The Capitol Was Just the Start
It was
a showdown between reality and dark digital fantasy. Fantasy didn’t lose.
Opinion
Columnist
- Jan. 13, 2021
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 digital-media
fantasyland.
Just as tech C.E.O.s
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.
One way to think about the attack on
the Capitol is as a clash between long-festering, partisan digital fantasy and
stark physical reality. What scares me is that even with reality flash-banging
all around them, the rioters still clung like stubborn barnacles to their
online fantasy. Their mental model of America could not be undone even by the
events playing out before their pepper-sprayed eyes — a depth of indoctrination
that really does not bode well for our future.
The fantasists did
not achieve their objective last week, and it may look as if the conspiracy is
reeling. President 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 their
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 the police put
up any resistance at all. “We backed you guys this summer!” a man can be
heard shouting at the 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 B.L.M., but
they’re shooting the patriots.”
In a clip that went viral for its
obliviousness, a woman who identified herself only as “Elizabeth from
Knoxville, Tennessee” complained to Hunter Walker, a reporter for Yahoo
News, that she’d been stopped at the door.
“I made it like a foot inside and they
pushed me out and they maced me!” she cries. When Walker asks her why she
wanted to go in, she’s exasperated at his ignorance. “We’re storming the
Capitol, it’s a revolution!”
The incongruousness
is remarkable: She was there to overthrow the government of the world’s largest
superpower, but nobody told her there would be mace.
Even death could not
shake their righteousness. Justin Winchell, a Trump supporter from Georgia,
traveled to the rally with a friend, Rosanne Boyland. At one point the pair
were in a scrum of people inside the Capitol when a fight erupted between
rioters and the police. Winchell told a reporter for
a Georgia television station that Boyland was crushed in the scuffle — she was
one of the five people who were killed during the siege.
“I put my arm underneath her and was
pulling her out and then another guy fell on top of her, and another guy was
just walking” on top of her, Winchell said. “There were people stacked two to
three deep, people just crushed.”
But even after seeing his friend walked
on by Trump’s supporters, Winchell could not see how Trump was to blame. He was
shocked when the TV reporter asked him if the president “has blood on his
hands.”
“Does he have blood on
his hands?” Winchell says, incredulously. “No!” He goes on to argue that antifa
and other “outside instigators” were to blame: “She was killed by an incited
event and it was not incited by Trump supporters.”
Do you see why I worry the internet’s
ugly alternate reality isn’t done with us? When online rumor gets its fangs in
you, its bite goes deep.
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. An attorney for Jake
Angeli, the horned, shirtless fellow who calls himself the “QAnon
Shaman,” told a judge on Monday that
Angeli had not eaten anything since his arrest on Saturday. His mother told
reporters that he requires a strict organic diet. So I suppose it’s possible
that jailhouse menu options may deter future conspiracy-fueled mobs.
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. The internet is still ruled by viral algorithms and
advertising metrics that prize outrage over truth. 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.