For Trump loyalists, Capitol riot was just the beginning
These were not just the Trump loyalists of lore, that economically marginalized, over-elegized white working class of the heartland. No, the crowd that stormed the Capitol was a big tent of whiteness, a cross section of American society bridging divisions of class, geography and demography. They were doctors and lawyers, florists and real estate agents, business executives, police officers, military veterans, at least one elected official and an Olympic gold medalist. They’d all come to coup for America.
What had drawn together this motley mob, other than race and party? A preposterous lie incubated in a digitalmedia fantasyland.
Just as tech CEOs had once boldly envisioned, disparate strangers from across the land really had come together online to forge common purpose out of shared philosophy. That the philosophy was conspiratorial lunacy and the common purpose insurrection — well, nobody’s perfect, I suppose.
It isn’t just the crowd’s variety that was striking. I’ve spent the past few days watching as many videos from the siege as my eyeballs could handle, and what terrifies me again and again is the sense of surprise and entitlement — the authentic shock so many of the rioters expressed when confronted with a reality that did not match the cosplay revolution they’d dreamed about on Discord.
The fantasists did not achieve their objective last week, and it may look as if the conspiracy is reeling. President Donald Trump is gone from Twitter and soon from the White House. Rioters are being arrested and charged by the dozens. QAnon — the collective delusion alleging that America is run by a cadre of pedophiles whom Trump is fixing to take down — a major presence in the crowd, has been kicked off the respectable web, and hate-filled redoubts like Parler are on its heels.
Yet none of this is over — far from it. Now that the conspiracy mob has effected such carnage on the real world, we’d be foolish to suppose that its appetite has been sated, rather than only whetted. Monstrous online lies are not done with us. The Capitol is just the beginning.
Consider how careless and casual they were about committing federal crimes. They’d flown in to undo an election as if it were no bigger deal than a weekend getaway. They expected to march on the Capitol, restore Trump to the throne, memorialize the moment for Instagram and then travel home unscathed, as if what happens in Washington in broad daylight with the world’s news media watching stays in Washington.
Many were shocked that police put up any resistance at all. “We backed you guys this summer!” a man can be heard shouting at police, probably in reference to Black Lives Matter protests. “When the whole country hated you, we had your back!”
“This is not America,” Andrew McCormick of The Nation overheard a woman saying. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
Legal trouble may shake the rioters’ delusions. Lounging with his feet up on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office, Richard Barnett looked as if he’d conquered the world; in his booking photo he’s vaguely stunned, the look of a man who has just had cold truth splashed in his face.
But my optimism runs thin. Even if internet companies are now, belatedly, taking action against the forces that led to last week’s riot, the conditions that led us to the brink remain unchanged. Vast swaths of the media, including the most popular corners of radio and cable news, are still devoted to unhinged propaganda. America is still a bitterly fragmented nation, and the whole thing could still blow up again with the slightest of sparks.