This segment is the final of four parts that comprise this voice essay. You can find this episode on Apple Podcasts here.

Chapter 11 - Aftermath

Ray Epps was there on January 6th, but he never went into the Capitol. But conspiracy theories about him and January 6th derailed his life. You see, Epps is on video, and got Internet-famous, for trying on the eve of the attack to agitate others to not just go *to* the Capitol, but to go *in* to the Capitol. Some people listening supported what he was saying. Some people pushed back. He said it over and over. After Trump’s speech, he directed people in the crowd toward the Capitol. But the kicker was a short clip, taken at an entry point along the Capitol perimeter where a younger guy was frontin’ the police. Ray Epps pulled him aside and whispered something in his ear. Shortly after, the guy busted through the barricade and on toward the building.

Despite appearing on an FBI list of persons of interest for a short time, Epps was never charged. He was not detained. And this seemed suspicious to many people, considering how the government seemed to be throwing the book at all kinds of offenders besides him. The hypothesis arose that he was working for corrupt elements of the federal government, who worked in premeditated fashion to cajole and nudge Trump’s peaceful supporters into violence and anarchy. A trap to lure patriots. Trump himself, along with other prominent Republicans and media personalities, have boosted this narrative.

A few things to say here. First: if this was a trap, you really have to wonder whether anyone at all even fell for it. A person who wasn’t already game for intruding on the Electoral College certification before they encountered Ray Epps on the streets of Washington, DC almost certainly wouldn’t have been swayed to do it on his say-so. To believe that Epps, or even a hundred people on the government payroll if that’s where your imagination takes you, could make lawbreakers out of a crowd of tens of thousands of peaceful people is frankly laughable. And that’s before you consider that the feds have no interest in doing anything like this.

Second, there are many good reasons the FBI would not charge a person like Ray Epps that have nothing to do with him working for the feds. Foremost among them: MAYBE HE DIDN’T BREAK ANY LAWS. Seriously, what is the argument here, that we can arrest people just for *talking* about breaking the law even when they never followed up with action? That’s not the country we live in, and we shouldn’t want to.

Third, the people pushing the Ray Epps conspiracy theory mostly do it in the hope of convincing others that the feds could have masterminded the attack and conned innocent Trump supporters into going along. But the existence and actions of Ray Epps don’t prove anything of the sort, and there is literally no other evidence to even suggest it.

For his part, Ray has had a pretty crummy time of it since January 6th, as these conspiracy theories have given him a bad rap with the MAGA crowd he used to hang with. Now, he is persona non grata. Epps was wrong to say what he did, and to condone what became a lawless riot that got people killed, but I do feel a little bad that, like QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley, he fell victim to the face-eating leopard of online disinformation.

This chapter deals with the effects that January 6th directly caused. Let’s do a brief recap.

It’s 2020. The President of the United States sows doubt about mail-in ballots for months, then loses reelection in a way that seems suspect to people who believe there is reason to doubt mail-in ballots. He insists without evidence that he actually won and vows to sue to fight to stay in power. All his lawsuits are ultra-fails. He tries to get the Justice Department to make it seem like there are real questions about the validity of the election. Fail. He tries to have the Defense Department look into nonexistent foreign hacking of election machines. Believe it or not, fail. He orchestrates a scheme to have states he lost submit electors for him to the Electoral College, leans on his Vice President to throw out Biden electors from those states, and calls for a wild protest on the counting day. All fail, repeatedly, except summoning supporters to DC. In a final gambit to stop the certification of Biden’s win, he turns the mob loose on the Capitol to strong-arm Congress and the Vice President into assisting him. This gets very ugly for several hours but, thankfully, in the end also fails to achieve the overthrow of the election. Donald Trump has lost about seven different ways at this point.

So, what happened next?

Well, a lot of people started getting in trouble for breaking the law, starting with the most obvious among the attackers. Not many arrests were made on the day itself, but for more than a few it was a simple task to figure out who did what. Drip by drip, tip by tip, video clip by video clip, many of those who perpetrated violence against the police or damaged federal property were brought in. Some made it almost too easy; all one had to do was look at what they posted on main before and during the action.

Donald Trump also took a bit of immediate heat, though in the end he would be able to claim vindication. Seeing his role in bringing the mob to the Capitol and directing angry supporters toward where they and the Vice President were, the majority of the House of Representatives voted to impeach the President. It was the first time in American history a president had been impeached twice. Ten Republicans joined in. Yes, it was also the first time a president had been twice acquitted by the Senate, largely behind arguments that it was too close to–or even past–the inauguration that would end his time in office anyway. There are good arguments counter to that, and it’s questionable how sincere any of those saying this were to begin with. But politics are what they are, and so Donald Trump stayed in office and retained the ability to run again.

A good amount of lies about January 6th also sprang up around this time, in addition to the ones we have already discussed, apparently driven by the imperative to defend Trump from impeachment, the Republican Party from embarrassment, and those being charged with federal crimes from the consequences of their actions.

To wit: the false flag narrative–that villainized Ray Epps and Jacob Chansley and others who were clearly on Trump’s side–was done in the service of constructing a counterfeit alternative reality to that which really took place. To create the impression of the situation that is sometimes based loosely on facts, but even then delves so narrowly and context-free as to be impossible to interpret correctly.

Sean Hannity, for example, texted President Trump during the violence to communicate that it was a serious mistake and could lead to disaster. He knows the reality, or at least he did then. Mr. Hannity, however, along with his Fox colleagues and others in the right-wing mediasphere, has since then also worked diligently to shift attention off of Donald Trump, spread lies about the attack, and turn his Republican viewers against the very idea that the United States should seriously investigate it.

And in this we can understand a key the reason why Americans have gotten on such different pages about it all. They are divided about January 6th because propaganda works. Trump-loyal Republicans and the media ecosystem that advocates for them with their audience of millions of Americans have purposely injected canards and falsehoods into the discourse. They have misrepresented what occurred on January 6th, changed the subject when damning headlines broke, and aligned against any efforts to get to the bottom of the schemes and ultimate attack. It would be funny if it weren’t so damaging to the stability of our government.

These influential figures–and think for a second about how they could have influenced you, either directly or indirectly–have consistently suggested that neither reporters nor Congress nor the Department of Justice should investigate January 6th. They would prefer we all just stay in the dark about this dark episode, or, failing that, trust only the Republicans in Congress who helped Trump try to stay in power to probe or examine these extraordinary events. Even if you generally agree with Republicans, this argument should seem ridiculous. Because it is.

So, what kinds of fairy tales did the January 6th apologists deploy to deflect the blame? What do people say should really be looked at whenever the commonsense suggestion is made that we find out why the supporters Trump told to go to the Capitol to fight went to the Capitol and fought?

“The feds disguised as Trump supporters did it” baloney is a variation on the earlier baloney trotted out on January 6th itself: that antifa dressed like Trump supporters and did it. Both of these take advantage of the cognitive dissonance that so many Republicans watching from home felt. That was a very natural reaction on the part of peace-loving people, who by and large would never condone political violence. Fans of the police and law and order generally, seeing MAGA-hatted men attacking the police with Trump flags in a direct attack on the rule of law, surely hoped against hope that there was an explanation that could reverse the impression that their own eyes had given. They were primed to believe it was perpetrated by almost anyone but people like them. Someone else HAD to have done it. So the false flag fairy tales were designed to alleviate that cognitive dissonance, and they worked. It’s how human beings are wired.

Among the set of people unable to acknowledge the truth about January 6th but not willing to go full conspiracy theory calling it a government op, another false narrative gained widespread popularity: that the protest was peaceful. There was no insurrection at all, and the protesters were peaceful. They did nothing wrong, and they certainly didn’t know it was wrong if they had. In this version of things, the people inside the Capitol thought they were allowed to be there, that authorities on scene had ushered them in as though on a tour.

Like the false flag business, this canard has no leg to stand on. Those peddling it sincerely hope that you will forget about the injured defenders and broken windows and violent chants. They want you to believe that it was possible that thousands of people could be on the premises, witnessing what was happening and who was doing it—entering the building with others shouting “our house,” seeing fellow protesters verbally and physically abusing police and screaming for the blood of Pence and Democrats—and genuinely consider themselves to be innocent. It conveniently ignores the nonstop blaring of bullhorns with messages about how they had come to stop the steal by whatever means and how great it was that the Defense Department was unwilling to intervene to restore order. When you stop and think about it, this narrative might strain credulity even more than the others.

But it’s a comforting narrative for many, and it seems to resonate with normie Republicans. And so you see people—typically those who could suffer legal or political consequences from their connection to the attack—who say this kind of thing. Anton Lunyk, for example, who traveled from Brooklyn to DC for the rally and entered the Capitol, told several contacts asking via social media DM afterwards that everything was on the up and up. He repeated to several of them the lie that police had basically helped the crowd to see the sights. Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, have charged Lunyk and two other men with him that day with entering and remaining in the Capitol unlawfully, violently entering the Capitol, disorderly conduct inside the Capitol, and parading, demonstrating or picketing inside the Capitol. All three pleaded guilty to the latter in April 2022, and in September they were sentenced to a few months of home confinement, probation, and small fines for the other crimes.

The peaceful protest narrative peaked in popularity some time after the live television coverage of the attack but before a lot of the high-profile court cases and other coverage made clear to anyone paying attention the actual mood and misdeeds of the mob. It was around this moment that a Republican congressman–who had HELPED BARRICADE the doors of the House chamber–went so far as to say footage from inside the Capitol on January 6th could be mistaken for a “normal tourist visit.” The temptation to make this kind of comparison remains strong for those with something to lose if more of the public grasps how violent and awful it was.

And then there exist other, still wilder kinds of counternarrative. Some of them overlap with the two strategic uber-narratives above. Some, like saying officer Brian Sicknick died from the COVID vaccine and not from complications from being assaulted by the mob, stand alone and are generally more tactical in the effect they are meant to produce.

For Donald Trump’s part, he has kind of tried to rhetorically be on every side of the question, though he has made plain that he doesn’t dislike any of the fake versions that have circulated. Trump’s approach has been to say all the things, and that way you can point to where you’ve said the right thing even when you have also said its opposite. In his speech on January 7th, he acknowledged Joe Biden had won the election–but later walked back that admission. Trump has condemned the violence a time or two, but he has not shown remorse that the attack happened. He has lionized the rioters who led the attack and also expressed support for law enforcement harmed by them. He has dabbled in or boosted many of the phony counternarratives that have come along about January 6th, but he seems at times constrained in the operating space that the reality affords.

Probably the most notable rhetorical innovation Trump introduced was to punch back at those in the media and elsewhere who were calling the thing an “insurrection.” In a reprise of a familiar technique for the now-former President, he took a word that was being used against him and twisted it to refer instead to something his enemies had done to him. Within about six months of the mayhem at the Capitol, Trump was trying out the line that the REAL insurrection took place when he was voted out of office. In his words:

“I reverse it. The insurrection took place on November 3 - that was Election Day - and before and after. That was, to me, the insurrection. And the - January 6 was a protest.”

Notice how this statement, framed as a difference of opinion over what is said in a particular context, easily breeds misinformation as the meaning of words gets hopelessly confused in the dust being kicked up. As you might expect, the right-wing media ecosystem found this reversal very clever indeed and have been echoing it ever since.

We are going to delve more into the controversy about what words can appropriately be used with respect to January 6th in the final chapter, so stay tuned!

The impeachment by the House of Representatives did not lead to a Senate conviction. Donald Trump would serve out the remaining days of his single term as President. But Congress wasn’t done. It determined to launch into large-scale inquiries to learn as much as possible about why this thing had been inflicted on the country and on them personally.

One risk to this endeavor, though probably unavoidable given that the minority party was complicit in the events of January 6th, was that any investigation would become or be perceived as a partisan hack job. There is no shortage of examples of Congressional committees being stood up to help the majority win elections, from the Red Scare to Benghazi. The moment called for serious efforts by serious people.

The Speaker of the House started out with a concept in which the new “select,” or temporary, committee would roughly reflect the partisan representation of the House as a whole. Democrats had greater numbers, but Republicans would have their say. In July, Pelosi announced the committee’s creation and requested that minority leader Kevin McCarthy put forward names for a roster of five Republicans to participate.

Right out of the gate, the representatives McCarthy tapped telegraphed that they wanted to flout the stated objectives of the committee and derail the investigation by pursuing lines of inquiry focused on the security failings. In the words of one, Jim Banks of Indiana, as he announced he was accepting McCarthy’s nomination, these five Republicans would “force the Democrats and the media to answer questions… [like] why was the Capitol unprepared and vulnerable to attack on January 6?"

If after listening this far you still think the unpreparedness of the defenders and the security vulnerabilities of the Capitol are to blame for the violence, this may sound very reasonable. Pausing here for a minute, though, just to note that investigations of those things were, in fact, done in the weeks and months following the attack. Many of them. Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate, for example, pursued bipartisan investigations and ethics inquiries just days later. A House-commissioned independent review of security failures including recommendations for addressing vulnerabilities was wrapped up within a couple months. Both chambers held public hearings on the physical security of the Capitol complex and on how we had failed to collect and share intelligence in ways that could have enabled better preparation. And so on. The Congress even passed a law to remedy critical flaws in police and National Guard response processes.

Executive branch agencies with a role in the Capitol’s defense–and which played a part in the weak response to the attack–also conducted in-depth internal reviews, though these were not to be completed until later. DoD, the U.S. Capitol Police, and the Department of Homeland Security all saw their inspectors general launch probes and publish reports. The Government Accountability Office did a separate independent review of the performance of the Capitol Police. Maybe not all the questions were answered to everyone’s satisfaction, but a lot was being done on this front.

In light of the extensive attention given to the security aspects, Republicans’ hard line on insisting Democrats look at them exclusively as the new select committee was getting started in July was a clear signal, to me, that they intended to play politics, deflect blame from the attackers and the one they attacked for, and generally hinder the investigation from doing what it needed to do.

Even so, Nancy Pelosi accepted three of the Republicans tapped, but rejected Banks and Jim Jordan, another highly unserious, Trump-loyal member of Congress who made a circus out of the first impeachment proceedings in particular. What point was there in having a committee to investigate the attack, Pelosi reasoned, if people clearly in the tank for Trump and the attackers were allowed to cause havoc at every turn.

McCarthy wasn’t having it, though. He was going to have all his nominees, or he would pull the whole slate and Democrats would go it alone. Pelosi said (paraphrasing) fine, you do you. Republican leadership would have almost no influence on the committee, including the subpoena power, hearings, and other investigative tools at its disposal. On the other hand, Republicans would be free to lob broadsides at the committee and, by extension, the Democrats who run the House.

McCarthy further said the minority would run its own investigation. I should note: 13 months later and we’re still waiting for him to stand up this alternative panel... possible it was an empty threat! In the meantime, Republicans have done a good amount of talking about the security issues, and more recently have spoken about how they planned to take a hard look at the activities the Democrats’ committee has undertaken when they get the majority back. Surrogates have even hinted that members serving on the Committee would face jail time as payback for the people who have been found guilty of contempt of its subpoena power. The perpetrators are the victims, you see, and the investigators are really the ones who deserve to be investigated. That’s how the alternative reality thinks.

So it was that Democrats moved ahead with establishing the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. It would have Republicans, just not ones that McCarthy would have picked or can even stand to be in the same room as. The Committee would be co-chaired by Democrat Bennie Thompson and Republican Liz Cheney, who had voted for impeachment and was regularly speaking out about how wrong January 6th was. The Committee had Democrats Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff, who had both played key roles in the Trump impeachments, but they also brought on Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who like Cheney had broken with his party on the thing it cared most about: Trump.

The Committee started working, quietly at first but growing in pitch and intensity as each month went by. The first phase was a wave of requests for interviews and documents from witnesses. These requests turned into subpoenas for some, and into criminal contempt referrals to the Department of Justice for a handful of the most obstinate. Steve Bannon was ultimately indicted for contempt because he had no legal defense for not complying. The momentum for gathering evidence built to the point that the Committee handed down subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, their own colleagues, in what surely made for occasional awkward silences in shared elevators around Capitol Hill.

Not everyone resisted. At least five staffers in the Trump White House, including a former press secretary and Trump’s daughter and her husband, cooperated with the Committee to provide testimony and documents. Donald Trump, Jr was deposed. Former Attorney General Bill Barr gave a revealing account of the weeks before he resigned. As of May 2022, the Committee had interviewed more than 1,000 people. It opened up a tip line, through which it received about 500 leads that it found worth pursuing.

On the documents front, the Committee went big early on to obtain records related to January 6th from the executive branch, now in the hands of the Biden Administration. Trump challenged this on grounds of executive privilege–saying the records of the Executive Office of the President and cabinet agencies should be shielded from others outside the executive branch from accessing–but President Biden waived privilege, which belongs to the sitting president, and the cases went against the former one. In January 2022, 8 justices of the Supreme Court ruled to let the Committee have the records. Clarence Thomas dissented.

This decision was a win for the Committee and for all interested in the public knowing more about January 2021. As of June 2022, the Committee had obtained 125,000 documents that would help it form an understanding of what happened within the government, and by key players not in government, and identify problem areas that needed more digging. It got text messages and emails and voice recordings and the memos that the lawyer types circulated saying the fake electors thing could really work if the Vice President went along.

Other wins came as well. Arguments had been made, mostly by witnesses who did not want to testify, that the Committee had no legislative purpose and that it had been improperly constituted and therefore lacked the authority to issue a subpoena in the first place. Federal judges considered both of these assertions and explicitly rejected them. The judicial branch found no fault with the Committee and was not willing to protect reluctant witnesses from its demands.

Trump kept leading the charge on total stonewalling of the Committee, and was able to in many respects himself. He invoked novel defenses such as a president’s supposed “absolute immunity” from being investigated for the rest of his life. He encouraged allies being served lawful subpoenas to refuse cooperation by claiming executive privilege, and many tried.

But the pressure on requested witnesses to cooperate, contrary to Trump’s wishes, intensified. Some doubled down and even tripled down, like former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark–remember him from Chapter 7?–who refused the Committee’s subpoena, saw his criminal contempt referral voted out of Committee, and then invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself more than 100 times in the course of an hour and 40 minutes in a separate deposition. Alex Jones pleaded the Fifth almost 100 times. In a letter explaining he would not give testimony responsive to a subpoena, John Eastman invoked the Fifth.

Stop the Steal firebrand Ali Alexander took to the courts, suing Nancy Pelosi, the Committee, and Verizon Wireless to keep his phone call records out of the hands of Congressional investigators. Mike Flynn sued Nancy Pelosi “in her official capacity as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives” in an attempt to block the Committee from enforcing its subpoenas. The Republican National Committee tried something similar.

By and large, these lawsuits went nowhere and ultimately the Committee got its hands on quite a lot. As the courts deliberated, though, the propagandists had time to keep hammering the counternarratives with the public and drive up negative perceptions of the Committee. Perhaps they calculated that if enough time went by Americans would be sapped of all interest in January 6th as fatigue set in over the back-and-forth.

Some of the topmost lieutenants, however, were finding resistance to be an untenable strategy. After all, it can cost a lot to file losing lawsuit after losing lawsuit, only to still end up at individual personal risk from a contempt charge. It was becoming clear that one could not rely on the “illegitimacy of the Committee” defense or, for most instances, the executive privilege defense when it came down to it.

Arguably the most significant single trove of evidence the Committee received was that turned over by Mark Meadows, a former Congressman who was chosen by Trump to be his final White House Chief of Staff after Meadows showed great loyalty during the first impeachment. Meadows at first cooperated, then didn’t and sued the Committee to protect himself from the consequences of stonewalling, then maybe cooperated again. It’s all a little unclear, and probably only the Committee really knows how that back-and-forth went. What we know is that before suing in December 2021, Meadows had shared basically the entire contents of his phone with the Committee. In it were messages going back to November 2020 about the idea to overturn the Electoral College all the way through to what the inner circle was doing and saying on January 6th itself.

The senior technical adviser for the Committee, who has written a book about his team’s work to analyze phone records and other data, called the Meadows haul a “road map to the coup” that Trump’s team tried to pull off. The Committee has made many of these messages public and has used them extensively in its hearings.  Meadows had sent texts to and received texts from a whole range of conspiracy theory advocates and Stop the Steal movers and shakers, including Mike Lindell and Ginni Thomas and many others. Whatever history makes of January 6th, the Meadows phone contents seem likely to play a central role in the final telling.

A lot of what we know at this moment about the work of the January 6th Committee comes from the series of televised hearings it held in the summer of 2022. Over eight sessions, Chair Bennie Thompson, Co-chair Liz Cheney, and Kinzinger and the rank-and-file Democrats took turns weaving recorded testimony and collected documents together to lay out varying aspects of the ordeal. Not for nothing, but I had structured the first half of this essay well before the first hearing aired, and I found that I had gotten myself most of the way to understanding January 6th the same way as did the many highly placed Republicans who had a front-row seat to it, whose testimonies constituted almost all of the video clips played in the hearings. Seeing the world through the misinformation lens and knowing how to read the media can sometimes get you the same kind of insight–if not quite the same degree–that the Committee got through a year of whole teams with access to absolute mountains of documents, firsthand accounts, and raw data. It’s a highly effective, highly efficient way of making sense of your world.

The January 6th Committee has said it will finish its work and publish a final report and no small amount of the evidence it has amassed by the end of 2022. I, for one, plan to carve out a good several hours to dig in to what they put out. Depending on whether I judge it to be of high quality in terms of substantiated argumentation, if it differs from what I’ve said in this essay I may choose to revisit my thinking and re-release a modified version.

I’ll end with a brief note that what I’ve laid out here are the big ones, but several other important civil suits and criminal investigations have been set in motion that will yield information about January 6th and potentially impose court-ordered consequences on those who did wrong. People suing Trump for damages and emotional distress on the one hand. Things like seditious conspiracy (which Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have now pleaded guilty to), conspiracy to defraud the United States, and attempting to obstruct Congress from doing its work on the other. Like the Committee’s work, I will be keeping an eye on these for the facts that are made known in the winding, yearslong course that these are sure to take.

And that’s going to be it for the part that deals with the immediate effects that January 6th caused. But what about those longer term things that constitute the legacy of that event, though? How can we understand what January 6th hath wrought on our politics, our communities, and our society? That’s in the next and final chapter.

Chapter 12 - Legacies

Mike Lindell just wanted a mushroom and swiss burger and a chocolate shake. Instead, what he got was a warrant served on him by the FBI, who came up to his car as it idled in a Hardee’s drive thru, and seized his cell phone. This capped off a year that had been something of a roller coaster ride for Lindell, who is a self-made millionaire as the CEO of MyPillow.

On the one hand, Lindell had championed the Stop the Steal cause, in particular keeping the flame of foreign hacking alive long after everyone else had rightly given up on it. This had been good for his business, with all the other true believer influencers lining up to hawk pillows and sheets with their own custom MyPillow promo codes. (He shares the revenues with major personalities in the conspirosphere–Glenn Beck, Dan Bongino, Rudy Giuliani, Jack Posobiec, and Vincent James Foxx all have codes–leading Steve Bannon to call him “the most significant financier in all of conservative media.”) He spoke at election denialist rallies and has been a fixture of Trump’s own rallies, showing up whenever election fraud was invoked. The now former President spoke well of him, which must feel nice for someone who is such a Trump fan.

On the other hand, Mike Lindell was tied in to everything leading up to January 6th and has become infamous for his involvement in the shenanigans that followed it. He made headlines on January 15th when his picture was taken outside of the White House. He or, he claims, an attorney who asked him to convey a message, had written the words “martial law if necessary” and the name Sidney Powell on notes he was holding just before a 5-10 meeting with Trump. There were those who wanted the departing President to not depart, to keep fighting by all means available. Mike Lindell was one who thought Trump should stay.

He has sunk, by his account, as much as $40 million into proving the 2020 election was stolen, on films about the supposed hacking–bearing titles like “ABSOLUTE PROOF,” “ABSOLUTE INTERFERENCE,” and “SELECTION CODE”--on a social media site that has gained no traction, and on a large conference 7 months after Biden’s inauguration that he dubbed a Cyber Symposium. At the latter event, he had promised to unveil incontrovertible data and let invited experts examine and test it. Instead, he unveiled no data at all.

Lindell has tried, repeatedly, to file “the case” for the Supreme Court to rule that the election fraud is real and therefore that the outcome we all observed–Biden winning–would have to be overturned. Nevermind that there is no mechanism in the Constitution for a president to be removed by a court after being sworn in, Lindell confidently opined that Trump would be reinstated. On multiple occasions, he made predictions about this that each time failed spectacularly to pan out. The Supreme Court has said it won’t be examining the briefs, to say nothing of ruling in his favor.

And then there was the Tina Peters saga, for which the FBI ultimately came for his phone as evidence in the case. The Colorado county clerk who arranged for her own election machines to be illegally breached in hopes of uncovering evidence of foreign hacking, and prosecutors have taken note and have indicted her. But between the breach and her indictment, Tina Peters made an appearance on the stage of Lindell’s big cyber symposium. The MyPillow executive very likely had direct communications with Peters, and could be investigated himself depending on what the feds find on his phone. Three days hadn’t gone by before Lindell, appearing at an event with Eric Trump, told the crowd they could save 66 percent off using promo code “FBI.” His money is still at the heart of the election denialism movement.

Mike Lindell. A kind of microcosm for all the weirdness and awfulness that has been on display since January 6th. But maybe one we can find hope in. You see, people have kind of lost interest in his schtick. A year after the symposium, and just days before the Hardee’s incident, Mr. Lindell tried to host a “summit” he called “Moment of Truth.” The problem he had, though, was that no one really came. In true conspiracy theorist fashion, he had a reason for this failure–that Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Facebook, Fox, and Newsmax all got together and decided to prevent him from succeeding–but its sheer implausibility only further eroded his credibility. With any luck, this will eventually be the fate of the false uber narratives about the 2020 election and January 6th: they collapse under their own weight and fade into political irrelevance and historical insignificance.

How Mike Lindell’s Pillow Business Propels the Election Denial Movement (New York Times)

Shifting gears from previous chapters, in which I tried my best to chronicle what happened with a focus on the lens that I use to make sense of the world. In this conclusion, it’s going to be more of the world according to Kevin, in that I am subjectively, though I hope transparently, going to lay out my views about the influence this episode of American history has and might have. Bear with me. Get ready for some editorial content!

Quick thoughts about terminology before we get into it. I have mostly avoided it so far, but I am going to refer to it as an “insurrection” in this chapter.

The question of whether it was a demonstration, protest, riot, insurrection, sedition, coup? A lot hinges on this, both in the legal sense of people on trial for crimes and in the political sense in that the Constitution since after the Civil War has not allowed people who participate in insurrections or seditions hold public office.

The efficacy of that restriction is being tested for the first time in a long time with pro-insurrection candidates, including incumbent members of Congress, around the country. Hard to say what the judicial system will do with such challenges, other than to say an early precedent has been set in New Mexico, where a judge ruled that a man who was found guilty of breaking into the Capitol was no longer eligible to hold his position as a county commissioner. If that is followed in other cases, the implications will be profound for our politics as legal consequences catch up with more officeholders.

Let’s consider the judge’s definition of “insurrection” in this case, because I think it is one that will make sense to most people. (With the caveat that, because of the stakes, pro-insurrection types want the word to mean something even more serious than what happened on January 6th—whatever THAT would look like.)

Judge Mathew wrote that an “insurrection” is an assemblage that uses force or intimidation to “prevent the execution of one or more federal laws.” This is clearly the case here. If this fairly standard definition of insurrection applies, January 6th was one. Force AND intimidation were marshaled to prevent a whole host of federal laws—and the Constitution itself—from being executed.

Not everyone there meant to do an insurrection, but notice that’s not what anyone is even saying. Bystanders to looting are not looters, but looting still occurred. People who watch a gang beat down someone in the street aren’t guilty of assault, but the crime was committed—and those who say so aren’t wrong to use the word.

There is a line, and my view is this was clearly over it when viewed in the aggregate. Just gets trickier when getting to whether an individual *person* did an insurrection.

One of the quickest ways to get into a waste of time argument on the Internet is to call January 6th an insurrection. There are a lot of people who simply can’t stand it, or they are glad to have a semantics debate to avoid having to defend what happened, or both. They have made up their minds, and they know the person saying it has made up theirs.

But. If you do get into conversation with someone reasonable, who won’t immediately pounce and is wondering why you think it was one, you might find it helpful to know that top Republicans other than Trump have used the I word. Including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has done so several times. Eventually he characterized it a “violent insurrection,” which is a little redundant but helps to reinforce the nature of insurrection while also correctly identifying this event as one.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also at one point agreed with McConnell here, but he has been less consistent. What happened with McCarthy is that the night of the attack he condemned it, then he stopped condemning it and made a trip to Mar-a-Lago to reconcile with Trump, and then became a January 6th defender. Something other than the truth is clearly driving McCarthy’s publicly stated views on this, whatever his personal understanding may be.

Meanwhile, recall that the Republican National Committee censured Republican House members Cheney and Kinzinger for participating in the select committee to investigate the attack. They were out. The RNC’s resolution went farther than most Republicans had been willing to in rationalizing what happened and steering the rhetoric away from talk of insurrection. Cheney and Kinzinger were bad Republicans, it asserted, because they were helping the Democrats punish the people responsible for what was, in the words of the censure resolution, “legitimate political discourse.” It was in the context of the public and political backlash to that egregious statement that Kevin McCarthy found it necessary to say he thought McConnell’s phrasing was accurate. It was an insurrection and it was violent, and was not legitimate as a form of political discourse.

So I’m in agreement with Judge Mathew and Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy on his good days. But I’ve chosen to mostly avoid saying “insurrection” anyway. Why? It is more important to me that I not trigger people than it is that I be able to use that word. Even though I believe it’s accurate, there are other accurate ways to describe January 6th that do not risk getting mired in semantics with people who are happy to distract from a real discussion—and put on a show of indignation that you dared to say “insurrection.” Not interested in playing that game. If I can reach more people by mostly avoiding the word, I’ll do that.

Still, and returning to what might END UP being one of the biggest legacies of January 6th, the question of if it is going to continue to be treated as an insurrection under the law—with ramifications for the future political careers of those who participated—remains to be seen. I’m not convinced the people who passed this Amendment after the Civil War to keep Confederates who battled for years against the Union out of the United States government would have agreed it should be applied, though, to elected officials whose role in the drama was essentially to cast a “no” vote on one or two states electors being certified.

Taking a maximalist position feels like a mistake for the pendulum swing we’re in right now as a nation. If someone worked actively to aid the coup machinations of Trump and his loyalists, sure let’s throw the book at them. But I’m sympathetic to the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board on this, which wrote that “down that road lies more political trouble as politicians use courts, rather than elections, to defeat their opponents. Mr. Griffin [the New Mexico county commissioner barred by the court from holding elected office] is best disqualified by the voters.”

Mostly what we need, I think, is to make insurrection*ism* poison on the campaign trail. If we enforce this provision but those who espouse it become martyrs and would otherwise easily win their races, matters will become far worse.

Okay, now for the legacies of January 6th, or what I’m just going to call the insurrection going forward, according to Kevin, in an order that I think demonstrates how each effect strengthens each of the others in a downward spiral:

The insurrection and its fallout have

* impaired our collective cognition and accelerated the descent of our society into conspiracy theory fever swamps.

* turned the Republican Party into a force for encouraging and even enforcing the talk and behaviors that lead to sedition

* made Americans less confident that that election outcomes can be trusted

* normalized political violence; and

* provoked new movements that push back on insurrectionism

These merit a good bit of unpacking. Let’s dive in.

First. The insurrection, and the ensuing information battles in which people and organizations with massive platforms have distorted reality, have impaired our collective cognition and accelerated the descent of our society into conspiracy theory fever swamps. That trend was already well underway between COVID and Stop the Steal, and now J6. The rabbit holes have gotten deeper, and the differences have been manufactured to be wider. It is classic American misinformation culture, but somehow moreso.

I know this firsthand because I started, and still admin, a support network for the loved ones of misinformation victims. It’s a private online group where people with a family member or close friend in the alternate reality can connect with others in the same boat. We have more than 740 members in this group from most of the states in the U.S. and a good number of folks in other countries as well. Overwhelmingly, what happens in our group is that people share heart-rending stories of how the conspiracy beliefs of their loved one is causing pain, igniting arguments, and in some cases destroying relationships.

I can say with confidence that the time surrounding and following January 6th saw a surge in the suffering of people in our group. It is very common for the loved one in question to believe in not just one conspiracy theory, but in many. Those to whom vaccines misinformation appeals tend to see merit in assertions that mass shootings are hoaxes. People who agree that Democrats steal elections and leave no real trace of their perfidy are just a step or two away from going all in on The Storm that QAnon thinks is coming. It all comes back to a shadowy “they”; when you are told after the attack that it wasn’t Trump supporters but that “they” framed Trump supporters, this reinforces and rhymes with many of the other fairy tales circulating. Blasting January 6th counternarratives into the infosphere was not harmless; it contributed in no small way to a new wave of misinformation that pushed Americans further than ever from reality.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, so many news organizations took an interest in the stories of people whose lives were being broken by January 6th and other misinformation. CBS ran a special with a panel of people. NBC Nightly News did a feature based on an interview with a woman in our support group. Probably dozens of articles in major publications.

In addition to looking at this through the lens of family relationships, too, there are other manifestations to evidence the trend I’ve described. Things like audits—and partisan exercises that shouldn’t count as audits—conducted in swing states to investigate made-up things about the long-over election. Without stopping to ask themselves if their own wins on the same ballots should be voided, Republican lawmakers charged ahead with calls to decertify Biden’s win. Part of this was cynical abuse of voters’ concerns—insisting that we still have to answer questions that have already been answered because that is what Trump wants and it seems to keep the base fired up. But many seemed sincere in their beliefs.

Another area where it can be hard to tell whether someone pushing conspiracy theories is just ignorant of the truth or shamelessly grifting is in the cottage industry of films, books, and other media that has sprung up around them since January 2021, and the conferences headlined by personalities who make such content, and the thriving merchandise economy that surrounds it all. Mike Flynn, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, Tina Peters, luminaries of the anti-vaccine movement, and a hundred others of lesser fame are fixtures in this revival-style road show. Many of these meetings have happened at large churches and have blended election denialism, COVID trutherism, QAnon zealotry, and Christian Nationalism into a jumble of emotional appeals completely detached from logic.

It hasn’t helped that Trump has more and more personally endorsed QAnon and the people, including fringe Republicans, who plan and make money from and speak at these events. He’s not single-handedly keeping the ecosystem alive, but he has played a large and increasing role in encouraging its growth. And grow it has.

The ecosystem does pretty well on its own, truth be told. It’s not nice to think about, but there are a lot of Americans, and a good number of them will open their wallets to scammers saying things they like. This is as true with election lies as with anything else. The popular conspiracy show InfoWars and its host Alex Jones draw in the target audience with outlandish, absurd, but ultimately simple and for many people satisfying, theories explaining why the world is the way it is. Many of them have been about the stolen election or the framing of patriots on January 6th, all the work of Satanist cabals and lizard people and the like. Jones then sells to that audience—and makes a killing on quack supplements, anti-Joe Biden or pro-MAGA pump and dump coin schemes, and merchandise. It is a well-oiled grift that takes millions from unsuspecting people every month.

Specific to the post-January 6th era, an organization called True The Vote got MAGA diehard Dinesh D’Souza to pick up some truly shoddy analysis it did and make it into a feature-length film. The surveillance footage of ballot drop boxes was grainy and the commercially acquired geotracking data is not precise enough to say much with confidence. But the film still tries—and has succeeded with many—to trick people into thinking that Democrats ran an enormous ballot harvesting operation in jurisdictions where Trump lost across the country, for example Georgia.

They called this work of fiction, which the producers loaded up with dramatic reenactments and talking head commentary to distract from the fact they showed no mules making visits to more than one drop box, “2,000 Mules.” Before all the debunks rolled in, and even after, D’Souza was charging election fraud believers a hefty 30 dollars per download to stream it. He wanted networks including Fox to give it free advertising by broadcasting the film, but none were interested.

Too awful for Fox, but a lot of people still point to “2,000 Mules” as some kind of inarguable trump card in disagreements about whether the election had been proven stolen. Since the film does nothing of the kind, it only makes sense as a grift from start to finish. In its first few weeks, indeed, “2000 Mules” grossed $1.3 million.

The larger Stop the Steal scam was orders of magnitude larger. It’s difficult to say concretely, but counting the fundraising of Trump’s Save America PAC and the revenues of wildly popular media personalities who propagate election misinformation like Dan Bongino, former Congressman and numbers guy Denver Riggleman once estimated the *floor* of the money raked in since November 2020 to be about $250 million.

With this kind of profit engine behind it, it’s no wonder that Stop The Steal didn’t end after January 6th. As things had now been fully certified and Biden even inaugurated, those who were sure that fraud really existed, and that its scale would be enough to reverse whole states all toward Trump, took a new approach. They’d just pretend that an election can be “decertified” well after its certification—and the President we all saw win could be simply swapped out for the other candidate.

This took different forms. In its most straightforward version, Republicans talked about decertification as an event that the people could petition for, or that elected representatives on the good side of the fight could introduce as a resolution in a state legislature. This was Mark Finchem and Wendy Rogers and others in Arizona. To take another Arizona example, Congressman Paul Gosar called for a “rematch” between Trump and Biden after the Maricopa County audit was concluded. Still one more from Arizona, Congressman Andy Biggs told a large rally audience that Trump would be president again in 2024–“if not sooner.”

Taking advantage of Trump’s mythical base of support meant, for one man, just inventing a story about how Biden is not vested with the powers of the presidency because Trump, in his wisdom, “devolved” them to the states where they belonged. According to this blog post that became a hit with the QAnon crowd, that action allowed Trump to continue on as POTUS even after his apparent loss. Sensational, brazen nonsense—that many in MAGA were happy to support financially.

Perhaps no person staked more on the early return of Donald Trump to the White House than Mike Lindell. He spent a small fortune producing films to persuade the persuadable that, aesthetically, are a lot like your old school conspiracy theory videos. It’s images, and voiceovers, kind of pieced together in a way that won’t even make sense unless you already know the ins and outs of the theory in question. Foreign hacking. Packet captures. Etc.

Lindell has also talked constantly about how the Supreme Court would overturn the election based on the supposed hacking. At least twice, Lindell prognosticated that Trump would be “reinstated” within a specific timeframe.

But decertification isn’t a thing, and neither is a rematch. Joe Biden has the full powers of the presidency  The only ways for a president to be removed from office after being sworn in are clearly laid out in the Constitution—and the Supreme Court just deciding to do it isn’t on the list. This was make-believe, innovations tailored to keep the Stop The Steal crowd engaged and ready to shell out for the cause.

And by any measure, it was a wild success despite how impossible it all was in the real world. As of January 2022, a poll found that three in 10 Republicans thought Trump’s reinstatement before 2024 might be possible. 

Some people got out of the election lie rabbit hole, even QAnon, after the insurrection, but on net the past 18 months will be remembered as a mass red-pilling event, where millions were bombarded with counterfeit narratives and bad information—and resolved to remain angry because of the things they now believed. Following on top of the COVID mass red-pilling event, this has made American misinformation culture stronger than it has ever been. There are two realities, and one of them is constructed around fairy tales and hopium for dramatic cures to our medical and political ills. We will have to reckon with this fallout for decades to come.

Second. After January 6th the Republican Party was transformed into a force for encouraging and even enforcing the talk and behaviors that led to insurrection—election denialism most of all. The only way to stay in today’s Republican Party is to pay lip service to Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him. That’s just objective and plain to see; all Republicans who do otherwise are driven out.

Some are genuinely afraid of a primary challenge or losing standing with the voter base that is loyal to Trump. Or they are afraid the people who constantly talk about the Second Amendment will decide they are traitors to their oaths by crossing him. Such fear is the only thing I can really figure to which things like voting against a Capitol police support bill can be chalked up.

I suppose I understand why they fear, though I do wish these public servants would muster more courage when their country needs them. The logic is very tough in individual cases, but what is stopping dozens of Republicans who truly want out of the death pact from banding together and making a direct, sustained, unified case for ditching election denialism? I have to believe there is strength in numbers.

Beyond fear, and perhaps the reason we don’t see pushback of the kind I wish for, the dynamic that has most frustrated me is that many, particularly leadership in the Party, seem to have calculated that they can harness the power of Trump and the brainwashing effect of the propaganda based on falsehoods to help themselves and the party get more power. Kevin McCarthy in particular appears to be banking on his fealty to Trump as the path to retaking the majority and being voted Speaker of the House. There’s a very “One Ring To Rule Them All” feeling to this, as if they think this corrupt, but powerful, dark magic can be used to accomplish worthy policy objectives and political victories without also corrupting and darkening them. Spoiler alert: it cannot!

Trump and McCarthy and the right-wing media ecosystem actively enforce election denialism and the shielding of Trump from all criticism, going back to when the Russian government supported his 2016 campaign, or the way he tried to withhold aid to Ukraine and hurt U.S. national security until he was personally benefiting from the transaction, or the long list of his private and moral failings. This fall, the apologism du jour was all about why Trump is allowed to claim government property, much of it very sensitive in the national security sense, as his own and throwing unwarranted suspicion on the National Archives and federal law enforcement, of all institutions, for insisting it be returned.

Republicans also don’t dare criticize Trump’s continued poor treatment of Mike Pence, either. The former President has never stopped talking about how he thinks Pence did the wrong thing. Trump has even suggested that the chants to hang Mike Pence on January 6th weren’t so bad when you thought about it. Pence has spoken out, and a couple members of Congress have backed him up, but generally it’s silence as Trump keeps hammering away at his erstwhile ally.

Perhaps most remarkable, though, is the complete reversal on who was responsible for the mob existing and coming to the Capitol on January 6th at all. This obviously was Trump, and most Republicans including McCarthy said so in the hours following the violence. But not long after, the deflection and redirecting took hold. The Party and its allies in conservative media decided on a strategy, and it was not going to be to tell the truth that many had already let slip in a fleeting moment of anger and patriotism. After only a few days, Republicans were no longer willing to say it was Trump’s fault.

As the most potent instrument he has to enforce the acceptance of this ugly, dishonest partisanship that can only be done well by abandoning conservative principles, Trump has wielded his mighty endorsement to destroy anyone who speaks against him in Republican primaries. One can see how dangerous it is that so many openly anti-democracy candidates are winning Republican nominations. At the same time, maybe there is hope that because of how extreme they are they will, by and large, be crushed in the generals. This would deal a severe blow to the near-mythical awe that Republicans hold Trump’s endorsement in.

But I’m not holding my breath. For now, Trump’s endorsement remains a salient, effective mechanism for further remaking the GOP in his image—and getting some of the fringiest election truthers on the midterms November ballot. In Pennsylvania, for example, Trump wanted Doug Mastriano, a QAnon follower who is transparently in favor of reversing the 2020 outcome and has indicated he will not allow Trump to lose in 2024, to be the Republican nominee for governor. He got it. Similar story with Kari Lake in Arizona.

Having Trump signal to his allies and followers that you are a RINO or disloyal to him, meanwhile, is the evil twin of his positive endorsement. By some measures he has been more effective at pushing people out for heresy than he has in elevating those who are sufficiently compliant. But it’s two sides of the same coin, really. Riding the likes of Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Rusty Bowers, and others out on a rail makes the party smaller but more in his thrall. What you lose in moderates you gain in activating people who love Trump.

The doctrines and makeup of the party have shifted to the point where if you’re running as a Republican, you have to say Trump won in 2020. In September 2021, one poll found that almost 60 percent of GOP and right-leaning independent voters felt that believing what Trump says about the election is an important part of what it means to call oneself a Republican.

Some examples. In August 2021 Mo Brooks—of Ellipse rally speech fame—spoke at another Trump event. “Look forward” and leave 2020 behind, he implored. He was booed, and heckled, and quickly walked it back. Brooks later said that well into 2022 Trump had pressured him into rescinding his 2020 loss—which he understood to be illegal and impossible. Amid this public falling out, Brooks lost Trump’s endorsement for his run for Senate in Alabama and failed to secure the nomination.

October 2021 was something of a watershed in the enforcement of this orthodoxy. At a rally in Iowa, Trump made not conceding into an applause line. Arizona’s Andy Biggs claimed from a House committee rostrum that “we don’t know” who won in 2020 when asked by a Democratic colleague. Trump issued a full letterhead statement praising Biggs for this performance, calling him “incredible” for parroting all the same nonsense about Maricopa County. The next day, the number 2 Republican in the House was asked on Fox over and over who won 2020, and Steve Scalise steadfastly refused to answer. And so on. Bear in mind that by this time almost a year had passed since Trump lost. Biden had been president for more than nine months.

Election denialism has been a fault line in factional warfare within the GOP in several states including Nevada, Wisconsin, Idaho, and Missouri. Local Republican leaders who definitely voted for Trump and even helped him carry their states are castigated for suggesting that the fixation on 2020 would be a drag on the party’s prospects in future elections. The deniers seem to have the edge in most places, but even with a stalemate or where normies ultimately carry the day, the issue drives a wedge between erstwhile fellow travelers and alienates the losing side.

The Trump camp sees itself as correcting an historic injustice here. The way they talk about it, the many elected Republicans and Republican election administrators who did not agree to help Trump “find” votes, or delay signing certificates, or say there was widespread fraud in their jurisdictions are at best RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, one of the worst things you can be called by the MAGA crowd. To be a true Republican means you support Trump no matter what. Leader over party, party over country. Anyone who enforces the law and sticks to procedure because there are no extraordinary circumstances to warrant anything else instantly become RINOs who have sold out and joined the criminals in the Demon-rat Party.

Enforcement of the new orthodoxy has reached the media as well. Trump has been vocal about which channels and publications are good—those that parrot the things he says about election fraud and January 6th—and which are not. Fox News has been on Trump’s naughty list, while Newsmax and OAN get full stockings.

When the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board truthfully said, also in October 2021, that Trump lost Pennsylvania, the former President wrote a letter with twenty bullet points with warmed-over, unsubstantiated claims that supposedly prove he did not. The number of ballots remaining in question, all told, are nowhere near enough to flip the state to Trump even if they went 100 percent to him, and the Journal fired back at Trump’s “2020 monomania,” which strikes me as accurate and also a label that Trump and his most ardent supporters might mostly agree with.

As a couple of the conservative outlets got gun-shy about propagating obvious lies about election machine hacking because of the massive lawsuits being filed by the companies that make election machines, the Big Lie about the 2020 election lived on in pro-Trump local news orgs. It found new ways to burrow into our collective consciousness.

And it’s not just Republican candidates and conservative media. Believe it or not, but Trumpism has driven out evangelical pastors who declined to follow the movement off a cliff. It’s an all-encompassing purity test that polarizes all that it touches.

All of the above adds up to this: Republicans will no longer allow Republicans to lose elections, especially Trump, if they can help it. In my opinion, this is not a positive development. Even if they don’t get away with it, swinging a sledgehammer at the foundations of representative democracy is moving the conservative zeitgeist closer toward overt authoritarianism. It has also prompted responses on the left that are more urgent and alarmed than is probably healthy. For the sake of stability, we should be looking for ways to narrow the pendulum’s reach, not allow it to swing ever higher.

One might rightly ask: what difference does it make? Why does it matter that Republicans are locking themselves into these kinds of antidemocratic stances? Well, the answer is that a national political party has a lot of power! Insisting that there is only one right answer, and that the answer is Democrats cheat so they must be stopped, is already manifesting a number of worrying trends.

To take one example, Trump has tipped the scales to help election conspiracy theorists running for secretary of state and other positions in swing states that control the machinery of election administration. In this, Trump is also aided by an open plot, led by an infamous QAnon influencer, to have Q-friendly individuals gain control of election infrastructure around the country. They aren’t even hiding that the point of doing this is to block the certification of tallies that go against Republicans. Wins for Democrats are inherently corrupt, according to this worldview, demanding extraordinary interventions in response.

Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn, who you will recall played important roles in the insurrection, have been leading the charge for even more localized activism to put Republicans, especially fringe Republicans loyal only to Trump, into strategic position to shape outcomes more to his liking. Kick the RINOs to the curb and put in some people with real spine. Fighters. In the QAnon community, you saw influencers encouraging adherents to the faith to run for Republican precinct committees and make them ideologically pure.

Further to the aim of imposing their preferences, these schemers have the help of groups like the Proud Boys. Yes, the Proud Boys! After a brief interlude in the wake of January 6th, the Proud Boys got back into public activism in a big way and have stayed there. In 2021, according to reporter Tess Owens, Proud Boys made themselves conspicuous at no fewer than 114 local events around the country. Grid News reported in June 2022 that the Proud Boys had more chapters at that point than they did before January 6th. None of this bodes well for Americans who hope for less political violence.

A lot of these candidates are, most likely, going to lose. Based on the wild popularity of election trutherism after 2020, and considering that Trump still never ceases talking about it, though, there is every reason to think that that the ones who don’t win, by whatever margin, are going to contest their losses and kick up a lot of dust that further confuses things. Same for fringe-y Republicans running for other offices, too. None of what they allege will hold up in court, but they’ve figured out that they just need to keep deceiving a large enough chunk of the population. Court wins are out of reach, and though losses don’t seem to matter to believers, we might see less time invested in working challenges through the legitimate process. Buckle up.

And for the ones who do win, what I expect to happen is they will direct most of their energies at measures that make voting harder for Democrats, elections more difficult to tally generally, and candidates and races at all levels easier for Trump and co. to influence.

There is also a backup plan for the presidential contest in 2024 in case fringe Republicans are unable to burrow themselves sufficiently into the bureaucracy to dictate election results at will. The final say, according to one theory, at least, is that state legislatures have ultimate authority over which votes their states send to the Electoral College. Because Republicans control a lot more state legislatures than Democrats, giving those assemblies the power to unilaterally decide which candidate gets its electors would change the game entirely.

This is almost certainly a bad legal reading of the Constitution. It doesn’t make sense on its face, either, because what reason could there be to put a middleman between what the people of a state want and who is chosen to cast votes at the Electoral College. But if a swing state or two tries it–Arizona nearly passed a law to this effect already–and the Supreme Court rules it to be valid, that could become a favored instrument for canceling whatever the people of those states decide via the voting booth. On a parallel track to all the rest of this stuff, people in the Republican Party are working on setting up just such a ruling and new political rules of the road. Something that I’ll be watching out for, and I hope you will too.

With the abyss widening and this Sauron effect turning the GOP into a force for pushing society into it, the third legacy of January 6th is that Americans no longer feel that election outcomes can be trusted. We have undermined and delegitimized THE THING that ensures the powers that be remain responsive to what the American people want. [start normal and gradually ramp up speed] Strident Stop the Stealism, the multiple attempts to overturn 2020, the dissembling over the multiple attempts to overturn 2020, the ease with which contextless video “evidence” and other debunked claims are accepted as true, the refusal to recognize the judicial branch as the arbiter of disputes, the so-called audits, the citizen “canvasses,” some conducted by armed Trump enthusiasts, that followed the audits [break]… all of these things have damaged, and are damaging, our country. They erode confidence in our system of democracy.

You’ve seen the Trump-led faction of the Republican Party dusting off the election fraud playbook on several occasions since January 6th. Tucker Carlson, for example, gave oxygen to a conspiracy theory about the Virginia governor’s race in November 2021. The same night, Telegram lit up with paranoia about fraud and users were self-reporting what they considered suspicious happenings.

More of this was to come with elections in New Jersey, and California. In more and more places where Democrats are winning fair elections, more and more Republicans are chiming in to say they think the whole system is hopelessly corrupt. In October 2022 in Arizona, the Republican candidate for governor went on a cable news channel and refused to answer whether she would accept the results of her own election if she loses. Not conceding, and crying fraud to avoid acknowledging a loss, is going to become far more frequent.

The 2022 midterms chapter of our history is still being written, but it seems clear that those that follow Donald Trump are going to deny adverse election outcomes in perpetuity because he hasn’t softened the rhetoric about his loss at all.

And, frighteningly, this trend is obviously a big step toward losing democracy altogether. It’s poison. People who feel there is no fair way to decide who will be in charge and what will get done tend to support extreme means to achieve their policy ends. Americans who repeatedly see their preferred candidates lose, but pretend they didn’t lose, will not have confidence that democracy is the right system. Demagogues and would-be dictators will take advantage of those passions. All will devolve into a raw power struggle with no off ramps. We have to shore up faith in elections, and we have to do it now. Yes, I’m talking to you folks who keep saying asking questions is good and should be celebrated. I’m talking to you, Donald Trump, and how you said as recently as October 2022 that you “don’t think we’ll ever have a fair election again.” Repeating falsehoods that have been proven false is bad, even if you dress it up as asking questions.

January 6th’s fourth legacy is that it has normalized political violence. We talk about violence much more often, and it isn’t universally condemned, especially on the right. Our politics were already taking on a harder edge before January 6th, but the ginned up controversy over whether the violence that day was justified has made it worse. It puts me in mind of countries, and times in our own history, where things like coercion and assassination are used to cow political opponents and scare off people who would be inclined to stand up for agendas those with thugs at their call don’t like. Leaders say violent things and listeners take it on themselves to act it out. Stochastic terrorism. Violence and talk of violence can be effective for the exercise of power. But it isn’t the American way.

The act of making excuses for the attack itself is the most obvious thing in this category, starting early on and perhaps culminating with that RNC resolution saying the riot was “legitimate political discourse.” If savagely assaulting police and breaking into buildings to achieve badly wrongheaded authoritarianistic aims is now legitimate, what else can be justified? Is violence okay when the people doing it just really really really believe they are right?

On top of the lies and deflection in general, Trump and his allies are going further by lionizing the specific people who perpetrated violence. He said he loved them on the day they attacked the police, and his feelings have not changed. On multiple occasions, Trump has held forth on the blamelessness of the rioters and pledged to pardon them if he is elected for another term. Surprise! The guy who asks his rallygoers to assault hecklers and talks about Second Amendment solutions to electoral loss problems is going to make sure people that do violence for him are taken care of.

Trump and his acolytes have attempted, further, to turn the tables by making these hundreds of lawbreakers into victims of an overzealous and politically motivated administration of justice. Yes, not only is what these people did acceptable, they insinuate, but it is unacceptable that they are made to take responsibility and do the time. The conditions in the jail are horrendous, they say. Their cases are taking too long to process, they say. The perpetrators are having the book thrown at them unfairly, they say. These are political prisoners, they say. Surely this is the work of Democrats who just hate them for their pure conservative beliefs, they say. Law enforcement and the courts are corruptly and unpatriotically persecuting innocents, they say. And so the thinking goes.

Marjorie Taylore Greene and other Trump allies want to help the foot soldiers in jail, which I suppose is admirable. Some in the Trump camp have gone so far as to stand up a legal fund to help those accused of January 6th crimes defend themselves, though this seems to be mostly going to the planners of the attack more than the front line attackers who need it most. But again: when people who do violence are cast as innocents and see a pouring out of political and even financial support, what does that say about how okay violence is becoming in some parts of our society?

Trump has also been leading out on the right’s martyr-ization of Ashli Babbitt, who you will remember was killed trying to rush a barricade inside the Capitol to reach lawmakers on the other side. Most memorable was probably the video Trump recorded for a family birthday celebration in honor of Ashli ten months after she died, in which he said, scripted: “she was shot and tragically killed… there was no reason Ashli should have lost her life that day. We must all demand justice for Ashli and her family.”

Where Trump goes, others follow. Here’s Tucker Carlson, commenting on the incident and railing against the officer who shot Ashli: “I don’t think we *execute* unarmed protesters, do we?” By erasing the responsibility Ashli Babbitt bears for her death, Tucker is here giving support to the kind of violence that she was trying to do in the moment the police officer shot her. By calling it an execution, Tucker performs what I’m sure he thinks is a clever reversal and makes her an innocent victim. He doesn’t want you to think about the violence she was doing, because if you look away from it in her case then the consequences of others doing violence are lessened.

Tucker Carlson, who by the way later made a whole film about how “patriots” are being “purged” by an illiberal regime of liberals. Black helicopter imagery, almost completely unveiled conspiracy ideation about a shadowy “they” who are coming for freedom-loving people. In this telling, January 6th and the people who faced consequences for their criminal outbursts were part and parcel of an ongoing good-vs-evil struggle. The people who did the Capitol attack, now political prisoners, were on the good side of this struggle. By extension shouldn’t you, another good person watching this, support them and their cause? Shouldn’t you, a good person who is witnessing these injustices, also consider that all the good people might need to rise up and resist the evil by force? You can see where this easily leads.

So that’s all looking backward, setting up January 6th as an event to be covered in glory when the attacking side wins and writes the history books.

What is happening now, though, is also clearly helping create an atmosphere of political violence in the present. Let’s talk about the trend toward more intimidation and threats–and acceptance of these as tactics. In a healthy political arena, every person speaking for a large bloc of Americans would come out against intimidation and threats whenever they occur. Yes, this is my wish. But for now only a wish, because it isn’t our reality.

First, consider how MAGA politicians wield threats of retaliation against people and organizations who take, or might take, actions that bother them. It’s like cancel culture, but instead of boycotting a company for its social justice failings, you vow to use the power of the state to crush those who cross your tribe. It’s calling for political opponents to be arrested when they have not even been charged with a crime–to say nothing of proven guilty. It’s saying you will delicense news organizations because they publish unflattering stories about you. In the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s threatening to entirely shut down telecomms companies when Republicans are back in power because those firms said they would comply with Congressional subpoenas for records related to January 6th.

What we really need to watch out for, though, is where these pressure tactics and efforts to intimidate are directed at the people who run our elections. And be assured, this is going on all around you. There are the times in late 2020 when Rudy Giuliani and Trump made phone calls to such officials, including in Arizona and Georgia. We talked earlier about Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; an hourlong phone call where Trump just kept asking over and over for the Republicans running Georgia’s election infrastructure to find him votes. That is one instance of a number that are known. Imagine how many others were subjected to this kind of pressure.

But it goes well beyond phone calls and suggestion. As has been extensively–though I suspect incompletely–documented, election officials, in swing states in particular, have been targeted with a torrent of threats of violence against themselves and their families. The FBI has warned of “unusual levels of threats to election workers” in AZ, NV, CO, GA, MI, PA & WI.

Secretaries of State being the highest profile of those threatened, but there are many others down the chain, going all the way to rank and file election workers of the kind that are known well by the neighbors in the precincts where they do their work. Most of these people aren’t hiding and can’t if they wanted to. These aren’t big shots who have resources to afford security or pursue legal action against those who threaten–and no way of knowing who many of them are, in any event.

There’s no mystery as to why they are being threatened, or who it is that wants them to change the way they run elections. Reuters has done whole series on this, and guess what? It’s Trump supporters. The ones who plan the harassment and make the phone calls are, overwhelmingly, fans of the former president who are unable to accept that their favorite politician could have lost in a legitimate election. So they turn on the administrators who they think are complicit. It is unfortunate, but law enforcement does almost nothing about these threats.

Imagine doing your job, one that you know is important for our society to function and the brings you satisfaction as a civic-minded resident of your state, and then finding yourself on the receiving end of a litany of baseless accusations and vile, unhinged voice messages calling you and your family traitors, and phone calls warning that you deserve to be hunted down and killed. This is the reality for many election officials in this country in the last two years. People around are also impacted by this. The threats are relentless, and you and your loved ones and your coworkers and staffers are distressed. Emotional trauma takes its toll as the weeks roll on.

Oh, and your job is getting harder and more dangerous to boot. Hassles ranging from things like Mike Lindell asking Trump supporters to intentionally flood local election offices with so many requests for information about 2020 that it grinds your operation into dysfunction to the advent of militias and sheriffs and freelance election truthers appointing themselves to “monitor” the polls and drop boxes for suspicious activity. Now I don’t just face threats at my office and on my home number, and am required by law to work through a backlog of bad faith requests that make it harder for me to pull off a solid election this cycle, I have to also go to places where hostile, armed, angry men are waiting to render judgment on my performance of the duties I have been assigned. What happens if they don’t like what they see? What happens if I see them harassing a voter? So many ways for this to go sideways. Election workers in many places are receiving active shooter training and seeing security increased at their work locations, but it shouldn’t have to be done! If politicians currently ignoring or encouraging the threats were to speak out against them, there would be little need for bulletproof glass and a contingent of trained guards.

Understandably, the proliferation of these threats has driven a lot of people who don’t want this life for themselves to simply get out of the business of elections. Informed as they are about elections and being unwilling to bend or break the rules in the ways the election fraud crowd demanded of them, they choose to leave.

The departure of seasoned election officials is a clear win for the election fraud crowd, because now there is a vacuum. Now there are openings to put people who DO have the stomach (“spine”) to help Trump in 2024. First run the competent, principled guard out of town on a rail, then install the denialist crew and make the little moves all across the country that will add up to a big difference. Get into position to steal an election by cursing and harassing the people who actually took seriously the responsibility. Say, falsely, that they helped steal the 2020 election and then help the ones who would be happy to “find votes” and do whatever Trump says is “the right thing.”

Going to shift gears and talk about another kind of violent rhetoric, more specific to the legacy of January 6th. There are millions of people in this country–millions–who think Trump’s return to office is so important that the use of force is justified to make it happen.

This has been the subject of a series of studies by the University of Chicago along with the National Opinion Research Center that have documented Americans’ attitudes toward political violence starting in 2021. A poll conducted five months after the insurrection showed that 26 percent of people asked said the 2020 election was stolen and Joe Biden was an illegitimate president. Of these, a fifth or so thought that using force to restore Trump to power is justified. The authors of the study estimate that about 15 million Americans are strongly in the insurrectionist way of thinking, mostly in urban areas and mostly Republicans. In this movement, about 6 million people support militias like the Oath Keepers and extremist groups like the Proud Boys.

And what, do you suppose, is the belief system driving these attitudes? Why is it that I have focused on misinformation all throughout the telling of January 6th? Well, it’s conspiracy theories. Most notably: Great Replacement, which holds that the demographic shift from majority white to majority other races in the U.S. will lead to white people having fewer rights and job opportunities, and QAnon. People who spend a lot of time on the chanboards and other right-wing social media, and to a lesser but still significant extent watching channels like OAN and Newsmax or listen to talk radio, are much MUCH more likely to hold these beliefs about political violence, according to this study. And no wonder; the whole ecosystem is flooded with this notion, and it has been moving more people in its direction.

That all comes from the first in the University of Chicago series. The titles of its subsequent reports bear the following titles, in case you are wondering: 

* Deep, Divisive, Disturbing: New Survey Shows Mainstream Community Support for Violence to Restore Trump Remains Strong. January 2, 2022.

* "Patriotic Counter-Revolution": The Political Mindset that Stormed the Capitol. April 11, 2022.

* Remorse or Double Down? Those Who Stormed the Capitol are Remorseful but Do Not Repudiate Trump's Big Lie. September 14, 2022.

If you can believe it, all of this gets worse still. Our stumble off the violent rhetoric cliff is going to a place we haven’t been in generations: a steady background chatter about civil war being possible. The rhetorical foundations are being laid to excuse full-blown domestic conflict; all you have to do is listen to fringe Republicans and many will tell you that such a war is coming, or they believe it is inevitable, or in their minds there is already one underway.

It starts with things like Representative from North Carolina Madison Cawthorn saying there could be “bloodshed” if elections in this country aren’t stopped from being rigged. Some of the most outspoken election truther personalities are former military or intelligence, and they tend to couch the situation, as they see it, in the language of armed conflict. For example, when talking about how they plan to stand ready to challenge results they don’t like in 2022 or 2024, they’ll say things like “it’s going to be an army” on their side. Right-wing podcasts are no help; they are getting people all riled up for civil war for more listens and ad revenues.

Remember, this talk resonates with so many people because the misinformation about election fraud–but not recognizing it as misinformation–has made them sure they are on the side of justice. That when they talk about fighting, it’s understood that they are fighting for freedoms that they believe are being taken away.

Consider, as well, that there is a negative feedback loop that will lead people who are convinced Democrats cheat toward radicalization and, ultimately, violence. It goes like this: I am absolutely certain that there was election fraud. I see people on my side trying to pursue this through the channels available in our system: law enforcement, the courts, state and federal prosecutors, maybe my elected representatives, etc. But, to my extreme frustration, none of these things go anywhere. The authorities who are supposed to handle things when there is wrongdoing are standing by. The other side appears untouchable. Since the allegations are so rock solid in my mind, I start thinking that officials who fail to take them seriously are corrupt—and in on the steal. And if the corruption is so widespread, there is no longer recourse to address grievances available within the system. After a couple times round this loop, I may be ready to nod along when someone comes and says “we the people” have to “take back our country.” They’re talking about civil war, and you start to feel we might not have other options left.

In the end, as on January 6th, whether there will be violence is largely going to depend on Donald Trump. He has indicated that aggressive pushback will be in order if he is made to feel real consequences for… anything, really. Hounded by federal and state prosecutors for a number of alleged crimes, the Congress investigating his role in January 6th, and a raft of civil suits on top of it all, as far back as January 2022 at a rally the former president fairly demanded that they all come to nothing, or else: “"If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington DC, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

In Georgia, where prosecutors were investigating Trump’s call with Raffensperger when Trump said this at a rally, the district attorney found it necessary to ask the FBI for security assistance including intelligence and federal agents to protect her and her staff. He knows the effect it has when he says this kind of thing, but he isn’t going to stop.

And then came the incident with the sensitive, highly classified government documents that he declined to give back despite being asked several times. The FBI showed up at Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago and took the documents back, which among other things means they had demonstrated to a judge probable cause that these documents were or would contain evidence of crimes. An entire voice essay could be separately dedicated to these 2022 happenings, which really don’t have all that much to do with January 6th.

But for now, let’s just highlight that Trump’s brush with the law has made him even more willing to hint that he will muster his supporters en masse if an indictment follows the search. And those supporters aren’t going to be hard to convince. 

Because Trump can’t start a civil war on his own, we also need to pay attention to who is helping him keep the possibility front and center. Picking up on Trump’s cues, influential allies like Marjorie Taylor Greene have suggested that the Mar-a-Lago event was the opening act of the coming civil war. Globalists and the corrupt institutions they control on one side, and freedom-loving patriots led by Donald Trump on the other.

A public that has had limited direct experience with war, and certainly not the kind where brothers fight against brothers, is certain to be under any number of illusions about how this would all play out. But violence has been excused and threats have gone unpunished, and now probably thousands or more of Americans are talking openly about civil war. Like it would be a fun time, and something to be welcomed. The Overton window, as they say, on what is acceptable in the country has shifted compared to where it was for all of my life and stretching back a good long ways. It seems unlikely that we will be able to escape further bouts of political violence. I hate January 6th for this.

Returning to optimism of the kind that springs from Mike Lindell losing his groove, the fifth legacy of January 6th is that new movements have sprung up to push back on the falsehoods and the political power that commitment to these falsehoods has commanded. What can I say? I want to end on a hopeful note.

Much of this is yet to be written, because in my estimation we are at the beginning of a yearslong period where the tide turns, slowly, to put people who don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories back in charge of whatever the Republican Party becomes. Or maybe of a new party that will take its place. All of this has been compared to a fever, and yes fevers do break–except for when they kill the patient first. So I think it will happen one of those two ways, but I don’t know which.

The how, though, we maybe can guess at. The 2022 midterms have seen the remarkable, alarming rise of a coterie of election truthers and January 6th enthusiasts to be the Republican nominees on the general ballot. I’m pleased to say, recording this on the 10th of November, that it seems to have been a good night for normies.

Some Democrats, too, have undermined confidence in elections at a time when we really need everyone to believe in them more. And, stupidly, Democratic strategists even got behind some of the most extreme Republican candidates in their primaries to the tune of millions of dollars, gambling that this would make them less acceptable to the general electorate and therefore easier to beat. Risky strategy. Probably makes matters worse even if all those candidates are defeated, which it looks like has now happened.

There have also been bright spots that could portend even brighter things in 2024 and beyond. A handful of Independent candidates are testing the proposition that the reasonable middle will reject extreme candidates and elect them instead. These independents are running against outspoken Trump supporters who were both personally invested in the fake electors plot and voted, or looked for a way to justify a vote, against certifying Biden’s win.

Is it possible that normies banding together can consistently defeat the fringe in elections to come? I’m anxious to find out. I am mindful, however, that many Americans I would consider “normie” are tuned out of politics and don’t exactly realize all of what is happening–and the stakes involved. Some know part, but think the dangers of election denialism are overblown. Still others, including many holding office, are plainly afraid to support this counter-movement yet because of how vindictive Trump is to anyone who crosses him. I understand this; it’s no fun to have the former president turn his vocal, already angry minority even more angry—and direct that ire at me and my family.

So it’s with all the more regard I hold these candidates, and the nascent, grassroots political structures that are building their capacity to get such candidates across the finish line. Organizations like Country First, the Forward Party, Stand Up Republic, Principles First, and others that have risen up to meet this moment and try to round up RINOs and right-leaning moderates into a proper herd, with a ground game, and fundraising.

I have hope when I see growing support for GOP castaways like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. I believe their courage to defy the prevailing currents and sacrifice their standing and seniority in the process will be seen for what it is in the years to come, and we’ll all be better off as more Republicans follow their lead.

But, as I said, I think this is going to take a long time. I’ll be here for it. I pray you’ll join me.

Chapter 13 - Epilogue

In San Francisco, a 42-year-old man let himself in to the home of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, in the middle of the night, by breaking a window with a hammer he was carrying. He seemed intent on doing violence. But Nancy wasn’t there. Paul Pelosi, whose wife was on the other side of the country, was, and David DePape woke him up. It was the end of October 2022. This happened as I was finishing the part above about political violence.

Paul managed to call the police, who arrived after a few minutes. It was then that DePape assaulted Mr. Pelosi with the hammer, landing at least one blow to his head. When the altercation ended, Paul was taken to the hospital. He underwent emergency surgery. As of this writing, his doctors said it was a successful surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands. They expect him to make a full recovery.

Details from LA Times on Pelosi attack https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-29/paul-pelosi-attacker-police-hammer-nancy-pelosi-san-francisco 

DePape, the man who probably would have killed Nancy Pelosi if she had been home that night, was acting out violent ideation that was all too familiar to listeners of this essay. While many at the Capitol on January 6th were out for Pence, there were many who wanted Nancy as well. When DePape shows up at her San Francisco home asking “where’s Nancy,” we can make reasonable guesses as to where this animus came from. It sounds an awful lot like the mob that sacked the Capitol.

But it turns out we don’t even need to guess; David DePape’s social media tells the story of a left-wing nudity ban protester turned by online misinformation into a MAGA enthusiast. He had posted and interacted with a variety of conspiracy theory content, including many you’ll know if you’ve listened this far. Mike Lindell’s “Absolute Proof” on May 7, 2021. Two weeks later, a YouTube video saying the Democrat farce effort to investigate January 6th had collapsed. Pizzagate, the red pill, and QAnon. Antisemitism. Et cetera.

Yes, it seems certain that DePape suffered a mental health episode. But it’s also the case that it is irresponsible to encourage or look the other way when these kinds of nonsense are reaching millions of people. There. Are. Consequences. To. Misinformation.

I believe that avoiding another insurrection, and attempts to assassinate leaders in Congress, begins with understanding of what has taken place. To do that, we have to get much more disciplined, quickly, about how we talk about these events and allow others to talk about it around us. The small minority of anti-Americans dressing themselves up as patriots who want a repeat event are working hard. We won’t succeed against them if we don’t put in the work as well. We are in real danger of further attempts at authoritarian takeover.

A lot will hinge on how fate treats Donald Trump. If for whatever reason he is not on the ballot in 2024, the chances are much better that the country will avoid another attempt at what he did on January 6th. Not likely, though. Despite a raft of legal troubles, the former president remains in as strong a position as he ever has been since leaving the White House. The Republican Party quickly came to terms with and embraced the insurrection, so he’s not in danger of losing that support. Its leaders take criticism of it and him as attacks on all Republicans, despite how obviously ridiculous that is. Trump will probably be the GOP’s 2024 nominee. The majority of all Americans think he is to blame for the insurrection, but they doubt he will face any charges for his actions. Feelings of helplessness have set in. 

There is much we need to do, and—for reasons that I hope are clear by now–-doing something about misinformation culture is at the top of my list. Misinformation culture is what I call that quintessentially American set of attitudes toward lying that makes us susceptible to paranoia and conspiracy theories. Going beyond mistrust of government, misinformation culture is why we wink at, and usually don’t challenge, insinuations that there is a shadowy “they” at work behind what we see in front of us. The belief that the news that gets reported is not an imperfect reflection of reality, but is somehow an elaborately choreographed show designed by master deceivers to cover up what the “they” are really doing.

Think about it: these are the centuries-old mindsets that have formed the basis of political attacks against whole parties with their millions of members, made it normal to talk without evidence of elections being stolen, led to January 6th, and rationalized and excused violence on countless occasions. They are the same mindsets that gave birth to and sustained wild tales about UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, 9/11, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, the U.S. government generally, and so on. If we leave misinformation culture untouched, it will just fuel the next thing after this moment has passed.

Weakening misinformation culture-–and strengthening an intentionally better culture and other mindsets about the information we consume in its place—is the way. Right now America is at a low point. We need all Americans to help fix this, including and especially you. Here are three simple ways you can help.

First, be aware that you are exposed to an almost constant stream of misinformation about all kinds of things. If this isn’t where you are already, you can follow news orgs and social accounts that keep tabs on the various false narratives and major claims in media and by government and via celebrities. Sign up for the Prism newsletter, which packages up all the reporting on misinformation in a given week, from January 6th and Elections to COVID and QAnon, plus what’s happening on the platforms and with respect to government policy. Get smart about the reliability of news sources that people are using around you, perhaps by using resources like the Ad Fontes interactive media chart. 

If you’re listening to this guide, and have gotten this far, you are well on your way! It’s curiosity about your information diet, and the habits of media literacy you build around that curiosity, that will make all the difference in the long run. In other words: choose to pay attention to the filters through which news about the world reaches your brain.

Second, I invite you to think of your stream as unique, and understand that you are the only one who can do something about the specific misinformation that enters your consciousness. Once you recognize it as such, you are making a choice no matter what you do. Maybe you will accept what is being said. Maybe you will reject it. Maybe you will repeat it. Maybe you will challenge it privately. Maybe you will put out a fact-based counterpoint on a separate thread. But it’s down to you, no one else sees the same things you are seeing. And remember: doing nothing is also a choice.

Third, experiment until you find an anti-misinformation approach that works for you, then live it. For some that will be putting good information out there and supporting others who do, for example about how elections are run. The more people understand civics, or public health, or climate science, the smaller the cognitive surface area is that disinformationists can target.

For some, their efforts will be focused on patiently rebuilding relationships with loved ones who have become detached from reality. There are no guarantees, but the misinformation culture in your immediate line of sight can be radically diminished if you find a way to reach people in the rabbit hole. There are support groups for people who are in this situation, and if you would like I can connect you.

Possibly the most impactful thing any of us can do is to stop tolerating when leaders with politics we like peddle in misinformation. Calling out lies on your political opponents is more satisfying, but ultimately this doesn’t do much to change things. Far more important is to call out when untrue things are being said by those with influence in your own camp. If they hear from their voters that this is unacceptable, they will do it less!

January 6th changed this country profoundly. It’s also affected me personally. Clearly. Here I am doing a lengthy voice essay on it, taking chunks of time away from family and hobbies and, like, Netflix over months to write and record it. At the time the attack happened, I remember being struck by how surprised a lot of folks were because they didn’t know what was happening with Stop the Steal, or maybe overestimated President Trump’s patriotism. This would be a wakeup call, surely, and we could all agree that this was a Bad Thing.

When it became clear that wasn’t the way it was headed, that universal, sustained condemnation didn’t follow, I despaired. Maybe the America that I thought I knew never existed. I felt sad for families torn apart. I felt angry when I saw politicians lying about it. What I want, most of all, is for us to deter it from happening again. My hope is that this project will help in its own small way.

Thank you for listening, and for the things you are doing to understand January 6th better. This essay was possible through the support of too many people to name, but I want to start with my wife and children, who gave the most. To make the video trailer in particular, I want to thank the generous support from the following friends of Prism:

* David and Jana Farrel

* Erin Thornhill Reeder

* Clint and Kathy Smith

* Dorothy Nash

* Luke Hubbard

* Rebecca Mackelprang

* Melissa Hayden

This segment is the third of four parts that comprise this voice essay. You can find this episode on Apple Podcasts here.

Chapter 9 - The Bat Signal

Ali Alexander stepped up to the microphone. It was the evening of January 5th, a cold night, on the streets of Washington, DC. Tens of thousands had come for the big day. Trump had called them there. Alexander had helped. Behind him on stage was a banner, upon which was emblazoned the words, in all caps, “MARTIAL LAW NOW.”

For a bit of context on what Alexander had been up to since we last checked in on him, I’m going to read a quotation from a deep dive that Right Wing Watch did on him this year. Begin quote:

“Alexander spent weeks in the lead up to the Capitol insurrection calling for ‘rebellion,’ starting chants of ‘victory or death,’ and using rhetoric of the American Revolution and spiritual warfare to call for action should Congress certify the election of President Joe Biden. He engaged in violent rhetoric, appearing to even advocate for physical attacks against members of Congress who he said stole the election. 

“The Jan. 5 rally served as the penultimate event of those calls. Speakers delivered Christian nationalist messages and veiled threats of violence if Congress failed to reject Biden electors. Bikers for Trump founder Chris Cox told rally-goers that the United States was on the brink of a revolution and that he would ‘take the first bullet.’” End quote.

So here was Ali Alexander, addressing the Stop the Steal mob, and he used the opportunity to once again encourage extralegal remedies to the imagined wrongs the country had been put through. With the events planned for the next day, the rhetoric could not have been intended to be metaphorical or theoretical. He wanted to see this crowd do some things. “Our government is only our government if it is legitimate,” said Alexander to the crowd. And, further: “1776 is always an option.” They were there to start “a rebellion against the Deep State,” referencing a conspiracy theory about anti-Trump forces in the federal bureaucracy and the national news media. The Trump followers in attendance joined him in chanting “Victory or death! Victory. Or death.”

In the final days before January 6th, the many machinations I talked about in parts 1 and 2 came together. We’re finally ready… for the final act.

We first rewind a bit, though, to December 19th. The primary call to action, the one that got people seriously making plans to come to the nation’s capital, was a tweet by President Donald Trump. The tweet was in two parts. First, a “boat parade logic” lie that it was “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election.” Second, an invitation: “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

A lot of people saw Trump’s tweet. Some of them immediately started working to ensure the big protest, then three weeks away, would indeed be WILD. Ali Alexander went out and nabbed the website wildprotest.com, which urged visitors saying “TRUMP WANTS TO SEE YOU IN DC.” Dates paired with images signaled where the action would be and when: Jan. 5 near the White House, Jan. 6 at 9 am at the White House proper, and Jan. 6 at 1 pm at the Capitol dome.

Okay, it’s time we talk about Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers, and a smattering of lesser extremists, all bent on using force to keep Trump in power.

These militant groups saw Trump’s tweet and reacted quickly and in ways that clearly foreshadowed violence. They were going to war, and this tweet was the bugle. Some set up encrypted communications channels; many acquired protective gear. The Oath Keepers coordinated to have heavily armed “quick reaction forces” staged outside Washington, which they did in the days just before the 6th, stockpiling weapons in hotel rooms. Their communications channels got, in their words, “apocalyptic.” At the same time, Trump’s tweet kicked off a rash of right-wing threats against members of Congress, though many remain unattributed.

Within a day of the tweet, a Texan member of a militia called the Three Percenters sent pretty explicit messages in a private channel to other members. (We have the messages because he was charged, went to trial, and was convicted.) The man insisted that the group owed Trump a debt that had to be paid, and that “Our President” would need ALL of them. To do what, you ask? Well, the following day this man was figuring out how to get to DC before January 6th, which he said would be “Armageddon all day.” He would drive, he said, because they wouldn’t let him fly with all his “battle rattle.” This kind of talk was common among these extremist groups after Trump gave the green light to get there and get rowdy.

Beyond their words, there was the planning. The day after Trump’s “wild” tweet, the leaders of the Proud Boys stood up a special, hand-selected crew of what they called “real men” for action on the 6th. They dubbed this crew the Ministry of Self Defense and set up an encrypted Telegram channel for its members to coordinate. The group launched crowdfunding campaigns to pay for travel to DC and gear. For some reason, the Proud Boys leader instructed members going to wear plain clothes to blend in, not the “traditional Black and Yellow” polo shirts the group had become known for.

There was at least some degree of coordination between otherwise independent groups to help President Trump pressure Congress and be on standby in DC for his further orders. One Oath Keeper told co-militants via a Facebook post in December that there was an alliance between them, the Proud Boys, and the Florida Three Percenters with respect to January 6th. He noted that Proud Boys could be “force multipliers” to their operation. The day before the main day, leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers met together in a parking garage in DC–though what they discussed has not been reported.

For real-time communication, Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, along with Mike Flynn and Roger Stone, had a running encrypted group chat that, beginning in November, they used to plan militant action across the broader pro-Trump coalition.

One really has to ask, at this point: why were these men and women so confident about what President Trump would do? They knowingly committed serious crimes, putting themselves through extreme and legal exposure and even physical risk. Did none of them question whether their leader was as “all in” as they were? If not, why?

When the former Oath Keepers spokesman Van Tatenhove testified in July 2022, he gave a hint about the motivations of that group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes: “We have to stop mincing words... He’s a militia leader. He has grand visions of being a paramilitary leader, and the Insurrection Act would have given him a path forward to that. The fact that the president was messaging, directly or indirectly, gave him the nod.”

Few of the people who showed up when the President called knew everything that was going on. Most of the mob didn’t go into the attack thinking that Trump would declare martial law, even if they were convinced that Biden had won the presidency through subterfuge and they wanted to register their displeasure. Some clearly wanted January 6th to be a “1776 moment,” as Alexander and others had called it, and felt that violence was justified. But fewer would end up acting on that desire and belief.

The people who *did* think that the mob itself would essentially end the government that day were discussing and planning it all online for weeks before. To take two examples: the owner of a website called Washington Tunnels, which had maps of underground spaces around DC including the Capitol, became so alarmed by the spike in traffic he was seeing that he alerted the FBI’s Washington Field Office. And on Dec. 21, the intelligence arm of the Capitol Police issued a 7-page report tracking an increase in activity on TheDonald.win, where threatening references were made to trapping lawmakers in the tunnels of the Capitol. (The FBI and Department of Homeland Security also received a flood of tips about stuff happening online, though they didn’t seem to take it too seriously.)

There was at least one Republican member of Congress, Barry Loudermilk, who gave aid to elements of the mob that wanted to learn more about the passageways of the Capitol complex. On the eve of the attack, Loudermilk accompanied a group through parts of the buildings where tourists never go–and on a day when the grounds were off limits for tours! One man with that group was filmed the following day as he marched from Trump’s rally at the Ellipse across the National Mall to the Capitol. He talked openly about hunting down certain people there and giddily stabbed the air with a flag whose pole had been carved into a spear.

And, of course, as has been widely reported, someone placed pipe bombs near the headquarters of the two major political parties in downtown Washington. How that incident relates to the attack on the Capitol, however, isn’t clear.

Much more openly, though, was the push via the Internet and other means to bring masses of people to Washington to pressure Congress and the Vice President to not certify the Electoral College result. Rally planners received financial support from the Trump campaign, and at least one was reported to make use of “burner phones” to communicate with the White House and Trump’s team.

Senior people advising Trump and helping organize January 6th events set up so-called “command centers” at fancy hotels around DC. They worked constantly, for days, to push Republicans to vote against Biden’s electors. And to make ready for the mob that would soon descend.

As all this was happening, Pence was subjected to a few more last-ditch attempts by the President. The pressure on the Vice President had never been greater. On January 3rd, for example, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was told by Trump that Trump believed "the legislatures have the power but… the VP has power too." The next day, Trump asked Pence to hear out John Eastman on how he could do the thing he knew he couldn’t do. Trump asked Pence if he didn’t think it would be “cool” to have that power if the mob gathering in the streets thought he should have it. After that meeting, Trump called Bannon and told him the Vice President was being “very arrogant” in his refusals. He ordered a press release falsely claiming “total” agreement between him and Pence, over the VP team’s stringent objections.

If Pence wouldn’t be won over by the promise of adoration from the mob, maybe he could be persuaded by fear of crossing it. The plan was to march on the Capitol. The people organizing the Stop the Steal events, some of which began the night before, understood that Trump would call for people to march on the Capitol. Trump allies like Roger Stone and Alex Jones and Jason Sullivan knew, and talked openly about it in the week beforehand. Steve Bannon went on his podcast right after two phone calls with Trump and let his audience in on a little inside information about the 6th: “all hell” would break loose. President Trump even reviewed a draft tweet, never sent but preserved by presidential records custodians, that would have explicitly put the Capitol in the sights of Trump’s supporters.

Trump, buoyed by the enthusiasm and numbers of the people who showed up for him, was for the first time in weeks in good spirits the night before January 6th. On stage at a pre-game evening rally, Trump’s close advisor Peter Navarro got up and urged the crowd to go to the Capitol the next day. They would pressure Senators, he said, to “do the right thing.”

The board was set. The pieces were in motion. It was on.

Chapter 10 - Violent Overthrow

Officer Caroline Edwards watched as the gathering crowd got increasingly agitated by the minute. More people were showing up, carrying flags and chanting and getting unruly. She was there to hold the line. The mob started pushing the barricade she was defending, and angry people wearing Trump and MAGA and QAnon gear, shouting insults at her, knocked Officer Edwards down, and she fell unconscious. The attack had just begun, and would last for hours. More would be injured. Some would die.

To Donald Trump, almost anything that happened to other people would be a price he was willing to pay to not accept the simple fact that he lost the election to Joe Biden. Knowing what we now know about the leadup to January 6th, what happened next doesn’t actually seem too surprising.

To review: Trump had tried every recourse he could think of, legal and otherwise, to undo his loss. But the court cases had gone nowhere. And the DoJ and other government offices had resisted Trump’s insistence that they loyally ride to his rescue.

And Rudy hadn’t gotten state legislatures to send alternate Electoral College ballots. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though and even a couple last-ditch efforts. Text messages between staffers of Senator Ron Johnson and Vice President Mike Pence, for example, show an attempt by Johnson’s team to have the senator pass a list of Trump electors from Michigan and Wisconsin–states Biden won–to the Vice President so he could introduce them during the counting on January 6th. The VP’s staff shut down the suggestion.

As late as the morning of January 6th, Trump’s ally in the Arizona Congressional delegation Andy Biggs was pushing for some kind of fig leaf with official imprimatur that could be useful back in Washington. Representative Biggs called the speaker of the Arizona House, fellow Republican Rusty Bowers, to ask him for either a letter from the Arizona legislature calling attention to the supposed fraud in the certification of his state’s election or a statement of support for “decertifying” its Biden slate. But Bowers wouldn’t.

Now, it was down to Trump’s first, last, and best hope: that the sitting Vice President would choose to break the law and hollow out American democracy on January 6th regardless. Pence was steadfastly refusing to commit that historic crime, despite the existence of a few fake slates meant to give him cover. Persuasion had failed.

Trump would change Pence’s mind, though—or so he thought—by turning his enthused rallygoers into a mob and directing them toward where the Vice President was performing his constitutional duty. The might of the people would make Pence abandon his principles and contravene the rule of law, under the implied threat of being torn limb from limb or put under “people’s arrest” if he didn’t. It was time to try raw intimidation. It was time for implied—and actual—violence.

So here are the big pieces of the day, and we’ll walk through each in order.

First, President Trump addressed his supporters from a stage at the Ellipse in front of the White House. He got them angry about the election being stolen and told them to march to the Capitol.

Second, Trump’s supporters hiked a bit from near the White House over to the Capitol, carrying their Trump banners and, for more than a few, weapons. They arrived gradually until the crowd there was a packed mob, numbering in the thousands.

Third, the mob broke through surrounding barricades and security at the Capitol building itself and streamed through the hallways. Trump tweeted about Pence—I’ll give you one guess as to its gist—and they saw. Many of the attackers by this point were plainly hunting for Pence and members of Congress that had spoken against Trump. The joint session of Congress was suspended. Lawmakers were evacuated.

Fourth, the tide turned hours later as reinforcements came to the scene and began restoring order and expelling the invaders. Eventually Trump tweeted a video saying he loves the attackers–but wants them to go home. The Capitol empties out.

Fifth and finally, amid the mess the mob left behind, Pence and Congressional leaders reconvened and finished what they set out to do. The Constitution carried the day, if only barely.

A word here about security failures. The police, the FBI, and others charged with securing the Electoral ballot count were, undeniably, not up to the task. A whistleblower on the force later laid out some of the ways police leadership failed that day. Why they were caught unprepared is a subject of intense debate. But what we can say, looking back, is that they seem to have not taken the threat of violence seriously—even though signs of it had been evident for weeks before. There is nothing to excuse this lapse.

We have also already addressed the delay—and frustration felt by almost everyone watching this unfold on live television—in getting the National Guard to the scene. An ex-National Guard officer later came out saying generals in the chain of command lied afterwards about what happened. So where was the Guard? We still don’t have good answers. This is an important part of getting to the bottom of January 6th.

But I WOULD like to point out that arguments that the entire investigation of what happened on January 6th should be focused on these failures are missing the point, mostly on purpose. It’s victim-blaming. “They had it coming to them” because… they underestimated how far Trump’s supporters would go, and how violent things would get? Do you really want to blame Caroline Edwards for not being able to hold off a crowd that outnumbered police dozens or hundreds to one? Is it helpful to criticize other officers who were crushed by a mass of humanity while trying to do their duty to protect Congress?

If the police investigate the break-in of a jewelry store, you probably wouldn’t want them to spend a lot of time getting to the bottom of why the robbers were able to get around flawed security measures and into the building. That is something the store’s owners would ponder as they think about installing and hiring better security. But even they would agree the police should focus on who did it, and where they and the jewels are now. The crime is the break-in, not the lax security.

It’s important to realize that this isn’t even a serious argument; it’s a distraction. Why, when there is a clear aggressor and plan behind the aggression, would we only be interested in what could have been done to better defend the Capitol against Trump’s mob? It’s not a partisan witch hunt to look at the whole big picture. It IS an exercise in partisan deflection to criticize the big picture approach by saying it is looking at more than just how the authorities goofed and couldn’t prevent a determined attempt to disrupt a Congressional proceeding at the core of our system of government. The scandal is that it happened, not that we failed to stop it from happening.

So we gain very little by interrogating the narrow security question. That’s not to say we shouldn’t, but what is of the most concern is that we had a transfer of power that was less than peaceful. People were willing to use violence to stop a democratically elected leader from taking office. No matter how sincere those people were in their beliefs, police at the Capitol *shouldn’t have to fight anyone*. Yes, they couldn’t keep the mob out of the Capitol. No, that’s not really the point.

Okay, back to the morning of, and we’ll go chronologically from there.

Pretty early on, there was a vanguard group that reached the Capitol before almost anyone else. Not all who went to DC were actually there for the Trump rally. Some, who understood the assignment without that final incitement, assembled themselves near the Washington Monument on the National Mall and started over to Capitol Hill before President Trump even began speaking. These people were Proud Boys. They did what they had been planning to do, which was take up positions at key points around the Capitol security perimeter, soften them up for when the rest of the crowd came, and agitate the gathering protesters into riot mode. Thanks to the organizing of this vanguard crew, the crowd at the Capitol was unruly from the start. It wasn’t a peaceful protest that turned chaotic. It was violent from the get-go, by design.

Back on the Ellipse, people packed into the rally venue. Uniformed Secret Service officers processed about 25,000 people into the rally. More were on the periphery, closer to the Washington Monument. It was a LOT of people.

Still, some people hung back and didn’t enter the venue. They were armed, and the Secret Service magnetometers were between them and their seats. It later came out that many people had tried to bring all kinds of weapons into the rally, but the contraband was confiscated at the gate. President Trump saw from backstage that not everyone was coming in, and he wasn’t happy about it, according to an aide who was there and testified under oath about it. Trump knew he wasn’t in danger, though, and demanded that they let “his people” in even if the metal detectors went off.

It was a cold day. The rally was pretty similar to others that many of the attendees had been to. But for the Trump superfans who showed up, it isn’t hard to guess their motivation for coming to Washington, DC. They wanted to stop the steal. This was the last chance.

Fighting Words

The Trump allies and aides who rose to the microphone and addressed the rally were belligerent. Fighting words flew fast and loose, and the crowd ate it up. Speaking from the stage and wearing a bulletproof vest, warmup speaker Representative Mo Brooks told attendees that January 6th was “the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass. … Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?”

As the rally was happening, but before President Trump came on stage, Mike Pence released a letter saying he would not block certification of the Electoral College. The power to choose the president, he said, belonged “to the American people, and to them alone.”

Well, that triggered President Trump. In response to concerns raised by his White House lawyers, speechwriter Stephen Miller had taken the parts about Pence out of the draft speech for the event. With Pence refusing the play ball, though, Trump put several mentions of his Vice President back into the speech. He intended for the crowd to believe that Pence was the problem—and could be the solution.

Finally, President Trump approached the dais. Following are a few excerpts from the speech he gave:

* “We will never give up. We will never concede.”

* “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

* The vice president does not have “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.”

* But… “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”

* “We’re going to walk down [to Capitol Hill], and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down.”

It was clear that the President wanted to be there in person as his supporters swarmed around the Capitol. But it was about a mile and a half to walk. At almost 1pm, right after finishing his remarks, Trump climbed into his car outside expecting the driver would take him up Pennsylvania Avenue to where the action was. But the Secret Service ultimately refused, and instead took the president back to his residence. Witnesses say Trump was enraged that he could not go. Like the rest of us, he would have to watch things unfold on screens.

THE CROWD MOVES

With the rally a wrap, the crowd got on its way toward the Capitol. Secret Service records since made public give a timetable of the migration and law enforcement responses:

* By 1:15, the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) had used munitions on demonstrators at the Capitol

* At 1:38, the White House got word that USCP was heavily engaged with demonstrators and that multiple arrests had been made

* 2:02… USCP calls for backup, apparently for the first time; things heat up quickly now

* Minutes later, USCP locks down the building and again requests mutual aid

* Another few minutes go by, and now there are about 15,000 people within a block of the Capitol and USCP is pulling back from initial positions

* At 2:15, the Capitol Building is breached

* 2:44 pm, shots are fired inside the Capitol; the fire department tries to save the victim but she does not survive

We’ll pause a moment here to talk about Ashli Babbitt, who died on January 6th. The story of Babbitt’s death is a political flashpoint, and the pro-attack side, including Trump, have advanced an alternative version of it to serve their narrative. In the real world, Ashli Babbitt was a QAnon-believing, election-denying Trump supporter who came from across the country to be part of what Trump had sold as the makings of history, and she died rushing a makeshift barricade where officers were guarding nearby members of Congress from the hostile mob. As can be seen on video footage of the incident, the defending officer did not shoot Babbitt until she was climbing through a window that one of her fellow attackers had just broken. She and the others had been warned not to attempt to pass the barricade, but she climbed up anyway, ducked through the window frame, and was shot. The tragedy was months in the making, starting when Babbitt had been radicalized with online conspiracy theories.

Compounding this tragedy, Babbitt’s death was made into a martyrdom of sorts for the people who want to retrospectively turn what happened on January 6th into a righteous cause. So you’ll hear things about it that are untrue, for example that she was killed by agents of Nancy Pelosi simply for exercising her right to peacefully protest. Or that she was shot without warning. Misinformation like this gets people further from understanding how and why she was killed, but it can be useful if you have something other than that goal in mind. If you could get people to believe Ashli Babbitt was hunted and murdered by agents of Nancy Pelosi just because she liked Trump, then you might be able to weave a narrative wherein all of the public backlash and other consequences of perpetrating the Capitol attack was outright persecution, by power-hungry Democrats, of freedom-loving patriots. As Tucker Carlson and others have tried to do. Ashli, for my part, may you rest in peace.

At the White House, Trump knew the attack was underway. He was watching on TV. House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke with the President over the phone, describing the attack as it unfolded around him and asking him to put a stop to it.

A lot of people tried to get Trump to intervene. Friends of his. Allies of his. People who had been extremely loyal to him. People who found themselves personally in the crosshairs of the mob. People who were worried that public opinion would turn if the attack was allowed to continue.

But as late as nine minutes after the first breach of the building, Trump was still tweeting that “Pence didn’t have the courage” to blah blah blah blah blah. Ringleaders at the Capitol shouted the text of this tweet out over bullhorns to others in the crowd, and everything got even more violent.

With all this going on, the Vice President and his team were still on the premises. One of Pence’s lawyers got an email from electors scheme lawyer John Eastman, who said Pence was to blame because he failed to do “what was necessary.” This was the message Pence was being relayed from someone close to the President, while multiple entrances to thr building were being overrun by Trump’s mob, one by one. Did I mention someone built a small gallows out in front of the Capitol? Did I mention the attackers were chanting “hang Mike Pence”? Did I mention the Secret Service detail assigned to the Vice President made goodbye calls to family in case they didn’t make it out alive? There was no mystery about why the mob was there, or what they would do if they found Mike Pence.

We have nothing to suggest Trump tried to contact his VP, though it’s probably safe to assume the message would have been threatening, not comforting, if he had. The president did, however, call allies in Congress, including Senator Mike Lee of Utah (although it seems he may have been trying to reach Senator Tommy Tuberville and dialed wrong) and Congressman Jim Jordan in addition to McCarthy.

Frustratingly, more than a year later we learned that the White House phone logs show no activity at all for about seven hours on January 6th—inclusive of time the attack was happening. So at a minimum, it’s worth asking what phone or phones President Trump used to make these calls that he himself said he made. Better would be to know what he wanted from those gentlemen. But maybe we’ll never know.

Before we move on to a few particularly egregious instances of the mob doing crimes, I want to unpack a bit more on what motivated such extraordinary, extreme behavior. As we’ve touched on throughout this Guide, a lot of the attackers, including the most dangerous ones who came ready for things to GET REAL—we’re getting to them—were not cynics about Trump’s lies about the election. Quite the opposite; most had applied almost no critical thinking at all to the claims he had pushed, and even helped amplify the nonsense themselves, as true believers. Remember this the next time you are gearing up to volunteer for a violent cause!

What the world saw on January 6th, moreso even than before, was the result of brains poisoned by misinformation and conspiracy theories. Let’s talk about how we know.

For one thing, no small number of the attackers who were later arrested have built their courtroom defense around explaining that election misinformation took them in. One rioter described himself as having been sucked into a rabbit hole of election lies and told the judge that he thought Trump had authorized the Capitol assault.

Another tried to argue that listening to Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory show, InfoWars, was the reason he started going to Trump rallies, which…  well, one thing led to another, and before you know it you’re breaking into the U.S. Capitol.

The stories get downright delusional from there. One man thought he was following Trump’s orders when he stole liquor and a coat rack from inside the Capitol. You had guys wearing clothes emblazoned with “Q” icons leading the charge and confronting police. One, the person who chased Officer Eugene Goodman up flights of stairs in that viral video, was so confused he thought he was invading the White House, not the Capitol.

Then there was the so-called QAnon Shaman, who we met earlier at the Arizona stop the steal demonstration, figuring prominently in photographs taken inside the Senate chamber with tattoos on display, red white and blue makeup on his face, decked out in animal skins and horns, an American flag zip-tied to his signature spear. Chansley left a note for the Vice President on the dais inside the chamber, where Pence had been sitting just moments before, saying "it's only a matter of time, justice is coming."

The shaman’s name is Jacob Chansley, and his conspiracy tie-in was so out there that it actually wrapped back around the other way. His fellow Q devotees, seeing that his ostentatious posing and immediate arrest was being pilloried in the public eye, expelled him from their ranks. While he was paying time for his crimes, the rest of the online QAnon community started telling one another that he had been hired as an actor to make them look bad. He was a plant now that he had been caught.

There really is no way to understand January 6th without comprehending the mindset of the people who swarmed the Capitol, and just how warped their reality had become. Each of us should take from this at least one important lesson: that it is your responsibility to diversify the information you take in, and to be harder to convince when it comes to the most dramatic things that people around you are saying. Ask what your companions believe to be true, and make yours a voice that pushes back when those beliefs are not in line with reality. The wilder the assertion, the more skepticism is in order. It sounds simple, but enough people practicing good media literacy habits could have prevented the whole affair on January 6th, and certainly could have spared many from alienating their families, going to prison for a false cause, or even being killed rushing police to get to lawmakers.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Violence and other kinds of lawlessness were rampant during the Capitol attack. Way more than you might see during a “normal tourist visit,” to be sure. If you’ve seen videos or reports on January 6th, you may have had a window onto some of it. But whatever you think it is, it’s probably more. I also can’t do justice to all of it here, though there are several helpful rundowns by Just Security and others. Hundreds of the rioters have gone to jail, charged with a range of crimes.

* there is video evidence of at least 1,000 instances of the mob assaulting police officers; some were exceptionally brutal; many involved weapons

* rioters physically attacked at least one member of the news media

* countless destruction of property incidents happened on the premises, including windows, doors, office furniture, and more

* nonviolent crimes were also committed, including demonstrating without a permit, trespassing, unauthorized entry to a government building, and obstruction of a Congressional proceeding

From court filings after the fact, collected by reporter Scott MacFarlane, we have gotten a clearer picture of the weaponry that the attackers carried to the Capitol. Guns, bear spray, hockey stick, baseball bat, taser, sharpened flagpole, knives, scissors, plastic knuckles, lacrosse stick, Tomahawk ax, Tree Branch, Pipe, Stick, Baton, Crutch, Club, Steel-toed boots, Four foot rod, Metal whip, sledgehammer, "Poles with nails in them," pitchfork, “electroshock weapon," wasp spray, RAID insecticide, WD-40, crow bar, hard-knuckle tactical gloves. They used fire extinguishers and stolen police shields and and stolen police batons and dismantled police barricades and velvet rope stands and flashlights and scooters and full cans of beer and coffee tumblers and trash cans and buckets and bottles and laser pointers and strobe lights and wooden table legs and skateboards as weapons. Perhaps most emblematic among the makeshift weapons was the group that assaulted police officers with a large, metal-framed TRUMP sign turned horizontally.

These are incomplete lists. But you get the idea. Here I’m going to read from a court document describing one of the incidents of gang-like assault against the police. In this case, an officer defending the arched doorway on the western side of the Capitol:

“9. Hundreds of individuals had gathered outside the Archway, some of whom were throwing and/or swinging various makeshift weapons at the group of law enforcement officers. Starting at approximately 4:27 pm, Officer A.W. was positioned toward the opening of the Archway when co-defendant Justin Jersey charged at Officer A.W., grabbing his face, and knocking Officer A.W. to the ground. While Officer A.W. was lying on the ground of the Archway, the defendant climbed over a railing and began striking at Officer B.M. with a crutch. The defendant then kicked at Officer A.W., who was still lying on the ground.

“10. The defendant grabbed Officer B.M., first by his baton, then by the helmet and the neck of his ballistic vest, pulled him down, over Officer A.W., and started to drag him down a set of steps in a prone position. Assisted by co-defendants Jeffrey Sabol and Logan Barnhart, the defendant then dragged Officer B.M. fully into the crowd, where other rioters, including co- defendants Peter Stager and Mason Courson, beat B.M. with weapons, including a flagpole and a baton.

“11. As a result of this attack, Officer B.M. sustained bruising and abrasions.

“12. Approximately 20 minutes later, at 4:48 pm, the defendant walked up to the line

of police officers in the Archway and kicked at them. Someone standing between the defendant and the police line yelled at the defendant and others to stop. Instead, seconds later, the defendant ran back to the line of police officers, kicked them, striking a riot shield held by MPD Officer D.P., and shouted ‘you’re gonna die tonight.’” 

Now, since this always comes up when someone talks about the January 6th rioters’ crimes, yes: there was also lawlessness in the summer of 2020, on the margins of the peaceful Black Lives Matters protests around the country. Here’s a simple way to maintain your integrity on this aspect of American society: just say everyone who breaks the law should be held accountable. I didn’t make excuses for people vandalizing courthouses, starting fires, or looting after George Floyd was killed, so I don’t feel obliged to respond to whataboutism from those who don’t like hearing about January 6th violence. Even if they were the same (they’re not, in just so many ways). I insist on being allowed to say crimes committed during both should be punished.

In case anyone is genuinely wondering why the BLM protest criminals weren’t punished, though… it turns out that many, many actually were. There are a few good explainers on how the law was enforced in those cases, by the Associated Press, USA Today, and others—just search “blm protesters charged.” Even the whatabout argument here is based on a gross mischaracterization of reality, because thousands of lawbreakers and rioters were arrested during the BLM marches, and more than 300 federal charges were brought against dozens of people for serious crimes, and many have been convicted and gone to jail. One woman got five years for arson in Seattle. The young man who set fire to a Minneapolis police station is serving four years AND has to pay a $12 million fine when he gets out. I could go on. If anyone brings up BLM protests with the suggestion that there were no consequences, now at least you know better.

Let’s talk about the defenders. In apparently isolated incidents, a police officer here and there did encourage the protesters in their advance. One went so far as to open up a barricade and let them through unchallenged. Some have suggested widespread complicity, that Trump-supporting cops corruptly allowed and encouraged the whole thing to take place, but that isn’t at all the case.

In the chaos of the scene in and around the Capitol on January 6th, heroic police officers on duty tried desperately to hold their ground. The mob hurled insults at them and accused them of betraying their country because they were on the side of the law and not the side of Trump. They sustained far too many injuries.

If you know what happened on January 6th, this picture is easy to see. And it’s why the confusion surrounding it can be so frustrating. Good folks, people who normally support law enforcement, find themselves wrongly calling “BS” on the eyewitness accounts of the police officers who bore the brunt of the assault. When things get distorted to the point where you are sure every officer who speaks out about being attacked is lying and has probably betrayed their oath, it’s time to reassess.

The days and weeks following the mob attack on the Capitol saw affected police officers speaking to the press, testifying in front of Congress, resigning their jobs, and suing Donal Trump for the physical and emotional traumas they endured because of his actions.

At least four officers on duty that day took their own lives in the aftermath. In true conspiracy theory fashion, outlandish tales about shadowy forces murdering these officers and making it look like suicide then added to the pain their families have suffered. Appalling and disgusting. And, again, could have been avoided with better information diets, critical thinking, and other media literacy habits.

We unfortunately have still not even come to the most dangerous parts of the Capitol attack. There was the rabble, and then there were the people who came with a purpose and a plan. These men and women didn’t waste time with displays of Trumpiness; they were on a mission to use force to keep Trump in office. Armored up, armed, with comms channels, contingency plans, and weapons caches. So let’s do a brief recap of what we covered earlier about these paramilitary elements and then talk about how they spent their day on January 6th.

Militant groups and Second Amendment enthusiasts including several state chapters of the Oath Keepers, a large contingent of Proud Boys, some Three Percenters, some First Amendment Praetorians, and others saw Donald Trump’s tweet about the January 6th rally as a clarion call. An order, really, from the Commander-in-Chief they fancied themselves loyal to. President Trump was in need of their support, and by golly they would be there to give it. That tweet kicked off a flurry of planning and preparation for the “wild” day, on which they believed Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act–and that *they* would be instruments in carrying out his wishes.

These men and women would be ready to make citizens arrests of any who opposed Trump. They would move to take control of federal buildings around the Capitol as the normal operation of America’s government was suspended to create time for Biden states to reconsider and flip their vote to Trump instead. Not unlike many of the others who trespassed at the Capitol, these would-be enforcers were deep into the collective MAGA delusion Trump and his allies had induced about a stolen election. In their minds, extraordinary times called for extraordinary measures. They would “make America great” by stealing the White House back from the usurpers.

The problem with all of this, as should have been clear at the time, is that doing all these things–and planning with multiple people across state lines to do them–amounts to seditious conspiracy against the United States. Historic criminal acts. The simplest way to explain their willingness to engage in them is that they probably just believed it would work and Trump would remain president. 

These groups were not working in isolation. They were working together, though not necessarily coordinating every detail. Kelly Meggs, a member of the Oath Keepers, told his colleagues in December that there was an “alliance” between their group, the Proud Boys, and the Florida Three Percenters. He suggested the Proud Boys could be “force multipliers.”

Okay, so what were these folks up to at the zero hour? Well, we’ve noted that plainclothes Proud Boys volunteered themselves to be first arrivers at checkpoints around the Capitol building. By analyzing video footage, reporters have shown that Proud Boys are the ones who led the attacks on police and encouraged others in the mob to follow suit. They were short at least one man. Enrique Tarrio, who had been inside the White House on December 14th, was arrested in DC as he was coming into town for the January 6th festivities because he had high-capacity firearm magazines on his person and had been banned from the city. But Proud Boys played a central role in the breach of the building. Dominic Pezzola of Rochester, New York was the Proud Boy who used a police shield to smash a reinforced window to gain entry, circumventing a nearby locked door. There is a good amount of video of the Proud Boys doing these things and more, including from a filmmaker who followed them around all day with their permission. It’s like they wanted to record the history they were making.

What were the Proud Boys after? How did they see this playing out? We know part of the answer thanks to later court filings that laid out evidence including the group’s communications. Text messages between Tarrio and another individual at the very end of December indicate the plan was to make 1776 happen by occupying the House and Senate and other “crucial buildings” with “as many people as possible.” In separate, encrypted messages, the group planned to make the Capitol’s front entrance their main approach. Seeing the Capitol breached, Tarrio crowed on Telegram: “we did this.” It could be the Proud Boys believed a delay was all that was needed to achieve the objective: one messaged Tarrio to suggest the election result could be invalidated if lawmakers failed to vote by midnight.

More than three dozen people charged in the Capitol siege have been identified by federal authorities as Proud Boys leaders, members, or associates. 18 of them have since been charged with seditious conspiracy.

In contrast to the chaotic street-fighting style of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers took a somewhat more methodical approach. Former military and law enforcement types who own tactical gear and organize themselves loosely after the likeness of the army, a small detachment of Oath Keepers moved in formation through the mob, up the steps, and into the Capitol after it had been breached. They took up positions inside the building to await orders from the boss.

Here’s how a paper published by the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center described the Oath Keepers in December 2021:

Since its inception in 2009, the group has used a warped sense of patriotism, loose enforcement of laws surrounding paramilitary activity, and America’s founding revolutionary spirit to justify anti-government mobilization. It consistently walked the edge of political violence before taking part in the January 6 insurrection. While the group claims to be “guardians of the republic,” its principal target is the government itself—particularly entities representing perceived federal government overreach and vectors for tyrannical forces to suppress Americans’ natural rights.

The Oath Keepers fancied themselves the paramilitary wing of the Trump effort to keep him in place. Between January 5th and 6th they provided security to Roger Stone and a member of Congress or two. The reasons they were asked to do this are not clear, but their lawyers have since argued that protecting Stone and others was their reason for coming to DC, so maybe that was just the cover for their true intent, which they communicated repeatedly among themselves. Before the failed attempt to stop the Electoral College being certified, they conspired to "oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power," according to a court filing, and to do that had amassed firearms "on the outskirts of Washington D.C. — some distributed across hotels and ‘quick reaction force’ (‘QRF‘) teams — and planned to use them in support of their plot to halt the lawful transfer of power."

What did Oath Keepers believe that could lead them to justify such extreme actions against the legitimately elected government of the country they swore to defend? Simple: they thought Biden had usurped the presidency through electoral fraud. The Oath Keepers had their brains poisoned the same as millions of other Trump supporters. They were all on the same mission. Here’s Stewart Rhodes, on November 15th, less than two weeks after the election:

I think about half this country won’t recognise Biden as legitimate. They won’t recognise this election. What that means is that everything that comes out of his mouth will be considered not of any force or effect, anything he signs into law we won’t recognise as legitimate. We’ll be very much like the founding fathers. We’ll end up nullifying and resisting.

Looking ahead to that future, after Trump made clear he would fight to stay in power Rhodes apparently calculated that helping him do so would be the best course of action. He and his team came up with a plan and started working to make it real. Central to the plan, according to Rhodes two weeks beforehand, was intent to scare and intimidate Congress. He is alleged to have said on Christmas Day that Oath Keepers would convince lawmakers that “it will be torches and pitchforks time if they don’t do the right thing.”

On January 6th, a crew of 30-40 Oath Keepers, according to their Zello chat, had assembled outside the Capitol along with the rally crowd around 1pm, ready to “stick to the plan.” Some were getting impatient, saying that Pence was “doing nothing” and, at 1:48pm, that all Trump was doing was “complaining” and that patriots were getting ready to take things into their own hands.

I mentioned the Quick Reaction Force stations just outside the city. Well, by this time these hotel rooms had been provisioned by Oath Keepers who in the days leading up brought weapons and ammunition on buses from North Carolina and elsewhere, and now they were on alert, according to court filings. In messages between themselves and other militia groups, Oath Keepers had shared a map of DC and designated rally points on the DC side of the Potomac River that would be activated to stage arms and additional people in case civil unrest broke out.

On the Oath Keepers website, Rhodes was clear: the QRF teams would be ready for a scenario in which President Trump called them up “as part of the militia” to assist him with force inside the District of Columbia. The plan even included having a boat prepared and the Quick Response Team and heavy weapons standing by to be ferried “across the river to our waiting arms.” Thank goodness none of that happened, but it is horrifying to contemplate how nearly it did.

Minutes after saying patriots had decided to act without waiting for Trump, the first Oath Keepers breached Capitol barricades at 1:52 and worked their way toward the entrance. Separately, another squad of Oath Keepers cart jacked two electric vehicles they found on the premises—their memorable phrase on the group chatter was “we’re en route in a grand theft auto golf cart”—and livestreamed themselves swerving around police vehicles on Facebook. They were coming, according to one, because DC Police were perpetrating “violence against patriots” and there was “war in the streets” as patriots were storming the Capitol.

Meanwhile, the main group formed themselves into a “stack” and worked themselves up through the crowd to the east entrance. Around 2:45, these Oath Keepers had breached the entrance and were inside the Capitol Rotunda, the space underneath the dome in the center of the building. The first to enter was William Todd Wilson, who later admitted under oath that he, armed with a pocketknife, was there to gather intelligence and disrupt the final certification of the Electoral College count.

From the Rotunda, some Oath keepers went the direction of the Senate chambers. Some went toward the House. A couple peeled off to go into restricted sections on the west side of the building. But the Senate advance was pushed back, and not long after saw the first Oath Keepers exiting back outside. Another stack came in, including some of the golf cart crew from before, right as the first stack was leaving. These Oath Keepers stayed inside fighting police in the Rotunda and entrance lobby until a little after 3:30. At 4, a large group assembled northeast of the building. Leader Stewart Rhodes retreated to the nearby Phoenix Park Hotel, where he called someone he thought could get a message to President Trump and repeatedly asked that Trump deputize the Oath Keepers to block the transition of power before the opportunity passed them by. The request was not granted.

Later that evening, Rhodes and some of the other Oath Keepers celebrated with some unlimited breadsticks at the Olive Garden in Tysons Corner in Virginia. He suggested to his confederates that they would be at it again the following day, perhaps not realizing that the certification would be a done deal by then. Congress would have more resolve than he expected and would regroup that very night.

Why did the Oath Keepers leave well before the rest of the mob? Is there a reason the Quick Reaction Force plan was not activated even though major civil unrest had broken out, or was it simply because President Trump never asked for the militias to help? What kinds of things were Oath Keepers saying to one another during the assault? I have questions. When the Oath Keepers are taken to trial for seditious conspiracy, we will hopefully get more answers.

There are others who LARPed as military operators among the crowd and inside the Capitol, like the guy dressed head to toe in tactical gear photographed jumping over a railing in the Senate chamber gallery with about a half dozen zip ties in his left hand, that we could also talk about if we had the time. In the interest of moving things along, though, let’s skip some of the minor characters and get back to the main story: Pence.

With a mob of thousands bearing down on them, and paramilitary types in the mix, those inside the Capitol had reason to fear. And one man in particular did, because Trump had told everyone that he, and he alone, could make all their wildest dreams come true–though he actually could not, in any way.

Let this sink in for a second: the Vice President of the United States could have died on January 6th, at the hands of members of his own political party, supporters of the President he served for four years. We’ve already covered how the mob erected a gallows on the Capitol lawn, and how many of those pouring in through broken windows and doors pried open were chanting about hanging Pence. Imagine what that must have felt like for the VP and his team with him on site.

Remember that Mike Pence had to be there at the Capitol with the Congress, because it was his job. It’s one of the few things the Constitution actually says about the position of Vice President. Here’s how it works: the states certify a slate of electors for the person who won the most votes in that state. Challenges to the outcome, including recounts, are resolved before the certification. The Constitution says the states each transmit their “list” under seal to the “Seat of Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate.” The VP is the President of the Senate, and the next step is for that officer to “open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted.”

I honestly don’t understand why there is ANY confusion about this. As we’ve covered above, the other interpretations were pretty obviously nonsense in the legal and practical senses. Pence was duty bound to ceremoniously open the electoral college submissions from the states. There is no wiggle room for him to so much as comment on their acceptability—to say nothing of reject them, entertain other slates not so certified, or even delay the counting. Go and read it yourself if you have a question about it. The passage is short and reasonably clear.

So that’s what Mr. Pence was about. The session of Congress to do the opening and the counting was interrupted by this point in our story, but it’s what he and they were working on when the attack happened. The mob *intended* to interrupt it.

This delay had consequences, and they could have been far more serious. The masterminds in Trump’s various hotel “war rooms”—characters like John Eastman, Steve Bannon, and Rudy Giuliani—had been pushing Pence to waver in his refusal to stand in the way of Biden becoming President. With this show of force backing them up, they continued to tell Pence’s team that he was to blame for the violence.

Meanwhile, the people with Pence were sounding alarms about the ongoing physical danger as the attack raged on. His staff had warned him and the security detail that President Trump would turn on him publicly, with obvious implications in the presence of a loyal, angry Trump mob. Members of the Secret Service assigned to protect Pence contacted loved ones to say goodbye because they weren’t confident they would survive the afternoon.

Ultimately Mike Pence was not hanged, or even harmed. There have been reports that he refused to get in a Secret Service vehicle that came for him for fear of being whisked away so others could carry out the coup in his absence, but the details aren’t terribly clear for now. Regardless, there is no reason to think the Secret Service was going to turn Pence over to the mob for them to administer justice in their way. If that driver and team were in on the plot, surely the point was to simply take him off the board, and this could have been accomplished without bloodshed—if he hadn’t gotten spooked. Pence remained at the Capitol throughout the afternoon and evening. 

All the while, the attackers marauded inside and around the Capitol. But it became clear that the quarry they sought had been whisked or hidden away, and there’s only so much sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s office, waving the Confederate flag, leaving threatening notes, rifling through drawers, grabbing laptops, hefting lecterns just for the fun of it, chanting, taking selfies, and defecating in hallways that a mob can do. They had worked hard to overwhelm security, but eventually reinforcements arrived and started clearing rooms and pushing the mob back.

It was at this point, after the momentum had shifted from the attackers to the defenders, that Trump tweeted a video addressing his followers. The time was 4:17, and almost everyone Trump knew and trusted had been begging him to tell the mob to disband and leave the Capitol for two hours. He finally did so.

Here’s what the President of the United States had to say about a major violent attack on the United States.

* I know your pain, I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt.

* It's a very tough period of time. There's never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us — from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election, but we can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You're very special. You've seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil.

* I know how you feel, but go home, and go home in peace.

Notice how Trump expresses no concern for the damage caused, or the people already hurt, or the interruption of Congress, or the threatening of his Vice President. He does not admonish the mob for being wrong—far from it, he reinforces their beliefs in multiple places. “An election was stolen from us. It was a landslide election… this was a fraudulent election… I know how you feel.” The President was asking for a peaceful end to the violent incident he inspired, which is good. What wasn’t so good was that he in no way renounced the false cause for which his people had fought. They lost the battle, and probably missed their final chance to avert a Biden presidency, but the war would continue.

This would be a good time to review Trump’s other tweets from that day. In order, starting in the middle of the night, according to a Newsweek roundup of them:

12:53 a.m.: President Donald Trump tweets that Republicans need to "get smart" and "fight" alongside a post suggesting GOP members of Congress should "got to the wall for the president."

1:00 a.m.: Trump suggests Mike Pence has the authority to reject electoral votes in a tweet about the vice president's role presiding over the certification.

8:17 a.m.: Trump tweets that states want to "correct their votes" and calls for Pence to "send them back to the states." He tells Pence it's "time for extreme courage."

2:24 p.m.: Trump tweets that Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution."

2:38 p.m.: Trump urges people to "support our Capitol police and law enforcement," and tweets that "they are truly on the side of our country. Stay peaceful!"

Pausing here to add that the Oath Keepers, inside the Capitol at this moment, interpreted this tweet to mean it was open season on members of Congress and egged one another on to find some in their voice chat.

3:13 p.m.: Trump posts on Twitter that he's asking people at the Capitol to "remain peaceful" and not engage in violence: "Remember, we are the party of law and order–respect the law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"

4:17 p.m.: Trump posts video of himself speaking to supporters telling them to leave the Capitol.

Pausing HERE to note that several more incidents of egregious violence happened after this video posted, including the assault on police at the Archway at 4:27 pm that I read out above, though this can probably be explained by limited bandwidth for streaming video up there and the difficulty of hearing Trump’s words if you did. The way most of the mob had learned of his tweets throughout the day was by people reading them out over bullhorn.

6:01 p.m.: Trump tweets a post suggesting that the Capitol riot was the result of a fraudulent election. "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love and in peace. Remember this day forever!" he says before deleting the tweet.

To note: this was the post that tipped the platforms over toward suspending Trump from reaching people on their websites with election-related misinformation. Within an hour, Facebook and Twitter had removed this and his other posts and frozen his accounts.

It took a while for the invaders to leave and be cleared from the interior. Slowly, the crowd outside dispersed. Some headed back home. A few huddled in their hotels and pondered what Trump might do the next day.

The Capitol Police didn’t declare the building secure until 8:00 pm. Six minutes later, the Senate had reconvened, followed by the House at 9:00 pm. The Congress worked well into the dark morning of January 7th, dispatched challenges to Arizona’s electors along the way, and got the certification done.

Pence, running the session, allowed for statements to be made before the vote eventually took place. This was where you saw many Republican lawmakers take their one and only stand against President Trump for inciting the attack. But allowing this could be seen as a violation of the Electoral College Act because the speeches pushed the time past the proscribed two-hour limit. John Eastman—bizarrely after it was clear Pence was not looking for an excuse to help the attempt—jumped on that decision to AGAIN agitate for the Vice President to send electors back to the states. Pence had said the Electoral College Act was a reason he could not do Trump’s bidding, and now he had broken the Electoral College Act. Might as well go ahead and dispense with that law altogether now, according to Eastman at this late hour. Logic!

Of course we all know how the day ended. The certified vote became official-official despite the mob’s attempt to prevent or delay it and John Eastman’s heckling. The Capitol looked as though it had been sacked by an invading army, and it was a little later than it should have been, but Congress got the job done.

Importantly for our aim to differentiate the true from the untrue, though, the gaslighting about and rewriting of January 6th had already begun. 

From the start, the lies took advantage of everyday Trump supporters’ shock that people on their side could have done such a thing. And disbelief that Trump, who loves America so much, could have encouraged it. The easiest play for the propagandists was to pin blame on someone else.

And so it was that the fairy tale “antifa did the insurrection” was born into the world. Antifa here being a shorthand for militant leftists of all kinds, a go-to bogeyman for Republicans whenever lawlessness is done or perceived.

To be clear: this was not antifa, or leftists at all, or in fact anyone other than genuine fans of Donald Trump. There is no evidence to suggest Democrats or Marxists or BLM or the deep state moved about the crowd and stirred them up to anger, agitating good people to break the law so they would make Trump and his movement look bad.

Head Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes, over private comms at the height of the attack told his colleagues, who had asked if it was people in disguise there to “cause trouble,” that it was ACTUAL patriots—supporters of the President—who had made their moment of triumph happen. The reward he got from his one-time allies for fighting for Trump? Media personality Lara Logan and others called Rhodes himself a fed plant trying to turn public opinion against real patriots.

Still, this fairy tale was later tried as a legal defense in at least one instance, but it failed because no video could be produced of peaceful protesters being incited to do violence.

Having no evidence, unfortunately, wasn’t seen as a problem for these bad faith accusers, who started saying exactly these kinds of things. Rumors of busloads of antifa rolling into the city before the attack surfaced—the buses story is a familiar one in conservative circles, so its emergence here kind of makes sense. On the floor of the House that night Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida cited an invented analysis that facial recognition technology had supposedly cross-checked identities and spotted several antifa people inside the building, masquerading as Trump supporters. Fox News—whose hosts were texting Trump and co. during the attack to make it stop—was soon running with the antifa narrative.

Tucker Carlson told his viewers that a man on the front lines at the Capitol—in red face paint and a “Keep America Great” hat—was really an agent provocateur in disguise. A fed to set up the false flag. The man has nothing to do with the federal government, but he is (or was) a fan of Tucker Carlson.

For people who don’t appreciate how easily these lies are ginned up, it started to feel like there was a lot of substance to what—in reality—was a factually bankrupt counternarrative to confuse them about what had really happened.

How effective was this rapid response disinformation and the reinforcement it was afforded in the year and a half to follow? A YouGov survey conducted in June 2022 found that about three-quarters of Republicans say “leftists” deserve blame for the attack. This is roughly three times the percentage who blame Trump.

These early narratives were to be embellished and expanded upon, and combined with new nonsense, as the propagandists came up with it. We are well on our way to seeing how Americans have been purposely misled about the story of the Capitol attack—and what Trump wanted Pence to do, and the fake electors scheme, and Trump’s attempts to use the Justice and Defense Departments to reverse his loss, and the people who criminally gained unauthorized access to voting machines, and how insincerely Sidney Powell believes in the Kraken when speaking under oath. And, surreally, still, even about which candidate won the 2020 election.

January 6th has rippled through our society, and misinformation about all of these aspects has in most ways strengthened, not diminished. In the next installment, I will attempt to answer the questions, “how has the legend of January 6th changed”? and “how has it changed us?” Implications and aftermath, in our fourth and final part.

This segment is the second of four parts that comprise this voice essay. You can find this episode on Apple Podcasts here.

Chapter 4 - The Boy Who Cried Fraud

We start, again, in the middle of the night. It’s early on November 4th, 2020, and the votes from the day before have not all been counted. It’s too close to call, but Donald Trump has decided what he will do. He approaches a podium and, with all the world watching, declares victory over his opponent, Joe Biden. He just starts saying he won. This was unprecedented in American history. And it was stupid because, as it turned out, when the votes were counted he would be the clear loser.

Trump’s inability to accept a loss would turn out to be a powerful engine giving energy to an entire movement, leading within two months to the violent assault on the Capitol. How is that even possible? You and I were there, but there is a lot to get into to make it make sense.

First, Americans should all know and be proud that their democratic traditions are strong, and resilient, and getting better all the time. When a political candidate loses, they can challenge the results of an election—but our system requires proof, and our laws keep things fair. Bring it in court, and if you win there you can hold cheaters accountable. This is the way we, all of us, can make our elections fairer, more equal, and more transparent, too.

Second, what Americans should know about Donald Trump is that he’s never demonstrated concern for the actual underlying reality of elections, or contests generally, in which he is personally invested. When he loses, his default, automatic response is to say the other guy cheated. He does not seem to believe in backing his claims up with evidence, though, and never has.

For all the talk of “election security” since November 2020, Donald Trump himself has almost no regard for the integrity of elections. If he is embarrassed by the outcome, it was illegitimate. If he stands to lose power, even moreso. Let’s go through some examples.

Trump won the 2016 contest, right? And he mopped the floor in the Republican primaries to secure the party’s nomination. But before all that, Trump lost to Ted Cruz in the Iowa Caucuses. He just… lost. And Cruz won. None of it was in dispute in any way.

Initially, Trump congratulated Cruz, apparently acknowledging his loss. Days later, however, he cried “fraud.” Someone had rigged the caucuses for Lyin’ Ted. In a fair matchup, Cruz never could have defeated Trump. QED, the matchup wasn’t fair. It’s a circular logic, and one that is more familiar to us all now. But it’s one of the most consistent things about Trump. He makes things up about fraud when he loses.

Fast forward to November of 2016, It wasn’t enough, having beaten Hillary Clinton, just to notch a win and take the presidency. Trump has to win in absolute terms: it was a landslide, it was the biggest win in history, he won the Electoral College AND the popular vote, he received the most votes ever, and so forth. Like many before him, Trump in fact didn’t win the popular vote; Hillary Clinton beat him by about 3 million. Trump’s response? Yep, he claimed illegal immigrants defrauded the popular vote, swinging 3—or maybe 5—million ballots ALL in Hillary’s direction. Trump actually won on all measures, you see—it’s just that Hillary cheated so it would seem like he didn’t.

Take a much more recent example. Georgia’s Republican governor, whom Trump openly hates, ran for reelection this year and was challenged in the primary by a Trump-endorsed challenger. The governor, Brian Kemp, absolutely crushed that challenger, David Perdue, winning by more than 50 points. People paying attention noted that Trump didn’t seem to have the juice to help Perdue win. Trump’s reflex to cry foul was simply too strong, and he put out a statement boosting wild claims that his guy would have won if not for… you guessed it, fraud. The bit gets old when the races are close, but at least it is more believable. In this example, though, you can see how immaterial reality is to his reaction to losing. It doesn’t matter. It’s always fraud.

And so it was when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. When Trump got up to that podium, he knew what he would say: “we were getting ready to win this election… frankly, we did win this election.” Cheers from his staffers in the room. “This is a major fraud on our nation.”

The question wasn’t whether President Trump would back down and concede if it turned out he lost. That was never going to happen. The question was simply how many people would choose to believe what he was saying, and buy into whatever excuses he would make for why he apparently lost. Would enough of the American public, and key officials at the federal and state levels, go along?

Chapter 5 - Stop The Steal

Shortly after Election Day, Tom heard from a reporter friend that a Korean Air flight to Phoenix had been loaded up with fake Biden votes. This fit very well with what he was hearing from Trump and other politicians about how sinister irregularities and outright shenanigans were cropping up all over the country. The plane had landed, so Tom and a couple other people who believed there was a conspiracy afoot went to see for themselves. They drove over to the airport, took a grainy video, recorded the tail number. One of them followed the cargo loading staff to their homes and took down the addresses. The video was posted online, and the suspicious activity was reported to a Pinal County sheriff. Tom and crew wanted to make sure the fake Biden ballots from the plane never got processed into the counting.

But then, nothing happened. The plane had nothing to do with the election at all, so there was no call for suspicion, to say nothing of an investigation. The ballots weren’t real and therefore could not be fraudulently tallied. The story about fake ballots being flown into Arizona was just nonsense that someone threw out onto the Internet. Tom forgot to activate his critical thinking and got taken for a ride, wasting time and embarrassing himself chasing ghosts.

What’s remarkable about this episode is that Tom Van Flein had been working in Congress for Paul Gosar, a Republican House member from Arizona, for about ten years when Biden beat Trump. Gosar is DC-famous for being one of the most ardently pro-Trump members of Congress, among other things, and he was all in on the election fraud narrative from the start. And Tom was his chief of staff. Along on the airport outing was also Josh Barnett, a Republican who had just lost a race to represent Arizona’s Seventh Congressional District–by 53 points, to Ruben Gallego. Barnett must have been hoping to bust the Korean Air affair *really* wide open.

So that was the first order of business once Trump declared his intention to bluff his way through as more Biden votes were counted and the gentleman from Scranton ran off with the Electoral College. If you support Trump, you have to help stop Biden votes from being counted.

In his midnight non-concession speech, Trump made clear that this was the strategy. He would ask the Supreme Court to intervene. Whatever it took. Doing this would a) prevent all the ballots from being tallied, so he would appear to lose by less than he had, and b) convey the sense that fake votes for Biden were flooding in all around, and it’s all quite suspicious, innit. On November 5th at 2:12 pm, he tweeted STOP THE COUNT exclamation point.

Gentle listener, the patriotic response to questions about who won the election before the ballots are counted is to insist that all the ballots be counted. Maybe there needs to be an audit later, but never have I seen a candidate call for stopping the count before it was possible to tell with confidence who won.

Let’s back up a minute and consider how we got to this place where it even made sense to some people that not counting all the votes, in the United States of America, was a good idea. In his final year as president, Trump had personally expended a great amount of effort into getting everyone to think that mail-in votes were easy to manipulate and counterfeit. You might have even found this persuasive; certainly many people did. He asserted it aggressively and often. For months before November, Trump repeatedly took to Twitter–he was still allowed to tweet then!–to rail against how easy it is to vote by mail in so many states, and insisted that in-person voting was the only way to go.

Here’s an example, the full text of a Trump tweet dated June 22nd, 2020. You and I were canceling summer plans because COVID had reached everywhere. Donald Trump was blasting in ALL CAPS, “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”

As election security experts will tell you, mail-in voting is in fact pretty well protected and has very low rates of fraud associated with it. Not perfect, but election results don’t get overturned, ever, because of fraudulent absentee ballots. We use them extensively, so there wasn’t any reason for Trump to take this line.

Except. That what is true in many states is that the mail-in votes are counted last, even if sent in well before Election Day. Trump managed, whether on purpose or not, to create a situation in which the votes that would be counted first, in person on Election Day, would be tilted his direction–and the votes that would favor Biden would mostly be counted after that. Everyone who knows how elections are conducted, correctly guessed which political party would be taking COVID seriously in the fall, and saw Trump’s tweets realized there was going to be a “Red Mirage”: in many places, the impression given by early results would most likely be that Trump had established commanding leads that did not exist in reality. Red Mirage, in fact, is a longstanding pattern going back decades, because Democrats generally prefer mail-in voting more than do Republicans. Attorney General Bill Barr later testified under oath that “everyone understood” this was going to happen in 2020. Experts warned repeatedly that it could engender widespread doubts about the outcome if Trump ended up losing.

News networks heard what those experts were saying, and caveated their reporting of tallies into Election Night. But it was still easy to take away the impression, and to reinforce that impression, of Trump doing very well until, suddenly and for the rest of the counting, he didn’t.

This was unthinkable to people who consumed only conservative media in 2020, because the idea of Trump not winning by a landslide was never entertained. All you heard was what a juggernaut Trump was, how epic his rallies were, how united the party was around him, and how terrible Biden was by comparison, hiding in his basement. It was an extraordinarily effective propaganda campaign with its target audience, based on half-truths, some outright lies (like Joe Biden being senile), and extremely weak logic. How is a person immersed in those vibes going to react when told Trump is on track to lose? How could he lose when WE ALL SAW the boat parades??

Trump supporters, primed to believe he was a lock for reelection, watched on election night as Sleepy Joe Biden caught up and surpassed Trump in swing state after swing state. As those mail-in ballots were counted and reported out. In the dark of the night. Surely this was the fraud that Trump had warned everyone about? What it actually was, was the Red Mirage was evaporating.

This was how “Stop the Steal,” a movement supercharged by misinformation that reached and persuaded millions of Americans, began in November 2020.

“Stop the Steal” was already a thing, in fact, and it had some infrastructure already in place. Trump was able to conveniently plug into what people had ginned up on phony pretenses in earlier contests, for example a 2018 Florida Senate race. It’s a playbook that disingenuous hucksters had used and knew how to make use of when a preferred candidate loses. Ali Alexander, Roger Stone, and others were more than happy to put their tactics and organizing skills to work for Trump in his hour of need.

So ready-made was this movement that the very evening of November 4th saw the first Stop the Steal rally, in Phoenix. Paul Gosar was there as a speaker. He warmed up the audience for a guy notorious for promoting the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory. For the next several weeks, people demonstrated outside the Maricopa County ballot processing facility, trying to demand that the count be halted. Arizona resident Jake Chansley–the so-called QAnon Shaman who we’ll later see inside the Senate chamber–got his first major press exposure at these events. The Phoenix protests, from the beginning, were infused with a radical element explicitly in thrall to the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy.

In addition to Arizona, Stop the Steal targeted Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, the places where Red Mirage effects were most powerful because they flipped those states from Trump to Biden. At least two of these states would need to be put back in the Trump column to overturn, so this is where they concentrated fire.

Things then got more complicated and more convoluted. When it became clear that Maricopa County was going to hand Biden Arizona’s electoral votes, localized bunkem quickly spread, notably the claim that Sharpie markers had invalidated ballots cast for Trump.

Fairy tales multiplied. Soon it wasn’t just that mail-in ballots or Sharpie markings were suspect, it was that the tabulating machines had been hacked, supposedly by foreign powers, and votes cast for Trump had been changed, electronically, to votes cast for Biden.

At the headquarters of the Republican National Committee on November 19th, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and other attorneys representing Trump did a press conference in which they spun some of these types of extremely hard-to-believe tales. When the companies that made the machines later sued for defamation, it was shown that none of what was being said was based in reality.

It’s important to note at this point that not too long into November, the Trump campaign definitely knew it had lost. The question didn’t really linger much past the two weeks following Election Day, at least not for anyone paying attention. To take one notable example, the federal leader directly responsible for election security communicated repeatedly, including in public, that the allegations were untrue. Trump fired Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a tweet on November 17th.

Before November 19th, campaign staffers had determined to be false the claims being made about Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines. They prepared an internal memo saying so. Everyone knew.

So it was all out there. Almost no mystery left to hide behind. Barring some dramatic development, Biden had clearly won enough states to secure the Electoral College, a fact that Trump’s team was in possession of as “Stop the Steal” got going in earnest. The states were certifying these results one by one. It was, in the official sense, over.

But the outgoing President plowed ahead, entertaining and embracing outlandish conspiracy theory after outlandish conspiracy theory—any and all that could explain away his loss, no matter how implausible. And this despite their falseness being so easy, on the whole, to determine. It was not a quest to learn what happened, it was an expedition to fish for pretexts for other action. An assault on public confidence in our elections, dressed up in the language of “election integrity.”

Others stood by to help, to lend their platforms, credibility, and rhetorical talent to the cause, bringing many in who otherwise might have exercised skepticism about it all. Jim Jordan, Congressman from Ohio and jacketless pro-Trump firebrand, like Trump had suggested weeks before the election that Demcrats would try to steal it. As early after the election as November 5th, Jordan was asserting that this had indeed come to pass, and he systematically hammered known falsehoods about the election into the consciousness of anyone who would listen.

The Stop the Steal leaders knew how to use the Internet, too. Without Facebook groups and astroturfed Twitter campaigns, the movement probably would not have reached the immense scale or incurred the severe anger that made January 6th possible within a few short weeks. It was everywhere, and growing quickly. People who were disappointed that Trump lost were seeing in their feeds, hour after hour, confident statements about how obvious the fraud was, and how important it was for patriots to not allow it to stand. Talk of 1776 bubbled and simmered. Angry face emojis. The comments were a wasteland.

Massive rallies in DC followed, organized and promoted online, first in November and then in December. All along the way, Ali Alexander was touching base with other organizers and spreading election misinformation via a platform called Periscope. As January 6th got closer, 4chan, 8kun, Gab, Google, Parler, Reddit, Snapchat, Telegram, theDonaldwin, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, and Zello were all used to communicate, plan, and/or disinfom, judging from the interest investigators have taken in hearing from those platforms in the year and a half since the attack.

Stop the Steal had grown into a misinformation-fueled leviathan, a well of grievance waiting to be tapped. The place to turn its attention on would be none other than Trump’s own Vice President and the Congress. Could these rallies, this mass of misled humanity, be used to coerce Pence and wavering Republican lawmakers into abusing their positions to help Trump illegally do something that had never been attempted?

To answer that, here’s what Ali Alexander said on December 28th in a now-deleted Persicope video: “I was the person that came up with the Jan. 6 idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and then Congressman Andy Biggs… We four schemed up of 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.”

But before the ROAR, we have to briefly walk through the lawyer-concocted schemes that would attempt to provide cover for Pence and the Congress to do what Trump wanted them to do. How could they possibly justify objecting to the certified electoral ballots of enough states to deny Biden the win? It starts, in true Trump fashion, with LAWSUITS.

Chapter 6 - I’ll See You in Court

On February 7, 2022, veteran lawyer Sidney Powell submitted a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit. Powell was in danger of being disbarred and losing her ability to practice law in Michigan, and she needed to defend herself. At issue was the so-called “Kraken,” a raft of lawsuits that Powell and other Trump attorneys had sold the public in late 2020 as THE THING that would flip Red Mirage swing states from Biden to Trump. Was the Kraken ever real? Did she actually believe it would do what she said?

You may remember Powell from earlier, when I said she held a press conference at the RNC on November 19th. Ms. Powell had sold the Kraken as the antidote to a far-fetched set of absurd conspiracy theories about the election being hacked. Her focus on the remedy fooled many into skipping right past checking if her diagnosis was correct in the first place. It wasn’t, and in the end she had to admit that even the cure was predicated on stuff for which the best evidence of its veracity is that… many people think it’s so. From the filing: “Millions of Americans believe the central contentions of the complaint to be true, and perhaps they are.”

In short, the Kraken was never legit. But it took a couple of billion-dollar defamation lawsuits to force Sidney Powell to voice this conclusion, and a great number of her countrymen still cling to the preposterous fairy tale that foreign powers, or media machinations, or a global anti-conservative elite, or Democratic operatives, or all of the above, had perpetrated unprecedented levels of voter fraud to get Trump out of the White House. And what’s even more amazing, is that these baddies did all this without leaving so much as a scintilla of evidence behind that proved they did it. That’s how complete, and capable, the conspiracy was to many Republicans.

Despite having mostly only flimsy anecdotes, unverifiable witness accounts, and a few heavily edited video clips to make their case, Powell and others filed more than 60 cases to challenge the election results. Because they were not good cases—and badly lawyered to boot—these challenges started losing. And then more of them lost. In the end, almost every one of them came up totally empty. What remained didn’t show anything close to what would be needed to put Trump back on top in even a single Biden state.

Legal Ls notwithstanding, there were two important ways the courts strategy helped get us to January 6th. First was the effect on Republicans of all the Kraken talk, and of the association of people with then-good reputations, and of constantly hearing that Trump was on offense. That surely several of these lawsuits, not essentially zero of them, would turn into something and vindicate the President. Undoubtedly the multitude of thousands of sworn affidavits these attorneys were touting in official-sounding terms… well, those couldn’t ALL be nothingburgers… could they?

The impact here is additive, despite there being no substance to the individual assertions. People paying less than close attention could be forgiven for feeling like there was SO MUCH evidence, not realizing that allegation after allegation was actually being publicly debunked, shot down in court, and often both. Sworn affidavits can be submitted as evidence, but they still have to be evaluated for substance before anyone will decide to look into whatever is being said. Literally anybody willing to say it can give an affidavit, but only substantive testimony becomes evidence and is further vetted.

The second important effect of this flurry of litigation is that it gave Trump ammunition to persuade Republican Party state organization leaders, state legislators, and state delegations to Congress, that there was a big enough question mark over the election results that they should feel comfortable helping to thwart what appeared to be the will of their voters. This mattered a great deal for Trump because his Constitutional lawyers had briefed him on a novel interpretation of how those elites could throw the Electoral College into chaos for his benefit.

The idea his advisors brought him was that one man, Mike Pence, could go against the voters and make Trump president again. Retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig told Congress and all Americans recently that “there was no basis in the Constitution or laws of the United States at all for the theory” that these advisors were suggesting. Trump decided to give it a whirl.

Chapter 7 - Organized Subversion

Robert Sinners was feeling squirrelly. He was up to something–something *big* that could help his boss, Donald Trump, stay in the White House after losing the election. But in order for it to work, the people involved had to keep it quiet. That was because the something he was up to was extremely antidemocratic and, probably, illegal. They would need a smidge of tradecraft.

Georgia, where Sinners had been working as a leader in the Trump campaign, had gone narrowly for Joe Biden in November. In December, the state would certify its official results and duly appoint a slate of electors to represent Georgia in the Electoral College. But. In the past few weeks Trump’s people had orchestrated a multi-state scheme to have states he lost, including Georgia, send parallel, illegitimate, slates of electors to set up Congressional Republicans and Vice President Pence to overturn the election on January 6th. That sounds inflammatory, but there’s really no other way to say it. By mid-December, Republicans carrying out this scheme in Atlanta were set to meet at the state capitol building, which it was thought would give a veneer of authority to the sham operation.

And so it was that Robert Sinners sent an email to Georgia’s fake electors ready to do their part. Paraphrased: Hi from the Trump campaign. Please be sneaky, or we could run into problems.

Direct quotes from the email are actually even worse, if you can believe it, and they reveal a high degree of consciousness of guilt about how fundamentally wrong the fake slates plan was. "I must ask for your complete discretion in this process… Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result -- a win in Georgia for President Trump -- but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion… Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to media."

The idea to have “alternate” electors was raised to Trump’s inner circle no later than the days immediately following the election. Members of Congress and lawyers who know how the Electoral College works started pitching this to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, including in text messages that have since been made public. One can imagine them all nodding and agreeing with one another when this was discussed, thinking this was very clever indeed. Of course the election was stolen, after all, and the court cases were going to prove it. But if that doesn’t happen fast enough, prudence demands that we get these gears in motion.

The clock was ticking until January 6th, when Congress would have opportunity to challenge elector slates, state by state, and the VP would do his part to count the ballots as proscribed in the Constitution. Full steam ahead, no time to waste. They would try first for state legislatures to authorize alternative slates. That would be as good as could be hoped for and would make things easier for the VP and Trump’s allies in Congress. Failing to get partisan legislatures to authorize Trump slates, the Trump team would resort to having Republicans informally create faux slates.

Legally, this whole notion is a shambolic, un-American travesty. It goes against the Constitution, and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, and the norms of peaceful, orderly presidential transition that our nation has observed for centuries. The reason we know this is because several people working for Trump wrote memos outlining legal theories for how this would work, and then it got shot down by one person who looked at it after another, many of them sympathetic to Trump’s push to keep power. Pence’s people looked at and rejected it. The White House Counsel looked at and rejected it. Virtually every legal scholar who has analyzed it since this all became public in recent months has rejected it categorically.

These theories amounted to bogus justifications to carry out a coup. They tried to make a case for overthrowing the government that the people of the United States duly chose under the Constitution. That’s unpatriotic. It’s also illegal, and you can’t make it legal with too-clever-by-half legal memos.

But some people tried. John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis drafted a few of the known examples. Senator Mike Lee of Utah advised the effort, spending hours a day at one point trying to find a way for Trump to not lose. Slide decks were made recapping the arguments in the memos. It was a whole. thing. in November and December of 2020.

Trump was easy to convince. You basically had him at “there’s a way”! So what was the point of all this law talk? Well, for one thing, it related to the lawsuits underway and Trump’s wish that the Supreme Court would step in and stop Biden from being inaugurated. Second, and very importantly once the lawsuits failed en masse, the memos were seen as a way to persuade Republicans in Congress and at the state level that they could get away with putting Trump in office for another four years. These arguments would give them rhetorical cover for doing what they surely should have understood was unambiguously wrong. A fairy tale to make them feel better for essentially telling their constituents, “I don’t care that you wanted Biden; I want Trump.”

The Trump camp printed out reams’ worth of copies of these memos and put them into the hands of friendlies all over Capitol Hill and in Red Mirage statehouses. Some of the state legislators, apparently emboldened by this convenient excuse, held “hearings”--meetings that were meant to look like official hearings but weren’t–in which witnesses asserted that their state’s vote should be invalidated or even reversed. Charitably, the evidence cited in these meetings was unverified. In some cases, the claims had already been thoroughly debunked or rejected out of hand from the Kraken and other court challenges. But the point wasn’t to make a compelling case on election fraud. It was theater to help further the alternate and fake electors plan. Disinformation in service of the coup.

Trump made direct appeals to members of Congress and state lawmakers so they would be ready to step in and do their part, we have since learned. The weight of the Republican National Committee came squarely down for the plan, with fundraising emails between the election and January 6th appealing to rank-and-file Republicans to pressure Congress to keep Trump in power.

We can also single out three individuals in particular for their notable roles in all this.

First, Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was the driving force behind much of the action at the state level. Rudy made personal appearances at some of the “hearings” and generally did whatever he could to make Trump slates happen.

Second, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who had served in the House of Representatives until tapped by Trump, helped grease the machinery in Washington. As a gatekeeper for Trump, Meadows put onto the White House schedule all sorts of individuals who would introduce all kinds of impossible Hail Mary pass ideas into Trump’s mental space. Trump was focused like a laser on undoing his loss, and these people were saying they could help. So what if they involved fantastical conspiracy theories and pseudo-legal baloney? Along with Giuliani, Meadows also reportedly supplied state legislators with suggested templates for them to use in creating their alternate slates. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are the ones that have been confirmed to have used these centrally drafted templates.

Third, Virginia Thomas bears special mention as an especially enthusiastic proponent of the elector slates scam. Thomas, a conservative activist whose husband, Clarence, is an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, urged Meadows to fight Trump’s loss. Notably, she personally contacted at least 29 Arizona lawmakers about what Giuliani and Meadows were coordinating. [As an aside: Justice Thomas later dissented, himself against all eight other justices, from a majority opinion that affirmed the January 6th Committee’s right to be provided Trump-era records from the National Archives and Records Administration. So, lots of questions there. But I digress.]

In the end, none of the state legislatures took the extraordinary measure of sending a competing Trump slate to the Electoral College in conflict with their certified Biden slate. None of them rescinded or decertified anything–and there’s almost certainly no legal basis for doing so, anyway.

After all the work they put in, what Trump and co. were left with was a small number of entirely unofficial Trump slates. Things weren’t going as hoped, but still the plan went forward. Everything would now come down to Pence. Either he would fulfill his duty to Trump–what Trump would paradoxically call “doing the right thing”--and declare the Electoral College to be riven by the imaginary problem of alternate slates, or he would just count the ballots officially sent by the states, as the law required him to do.

The outgoing President needed to lean on Mike Pence harder. In the coming weeks, Pence would go through some things. Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas and several of those who signed the fake Arizona Trump slate sued the Vice President. (This case was dismissed on January 2nd.) Pence would increasingly become a main character and villain on the conspiracy theory message boards, with people who aren’t in touch with reality calling for his arrest and death if he went against Trump. There is a lot we don’t know about in detail from Trump himself. Pence once described it to someone by saying they had no idea what kind of pressure he was under. The pressure was intense, and intensifying by the day. Things would get much, much worse.

Chapter 8 - Insider Threat

Donald Trump believed in at least one thing that we know of. He thought that martial law, like duct tape, could be an effective solution for any number of problems that a President of the United States might face. A former senior official in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, has said publicly that Trump spoke often in official settings, over the course of years, about invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that allows the president to exercise emergency powers under some conditions. According to Taylor, Trump referred to this ability he had to send the troops in to quell domestic unrest as a kind of “magic power.”

The idea of using the awesome might of the government to benefit himself clearly was on Trump’s mind leading up to January 6th. It was all hands on deck, and that included any loyalists he had or could put in place in federal agencies.

There were two main fronts to this. Trump wanted the Department of Justice to provide cover for the electors scheme by suggesting to the public the election was corrupt. Separately, if needed, the military could be ordered to intervene in the post-election goings-on.

First, the DoJ. An investigation, or even an announcement of an investigation, would be GREAT.

Imagine having the shadow of a Department of Justice investigation hanging over the election result that you desperately want to be reversed. You could say, “Look, the election was corrupt, that’s why federal officials are working to expose and charge the criminals!” Imagine how very helpful this could be, as the civil lawsuits lost steam, for moving unsure Republicans in Congress. It could give cover to Pence and make his impossible task less difficult politically.

You need the Attorney General on board to make this work. Bill Barr had been very helpful to Donald Trump when Robert Mueller was investigating the nature of Russia’s support for his 2016 campaign. By enabling the “investigate the investigators” effort, Barr helped create a counternarrative to what was becoming known at the time, and this counternarrative filled the void while Mueller worked in silence. Crucially, Barr released a “summary” of Mueller’s report, in advance of its full release, that watered down what Mueller had found and misdirected blame away from Trump. Thanks largely to Barr, the nation ended up essentially shrugging at the proven facts that a) Russia openly lent assistance to get Trump elected, and b) the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s assistance. Mueller also left little doubt that Trump had personally acted on numerous occasions to obstruct his investigation, but he declined to go beyond documenting those episodes. With Barr’s assist, Trump was able to spin the report as an exoneration–and then go into attack mode using “Russia Russia Russia” as a tagline.

In November 2020, it at first appeared as though Bill Barr might go along with lending the credibility of the Justice Department to the election fraud allegations. In a letter sent to staff on November 9th, Barr formally changed decades-long Department policy of not intervening in election-related cases, which are handled by the states. The letter was enough of a breach of Justice norms that District Elections Officials from around the country, senior officers, signed a joint letter urging Barr to rescind this announcement and policy change. In their opinion, non-intervention was good and important, it is respectful of states’ sovereignty over elections, and they didn’t want to be thrown into partisan politics. Would Barr listen? Or would he go full election truther?

As it turned out, no to both. He didn’t reverse that decision, but Barr told President Trump directly that the claims being thrown around were baseless. The supposed inner city fraud in Detroit, the supposed electronic flipping of votes on Dominion machines, and the other supposed crimes—they were all bunk. Trump didn’t pay any mind to his Attorney General’s attempts to correct the record, though. As conspiracy theorists tend to do, when one assertion about the election was conclusively shot down he just galloped off to another. According to Barr, in later testimony to the January 6th Committee, he asked people in Trump’s inner circle like Meadows and Kushner when the President would be moving on from this.

Barr and his deputies knew, from dozens of investigations into the claims and hundreds of interviews, that there was no there there. But the President wasn’t listening, and eventually Barr made his stance public. He invited an Associated Press reporter to lunch, and over their meal Barr gave on-the-record refutations of the lies the President was pushing. It was December 1st, and Barr was not long for his position.

Back at the White House, Trump was having his own lunch in a dining room. Incensed that Barr seemed determined not to help overturn the election, Donald threw his porcelain plate against the wall with enough force that it shattered, splattering ketchup around the room. He summoned Barr to the White House when the quotes were published, and afterwards Trump tweeted about how Barr had decided to resign before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.

Okay, so… Barr is out. But his replacement, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosen, also ended up being a no-go. Rosen and the Deputy Attorney General, Richard Donoghue, were immediately given opportunities to assist in the ways Trump wanted, but they quickly declined.

As Rosen would later recall, Trump applied persistent pressure, week after week, on the Justice Department to have the election discredited. Rosen has testified under oath that the President called virtually every day on the issue. The line Trump used with Rosen and Donoghue was “just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me” and Congressional allies. Like Barr, these gentlemen pushed back on election falsehoods on multiple occasions.

A lot of what we know from this period comes from Donoghue, who took contemporaneous notes of interactions with Trump. Rosen and Donoghue have also both given testimony to Congressional investigators.

In speaking with the new leaders of the Department, Trump barely even pretended there was any evidence for making these claims. It was all about vibes. From Donoghue’s notes: Trump said “thousands of people called” their local U.S. attorney’s offices to complain about the election and that “nobody trusts the F.B.I.” He said that “people are angry — blaming D.O.J. for inaction.” In what might be interpreted as helping them save face, but which really just revealed how bad Trump’s own information about the election was compared to theirs, he told them “You guys may not be following the internet the way I do.”

Trump continued hinting to Rosen and Donoghue that many people wanted him to replace them. But with who? Why, someone reliable, of course! Just before Christmas, Trump was introduced to one Jeffrey Clark, at the time acting as head of the DoJ Civil Division. Congressman Scott Perry does the introduction. According to Perry in a later radio appearance, Trump requested this introduction, and he obliged.

Clark and Trump hit it off. Clark was a Stop The Steal superfan and had been agitating for Justice to do more to look into alleged election wrongdoing in Georgia and other states. In a private chat in the Oval Office, Clark and Trump found themselves agreeing on what Justice should be doing.

It wasn’t long before Rosen learned about the Oval Office meeting, and he read the riot act to Clark, who promised to not meet with Trump alone again. But the damage was already done. Clark kept pushing, knowing he had the President’s ear and a shot at the big chair. Trump began telling Rosen that he hears from people that Jeff Clark “is great” and that he should be put in.

On December 27th, Trump called Rosen and Donoghue, again pressing them on voter fraud claims the Justice Department had found no evidence for. The next day, Clark asked Rosen and Donoghue to authorize a letter from the Department to Georgia and other states. The draft pushed all the same election conspiracy theories and suggested that these states void Biden’s certified victories there because the Justice Department was investigating voter fraud. The letter even mentioned, approvingly, slates of replacement electors for Trump. Just what the President would have loved to see. The two leaders informed Trump they could not change the election outcome and summarily shut down Clark’s suggestion.

Here we have to go on a sidebar about Georgia. Georgia was of special interest to Trump, which may explain Clark’s fixation with sending such a letter to officials there. Trump had lost by a smaller margin in Georgia than in many other Red Mirage states, and apparently believed that the numbers could be crunched again to his benefit. On January 2nd, the President made a call to the Republican Georgia Secretary of State who had weeks earlier voted for Trump, Brad Raffensperger. You’ve probably heard of this call; it’s the one where Trump tells Raffensperger ”I just want to find 11,780 votes” for him, one more than he lost by, so the state would flip to his column. The Electoral College had met in December. The ballots would be formally counted in just a few days’ time on January 6th. The impromptu call, arranged after Trump saw Raffensperger on TV saying he lost, was so extraordinary that someone on the Georgia side of the conversation recorded and leaked it to the Washington Post. Someone on the Georgia side also texted Meadows mid-call, saying the conversation needed to end. Making this ask was illegal on its face. Trump was really, really desperate to get Georgia.

From a misinformation standpoint, what stands out about the phone call is how Trump begins by saying he wants to review the ballot counts but almost immediately pivots off, briefly, to saying that attendance at his rallies vs. that which Biden got was evidence that he couldn’t have lost. That it was impossible. Therefore something must be wrong with the count. He returns to the rallies argument later in the call as well. This is a logic that you hear all the time from election truthers–I call it Boat Parade Logic–but what Trump may not have grasped was how little it would count for with people who were still generally attached to reality. Raffensperger and his team were not swayed in the least.

The other misinformation-fueled tactic Trump tried, repeatedly, was to assert that many multiples of the 11,779 votes he lost by had been fraudulently cast. Always with reference to the number 11,779, which seemed to be stuck in Trump’s head. He rattled off number after number that had been supplied to him from who knows where, whether of dead people who had voted, or ballots that had been shredded, or whatever else, confidently stating that they had plenty of votes to overcome the deficit and that he probably actually won Georgia by as much as a half million votes.

Team Georgia told Trump his numbers were wrong. Meadows tried to broker a compromise, where Trump’s team could gain access to the data the Secretary had investigated. He was told that this was not allowed by law. It all went nowhere. To Trump’s obviously increasing frustration throughout the hourlong call, Raffensperger wouldn’t be fishing for the 11,780 votes.

Okay, back to the Justice Department. The day after the Raffensperger call, and as its leak was reverberating throughout Washington, Donoghue and Rosen were brought to the Oval Office to convince Trump not to replace them with Clark, who was ready to send “the letter” asserting that widespread fraud in multiple states needed to be investigated. According to Rosen, Trump told him he had already decided to make the switch to Clark before they got to the White House. White House call records show that the title “Acting Attorney General” was already being afforded to Clark by this point. The hour was late.

The rumor was also getting around that Rosen would be fired, with at least one Trump ally excitedly texting Mark Meadows that the word was Clark would be installed the following day, and that patriots would be happy. Texts between senior Justice officials on that day reflected speculation that Rosen would be out, but their reaction was to assure one another that they intended to resign in protest if it happened.

Back at the Oval Office, the meeting with Rosen, Donoghue, and Clark lasted hours. Also present was Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, who had been considered for the Supreme Court, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy. Trump wanted to know why he shouldn’t just put Clark in. What did he have to lose?

At the end of the day, however, Rosen was still standing. Trump believed when Donoghue insisted the decapitation move would trigger a wave of dozens of resignations of officials Trump had appointed to the Department, starting with himself and Engel. Cipollone also said he would resign and likened the idea of firing Rosen to a "murder-suicide pact" the administration would not survive. Trump told Clark he appreciated his willingness to throw the weight of the Department behind the fraud narrative, but that it was clear Clark would be unable to follow through with the letter and the rest of it, given the all-but-certain resignations and other blowback. Clark couldn’t have the job because he wouldn’t be able to do the job the President wanted done.

Rosen and Barr weren’t the only Justice officials Trump tried things with, either. The Georgia saga saw yet another drama as Trump started complaining about one of Justice’s U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, BJay Pak. The President was sure that Pak was a never-Trumper, as he mentioned at one point in his call to Raffensperger. 

The Pak episode was more about personal pique than anything that was going to move the election project forward, but it represented pressure from the White House on an official who should not be pressured by the White House. On January 4th, Pak abruptly resigned after Donoghue told him about the president’s plot to install Clark and of the complaints Trump was voicing about Atlanta.

There was a bigger context to the Justice story, too, which was that it wasn’t the only federal agency where Trump was considering who he could put in place to swing those bureaucracies into action. For example, it has been reported that Trump thought about replacing the directors of the CIA and FBI.

In a tweet on November 9th, the President also fired Mark Esper as Secretary of Defense and elevated counterterrorism chief Christopher Miller to be Acting Secretary. Young, fringey loyalists like Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick were in leadership positions at the Pentagon.

There is much in this that could turn out to be consequential in this part of the dramatic scene being set for January 6th. For example, the military would have played a role if the President had invoked the Insurrection Act, as many suspected he might. At a rally in June 2022, Trump claimed he offered to Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of DC to send 10,000 soldiers or National Guard to protect the Capitol… on January 3rd. But this claim is very likely false, as there is no record of Trump making such a request. On the one hand, holy cow, what would have been possible with 10,000 soldiers under his command across the Rubicon with the pretext of unrest? On the other, if this was true then what happened when authorities repeatedly hailed the National Guard for backup on that day?

There was the baffling, hourslong delay in deploying the National Guard to the Capitol as it was being attacked, which raised a lot of questions about the chain of command on that day. So that remains another unexplained aspect of all this.

But much of this is not well established or counterfactual, and it is difficult to convey without speculating. So I ask your understanding that I am choosing not to go into further detail here, at least for now.

Let’s go instead to a different story that is also about the Defense Department. And this is the second big piece we’ll cover in this chapter: People close to Donald Trump were advocating that he order the military to seize voting machines across the country—and he at least entertained the idea.

Notionally, grabbing the machines was the first step in having them examined to uncover the supposed massive corruption of the companies like Dominion that make them, or prove that foreign powers had hacked them. But taking this action would have amounted basically to invoking martial law and activating U.S. troops for a mission they had never performed before.

The people who were telling Trump that Dominion had been compromised were the ones who suggested he simply take the machines that stole votes from him by force before they were moved and wiped. There could be no waiting, because Dominion was on the move to cover its tracks. This came up several times on the Raffensperger call, in fact: Trump made clear reference to Dominion being a problem for him in several states, and that he had heard Dominion was moving parts of machines around (it wasn’t), and that he had a solution to that problem. But, he said, he didn’t want to “shake up the whole world” and insisted there were more than enough votes to change the outcome in Georgia without taking this unspecified, apparently drastic action related to Dominion.

What could the President have had in mind related to Dominion on January 2nd?

Well, for one thing, he had been briefed on December 18th by Kraken attorney Sidney Powell, disgraced former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, and others about how he could issue an Executive Order to have the military step in to seize the machines. They had helpfully drafted such an order in advance, ready for his signature, and essentially sidled their way into the Oval Office using false pretenses to present it to him. By the time of the Raffensperger call, this had been on Trump’s radar for more than two weeks.

The President, however, ultimately seemed reluctant to go that route. For two weeks, he had been persuaded to not empower the Powell faction or seize the machines. But he brings it up as a possibility still, unprompted, on January 2nd. Kind of like he is holding it in reserve, in case the arguments he confidently asserts as ironclad don’t do the trick. Maybe he was calculating that he could just get what he wanted on January 6th through the electors scheme, and that would obviate the need for martial law unpleasantness. At least until after? But we don’t really know.

Trump never did the E.O. That said, looking just at what we know about, Trump at various points tried to have Defense, DHS, and even Justice get the machines for him. He talked to state lawmakers in Michigan about having them use local law enforcement. There may be others; what’s clear is that he was considering all angles.

Rudy Giuliani didn’t want the military to be involved, so his solution was to ask a prosecutor in Michigan to voluntarily hand over the Dominion machines from Antrim County, a place where the Trump team felt sure there had been foul play. (There hadn’t, but that wasn’t enough to kill the misinformation about Antrim, which continues to this day.)

Before the E.O. was drafted, Team Seize suggested a kind of “letters of marque” approach, in which Trump would sign an authorizing letter—and private companies would then do the seizing, not U.S.soldiers. Election machine privateers. Legal piracy.

Some people volunteered for pirate duty even without the authorizing letter. In Colorado, in Michigan, in Nevada and in Georgia at minimum, Republicans seeking to prove the election was fraudulent took matters into their own hands and freelanced inspections of voting machines. They breached local government-held systems, which, obviously, is illegal. Slowly, these people are facing consequences, which is how we know about their escapades.

So, to recap: Trump tried to get people at Justice to help paint the election as corrupt. The Supreme Court declined to hear his cases. There were no alternate slates. The Vice President did not intend to invalidate any Electoral College ballots.

Trump now shifts into battle mode. It is time to get serious about using the crowd, and the extremist groups among the crowd, who are by now on their way to Washington, to good effect. On Christmas Eve, architect and public face of the fake electors scheme John Eastman wrote to someone in Trump’s circle what was needed was “a targeted way to deploy” the 74 million people who had voted for Trump and still supported him. White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham recounted that this was the period in which Trump held secret meetings to plan January 6th. In addition to militias planning and rally organizers planning, Trump did his own planning in the White House. Dozens of meetings between members of Congress and White House staffers, according to one account. One such meeting, on December 21st, included several Republican congresspeople who later requested Trump pardon them for crimes unspecified. What specifically was discussed has yet to be revealed.

We’re now at the brink of disaster. The machinery was complex, but the theme was straightforward: President Trump and his supporters felt, strongly, that he shouldn’t have to leave the White House over something as silly as the duly certified elections results from a handful of states that chose the other guy. President Trump took the kernel of a knee-jerk reaction to losing, rallied his supporters around it, set in motion a pseudo-legal scheme to undo the loss, and cajoled the Congress and federal bureaucracy into making it all seem legit. Now, he and his merry band were ready to light the fuse that would lead directly to insurrection. We know how this ends, but put yourself back to January 5th, 2021, knowing what you now know about what was underway. Would they pull it off? Could they possibly? Find out in Part 3.

This segment is the first of four parts that comprise this voice essay. You can find this episode on Apple Podcasts here.

Chapter 0 - Prologue

The confusion that has taken hold around January 6th hit Caroline Edwards on a personal level. She had been on the receiving end of insults from people who supported the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. In her words: “I was called Nancy Pelosi's dog, called incompetent, called a hero and a villain. I was called a traitor to my country, my oath, and my constitution.”

Ms. Edwards, actually Officer Edwards of the Capitol Police, received all this abuse during and since the attack for the sin of simply doing her job and defending the Capitol from a mob intent on breaking through barriers and windows to get to people inside the building.

Edwards was knocked unconscious in the early part of the attack. But on it went, for hours, and she got up and fought again, injured.

Officer Edwards, testifying in front of Congress about the experience, later said she has asked herselves many, many times how we had gotten to the point where Americans were attacking other Americans on the steps of one our most American institutions. Maybe you have asked this as well. A lot of Americans have. A large part of the reason—and to why we are still asking the question 18 months later—is, my friends, that misinformation about January 6th is rampant and effective.

As Caroline Edwards was recovering from her wounds late that evening, the Congress eventually assembled to finish formalizing the election of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. They were supposed to have done it much earlier in the day. They had in fact convened for that purpose, but the mob disrupted those Constitutionally prescribed proceedings. Never before, until this time, had the United States seen a less-than-peaceful transition of power from one President to the next. Never before, until this time, had the United States seen a defeated President refuse to concede. Or call supporters together to “fight” for him. Our country had never seen anything like it before.

As dramatic as these events were, and for all that we know about them, why do Americans find themselves arguing with one another over the basics about January 6th? We watched our TVs in shock as it unfolded. Almost no one had a clue in the days following, which you might expect in the near aftermath. But you could spend all your time reading and come away confused, still, 18 months later, about what went down. So… why is this episode so hard for us, individually and collectively, to make sense of?

Welcome to our guide to January 6th, in which I will attempt to answer this important question.

I’m Kevin, the editor of Prism Metanews. 

But that probably doesn’t mean anything to you! And you’d be right to question whether it makes sense to listen to me on this or any other topic. As an advocate for critical thinking about sources of information and media literacy habits generally… I ENDORSE.

So here’s me in a nutshell: once upon a time and for a long time, I was in public service. I’m an economist who turned into a linguist who turned again into an intelligence analyst. The U.S. Government trained me to synthesize wide-ranging pieces of information into actionable analysis to help safeguard our national security. For many years, I specialized in understanding foreign media environments and analyzing propaganda.

I have been doing Prism Metanews, and precursor projects related to misinformation, for over a year and a half, all on the side of a full-time job and on the margins of the responsibilities that come from being a father of four. It’s not a paying gig, and there’s no glory in it; I do it because I believe we all need to do something about misinformation culture. This is my something.

It is essential that we as a nation deal with the big questions surrounding the bloody, nihilistic Capitol attack. This was the most significant aggression to pierce our temple of democracy since the War of 1812. Why did these people come to Washington, D.C. from all around the country? What was planned, and what was spontaneous? How close did we really come to a full-blown overthrow of the Republic? Which parts did Donald Trump know about, and when, and what did he do about it? And, again, what is it about the answers to these questions that they confound us so?

For those of you who know what Prism Metanews is about, you already understand that I consider January 6th to be a seminal event in the history of misinformation. Believing things that are objectively wrong is what drove the lawlessness, and propagating things that are objectively wrong has surrounded the events of that day from as soon as they happened. With the stakes this high, it is the duty of every citizen to discern what’s fake–and form their judgments around the real things that are left. Week in and week out, Prism’s newsletter tries to help with this. This voice essay is a misinformation-focused recap of our weekly January 6th coverage since we started last year. We have written up January 6th and elections-related developments dozens of times in over 60 editions. I’m drawing here from hundreds of news articles, which you can find linked in our archived editions.

Facts are the watchword. I am slow to draw conclusions, and never do so when unsupported. Some of what I say here is going to sound sensational, but please believe that it is not my style to exaggerate for effect. These events really happened, and they are extraordinary. I try to be fair to the many genuine people whose view of things is different from my own. If it matters to you, I consider myself a moderate conservative, and until recently was a Republican all my life. No editor is without bias. I also make mistakes like anyone else, and I hope you will make me aware of them when I do.

But, also: the attackers weren’t Antifa. I believe our democracy’s future depends on wrapping our collective minds around January 6th, and coming to a shared understanding.

With that as introduction, I hope you will find this voice essay necessary and useful. The January 6th Committee is finishing its work and will be putting out reams of the  evidence it has collected and, probably, a final report. Those findings will be all over the place as the midterm election approaches in November. The Department of Justice’s investigations into related crimes will stretch still further into the future. You might be worried, as a lot of people are, that the Congressional hearings are partisan and too much to take in. And the DoJ communicates through dry court filings. And CNN and Fox and other sources sensationalize and editorialize to the point it seems unwise to rely on any one on its own. So what I’ll do is summarize, looking across the range of reliable reporting and weeding out the extra or questionable. I have done my best to make this an alternative yet unified, comprehensive explainer. Thanks for listening.

Chapter 1 - The Facts of the Case

Let’s begin with a few basic things about January 6th, 2021. This is the foundational reality, the parts that are broadly known to be true. In later chapters, we’ll talk more about what is known to be untrue about certain parts. The cutoff for this information is August 18th, 2022.

* First. In the United States, finalization of the Electoral College vote happens every four years on January 6th, about eight weeks following the presidential election. By January, the states have counted their votes and certified a winner, usually by their Secretaries of State and Governors. The states have sent these certified results to Washington, D.C. to be counted along with those of the other states. They get counted, and the winner is inaugurated two weeks later on January 20th, the day specified by the Constitution. January 6th has been, with *one* exception in American history, a pretty dull, made-for-C-SPAN affair. Sometimes there are objections to individual states, but nothing really ever comes of them. These challenges have never gotten close to turning a win into a loss, or vice versa. After votes on the challenges, if any, the sitting Vice President oversees the final tally.

* Second. President Donald Trump called for his supporters to come to the nation’s capital to be there on this particular January 6th. It was another in a series of demonstrations in his support in Washington, D.C.; two others had happened in the preceding month. But this time would be “wild,” he said. And when they came, in huge numbers to the White House… Trump told them his wish that they would march up the street to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” He said he would go with them.

* Third. A mob sporting merch and waving banners emblazoned with Trump’s name descended on the Capitol, assaulted police officers, chanted “hang Mike Pence,” broke reinforced windows, swarmed into the building, caused lawmakers to be evacuated mid-session, and hunted aggressively for Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and others. One of the attackers was killed rushing a door that security officers had barricaded to keep the intruders from reaching members of Congress. They looted and trashed and desecrated the seat of our government.

* Fourth. Trump did not keep his promise to walk with thousands of his supporters to the Capitol. It’s still not too clear what he did during the hours before he finally spoke up to stop the attack. There is no evidence that he talked with anyone who could have helped stop the attack, for example the National Guard. But it is clear that he knew what was happening down the street, and who was doing it. His chief of staff fielded request after request, mostly from friends and allies, for him to call off the mob. Everyone knew he was the only one who could make it stop. Hours later, after law enforcement had started to regain their footing against the mob, he finally did.

* Fifth. Whatever was intended by Trump or his loyalists in government or elements of the mob, in the end their efforts came to naught. Joe Biden was certified as the winner of the 2020 contest and went on to be inaugurated at noon on January 20th.

So that’s the story, high level, of what went down on January 6th. Those five pieces are the pillars that we, the House Select Committee, the Department of Justice, and (most of) the American public have as a basic structure. Good start! Let’s try to fill out some of the rest.

Chapter 2 - Cast of Characters

If you would, please turn your playbills to page 2, where you’ll find the names and brief descriptions of the players in this drama.

The lawyers: John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood. Without the legal-sounding justifications for extraordinary and illegal actions to deny Joe Biden the presidency these individuals supplied, January 6th would have been far less dramatic. Better for the continuance of our Republic—which they wounded with their quack theories—but less dramatic.

The loyalists: Mark Meadows, Peter Navarro, Jeffrey Clark, Kash Patel, Ezra Cohen-Watnick. After losing the election, turning the mob on Congress was actually Plan D to undo that loss. Plan A was to have the Justice Department declare the election fraudulent and then use the levers of government to create facts on the ground and prevent the certified results from taking effect. Plan B was to have the military seize the voting machines using the pretext of a foreign threat to national security. We’ll show how Trump put, or tried to put, men who would answer only to him into key positions to see these plans through. We still don’t know how close they got.

The Sedition Caucus: Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Kevin McCarthy, Andy Biggs, Scott Perry, Barry Loudermilk. More than 100 House members and a dozen Senators committed to voting against certifying the election. Plan C, then, was to flip states into Trump’s column so the Electoral College would hand him a “legitimate” second term. Senators and representatives, especially from key states like Arizona, were instrumental in suggesting this course of action to Trump and working to make it a reality. The state legislatures or, failing that, outright unauthorized Republicans would designate Trump electors instead of Biden electors, and when the vote reached Congress these individuals would make sure the alternate slates would be considered. Some encouraged Trump’s mob and fist-pumped them. Some gave tours of the Capitol on January 5th. Some solicited a preemptive pardon from Trump after the scheme failed. All broke their oath of office.

The propagandists: Sean Hannity, Ali Alexander, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Mike Lindell, Patrick Byrne. How many Americans would have supported what Trump and his allies wanted to do to the country if not for the steady drumbeat of “stolen election” rhetoric blasted over the airwaves since November? These influencers brought Republicans along from sad-that-Trump-lost to certain-he-was-justified in laying waste to the Constitution to keep his power. That he owed this to himself and the 74 million people who voted for him.

The insurrectionist LARPers: Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, First Amendment Praetorians. Unlike most of the Trump supporters there that day, these ex-military, unregulated militia, and wannabe tough guy types were organized. And they had plans. They met beforehand. They prepared provisions, and arms, and ammunition. They had comms and body armor and zip ties. They had backup plans. Most importantly, they were confident that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and deputize them to impose martial law over the Congress. That’s why they came.

The misinformed mob: Most of the people outside the Capitol, all of whom were convinced that Trump had in fact won, were straightforward victims of the explosion of misinformation about the election. The propagandists used things like the dozens of court cases filed, thousands of affidavits sworn, and vague but technical insinuations to create the impression of an election riddled with Democratic fraud, foreign interference, or both. No matter that none of it held up in court, or could withstand expert scrutiny, or was even in the realm of possibility. Many of those present at the Capitol, in fact, had been taken in by the fantastical pro-Trump Internet fairy tale known as QAnon. However they came to their beliefs, though, it was real to them. They turned out to speak their truth, and in the process more than 800 of them were carried away by the historic passions of the day on to attacking law enforcement, breaking and entering, trespassing, and committing other federal crimes.

The heroes: Eugene Goodman, Caroline Edwards, Aquilino Gonell, Mike Fanone, Brian Sicknick, Daniel Hodges, Harry Dunn. And many others. They were on duty on what turned out to be a day of blood. To those who stood between the lawless mob and the orderly processes laid out in the Constitution, we all owe tremendous gratitude. How differently would we remember this day if they had not held off the mob for as long as possible, giving reporters, staffers, Senators, Representatives, and the Vice President time to get to safety?

The Vice President, pushed too far: Mike Pence. Along with his team, Pence stood firm against enormous pressure from his boss, who repeatedly asked him to unilaterally overrule the will of the people. President Trump wanted Pence to do something that wasn’t possible, and he couldn’t understand why Pence wouldn’t just do it anyway. As a direct result, Trump’s angry mob threatened the Vice President. He faced real mortal peril. His security detail feared for their lives.

The man for whom all of this was dreamed up and done: Donald Trump. The now-former President who is the overwhelming favorite among Republicans to be their nominee again in 2024. Who, to this day, has not expressed regret for the damage he and his supporters caused on January 6th. Nor has anyone with the power to make a difference demanded that he do so. It seems fair to say that, so far anyway, Mr. Trump hasn’t been held accountable—or been deterred from trying something similar again.

Now briefly, since this is an anti-misinformation publication, let’s also clear up who *wasn’t* involved. There were no Italian satellites or Venezuelan officials or Chinese communists who had anything to do with Joe Biden winning the vote. Voting machine executives didn’t intervene to help or hurt any candidate. Actual state legislatures never ended up sending alternative elector slates to Washington, DC. The attack on the Capitol was not perpetrated or instigated by federal agents. Neither BLM nor antifa dressed up as Trump supporters on January 6th. All of these things, each unfortunately believed by many, are fairy tales. Asserted, but never proven or even substantiated. File them all in the column of made-up nonsense that was thrown against the wall to see what would stick. Trump’s loss was like a mural, with unifying motifs, plenty of space for variations on the theme, and thousands of artists of varying degrees of respectability and talent able to walk up and add a part. It’s like, um, art. Yeah. Art.

And on that sidebar note about the creativity aspect of 2020 election misinformation, we move on to stories that really happened and for which there is overwhelming evidence.

Chapter 3 - Plot Lines

January 6th was a day unto itself, but it was also the culmination and intersecting of thousands of individual stories. To help make sense of it all, think of January 6th as having major and minor plot lines running throughout, and individuals plug in to one or more of those plot lines at different points. It’s like a season of Lost—except it actually goes somewhere!

For our purposes, I propose the following eight major plot lines, presented in order of time. We’ll dive into each in later parts:

* The Boy Who Cried Fraud. Donald Trump has a habit of saying any contest he loses is illegitimate. Alleging his opponent cheated is, in this arena, his signature move. In 2020, he laid the foundation for this canard early by sowing doubt about mail-in voting.

* Stop The Steal. Disbelief that Trump could have lost pushes millions of people to believe something that never was: that someone conspired to steal the election from him. They glide right past seriously considering the veracity of the allegations and begin demanding the supposed perpetrators be punished–and the election be overturned. It is a misinformation bonanza that will power all that is to come.

* I’ll See You in Court. Trump’s allies launch a blitz of dozens of legal challenges to the final tally in battleground states. Not one of them comes close to proving significant voter fraud occurred. 46 different judges, including many appointed by Trump or other Republicans, rule against the bogus claims. Essentially all of it is debunked, one by one. But the propagandists don’t seem to mind. And in the minds of casual pro-Trump observers, the evidence feels like it is piling up. They’ve heard it so many times now, and they never see the corrections–or, if they do, proceed to update their beliefs.

* Organized Subversion. The outgoing President, who knows he has lost, signs on to suggestions that the certified results in some states could simply be substituted out for ones he likes better. Republicans who hold levers of power in those states would help, he’s told. Here’s the theory: confuse people enough about what states are sending to the Electoral College, and Congress and your Vice President could then throw the thing your way at the federal level. If enough people don’t know how elections work and you can control what information reaches them, you might be able to get away with this.

* Insider Threat. When you don’t care what’s true and have the awesome might of the U.S. government at your disposal, you might be tempted to use loyalists leading key agencies to help keep you in power. Trump tried this with the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, but failed on both fronts.

* The Bat Signal. It wasn’t clear whether Pence would play ball with the Electoral College gambit, but the time had come to call in the mob. Fire up the bullhorns, bring on the merch stands. Oh, and telegraph that very big, historic things will be happening. 1776. Et cetera. Suggest to the militias that support you that they should be ready for anything.

* Violent Overthrow. They see the signal. It is the ultimate Trump rally, right in the front yard of the White House. With Congress and the VP set to certify the vote against his wishes, Trump’s hail Mary is to rile his supporters up and send them to Capitol Hill. Maybe their conspicuous presence will persuade Republicans to get with the program. Maybe some of the rioters will be able to stop the proceedings from proceeding. The attack is massive and sustained. Ultimately it will not succeed. But it will be with us always.

* Aftermath. The attackers retreat. Representative Andy Kim helps clean up the mess. Trump pouts a few days, then leaves Washington. Joe Biden is inaugurated. But the election lies are just getting started. Within a few months, more Republicans than ever are angling for Trump’s approval by parroting them. Millions come to wrongly believe that Biden’s presidency is not legitimate. New lies are added about January 6th itself, for example that the attack was done by Antifa, or that it was entirely peaceful. Amazingly, these narratives find an audience willing to forget the reality of what happened. Largely behind the scenes, though, big wheels begin turning to see if the ones responsible for the attempt to subvert our Constitutional order can be held accountable.

The answer to “why isn’t January 6th well understood by most Americans” is, in part, simply because there are so many pieces to assemble and threads to run to ground. A low degree of understanding is also, though, exactly the outcome that people who wanted the attack to happen have worked toward since it was perpetrated–aided by others who have decided that doing so could help them even if they didn’t initially support the rioters.

The events of January 6th, 2021, and the ones that led up to and followed it, have *at best* been rife with misinformed confusion. The day and how it is perceived by the public are infused with politics, which means any investigation of what happened will by definition be extremely political. And that means people and political parties are acting upon strong incentives to uncover, exaggerate, misrepresent, sensationalize, deny, fabricate, fabulize, and otherwise wield information as a weapon. These actors want to help their tribe either survive the episode–or, they hope, come out on top.

In the following parts of this voice essay, I’m going to do my best to cover each of these eight plot lines, one by one. Not in thorough detail--there is much more that could be said about each–but just synopses to give the idea.  For anyone interested, I have all of the information sourced and can provide citations, but I won’t be reading off citations as I go. 

As I said before, misinformation skews our perceptions of reality, and that’s never been more true than in the roughly 19 months since January 6th happened and proceeded to become one of the most contentious episodes in living memory.

But knowing this only raises the next question: if we are still grasping for answers now, what can we learn by reflecting on our own lived experience in the year 2020? Are there clues that can help us spot the next major misinformation event before it blows up? Let’s check it out, in Part 2.

A chat with Media Matters reporter Alex Kaplan, who has been tracking politicians that endorse QAnon, and @QOrigins, who as you might guess takes a strong interest, to take stock of how misinformationism fared in the 2022 midterms. Turns out it was a great night for normies, not so much for the conspiracy theory enthusiasts running for office. Good discussion of QAnon influencer Juan O. Savin and his coalition of candidates for secretaries of state and other offices.

Bottom line: almost all of these candidates lost, and many of them lost big. We're hopeful that this will mean the misinformation strain of politics will be weaker going into 2024--but who knows how Donald Trump's candidacy will swing the pendulum back?

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We talked a bit about the January 6th Committee hearings and what was covered there, especially as relates to misinformation. The conversation then turned to the ecosystem of fraudsters and charlatans who make a living off of people who believe in conspiracy theories. Our word for these predators is "grifters." Featuring good folks Paola (@PootDibou), Cosmos (@CPT_Cosmosis), VICE reporter David Gilbert (@daitaigilbert), Teddy Wilson (@reportbywilson) of Radical Reports, Rosalie (@NovelSci) of Hoaxlines, @Garrett_Archer a.k.a. The Data Guru with ABC 15 in Phoenix, and fan favorites @get_innocuous, @PokerPolitics, and @QOrigins.

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An impromptu Meetup in which Prism and friends talk what kinds of jobs the anti-misinformation community needs to do now and in the future--and the corresponding "infrastructure" that will enable us to do the work.

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In which we talk about the language of communities such as QAnon and crypto (originally titled "Normies and Anons: The Linguistic Divide") with Dan Olson (@FoldableHuman), Professor Laura Dilley (@laura_greenaura), Sara Aniano (@coolfacejane), and QAnon experts @dappergander, @QOrigins, and @PokerPolitics.

Summary:

First, why “shibboleths”? Well, language being the amazing technology it is, people of all kinds deploy language to accomplish all kinds of things. Language is cool. Within online communities, language is used to do things like asking for and granting a feeling of belonging, signifying status, and communicating with deep meaning, efficiently. So you see people in online and other communities get really into jargon and inside speak, which aids in accomplishing the above. Speaking like the group is a kind of code.

We thought it would be interesting to focus on two online communities that display strong shibboleth tendencies. Massive Internet places where it’s easy to get lost if you don’t know the lingo: conspiracy theories and crypto. [Note: These communities are not one and the same! We in no way mean to suggest or imply that everyone who holds or promotes crypto also believes in conspiracy theories. Vice versa as well. Fans of crypto, NFTs, web3, please know that we aren’t hostile to your enthusiasm for a movement that is clearly resonating with a lot of people. We are skeptical, though, about the sustainability of the boom.]

With this intro, let’s hit on some of the many great points made by the speakers.

1. A lot of language you see in QAnon originated in much older chanspeak

2. Catchphrases are as vital to their communications as individual words (“watch the water”)

3. “Think mirror” is used as a kind of catch-all to cope with the cognitive dissonance arising from real world events as they play out contra to what was predicted

4. “Disinformation is necessary,” same kind of thing, and can be used to calm down any anon who is fretting

5. Language is a way to communicate meaning, signal group identification, and influence thought

6. The underlying logic of crypto world’s language is not extremely different from that of conspiracyland’s, for example a lot of chanspeak-rooted words in the crypto vocabulary, including that coming more directly from Reddit

7. The rest of the language commonly used in crypto comes from the finance industry

8. Crypto was also a topic of frequent mention by the social media account networks that promoted QAnon

9. This, combined with the digital astroturfing/inauthentic boosting that accompanied and probably helped grow QAnon, could be seen as evidence of accelerationist disinfo

[This goes on for 26 more points; see the full recap thread here.]

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In this Misinfo Meetup, we discuss "Issues in Reporting On Misinformation" with VICE News reporter David Gilbert, author Mike Rothschild, and journalists Steven Monacelli and Eric Levai.

Summary:

Misinformation is a newer kind of “beat” for news organizations to devote coverage to. A lot has sprung up in this area the past five-ish years, from books published to freelancers, dedicated reporters, and whole teams at major outlets. It’s great, really. So we wanted to talk about issues in this reporting. More news orgs are assigning misinformation stories because it’s a problem that has grown to the point that ignoring it carries large risks. And to understand a lot of what happens these days, the misinformation lens is clutch.

We talked with our professional reporter/author guests about why news orgs choose to put resources toward misinformation coverage, how stories are framed, and what it’s like to produce them. Touched on the potential for bad actor blowback when reporters do this kind of work. In the Q&A, we got into principles of science communications and the challenges of writing headlines. Accessibility as an essential aspect of misinformation journalism. What we can learn from episodes like the Japanese ivermectin/omicron study. And more.

Unfortunately we’re all at a bit of a loss re: solutions beyond documenting the misinformation issue in professional reporting. There are no easy answers. As always, Prism came down on the side of rallying society around anti-misinformation “infrastructure,” by which we mean primarily building tools and collaborating more and raising and deploying war chests to counter those of the bad actors. All agreed we could do a lot better than we have with the support of just one wealthy benefactor. Until then, we just scraping by!

In the end, the meetup was the friends we met along the way. tfw you share in the yarn-boarder-i-ness that we yarn-board watchers have in common. Went away feeling grateful for the anti-misinformation community and hopeful that we can figure this all out soon. Many thanks to our guests.

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