January 6th Was a White Nationalist Insurrection

January 05, 2022 by

And we are not done crushing it

Screencap from Justice Department footage of the January 6th Capitol attack

One year after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, temporarily preventing the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, the most troubling aspect of that day is the way the MAGA faction has managed to suppress nearly all dissent among Republicans about what happened that day and what it means.

From Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who will become House Speaker if the Republicans retake the majority next year, to the Wall Street Journal’s editors, the backsliding has been abysmal. In the days after the attack, McCarthy insisted Trump bore responsibility for the mob’s actions. The Journal denounced him for “lying” to his supporters about the election. It took just a few days for McCarthy to fly down to Mar-a-Lago to be photographed grinning with Trump. Now the Journal publishes opeds arguing that “the idea that the Capitol rioters threatened the American republic is a fantasy.” If you want a full accounting of Republican hypocrisy, the #NeverTrump writers at The Bulwark like Mona Charen and Charlie Sykes are out with fresh recaps.

It’s easy to get discouraged by polls showing that most Republicans want Trump to run for president again, and that January 6th has left little overall mark on public attitudes toward the GOP. But something more telling is going on. According to a new survey by ABC News/Ipsos , 71% of Republicans say Trump was the rightful winner of the election, and a somewhat more narrow majority of them say that those involved in the attack on the Capitol were “protecting democracy.”

How can this be? The answer is in understanding what we are dealing with.

Over the last few days I’ve been reading an unusual book called The Night of Broken Glass. It is an edited compendium of eyewitness accounts of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the day that the Nazis organized violent attacks on the Jewish community across Germany and Austria, burning hundreds of synagogues, looting and destroying thousands of shops and homes, killing 400 Jews and then imprisoning more than 30,000 in concentration camps. The accounts were collected in 1939 by a Harvard sociologist for a prize competition and an intended book, but then forgotten among his papers until they were recently unearthed.

The stories are gripping and shocking, and if you are like me, the child of a Holocaust survivor, familiar, difficult and necessary reading. But here’s what you often don’t hear about Kristallnacht: It shocked many ordinary Germans. It was so large and obvious an act of state terror that it was impossible for them to ignore. One survivor and eyewitness, Hugo Moses, was held in a prison for several days afterwards. When he returned to his ransacked home, he writes in his essay in the book, his wife told him that a number of Aryan women had come to see her to commiserate. One told her, “This is worse than in Russia. The swine who ordered this destruction ought to have their necks wrung.” Another quietly told her, “This time it was your temples; the next time it will be our Catholic churches.”

The Nazis didn’t just act boldly to create their reality of a world where Jews were enemies of German culture, scapegoats for Germany’s losing WWI (the original “Big Lie”) and subhumans to be expelled or wiped out. They constantly reinforced those actions with insistent and public demands that their fellow Germans come along with them. Rudolf Bing, a Jewish lawyer living in Nuremberg, managed to escape with his wife out a back window of their apartment when Nazi thugs rampaged through their building. Here’s how he describes the next day in his essay in the book:

When the morning after this abominable night people who had not taken part in it as police or as SA men [the Nazi paramilitary known as the ‘brown-shirts’] awoke and saw the destruction that had been wrought, something happened that the instigators had not expected. A deep feeling of depression and shame clearly gripped the public. For the first time, some of the population dared to show sympathy with us. One heard people saying: “I am ashamed to be a German.” I know of one teach in a state institution of higher education who, having seen the destruction of apartments in his building, informed his superior that he was ill and put in a request for his pension because he no longer wanted to serve such a government. In particular, the working population was indignant. What did the party and SA do? The latter sent their spies into the bars in the working-class suburbs, where they engaged the guests in conversations about the events in order to provoke them into making careless statements and then inform on them…[And] on the day after that terrible night, Herr [Julius] Streicher [editor of a notoriously anti-Semitic rag called Der Sturmer] organized a kind of victory celebration in the main market square, and in his speech castigated a few women who had wept on seeing the destroyed Jewish shops, telling them that they lacked a sense of the magnitude of these events.

Years ago, an unnamed Republican White House aide who is widely believed to be Karl Rove, a top advisor to then President George W. Bush, told Ron Suskind that journalists like him were “in what we call the reality-based community,” meaning people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” The aide said, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Creating alternative facts and insisting they are truths in the face of obvious and contrary evidence is a core feature of fascism. So is intimidating any and all people who try to say otherwise. And this is what we’re dealing with. Since January 6th, the MAGA faction has been working relentlessly to create and cement an alternative version of January 6th, one that blames Antifa and the FBI for the storming of the Capitol and which insists that the “real insurrection” was on Election Day and that January 6th was just a day of patriotic protest against the “fake election results.”

Which is why the most important thing you can do now, as we commemorate the anniversary of January 6th, is speak up. Don’t turn away. Even more important, celebrate its heroes: the brave men and women in the Capitol Police force and the DC Metropolitan Police Department who put their bodies in the way. One of my heroes of that day, Officer Daniel Hodges, was memorably captured on video screaming in pain as his body was jammed in a doorway that he and other police were defending from the mob. Here he is being interviewed a few days later.

He says, “If it wasn’t my job I would have done that for free. It was absolutely my pleasure to crush a white nationalist insurrection. It was absolutely my pleasure to help. We’ll do it as many times as it takes.”


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