations.”[18]
So, on the eve of the insurrection, Oath Keepers were seen at the hotel trundling guns and ammunition stored inside crates and other containers into designated storage rooms on luggage carts. The plan was to have men ready to transport the weapons and ammo cache into D.C. when they received a signal. The crates included a thirty-day supply of food in the event their plans went sideways and they found themselves in an armed standoff. The QRF plan even included having boats on the Virginia side of the Potomac River ready to transport guns to the Capitol in a pinch.
The next morning, the Oath Keepers rose early and headed into Washington to attend the Stop the Steal rally at the Ellipse and hear Trump speak. Several of them, including Rhodes, were backstage. Six Oath Keepers had been assigned as the personal security detail for longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. Stone, who was part of the group of schemers in Trump’s “War Room” in the Willard Hotel—one block away from the White House and the Ellipse—was captured on video with the men outside the Willard that morning. He had promised his followers on social media that he would make a speech near the Capitol, but he never appeared, and claimed he had remained at the hotel the entire time.[19]
His security detail, however, did not.
At about 12:50 p.m., while Trump was still speaking, a cluster of angry MAGA fanatics—led by a claque of Proud Boys—showed up at one of the barricades on the perimeter of the Capitol grounds on its west side, which faces toward the National Mall. They attacked the five Capitol police officers manning the barricade and broke it down, forcing the police to retreat, leaving an opening for the gathering mob to rush into. The other entrance to the area was similarly attacked and opened.
Soon, the large sloping lawn leading from the perimeter to the Capitol itself was full of red-hatted, flag-waving Trump fans, all surging toward the barricades that had been erected around the building. The mob featured a hodgepodge of far-right extremists: white nationalists waving Pepe the Frog and Kekistan banners, Christian nationalists waving their “An Appeal to Heaven” banners, and QAnon cultists ranting about pedophiles—but most of all, hundreds of Patriots bearing their Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and wearing Three Percent militia and Boogaloo patches.
Stewart Rhodes appears to have been among them, but mostly seems to have been hanging back and observing. As hundreds of people began battling police on those lines, hitting them with poles and baseball bats and spraying them with mace, Rhodes texted with his team back at the Ellipse. His attorneys later claimed that he was waiting outside, communicating with a contact from the White House, waiting for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and give them the green light to proceed as the president’s own militia.
A rumor quickly popped up on the Oath Keepers’ leadership chat channel on Signal that “Antifa” had penetrated the Capitol. Rhodes nixed the rumor: “Nope. I’m right here. These are Patriots.” A little later, he added: “Pence is doing nothing. As I predicted…All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They’ve had enough.”
Another participant wondered: “Are they actually Patriots—not those who were going to go in disguise as Patriots and cause trouble [?]” Rhodes answered: “Actual Patriots. Pissed off patriots[.] Like the Sons of Liberty were pissed off patriots.”[20]
A team of Oath Keepers headed on the double toward the Capitol, including Meggs and Ohio-based militia leader Jessica Watkins, who had equipped themselves with communication devices and reinforced vests, helmets, goggles, and other tactical gear. This team had practiced creating a paramilitary stack formation for crowd situations. They planned to meet up with Rhodes on the Capitol’s eastern side, where the mob had broken down the barricades around the concrete plaza and similarly began pushing violently against police lines that had formed around the building’s entrances.
Back at the Willard, the team of six men guarding Roger Stone, led by Roberto Minuta and Joshua James, realized that they were missing out on the action. “Now we’re talking, that’s what I came up here for!” Minuta exclaimed. James directed the team to grab their gear to head to the Capitol. And they did so, at high speed—in golf carts. It was 2:00 p.m.[21]
The carts they had been using to escort Stone now became their high-speed transport from the Willard to the Capitol, careening down Pennsylvania, dodging pedestrians and police cars on the way. Minuta live streamed the whole thing on Facebook, commenting as he did so:
Patriots are storming the Capitol building; there’s violence against patriots by the D.C. police; so we’re en route in a grand theft auto golf-cart to the Capitol building right now…It’s going down, guys; it’s literally going down right now Patriots storming the Capitol building…Fucking war in the streets right now…Word is they got in the building…Let’s go.
Rhodes remained on the northeast side of the building, trying to get some kind of word from his White House contact. But the team led by Meggs, already in the east plaza, stopped and exchanged a ninety-seven-second phone call with him. The call took place at 2:32 p.m., prosecutors say, “as, Meggs, Watkins, and the rest of the stack embedded themselves at east side Capitol building double doors.”
Shortly afterward, at 2:41 p.m., the Oath Keepers stack led by Meggs and Watkins moved in disciplined formation up the steps of the Capitol through the mob, and then began leading efforts to team up and force their way past police. They forcibly entered the Capitol, pushing past police and causing severe damage to the Capitol doors. Rhodes posted a photograph of them, as well as a comment: “Trump better do his damn duty.”
The team, dubbed “Stack One,” then walked into the Rotunda—remaining in their formation the whole time—and exploring the building. They attempted to enter the Senate’s chambers, but were driven back by pepper spray. So then they shifted their focus to the House, and headed down the hallways in search of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s offices.
The second team—Stack Two—led by Minuta and James, had arrived near the Capitol at about 2:30 on its western side, then moved through the mob in formation, hands on one anothers’ shoulders, until they reached the east-side entrances at about 3:00 p.m. They began menacing and taunting the remaining police. James spotted an entry point on the central steps and ordered the team: “They’re going in over there, let’s go!” They eventually forced their way in through the Rotunda doors and began scrumming with police who were trying to guard the adjacent lobby.
Minuta screamed: “This is what’s bound to happen, just get out! Get out! Get these cops out! It’s our fuckin’ building! Get ’em out, get out!” James grabbed a Metropolitan police officer and screamed at him: “Get out of my Capitol! Get out! Get out of my Capitol!” He fell backward and then jumped back, yelling: “This is my fucking building! This is not yours! This is my Capitol!”
Afterward, when police descended on the building in large enough numbers to force out the intruders, the Oath Keepers team that had been inside the Capitol met up back in the east plaza with Rhodes. The green light had never come. The group then retreated back to their hotel rooms and continued chatting on Signal.
Rhodes texted the group: “Thousands of ticked off patriots spontaneously marched on the Capitol…You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Oath Keeper Ed Vallejo of Arizona, who had been left in charge of the QRF operation back in Arlington, answered: “We’ll be back to 6am to do it again. We got food for 30 days,” adding, “We have only [begun] to fight!”
Meggs chimed in, too: “We aren’t quitting!! We are reloading!!”
Rhodes added: “Patriots entering their own Capitol to send a message to the traitors is NOTHING compared to what’s coming.”
Later that evening, Rhodes continued to embrace his members’ actions in another social media post: “The founding generation Sons of Liberty stormed the mansion of the corrupt Royal Governor of Massachusetts, and trashed the place…We are actually in a far more deadly situation given the FACT that enemies foreign and domestic have subverted, infiltrated, and taken over near every single office and level of power in this nation,” he wrote. He did not call the siege an aberration from the Oath Keepers’s “mission” on January 6 until the next day.
THE PROUD BOYS WERE the first organized group of Trump supporters to attack the police barricades, and its members were among the first to breach the Capitol an hour or so later. They just weren’t quite as recognizable.
Eschewing their well-known uniforms—black Fred Perry polo shirts with yellow embroidery, bright red MAGA hats—the Proud Boys leadership had determined ahead of January 6 to show up “incognito” to avoid easy identification. National chairman Enrique Tarrio, posting on Parler, called on his cohorts to “turn out in record numbers” in D.C., but this time “with a twist”: “We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow. We will be incognito and we will be spread across downtown DC in smaller teams.”[22]
Joe Biggs, a national board member from Florida, also took to Parler to stress the necessity of “blending in”: “You won’t see us,” he wrote. “We are going to smell like you, move like you, and look like you. The only thing we’ll do that’s us is think like us! Jan 6th is gonna be epic.”
The men agreed to all wear bright hunter-orange caps or similarly colored armbands as a way of being able to mutually identify one another.
As the date approached, the Proud Boys’ preparations primarily unfolded on the encrypted platform Telegram, where the men used two channels for organizing their insurrection: a larger “Boots on the Ground” channel involving over sixty Proud Boys members present in Washington that day, and a smaller “New MOSD [Ministry of Self Defense]” channel evidently reserved for top leadership.
Their plans hit an obstacle when Tarrio was arrested by D.C. police when he landed at the airport on January 4 and charged with lighting the BLM banner afire during the December 12 protests. The Proud Boys’ leadership roles were promptly assumed by Biggs and two other national-board members: Ethan Nordean, a thirty-year-old street brawler from Auburn, Washington, and Zach Rehl, the thirty-five-year-old leader of the Proud Boys’ Philadelphia chapter. Nordean was given “war powers” to lead the men on the ground on January 6.
Shortly after the “Boots on the Ground” channel’s creation, Biggs posted a message to it that read: “We are trying to avoid getting into any shit tonight. Tomorrow’s the day,” and then, “I’m here with rufio [Nordean] and a good group,” according to the affidavit.
A group of about three dozen Proud Boys assembled at 10:00 a.m. the morning of January 6 near the base of the Washington Monument. After conversing a bit, they proceeded to walk up the National Mall toward the Capitol and then around to its eastern side, gathering on the lawn across from the building’s eastern entrance.
Biggs and Nordean conversed with the men, with Biggs pointing out key locations around the Capitol and discussing how they could defend against attackers hitting them from behind. They milled about, seemingly waiting for the right moment.
In a video shot by a supporter, Proud Boy Dan “Milkshake” Scott could be heard shouting: “Let’s take the fucking Capitol!” as he ordered his cohorts: “Tighten up!”
Someone admonished him: “Let’s not fucking yell that, all right?”
Nordean, sounding disgusted, said into the bullhorn he was carrying: “It was Milkshake, man, you know. Idiot!”
Another man chimed in: “Don’t yell it. Do it.”
As Trump was still speaking, the Proud Boys began marching together around the northern perimeter of the Capitol, chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets!” and “USA! USA!” and “Fuck Antifa!” while heading toward the western side up Constitution Avenue. They turned left at First Street Northwest, straight toward the fenced-off lawn west of the Capitol where police had set up barricades at two entrances.
A sizable crowd of MAGA protesters had already gathered at the northwestern entrance, where only five Capitol police officers were stationed, supported by a couple dozen more closer to the Capitol. The crowd chanted: “We love Trump!”
Biggs was seen on video conferring briefly with Ryan Samsel, a Proud Boys organizer from Pennsylvania wearing a red MAGA cap and a jean jacket. Samsel later told the FBI that Biggs encouraged him to push on the barricades and challenge the police, and when he hesitated, Biggs flashed a gun and questioned his manhood, urging him again to attack the barricades (Biggs’s attorneys would deny all this later).
Samsel was seen on video as the first man to approach the barricades and begin pushing on them and fighting police. Others joined in, toppling the metal barricades and knocking a police officer backward onto her head, causing a concussion. Meanwhile, the mob began pouring onto the lawn as the outnumbered police retreated to where their fellow officers had formed an interim line of resistance. Biggs, Rehl, and Nordean were among the first through, along with the rest of the Proud Boys who had marched with them.
One of these was Billy Chrestman, a Proud Boy from Olathe, Kansas, who took on the role of cheerleader for the crowd as it pushed against the barricades. “Whose House is it?” he shouted.
“Our House!” came the response.
“Do you want your House back?” Chrestman shouted.
“Yes!” the mob shouted.
“Take it!” he exhorted.
As the mob poured up the lawn, one man exulted: “D.C. is a fuckin’ war zone!”[23]
The siege went on for more than an hour before the mob finally broke through police lines and into the Capitol. Again, Proud Boys played the central role, three of them in particular, all from upstate New York: Dominic Pezzola, a forty-three-year-old from Rochester; William Pepe, thirty-one, from Beacon; and Matthew Greene, thirty-four, of Syracuse. They knew one another through their regional Proud Boys chapter and had coordinated their travel plans to Washington.[24] They were part of the mob that first broke through the barricades. Pezzola was wearing an earpiece, indicating that he was in on the Proud Boys’ communications (though he later claimed he was only listening to music).
All three were filmed participating in the violence on the west Capitol steps. When members of the mob discovered a path up some stairs to the Capitol plaza’s second level covered by scaffolding—preparations for the coming inauguration on January 20—they were among the people who led the charge up them, battling police the whole way.
When they reached the second level and police fell back to form a new line at the center of the building, Pezzola and the others went left, heading straight toward a set of windows on one side of the second-level hall. Somewhere in the battle Pezzola had successfully snatched a riot shield away from a police officer, and he carried it over to the windows and began bashing at them with it. Soon a window gave way, and the men cleared out the glass and began jumping in. Pezzola was the second man to breach the Capitol, following Trump supporter Michael Sparks, who was the first to jump through the window at 2:13 p.m.
Pepe was right behind; dozens more followed. They flooded the Capitol hallways with shouting insurrectionists, toting Confederate flags and baseball bats, Biggs and Matthews among them. Their initial entry placed them near the Senate chambers; the Senate quickly suspended its certification process for the Electoral College ballots and evacuated the chambers to a protected area, Vice President Mike Pence first. As the mob rampaged through the halls above them, they could be heard chanting: “Hang Mike Pence!”
As the rest of the mob poured in, they shouted: “Where’s the traitors?” “Bring them out!” “Get these fucking cocksucking Commies out!”[25]
Biggs went back outside and connected with Nordean. The two men and another cluster of Proud Boys then walked around the building to its east side, which they also found under siege by the mob. Joining eagerly, the Proud Boys forced open the Columbus Doors facing out onto the plaza, and Biggs, Nordean, and the others all rushed inside.
Someone recorded Biggs inside, still masked at the time. “Biggs, what have you got to say?” asked an enthusiastic fan who had been shouting an “Our House!” chant. Biggs pulled down his mask, smiled, and answered: “This is awesome!”
From there, the Proud Boys mostly dispersed. Many of them headed toward the House chambers, which had not been fully evacuated until well after the Capitol was breached. One Proud Boy, Gabriel Garcia of Miami, walked toward the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling: “Nancy! Come out and play!”[26]
Five Proud Boys helped disable crash barriers designed to descend from the ceiling even as police were trying to lower them. Eventually, they all exited the building when police reinforcements arrived at around 3:30. Biggs, Nordean, and others reconvened in the east plaza.
Pezzola bragged about breaking the windows to the Capitol and entering the building. Other members of the group, one witness said, boasted about their feats that day, saying anyone who they might have gotten their hands on would have been killed, particularly Pence and Pelosi.
The men vowed that they would return on Inauguration Day. The witness said they planned to kill “every single motherfucker” they could on that day.
They continued to boast on social media and in conversations. “I boxed a cop,” said Chrestman in a phone call with some friends recorded by the FBI. “I got part of his fucking body armor, ’cause I thought he was attacking one of our boys. Turns out it wasn’t one of our boys…Anyways, the cop was being kind of a dick…It was insane and you know what happened today? We stormed the Capitol Building and we took it over…We made the fucking House leave. Like, they couldn’t finish their vote.”[27]
He added, “And the first fence that was up there—bunch of people were standing against it, yelling at the cops, the cops started getting nervous and then—so I kicked the fence, I said, ‘We wanna talk to the fucking House right now!’ And all these people started yelling and I kicked the fucking fence again…I fucking started it. Yeah, I started a revolution. Because once everybody heard about this, and then we cleared out the House, they evacuated the House and everything, to stop those votes.”
WHITE NATIONALISTS WERE ALSO present in significant numbers among the January 6 mob, having planned for the event and promoted it heavily. However, they weren’t nearly as organized as the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys—just, perhaps, more visible.[28]
Mostly, they made their presence known among the crowd with the banners they carried. Some carried Pepe the Frog banners celebrating the white-nationalist alt-right, while others carried the Kekistan flag—an alt-right variation on the Nazi war flag. Others toted the flag of the white-nationalist group VDARE, a red-white-and-blue banner with a lion logo at the center. One man wore a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt.
The most common, however, were the America First banners representing Nick Fuentes’s organization of the same name. Its participants are known less formally as the “Groyper army,” and they use a cartoon-frog variation of Pepe as their main symbol. They had turned out in numbers on January 6, and several of their followers invaded the Capitol.
Fuentes, for that matter, had been one of the most avid promoters of the post-election pro-Trump protests, speaking at both the November 14 and December 12 events in Washington, as well as at election-result protests in places like Michigan, where he warned that “we’re not remaining in our homes. We’re on the streets now.”[29]
On his popular podcast on January 4, Fuentes had flippantly suggested killing state legislators who were unwilling to overturn the 2020 election results. “What can you and I do to a state legislator—besides kill them?” he wondered rhetorically, then hastily added: “We should not do that. I’m not advising that, but I mean, what else can you do, right?”
An early alt-right figure named Tim Gionet—nicknamed Baked Alaska—who had attached himself to the Groyper army in 2020 by doing live streams at their events, was out doing his thing on the streets of Washington the night of January 5, interviewing MAGA protesters ginned up on violent rhetoric.[30]
One man he interviewed—later identified as an Arizona Oath Keeper named Ray Epps—told Gionet that “we’re far beyond” the tax revolt that inspired the original American Revolution, adding: “In fact, tomorrow—I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested—we need to go into the Capitol.”
“Let’s gooooo!!!” Gionet shouted enthusiastically in response.
The next day, after Trump’s speech, Fuentes spoke to a crowd of supporters at Freedom Plaza: “It is us and our ancestors that created everything good that you see in this country. All these people that have taken over our country—we do not need them…It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world…Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.”[31]
Shortly afterward, as the crowd at the Ellipse began making its way to the Capitol, Fuentes got on a bullhorn and addressed his followers:
We have just got word that they have stopped the vote of the Electoral College in Congress! I say that we should not leave this Capitol until Donald Trump is inaugurated president! We the American people will not let this fraudulent election go forward one more step!
Fuentes himself never went inside the Capitol. But a number of his followers did. Several men later charged with trespass and obstruction were seen carrying America First banners inside the Capitol and wearing the organization’s T-shirts and hats—in particular, the insurrectionists who entered Pelosi’s office and trashed the place. “Nancy, I’m hoooome!!!” one crowed, in the manner of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.[32]
One America Firster was Riley Williams, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Pennsylvania who had a predilection for donning neo-Nazi gear and making TikTok videos of herself saluting the camera Nazi style, posting on social media as a white-nationalist Groyper and participating in a popular neo-Nazi Telegram channel and other far-right accelerationist online spaces. When she got into Pelosi’s office, she live streamed herself rifling through papers and examining a Hewlett-Packard laptop computer—which she then apparently stole.[33]
Williams’s ex-boyfriend showed investigators the videos from her live stream, and told them that Williams intended to sell the laptop to a Russian agent, but the deal had fallen through. The laptop was never located, and Williams’s attorney adamantly denied she stole the computer.
Gionet was one of the ringleaders of the Groypers inside Pelosi’s office, and he had of course also been live streaming the whole thing from its beginnings. The video—later collected by investigators—showed him entering the Capitol, chanting: “Patriots are in control!” Whose house? Our house!“ and ”Traitors, traitors, traitors!“ He told the audience, after showing his face: ”We are in the Capitol Building, 1776 will commence again.“ A little later he added: ”Unleash the Kraken, let’s go.“[34]
Eventually, when Gionet reached Pelosi’s office, he became especially antic, picking up a phone and acting out a call with members of the Senate. “Let’s call Trump!” he said. “Dude! Dude! Let’s tell Trump what’s up. He’ll be happy, whaddya mean? We’re fighting for Trump. We need to get our boy Donald J. Trump into office.”
A little later, he added: “Occupy the Capitol let’s go. We ain’t leaving this bitch.” But when he finally was convinced to leave the building, it wasn’t without a conflict: His live stream showed him heading toward the exits and accusing a police officer of shoving him, though the video showed no physical contact. Nonetheless, Gionet verbally attacked the officer: “You’re a fucking oath breaker, you piece of shit!” he told the man, then shouted “Fuck you!” four times, concluding: “You broke your oath to the Constitution.”
Afterward, Gionet, Williams, and a number of other Groypers (ten of them altogether) who entered the Capitol were arrested by the FBI and charged with various felonies for their actions that day—though Fuentes, who remained on the outside, was not. Fuentes did, however, advise all of his followers who were present during the insurrection to simply destroy their cell phones and SIM cards to erase any evidence (which itself would be a federal obstruction-of-justice crime).[35]
Fuentes also complained that he had to be more careful after January 6: “Everything is gay now. The feds are watching me. I can’t say anything cool anymore, because the government is watching me,” Fuentes said.
Six months later, while lamenting Gionet’s arrest and prosecution, Fuentes told his podcast audience about how much fun January 6 had been.
“I am unapologetic. I thought the Capitol [riot] was awesome; it was awesome! And so was Trump. And Trump was awesome because he was racist. Trump was awesome because he was sexist,” Fuentes stated. “The only thing Trump wasn’t awesome for was being anti-Semitic; he wasn’t anti-Semitic.”
“But the rest was awesome. And people have got to get racist,” he added.[36]
Derek Black, a former white supremacist who grew up in the movement, told The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart that the presence of white nationalists was a natural outgrowth of the preceding four years:
Because there were definitely plenty of people in that crowd who were white supremacists. There were people in that crowd who were present at Charlottesville. You could see them livestreaming from the House Chamber, and if you go back through the old Charlottesville videos, you’ll see a lot of the same faces. And I think that’s something that we need to reckon with. I think there was a belief that I encountered every now and then between when the Charlottesville march happened in 2017 and now that that had been defeated or driven out of the public eye, and the reality was, it was much harder to organize after Charlottesville. But these people were still around. They were still present. They were still organizing. And to see them showing up at the Capitol is exactly what you should expect. [37]
Black also warned an interviewer that white nationalism was gathering steam nationally and was unlikely to be requited by the insurrection: “Unless we go through the act of confronting it, it’s going to continue and to be a dangerous force in what the country is.”[38]
CONSPIRACISTS COMPRISED THE LARGEST portion of the January 6 mob. In most regards, everyone who besieged and invaded the Capitol was a believer in conspiracy theories, and one in particular: that a sinister cabal of “globalists” had colluded to commit large-scale voter fraud to eject Donald Trump from the White House.
This is in no small part a reflection of the reality that all the far-right movements that played central roles in the insurrection—the Patriots, the Proud Boys, the white nationalists, as well as their mainstream Republican enablers—are profoundly conspiracist in nature. They all fundamentally dwell in the same alternative universe—a semi-functioning epistemological bubble composed of misinformation and disinformation and fabulist conspiracy theories leavened with a few grossly distorted facts, which I have elsewhere named Alt-America. They occupy varying zones of this universe, meaning that they differ at times on the details and emphasis, but are united in the essential view that the world—its politics, its media, its cultures—are being deviously manipulated by the same cabal that brought down Trump to impose their “New World Order” enslavement on us all.
Despite its attachment to these movements, there exists an even larger bloc of people who do not necessarily affiliate with them—though they often sympathize with and encourage them—but rather for whom the conspiracy theories themselves form the basis for their politics, and for whom, on January 6, these fake narratives provided all the fuel they needed to besiege a Capitol they had come to believe had been corrupted by sinister Marxists and possibly satanists.
There were two main nexuses of this component of Trump’s army: Alex Jones and his Infowars operation, and the authoritarian QAnon conspiracy cult.
Jones is the most famous conspiracy-monger in America and, for that matter, the world. He also has identified consistently on-air with the Patriot movement dating back to at least 2009, and realistically back to 1995, when he first began airing militia-movement “FEMA concentration camp” and “New World Order” conspiracy theories.[39] Stewart Rhodes was a frequent guest, and Joe Biggs had been a regular Infowars host before he became a Proud Boys leader.[40] Before Jones was removed from YouTube in 2018 for his hate-mongering and disinformation, his channel had millions of subscribers. He adjusted his strategy by continuing his Infowars operation, replete with videos and podcasts, on the independent hosting service Epik, and though his audience now is more limited—and his future in doubt, thanks to losing major lawsuits to the victims of his bogus claims—he remains enormously popular.[41]
Moreover, Jones also is one of Donald Trump’s most perfervid supporters, dating back to 2015, when Jones hosted Trump on his program and was lathered with praise by the then-candidate. The connection only deepened during Trump’s presidential tenure, and it reached meltdown levels after Trump lost the 2020 election.[42]
Jones played a leading role in promoting the earliest pro-Trump Stop the Steal events in Washington on November 14 and December 12. For the January 6 event, Jones personally ponied up $50,000 of his own money, and moreover arranged for Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli to donate $300,000, which was the lion’s share of the funding needed for the halfmillion-dollar rally.[43]
As the date approached, Jones’s rhetoric became more strident and violent. Three days before the rally, he ripped into Trump supporters hesitant to travel to D.C. “I’ve seen people making a lot of excuses. ‘Oh, Antifa is dangerous.’ It’s a lot more dangerous walking across the street. There’s hardly no Antifa. They are a bunch of cowards,” he said.[44]
Jones and Infowars host Owen Shroyer traveled to Washington, along with an Infowars video editor named Samuel Montoya. As part of the March to Save America rally in Freedom Plaza near the White House on January 5, both Jones and Shroyer spoke.
Shroyer’s language was typically militant: “Thomas Jefferson once said when the government fears the people, there is freedom. But for too long now the people have feared the government,” he said. “I can tell you that the crooked politicians that occupy our Capitol are in fear right now. Do you know how I know this? Because they are scurrying around in secret tunnels to avoid ‘we the people.’ Right now as we speak they’re scurrying around like the little rats that they are to try to avoid you.”[45]
Jones spoke the familiar language of “civil war.” He told the crowd that “we have only begun to resist the globalists” and that “they have tried to steal this election in front of everyone.”
“I don’t know how all this is going to end, but if they want a fight, they better believe they’ve got one,” he went on. “This will be their Waterloo. This will be their destruction.” He then led the crowd in a “1776” chant.[46]
The morning of January 6, Jones organized a rally near the Ellipse, and again both he and Shroyer spoke, amping up the violent rhetoric. Shroyer told the crowd: “They said you lost this election in a landslide to Biden. We said, ‘No, we don’t buy your bullshit.‘ But, guess what? You want to feed us bullshit? We’re going to bring it right to your front door and you can eat it yourselves.”
Jones was again predictably over the top: “We declare 1776 against the New World Order,” he said. “We need to understand we’re under attack, and we need to understand this is twenty-first-century warfare and get on a war footing!”
The men marched to the Capitol, but once there, Jones was able to assess the violence unfolding, and he changed his tone. “We’re not Antifa; we’re not BLM,” he told the mob through a bullhorn. “You’re amazing. I love you. Let’s march around the other side, and let’s not fight the police and give the system what they want. We are peaceful, and we won this election. And as much as I love seeing the Trump flags flying over this, we need to not have the confrontation with the police. They’re gonna make that the story. I’m going to march to the other side, where we have a stage, where we can speak and occupy peacefully.”
Jones continued: “Trump is going to speak over here. Trump is coming.”
Trump, of course, never came. Neither did the dark forces of Antifa to which they had devoted so much preparation.
Neither Jones nor Shroyer ever entered the Capitol, though they did enter a restricted area by walking up on the west-side lawn; they retreated to a “secure location” instead.[47] However, Samuel Montoya was among the mob that got in from the east side, recording video the whole time, reporting to the audience as “your boy Sam with Infowars.com.”[48] (Shroyer and Montoya were both later charged and arrested.) After crossing the threshold, Montoya shouted jubilantly: ”Guess what? We are in the Capitol, baby!“ He joined the mob that then besieged the House and tried to get in through the Speaker’s entrance. He was standing near a woman named Ashli Babbitt when she was shot there by a security guard.
IN MANY WAYS, ASHLI Babbitt was the living embodiment of the QAnon cult. Sucked down its conspiracy-theory rabbit hole, she had become alienated from friends and workmates, and over the several years in which she lived in that alternative universe, she became so radicalized and so full of anger that she flew across the country on a mission to save Donald Trump.
Raised in Southern California, Babbitt enlisted in the US Air Force in 2006 and became an Air National Guard member in 2010, ultimately serving seven overseas deployments before leaving in 2016 as a senior airman. She set herself up in a swimming-pool-maintenance business in the San Diego area that struggled.[49]
And she became a devoted Trump fan, despite having voted twice for Barack Obama, or so she claimed. On her Twitter account—where she posted more than eighty-six thousand tweets—she regularly described her belief that Trump was destined to save America, and that Hillary Clinton belonged in prison.
During the 2016 campaign, her adoration of Trump was unbridled; one October tweet featured a meme with Trump’s name above three signs nailed to a tree: “Make America Great Again,” “H FOR PRISON,” and “CHRISTIAN DEPLORABLES LIVE HERE.” Babbitt added the hashtag #Love.
When Trump won the election, she cried, and wrote an encomium declaring that “today we save America from the tyranny, collusion and corruption.”
The first QAnon posts began appearing shortly after the election, and by early 2017 were spreading widely among pro-Trump conspiracists—including Babbitt. Like the rest of the cult’s true believers, she ardently promoted the claims that a coterie of “globalists” was operating a secretive, worldwide pedophilia/child-trafficking ring that kidnapped children and harvested their blood, headed by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and others—and that their hero, Donald Trump, was gathering a “Storm” in which all these evildoers would be arrested, tried, and executed. By 2020, she was regularly spouting their cryptic jargon and hashtags.
“The best is yet to come,” she tweeted in February. A month later, she quoted “Q drop”: “What is dark will come to light!” At other times, she adopted QAnon-borne hashtags and “causes”: “We have to #SaveTheChildren,” she wrote.
She also believed that the COVID-19 pandemic was blown out of proportion, that the disease (the “controla virus”) was a hoax (“a FUCKING JOKE”), designed by the same nefarious globalists in a scheme to enslave everyone: “We are being hoodwinked,” she tweeted in July 2020. “The sheep need to wake up.”
After Trump lost the election in November, Babbitt’s account was wild with fury, repeating #StopTheSteal and #TheStormIsComing hashtags amid angry claims that Democrats had committed massive voter fraud—as well as the belief that Trump would still emerge triumphant in the end.
When Kamala Harris, who was then the vice president-elect, promised on Twitter “to ensure Americans mask up, distribute 100M shots, and get students safely back to school,” Babbitt replied furiously: “No the fuck you will not! No masks, no you, no Biden the kid raper, no vaccines…sit your fraudulent ass down…we the ppl bitch!”
When Trump announced the January 6 rally in D.C., Babbitt was ecstatic, and began eagerly retweeting posts—from figures ranging from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump Jr. to white nationalist Jack Posobiec—encouraging Trump supporters to turn out en masse to overturn the election.
The entire QAnon cult was raging with similar claims. Top QAnon influencers on social media like the pseudonymous Joe M, JuliansRum, and Pepe Lives Matter led the parade:
It’s a bad crime to attempt to cheat in an election. It’s a worse crime to actually cheat in an election. It’s the worst crime of all to actually steal an election, certify fraudulent votes and get to the finish line. Maximum penalties are now on the table, and we caught them all. Buckle up.
Patriots have exercised more patience than I ever thought possible. But we’ve reached the point where patience is no longer a realistic expectation. People are fucking PISSED. And it’s 100% justified. Trump and his allies must take action soon.
The Storm was always gonna be ugly. Remember this my frens: The alternative timelines were much much uglier. We are the calm before and during the storm.[50]
One of QAnon’s leading promoters, Ron Watkins—whose close ties to the cult’s origins on the fringe 8kun message board have led to suggestions that he actually might be Q himself—concocted a claim, shortly after the election was called for Biden—that employees of Dominion Voting Systems, one of the major software providers for voting machines, had managed to switch votes for Trump to Biden votes in key battleground states. He appeared as a guest on the pro-Trump One America News Network to explain the theory on November 12.[51]
The next day, Trump himself eagerly promoted the Dominion theory on Twitter, telling his millions of followers that Dominion had deleted more than a million votes, citing OAN. The race was on: On Twitter, Trump supporters went wild, tweeting the #Dominion hashtag 35,700 times a day. One study found that one in seven of these tweets came from self-identified QAnon accounts.[52]
In the leadup to January 6, QAnon accounts grew excited. More than half of the 20,800 QAnon-identified accounts on Twitter mentioned the date and the rally, though only a minority called for violence. Rather, most of them posted their typically outlandish claims intended to outrage and inflame readers.[53]
“No wonder the President said January 6 in DC was going to be wild. @LLinWood just told us many of our politicians are raping and killing children. They won’t be able to walk down the street,” one QAnon account on Parler posted.[54]
Ashli Babbitt believed the protest was a pivotal moment that would fulfill several key QAnon “prophecies” regarding “the Storm”: “Nothing will stop us,” she tweeted on January 5. “They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours…dark to light!”[55]
She flew out from San Diego the day before the rally, seated next to USA Today staff writer Will Carless, who (unknown to Babbitt) had written frequently about QAnon. They did not talk politics much, but instead spent most of their conversation on the subject of favorite beach towns.
When the crowd gathered at the Ellipse to hear Trump’s speech, it was thick with signs of QAnon’s presence: T-shirts, sweatshirts, signs, and banners with QAnon symbols and slogans: “Where We Go One We Go All” (also shortened to the hashtag #WWG1WGA), “Trust the Plan,” “The Storm is Here,” “Q Sent Me,” and the like—and they remained with the mob that marched up the National Mall to the Capitol and besieged the building. Babbitt was among them.[56]
They were mixed among the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who entered at the first breach. One of them, Douglas Jensen, forty-one, of Des Moines, Iowa—wearing a sweatshirt with a large Q symbol and the words “Trust the Plan”—was at the forefront of the mob that first attempted to enter the Senate chambers, and was drawn away from the entrance and up a flight of stairs by a quick-thinking Capitol police officer, Eugene Goodman. Jensen later told FBI investigators that he “wanted to have his T-shirt seen on video so that ‘Q’ could ‘get the credit.‘ ”[57]
The most eye grabbing of the QAnon figures was Jacob Chansley, nicknamed “the QAnon Shaman” for his buffalo-horn fur hat, flag-painted face, and bare torso adorned with multiple conspiracist tattoos: eventually, he would become the symbolic face of the insurrection. Chansley, a thirty-four-year-old from Arizona, had previously donned his outlandish garb for Stop the Steal protests outside polling centers.[58]
Chansley was among the rioters who had stormed into the Capitol from the upper west terrace after the Proud Boys had breached the building there. First seen strolling the halls of the Capitol, he entered the Senate chambers, announcing as he entered: “Time’s up, motherfuckers!” Proceeding to the Senate floor, he greeted his fellow insurrectionists: “Heyyyy, glad to see you, man. Look at you guys, you guys are fuckin’ Patriots!”
Mounting the dais with others, Chansley led a group prayer with fellow rioters—which a prosecutor later read aloud prior to his sentencing:
Thank you, Heavenly Father, for gracing us with this opportunity…to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs. That we will not allow America, the American way of the United States of America to go down…Thank you for filling this chamber with Patriots that love you…Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the Communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.[59]
Chansley also left an ominous note on the dais in the Senate, apparently directed at Vice President Mike Pence: “It’s only a matter of time. Justice is coming!”[60]
Working mainstream journalists in the crowd remarked on the influence of QAnon among the mob, even for those who did not necessarily identify as followers of the cult. The New York Times’s Matthew Rosenberg remarked afterward that “it was remarkable how many other people in the crowd who would say they did not buy into QAnon repeated many of the conspiracy theory’s main ideas about powerful pedophiles and vaccines filled with nanobots and all kinds of other nonsense.”[61]
Ashli Babbitt was among the mob that breached the Capitol a little later, on the east side of the building, and was at the forefront of the rioters who scrambled to get inside the House chambers, intent not only on stopping the vote but on taking out their fury on members of Congress. Blunted in their first attempt to get in through the main entrance, she joined the group that peeled off and rushed to find another route to the rear of the chambers—which they did, at an entrance to the Speakers Lobby.[62]
The door was locked and guarded by only three Capitol officers, who attempted to stand stoically in the way as the mob banged on the glass.
Babbitt, wearing an American-flag backpack, was one of the people who harangued the officers. As it happened, the evacuation of House members from the chambers had begun only a few minutes beforehand, their exit route within the line of sight of the lobby.
Then, through the windows on the doors, Babbitt and others spotted the last of the House members making their escape, and she went ballistic. “There they are!” she shouted. “What the fuck!!!??” Members of the mob began punching the windows with their fists, cracking them.
Then, a heavily armed SWAT unit arrived to the rear, and so the three police officers moved up to meet them. That created an opening for the rioters to begin inflicting serious damage on the doors and glass, and they finally punched out a window on the right side of the doors. At about this time, a security officer on the inside of the chambers, positioned just inside a facade near the door, shoved out his weapon and pointed it so that everyone could see it.
“There is a gun! He’s got a gun!” people began shouting. “Hey! He’s got a gun!”
Babbitt, however, was undeterred. She leaped up onto the panel where the pane had been smashed out and prepared to jump inside to pursue the escaping members of Congress. Instead, the guard fired his gun once, hitting her in the upper chest and knocking her back into the hallway outside.
A medical team was promptly called and the halls cleared to make way for them. Babbitt was semiconscious as she was taken out on a gurney, and died in the ambulance en route to the hospital.
Babbitt became an instant martyr for the insurrectionists and particularly for the QAnon faithful. The siege itself was broadly celebrated both among its participants and those who watched from a distance. It had, after all, played out in real life just like a QAnon fantasy: summoned to Washington by their beloved leader, they had risen up by the thousands and seized the seat of democracy while its denizens, cowering under desks, finally learned to fear the people.
When the dust had settled and the Capitol finally cleared, they congratulated themselves, firm in their belief that Trump would emerge triumphant. “Time for rest. I had to stay up to watch the conclusion of the greatest attempted theft in history. Now it is a completed crime,” tweeted Lin Wood, the QAnon-loving lawyer who had served for a while as one of Trump’s attorneys in his ill-fated attempts to challenge the election results in court. “Many traitors will be arrested & jailed over the next several days. President Donald J. Trump will serve 4 more years!!!”[63]
“QAnon Shaman” Chansley was not just unrepentant in press interviews but exultant. He told NBC News: “The fact that we had a bunch of our traitors in office hunker down, put on their gas masks and retreat into their underground bunker, I consider that a win.”[64]
BESIDES THE INSURRECTIONISTS THEMSELVES, the mob violence on January 6 was set into motion by a large number of people who operate within the mainstream of American politics, particularly Republican politicians and media figures who were close within Donald Trump’s political orbit. They ranged from the president’s advisers and attorneys to members of Congress to Trumpist pundits in the right-wing media—none of whom actually participated in the siege themselves.
The idea for a Stop the Steal campaign actually originated with longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone—in 2016. Stone devised the slogan during that year’s Republican primaries, claiming the GOP establishment was attempting to rig the vote to defeat Trump—accusing a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” of plotting to stop their primary foe. He set up a website at StopTheSteal.org and fundraised with requests for $10,000, warning Trump supporters: “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.”[65]
After Trump won the nomination, he repurposed the site for the general election and kept raising money. “Donald Trump thinks Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are going to steal the next election,” his website said that October. It’s unclear what became of the money he raised after Trump won in November.
Stone—a longtime Republican political operative, dating back to his work in 1972 as dirty trickster for Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, as well as his involvement in the 2000 “Brooks Brothers riot” in Palm Beach, Florida, that affected the course of the decisive recount in that year’s presidential election—was part of Trump’s inner circle of friends for years, and was an adviser to Trump’s campaign for its first two months in 2015 until he was fired when the two men argued over strategy.[66] Stone nonetheless remained an ardent Trump supporter, and kept an informal relationship with the president—which turned out to be helpful when Stone was convicted in 2019 on seven felony counts of obstruction and lying to investigators about his relationship with the WikiLeaks operatives who leaked emails hacked from the Clinton campaign, and was sentenced to forty months’ prison time: Trump shortly afterward commuted the sentence, and ultimately issued a full pardon (in mid-December 2020, after he had lost the election). [67]
Just as in 2016, Stone repurposed the Stop the Steal slogan for the 2020 general election, especially as the campaign wound down and it became apparent that Trump was likely to lose. He set some of his far-right protégés to work reviving it. One of these was Ali Alexander, a right-wing activist of mixed African American and Arab descent who had gained notoriety for, among other things, orchestrating the false claim that Joe Biden was suffering from a debilitating disease. Alexander also had been briefly banned from Twitter in 2019 for a post warning Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “I would *literally* put you down if you came near me, Marxist. I would call 911 to come retrieve your body. Have a Good Friday!”[68]
In mid-September, Alexander posted a video announcing, “I’m thinking about bringing Stop the Steal out of retirement…In the next coming days we are going to build the infrastructure to stop the steal.” On social media, he began using the hashtag #StopTheSteal—and created a Stop the Steal website that guided Trump supporters to locations around the country where election-count protests were being held, in states such as Arizona and Michigan, where Trumpist conspiracy theorists claimed votes had been stolen.
Other players in Trump’s inner circle also became involved, particularly Steve Bannon, the campaign-manager-turned-presidential-adviser who had also been subjected to an unceremonious firing but remained loyal. On November 4, the day after the election, a group of people associated with Bannon and Stone, led by right-wing activist Amy Kremer, started up a Stop The Steal group on Facebook devoted to organizing pro-Trump protests.[69]
Kremer was a veteran of the Tea Party movement who ran a pro-Trump outfit called Women for America First. She had previously operated a super PAC called Women Vote Trump in partnership with Stone’s ex-wife, Ann Stone. The group page’s administrators included Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, both of whom had previously written for Bannon’s Breitbart News operation, and had been part of his core team for We Build the Wall, the fraud-riddled crowdfunding campaign for Trump’s border wall that ultimately caused Bannon to be charged with misappropriating funds.[70]
Their “Stop the Steal” Facebook group was an immediate sensation, drawing over 300,000 followers in its first twenty-four hours. It also inspired dozens of knockoffs employing variations of the slogan. Commenters at these groups used “threatening rhetoric anticipating a civil war, or talk from members about how they are locked and loaded,” said Ciaran O’Connor, a disinformation analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.[71]
Violent rhetoric was a common feature of the group, encouraged by its leaders. “Clean your guns,” said Stockton on a live stream video. “Things are going to get worse before they get better.” (Stockton later dismissed critics by saying the remarks were just “common political hyperbole.”)
Facebook shut the page down on November 5, citing its spread of election disinformation, but other groups using the name and concept continued to operate. Bannon himself started up a Stop the Steal page on Facebook on November 5, but then promptly changed it to “Own Your Vote,” after Facebook took down Kremer’s original page; it remained up on Facebook until January 6.
The associated Stop the Steal groups altogether amassed 2.5 million followers, according to an analysis by the activist group Avaaz.[72] Another analysis by Just Security found that the 8,200 online news articles featuring “Stop the Steal” published between the election and the insurrection garnered some seventy million engagements across a variety of platforms, with more than 43.5 million of them occurring in December 2020. On YouTube, Stop the Steal videos attracted 21,267,165 views, 863,151 likes, and 34,091 dislikes. Mentions of Stop the Steal on Facebook, Twitter, and Google spiked in the days associated with their largest protests—on November 14 and December 12 in Washington—and immediately preceding January 6.[73]
The December 12 Stop the Steal protest in Washington was primarily an Ali Alexander production.[74] He created a trailer for what appeared to be a film project about the campaign that he published three days before, featuring appearances from Stone and other far-right figures, notably America First’s Nick Fuentes and longtime nativist pundit Michelle Malkin, fondly dubbed by Fuentes’s followers “Groyper Mom” due to her close association with and support for Fuentes.[75] Both Fuentes and Malkin heavily promoted the #StopTheSteal hashtag.
A week later, at an Arizona Stop the Steal event, Alexander boasted that he had been “on the phone” with “people from the White House” while indulging in the violent metaphors that had become the movement’s forte:
To all these weak-kneed Republicans I say, what would you do if somebody broke into your house and stole something and they were—well, I don’t want to say still in your front yard because I know what we’d do. Let’s say they made it out to the road. I don’t want to be accused of anything yet. Yet. Let them hear that. Yet. What if somebody stole something from your house, and they’d made it out in the street. Would you pursue? Hell yeah. We have a moral obligation to pursue them, don’t we?[76]
A December 27 email from StopTheSteal.us, headlined “TRUMP JUST TWEETED JAN 6TH EVENT! AGAIN!” encouraged followers to attend, directing them to the website Alexander had created for the event, dubbed “Wild Protest.” “PRESIDENT TRUMP WANTS YOU IN DC JANUARY 6,” it emphasized, adding that the organization was working to secure the votes of Republican senators to oppose Biden’s certification: “We’ve identified six (seven including Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville) that could join our cause. StopTheSteal.us is working closely, whipping the vote up, with patriots in the Congress.”[77]
Trump himself referenced the slogan in a January 1 tweet: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11:00 AM on January 6th. Location details to follow. StopTheSteal!” Other Republicans joined in: Texas senator Ted Cruz spoke at a January 3 Stop the Steal rally, telling the crowd, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will defend liberty.”
Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA got in on the action, too. On Twitter, Kirk claimed that TPUSA was “sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” He added that the rally “will likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history.”[78]
Roger Stone, meanwhile, worked assiduously to promote turnout for the event. He appeared on Alex Jones’s Infowars program, pronouncing the Biden victory a “hoax”: “I think our headline is Join the Patriots in Washington, D.C. this weekend to protest the hoax that is the theft of this election and demand that we Stop the Steal,” he said, hastily adding a promotional note: “Hashtag Stop the Steal.”[79]
He appeared at the Rally to Revival event in Freedom Plaza on January 5, telling the crowd that the president’s enemies sought “nothing less than the heist of the 2020 election and we say, No way!” Furthermore: “We will win this fight or America will step off into a thousand years of darkness. We dare not fail. I will be with you tomorrow shoulder to shoulder.” (Of course, as it turned out, he was not; according to his own account, he stayed at the
Willard Hotel all day.)
Likewise, Bannon pounded the Stop the Steal war drum incessantly, including on his Own Your Vote Facebook page, which promoted Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election had been stolen, intermingled with QAnon conspiracy theories. But his podcast, Steve Bannon’s War Room, was particularly influential in pushing the same disinformation and promotion for January 6 in the podcasting space.[80]
The War Room podcast led what a study by Brookings Institute called “a massive and sustained post-election increase in episodes that endorsed unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and related narratives.” After November 3, the study found, just over 50 percent of the popular US political podcasts sampled were trafficking in false or misleading claims. Moreover, Bannon was, in his own formulation, “flooding the zone with shit”: His podcast, along with others that specialized in the false narrative, like Sean Hannity’s and Rush Limbaugh’s, “produced the largest total number of post-election episodes.”
On January 5, Bannon made a prediction:
I’ll tell you this. It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is, strap in.
All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. Just understand this. All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s gonna be moving. It’s gonna be quick…We’re on the point of attack. You have made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready.[81]
At least one senior Trump adviser later confirmed that Bannon and Trump had been in close communication in the weeks leading up to January 6, revolving mainly around Trump’s election conspiracy theories and his strategy for staying in office.[82]
THE STOP THE STEAL organizers and their allies created multiple rallies for January 5 and 6. On Tuesday the fifth, there was an early-afternoon Save the Republic rally created by Moms for America at Area 9 across from the Russell Senate Office Building; a One Nation Under God rally with Christian nationalist themes near the US Supreme Court Building; and the main Rally to Revival at Freedom Plaza featuring Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and others. Ali Alexander led the crowd in a “Victory or death!” chant.[83]
The big event on January 6 was the March to Save America at the White House Ellipse, at which Trump was to speak. There were other rallies scheduled to follow: Ali Alexander’s Wild Protest, scheduled to take place northeast of the Capitol; and three variations on Stop the Steal rallies at Freedom Plaza, just east of the White House. These later events were largely short-circuited by the insurrection.
When the big event at the Ellipse began at 9:00 a.m., the audience was treated to a series of warmup speakers, interspersed with propaganda videos. One of these, a collage of images and snippets from Trump’s speeches, portrayed America as descending into chaos due to the corruption and greed of elites, both corporate and government. The clear message: the only way to save the American way of life was to keep Trump in
the White House.[84]
The speeches were uniformly tailored to whipping the audience into a frenzy. Well-known figures in Trump’s inner circle stepped up to the podium and offered incendiary rhetoric: Donald Trump Jr. thanked the “red-blooded, patriotic Americans” in the crowd “for standing up to the bullshit,” and attacked congressional Republicans: “The people who did nothing to stop the steal, this gathering should send a message to them: This isn’t their Republican party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s.” He added, “If you’re gonna be the zero and not the hero, we’re coming for you and we’re going to have a good time doing it!”
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani was also among the speakers. “Over the next ten days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent. If we’re wrong, we will be made fools of,” he said. “But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat.”[85]
And then there were the members of Congress—namely, the ones who had schemed to help set the whole thing in motion.
One of the first speakers was Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama—in body armor—who told the crowd: “I want you to take to your heart, and take back home, and along the way, stop at the Capitol!”
That day, he told them, is “the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” As he wrapped up, he demanded to know: “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?”[86]
Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina—freshly elected and sworn in for the first time—came out in his wheelchair and pumped up the audience: “Wow, this crowd has some fight,” he began. He painted Trump supporters like themselves as victims: “The Democrats, with all the fraud they have done in this election, the Republicans, hiding and not fighting, they are trying to silence your voice.”[87]
Brooks and Cawthorn, as a Rolling Stone investigation later revealed, were two of the seven Republican House members who coordinated closely with the Stop the Steal organizers in forming a strategy to pressure Congress into delaying the Electoral College ballot certification. The others were Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Louie Gohmert of Texas, and Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona.[88]
Gosar had been particularly strident leading up to the insurrection. At a December Stop the Steal rally in Arizona, he had told the crowd: “Once we conquer the Hill, Donald Trump is returned to being the president.” He announced on Twitter that he would be in D.C. for the protests with “the rest of America,” adding that he would “fight back against the leftists who have engaged in sedition to run a Technology Coup.”[89]
The morning of the rally, Gosar tweeted: “Biden should concede. I want his concession on my desk tomorrow morning. Don’t make me come over there. #StopTheSteal2021 @ali.”[90]
Gosar was one of the House Republicans, along with Brooks and Biggs, identified by Alexander in an earlier interview as one of the key members who had helped organize the January 6 protests. “I was the person who came up with the January 6 idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and Congressman Andy Biggs,” Alexander said in December. “We four schemed up on putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting so that—who we couldn’t lobby—we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body hearing our loud roar from outside.”[91]
An investigation by The New York Times found at least two other key House Republicans—Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio—also played key roles in coordinating the attempt to overturn the election, mainly inside the realm of congressional action (or inaction, in this case), with Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who was the primary liaison between the president and his cohorts in Congress.[92]
Trump met with members of the so-called Freedom Caucus—namely, Gosar, Jordan, Biggs, and Brooks—on December 21 to discuss their plans. Afterward, Gosar tweeted about the meeting: “President is resolute,” he wrote. “We will not accept disenfranchisement of 80 million who cast a vote for @POTUS…This sedition will be stopped.”[93]
At least two members of the Senate also participated in the campaign to derail the certification of Joe Biden’s victory: Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri. Cruz spoke at Stop the Steal rallies, and both had announced beforehand that they intended to vote to object to the certification. “Somebody has to stand up. 74 million Americans are not going to be told their voices don’t matter,” Hawley had tweeted.[94] Cruz announced that he was joining him on December 2, and claimed that at least ten other Republicans would join them.[95]
While most GOP members of Congress were content to regurgitate claims of voter fraud, this core circle of Trumpists went well beyond that. They used their offices to bombard the Department of Justice with anecdotal claims of voter fraud that turned out to be groundless, and participated in efforts to pressure members of state legislatures, as well as secretaries of state, to conduct audits that would delay the count and cast a shadow over the election’s viability. Most of all, they schemed up ways to disrupt the January 6 ceremonial certification of the Electoral College ballots that favored Biden over Trump 306–232.
So when Congress convened in a joint session to certify the ballots at 1:00 p.m. on January 6, the mob led by Proud Boys had already broken through the perimeter on the west side of the Capitol and was streaming onto the lawn below the steps and the entrances. At 1:13, Gosar filed the first objection to the Electoral College certification, with Cruz serving as his senatorial sponsor, claiming that there was fraud in Arizona’s election. With a two-hour limit on debate, each man set about arguing against certifying the vote in their respective chambers.[96]
Shortly after the Proud Boys first breached the Capitol at 2:07, Cruz’s speech was cut short as the Senate went into recess and Secret Service agents evacuated Vice President Mike Pence to a safe location, with senators filing out quickly afterward. But in the House, the proceedings continued with Gosar droning on about hypothetical and anecdotal reasons to audit Arizona’s elections, even as the mob broke through on the east side of the Capitol a little after 2:30 and began pouring through the halls in the direction of the House.
The House only narrowly escaped the mob. Because of Gosar’s delay, many of them were still making their way out of the lobby when the insurrectionists reached the Speakers Lobby doors and went berserk at the sight of their escaping targets. Other key House members, including Democratic Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Seattle, were on the upper balcony at the time of the evacuation and were forced to shelter there until a SWAT team was able to rescue them—drawing guns on the insurrectionists outside the balcony doors who were attempting to get in and forcing them to lie prone on the floor. They were still lying there when the House members and their staffs trapped there were finally evacuated, filing past them.[97]
TERRORIZING MEMBERS OF CONGRESS was always part of the plan to overturn the election. So was battling Antifa in the street. The latter, however, never materialized—and so neither did the intended outcome. Either way, it came perilously close to succeeding, as the fleeing congress members and senators and staffers could readily attest.[98]
Although the January 6 insurrection was the epitome of chaos, that was largely by design. Donald Trump did not cross the Rubicon with his army on January 6 without a carefully mapped strategy in place. His entire tenure as president, for that matter, was a ceaseless litany of ways to unleash chaos for authoritarian goals, and its ending was its apotheosis.
The January 6 scheme was a classic inside-outside strategy, wherein you can achieve institutional change by operating on the inside to create the conditions for transformation, and then applying pressure from the outside to make it reach fruition, both operations achieving a kind of synergy in the process. For Trump, his minions in Congress and the White House provided the inside game, while the assembled army of right-wing extremists and conspiracist authoritarians were always intended to bring the outside game.
Trump’s inside game had both legal and political components. The legal strategy was based on a pair of memoranda by Claremont Institute fellow John Eastman, who ascended within Trump’s inner circle during his last months in office on the basis of a proposed plan to overturn the election results and keep him in office.[99] Eastman dubiously contended in the memos that the Constitution designates the vice president as the “ultimate arbiter” of the election with the power to determine and declare the victor.
Eastman proposed that members of Congress from six battleground states where Trump’s team was attempting to contest the outcome in court—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—could object to the certification of the Electoral College ballot from their state on the basis of the legal challenges, which would draw out the debate long enough for the Republican legislatures in those states to declare alternate slates of electors. This would give Vice President Mike Pence the opportunity to assert that he had competing slates from these states, forcing him to exclude their votes, thus giving Trump a 232–222 Electoral College victory.
The plan proceeded well enough that Republican activists in each of those states filed bogus slates of electors who submitted false certificates declaring the election for Trump. (The National Archives refused to accept the unsanctioned documents.) On January 6, Eastman—who also spoke that morning at the Ellipse rally—was one of the political operators in Trump’s “War Room” at the Willard Hotel, rubbing shoulders with Roger Stone and his Oath Keepers crew and others.[100]
This fraudulent legal scheme required a political strategy to enact it, and its main architect was Steve Bannon, who called the inside-game move he planned “the Green Bay Sweep,” after the legendary football team’s Vince Lombardi–era play that had the running back or quarterback following behind a massive phalanx of blockers to score touchdowns. What that meant in Trump’s circle was sending waves of cohorts in Congress to block the certification long enough for their “quarterback”—the vice president—to push the ball over the goal line for Trump.
Trump adviser Peter Navarro later boasted that it was “a perfect plan,” noting: “We had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”[101]
This put Mike Pence at the center of their schemes, and Trump and his cohorts began applying massive pressure on him. Pence, however, consistently refused to play along. At a meeting with both Trump and Eastman, Pence had asked the lawyer: “Do you think I have such a power?”
When Eastman demurred that, while he might have such authority, it would be foolish to exercise it before the battleground states certified alternate slates of electors, Pence turned to Trump and said: “Did you hear that, Mr. President?” Trump did not respond, as if it had gone in one ear and out the other.[102]
The inside game was not going to be enough to achieve Trump’s goals. That’s where the outside game and Stop the Steal came in.
Trump had developed an interest in his ability to trigger the Insurrection Act—which essentially establishes martial law in emergency situations—over the course of the summer of 2020, during national protests over police brutality inspired by the murder of an African American man, George Floyd, by Minneapolis police in May.[103] He had even prepared a draft version to sign in order to call out the National Guard in Washington during protests there in early June, but was ultimately persuaded not to take the action, despite public support from Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who penned a New York Times op-ed calling on Trump to use the act.[104]
The idea remained an active option in Trump’s mind. Later that summer he declared that he was still considering invoking it: “Our country’s going to change,” Trump said. “We’re not supposed to go in, unless we call it an insurrection. But you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to have to look at it.”
This discussion excited the Patriot element, particularly Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who, as we have seen, began urging Trump to use the Insurrection Act to stop Antifa through October, and then began suggesting it as a solution to Trump’s loss after the election. Most of the Oath Keepers came to Washington fully expecting the president to pull the trigger.[105]
Trump himself was indeed preparing to use the Insurrection Act around January 6.[106] He ordered attorneys to prepare a draft version of a national emergency declaration, one in which the military would be permitted to seize election-related “assets”—such as voting machines and ballot boxes. The order would have authorized the Pentagon to seize election machinery in designated states.[107] Just a few days after Biden’s election victory, Trump also fired his defense secretary, Mark Esper, and a number of key Pentagon officials and replaced them with Trump loyalists like Christopher Miller, the new acting defense chief.[108]
A PowerPoint presentation shared among the team working to overturn the election also called for Trump to declare a national emergency based on the pretext that “the Chinese systematically gained control over our election system constituting a national security emergency.” Among its recommendations was that members of Congress be briefed on “foreign interference” and that a “national security emergency” be declared. “Declare electronic voting in all states invalid,” it suggested.[109]
Generals in the Pentagon feared that Trump was about to try to use military forces to retain power, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley.[110] He foresaw a “nightmare scenario” in which Trump would attempt “to use the military on the streets of America to prevent the legitimate, peaceful transfer of power.” They were not alone: On January 3, all ten then-living ex-secretaries of defense published an extraordinary letter in The Washington Post, warning: “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”[111]
Trump knew that he would have a massive mob at his disposal on January 6. But he would not activate the Insurrection Act in order to use the military against his own supporters. That was where Antifa came in.
For four years, Trump had hyped the supposed existential threat of the anti-fascist movement, describing them as terrorists and evildoers. When he had told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his October 2020 debate with Biden, Trump had added: “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
He began beating this drumbeat even more loudly after he lost the election. When the November 14 March for Trump devolved into evening violence—primarily involving Proud Boys assaulting random protesters on the streets—Trump blamed it all on Antifa, tweeting:
Antifa SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back. Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA people. DC Police, get going—do your job and don’t hold back!!![112]
In the minds of Trump and his rabid supporters, Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement had become inextricably intertwined, gradually becoming the same “violent left” threat. When Trump’s supporters gathered in D.C. for another Stop the Steal rally on December 12, they again engaged in random street violence with counterprotesters—and then attacked two African American churches that bore BLM banners, vandalizing the buildings and then tearing the banners and setting them aflame.[113] (Among the Proud Boys who were seen on video lighting the banners was national chairman Enrique Tarrio, who was arrested for the act when he returned to D.C. to participate in the January 6 events.)
On January 5, Trump signed a resolution urging Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to designate Antifa a “terrorist organization.” “The violence spurred on by Antifa—such as hurling projectiles and incendiary devices at police, burning vehicles, and violently confronting police in defiance of local curfews—is dangerous to human life and to the fabric of our Nation,” the memorandum read. “These violent acts undermine the rights of peaceful protestors and destroy the lives, liberty, and property of the people of this Nation, especially those most vulnerable.”[114]
Trump supporters eagerly prepared for their designated enemies to turn out in force, and shared “sightings” of them in the days leading up to January 6. On Parler, a prominent QAnon account posted a photo of two black tour buses featuring the Black Lives Matter slogan on their sides, warning:
To all the Patriots in Washington DC, Virginia, MD. Let us know where BLM and Antifa buses are staying, give us addresses and pictures. We will send to Proudboys. We need to get them before they go out to the streets, this will make all patriots safer at the March…January 6, 2021.
There was just one flaw with all these plans. Anti-fascists were able to see through Trump’s scheme and encouraged all their colleagues to avoid the capital city on January 6. On social media, they shared hashtags like #DontTakeTheBait and #January6TrumpTrap that spread the word.
One widely shared meme showed a bear trap, with the text: “On January 6th in Washington DC the Proud Boys are cordially inviting you to be part of Donald Trump and Roger Stone’s plan to destroy American democracy.” Moreover, anti-fascists in reality (quite unlike the figments of right-wing imaginations) comprise an almost entirely reactive movement that organizes to oppose far-right extremism when it manifests in their communities. They’re not particularly aligned with any political party and have no active affiliations with any mainstream party, including Joe Biden’s Democrats.
So when the mob gathered on the National Mall on January 6 and headed toward the Capitol, they encountered no resistance from any counterprotesters, much to their surprise. Oath Keepers and Proud Boys alike had been warning one another for weeks to prepare for Antifa or BLM violence. Instead, the only resistance they encountered came from Capitol Police.
The first key step in Trump’s plan—for Pence to play along and decline to accept the ballots from the key battleground states—fell apart when Pence did his constitutional duty and certified the Electoral College vote in the Senate. Then Trump’s plans to use what he fully expected to happen—that is, violence between his army of “Patriots” and Antifa—as the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act were dismantled by the reality that “Antifa” was a concocted bogeyman, and vanished back into the mists of their imaginations.
The pro-Trump right-wing media and his defenders on social media were prepared to trot out the presence of violent anti-fascists on January 6 as justification for whatever Trump did. On Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show, guest host Todd Herman said as the scenes from the insurrection unfolded: “It’s probably not Trump supporters who would do that. Antifa, BLM, that’s what they do. Right?” The right-wing Washington Times ran a story falsely claiming that a facial-recognition firm had identified activists in the crowd at the Capitol as Antifa (it was corrected about twenty-four hours later). Fox News talk show hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity suggested on national TV that night that Antifa might somehow be to blame, and the claim was made all day on Fox.[115]
“We did have some warning that there might be Antifa elements masquerading as Trump supporters in advance of the attack on the Capitol,” Mo Brooks told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs.
When it became clear, however, that he couldn’t blame Antifa for the violence, Trump’s options for overturning the election had shrunk down to a simple and clear one: for the insurrectionists to successfully stop the Electoral College ballot count—and to do it in a way that could forestall the proceeding indefinitely. In other words, for them to succeed in their frenzied desire to not merely terrorize Congress, but to get their hands on members and lynch them.
This played a decisive role in the failure of the D.C. National Guard—which Trump commands, and had placed on standby—to show up to resist the insurrection until over three hours after the Capitol had first been breached and Capitol Police had requested their deployment. Throughout the afternoon, the departing president resisted pleas from his staff, his confidants, and his congressional allies to stand up and stop the violence.
Many of them texted his chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Donald Trump Jr. was especially agitated: “He’s got to condemn this [shit] ASAP,” he wrote. “I’m pushing it hard. I agree,” Meadows responded.[116]
“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” popular Fox News host Laura Ingraham texted Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
One of Trump’s favorite Fox cohosts, Brian Kilmeade, urged Meadows to “please get him on TV,” warning the violence was “destroying everything you have accomplished.” Trump’s close confidant at Fox, Sean Hannity, asked Meadows whether Trump could “make a statement” and “ask people to leave the Capitol.” Still, nothing happened.[117]
House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, kept trying to reach the president by phone, and eventually did. Rep. Jaime Herrera-Buetler of Washington state was privy to the exchange.[118]
“When McCarthy finally reached the president on Jan. 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol,” Herrera-Buetler later explained. “McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said, ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.‘ ”
Finally, after it became clear that members of Congress had been safely evacuated and were planning to return later that evening to complete the certification of the vote, and a combined force of Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan officers had successfully shut down the violence and begun clearing the Capitol, the word came down for the National Guard to deploy.
A little while later, Trump finally made his public plea to the mob: He tweeted a video downplaying the events of day and sympathizing with his followers: “I know your pain. I know your hurt.” He added, “But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
An hour later, he tweeted out a justification for the violence he had unleashed:
These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever![119]
AUTHORITIES ESTIMATE THAT MORE than two thousand people illegally entered the Capitol that day, and several thousand had trespassed on the grounds outside as well.[120] Four protesters, including Ashli Babbitt, died in the violence, primarily from personal health issues; one Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, died that evening at home from a stroke almost certainly induced by the stress of the day’s events. More than 140 officers were injured. The cost of the cleanup and repairs was more than $1.5 million, perhaps as much as $30 million.[121]
Some of the arrested insurrectionists were immediately regretful and contrite. Douglas Jensen, the QAnon fan who had followed Officer Goodman up the stairs near the Senate entrance, was initially apologetic and claimed he no longer believed in QAnon: “Jensen became a victim of numerous conspiracy theories that were being fed to him over the internet by a number of very clever people,” his attorney explained in a court filing. “Six months later, languishing in a DC Jail cell, locked down most of the time, he feels deceived, recognizing that he bought into a pack of lies.”[122] (Jensen was later returned to jail for violating his release conditions by watching a conference online dedicated to proving that Trump won the election.) Similarly, “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley’s attorney caustically blamed Trump for not issuing a pardon to the insurrectionists and claimed that Chansley had been “duped by the president.”[123]
Others, notably Proud Boys like Ethan Nordean, felt abandoned by Trump and were angry about it. Nordean vented in a Proud Boys chat on Telegram:
Alright I’m gunna say it. FUCK TRUMP! Fuck him more than Biden. I’ve followed the guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all. Yes he woke us up, but he led us to believe some great justice was upon us…and it never happened, now I’ve got some of my good friends and myself facing jail time cuz we followed this guys lead and never questioned it.[124]
Nordean, however, still believed in the underlying cause—namely, the long-anticipated civil war he and his fellow Proud Boys believed they were now engaged in.
“This is a very fragile time for the club, but we must be more vigilant than ever, not just for those that look up to us in the club,” Nordean wrote. “We are on the brink of absolute war.”