Mostly male, white and toxic in unexplored ways
Who are these people? Or rather, who are these men?
News stories didn’t note the maleness because masculinity is considered the baseline; it goes without saying. But the violent insurrectionist Americans who stormed the Capitol building carrying guns and Molotov cocktails were overwhelmingly male, white and toxic in ways that haven’t been fully explored, not even by them.
That same day, a fed- up Washington homeowner, a middle- aged white man in an attractive Christmas- wreathed house, talked from his porch with a young Black woman stuck in traffic on his residential street, as the mob was heard not far away. Both were upset.
“They are destroying our city,” she called out to him. He agreed. “If that was Black Lives Matter,” he shouted across the road, “they’d have tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. But they let these f------ crackers take over the goddamn Capitol.” The woman wiped tears away, so moved to have this good man unexpectedly on her side.
Trump loves whites. He does not love poor whites. Were the rioters indeed “crackers”? Salt of the earth? Deplorables? White nationalists?
Richard “Bigo” Barnett, 60, of Gravette, Ark., who looted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, posing for photos with his boots on a desk, said he objected to Pelosi using that last term in a “derogatory” way.
“I am white. There is no denying that. I am a nationalist. I put my nation first. So that makes me a white nationalist.” But a moral one, presumably. At this point, his reasoning withers.
As he wrote on Facebook earlier, he “came into this world kicking and screaming, covered in someone else’s blood,” ( it was your mother’s, Bigo) adding, “I’m not afraid to go out the same way.” Barnett is a big violence fan, police enthusiast, antimasker, gun supporter and QAnoner.
Though now under arrest, Barnett saw himself as a good guy. So did a Maryland man, minuscule with a perfectly circular beard, who joined the riot wearing a work badge with his name on it. He was fired immediately.
Presumably so did the rioters who broke into a senator’s office and tore only one item from the wall, a Chinese scroll. One man boasted of using the toilet and not flushing. They smeared human poop on the walls.
They hunted for Vice- President Mike Pence who allegedly betrayed them, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish. “He’s probably the most corrupt guy up here. He’s slimy. You can just see it,” a rioter said of Schumer.
As the Atlantic put it, the Republicans had met their monster. It was them all along.
In the place where the riot began and the fencing fell, a tide of men asserted they had the right to be there and expected the police to agree. ( Apparently some did.) “It’s our House. We pay your bills,” they shouted at the outnumbered officers.
And then the crowd roared down the path and broke into the building to terrorize police, Republicans, Democrats, staff, journalists and others.
They were bestial. They scrambled over the walls of the west front of the building like the Bolivian gangsters swarming over Tony Montana’s house in the movie “Scarface.”
But the insurrectionists weren’t very bright. Once inside, they were struck by the grandeur, their rage made strangely directionless with almost no Black, Brown or Asian faces to be found.
“Hitler was right on one thing,” Illinois Rep. Mary Miller told a rally that day as she stood at a MOMS for America podium. “He said ‘ Whoever has the youth has the future.’ ” Miller, set to become co- chair of the Michigan Republican Party, has seven children.
Again, who are these people? They had crafted their look. The men, heavily tattooed, wore cow horns and pelts that made them look more like llamas than Vikings. With earth- toned statement layering, they kept their essentials in backpacks filled with merch, Confederate flags, Punisher patches and Axe body spray. Yes, they hoped to meet girls.
Hair was huge, almost ’ 80s in span. Inventive beards were mandatory, moustaches that dripped below the chin, long puffy chin patches, floorman beards. Hats were an essential item, particularly toques.
Statement posing: punching street signs for a booming noise; chanting USA! USA! USA; urinating on the Capitol building; smoking in vandalized offices. When Ashli Babbitt was shot, her fellow rioters filmed her dying.
They hoped her death would be a meme, but no. It was just the death of a QAnon woman, working class, violent, in trouble with the law, freshly divorced and headed for bankruptcy. Two men boosted her into a window while a gun was clearly pointed at her.
It’s as if she thought, “They won’t shoot me. I’m a white woman.” The Republican mob thought it was on the same side as power. Me? A criminal?
They didn’t figure on the rest of the world looking at them fouling the halls of democracy and recoiling. They didn’t realize that they were “matter out of place,” in anthropologist Mary Douglas’s great phrase.
“Matter out of place” is the definition of dirt.